Manto’s ‘Top, Under and In Between’ and a giggle
I came across the translation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Upar, Neeche aur Darmiyaan’ (Top, Under and In Between) today. The story, among many others that were loudly protested against by the civilians of pre-Independent British Lahore, was condemned by a Pakistani court in 1952 for being obsecene. A lengthy trial and Manto was charged with Rs. 25/- (a hefty sum at that time) for the story; his publisher took to abandoning the piece. Grieving over this, Manto published the story himself with a short note that said: “I’m quite certain you will honor the piece — for you are my dear reader, not my publisher.” What was so obscene or dirty about this piece? Did Manto deserve getting penalized for it?
The story (You can find the translation at: https://caravanmagazine.in/fiction/top-under-and-between) is a series of conversations—mainly a dialogue between a couple he calls “Mian Saheb” and “Begum Sahiba” — on whether they should have sex after what seems like a really long time (a year). What adds to the mirth and the absurdity of it all is that throughout the story, Mian Saheb and Begum Sahiba merely hint at their amorous interest, with dialogues like “I was thinking I’d ask you…” to a “Oh… you’re getting quite naughty” in response, but nothing is said explicitly, reminding you of Bollywood movies from the 90s with couples kissing behind trees and bushes, and songs full of innuendos, but nothing ever being truly said or shown. No. Scratch that. Because we know the story was charged with obscenity, we — the readers — presume the couple could be discussing the possibility of having sex, but the story is so expertly crafted, we cannot be absolutely sure.
That’s what is delightful, the idea of Manto writing this, while hopping around his room figuring out where the line so he could toe it carefully, leaving a gap of half a centimeter between the line and his story.
That the couple want to have sex — or whatever it is that they want to do after a year’s gap — being by itself an outrageous desire is also captured in indirect ways: the couple consults their doctors about whether their hearts and bodies can survive the cardio, and the doctors meet to gossip about the couple themselves later and voice out loud that they “gave permission [for sex]… though decency would have had it otherwise” and “whenever we come to visit these fools, we ruin our characters”. We aren’t clear on what the age of the couple could be when we read; we get a distinct impression that the couple might be past their prime too: they have a son who is caught reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover right at the beginning of the piece, and then there are these jokes about the idea of them having sex being “indecent” or that their bed is like the “deathbed”. So, in one shot, Manto is not only dealing with the delicate project of telling the story of a couple in heat, but also of a couple that is beyond what is an acceptable age to be in heat.
The scene of the act — the sex? — opens to the couple being atop their bed, and there is foreplay that can only be described as hilarious and explicit in mockery of the rules that disallow them to openly have sex if explicit about the sex itself:
“MIAN SAHEB: Now, shall we?
BEGUM SAHIBA: Wait. Have you brushed?
MIAN SAHEB: Yes. I also gargled with Dettol.
BEGUM SAHIBA: I did too.
MIAN SAHEB: We’re made for one another.”
Scene III ends in a climax that can make the most serious man burst into giggles; the couple is discussing Mian Saheb consuming twelve drops of brandy for his sudden sneeze:
“MIAN SAHEB: True. You put it in.
BEGUM SAHIBA: Here. Slowly… now.
MIAN SAHEB: It can hardly get any slower than this.
BEGUM SAHIBA: Are you better?
MIAN SAHEB: I’m getting there.
BEGUM SAHIBA: Rest for a while.
MIAN SAHEB: Yes. I think I’ll need to.”
The next thing you know, the bed’s broken and the servants have gone to fetch a carpenter. It is reported online that that is the part that got the Pakistan court’s goat: the broken bed. How dare Manto show something that smutty, that lewd? An elderly couple breaking beds doing God knows what. They couldn’t have been jumping on it like it were a trampoline, could they? It must be the dreaded word… the sex. Next thing you know, Manto is out paying his Rs. 25/-.
How do you show a couple having sex in a place and a time when sex was not allowed to be mentioned, let alone described wholly in a story? How do you do it in a way that isn’t termed sleazy? How do you do it in a way that the readers know it definitely happened, but did not get “titillated” by it? If anyone could have taken this challenge on and done everything legally sound, it was Manto. And he delivered fantastically, too. But the Pakistani court disagreed — the broken bed! — and poor Manto got the axe. Or the Rs. 25/- penalty. As the writer of the Caravan piece rightly describes it, “…the story actually features one of Manto’s most discreet fictional narrators, almost proving that censors have much more lurid imaginations than the artists whom they would suppress…” When you read it, you are convinced that the Court almost read in the sex where it wasn’t; the Court filled all the gaps between the dialogue by themselves, and got titillated even when there was barely any cause to, ’cause where did the broken bed come from!
Reading these banned/ condemned pieces is an exercise in how sedition laws operate, how Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code operates (“promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony”) or Section 292 does (“a book, writing, shall be deemed to be obscene if it is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect… tends to deprave and corrupt person, and whoever sells it is punishable”). It lets you take a decision on your own if the writing is “lascivious” or appeals to your prurient interest, or if it has depraved and corrupted you.
All Upar, Neeche aur Darmiyaan has done to me… is make me giggle.
For those who haven’t opened that Caravan piece, it may be noted that the odd ill-motivated nationalist who goes by the name Sadaf Mehmood has also commented on the piece, “If he was an Indian then his medium of language should be Hindi not Urdu”, and all that it does… is make me giggle more. Oh, you censors.
