Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  And it’s not just Pakistan: India, too, is hardly immune to ideologies that wish to cure it of its internal differences, and that dream of a more perfect alignment of identity with territory. To many Indians today, living in a growing and increasingly world-important economy, the chasm that separates them from the country Jinnah conjured appears reassuringly unjumpable. Yet contrary to what Indians may wish to think, it’s no protective moat. India can’t fix Pakistan, but neither can it ignore it. It’s not just that what brews in Pakistan bubbles up in India; it’s that Pakistan remains a mirror to what India might have been, and might be—if it goes in search of a singular, neat national identity of the type that Jinnah believed he could master.

  No religion, no nation, no community, no individual, even, is ever one. From the nation all the way down to the individual, identity is prone to be secessionist. Jinnah articulated one powerful strand in the dreams of modern nationalism: for homogeneity. But every dream of homogeneity stares at an infinite regress: there’s always some aspect of identity, some sect, some culture or language, that doesn’t fit. To pursue homogeneity is to enter an endless life of purging, secession, and self-destructive violence.

  40

  MANTO

  The Unsentimentalist

  1912–1955

  For all the accounts I’ve read about the Partition of 1947, it is passages from fiction, not history, that thrum in the back of my brain when I try to fathom the depth of the loss. Perhaps the deepest thrums are lines from India’s master of the short story, Saadat Hasan Manto.

  The first startlement of the art of the great twentieth-century Urdu writer is that, when his lens zooms in, you feel the horror opening out. In “Khol Do” (“Open It!”), an old man who has traveled by train to Lahore returns to consciousness after being assaulted. Through his frayed mind, Manto distills, in half a dozen words, twentieth-century South Asia’s greatest nightmare: “Loot. Fire. Stampede. Station. Bullets. Night.” This list is followed, chillingly, by the name of the old man’s daughter, who is missing.

  This brings us to the second surprise of the art of a Manto story: for all the velocity that his economy of language creates, the pressure of a story builds quite slowly. You’re never quite prepared for the moment that blasts off the emotional roof. His sentences etch a groove in the mind not because he saturates his truths about atrocity in lurid color, but because he delivers them offhand, even elliptically.

  Manto didn’t fuss much over his sentences. He wrote in a rush, at hack speed, for money—and often legless drunk. His visceral response to experience matched a historical moment that needed it. In a divided country that Manto thought possessed “too few leaders, and too many stuntmen” (one of many instances in which he jibes at ascetics such as Gandhi), his sentences asserted, plainly, the human facts, not the moral or political motives that produced them. “Don’t say that a hundred thousand Hindus and a hundred thousand Muslims have been massacred,” he writes in his story “Sahai.” “Say that two hundred thousand human beings have perished.”

  The sensibility that Manto brought to that violence had been in the forge for years. He spent his childhood in Amritsar, where colonial brutality upturned his childhood. Young adulthood spent in the glitter and seediness of 1930s Bombay intensified his empathy, his cosmopolitanism, and a sexual frankness that even multiple obscenity charges did not thwart. “If you cannot bear my stories,” he once said about those charges, “then this is an unbearable time.”

  And it was, especially in 1947. As communities across the country broke up along religious lines, he was one of the roughly fourteen million who made the wrenching decision to leave home for life in a new country—in his case, migrating from Bombay to Lahore. There, in his famous Letters to Uncle Sam, he developed a near-prophetic sense of what the future of Pakistan would look like, from the censorious mullahs to the military state.

  Yet to construe Manto merely as a notetaker of the bohemian corners of a society, or as an eyewitness to Partition and the early years of Pakistan, slights the power of his style and his voice. He had the capacity to turn the heard phrase into aphorism, the seen moment into parable. In January 1955 a friend discovered him shivering in bed and rushed him to the hospital. The doctor on duty felt for Manto’s pulse and said casually, “You have brought him to the wrong place. You should have taken him to the graveyard. He is dead.” It could be a line from one of Manto’s stories—tales that sprung immediately, unsentimentally, from life.

  Manto claimed that “I write because I’m addicted to writing, just as I’m addicted to wine. For if I don’t write a story, I feel as if I’m not wearing any clothes, I haven’t bathed, or I haven’t had my wine.” We are the better for his compulsion, because although he churned out a lot that didn’t hold up, he produced enough of quality to help underwrite the late twentieth-century blossoming of fiction in India and in Pakistan.

  * * *

  In the winding trek toward the creation of a free India, the most decisive single day was probably April 13, 1919. At Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, protesters had gathered in anger at the arrest of two of their leaders, held under wartime detention powers that the British refused to rescind. Brigadier General Reginald Dyer entered with 140 troops and ordered them to fire. Hundreds of men, women, and children were killed, and more than a thousand injured. It was a massacre that fundamentally changed the way a generation of elite Indians understood the intentions of the British—especially when an official investigation cleared the general of any wrongdoing. Tagore (32) returned a knighthood he’d been given; Gandhi (38) withdrew his loyalty to the empire; Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose (37) lost any dreams they had of serving the Raj.

  Manto was seven years old when the killings devastated the city he lived in. His memories of the massacre inflected one of his earliest published stories, “Tamasha.” Tamasha, a trivial or foolish commotion, was the word the fictional boy’s protective father used to explain away the gunfire they could hear from their house. The boy can’t understand why they can’t go and join the fun. From his window, he watches, bewildered, as another boy bleeds to death on his street.

  The experience turned Manto vehemently against the British; as a teenage “armchair revolutionary,” he longed for the populace of Amritsar to take to the streets as if this were Moscow in 1917. His intense desire to overthrow the colonial rulers was a position that would have alienated him from his barrister father, had the two not already been estranged. His mother was the second wife, a woman of lower status—and treated accordingly. Manto’s anger at her treatment, and his own denigrated position in the family, may have seeped into the ironic, often cutting tone of his writing.

  In 1936, after studying at Aligarh Muslim University, Manto left Amritsar for the more glamorous and squalid precincts of Bombay. It’s telling that, less than twenty years later, hallucinating and with liver cirrhosis in a Lahore hospital, he believed he was back in Bombay, the place where he’d found his voice.

  * * *

  Bombay’s middle-class Byculla neighborhood is majority Muslim, and far less diverse today than it was in Manto’s time. Then known as the Jewish quarter, it had Iranian cafés and Parsi chawls, or tenements; it took all comers, including a financially strapped writer eager to explore the city’s culture, high and low. “You can be happy here on two pennies a day or on ten thousand rupees a day, if you wish,” Manto would later write of how the city beckoned him. “You can also spend your life here as the unhappiest man in the world. You can do what you want. No one will find fault with you. Nor will anyone subject you to moralizing. You alone will have to accomplish the most difficult of tasks and you alone will have to make the most difficult decision of your life.”

  Manto became a member of the Progressive Writers’ Association, a group of leftist intellectuals who felt literature should engage more usefully, and politically, with contemporary life. But his Bombay writings were only obliquely political. To make a living, he hit upon the film world, a subject with enough p
opular appeal to just about support the wife he married after his arrival there, and later their children. Many of his sly weekly dispatches from the film line—recounting the naïveté of the actress Nargis, or the reclusiveness of the actor Ashok Kumar—hold up today. Funny, full of unexpectedness (“In the beginning, he used to look like someone made of chocolate…”), and acid with insight and gossip, this was hackwork of a high order.

  He was also developing his fictional voice, having refined his skill in Amritsar by translating Chekhov, Oscar Wilde, and Maupassant, that master excisor of extraneous detail. Soon his own stories were creating a tamasha. In “Bu” (“Smell”), for instance, a young man calls inside his house a much poorer girl who has been drenched in a sudden downpour. With few words, he strips her of her soaked clothes and they have sex. He becomes transfixed by the smell of her armpits, her breasts, and her navel—an erotic immersion so intense that later the memory would render him cold to his wife. The writer Aakar Patel, who calls the story “the most sensual thing I have read in any language,” came across it at the age of thirteen and was enraptured; many other writers will tell you first-encounter-with-Manto stories that are reminiscent of Keats on Chapman’s Homer.

  “Bu” inspired a judge to charge Manto with obscenity. Other obscenity charges would follow—but they seemed only to incite him to stretch the boundaries further. In addition to editing film weeklies, contributing to All India Radio, and writing screenplays, he kept producing stories of uncommon style and provocation.

  Perhaps my favorite of the Bombay stories is “Ten Rupees,” an account—this one not erotic—of a child prostitute sent with customers on a car trip, beautifully translated into English most recently by the writer Aatish Taseer. Consider the spare simplicity with which Manto conveys the web of relationships within the chawl where the exploited girl is growing up. In reference to a sad anecdote that the girl’s mother tells her neighbors, he writes, “In any case, it didn’t evoke any compassion for her in the chawl, perhaps because everyone there was also deserving of compassion. And no one was anyone’s friend.” There’s no pity here, nothing softening about life in a stressful, impoverished community. Rather, there’s a felt sense of that world as it is to those who live there, transmitted with stunning efficiency. Like most of Manto’s characters, the child prostitute is decidedly individual, finely realized instead of stereotyped—permitted a sense of both delight and dignity.

  Stories such as “Ten Rupees” provoked readers on the left, just as stories such as “Bu” provoked conservatives. Social reformers thought his depictions of social ills such as child prostitution should breathe outrage, and condemn more explicitly, while also proposing means of social correction. Yet Manto, who couldn’t fix his own slide into alcoholism, didn’t presume he could fix society. No sentence he wrote could be mistaken for one in a pamphlet.

  * * *

  Sometimes, in the Bombay stories, we pull close to Manto himself. In one, a father is stricken by the sudden severe illness of his beautiful young son. Descending into paranoia and obsession, he exacerbates the panic of his desperate wife. As the illness worsens, he disappears—willfully absent when the boy breathes his last. Manto, a vexing husband, was also a loving parent who lost his own son to pneumonia, and he wrote his harrowing fictional portrayal of parental love and paranoia with that history in mind. Here, as in his more explicitly nonfiction writings, Manto avoids playing victim—or judge.

  This helps explain why Manto, who had longed for freedom from colonial rule since childhood, shuddered at the movement incarnated by Gandhi. He had no use for Gandhi’s moralism and sanctimony. Men’s natures are often bad, in Manto’s cosmos, but they can’t long be denied. One of Manto’s fictional descriptions of Gandhi’s followers in the ashram showed men “as blanched and lifeless as the udders of a cow from which the last drop of milk has been squeezed out.”

  These joyless, self-denying men ultimately helped make India free, of course. Yet when that freedom came with Partition, the religious tensions that had begun to flare up during Manto’s lifetime exploded. Religion was a garb he had always worn lightly—in Sikh Amritsar, in Bombay’s Jewish quarter, among his seemingly infinite number of Hindu friends. In January 1948 he shocked many in his circle by choosing to go to the other side of the new border.

  One longtime friend, with whom Manto had a falling-out over Pakistan, wrote that Manto’s interests were base: he wanted to claim one of the nice Lahore houses from which Hindu families had fled. But it’s also clear that he was shocked by anti-Muslim actions at his day job at the Bombay Talkies film studio. If communal hatreds that had quickened on the streets were poisoning even this haven of sophisticates, breaking up old collaborators because of religions they barely practiced, perhaps he felt the Bombay he loved was done for.

  After he joined his wife and children there, his drinking worsened, as did his tendency to pick fights with his wife. A close friend in Lahore noted that even though Manto was not pessimistic by nature, his private life was “very bitter.” Personal distress mixed with political anguish, and his writing became edgier and more haunting.

  In late 1948 he published Siyah Hashiye, or “Black Margins,” a series of connected, pointedly arrhythmic fragments on Partition, some of which were only a few urgent sentences in length. None of the participants in violence is identified by religion, because to Manto the distinctions were arbitrary, and the guilt had to be shared. This experiment in form, reflective of the shattering of a country, was followed by a longer story, about the psychological effects of committing rape—which brought him a new obscenity charge. In Pakistan the stakes of conviction were high: up to thirty-six months in prison. Manto, financially strapped, spent the next three years fighting the charge, and enduring police searches of his home and surveillance of his movements, before the conviction was overturned on appeal.

  His work in this period was uneven, but some of it ratifies that cliché of prose, “unforgettable”—even when you might wish to forget. In “Khol Do,” the old man eventually finds his daughter in a hospital, dying, barely conscious. When she hears a doctor request that a window be opened—“khol do”—she reflexively parts her legs. The doctor, understanding the implication, is left in a cold sweat. And that’s the end. Manto won’t let a wall of words distance his reader from a terrible image. This had happened, this was life now, and it had to be confronted with realism, lacerating economy, and black irony to be made endurable.

  By the early 1950s, Manto was, himself, barely enduring. “This country, which we call Pakistan and which is very dear to me, what’s my place in it? I haven’t found it yet,” he wrote in an essay. “This makes me restless. This is what has sent me sometimes to the lunatic asylum, and sometimes to the hospital.” What he hoped (and sometimes worried was merely delusion) was that he was making a name for himself in Urdu literature. Yet neither drying-out hospitals nor asylums could cure him of his thirst. So Manto’s time in Pakistan proved not just miserable, but brief.

  * * *

  After Manto’s death, at the age of forty-two, his reputation became attenuated. In Pakistan, he fell out of fashion for moral reasons; in India, for punitive ones. Access to his work in India was diminished twice: first because he had fled, and then because Urdu, still the mother tongue of many North Indians, lost some of its literary prestige in the face of Hindi revivalism and policies of linguistic nationalism.

  Yet sensitive readers and writers on both sides of the border kept his stories in circulation, aided before long by English translations, the best known of which were Khalid Hasan’s somewhat sanitized versions. For many South Asian writers, the Partition stories, coming as swiftly as they did after the birth of two new countries, were important legitimations of the literary form. They instanced fiction’s ability to capture with clear eyes immediate aspects of life in the two nations that the conventions of South Asian nonfiction and nationalist history obscured. Salman Rushdie, who himself brought Partition to life in Midnight’s Children,
rated Manto as unmatched in India in the short-story form—an enthusiasm that helped Manto’s reputation spread farther in the West. Mohammed Hanif and other Pakistani writers also took up his cause. And in 2012, moral issues set aside, the civilian government of Pakistan commemorated his birthday. Today, as his popularity surges, and new translations clarify more of his technical and linguistic inventiveness, there’s a risk that he will be seen in the twenty-first century as the only fiction writer of the Partition era. Manto, of course, would have liked that.

  41

  AMBEDKAR

  Building Palaces on Dung Heaps

  1891–1956

  “A society, almost necessarily, begins every success story with the chapter that most advantages itself,” the American public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates recently argued regarding mythic constructions of liberation all over the world. “Chapters are almost always rendered as the singular action of exceptional individuals.” In modern India’s myth of finally, formally confronting its brutal history of caste, Bhimrao Ambedkar is that exceptional individual. Yet every Great Man story is also a story of circumstance. Had India not been devastated by Partition, the formidable lawyer and scholar who led the untouchables might not have become the founding father most meaningful to ordinary Indians today.

  It’s almost unsayable, even among historians, that Partition was a boon to India’s Dalits and other oppressed minorities. But I’ve long suspected it was so. India’s largely upper-caste nationalist elite had patently failed to convince most of the subcontinent’s Muslims to trust their future to an independent India. To prevent what they saw as a further stab in the back of national unity, they needed to convince lower castes and outcastes that their interests would be protected. The Constituent Assembly to write a constitution for a free India began meeting late in 1946. Its debates are usually presented as a triumphal coda to the coming of freedom, but all through them you can hear a backbeat of regret and anxiety among privileged and soon-to-be-powerful men. Just after being empowered to make laws, they learned how hideously Indians could treat one another.