Manto Vs Fehmida Riaz

One of the reasons that Godavari is different from the rest of the stories that we have read is because it is written by a female. We not only see women from a woman’s point of view, but also a different perspective of men. The female characters in the novella include Maa, Usha, Barki and kikli. In the previous Manto’s stories, the women were uneducated prostitutes with little or no agency like Bismillah.  Here the women have a lot of agency and are learned. Maa is the typical bourgeois activist, Barki and Kikli go to an English medium school and even though Usha is not educated, ‘woh zaheen hai’. Usha is street smart which can be seen in the little pieces of advice that she gives to Maa about stuff like the light and water.  Similarly in Godavari the men instead of the women are described by their physical attributes and are objectified. In Manto’s stories the prostitutes were reduced to their body, in Godavari the men are reduced to their gaze. The previous stories depicted women as insecure through their yearning of a family, in contrast, here they are liberated and in control.  In Godavari the intimate knowledge of man’s nature - ‘mard tou kutta hota hai’- and his wandering gaze makes him come across as weak.  Whenever Ba sees ‘kisi bhi kism ki aurat, who Rehsa Khatmi hojata tha’ this melting imagery used to describe a man is very impactful especially if you link it with Saughandi’s vulnerability in Hatak jab woh ‘bus moum hojati thi’. Hence Fehmida Riaz’s feminine voice comes across in this novella in many instances especially in the voices and the characters in the novella.