Dr. Neetu Khanna on "Stars from Another Sky"

This talk explores how Urdu authors Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai developed distinctive Marxist feminist aesthetics during the era of decolonization in India, which they cultivated in relation to popular films, as both made a living as scenarists for the Bombay film industry in the 1930s and 40s. Chughtai and Manto were a notorious and controversial pair, they wrote through and against each other, and were both tried for obscenity by the colonial government for their explicit representation of sexuality and sexual violence. While Manto and Chughtai are deemed some of the greatest practitioners of the Urdu short story form, and their writings remain some of the most searing and poignant explorations of the trauma of colonialism and Partition in India, Manto and Chughtai also wrote exposés about the scandals and sex-capades of the Bombay film celebrity world in 1940s India. I take the title of this talk from Saadat Hasan Manto’s Stars from Another Sky: The Bombay Film World of the 1940s, a promiscuous text that is part film journalism, part anti-colonial political critique, part autobiography, and part smutty film gossip. This talk centers this peculiar range of Manto and Chughtai’s distinctive writings against the backdrop of decolonization in India in order to interrogate their experiments in revolutionary aesthetics and their explorations into the erotics of decolonization.