SAADAT HASAN MANTO: The Lawrence of Urdu Literature

Saadat Hasan Manto, the most widely read and the most controversial short-story writer in Urdu, was born on 11 May 1912 at Samrala in Punjab’s Ludhiana district. Manto received his early education at Muslim High School in Amritsar, but he remained a misfit throughout in school years, rapidly losing motivation in studies and failing twice to matriculate. His only love during those days was reading English novels, one of which he stole from a bookstall in Amritsar Railway Station.

Manto was the son of a Muslim barrister, an “extremely harsh” father, and his second wife, a woman “with a very tender heart.” In “Manto on Manto,” a characteristically broken-sounding, underhanded assault on his own literary reputation, Manto describes his urge to write as nothing more than “a result of the clash” between his parents. The Manto scholar Leslie Flemming agrees: his father was “the symbol of authority against which Manto continued thereafter to rebel.

Manto started his literary career translating works of literary giants, such as Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde and Russian writers such as Chekov and Gorky. His first story was “Tamasha”, based on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar. Though his earlier works, influenced by the progressive writers of his times, showed marked leftist and socialist leanings, his later work progressively became stark in portraying the darkness of the human psyche, as humanist values progressively declined around the Partition. In 1936, aged 24, he published his first collection of original short stories in Urdu, Atish Pare(Sparks; also Quarrel-Provokers).

In a literary, journalistic, radio scripting and film-writing career spread over more than two decades, he produced twenty-two collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three collections of essays, two collections of personal sketches and many scripts for films. He was tried for obscenity half six times, thrice before 1947 and thrice after 1947 in Pakistan, but never convicted. Some of Manto’s greatest work was produced in the last seven years of his life, a time of great financial and emotional hardship for him.

In the spring of 1919 in his home city Amritsar, when Saadat was seven years old, a British general had opened fire on some twenty thousand Indians gathered in a public garden, an act that roused anti-imperialists across the land and hastened India’s march to independence from British rule. In this gaseous atmosphere Manto came of age: a memoir of that time shows him hanging out with a group of “armchair revolutionary” friends and putting up posters on the city walls with “screaming headlines” (“Autocratic and Oppressive Rulers Meet Their Well-Deserved Fate”) lifted from “one of Oscar Wilde’s inferior plays.” (And this is one indication of the influence that European developments, literary and political, already had on the ferment in India.)

Saadat Hasan Manto is often compared with D.H.Lawerence, and like Lawrence he also wrote about the topics considered social taboos in Indo-Pakistani Society. On his writing he often commented, “If you find my stories dirty, the society you are living in is dirty. With my stories, I only expose the truth”.

He is best known for his short stories, “Bu” (Odour), “Khol Do” (Open It), “Thanda Gosht” (Cold Meat), and “Toba Tek Singh”. Some of his other famous works are:

Atishparay (Nuggets Of Fire) – 1936

Chugaad

Manto Ke Afsanay (Stories of Manto) – 1940

Dhuan (Smoke) – 1941

Afsane Aur Dramay (Fiction and Drama) – 1943

Lazzat-e-Sang-1948 (The Taste Of Rock)

Siyah Hashiye-1948 (Black Borders)

Badshahat Ka Khatimah (The End of Kingship) – 1950

Khali Botlein (Empty Bottles) – 1950

Loud Speaker (Sketches)

Ganjey Farishtey (Sketches)

Manto ke Mazameen

Nimrud Ki Khudai (Nimrod The God) – 1950

Thanda Gosht (Cold Meat) – 1950

Yazid – 1951

Pardey Ke Peechhey (Behind The Curtains) – 1953

Sarak Ke Kinarey (By the Roadside) – 1953

Baghair Unwan Ke (Without a Title) – 1954

Baghair Ijazit (Without Permission) – 1955

Burquey – 1955

Phunduney (Tassles) – 1955

Sarkandon Ke Peechhey (Behind The Reeds) -1955

Shaiytan (Satan) – 1955

Shikari Auratein (Women Of Prey) – 1955

Ratti, Masha, Tolah-1956

 Kaali Shalwar – 1961

Manto Ki Behtareen Kahanian (Best Stories of Manto) – 1963

Tahira Se Tahir (From Tahira to Tahir) – 1971

Manto was in Bombay when he heard the news about creation of Pakistan: the British, quitting India at last, had decided in their haste to let the Muslim-majority regions in the east and west become a separate country. Manto and his family were among the millions of Muslims who left present-day India for the newly created Muslim-majority nation of Pakistan.

He died several months short of his forty-third birthday, in January 1955, in Lahore. A little before his death, in 1955, Manto had worried—it is hard to tell whether he was being sarcastic as usual—that the Pakistani government might one day “find itself pleased with me and place a medal on my coffin, which would be a great insult to my commitment to what I believe in.”

This year, on the occasion of Pakistan’s sixty-fifth birthday, in the year of Manto’s hundredth, the Pakistani government did just that: after years of neglect and denial, it gave in to a Manto-esque irony and awarded him the Nishan-e-Imtiaz (“Sign of Distinction”) medal.

“A writer picks up his pen only when his sensibility is hurt.”
— Manto to a court judge.