Copyright © Saadat Hasan Manto, 2021
English translation copyright for “Colder Than Ice,” “The Assignment,” “Mozail,” “The Return,” “A Woman’s Life,” “Upstairs Downstairs,” “The Room with the Bright Light,” “Siraj,” “The Wild Cactus,” “It Happened in 1919,” “The Woman in the Red Raincoat,” “The Dog of Tithwal,” “The New Constitution,” “Khushia,” “Babu Gopi Nath,” “Mummy,” “The Patch,” “Two-Nation Theory,” and “For Freedom’s Sake” © Khalid Hasan, 2021 • English translation copyright for “Toba Tek Singh,” “God–Man,” “The Last Salute,” “Empty Bottles, Empty Cans,” “I’m No Good For You!,” “Kingdom’s End,” “The Monkey Revolt,” and “Yazeed” © Muhammad Umar Memon, 2021 • English translation copyright for “Barren” © Muhammad Umar Memon and Moazzam Sheikh, 2021 • English translation copyright for “Ram Khilavan,” “The Mice of Shah Daulah,” “Ten Rupees,” and “Licence” © Aatish Taseer, 2021
First Archipelago Books Edition, 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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This book was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Funding for this book was provided by a grant from the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation.
Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, the Nimick Forbesway Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
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Contents
Preface by Vijay Seshadri
Kingdom’s End
For Freedom’s Sake
The Dog of Tithwal
The Mice of Shah Daulah
Ten Rupees
The Monkey Revolt
Barren
Licence
Colder Than Ice
Toba Tek Singh
Upstairs Downstairs
Ram Khilavan
Mozail
The Return
A Woman’s Life
Siraj
The Wild Cactus
God–Man
The Assignment
Two-Nation Theory
The Patch
Mummy
Yazeed
The New Constitution
Khushia
Babu Gopi Nath
The Room with the Bright Light
I’m No Good For You!
Empty Bottles, Empty Cans
It Happened in 1919
The Woman in the Red Raincoat
The Last Salute
Preface
BY VIJAY SESHADRI
WHEN, THE FAMOUS legend tells us, Kabir, the fifteenth-century poet, saint, and mystic of the Gangetic plains, died, the Hindus fought with the Muslims over his body. The Muslims wanted to bury the body in anticipation of the Day of Resurrection. The Hindus wanted to take it to Varanasi, the sacred city and Kabir’s birthplace, to cremate it and relinquish the ashes to the sacred river. While the quarrel was intensifying, someone lifted the shroud covering Kabir and found that he’d vanished. In his place was a mound of flowers. A miracle. The Muslims buried half the flowers. The Hindus burned the other half.
This is an attractive story. It confirms certain ideas about India that persist to this day, among both Indians and Westerners. (I first encountered it in the nineteen-seventies, a mystical, multicultural decade, in Robert Bly’s introduction to his Americanized versions of Tagore’s English translations of Kabir.) It echoes the Easter-morning story nicely. It combines piety toward a person with a transcendental solution to a collective human problem. Anyone who knows the history of the medieval and modern Subcontinent could be forgiven, though, if what they heard in it was not the harmony of the spheres but, instead, the ominous reverberations of communalism—the word that in South Asia denotes primarily religious but also sectarian (between Sunnis and Shias, for example, or between Sikhs and Hindus) and caste and ethnic conflict. And for anyone who knows the stark, unyielding Partition stories of the Punjabi slash Kashmiri slash Indian slash Bombay-wallah slash Pakistani writer Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–1955), those echoes can become almost deafening.
It might not seem inevitable that a preface to a selection of Manto’s stories should begin by evoking the death, over five hundred years ago, of an ecstatic devotional poet. The absence in Manto of any interest in religion other than as a communal marker (or as in the story “God-Man,” included in this volume, an opportunity for a variety of clerical scams) seems to make the connection even less inevitable. There is, though an unassailable point of comparison, one that Manto himself, a subtly sardonic connoisseur of paradoxes, would have appreciated. No writer in any of the Hindustani vernaculars, and, in fact, no South Asian writer of equivalent stature in the half-millennium since Kabir would have been less likely, figuratively speaking, to have his body fought over by the different communal entities than Manto.
Manto can be recognized, admired, praised—as he has been almost from his beginnings as a writer. He can be revered—as he has been. But he can’t be embraced. He had a powerful, free-floating, impartial imagination. He could fashion characters across the entire range of available human specimens. He had tremendous negative capability. He wrote a dry, vocally rounded, impeccably neutral, firm, precise, and limpid Urdu prose, which has proved to be easily accessible to translation. He had quicksilver powers of assimilation and dissemination. His storytelling gifts—the celerity, the smooth, masterly pacing, the controlled use of melodrama within a naturalistic frame, the instinct for dramatic tensions and for bare-bones but effective mise en scène (talents that made possible his well-compensated decade-long career in the cutting-edge media of the nineteen-thirties and -forties, as a writer of radio plays for All India Radio and a screenwriter for Bollywood)—were exemplary.
All these qualities make him wonderfully readable. But this readability has sharp edges. Is it a pleasure or a danger? Not just the darkness (in some places, the utter darkness) of so much of his material provokes this question. Given that darkness, the characteristics of Manto’s supreme fictions—his laconic specificity, studied reportage, understated tone, and unwillingness to take pity on his readers by giving them at least the occasional refuge of moral judgment—make it easy to wonder if his designs on us are benign. Readers who couldn’t care less about the subversive effect reading him was said to have had by the authorities of his day—he was put on trial (and acquitted) six times as a menace to society—might nevertheless feel a reluctance and unease in the face of his frankness and truth-telling. Manto’s career began among the Progressive writers of the Independence era, writers strongly influenced by Marxism, who demanded literature’s submission to moral outcomes. They, too, largely repudiated him. Moral rage can suffuse Manto’s stories, but they have no moral outcomes.
The stories in this book are Manto
’s most famous. They’ve been culled and translated from a body of Urdu writing that is huge for any career, let alone for a career of a couple of decades (twenty-two books of short fiction, along with a novel, multiple collections of radio plays, essays, and personal sketches). There are stories here with an impressionistic interiority and ruefulness reminiscent of Chekov; stories about sex that were revolutionary for their time; stories that delicately examine the deepest privacies of consciousness, that are rich with humor, absurdity, phantasmagoria, that are self-reflexive and as much about how they are told as what they tell; stories that display a remarkably advanced feminist comprehension of women who succumb to, refuse and withstand, or triumph over male oppression and control.
Stories like these represent what might be reasonably called the normal Manto, and, even, the companionable Manto, the Manto who can be talked about in the way other artists are talked about. This Manto can be analyzed as an embodiment of literary hybridization in the aftermath of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and Independence. He can be appreciated for synthesizing influences ranging from the classical Urdu poets to Poe, Maupassant, and Gorky, and adapting them to the churning reality of India in the decades of the freedom movement. Absent the tragedy of Partition, this companionable Manto would have had a (sort of) normal career and a (sort of) normal life in cosmopolitan Bombay, his beloved adopted city, open to the sea breezes and the world, instead of being panicked into fleeing from its communal riots in the months after Independence to provincial, pious, landlocked Lahore, where he died in 1955, prematurely and impoverished, of alcohol poisoning. His deep-rooted impulses to self-sabotage and self-destruction would have been sufficiently subdued, and might even have been dissolved, by a glamorous life, an affluent life. He’d still be drinking, but far more moderately, and drinking good Scotch, not the rotgut that killed him. He would have grown old as the family man he was in his own way meant to be.
But there are other stories here, too: coldly furious allegories, fevered illustrations, parables, vignettes, sketches, some of which are shapely, some of which are bitten-off shards, perpetual fragments. These are Manto’s Partition stories. They don’t comprise descriptions of carnage. Instead they represent by means of ironies, indirections, and a restrained, ferociously objective orchestration of effects, humans lost in a wilderness of unspeakable violence. They are acts of imaginative courage, products of the refusal to lie, which refusal in turn becomes Manto’s fatality. His reputation substantially rests on these stories, and they encircle his isolated presence in the literary landscape of mid-century South Asia. Enduring (maybe the enduring) artifacts of the literature of Partition, they are vehicles for impossible truths about human violence, truths that however much the evidence of history renders undeniable people other than Manto—and societies everywhere, ancient, modern, and contemporary, seeking to preserve their good opinion of themselves—repress with psychic cunning and determination. This has been especially true in India, Pakistan, and what is now Bangladesh, where the surges of mass psychosis, and the imperialist indifference shot through with spite and racial animus, that define the end of the British era gave way to a massive denial—a denial that determines and compromises national, international, and geopolitical relations in the region up to this moment. Acknowledged as he’s been over the past seventy years, because of those truths Manto has never been, and never could be, the object of a cult or a following. Not only is he not embraceable, he can hardly even be approached.
This is as much the case for professional readers—scholars, critics, writers of prefaces—as it is for general ones. Critical and biographical accounts—in English, anyway, and probably even more so in other South Asian languages—inevitably circle and approximate Manto rather than trying to get a direct fix on him. Discriminations and aesthetic judgments are made; stories are classified as successes or failures; strategies are undertaken to contain this radically disenchanted, radioactive material by asserting its crucial value to the historian of Partition, its value as a certain kind of data. Writers writing about him, baffled by the limitations of discourse itself, can seem like interlocutors at a seminar table ignoring the tiger that happens to be pacing the classroom. An indication of Manto’s unique achievement is, in fact, that he makes the limitations of discourse apparent, and forces us to ask questions about the moral purpose of reading itself.
Our ordinary responses to literature tend to be loquacious, or at least talkative. We argue, admire, reject; we’re eloquent or ineloquent when we like or dislike. Reading, being social, involves a rhetorical contract between reader and writer. Even the majestic darkness of “King Lear” leaves room for reader response. Manto has stories that accommodate such responses. But the towering Manto stories, irreconcilable and undeniable, don’t accommodate responses. They stun us into silence, and transform the roar of Partition into a surrounding silence. This surrounding silence is one from which we want to extricate ourselves as quickly as possible; and we would, quickly, except for the fact that we can hear at the center of this silence the faint, muted sobbing of Manto’s anguish, and are transfixed by it. Kabir famously said that he was neither a Hindu nor a Muslim. Manto, as pure a writer and as purely a writer as there ever was, involved in humankind to the point of his own destruction, was helplessly both, and helplessly every other kind of person, in every other place. It remains very hard for us to know what to say about such an artist.
Kingdom’s End
THE TELEPHONE RANG. Manmohan, who was sitting beside it, picked up the receiver and spoke into it. ‘Hello, this is 4457.’
A delicate female voice came from the other end. ‘Sorry, wrong number.’
Manmohan hung up and returned to the book he was reading.
He had read this book nearly twenty times already, even though its last pages were moth-eaten; not because it was especially interesting, but because it was the only book in this barren office.
For the past week he had been the sole custodian of this office. Its owner, a friend of his, had gone away somewhere to arrange some credit. Since Manmohan had no place of his own, he had moved here temporarily from the streets. During this one week he had read the book nearly twenty times over.
Isolated here, he bided his time. He hated any kind of employment. Otherwise, had he wanted it, the job of director in any film company was his for the taking. But working for someone was slavery and he didn’t want to be a slave. Since he was a sincere, harmless person, his friends saw to his daily needs, which were negligible: a cup of tea and a couple of pieces of toast in the morning, two phulkas and a little bit of gravy for lunch, and a pack of cigarettes that lasted the whole day – that’s all.
Manmohan had no family or relatives. He liked solitude and was inured to hardship. He could go without food for days on end. His friends didn’t know much about him, except that he had left home while still very young and had found himself an abode on the Bombay pavements for quite some time now. He only yearned for one thing in life: the love of a woman. He would say, ‘If I’m lucky enough to find a woman’s love, my life will change completely.’
‘Even then you won’t work,’ his friends would say.
‘Work?’ He would answer with a big sigh, ‘Oh, I’ll become a workaholic. You’ll see.’
‘Well then, fall in love with someone.’
‘No, I don’t believe in love that is initiated by the man.’
It was almost time for lunch. Manmohan looked at the wall clock opposite him. Just then the phone rang. He picked up the receiver, ‘Hello, this is 4457.’
A delicate voice asked, ‘4457?’
‘Yes, 4457,’ Manmohan confirmed.
‘Who are you?’ the female voice asked.
‘I’m Manmohan. What can I do for you?’
When there was no answer, Manmohan asked, ‘Whom do you want?’
‘You,’ said the voice.
‘Me?’ he asked, somewhat surprised.
‘Yes, you. Do you have an objection?’
Manmohan was flummoxed. ‘Oh no, none at all.’
The voice smiled, ‘Did you say your name was Madan Mohan?’
‘No. Manmohan.’
‘Manmohan.’
Silence ensued. After some moments, he asked, ‘You wanted to chat with me?’
‘Yes,’ the voice affirmed.
‘Well then, chat.’
After a slight pause, the voice said, ‘I don’t know what to say. Why don’t you start?’
‘Okay,’ Manmohan said, and thought for a while. ‘I’ve already told you my name. I’m temporarily living in this office. Before, I used to sleep on the pavement, but now I sleep on the desk here.’
The voice smiled, ‘Did you sleep in a canopied bed on the pavement?’
Manmohan laughed. ‘Before I go any further, let me make one thing clear. I’ve never lied. I’ve been sleeping on pavements for a long time. But, for about a week now, I’ve had this office all to myself, and I’m having the time of my life.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I found a book here. The pages at the back are missing. All the same, I’ve read it…oh, about twenty times. If I ever get hold of the whole book, I’ll find out what became of the hero and heroine’s love.’
The voice laughed. ‘You’re an interesting fellow.’
‘Thank you,’ he said with mannered formality.
After a pause, the voice asked, ‘What’s your occupation?’
‘Occupation?’
The Dog of Tithwal Page 1