Saadat Hasan Manto

Saadat Hasan Manto is the greatest writer of the Urdu short story and one of the great short-story writers of the twentieth century. In some twenty collections of stories, sketches, plays and essays written in a brief, chaotic life, he wrote with brutal honesty, black humour and deep compassion about prostitutes and pimps, the poor and the outcast of Bombay’s streets, sexuality and hypocrisy, and above all the horror of Partition in 1947 — in stories like “Toba Tek Singh”, “Khol Do” (“Open It”) and “Ṭhanḍā Gosht” (“Cold Meat”) that are among the most powerful works of literature about violence ever written. Accused of obscenity six times, despised by moralists of every kind, he insisted that he was only describing reality: “If you find my stories dirty, the society you are living in is dirty.” He died of alcoholism in Lahore at forty-two. Today he is revered in both Pakistan and India.

Life

Amritsar

Manto was born on 11 May 1912 in Samrala, in Ludhiana district, Punjab, into a family of Kashmiri Muslim lawyers, and grew up in Amritsar. His father, a judge, was stern and distant; Manto was a rebellious, indifferent student who failed his school examinations in Urdu several times. In 1933 he met the scholar-journalist Abdul Bari Alig, who encouraged him to read and translate French and Russian literature; he translated Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man, Oscar Wilde’s Vera and Russian stories into Urdu. He briefly attended Aligarh Muslim University, where he contracted tuberculosis. His first story, “Tamāshā”, about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 seen through a child’s eyes, appeared in 1934.

Bombay

In 1936 he moved to Bombay, which he loved more than anywhere — “I am a walking Bombay.” He edited film magazines, wrote screenplays for the film industry (for Imperial Film Company and Bombay Talkies, working with the actor Ashok Kumar), and wrote radio plays for All India Radio in Delhi (1941–42). He married Safia in 1936; they had three daughters. In Bombay he wrote many of his great stories of the city’s underworld — “Hatak” (“The Insult”), about a prostitute rejected by a customer who shines a torch on her face; “Kālī Shalvār” (“Black Shalwar”); “Mammad Bhāī”; “Bū” (“Odour”), about a young man’s memory of a sexual encounter with a Ghāṭī girl in the rain — and associated with the Progressive Writers' Movement, though his independence often clashed with its orthodoxies.

Partition and Lahore

In January 1948, after Partition and the communal riots that followed, Manto reluctantly left Bombay for Lahore in the new Pakistan — a decision he never fully understood or recovered from. In Lahore he was poor, harassed, unemployed, tried again for obscenity, and drank heavily; he wrote prolifically to survive, selling stories for a few rupees. Yet these last years produced his greatest work about Partition. He was twice committed to a psychiatric hospital for alcoholism. He died of cirrhosis on 18 January 1955, aged forty-two.

The Partition stories

“Toba Tek Singh” (1955), his most famous story, is set in a lunatic asylum in Lahore a few years after Partition, when the governments of India and Pakistan decide to exchange their mental patients — Muslims to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs to India. The inmates are confused: where is Pakistan? Is Lahore in India or Pakistan? One lunatic climbs a tree and declares he will live there, belonging to neither country. Bishan Singh, a Sikh who has stood on his feet for fifteen years and mutters a nonsense phrase ending in “of the Pakistan and Hindustan government of the Toba Tek Singh”, wants to know only one thing: where is his village, Toba Tek Singh? No one can tell him. At the border, when he is told that Toba Tek Singh is in Pakistan, he refuses to cross. At dawn he gives a scream and falls dead in the no-man’s-land between the two countries: “There, behind barbed wire, on one side, lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan. In between, on that bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.”

“Khol Do” (“Open It”, 1948): an old man, Sirajuddin, searching for his daughter Sakina, lost during the migration to Pakistan, asks a group of young volunteers to find her. They do — and keep her for themselves. Later she is brought to a camp hospital, apparently dead. When the doctor, needing air, points to the window and says “Khol do” — “Open it” — the girl’s hands move to her shalwar string and she pushes it down. The old man cries with joy: “She’s alive! My daughter is alive!” The doctor breaks into a cold sweat.

“Ṭhanḍā Gosht” (“Cold Meat”, 1950): Ishar Singh, a Sikh, returns to his mistress Kulwant Kaur after days of looting and killing during the riots and cannot make love; when she stabs him in jealousy, demanding to know which woman he has been with, he confesses that he carried off a beautiful Muslim girl to rape her — and found she was already dead. The story was prosecuted for obscenity in Pakistan.

Siyāh Hāshiye (“Black Margins”, 1948) is a collection of very short sketches of the riots — some only a few lines long — of terrible irony: a man carries a looted sugar sack, falls into a well and dies; in “Mistake”, a mob kills a man, then finds he was of their own faith.

Manto never identifies one community as villain: Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs are all perpetrators and victims. He wrote: “Don’t say that one lakh Hindus and one lakh Muslims have been killed. Say that two lakh human beings have died.”

The trials

Manto was tried for obscenity three times before Partition — for “Kālī Shalvār”, “Dhuā̃” and “Bū” — and three times in Pakistan — for “Ṭhanḍā Gosht”, “Khol Do” and “Ūpar Nīche aur Darmiyān”. He was fined once and ultimately acquitted. His defence: “A writer picks up his pen only when his sensibility is hurt… If you cannot bear these stories, it means the age is unbearable. I am merely holding up a mirror to society.”

Other work

His essays and sketches include Ganjē Farishtē (“Bald Angels”), frank portraits of film stars and writers (Ashok Kumar, Noor Jehan, Shyam); a series of satirical letters to “Uncle Sam” (Chacha Sam ke Nām Khatūt, 1951–54), prophetic about American influence in Pakistan; and the story “Naya Qānūn” (“The New Constitution”, 1938), about a tonga-driver who believes the Government of India Act of 1935 has freed India and is beaten by an English soldier.

Legacy

Neglected and reviled in his lifetime, Manto is now regarded as the greatest Urdu prose writer and one of the great short-story writers of the world, often compared to Chekhov and Maupassant. His Partition stories are central to how the subcontinent remembers 1947. Nandita Das’s film Manto (2018), with Nawazuddin Siddiqui, and Sarmad Khoosat’s Pakistani film (2015) told his life. He was posthumously awarded Pakistan’s Nishan-e-Imtiaz in 2012.

In conversation

• Toba Tek Singh — the no-man’s-land of those who belong to no nation.
• “Khol Do” — the unspeakable violence of Partition, told in two words.
• “I am merely holding up a mirror” — Manto’s defence of telling the truth.