NECROPOLITICAL NATIONALISM: CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF SAADAT HASSAN MANTO’S SELECTED FICTION

Abstract

Nationalism is a framework for maintaining national unity and accommodating identities with common cultural, linguistic, racial, and geographical backgrounds. It is an ideological concept that does not encourage nation, state, and political amalgamation. In this way, nationalism stands as an exclusionary principle that eliminates all those groups who do not belong to the same geographical area. This paper will appropriate the concept of nationalism by forming a connection between nationalism and Necro politics. I will accomplish this by analysing the selected short fiction produced by Sadat Hasan Manto with reference to Necro politics and Nationalism. Mbembe’s Necro politics deals with the subject of forms of targeting killing in the context of war. Keeping this precise nature of Necro politics, this paper will argue that the logic of nationalism had been used as a Necropolitical tool at the time of partition through which the generalized killing of the oppositional party had been justified. The framework used for this paper combines the notion of Mbembe’s Necro politics and Chatterjee’s insight on nation and nationalism in order to demonstrate the adverse effect of partition between Pakistan and India. Besides these theorists, some other theorists’ views are also utilized in order to fully explore the nature of research problem.