Beyond His Last Trial: Reflections and Speculations on Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s “Aṣlī Jinn”
Haris Qadeer
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16751234
Abstract. A significant amount of scholarly and critical discourse engages with Manto’s portrayal of sexuality and obscenity, particularly within the context of heteronormativity that shapes his narratives. While most of his controversial, obscene short stories highlight heterosexual desires, he also authored “Aṣlī Jinn” (The Real Jinn), a short story that deals with homoerotic desires between two young adult girls. Composed toward the end of his life, this short story has largely been overlooked and has not received the critical attention that other works addressing homoeroticism received during the mid-twentieth century. This essay uses Manto’s provocative story, which holds the potential for censorship in conservative societies, to reflect on the author’s complex legacy following his last trial before his death. It engages with the following questions: Did Manto succumb to societal pressure and stop writing after that final trial? If he did not, how did he continue to explore themes of sexuality and sexual intimacy in his work? Furthermore, why was he not subjected to further legal trials if he continued to produce provocative stories? The essay concludes with an English translation of “Aṣlī Jinn” as “The Real Jinn.”
Keywords: Censorship; obscenity; homoeroticism; Urdu short story; Manto’s trials
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Haris Qadeer is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India. He was a visiting fellow at Co-Futures, University of Oslo (2024), a Charles Wallace India Trust fellow at King’s College, London, UK (2022), and a UGC-DAAD visiting faculty at the Department of English, Potsdam University, Germany (2019). He has co-translated Premchand’s Karbala (Sahitya Akademi 2023). His research articles have appeared in prestigious, journals of international repute. He has co-edited Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Genre, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction (Routledge 2021) and edited The Silence that Speaks: Short Stories by Indian Muslim Women (OUP, 2022) and Medical Maladies: Stories on Disease and Cure from Indian Languages (Niyogi 2022).
Email: hqadeer@english.du.ac.in
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9203-7561
Beyond His Last Trial: Reflections and Speculations on Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s “Aṣlī Jinn” © 2025 by Haris Qadeer is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
