Kali Shalwarکالی شلوار

Kali Shalwar (The Black Shalwar) is a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, published in Urdu in the early 1940s. Set in Delhi, it follows Sultana, a sex worker whose trade is failing, through the days before Muharram as she longs for a new black shalwar. It is one of the three stories for which the colonial government tried Manto for obscenity, and it remains one of his most discussed works.

About the story

Manto's collection Dhuan, published in Delhi in 1941, carried the story, and Manto himself recalled it appearing in the annual number of the Lahore magazine Adab-e Latif in 1942. It was written before Partition, when Manto was living and working in Bombay and Delhi and writing the stories of prostitutes, pimps, gamblers and labourers that made his name. The title names the garment at the story's centre: the shalwar, the loose trousers worn with a kameez, in black, the colour of mourning worn during Muharram.

What happens in Kali Shalwar?

Sultana once did good business in Ambala, where most of her clients were English soldiers. At the suggestion of her lover Khuda Bakhsh she moved to Delhi, and there her trade fell away. She lives in one of a row of identical flats the Delhi authorities built on the edge of the city to house prostitutes, across the road from a warehouse and a maze of railway tracks. She watches the trains from her balcony and sees herself in a carriage shunted off on its own, running on a track of its own until its momentum is spent.

Khuda Bakhsh is no help. He trusts in God and spends his days chasing fakirs and holy men who he believes will work miracles for him. Muharram is coming and Sultana's friends have all had black outfits made. She has no money and has sent her shirt and dupatta to be dyed. Then Shankar appears, a drifter with nothing but his wit and his tongue. He offers himself to her in exchange for what she sells. She refuses him at first, then beckons him back. She asks him for four and a half yards of black satin. He takes her silver ear drops instead, and on the first day of Muharram he returns with the black shalwar. When her friend Mukhtar comes to visit, Mukhtar is wearing Sultana's silver drops and Sultana is wearing her black shalwar.

Sultana, Khuda Bakhsh and Shankar

The three characters are drawn with Manto's usual economy. Sultana is not a symbol but a working woman with a rent to pay, electricity to pay for and a faith she keeps in her own way: she wants the black shalwar because Muharram matters to her, not because anyone tells her it should. Khuda Bakhsh, whose name means blessed by God, is the story's quiet joke: the man who trusts in God does nothing, while Shankar, who trusts in nothing but his own sharpness, is the one who delivers. Shankar is no hero either. He gets Sultana what she wants by taking from her friend, and the bargain is plain: in Sultana's world, everything, even a gift, is paid for.

Why was Kali Shalwar put on trial?

The story was banned under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code on grounds of obscenity, and Manto had to travel from Delhi to Lahore three times to answer the charge. He was tried with Ismat Chughtai, whose story Lihaaf faced the same charge, and both were acquitted on 1 June 1946. It was one of six obscenity trials Manto faced in his life, three before Partition, in colonial India, for Dhuan, Bu and Kali Shalwar, and three afterwards in Pakistan. He was never convicted.

Manto answered the charge in his essay 'I Too Have Something to Say'. If talking about a prostitute is obscene, he argued, her existence is no less obscene, and if her business is lawful, talking about it cannot be a crime. The story, he said, simply showed the face of a corpse that society carries on its shoulders and refuses to look at.

The author

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) was born in Samrala, in Ludhiana district, and became the most widely read short story writer in Urdu. He published twenty-two collections of short stories, along with a novel, radio plays, essays and sketches. His Partition stories, above all Toba Tek Singh, are counted among the finest short fiction in South Asia. Kali Shalwar belongs to the earlier, pre-Partition half of his work, written when his subject was the Bombay and Delhi of the streets rather than the violence of 1947.

Reception and legacy

The trial made Kali Shalwar famous, and the story has stayed in print ever since, in Urdu and in English as 'The Black Shalwar'. It is taught and anthologised as one of Manto's defining stories, and the case around it is now cited in writing about censorship, free expression and the policing of literature in South Asia. What keeps the story alive is not the trial, though. It is Sultana herself: a woman with no safety net, no protector and no illusions, who gets what she needs and pays the price in full view of the reader.