Faiz wrote to his wife Alys upon Manto’s death “I was very sad to hear of Manto’s death. Inspite of all his shortcomings, he was very dear to me and I am proud that he was my student in Amritsar…”
“be-mai kise hai :taaqat-e aashob-e aagahii”
Without wine, who has the strength for the terror of awareness?
Ghalib
Saadat Hasan Manto remains an enigma. Was he one of the greatest short story writers of all time or, as his detractors claim, an alcoholic pornographer? He was prolific; in his short life (he died before his forty third birthday), he published twenty-two collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three collections of essays and two collections of personal sketches. He was also controversial, sometimes on purpose. He was tried for obscenity half-a-dozen times, thrice before 1947 and thrice after 1947 in Pakistan but never convicted.
Who was the real Manto? What is his legacy? Like Manto, Faiz Ahmed Faiz had his share of detractors but Faiz had the consolation of being lauded as one of the greatest poets of Urdu in his lifetime. While Manto received his share of accolades, he was also repeatedly censured and tried in court for ‘obscenity’ and ‘indecency’. Manto was convinced of the greatness of his writings and sometimes felt that he was a kindred spirit to that other great rebel, Mirza Asadullah Khan ‘Ghalib’. Like Ghalib, Manto was convinced that his genius would be appreciated only after he was dead. Also like Ghalib, Manto loved his drink and struggled financially all his life, finally dying in abject poverty, bitter and unhappy. What did Faiz think about Manto and his work? What was his opinion about Manto’s art, his controversial writing and his life? Let us attempt some answers to these questions.
Saadat Hassan Manto was born in Samrala, in the Ludhiana district of the Punjab in a Muslim family of barristers, on May 11, 1912. His father, Ghulam Hasan Manto was a Sub-Judge and he married Sardar, a widow, against the pleasure of his large Manto clan. It was his second marriage and presumably Saadat and his sister Nasira received the proverbial stepsibling treatment from the offspring of their father's first wife while Saadat was growing up in the streets of Amritsar. Things got all the more difficult after Ghulam Hasan secured an early retirement in 1918. There was little motivation for the young boy to excel in studies. The only books he ever touched were the ones categorically forbidden by his teachers. He received his early education at Muslim High School in Amritsar but was never too interested in conventional studies and remained a misfit throughout his school years failing twice in matriculation. His only love during those days, was reading English novels, a scandalous pastime for those from ‘respectable’ families. In 1931, he finally passed out of school and joined Hindu Sabha College in Amritsar, which was already volatile due to the independence movement. Here he produced his first short story, 'Tamasha', based on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Here too, he was disinterested in studies, failing twice in his FA examination. The next few years were spent roaming around in the company of other delinquents who reveled in night cinema, alcohol, drugs, gambling and small-time swindling.
However, he was a misfit in the small Amritsar underworld too. He was over-sensitive with delicate features and a thin physique. His favorite vice was inventing rumors: he once told his friends that the Taj Mahal was going to be dismantled and shipped out to the United States! He also joined Aligarh Muslim University for a time, again dropping out shortly. In Amritsar is when he first met Faiz and was his student briefly. This was when Faiz went to Amritsar as a lecturer after doing his Masters from Government College Lahore. Faiz recounts that Manto rarely ever came to class. One day Faiz asked him, in his typical style ‘Kyun bhai, class main nahin aatay, kya kartay ho sara din?’ (‘Why do you never come to class, what do you do all day’?) to which Manto replied that he spent his time translating stories and novels from English to Urdu. Faiz asked him to bring some samples of his translations to class which Manto did after which Faiz said, fine, you don’t have to come to class, keep doing what you are doing.
The real turning point came when he was around 21. That was when he met Abdul Bari Aligue. Bari was a progressive activist and scholar. This was just a few years before the official commencement of the Progressive Writers movement. It was Aligue who encouraged him to broaden his literary horizons and read the works of French and Russian novelists. Within a matter of months Manto produced an Urdu translation of Victor Hugo's The Last Days of a Condemned Man, which was published by Urdu Book Stall, Lahore as Sarguzasht-e-Aseer (A Prisoner's Story). Soon afterwards he joined the editorial staff of Masawat, a daily published from Ludhiana. His 1934 Urdu translation of Oscar Wilde's Vera won him recognition in literary circles and at the continued encouragement of Abdul Bari, he published a collection of Urdu translations of Russian stories as Russi Afsane. Before he was 24 he had four complete publications to his credit, including an anthology of original short stories. All these works were wrought with explicit socialist messages. This recognition pushed Manto to pursue graduation at Aligarh Muslim University, which he joined in February 1934. Here he met and was befriended by other members of the Indian Progressive Writers' Association (IPWA) including Ali Sardar Jafri. His second story 'Inqlaab Pasand' was published in Aligarh magazine in March 1935. Most of his stories from this time are ‘socialist’ and polemical. It was only later that he moved away from the conventional ‘left’ position of the Progressives and found his own, unique voice.
After 1936, he moved to Bombay where he stayed for the next few years editing Musawwir, a monthly film magazine. He also started writing scripts and dialogues for Hindi films, including Kishan Kanhaya (1936) and Apni Nagariya (1939). Soon he was making good money, though by the time he married Safia on 26 April 1939, he was once again in dire financial straits. The film studios recognized his gift for story writing (he had already worked on several film scripts, including Apni Nagariya [1939]). Now he found himself working on films such as Aath Din with like-minded people like Ashok Kumar. Those were the days he later recounted nostalgically: "In Bombay I earned and spent not just thousands but hundreds of thousands of rupees." This was also a relatively happy period for him. In addition to Ashok Kumar, one of the biggest stars of that time, he became friends with many actors, writers and directors. However, he had a close personal friendship with Ashok Kumar and, in fact, wrote a lengthy essay on his relationship with him. The essay is alternately funny, revealing and sad, much like Manto himself.
As usual, Manto is at his best when describing the personalities, foibles and quirks of individuals including his protagonist, the handsome but rude and (according to Manto) socially inept ‘Dada-muni’. The honorific means ‘elder brother’ in Bengali, Ashok Kumar’s native language and Kumar insisted that Manto address him with it once the two had grown close. Manto argued that he was probably older than Kumar but after some calculation, they decided that Kumar was older by a couple of months so the title stuck. Manto describes how he liked using it ‘because it had a touch of the sweetness and roundness of rasgulla, the favorite sweetmeat of Bengalis’. Kumar addressed him as ‘Mr. Manto’ and later just ‘Manto’ even though he disliked it.
In this same essay, Manto described why he eventually left a successful career to move to Lahore after partition even though it proved to be the worst decision of his life and probably led to his early death from poverty and alcoholism. As Manto wrote in his typical wry style ‘It was the period when the British were drawing up rough sketches for the partition of India—in other words, when they were standing on the sidelines gleefully watching the conflagration they had themselves started.” In addition to the fact that his family was already in Lahore, Bombay too, had started experiencing communal riots as partition approached. This was only natural. After all, partition was being planned along communal lines and it was necessary to break down communal harmony and inflame tensions in order to complete it successfully. In addition, as the sunset approached on the British Empire and its colonies struggled to break free, the bigger danger after independence was that a mass movement would not only eject the British from power in India, it would also transfer actual power to the teeming millions of India. This was what the Progressives, Socialists and Communists were hoping and working for. Their model, at the time, was obviously the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and their ideal was the Soviet government of the USSR whose prestige had been immeasurably enhanced by their sound defeat of Hitler’s armies and their capture of Berlin. The crimes of Stalin and his clique were still hidden from the eyes of the world and would not be known for many more years.
Despite financial ups and downs Manto continued writing for films until he left for Delhi in January 1941 where he accepted a job writing for the Urdu Service of All India Radio. This proved to be his most productive period as in the next eighteen months he published over four collections of radio plays, Aao (Come), Manto ke Drame (Manto's Dramas), Janaze (Funerals) and Teen Auraten (Three women). He continued to write short stories and his next short story collection Dhuan (Smoke) was soon out followed by Manto ke Afsane and his first collection of topical essays, Manto ke Mazamin. This period culminated with the publication of his mixed collection Afsane aur Drame in 1943. Meanwhile, after a quarrel with then director of the All India Radio, poet N. M. Rashid, he left his job and returned to Bombay in July 1942 and again started working with the film industry. This was his best phase in screenwriting with films like Aatth Din (directed by Ashok Kumar), Chal Chal Re Naujawan and Mirza Ghalib, which was finally released in 1954 after he had left for Pakistan. Some of his best short stories also came from this phase including 'Kaali Shalwar', 'Dhuan' (1943) and 'Bu' which was published in Qaumi Jang (Bombay) in February 1945. He continued to stay in Bombay till he moved to Pakistan in January 1948.
He took the decision to move to Pakistan after some agonizing. After all, he was doing well in Bombay, his writing was in demand, he was friends with the famous and the wealthy and he was comfortable. However, the dark clouds of communal violence continued hovering overhead. Bombay Talkies, the film studio which had launched the career of Ashok Kumar was ailing, almost bankrupt. Savak Vacha, an old associate of the studio took it over and removed several people who happened to be Hindus. This created many problems. Manto writes how when the new positions were filled Muslims held several of the key positions. In addition to Manto there were Shahid Latif, Ismat Chughtai, Kamal Amrohi, Hasrat Lukhnawi, Nazir Ajmeri, Nazim Panipati and the music director Ghulam Haider. This infuriated the Hindu employees. When some of them were reprimanded for insolence, Vacha started getting anonymous letters that if he did not throw out the Muslim employees, the studio would be burned down.
Manto writes how Ashok Kumar’s mind and heart were blissfully free of communal prejudice but Manto himself was beginning to feel guilty. Ashok and Vacha were his friends; they had taken his advice and trusted him. But he was no longer sure of my own feelings. What if something adverse did happen to the Talkies—how would he face them? He described a terrifying incident when Ashok Kumar set out to drop him home and started driving through a Muslim neighborhood. They ran into a wedding procession and Manto’s blood ran cold. Everyone knew that Kumar was a Hindu. His murder would be a feather in the cap of Muslim rioters. Of course he was recognized and despite Manto’s fear, nothing happened. He then writes “I thought about that a lot but couldn’t understand it at all. In the end I told myself, “Manto Bhai, you won’t find a way through up ahead. Stop the car … and drive through a side street.” Quietly I took a side street and came to Pakistan where my short story “Thanda Gosht” was put on trial”.
Partition was the cloud hovering over the horizon of every story in Manto’s later years and the subject of some of his best work. Partition is a collective wound on the Subcontinent, especially the Punjab where the majority of the violence took place so it is no surprise that Manto’s harrowing stories still have the ability to make one’s hair stand on end. His most controversial stories, those for which he was tried on charges of obscenity (though always acquitted), are fairly tame by today’s standards. However, they are significant for the sense of menace lurking in the background and their stark portrayal of men and women caught up in the maelstrom of violence, unhinged and adrift. Manto takes care not to moralize or preach, not to instruct or demean; as he himself says, he simply observes and lets the characters speak for themselves.
While his characters often appeared stoic, the same could not be said of Manto. He wrote ‘Don’t say that a hundred thousand Muslims and Hindus died (instead) say that two hundred thousand human beings died but this is not the real tragedy. The real tragedy is that neither the murderers nor those murdered count for anything. Muslims thought that by killing a hundred thousand Hindus they had killed the Hindu religion but it lives on. Hindus celebrated that they had destroyed Islam by killing a hundred thousand Muslims but Islam did not receive a scratch. These people who think they can hunt religions with guns are stupid…religion, faith, belief, conviction, creed…all this resides not in the body but in the spirit…How can it be annihilated with knives and guns?’
His most famous (or infamous) stories, those for which he was tried for obscenity range from the fairly tame such as ‘Ooper neechay aur darmiyan’ (Above, below and in-between) and ‘Kaali Shalwaar’ (‘Black trouser’) to the searingly painful ‘Khol do’ (‘Open it’; one of the most damning indictments of sexual violence against women ever written) to the positively feral such as ‘Bu’ (‘Odour’) and ‘Thanda Gosht’ (‘Cold Meat’). Sexual violence against women is a constant theme in his stories as is the ease with which humans can shed the veneer of civilization and turn into animals in the face of unbearable social conditions. To the discerning observer, there is nothing obscene about Manto’s writing. He writes a lot about the sexual relationship between people but in doing that, he is simply describing what most people prefer to ignore especially in overly religious societies, as if pretending that sex does not exist will make it disappear.
This preoccupation with the central place of sex in society was also part of what led to Manto’s break and ostracism from the conventional Progressives/Leftists in the All India Progressive Writer’s Association. Manto started his career writing ‘conventionally socialist’ stories which had a strong reformist message. This was, of course, under the influence of Abdul Bari Aligue, his literary mentor. Soon though, his voice veered towards his chosen themes, relationships, the ‘mysterious working of the human psyche, the hidden (and often denied) motives behind human actions’ and the reactions of men and women to societal and established taboos. In this, he had more in common with the arch-opponents of the Progressives, the ‘Halqa-e Arbab-e Zauq’ (‘Circle of the friends of taste’) spearheaded by two other free spirits, the poets NM Rashed and Sana-Ullah Dar ‘Mira-ji’. Very soon, he was declared a ‘reactionary’ and a ‘modernist’, the terms used in opposition to ‘Progressive’ in those days. Manto himself defended himself against these charges ‘the biggest complication is about this Progressive literature although it shouldn’t be. Literature is either literature or not, Man is either Man or not, he cannot be a donkey or a house or a table. People say Manto is a Progressive, what rubbish. Saadat Hasan Manto is a human being and every human should be progressive….I am in favor of progress in all walks of life. I want this for everyone; you are students, I want you to progress till you reach your ideal’
Faiz defended Manto against the charges leveled against him by the Progressives, not necessarily because he admired Manto’s art and his convictions (which he did, to some extent) but because he believed that freedom of speech and expression was a basic human right and should be defended at all costs. He wrote ‘…some people (members of the Progressive movement) moved towards emotional extremism and because of this…we restricted our circle. On principle, we should have focused on the ideas of writers and artists, we should not have tried to interfere with their creativity. By doing this, we lost writers like Manto, Ismat (Chughtai) and Qurrat-ul-Ain Hyder to which I was opposed’. Ironically, Faiz, a maverick himself also later separated himself from the Progressive movement because of this same ‘meaningless extremism’ and what another Progressive historian and Faiz’ lifelong friend Sibte-Hasan, referred to as ‘literary terrorism’ on the part of the Progressives.
Manto migrated to Lahore in the new state of Pakistan a few months after partition. He had been working on a film script on the life of the great Ghalib and saw many similarities between the two of them. Ghalib too, had lived a life of poverty and relative obscurity, overshadowed by those he thought were his lesser. Like Manto, Ghalib had been a lover of alcohol and had once been sent to prison for a petty crime and also like Manto, Ghalib had been denied his well deserved literary status for a long time. Manto did not see Ghalib completed, he migrated to Pakistan in early 1948. A producer from Lahore had already approached him with a generous offer. He was well settled in Bombay but restless. The same restlessness had made him walk out of opportunities all his life. But always he had found better ones waiting ahead. Not this time. Migrating to Pakistan was his last anxious mistake, and a fatal one.
Lahore, he now found, was not the same city he remembered from pre-independence days. All of Pakistani society was moving towards a hypocritical farce of religiosity, and some of the writings from his Pakistan period serve as the most lucid critique of that transition. The death of the Lahore film industry affected him most directly since many of the industry’s brightest stars had left for India. The offer he had received earlier turned out to be a little more than a hoax. On the other hand, in India, his film Ghalib (1948) became a commercial blockbuster and even grabbed the first National Award. Independent India was opening up to vast opportunities in the film industry. Sadly, Manto had left it at just the wrong moment. Back in Pakistan, the money he had brought from Bombay was gone within a few months.
It was the beginning of the end. Manto turned to fiction writing as the only means of livelihood. The Pakistan years of Manto were very productive. He wrote a lot of stories, many of them masterpieces. Also, in him Pakistani society found the best chronicler of its early years. But the experiment of migration was a disaster for Manto in all other ways.
The first story he wrote after moving to Lahore was "Thanda Gosht", raw and shocking in its portrayal of the communal violence of 1947. It was published in a literary magazine in March 1949, and the magazine was immediately banned. This time the District Court sentenced him to three months of rigorous imprisonment and a penalty of Rs.300. The High Court revoked the sentence of imprisonment but retained the penalty.
Around the same time "Khol Do," a masterpiece on violence against women, and "Ooper, Neechay Aur Darmian," a minor farcical essay about married couples' attitude towards sex were also charged with obscenity by the federal government bringing the total of Manto's condemned stories to six. He remained prolific, sometimes writing a story a day and charged his publishers 25 rupees a story, a not inconsequential sum in those days. However, he was an unhappy man, restless and anxious and his drinking had escalated since coming to Lahore. Many days he spent all his income on alcohol. Desperate, his wife Safia, who feared for his life and his health, had him committed to an insane asylum to get him sober. While he kept drinking, that experience provided the material for his magnum opus, the magnificent story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ about an asylum full of inmates, their trials and tribulations and the effect of the communal partition of India on their lives. The story is vintage Manto with sympathetic characters, humor, pathos and a devastating dénouement. It encompassed all his anguish and confusion about the division of his land into two and which one he belonged to. He died on January 18, 1955, a few months short of his 43rd birthday from complications of liver cirrhosis and alcoholism.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, himself incarcerated in Montgomery (Sahiwal) jail for crimes against the state wrote to his wife Alys upon Manto’s death “I was very sad to hear of Manto’s death. Inspite of all his shortcomings, he was very dear to me and I am proud that he was my student in Amritsar, though mostly in name only, he rarely came to class. However, we used to meet often at my home and we would argue over Maupassant, Chekov, Freud and God knows who else. Our intellectuals who have no idea of, or sympathy for the broken heart of an artist would, no doubt blame Manto himself for his death. He drank too much, lived a dissolute life, ruined his health etc etc. But does anyone ever think why he did this? Keats killed himself the same way, so did (Robert) Burns, and Mozart too. There are others. In truth, when due to social conditions, Art and Life are at war with each other, one has to be sacrificed. The other option is compromise where a part of both has to be given up and the third way is to combine both and produce the synthesis of struggle which only the great ones can do. Manto was not a great artist but he was honest, talented and straightforward.”
Saadat Hasan Manto lies buried in Lahore. His spirit lives on.
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The writer is a psychiatrist and a trustee of the Faiz Foundation, Pakistan and Faiz Ghar, Lahore (www.faizghar.net). He can be reached at |
