Vidyarthee Chatterjee
 |
| Saadat Hasan Manto: May 11, 1912 - January 18, 1955 |
If Saadat Hasan Manto had been living, he would have been a
centenarian this year, thirty-five years older than the Indian nation he loved
deeply and which he did not wish to leave for an unknown land called Pakistan,
but had to under tragic circumstances. As Ahmed Rahi, a close friend, said in
April 1990 at Lahore in course of a conversation with other friends of Manto:
“In my opinion, Manto began to die the day he set foot in Pakistan.”
Manto who? That would have been the reaction of even a well-read
person if you had mentioned the writer’s name two decades ago. But no longer.
In fact, these days it is fashionable to drop his name at least once in course
of an intense literary evening brought to life by alcohol and cigarette fumes.
Be that as it may, Penguin India deserve our thanks for bringing
out more than one anthology of Manto’s short stories which should go some way
in familiarizing the interested reader with the writer who, in a short and
turbulent life of forty-three summers, established himself as one of the
pillars of modern Urdu fiction along with the likes of Krishan Chander, Ishmat
Chughtai and Rajinder Singh Bedi.
Saadat Hasan Manto was born in Sambrala in Punjab’s Ludhiana
district on 11 May, 1912. He was of Kashmiri stock which once made him write a
hilarious letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, calling him a ‘fellow-Kashmiri’ and
calling himself a ‘Pandit’ like India’s first Prime Minister. In a literary
career spanning no more than two decades, Manto wrote more than two hundred
short stories. He also tried his hand at writing plays and essays, but it is
chiefly on his short stories that his enormous reputation as a literary artist
and the scarred conscience of his tragic times, rests.
In a country such as ours, where it is customary not to speak of
one’s own in the highest of terms, however deserving he or she might be, it is
saying quite a lot, as many knowledgeable literary people have been doing for
some time now, that many of Manto’s short stories would easily walk into any
anthology of the world’s best. Toba Tek Singh
or Thanda Gosht (Colder thn Ice) or Khol Do (The Return) are just three of
the many masterpieces he wrote about the partition, which may have helped some
people on either side of the divide to further their political careers, but
left millions in the cold in a psychological no-man’s-land.
Manto has been known in select circles in India and Pakistan for
some time, but the day has now surely dawned for his reputation to spread to
the four corners of the earth. Manto died a few months short of his forty-third
birthday, on 18 January1955, in Lahore, broken in body but unhumbled in spirit
and unfathomable in his love and understanding for the wretched of the earth,
counting himself as the first and foremost among them.
Salman Rushdie thinks that Manto is ‘the undisputed master of the
modern Indian short story’. (It is possible that Rushdie is not familiar with,
say, Manik Bandopadhyay, or the Malayalam master, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer). It
is worth noting that both Manto and Rushdie suffered persecution and social
ostracism, albeit in different forms and in different conditions, for being
true to themselves in matters of social and religious thought, as indeed in
literary taste and manner of expression.
Manto wrote with cruel and heartrending accuracy about characters
drawn from the lower depths of Bombay, where he was involved in the film
industry writing stories and dialogues for Hindi films. Many of his characters
owed their misfortunes to the partition, as also to the ways of so-called men
of god who seemed to Manto to possess little or no godliness. Like Manik
Bandopadhyay, Manto was seized with an obsessive compulsion to delineate the
brutal and often bizarre relationship between sex, religion and violence.
In the process, Manto incurred the implacable wrath of both the
State and the Church in newly-formed theocratic Pakistan. His writings were
accused of being blasphemous, obscene and unpatriotic. The mullahs and their followers, as well as those who saw their
political destiny in the Muslim League, read meanings into Manto’s short stories
which suited them but which he had never intended. The artist was deliberately
distorted and disfigured, his art vulgarized and vilified. But there was no way
that Manto would be diminished in his own assessment or in that of his genuine
readers. Till the very end of his short and poverty-racked life, Manto wrote
only what he believed in, unafraid and unrelenting.
At this point, a brief digression is perhaps necessary. Those of
us in this subcontinent who never cease to admire – and rightly so – the stories
of Maupassant, Balzac, Gogol, Chekhov or Edgar Allan Poe, would do well to
spare some time for this neglected genius of the short story as it grew and
developed on our own soil. Verily has it been said: Seek the universal in the
local. For, if one fails to appreciate Life and its creatures in all their
diversities and complexities as they exist on one’s own doorstep, what sense
would one be able to make of their varied manifestations in the vast world
without?
Manto deserves our time and our energies for he is truly one of
the originals of modern Urdu literature, now thankfully available to a
pan-Indian audience as a result of some competent translations into English,
preceded by equally able exertions in several Indian languages, notably Hindi
and Bangla. In this regard, Manto’s perceptive translator, Khalid Hasan, has
observed: “ Saadat Hasan Manto, little of whose work is known outside India and
Pakistan, remains by any reckoning one of the world’s major short story
writers.”
Manto’s confidence in himself as a literary artist capable of
conjuring apocalyptic visions through the stories of lacerated loners in times
quiet or confused, was Himalayan. Even though he received from the general run
of society little that was encouraging, Manto seems to have felt secure in the
knowledge that he was leaving behind him a body of work that would stand the
test of time and competition of the highest order. As much is conveyed by his
epitaph, written by him a year before his untimely and painful death, which can
and has been interpreted differently by different people. His parting words
were as follows: “Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. With him lie buried all the
arts and mysteries of short story writing. Under tons of earth he lies
wondering if he is a better short story writer than God.” Khalid Hasan informs
us that the epitaph does not appear on his gravestone in Lahore because of his
family’s fears that it would enrage the orthodox and the clergy.
Again, we do not know whether a tongue-in-cheek prayer that Manto
wrote was ever uttered in public by the writer or anyone else. As anyone with
the rare ability to fool around or flirt with the Divine Being will appreciate,
the prayer was composed more in jest than in earnest. Joking with God or his
self-appointed representatives on earth can be serious business as Manto
discovered to his amusement more than once. Manto’s prayer is short, funny and
memorable: “Dear God, Master of the Universe, Compassionate and Merciful: we
who are steeped in sin kneel in supplication before your throne and beseech you
to recall from this world Saadat Hasan Manto, son of Ghulam Hasan Manto, who
was a man of great piety.” The prayer continues: “Take him away, Lord, for he
runs away from fragrance and chases after filth. He hates the bright sun,
preferring dark labyrinths. He has nothing but contempt for modesty, but is
fascinated by the naked and the shameless. He hates sweetness, but will give
his life to taste bitter fruit. He will not so much as look at housewives, but
is in seventh heaven in the company of whores. He will not go near running
waters, but loves to wade through dirt. Where others weep, he laughs; and where
others laugh, he weeps. Faces blackened by evil, he loves to wash with tender
care to make visible their real features.” The prayer ends as only Manto can
end: “He never thinks about you but follows Satan everywhere, the same fallen
angel who once disobeyed you.”
Obviously, all the slings and arrows of life in Pakistan and in
India before he forced himself to cross over to the other side, were not enough
to rob the great artist of his irrepressible sense of humour; his cockiness and
his capacity for self-mockery in a language that is not always easy to
penetrate, tether as it does between horseplay and word-play; and his love of
the absurd as a vehicle to express his unflinching commitment to lasting human
values. Neither the clerics nor the political conmen of the newly-fashioned
‘land of the pure’ could take away from him his deep confidence in his own
worth as a chronicler of, and commentator on, his times and his fellow-beings.
But there were moments when even Manto was compelled to feel
lonely, such as when court cases kept piling up against him for allegedly
scurrilous writing. Manto was tried for writing ‘obscene’ stories three times
before Independence and three times after Pakistan came into being. In all the
six cases, he was ultimately acquitted but not before he had been made to face
hell on earth in each case. It is almost certain that the writer’s loneliness
would have been even more if a section of the liberal intellectuals of the time
had not come to his defence.
However, there is more to be said on this count. The isolation in
which Manto found himself at times, was due to several factors. One was his
addiction to the bottle, which ate into not just the vitals of his frail frame
but also the little he earned from his writings which were well ahead of his
times; the second was the virulent opposition to his stories and other writings
by powerful sections of conservative society; and finally, his refusal to be
drawn into any formal body of artists and intellectuals.
Here, it may not be out of context to quote Manto’s wife, Safia,
‘who stayed by his side through good times and bad’. On 6 April 1968, she wrote
to one of Manto’s Indian biographers: “(Manto) was always treated unjustly by
everyone. The truth is that he had no intention of leaving India, but a few
months before Partition, Filmistan (the Bombay production company where he was
employed) handed him a notice of termination and that, believe me, broke his
heart. For a long time, he kept it hidden from me because he was proud of his
friendship with Mr. Mukherjee (owner of the company) and Ashok Kumar (the
actor). So how could he tell me that he had been served with a notice? That was
when he started drinking heavily, which in the end claimed his life. I had come
over earlier; he came in January 1948. While he was alone in Bombay, his
drinking got completely out of hand. Here his life was full of worries. You can
yourself imagine the state he was in and if it was conducive in any sense. His
health had also become poor. But one thing he did. He wrote prodigiously,
almost a story a day, until the day he died. That is all I know.”
True, alcoholism added to Manto’s physical and financial worries,
and hastened his end, but ironically it provided him with flesh-and-blood
characters and situations credible to the extent of being unbearable. These he
effortlessly wove into his stories with the mastery that is given to very few.
Drinking is often used as a metaphor in his stories, indicating release from
the chains of a suffocating social order that frowned at anyone who failed to
or refused to conform to standards set down by it. Manto’s opponents were able
to make impressionable people believe that he was a characterless heathen and
the opposite of a nationalist and a patriot, all the while harping on his
drinking and his allegedly obscene writings. Even after the law courts had
acquitted him, there remained the intractable problem of how to get his worst
critics to abstain from their favourite pastime of Manto-baiting. Quite
conveniently, the critics made no mention of the writer’s scrupulous honesty in
his dealings with people, his generosity of spirit, and his belief that if
humanity is to triumph, human beings must defeat superstition and abuse of the
poor and the unlettered.
One would have thought that a man of Manto’s egalitarian
temperament and unshakeable commitment to the oppressed would have
automatically opted for life membership of one or more of the organisations of Leftist
writers and intellectuals which held sway in Bombay of the 1940s. But no such
thing happened, for Manto was nothing if not his own boss. His inherent
distrust of labels, dogmas and political ideologies prevented him from coming
too close to so-called progressive writers and artists. In their turn, those
bodies which counted in its ranks intellectuals with a marked Moscow tilt,
maintained a safe distance from freethinkers like Manto. Many of Manto’s
contemporaries have written about how he chose to be his own lord and master
and, even as he had cordial terms with many a Leftist, he consciously and
deliberately distanced himself from marked political creatures. However, on
hindsight, it seems that perhaps the active comradeship of the progressives
might have lessened the isolation which Manto was gradually forced into. In the
end, only by an extraordinary performance of will, combined with the magical
strength of his genius, was he able to transcend that gnawing isolation.
Writing on this aspect of Manto, the Delhi writer and scholar
Tarannum Riyaz has observed: “Manto’s writings have certain features which
accord them a distinct identity and a different complexion. Sometimes his
writings seem to be full of contradictions. However, a careful reading of his
works reveals that there is a philosophical continuity to his writings. Manto
appears to be quite impressed by socialism, but he does not recognize it as the
prescription for the political and economic problems of India. He refuses to
endorse any particular political ideology. Nevertheless, he has a sharp
political and social consciousness which helps him to develop his ‘liberal’
attitudes… Manto does not raise slogans, nor does he trade politics in the name
of literature… It is a sad commentary on the history of Urdu literature in
India that Manto did not receive the recognition that was due to him merely
because some prominent progressive writers dismissed him as a reactionary.”
The single most important feature of Manto’s life and legacy is
his opposition to the concept of overlordship, regardless of the source from
which it emanated – whether it was the State, the socio-religious
establishment, political ideologies and political parties, or the intellectual
fraternity. He possessed an open mind on every subject under the sun; an open
heart whose principal enemy was meanness and backbiting; and a tongue that
freely, if not always judiciously, articulated, often in public, what went on
in the sacred space between his ears. Manto’s reaction to being called a
reactionary was characteristically Mantoesque – unapologetic, unsparing: “I
greatly detested the so-called communists. I could not appreciate people who
talked about ‘the sickle and the hammer’ while sitting in comfortable
armchairs. In this connection, comrade Sajjad Zaheer, who sipped his milk in a
silver cup, always remained a clown in my eyes. The true psychology of working
labourers is manifested in their sweat. Maybe, the people who used this sweat
to earn wealth, and used it as ink to write detailed manifestoes, are sincere
people. However, you will pardon me, if I consider them to be imposters.”
If Manto had no use for “these charlatans (who) were using the
prescription proposed by Kremlin and were busy preparing a mixture of
literature and politics”, the deep-seated humanist in him was also alarmed with
the creeping American influences on the society and polity of infant Pakistan.
In one of his nine letters addressed to Chacha Sam (Uncle Sam), written in a
satirical vein and full of insight, Manto predicted: “We will have buses fitted
with American tools. We will have Islamic pajamas stitched by American
machines. We will have clods of earth ‘untouched by hands’ from the American
soil. We will have American folding stands for the Holy Quran and American
prayer mats. Keep watching Uncle, you will find everyone singing your praises.”
For someone who was thought to be politically naïve by the
progressives, Manto saw through the games of both Moscow and Washington very
early on. It was the era of the Cold War and the two newly-independent
countries were thought to be fertile ground for ‘political picking’. Manto may
not have been involved in politics at any stage of his life, but it was the
height of absurdity on the part of his all-knowing critics to claim that the
writer was innocent of political ground realities. In a sense, it was the
awareness which saved him from being predictable and uncreative after a while –
a fate that was in store for many of his contemporaries.
In conclusion, it is argued by Manto aficionados that he turned out to be the kind of person he was
largely due to his association with the Bombay film industry. The wantonness,
the search for refinement of style and other expressions of creativity, the
urge for absurd flights of fancy, and the nerve-racking insecurity commonly
associated with the film industry, combined slowly but surely to sharpen his
intellect and shape his social awareness. So, when many years after his death,
Mrinal Sen chose to film a story by Manto, he was in fact paying his homage to
an undeservedly maligned genius who was as much at home in the world of letters
as he was in that of the moving image. That Antareen,
that Sen film, was a hopeless flop, is a different story altogether.
If Manto was allowed to have his way, he would never have left
Bombay. And had he lived a little longer, he would have wholeheartedly endorsed
the words and sentiments in the hit song in the film CID: Aye dil haye mushqil
jeena yahan / zara hatkey zara bachkey / yeh haye Bombai meri jaan.
(This article will appear in the next issue of little magazine Samayantar)
