“Manto’s most
powerful
Partition story
was Toba Tek
Singh, which
poignantly
describes
the dilemma
of a man caught
within no man’s
land between
the borders
of India and
Pakistan”
one man could have carried so
much rage and despair inside
him. Shortly before he died,
he composed his own epitaph:
“Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto
and with him lie buried all the
secrets and mysteries of the art
of story writing. Under mounds
of earth he lies, still wondering
who among the two is the greater
story writer – God or he.”
Manto began his literary life
as a translator. Born in a village
called Samrala near Ludhiana
in undivided India, Manto grew
up in a family of barristers.
Always interested in literature,
he was introduced to Russian
and French writers such as
Gorky, Chekov, Victor Hugo and
also Oscar Wilde by Abdul Bari
Alig, a scholar and a writer. He
also began to translate them into
Urdu, starting with Victor Hugo.
Later, he studied at Aligarh
Muslim University and soon
began work with a daily called
Masawat. During this time,
the 1930s, he became associated
with the Indian Progressive
Writers Association (IPWA).
His association with IPWA
brought him in contact with
many writers, including
Ali Sardar Jafri, and he began
writing seriously.
Manto experimented with
many different forms of writing:
he began with two short stories,the first one based on the
Jallianwala Bagh tragedy (even
at this early stage, he felt very
connected to political battles
and the abuse of power by the
colonial state). Shortly after
his stint at Masawat, he joined
All India Radio and produced
a number of radio plays. Later,
he produced collections of
stories and essays and also
experimented with screenwriting
for films in Bombay.STRONG VIEWS
By all accounts, Manto the writer
was brilliant and Manto
the human being was not
an easy man to get along with.
He felt things strongly and
expressed them strongly.
In the 1950s, he put together
a series of letters that were
addressed to a mythical Uncle
Sam. In one of them he wrote,
almost as if he could read the
future, about where he saw
US-Pakistan relations going.
Among Manto’s friends was
the writer Ismat Chughtai. Funny
and irreverent, Chughtai’s prose
is acerbic and nuanced, and,
in many ways, gentle, unlike
Manto’s that is often like the
thrust of a knife in the reader’s
belly. It is often said about Manto
that he was tried for obscenity
six times for his writing, three
times in British India and
the other three in Pakistan.
The first time he received
a court summons from the
British Crown was in 1944,
the same day his friend Chughtai
received one too. In her case,
she was accused of being
obscene in her story Lihaaf
(The Quilt) and, in his, it was for
his story, Bu (Smell). Chughtai
describes the incident with her
characteristic humour: “Manto
phoned to say a suit had been
filed against him as well. He
had to appear in the same court
on the same day. He and Safiya
(his wife) landed up at our
place. Manto was looking very
happy, as though he had been
awarded the Victoria Cross.” He
joked with Chughtai and told
her husband, Shahid, “Be a man
and come to Lahore with us...
Fried fish and whiskey...” Once
in Lahore, Manto and Chughtai
spent the time shopping and
visiting friends. Chughtai
wrote that each time she lost
courage about fighting the case,
it was Manto who would get
furious at her and encourage
her to fight on. Chughtai says:
‘‘Manto, Shahid and I roamed
around... shopping... When we
were buying shoes, the sight ofR
ECENTLY, at a one-day session of the Karachi Literature
Festival in London, I listened to actor Nimra Bucha
read from Saadat Hasan Manto’s short pieces in Urdu.
The occasion was a session on the Partition, where artists,
performers and storytellers were presenting artistic and
literary works. The hall was packed, we were in London,
you would have expected that the reading would be
in English. But Nimra chose to read in Urdu. Manto,
she said, was best understood in the language in which he wrote.
Her powerful, moving reading, Manto’s powerful, searing prose,
made for an electric, charged moment.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Saadat Hasan Manto was
perhaps Pakistan’s most famous writer. In his short life – he died when
he was a mere 48 years old – he produced a formidable body of work,
comprising short stories (his forte), journalistic articles, prose pieces,
plays, a novel, commentaries and more. Writing was like oxygen to
him, and he could not live without it, just as he could not live without
his other passion, liquor – which was what killed him in the end. But
the intensity with which he wrote, and the depths of pain, despair
and cynicism in what he wrote about might equally well have killed
him. Readers who come to Manto again and again often wonder how93