Author: Takbeer Salati
Author Affiliation: PhD Scholar at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Indology, University of Hyderabad
Abstract: Pakistan-based writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Kali Shalwar’ received critical appreciation for the choice of his subjects such as a sex-worker. The conditions of the depletion of human conditions have been the prime source of Manto’s short stories. ‘Kali Shalwar’ (Manto, 1941) tries to fictionalize the ritual of Muharram, a ‘mourning practice’ into the normalized ‘gendered’ mourning conditions of Manto’s sex-workers. Lacan’s ‘Graph of Sexuation’ represents the sexed subject and sexual relation to the phallic function. A different relation to the phallus structures the masculine and feminine positions. The phallic functions inscribe the male subject ‘man as a whole’, or ‘as all’. Lacan’s remark stands true for Sultana. The paper reverts to the ‘mourning’ representations of subjects in their perpetual psychic ‘mourning’ which provides a sense of space for these universally deplorable conditions of sex-workers.
Keywords: Psychoanalysis, Mourning, Culture, Society, Lacan, Manto.