Sharifan (شریفن) by Saadat Hasan Manto: Summary, Themes and Ending
Quick answer: Sharifan by Saadat Hasan Manto: summary with the ending, Qasim finds his daughter dead and takes revenge on a stranger's child, themes and craft. Mature readers.
Qasim comes home in the middle of the riots to find his wife dead in the courtyard and his young daughter Sharifan dead and naked in the inner room. He covers her, picks up an axe and goes out into the street to do to the other side what has been done to him. The story is about the house he enters next.
Saadat Hasan Manto wrote Sharifan around 1950 as part of his second wave of Partition fiction. It is very short, about 1,000 words, and among his most violent; it deals with the rape and murder of children and is strictly for mature readers.
The story in brief
The first half is a single shock. Qasim sees his wife's body, then finds Sharifan, and the sight of his daughter's nakedness undoes him. He throws a cover over her, and grief turns almost at once into a need to kill. He takes an axe, leaves the house, and in the street cuts down men whose faces he barely sees. Qasim is looking for a house like his own.
He breaks into one. Inside is a girl of about Sharifan's age. He attacks her with the same frenzy he saw in his own room, strips and kills her. As he stands over the body a man enters, sees the girl and cries her name, Bimla. Qasim's hands start to shake, and with them he pulls a sheet over the body he has just made, exactly as he covered his daughter. That repeated gesture is the story's last image.
The characters
Themes and meaning
Exam readings name the cycle of communal revenge and the way Partition violence reproduced itself house by house. Manto's method is to strip the cycle of speeches: there is no religion named in the first half, only a man and a dead girl, and the second half repeats the first with the roles reversed.
The sharper observation is the sheet. Qasim covers Sharifan out of love and covers Bimla out of shame, and the two movements are the same movement. Manto refuses to let the perpetrator feel different from the victim's father; he shows the hands doing the same thing, and lets the reader supply the recognition.
The craft
The turn is one spoken name. Bimla is the only dialogue that matters, and it converts a nameless body back into somebody's daughter, which is the whole story in one word. Manto times it a beat after the killing so Qasim cannot undo anything.
The technique worth stealing is structural mirroring in miniature: two houses, two girls, two fathers, one gesture repeated. A story under a thousand words can hold a complete moral argument if its second half is its first half seen from the other side.
For class and essays
What writers can take from this
- Pair the story with Thanda Gosht in any essay on Manto's perpetrator stories.
- Point to the repeated sheet as the structural key.
- Explain how the two names carry the communal identities.
- For your own fiction, make the second half repeat the first from the opposite side.
- Give the turn to a single spoken word.
- Describe violence in flat, brief sentences and never dwell.
Try it yourself
Write a very short story in two halves in which the second half repeats the physical actions of the first with the roles reversed, and end on one spoken word that identifies a person the protagonist had refused to see.
Questions
What is the summary of Sharifan by Manto?
Qasim finds his wife and daughter Sharifan murdered during the riots, takes an axe into the street and breaks into a house where he rapes and kills a girl of the same age. Her father enters and cries her name, Bimla. Qasim covers the body with a sheet as he covered his daughter.
What is the theme of Sharifan?
The cycle of communal revenge, shown as pure repetition. The perpetrator becomes the man who wronged him, and the story marks this with one repeated gesture.
Why is the story called Sharifan?
After Qasim's murdered daughter. The title keeps the first victim in view while the story shows her father producing a second one.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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