Structure
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Outer story
“The Dutiful Daughter” by Saadat Hasan Manto takes the form of a story within a story, containing an outer story and an inner story.
The outer story begins with an exposition. The historical context is presented, focusing on the division of former British India into two countries, India and Pakistan:
The country had been divided. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Hindus were moving from India to Pakistan and from Pakistan to India in search of refuge…
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Inner story
The inner story begins with a liaison officer telling the initial narrator a story about an old Pakistani woman looking for her daughter. The story takes the form of an allegory, which talks about the reactions to the consequences of partition with the help of symbolic characters.
The liaison officer’s account is chronological and follows his encounters with the old Pakistani woman throughout his journeys through India. The man meets the woman several times in different places and, with each encounter, the old woman’s state degrades. The woman’s decay also increases tension in the story…
