The Barking Dog and Crying Bird in Partition Stories: Beastly Modernism and the Subaltern Animism of Manto, Rakesh and Anand

Critics have categorized much of the modernist story in Urdu, Hindi and English of the Indian Subcontinent from the 1930s to the 1950s as Progressive literature. The fictional push for reform in the society and reformulation of humanism in Progressive stories shows the agency of the detritus of society. The thrust for social reform and reconstruction of humanistic values had become all the more urgent in the wake of the cataclysmic violence engulfing the Subcontinent at the time of Partition—in the years between 1946 and 1948. The immediate, shocking responses to the holocaust-like events of the Partition in the Subcontinental discourse of the time harp on men becoming animals and humanity turning into beasts. In sharp contrast to the prevailing cultural discourse, three leading Progressive writers: Saadat Hasan Manto (Urdu), Mohan Rakesh (Hindi), and Mulk Raj Anand (English) fall back upon the animals—the barking dog and the crying parrot—to expose the animality of humanity, both as victimizer and the victimized, one the one hand, and to dramatize the human attributes of the animal on the other hand.