Abstract

The cultural conditioning and praxis that narrate, maintain and solidify the oppressions of the female body, nurtures morality to keep the oppressions alive and continuous. The female bodies exhibited in Manto’s stories examine these oppressions and body narratives as cultural, seemingly, making Manto question the very paradigm of culture. Who defines it? Those that are a part of it or those who distort and bind it in the name of religion, tradition and morality. Therefore, this paper aims to exhibit the idea of obscenity as a part of cultural hegemony with censorship as a means to quieten certain expressions that reflect the bitter truth of society as it is. The paper shall investigate how the body politic elaborates in the texts, as a site of lineage and identity, which is eventually dismantled as a site of socio-political and legal victimization. The objective of the paper is to highlight the nuances of exposition of realities, through Manto’s stories, which otherwise stay veiled in the society and are maintained so through culture.