The epigraph and title of Saadat Hasan Manto’s 50 sketches and stories of Partition is from Faiz’s poem, ‘Subah-e-azadi’: “This mottled dawn/ This night-bitten morning/ No, this is not the morning/ We had set out in search of.”
The Partition in 1947, which led to the birth of modern India and Pakistan, was a catastrophic event which saw over one million dead and over 14 million displaced. Manto, who wrote in Urdu, chronicled its devastating impact on people, in several other editions besides this, including Bitter Fruit , Kingdom’s End , and the three-volume Stories about the Partition of India edited by Alok Bhalla, to name a few.
The in-between earth
He saw Partition from close quarters and stories like ‘Toba Tek Singh’, ‘The Return’, ‘A Tale of 1947’, ‘Jinnah Sahib’ echo the “dilemmas of people caught up in a great internecine massacre,” as Daniyal Mueenuddin writes in his brilliant introduction: “In these stories, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs are all guilty of murder, of inhumanity... Manto’s dominant attitude, in the face of this madness, is one of bemusement at the absurdity of the violence.”
In ‘Toba Tek Singh’, one of his most famous tales, the governments of India and Pakistan decide that inmates of lunatic asylums should also be exchanged a couple of years after Partition. “When the news reached the Lahore lunatic asylum, it became the subject of heated discussion.” One prisoner, a Sikh who had been in jail for 15 years, and only spoke “mysterious gibberish”, hailed from Toba Tek Singh, now in Pakistani Punjab. Prisoners called Bishen Singh by the name of the town he belonged to. On the day of the exchange, Toba Tek Singh refuses to cross the border to India and remains rooted in no-man’s land. The guards let him be, but next morning, he lets out a scream and dies, and Manto ends his story with this line: “There, behind barbed wire, on one side lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth, which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.”
‘A Tale of 1947’ is about four friends, three Hindus and one Muslim, the latter sailing to Karachi from Bombay. His friends, who have come to see him off, are trying to understand why exactly Mumtaz is going to a country he knows nothing about and where he will always be a stranger. Mumtaz is philosophical, and points to the horizon, saying, “Can you see where the sea and the sky meet? It is only an illusion because they can’t really meet but isn’t it beautiful, this union which isn’t really there?”
Poison weed
With a subtle hand, Manto touches on questions of faith, religion, nation, and how people are often lost for answers. In ‘The Return’, the chilling story of a father and his lost daughter, Manto lays bare the horrors human beings can unleash on one another.
This edition, like Bitter Fruit and Kingdom’s End, is also translated by Khalid Hasan, who writes in his note that Manto’s “most creative period” was also “his harshest in economic and emotional terms.” Manto left his beloved Bombay for Lahore soon after Partition because he felt “deeply disturbed by the intolerance and distrust that he found sprouting like poison weed everywhere… He could not accept the fact that suddenly some people saw him not as Saadat Hasan but as a Muslim.”
But, says Hasan, he did not let this “diminish his faith in the essential rightness of human nature.” Besides the 18 stories, there are short sketches, that, Hasan points out, make up a slim volume called Siyah Hashye , which means “black fringe”. If Independence was “something bright and good”, for Manto “it was fringed with black.” In one, called ‘Tidiness’, passengers on a train are asked if there are any ‘turkeys’; when one is found, one of the men holding lances shouts, “slash his throat”, to which his friend says, “No, no, not here! It’ll mess up the carriage.”
Reading Manto, who held a mirror to that time, one wonders why the ghosts of Partition still linger and the wounds haven’t healed. Haven’t we learnt anything from history?
The writer looks back at one classic every month.
