The University at Buffalo Humanities Institute Research Workshop on Translation will host Dr. Jennifer Dubrow (University of Washington-Seattle) for an online public lecture, “Characters to Resist Modernity in the Short Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto.” The event will take place on Zoom 2 – 3:30 pm EDT Monday, May 9, 2022. 

To register for this talk and download three brief English translations of short stories by Manto, please visit https://bit.ly/dubrowtranslationzone. 

This talk introduces the work of Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955), whom Salman Rushdie called “the undisputed master of the modern Indian short story.” Now known for his radical stories of prostitutes and Partition, Manto penned indelible characters who refused South Asian modernity’s categories of Hindu/Muslim, pimp/prostitute, and man/woman. Through a reading of some of Manto’s most well-known and controversial stories, this talk reveals how Manto used a character-driven style to critique colonial modernity, and then fragmented this style to interrogate sexuality after Partition.

Jennifer Dubrow is Associate Professor of Urdu at the University of Washington-Seattle. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia, published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 2018 and Permanent Black in 2019. She is currently writing a book on Urdu modernism in South Asia from the 1930s to the 1960s.