One of South Asia’s most talented short story writers had to subsist on more than a full bottle of undiluted bootleg liquor and two slices of bread everyday for many years before finally succumbing to liver cirrhosis. In the last days of his life, after having spent nearly seven years in Lahore, he was drinking himself to death and died as a broken man in the year 1955 barely when he was 43. He is Saadat Hasan Manto.
What claimed his life? The pain of being treated unjustly by everyone? In Bombay, a few months before Partition, he was handed a notice of termination, which, his wife said, broke his heart. In the aftermath of the Partition, Manto, had to leave Bombay in 1948 for Lahore because he did not feel secure in a communally-surcharged India.
As long as he lived he regretted having left the city that he loved and where he had spent the happiest and, financially, the most creative part of his life.
In Lahore, he became almost a destitute. The new Pakistan belied his hope. But in Lahore he wrote his masterpieces like ‘Thanda Gosht’, ‘Khol Do’, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, ‘Iss Manjdhar Mein’, ‘Mozail’, ‘Babu Gopi Nath’ etc. Two of his greatest stories ‘Colder than Ice’ and ‘The Return’ were considered obscene by Pakistani censors. He was tried thrice for obscenity before and thrice after independence. Small wonder, Manto was greatly influenced by D H Lawrence and comes closely to be compared with Ismat Chugtai.
The 28 stories— translated seamlessly in the hands of Khalid Hasan, one of the ablest translators of this foremost Urdu writer— are some of the most representative ones by Manto (he produced more than 250 short stories). The part of selection has surely been a tricky affair because during his career Manto published 22 collections of stories, seven collections of radio plays, three collections of essays, and a novella. The book includes unforgettable stories like ‘Toba Tek Singh’, ‘The Return’, ‘The Assignment’, ‘Colder Than Ice’ and many more, bringing alive the most tragic event in the history of the Indian subcontinent.
Manto’s strength of course lay in the short story. ‘The Return’ (Manto rated this story, titled originally as ‘Khol-do’, as his greatest) is a chilling tale from 1947 about Sakina, a girl abducted from East Punjab, who is finally found by Sirajuddin, her father, in a hospital where she lies in a traumatised state, raped not only by her abductors but the rescuers as well. The father, despite the hint that she has not only been raped but has got used to being so, is deliriously happy simply over the fact, that her persecutors left her alive making the attending doctor break into a cold sweat.
In the ‘Dog of Titwal’ a dog is alternately mistaken for an Indian or a Pakistani spy because it strayed into the two warring camps of India and Pakistan and is ultimately given a “dog’s death” by playful exchanges of rifle bullets. In the story, Manto mocks at the foolish gullibility and mindlessness of people that betrays a constant tension: would those who killed the dog die as patriots or would they die the death of cruel fools for their country, religion or cause.
‘The Last Salute’ is a moving tale of two friends who belonged to the same village, a shared childhood but now serving two separate armies and fighting one another.
The mistake of Mangu
In ‘The New Constitution’, another Manto classic, first published in 1937 as ‘New Law’, tells the story of Ustad Mangu, a tongawallah in Lahore, whose hatred for the British raj is pathological. Driving around Lahore, Ustad Mangu overhears several of his passengers discussing the 1935 Government of India Act, which was intended to give limited self-government to Britain’s Indian subjects.
Ustad Mangu is under the false impression that the Act will instantly eliminate British rule. The tonga driver discovers his error when he beats up a British soldier on April 1, 1935, the day when the law is supposed to take effect. He is instantly dragged off to prison by native policemen. When Ustad Mangu protests that there is a new constitution, the policemen scoff at him: “What rubbish are you talking? It’s the same old constitution”.
And if you want sheer sensuous beauty, read ‘On the Balcony’ where Manto says in the voice of the first-person-narrator to a girl whom he took fancy to: “Live, make use of this life! We all have to die, which is why it is necessary to live.” And this life-sniffing zeal is embodied in his story ‘Odour’ where it is the smell of the women that talk to Randhir— the language of their body and the unwashed smell of one dark girl under a tamarind tree that sets his senses tingling. Pure smell of life this!
Ballistic power
Stories that talk of base primal passions like in ‘The Wild Cactus’, ‘Mummy’, ‘The Room with the Bright Light’, or ones that chill you to the bones like ‘Mozail’, ‘Colder than Ice’ or ‘The Assignment’ give you an idea of the ballistic power of Manto’s literary imagination.
To Manto, 1947 was not a celebrative, an epiphanic event. Partition was, “not an unfortunate rupture in historical time but a continuation of it”. It was, to him, an overwhelming tragedy. He transmuted his sense of personal loss at the horrors of Partition into stories as unforgettable as ‘Toba Tek Singh’. No one portrayed it in so few words, and with such irony as he did in the story set in a mental hospital where some patients believed themselves to be famous political leaders of the day. Some of the passages truly read like an early experiment in magic realism.
He celebrated non-conformism. His heroes were people who lived on the fringes of society who populated his stories such as ‘Siraj’ and ‘Babu Gopi Nath’. To him prostitutes were more interesting than housewives and crooks more human than civil servants. In school, he had no interest in textbooks. By the time he reached college he had recognised himself as a dropout. He failed twice in the intermediate.
The next few years were spent roaming around in the company of other delinquents who revelled in night cinema, alcohol, drugs, gambling and small-time swindling. Like Manmohan in ‘Kingdom’s End’, he died with blood bubbling out of his mouth leaving a legacy of his subversive tales.
Manto was the chief literary exponent of Partition literature in this subcontinent and his stories strike us with an uncanny relevance. Sixty years after the Partition of India, he remains one of the first and finest writers to creatively depict that era. And he is yet to be fully appreciated. Manto once said that a writer should not read because that puts an end to his originality. What he should read is the book of life. More than 50 years after Saadat Hasan Manto’s death, there is no question that few have read that book better than him.
Selected Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto, Translated from the Urdu with an introduction by Khalid Hasan, Penguin Books, 2007, pp 309, Rs 295
