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First published by Penguin Books India 2015
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Introduction, selection and translation © Muhammad Umar Memon 2015
Cover design by Tara Upadhyay
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-670-08690-0
This digital edition published in 2015.
e-ISBN: 978-9-352-14035-0
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Contents
Foreword
Preamble
My Name Is Radha
Scorned
Janki
Mozel
The Black Shalwar
Siraj
Sharda
Babu Gopinath
Yazeed
Ram Khilawan
Sahae
Khushia
Toba Tek Singh
The Testament of Gurmukh Singh
For Freedom’s Sake
The Last Salute
A Tale of the Year 1919
Frozen
Open It!
Empty Bottles, Empty Cans
A Progressive
Pleasure of Losing
God–Man
I’m No Good for You!
The Revolt of Monkeys
Gilgit Khan
Martyr-Maker
Recite the Kalima!
Barren
Behind the Reed Stalks
Smell
Kingdom’s End
By the Roadside
Tassels
Hindi–Urdu
Upper, Lower, Middle
Green Sandals
The Gold Ring
Turnips
In this Maelstrom (A Melodrama)
The Fifth Trial
Manto and I
(by Mehdi Ali Siddiqi)
‘Iṣmat-Farōshī (Prostitution)
The Short Story Writer and Matters of Sex
I Too Have Something To Say
Afterword
How I Write Stories
Marginotions
(by Muhammad Hasan Askari)
Communal Riots and Our Literature
(by Muhammad Hasan Askari)
Recounting Irregular Verbs and Counting She-Goats: Manto and His Alleged Obscenity
(by Muhammad Umar Memon)
Footnotes
Foreword*
The first edition of this book [Chughad] was published in Bombay. After Partition I handed over the manuscript to Book Publishers Limited and left for Pakistan. From here I wrote to Ali Sardar Jafri, who was then employed at Book Publishers, saying that the only way to hasten the publication of the book was for him to write the foreword and that I would accept whatever he said. He replied:
Of course, I’ll write it with pleasure. However, the book doesn’t need a foreword, much less one by me. You are well aware that our literary views are far apart. That aside, I regard you very highly and expect great things from you.
‘In that case,’ I wrote to Jafri Sahib, ‘let the book go without a foreword.’ But by then, as became clear from his subsequent letter, he had already written a brief foreword and included it in the book. Regardless of its contents, it is there in the first edition of Chughad. However, I’ve excised it from the present edition, not because I have, God forbid, developed a sudden enmity towards Jafri Sahib or started hating him, but in view of the absurd furore the so-called Progressives of Bombay have raised about my work lately, I didn’t think it was proper to have their most active member become an appendix to my ‘reactionary’ work.
I was still in Bombay when ‘Bābū Gōpīnāth’, one of the stories of this collection, appeared in the literary magazine Adab-e Latīf. All the Progressives praised it to high heaven, even anointing it as the best short story of that year. Ali Sardar Jafri, Ismat Chughtai and Krishan Chandar especially applauded it. Krishan Chandar even gave it a prominent place in ‘Hal kē Sā,ē’. Then, all of a sudden—God knows what got into their heads—every single Progressive turned against the story’s greatness. First they faulted it in hushed voices and condemned it in whispers. But now every Progressive of India and Pakistan has begun running it down, openly and loudly, as reactionary, immoral, sordid and depraved.
The same treatment was meted out to another of my stories, ‘Mērā Nām Rādhā Hai’ [My Name is Radha], though when it was first published the Progressives could not stop applauding it, beside themselves with enthusiasm and exhilaration. Anyway, when Ali Sardar Jafri penned his foreword as an offering to ‘progressivism’, he wrote to me:
I would like to know your opinion of my foreword. I’ve written it with much sincerity and love, and I’m now thinking of writing a longish article about your short stories. So far, run-of-the mill people have only reviled you. It is useless to expect anything better from them.
Don’t these lines cry out to have every single word in them thrown in the face of all Progressives and let ‘reactionism’ smile quietly? In the same letter, Ali Sardar went on to say: ‘I consider your short story ‘Khol-do’ [Open It!] a masterpiece of this period.’
The tragedy that befell the Progressives, or perhaps this story, was its publication in Nuqūsh (Lahore), under the editorship of His Honour Ahmad Nadim Qasimi—the guru of Pakistani Progressives and the architect of the pithy ‘zindagī-āmoz-o-zindagī-āmez adab’—otherwise it too would have been consigned to the dustbin of ‘non-literature,’ leaving me gawking at ‘progressivism’s’ red face.
The only reason my book Siyāh Hāshiye didn’t go down well with the Progressives was that Muhammad Hasan Askari, whom they’d already put on their blacklist, had written its foreword. And so, with his characteristic sincerity and love, Ali Sardar Jafri again wrote to me:
What is this I hear from Lahore that Muhammad Hasan Askari is writing the foreword to some new book of yours? How on earth the two of you could hit it off baffles me. I don’t consider Hasan Askari a sincere person at all.
One really must hand it to
the Progressives for mounting such an efficient and speedy system of communication. News from here travels in the blink of an eye to Khetwadi’s Kremlin with total accuracy. What Ali Sardar Jafri had heard was absolutely correct. The end result was that Siyāh Hāshiye had hardly been out before it was condemned and trashed as a bunch of ‘reactionary’ writing. It is amazing, though, that as Ali Sardar Jafri was drafting his preface for my Chughad, it never dawned on him that he and Manto were two mutually exclusive entities and that our literary views were, according to him, far apart. Alas, my Progressive friends are averse to thinking! They consider it a negative act.
Let me present an example of this aversion. The magazine Saverā, a publication of Nayā Idāra, which is owned by Nazeer Ahmad Chaudhry, is the ‘Mouthpiece of the Progressive Literary Movement’. It has blacklisted me. In its pages I’m routinely dubbed as reactionary, opportunistic, individualistic, hedonistic and escapist. And yet Nayā Idāra advertises one of my books in the following words:
Saadat Hasan Manto is the standard-bearer of truth. He is armed with the double-edged sword of truth, which he brandishes fearlessly in the thick forests of the government and society, tearing asunder all their veils of hypocrisy and affectation. Abuse is heaped on him, but he smiles. He marches down a path that he alone can travel, impervious to any thought of reward or punishment.
Did I smile on reading this advertisement in the pages of Saverā? No, I laughed my head off. Forget the subliminal message, ‘it will greatly help the readers’, rather think: Aren’t the Progressives and their equally progressive publishers travelling along a path which they alone can travel, without caring a fig about their consciences? During the recent Bhopal Conference, Ismat Shahid Latif* valiantly, and at one go, openly disowned any of her stories that didn’t measure up to the standard of ‘progressivism’. Why don’t these progressive publishers take their cue from Ismat’s forthrightness? They should burn all the books by ‘blacklisted reactionaries’. And if they were to do so, I would surely kiss their hands.
Preamble
Any literary work that aspires to the condition of art must forget politics, religion, and, ultimately, morals. Otherwise it will be a pamphlet, a sermon, or a morality play.
—GUILLERMO CABRERA INFANTE
By common consensus of most Urdu critics and readers of fiction, Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–55) is unquestionably the pre-eminent Urdu short story writer of the first half of the previous century. And even now the popularity of this iconic writer has not waned. He is avidly read and admired across the South Asian subcontinent and is also well known overseas, thanks to the many translations of his choicest work into English and other European languages. A prolific writer and, in his early years, a translator and journalist, he managed to produce in his short life of only forty-three years an enormous literary corpus, mostly short stories, but also plays and works of non-fiction, collected in five fat tomes of roughly a thousand pages each—an amazing testimony to the astonishing range of the author’s thematic reach!
Born in Ludhiana in British India, Manto started work as a member of the editorial staff of Masāwāt, an Urdu daily published from his native Ludhiana. In 1936 he moved to Bombay to work as a scriptwriter for films before moving on to Delhi in 1941. Here, he joined the Urdu Service of All India Radio and wrote radio plays. The following year saw him back in Bombay, where he resumed his earlier work for the film industry.
With the political situation in Bombay deteriorating rapidly in the aftermath of Partition, and communal rioting having erupted across the country, Manto felt constrained to leave for Pakistan in 1948. The move does not appear to have been motivated by ideological reasons. In Bombay, Manto had enjoyed relative prosperity and at times even abundance. In Pakistan he was reduced to living in financial straits, made worse by his chronic dependence on alcohol, which led to cirrhosis of the liver that eventually claimed his life.
Manto’s short fiction offers a wealth of thematic diversity. However, he is chiefly—perhaps even exclusively—remembered as a writer on Partition and prostitutes. The present selection seeks to correct this reductionist impression of a writer who is concerned more with the unique substance of his characters than with social problems and political events as the mainstay of his creative work. No surprise if he has titled some of his major stories with their protagonists’ names. This book, therefore, presents an assortment of the author’s fictional and non-fictional writing as well as three pieces by two Urdu critics. The presence of the latter may seem unconventional, if not entirely out of place, in a book that purports to be a selection of his short stories.
A translator’s choice is determined no doubt by his preferences, biases and idiosyncrasies; mine being no exception. Some of Manto’s best-known stories are here followed by a few that are less often talked about. They have been chosen to give, hopefully, a more rounded and balanced view of the author’s creative work, its delightful diversity and its underlying assumptions.
In the non-fictional pieces the author speaks directly about himself, his literary milieu and, in some, he clarifies, among other things, his position regarding the alleged ‘obscenity’ in his work—a charge frequently hurled at him by the Progressives and one that landed him, by his own admission, in the courts of law, both during British India and, later, in Pakistan, five times. The pieces also give us some idea, in a style daubed with pain and occasional humour, about the man Manto was, about his uneasy relationship with the Progressive establishment, and his immense reluctance and pain at leaving Bombay, the city he loved.
Included here are two pieces by critic Muhammad Hasan Askari (1919–78), ‘Communal Riots and Our Literature’, and ‘Marginotions’, which he contributed as a preface to Manto’s collection of Partition vignettes Siyāh Hāshiye (Black Margins). Partition? Yes, but only as a convenient classificatory term. In essence they are little stories of individuals who each work in unexpected ways when flung in the midst of a harrowing event.
Askari’s pieces are important for two reasons: (a) they critically examine the tenor of much of Urdu fictional writing inspired by Partition and show its inherent conceptual fallacies and weaknesses resulting from limiting the event to merely one of its offshoots, namely, the communal rioting and its toll in human lives and property, without any regard for its effect on both the perpetrator and the victim of oppression which, he argues, cannot by itself constitute a valid subject of literature; and (b) the uniqueness of Manto in dealing with it in purely human terms, in the actions of the oppressor and the oppressed, with a neutrality few among his contemporaries writing on the subject could rival.
The last piece, ‘Recounting Irregular Verbs and Counting She-Goats’, is presented as a defence of Manto against the charge of ‘obscenity’.
Over the years a thick layer of interpretive fog has slowly accumulated around Manto’s work. It has quite obscured the notion of (a) literary autonomy and self-sufficiency, and (b) the primary allegiance of a writer to his calling. Social scientists and historians and, now, even experts of psychoanalysis have jumped into a terrain whose natural custodians appear to have, by and large, lowered their guards and abdicated their responsibility. To a degree it was perhaps inevitable. Where Premchand, importantly, finalized as a dialectical necessity the short story’s impending break with the cloying romanticism in which such writers as Sajjad Haidar Yildirim, Niaz Fatehpuri and Laam Ahmad had plunged it, he also saddled it with a reformist purpose, later embraced in earnest by the Indian Progressive Writers. Manto, by temperament, and even more by the demands of his calling, simply could not accept any social, political, or religious purpose as the primary concern of his writing. But challenged so often as he was by his detractors and just as often put into the dock for the charge of obscenity, he felt compelled to vindicate himself by repeated attempts to explain the underlying assumptions of his art. This never allowed the discourse to rise above the narrow confines of literature as socio-politically determined. An impression was created that his writing d
id have a sleazy or noble purpose, but purpose all the same, which he managed to obfuscate by eloquent casuistry.
In his delightful little book Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa describes the writer as someone afflicted with a ‘tapeworm’. His own life—why, even his own will—is forfeit to this creature; whatever he does is for the sake of this grisly monster, and he feeds off of himself for his themes, like the mythical ‘catoblepas’. So writing is a calling and one writes from an inexorable inner compulsion, unlike the ‘graphomaniacs’ Milan Kundera has deplored. The compulsion arises from what some might call the wayward desire to see a different world in place of the real, with its inherited values and mores and certainties that admit to no contradiction in human action and stifle questioning.
One understands the world through the prism of one’s own imagination, which only brings forth outcroppings of subliminal desires rehabilitated or transplanted in imaginative geography. For most Manto critics, the writer and the world are the only two terms of the equation—the substantial agency of human imagination that mediates between the two is routinely thrown overboard.
Strangely, though, Manto’s stories do easily lend themselves to such easy distortion because of their deceptive proximity to workaday life (and yet the external reality of the surface is often subverted in the subterranean landscape of his work so subtly that it provokes doubt and ambiguity in what was taken as a straightforward matter). No one asks, not even the critic: Why write stories if all you want is to substantiate reality as it is? Is that what stories are meant to do? Or are they supposed to mount an exploration into the existential situation of the character (and discover, in Kundera’s words, what the novel—read fiction—alone can discover)? Is fiction not expected to create parallel worlds? Or, at the very least, scramble the elements of existing reality and conjure them back to life in dizzying combinations whose entire geometry is drawn from a playful imagination delightfully irreverent to the rules of conventional values and modes of thinking?
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