Tracing the Violated Identities of Women

A Comparative Study of Saadat Hasan Manto's 'Khol Do' and Dr. Sherri Szeman's 'The Kommandant's Mistress'

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.70042/eroth/09010006

Keywords:

Partition, Holocaust, women, memory, trauma, identity

Abstract

This paper will attempt to explore the concept of the female body being used as a site of violence in Manto’s Khol Do and Szeman’s The Kommandant’s Mistress. The texts refer to the two canonical genocides of human history – the Partition (1947) and the Holocaust. This comparative study delves into the psyche of two different communities from two different parts of the world tied with the same string of trauma and loss. The fragmented memory caused by the recurring nature of trauma in women due to sexual atrocities committed upon them and the subsequent silence and repression of emotions will be nuanced within this paper, deriving from Freud’s work on Hysteria, stating that traumatic experiences can cause psychological disturbances. Based on Caruth’s theory of Belatedness, this paper will examine and highlight the recurring nature of trauma and the altered identities of the two rape victims.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

  • Sagnik Thakur

    Sagnik Thakur graduated in English (with Honours) from City College, University of Calcutta (2019-22) and is currently pursuing an M.A. from the Department of English, University of Delhi.

  • Angshumala Karmakar

    Angshumala Karmakar graduated in English (with Honours) from City College, University of Calcutta (2019-22) and is currently pursuing an M.A. from the Department of English, University of Delhi.

Downloads

Published

2025-04-01

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 1 (2025): Erothanatos

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Erothanatos: A Peer-Reviewed Quarterly Journal on Literature

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

All articles and content published in Erothanatos are made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), unless otherwise stated. This license permits users to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, and to make derivative works, for non-commercial purposes only, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.

Authors retain the copyright to their work. In cases where a special issue is priorly declared to be published in book form with an ISBN, the copyright and licensing terms for that publication will be specified separately and communicated to contributing authors in advance.

By submitting to Erothanatos, authors agree to the terms of this license and acknowledge that their work will be freely accessible to the public and may be used for academic, educational, and non-commercial purposes in accordance with the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

For further details about the license, please visit the Creative Commons website.

How to Cite

Tracing the Violated Identities of Women: A Comparative Study of Saadat Hasan Manto’s ’Khol Do’ and Dr. Sherri Szeman’s ’The Kommandant’s Mistress’. (2025). Erothanatos: A Peer-Reviewed Quarterly Journal on Literature, 9(1), 89-98. https://doi.org/10.70042/eroth/09010006