Manto’s problem, if it was a problem at all, was his straight thinking, and even more, his straight-talking. He didn’t care about such taboos. If people made love, then there was nothing wrong in talking about making love, especially when the subject of his stories was not the act but what lay behind the act in the protagonist’s psyche. According to the aforementioned judge, “[Manto] told me that the story in question was to a large extent based on real events. So if it was obscene, there was little he could do about it. Contemporary society was itself obscene. He merely portrays what he sees …†(p.187). Which made the judge conclude, “Precisely at that moment the realization hit me in all its intensity that this man was a true artist. Manto didn’t have the foggiest idea that he had written anything obscene; he had merely written a short story†(p.186).
A few years ago I read Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel Corruption. [2] The subject of this fictional piece is familiar to South Asians, who daily witness the myriad forms of this abominable practice in their national life. The novel contains numerous graphic descriptions of the love life of a lawfully wedded couple Here is a tasty morsel from the life of a lawfully wedded couple:
Was it love? My shyness, my hang-ups, and my seriousness were handicaps to knowing the truth. Now, I know that I desired her physically. At the beginning of our marriage we spent a lot of time making love. What was surprising was that she went wild in bed. She made love with her entire body. One day, from underneath the bed, she pulled out the book of Sheikh Nafzaouvi, a manual of Muslim erotology, and decided that for one month we were going to execute every position described by the sheikh, twenty-nine in all. It was funny: we made love with a manual in front of us. She knew this book by heart and recited entire passages to me. I memorized a few names of positions I found comical, like “black-smith’s copulation,â€â€œthe camel’s hump,†“Archimedes’ vice,†and so on. Why the black-smith? At a certain moment, while the woman is on her back, “her knees raised toward her chest so that her vulva is exposed, the man executes the movements of copulation, then removes his member and slides it between the woman’s thighs, like the black-smith removing the red-hot iron from the fire …†(p.10)
Far be it from Manto to use such graphic language, or even the language used by Mir Dard and Momin Khan Momin in their masnavis, which Manto has cited elsewhere [3]  as telling specimens of what is called “obscenity.†But even in Corruption, this minor detail, like so many others, is simply a part of the protagonist’s life and contributes its share in weaving the multi-colored tapestry of his personality—a simple, upright man who would not accept a bribe, in any form or fashion, because such practices went against his conscience, his innate sense of morality. By the time we finish the novel, the minuscule details of his married life are entirely forgotten, submerged, as it were, in the trials and tribulations which Mourad, a decent, honest man, must go through in order to live a decent, honest life. Then again, reference to conjugal intimacy is not thrown into the novel merely willfully, nor for titillation. Mourad has come to doubt whether it was he who wanted to marry his wife or she who had trapped him using cunning and wile. The doubt has surfaced because she, a competitive, ambitious woman, pining to live a luxurious life and keep up with the Joneses, never failed to hold him responsible for their modest style of living, insinuating in so many ways that he ought to adopt the ways of the world, of his colleagues—i.e., start accepting bribes.
