Manto: Messiah or madman?

Nirupama Dutt on Saadat Hasan Manto, the wild child of literature, in his 50th death anniversary year

A month before I was born here in Chandigarh, there died a man called Saadat Hasan Manto out there in Lahore in 1955. He was just 43 and he had challenged God in his own epitaph that is written on his grave_ "There Saadat Hasan Manto lies buried…and buried in his breast are all the secrets of the art of story writing. Even now lying buried under tons of earth he wonders whether he or God is the greater writer of the short story."

For the likes of me who grew up without knowledge of Urdu, the language Manto wrote in, he remained a much-talked-about yet obscure litterateur and my first introduction to his stories was through a special issue of Sarika, a literary monthly that used to be brought out the by Times of India group long ago, sometime in the 1970s.

This issue carried some of the Partition stories for which Manto is so famous. However, for a teenager brought up on a not so merry mix pulp fiction in English, Hindi and Punjabi via Devanagari these stories were difficult and somewhat remote.

This seems a rather strange confession from a member of a family that had migrated from Lahore in the bloody 1947. The only alibi that I can find for it is in the ‘conspiracy of silence’ that was to be found not only in politics, history but even within homes. It took me many years to know which aunt had been abducted and then rehabilitated or which relatives had slaughtered their daughters as they migrated from one part of the Punjab to the other.

Anyway, Manto was not a name to be mentioned too often in middle class homes, specialise as he did in tales of pimps and prostitutes. He was a drunk and had been an inmate of lunatic asylums. What had we, the new breeds of Independent India, have to do with the likes of him?

Glimpses of him came in snatches from my mentor, Mantoesque poet of Hindi called Kumar Vikal. I recall him saying, "If one is to write of red-light areas in present times, one should be able to transcend a Manto who seems to have said it all." Vikal with Hindi as the medium of his expression and Left-wing politics as his inspiration seemed to dismiss Manto such.

Those were still days of ‘Laal Salam’ and Manto was also a deserter of sorts who had chosen to migrate to a country that was formed on the basis of a particular religion.

It was only in the late 1980s when Baba Laali, the Savant of Patiala, allowed me into the ranks of his disciples, who could be talked to, that I heard him referring to Manto, his writings, and also using him as a symbol for humanism amidst the dark days of militancy in Punjab. I recall some quotable quotes by Laali uttered on the bench outside the cafeteria of Punjabi University at Patiala and I gobbled these remarks with the enthusiasm of a slow learner. So said Laali: "That was 1947 and now it is AK 47." "The urinal is the only secular space. Manto has said it all in the symbol of the urinal."

In the early 1990s I actually entered that pre-Independence urinal in Bombay of old where the graffiti debated, in unprintable epithets the treatment meted out to the mothers of the two communities. For mothers and sisters are the first to be targeted in any battle that men fight and so it was with the names of the two countries that were replacing female genitals. This was when Rajkamal Prakashan published five volumes of Manto’s complete works in Devanagari. Of course these were not so complete as what would be unpalatable to the popular opinion in Hindustan was edited out. Nevertheless ‘Mutari’ (urinal) and other stories that make Manto compete with God were there and also my slowly acquired understanding to receive them.

That was a time when 50 years of Partition were approaching and so was a revival of interest in this madman and messiah called Manto who had intervened in spaces into which historians social scientists failed to reach. That was a time when progressive historians accepted their failure. Mushirul Hasan aptly says: "The fact is that to me and many other historians like me, Manto and many other creative writers expose the inadequacy of numerous narratives on Independence and Partition, and compel us to adopt new approaches that have eluded the grasp of social scientists and provide a foundation for developing an alternative discourse to current expositions of a general theory on inter-community relations."

Manto’s nephew Khalid Hasan, to whom goes the credit of translating much of Manto into English for Penguin, wrote some time ago wondering if Pakistan would pay adequate tributes to Manto on the 50th anniversary of his death. Tributes to Manto? What tribute can one pay to a writer who at the cost of his sanity, health and well-being paved the way for the preservation of essential human values. And it is to Manto and his kin that we today think of a sub-continent that will shape up differently for the positive. Manto Mian, I would like to tell you of some graffiti here in this Chandigarh of ours.

As I take a lift in some office in Sector 34 during the India-Pakistan cricket days, I find a heart with an arrow piercing it drawn by some youth of the MTV generation with the words ‘I love Pakistan’.

It has been a long and painful journey since the two governments of India and Pakistan divided their madmen and the protagonist of your Toba Tek Singh breathed his last on the no-man land. But we seem to be moving on and there are more choices before us than banishment, madness or death. Perhaps, there was a method in your madness.

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