Transgression in Saadat Hasan Manto’s Kali Salwar and Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf

-Akashleena

The decades of the 1930s and 1940s in India were a period of turbulence, both politically and culturally. Colonial authority was weakening, independence movements were intensifying, and communal tensions that would eventually explode into the Partition were already festering. Alongside these upheavals, literature too was undergoing a transformation. The Progressive Writers’ Movement, launched in 1936, urged writers to confront social injustice directly. Flowery romanticism was to give way to gritty depictions of the reality — poverty, exploitation, repression. Yet when writers did precisely this, they faced not only colonial censorship but also condemnation from within their own communities. The guardians of morality demanded that literature preserve tradition and respectability, particularly in the portrayal of women. Against this climate of caution, Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai emerged as provocateurs. Their stories Kali Salwar and Lihaaf became flashpoints in the battle over what literature could dare to say.

Manto was obsessed with society’s margins, consisting of the prostitutes, alcoholics, and petty criminals that “respectable” people preferred to ignore. He once wrote, “If you cannot bear these stories, then the times are unbearable. I write what I see, what I feel, what I have experienced. I cannot change the truth.” His commitment to depicting the raw, often sordid truths of urban life meant that he was constantly accused of obscenity, yet he insisted that he was merely holding up a mirror. 

Chughtai, meanwhile, took another kind of risk: she entered the inner lives of women. Domestic spaces, bodily experiences, and suppressed desire were her subjects. Her style was irreverent, sly, and unsentimental. Of her work she once remarked, “I do not write for the courtesans of literature; I write for the women in kitchens and closed rooms, whose lives are hidden under quilts.”

In Kali Salwar, Manto tells the story of Sultana, a young prostitute who moves from Benares to Bombay. The city, indifferent and ruthless, betrays her hopes. Her lover Shankar abandons her after draining her money, and another man, Khudabakhsh, proves equally unreliable. As Muharram approaches, she longs for a black salwar, which is the mourning garment worn during the rituals. Her desire is small, almost trivial, but it is charged with pathos. “All she wanted,” Manto writes, “was a new black salwar. But in the city where she had given everything, there was no one who would give her even this.” The salwar becomes both an object of yearning and a cruel reminder of her dispossession.

Chughtai’s Lihaaf, published just a year later, scandalized in a different way. Narrated by a young girl, it recounts the story of Begum Jan, the neglected wife of a Nawab who prefers the company of handsome young men. Lonely and repressed, Begum Jan finds comfort in her maid, Rabbu. The narrator sees strange movements under the quilt, shadows and contours that suggest a forbidden intimacy. Chughtai never states outright what is happening; instead, the child’s innocent perspective both reveals and conceals the erotic scene. “The quilt creaked and swayed as though an elephant was trapped beneath it,” the girl recalls. The ambiguity was deliberate, but the implication was clear enough for outraged readers to accuse Chughtai of smuggling sapphic desire into literature.

At their core, both stories are about women who transgress. Sultana’s transgression is modest yet devastating: she dares to desire something for herself. As a prostitute, her body is permitted only as an object of male use, not as a site of personal longing. Yet her insistence on the black salwar; an item charged with religious symbolism, asserts her humanity in a society that denies her dignity. Begum Jan’s transgression is more direct: she refuses to accept a loveless marriage as her destiny and seeks intimacy elsewhere, with another woman. In doing so she breaks not only the code of marital fidelity but also the deeper taboo against women’s sexuality being self-directed at all.

Placed side by side, Sultana and Begum Jan appear worlds apart: one is impoverished, the other a wealthy aristocrat. But their stories converge in a shared act of rebellion. Both refuse silence. Both insist that women can feel, want, and act beyond the boundaries set for them. As different as they are in class and circumstance, they are linked in their refusal to remain passive.

The cultural resonance of these transgressions in 1940s India cannot be overstated. Female sexuality at the time was policed under the banner of honor and respectability. Even in the Progressive Writers’ Movement, which called for liberation from tradition, male writers rarely ventured into the territory of female desire. That Chughtai dared to write about lesbian intimacy, and that Manto dared to humanize a prostitute’s longing, shook the literary world. Neither story offers moral punishment or narrative closure. There is no lesson, no tidy moral to reassure the reader. Instead, both writers force the audience to confront their own discomfort: why is it so scandalous for women to want?

The outrage was swift. Manto faced obscenity charges again and again, both in India and later in Pakistan. His stories were dragged into court for being too vulgar, too explicit. He responded with characteristic defiance: “A writer picks up his pen only when his sensibility is hurt. Mine was always hurt.” Chughtai too was summoned to court for Lihaaf. She recalled the trial with humor, noting how the judge asked her to read the story aloud: “There was not a single word in it which one could call obscene… if people read meanings into it, it was their dirty minds.” She was acquitted, but the scandal cemented her reputation as a fearless writer.

The trials reveal an important symmetry between the characters’ transgressions and the writers’ own. Just as Sultana and Begum Jan transgress social boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality, Manto and Chughtai transgressed literary and legal boundaries. To write about these subjects at all was itself an illicit act. The courtroom became a stage on which they had to defend not only their stories but also the very right of literature to represent female desire.

It is tempting to see the quilt in Lihaaf and the black salwar in Manto’s story as metaphors not only for the women’s longing but also for the authors’ own literary defiance. Both objects are charged with scandal. The quilt, concealing an act that cannot be named, becomes the text itself - Chughtai daring her readers to peek beneath it. The black salwar, imbued with the sacredness of mourning, becomes Manto’s symbol of how even the most marginalized women cannot be stripped of desire. To write of these things in the 1940s was to commit a double transgression: against society’s policing of women, and against literature’s role as moral guardian.

Ultimately, Kali Salwar and Lihaaf remind us that literature’s true power lies in its ability to disturb. Sultana’s longing for a black shawl, Begum Jan’s writhing under a quilt, these are small acts in narrative terms. Yet they forced readers, then and now, to confront enormous questions: What does it mean for women to desire? Who decides what is obscene? Why does society fear women’s agency so much that it must be policed by law and religion alike?

The stories’ enduring power is inseparable from the lives of their authors. Manto drank himself to death in Lahore, embittered by obscenity trials and by the horrors of Partition. Chughtai lived longer, unrepentant to the end, proud of having written a story that would outlast its scandal. Together, they demonstrate that transgression in literature is not simply about breaking rules—it is about insisting on truths that society prefers to bury.

By writing these stories, Manto and Chughtai became mirrors to their characters. Sultana’s plea for a black salwar and Begum Jan’s quilt-bound rebellion are not just tales of women in fiction; they are reflections of the writers’ own struggles against silence and suppression. The scandals that followed were proof not of their obscenity but of their necessity. To transgress, whether as character or as author, was to assert humanity in the face of a world intent on denial.