Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry on taking Saadat Hasan Manto to stage

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

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? I don’t even try to cover it, because it is not my job, that’s the job of dressmakers. — Saadat Hasan Manto

“Language is a knife. Language has a way of cutting things open and revealing the truth,” Salman Rushdie writes in his new book, ironically called ‘Knife’. This analogy parallels the works of Saadat Hasan Manto, as he tore open the underbelly of society through multiple mirrors, revealing hard truths about people whose lives tottered on the margins.

Artists can be dangerous beings, often ferreting out truths that are normally hidden, locked and private. Making the invisible visible. Artists pose a threat to society as they frequently cross the Lakshman Rekha, a metaphor for crossing the boundaries of permissibility. History is replete with stories of thinkers, writers, scientists, artists and philosophers killed, isolated, exiled and hounded for their thoughts that did not resonate with normative thinking.

I believe that all of us are shaped by the books and stories we read. For many years, I have been both intrigued and fascinated by Manto, whose stories I devoured and dramatised for the stage. The characters he created were real, palpable and alive. Despite their penury-ridden existence, they had the agency to challenge and change their circumstances, no matter how savage the situation may have been.

Manto is a writer whom we still need, especially now. He is an eviscerator who ripped opened dark realties for his readers rather than making them enter an illusionary world.

Born on May 11, 1912, to a Kashmiri Muslim family in Ludhiana, Manto went to Amritsar for his schooling, but his destiny was in Bombay, a cosmopolitan city full of contradictions and contrasting realities. Bombay gave him the space to carve his own identity, but his search was crushed as the country was torn apart by Partition. This forced him to align with his religion, which was antithetical to his proclivities. During this difficult period, he was forced by circumstances to move to Lahore, leaving his beloved Bombay behind. Tragically, alcoholism was his weakness that would lead to his premature death in Lahore at the age of 43.

The plays that I created from Manto’s stories were ‘Bitter Fruit’, ‘Naked Voices’, ‘Dark Borders’ and ‘Tamasha’. Along with the actors, we processed the narratives from an eclectic variety of cultural sources, making us dig deep to interpret the dark forces that reside in human nature and history — a sort of subaltern history of migration, gender politics, violence and affirmation. His full-bloodied and feisty women characters — Sakina, Sugandhi, Kulwant Kaur and Neti, to name a few — came alive in the bodies and feelings of the actors. Their stories slid into the hearts and minds of the actors, both from inside and outside, with a precarious edginess. What I loved was that Manto’s characters were cheeky, irreverent and subversive, and not burdened by the notions of nationalism, religion or morality. They were unfettered and free, revelling in their own insuppressible joy of being alive. His characters showed the actors a roadmap to enter the dark spaces and shine a torch on the hidden crevices within their being.

The protagonists in Manto’s stories were pimps and prostitutes, goons and gangsters, but the setting was momentous political events: Partition, mass migration and poverty, which chronicled a period of crucial cultural, historical and political shifts. Alleys and dark corners were his abode. He explored the streets of Bombay, Amritsar, Lahore and Ludhiana, searching for stories, and in that process, Manto became the story. His stories of Partition, which I have directed, were strong metaphors that evocatively portrayed the savagery that drove ordinary people into unsuspected barbarity. ‘Toba Tek Singh’, ‘Tamasha’ and ‘The Dog of Titwal’ cemented his reputation as a masterful raconteur.

Eerily, he wrote: “I feel like I am always the one tearing everything up and forever sewing it back together.” It was exciting to connect the dots between Manto’s life and his stories, as his stories were his love letters to life. His disturbing recounting of the brutality of Partition and his portrayal of the underworld are written with empathy and devoid of moral positioning.

This seemingly apolitical positioning became glaringly political and led to a slew of critics labelling his work as voyeuristic and called him a scavenger of human misery. The diatribe was thrown at him as he had upended every conceivable notion of propriety.

Manto’s humanism became a leitmotif of relief that offers both pleasure and insight in equal measure. Claimed by both India and Pakistan, loved and rejected by both the countries with equal passion and fervour, Manto remains an enigmatic figure stuck in a no man’s land, like his adored character Bishan Singh in ‘Toba Tek Singh’. “Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception, but man was still a slave in both these countries — slave of prejudice… slave of religious fanaticism… slave of barbarity and inhumanity,” wrote Manto, with an urgency, gravity and unflinching honesty.

What worked for me as a theatre director was the fact that Manto was not into grand narratives, but interested in the small foibles and heartbreaks of the little people. Their struggle to connect the filaments of a dysfunctional social order in which his characters are placed made me recognise the extraordinary in the ordinary.

He was like a giant X-ray machine that could pierce through the entrails and sinews of a society, conflicted by eternal issues of love, deceit, pain, friendship, sexuality and materialism. This contrasted sharply with the specificity of the freedom movement, Partition and the class and caste matrix that was formulating human behaviour.

His epitaph, which he wrote in his typical black humour, showed a touch of arrogance and self-deprecating wryness: “Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing. Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is a greater short-story writer: God or He.”