What can be more appropriate than this that actor Nandita Das’s “Manto” made waves at the Cannes Film Festival in the same month when lovers of Saadat Hasan Manto’s writings were busy celebrating his 105th birth anniversary on May 11? One cannot but recall that when he died in 1955, “Mirza Ghalib”, a Sohrab Modi film that Manto had written and in which Bharat Bhushan and Suraiya had played leading roles, was drawing record audiences in cinema halls in India. It’s a measure of Manto’s greatness as a writer that with each year passing, his fame and fan following continue to grow and now, 62 years after his death, he appears as a colossus on the Urdu-Hindi literary scene of the sub-continent.
Like Mirza Ghalib, Manto too had to face many personal and literary attacks, and like him, he too was acutely conscious of his genius. Exactly five months before he died, he himself wrote his own epitaph: “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto buried, and buried with him lie all the secrets of the art of storytelling in his breast. Weighed down by maunds of earth, he wonders still: Who is the greater storyteller, God or he?” Taking a cue from this epitaph, Devendra Satyarthi wrote an article to commemorate Manto’s sixth death anniversary and conjured up an imaginary conversation between God and Manto. After God patronisingly speaks to Manto and forgives all his sins, this is what Manto says of Him: “What does He think of Himself? He is trying to frighten me! He loaned me only forty-two years, eight months and seven days, but I have given centuries to Saugandhi.”
Satyarthi hit the nail on its head as Saugandhi in ‘Hatak’ and so many of the other characters created by Manto-Bishan Singh (“Toba Tek Singh”), Sultana (“Kali Shalwar”), Ishar Singh and Kulwant Kaur (“Thanda Gosht”), Bholu (“Nangi Awazen”), Sirajuddin and Saqeena (“Khol Do”), to name only a few have become nearly immortal.
Manto wrote about the working class, prostitutes and other oppressed women belonging to lower classes, and others who lived on the margins of society. He was prosecuted on the charge of obscenity four times in undivided India and once in Pakistan where he had moved after the Partition, a tragedy he could never reconcile with. His disappointments, wayward lifestyle and alcoholism took him to lunatic asylum, which became a metaphor of the insane world for him.
Questioning Partition
His masterpiece ‘Toba Tek Singh’, whose mad protagonist Bishan Singh cannot figure out how a country could be divided into two overnight and keeps asking other inmates of the lunatic asylum, is one of the most powerful short stories ever written on the Partition.
The late Balraj Menra, a highly regarded Urdu fiction writer, and television veteran Sharad Dutt, an award winning documentary maker as well as a celebrated writer of music director Anil Biswas’s biography, teamed up to introduce Manto to the Hindi world and edited his collected writings with critical notes and introductions. Titled “Dastavez”, this five-volume edition was published by Rajkamal Prakashan in 1993 and was the first authoritative edition of Manto’s writings in Hindi. This edition played a very significant role in making the Hindi literary world familiar with the writings of the great Urdu writer. Manto’s popularity today can be gauged by the fact that a number of Hindi literary journals have brought out their special numbers on Manto in the past five years. Of them, the Manto number of “Udbhavana” merits a special mention. It not only contains articles on Manto written by his contemporaries like Ismat Chughtai, Upendra Nath Ashq, Ali Sardar Jafri and Mehdi Ali Siddiqui but also of noted Hindi writers such as Asghar Wajahat, Janaki Prasad Sharma and Rajkumar Sharma. Janaki Prasad Sharma has edited this special number that also offers poetic tributes paid by noted Urdu poets Shaharyar and Majeed Amjad, besides a few Hindi poets.
It’s really bitter irony that a pro-people writer like Manto enjoyed a rather strained relationship with the Communist-dominated Progressive Writers’ Movement. Although they admired his writings initially, progressive Urdu writers like Sajjad Zahir, Ali Sardar Jafri and Faiz Ahmed ‘Faiz’ became wary of them by 1945 because they confused the stark portraits of reality offered by Manto with decadence and obscenity. In 1945, at a Progressive Writers’ Association conference held in Hyderabad, Zahir, in fact, proposed a resolution attacking Manto but he drew support from unexpected quarters. Maulana Hasrat Mohani stoutly opposed the resolution and it could not be adopted.
Manto was very clear about his world view, literary style and artistic goal. “If you cannot bear these stories, then the society is unbearable. Who am I to remove the clothes of this society which itself is naked,” he wrote in his defence. Even while he was grappling with his mental illness, Manto was prescient enough to see the famed Allah-America-Army alliance emerging in Pakistan as is evident in the nine letters that he wrote between 1951 and 1954 to Uncle Sam. His playfulness, biting sarcasm and political far-sightedness are in full display in these marvellous letters.
