At the time, I was forming my first understanding of economy, an understanding to which Manto was to become essential. Just a few weeks earlier, an older writer friend had suggested I read Pushkin, Gandhi and RK Narayan to see what they did. I had begun with Pushkin, reading first The Captain’s Daughter. When, a week or so later, I met the writer again and told him I’d read The Captain’s Daughter, his face brightened and he asked, ‘How does Pushkin describe St Petersburg in The Captain’s Daughter?’ I went through the story in my head; it was still fresh, but I had no answer for him. I couldn’t recall any description of St Petersburg even though I knew the story’s last scene was set there. I became even more puzzled that evening when I went back to the Pushkin to see how he described St Petersburg: he didn’t. ‘With Pushkin,’ the writer said when we met again, ‘he’ll do one or two things. There’ll be a coat hanging in the room. And the scene is there. No more needs to be said.’
‘A coat hanging in the room. And the scene is there!’ This was also what Manto could do. Like in The Captain’s Daughter, in ‘Ten Rupees’ Bombay is hardly described. There’s a single reference to bazaars clogging with traffic from cars, buses, trams and pedestrians as Sarita and the boys are leaving town, but that is all. Bombay is that factory wall with the stench of urine drifting down its entire stretch. And this quality of detail, seeming to contain an entire milieu in a few lines, runs right through Manto. In ‘Khaled Mian’, the stillness of the night as Mumtaz waits for news of his dying child: ‘It was ten at night. The maidan was dark and silent. Sometimes the horn of a car would graze the silence as it went past. Up ahead, over a high wall, the illuminated hospital clock could be seen.’ In ‘Ram Khilavan’, the austerity of the narrator’s room: ‘It was a tiny room, destitute of even an electric light. There was one table, one chair and one sack-covered cot with a thousand bedbugs.’ In ‘My Name is Radha’, a restaurant where all the movie people came: ‘I’d spend whole days at Gulab’s Hotel, drinking tea. Everyone who came in was either partially or entirely drenched. The flies too, seeking shelter from the rain, collected within. It was squalid beyond words. A squeezed rag for making tea was draped on one chair; on another, lay a foul smelling knife, used for cutting onions, but now idle.’ Though Manto’s economy can be seen in each of these stories, nowhere is it more fully realised than in ‘Ram Khilavan’.
In under ten pages of short sentences, each sprung like a cricket bat, he conveys what feels like an entire lifetime in Bombay. The thread of the story is a relationship between the narrator and his dhobi. When the narrator is poor and living in a ‘tiny room, destitute of even an electric light’, the dhobi, illiterate and warmhearted, overlooks his unpaid bills. The narrator’s fortunes improve, he gets married, moves to a bigger place, the dhobi continues to come. One day the dhobi falls sick with alcohol poisoning and the narrator’s wife takes him in a car to the doctor, and so, saves his life. The dhobi never forgets this kindness. Then Partition happens, the city is inflamed with Hindu–Muslim riots and the narrator decides to leave for Pakistan. On his last evening in Bombay, he goes to the dhobi to pick up his clothes. The curfew hour is approaching and he finds himself surrounded by a murderous mob of drunken dhobis, of whom one is his. The dhobi, in a drunken haze, is about to attack the narrator when he recognises him. The next day, the narrator’s last in Bombay, the dhobi brings the clothes as usual. He is overwhelmed with regret, but is never really able to express himself. A few hours later, the narrator leaves Bombay, never to return. The sense of loss and futility, told through this story of the little people one knew and has now to leave behind, is devastating. So much else is contained in the story’s compass: the nature of Partition violence; the kind of person who fell prey to it; how relationships in a city can change through such violence. The writer seems to be writing from deep within his material so that none of this is added externally, but is part of the fiction’s logic. The economy is not forced or done simply for the sake of economy; it feels necessary, an aspect of the story’s urgency.
Given the extent to which Manto inhabits his material, there is something miraculous, like with Maupassant, whom Manto read and admired, that his range should have been so vast. He wrote about prostitution, religious superstition, adolescent anxiety, sex, the Partition of India and Bombay cinema in the thirties and forties. They were the great themes of his time and though the stories are not forgiving, nor do they falsify the hard realities of India, there is something euphoric in the writing; it is easy to sense the writer’s joy in the newness and variety of life.
Manto investigated these themes, using sometimes a third person narrator, and sometimes, as in ‘Ram Khilavan’, a narrator called Manto. Manto, the narrator, should not be confused with Manto, the man or the writer. He is like the narrators used by Proust and VS Naipaul, and though travelling under the writer’s name, he is, if anything, a more forceful creation of the imagination. Nor are the stories any less a work of fiction than if an omniscient, third person narrator had been used. This kind of narrator is not a gimmick; he serves a distinct purpose. In an immigrant city like Bombay, where no cultural knowledge can be assumed, where the landscape is often foreign and various, Manto, the fictional presence, declares his outsider’s perspective and becomes a kind of guide to the new terrain. He marks out the world; the reader can put himself in his hands; his discoveries become part of the narrative. His gaze, like in ‘Ten Rupees’, is always oblique and a little perverse. The situation of women in society might be dealt with through the anger of an affronted prostitute, an adolescent’s sexual discovery through a satin blouse.
It is hard not to come to feel a great affection for this narrator. He is mischievous, compassionate, funny, a listener, a drinker, sceptical and without prejudice. His Bombay is a city of motor cars and bicycles, of chawls and mansions, of hookers and heiresses, of Sikhs and Parsis, of depressives and lunatics, and he asserts his nativity by moving freely between its varied lives, making it seem like no less his right than sitting on a bench at Apollo Bandar, watching boats and people go by. At one point in her essay, ‘My Friend, My Enemy’, Manto’s great friend, Ismat Chughtai, questions a description Manto gives to her of a friend of his.
That he could be a rascal and at the same time an extremely honest and honourable man, how could that be? I didn’t even try to understand. This was Manto’s territory. From the jilted squalor and refuse of life, he picks out pearls. He enjoys digging in the refuse because he doesn’t trust the luminaries of the world; he doesn’t trust their brilliance or their judgement. He catches the thieves that lie in the hearts of their pure and respectable wives. And he compares them to the purity in the heart of a whore in a brothel.
As much as one would like to separate Manto, the writer, from Manto, the man, it is not always easy to do so. There is the added confusion of how much Manto’s main narrator seems to resemble both writer and man. All of this makes it harder to bear that ugly truth about Manto, the man: that for all his love of Indian multiplicity, he went to Pakistan. He even tried convincing Chughtai to go. ‘The future looks beautiful in Pakistan,’ he said to her, ‘We’ll be able to get the houses of people who’ve fled from there. It’ll be just us there. We’ll progress very quickly.’ When I read this, I had trouble holding the two Mantos in my mind. It seemed impossible that the creator of Manto, the narrator and fictional presence, so immersed in the variety of India, seeming so much to rejoice in it, should also be the author of that remark, with its sly wish for homogeneity, for the place where ‘It’ll be just us.’ Chughtai, for other reasons, was also disgusted. The two had an intensely close friendship. He spoke movingly to her about the son he’d lost, giving details about bathing him, and how he would pick up things from the floor and put them in his mouth, details which seem to have fed directly into ‘Khaled Mian’. Manto and Chughtai argued and fought and laughed about everything from love and relationships to language and literature, but never seriously, except over Pakistan. ‘I’d had so many fights and arguments
with him,’ she wrote, ‘but never over a serious matter of principle. In that moment, I realised what a coward Manto was. He was ready to save his life at any cost. To make his future, he was ready to get his hands on the life earnings of people who were fleeing. And I began to feel a hatred for him.’
Manto did not just regret his decision to go to Pakistan; it destroyed him. In his stunning essay on the 1949 ‘Cold Flesh’ trial (in which, it must be said, my grandfather, though he said little to damn him, appeared on the side of the prosecution) in Lahore, he pointedly answers Chughtai’s charge of taking part in the property grab and denies ever having done so. He also seems very early to anticipate the larger cultural questions the Partition would bring up for both Pakistan and India. He wrote of his arrival in Lahore:
Try as I did, I wasn’t able to separate Pakistan from India and India from Pakistan. Again and again, troubling questions rang in my mind: Will Pakistan’s literature be separate from that of India’s? If so, how? Who owns all that was written in undivided India? Will that be partitioned too? Are India’s and Pakistan’s core problems not the same? Will Urdu be totally wiped out in India? What shape will it take here in Pakistan? Will our state be a religious one? We’ll defend the state at all cost, but does that mean we won’t have permission to criticise its government? As an independent country, will our condition be different from what it was under the British?
In Pakistan, Manto was tried twice for obscenity. He and Chughtai had faced obscenity trials before Independence as well, but there is a marked difference in the tone of his descriptions of the pre-Partition trials versus those in Pakistan. There is a lightness about the earlier trials: he travels up to Lahore with Chughtai; they buy slippers along the way; and at the 1941 trial of ‘Smoke’, he seems to be having a positively good time, lecturing the court on Maupassant. But in Pakistan, the trials were longer, more exacting, and the outcome, more disturbing; there were arrests, searches and the risk of jail time with hard labour. In January 1952, in between trials, Manto wrote,
My mind was in a strange state. I couldn’t understand what I should do. Whether I should stop writing or carry on totally regardless of this scrutiny. Truth be told, it had left such a bad taste that I almost wished some place would be allotted to me where I could sit in one corner, away for some years from pens and ink wells; should thoughts arise in my mind, I would hang them at the gallows; and should an allotment not be possible, I could begin work as a black marketeer or start distilling illicit alcohol…
It was the latter that finally claimed Manto. His last years were beset with financial troubles; he drank heavily; he wrote to Chughtai on more than one occasion, pleading with her to find a way for him to come back to India. She was surprised to learn that far from large protests and signed declarations on his behalf, many in Pakistan felt he deserved to be punished. He died on January 18, 1955 in Lahore at the age of forty two.
In death, Manto paid a greater price for his migration than he had when he was alive. He was forgotten in the country he wrote most about. He became part of a number of artists, musicians and writers whom India disowned—sometimes by singling them out, sometimes as part of a larger disowning of Urdu—for their migration. It might appear strange to someone reading this collection why I, with my mixed Indian and Pakistani heritage, have included so few of Manto’s famous Partition stories in this collection. The reason is that I found, with their simple symmetries, drenched in that bittersweet irony of how one people could have ended up as two nations, they were the only stories of Manto’s two hundred and fifty that today, feel dated. But it is also for this reason, because so little has ended up as symmetrical in the fortunes of India and Pakistan, that India must now reclaim men like Manto. In Pakistan, Manto’s world, crowded with Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, would feel very foreign. It is only in India, still plural, not symmetrically Hindu, that it continues to have relevance. His eye could only have been an Indian eye, sensitive to surprising detail, compulsively aware of Indian plurality, sympathetic to people trapped in their circumstances, here pointing to a particular Hindu festival, there imitating Bombay street dialect.
Writers rarely set out to be national writers. They need small, intimate worlds, full of details; the macro scale of countries, especially those as wide and various as India, cannot be their direct material. Cities, neighbourhoods, sometimes a single street, provide the gritty detail in which a larger architecture can become visible. For Manto, this city, as Dublin was for Joyce and Chicago for Bellow, was Bombay. He was not an Indian or Pakistani writer as much as he was a Bombay writer, and more than India, the city of Bombay must reclaim Manto.
Khalid Hasan, Manto’s Pakistani translator, has done what he can to make Manto available in English, and though exhaustive, his translations not only lack the simplicity, speed and vitality of Manto’s prose, they are guilty of the greatest crime any translator can commit, the crime of trying to improve upon the writer. This well meaning journalist paraphrases Manto; he deletes entire paragraphs in ‘For Freedom’; and rearranges chunks of text in ‘Blouse’, even deciding to change the colour of the blouse from purple or violet to ‘azure’. The result is that his translations are not really close translations at all; they are synopses.
Having said this, the challenges of translating Manto are considerable. What is rich, fluent prose in Urdu can appear florid in English; Manto leaves loose ends, his sentences can be mangled. He also becomes a victim of his form, namely the short story’s dependence on trick and surprise endings. David Coward, in his introduction to Maupassant’s stories, writes,
For the short story, while admitted to be extremely difficult to manage successfully, has long been regarded as somehow second rate, not least because it is generally felt to suffer from Cleverness. Perhaps it requires too much control, so that the reader feels manipulated, and because many short stories depend so much on irony or sudden reversals, they may seem overcontrived—like a joke which, once told, loses its tension.
For the reader of the novel especially, this kind of ending can be hard to stomach. In stories like ‘My Name is Radha’, and even ‘Licence’, one is almost left wishing for an unfinished ending rather than the one of high drama. And yet, I feel in the end, it is better for the translator to lay himself at the feet of his subject than try, at this late stage, to tidy him up, especially when dealing with as natural and gifted a writer as Manto. Translations are often criticised for being too literal, but in the case of Manto’s translators, I feel they haven’t been literal enough, that they have tried to rewrite the stories. This translation aims at being very literal, relishing especially, the feeling of the other language breaking through. The stories I have selected are only a few, but they show Manto’s range both in style and subject.
The translations became a way for me, with my mixed heritage, to limit the effects of the intellectual partition Manto feared. The linking of language to religion, followed by the partition along religious lines, has left the subcontinent’s intellectual past fenced up and pitted with no go zones; it has constantly to be sorted through, constantly to be excavated and reclaimed. The translations were part of a larger feeling in me that I would rather end up with Sanskrit and Urdu than neither. It was English, both for its impartiality and the opportunity its literary life offers, that made this possible. And for the same reasons, translations of Manto into English become important. It is a strange truth about Indian intellectual life that the road to rediscovering a writer like Manto in the original is bound to run first through English.
But for those without English, men like Zafar Moradabadi, who became an Urdu poet when it was still possible to do so, the currents of intellectual life have washed them up on less secure shores.
Zafar lives in the Sui Valan section of the old city of Delhi. I went to his house for the first time one smoky December night, on Eid. He picked me up outside Delite cinema, admonishing me for bringing him flowers and sweets. As we entered the old city, some men from the abattoir were unloadin
g a truckload of meat. The rickshaw splashed through a pale, brownish-red puddle; the smell and the frenzy of flies gave it away as blood. Narrow streets, crowded that night with bright kerosene lights and people in their new clothes, led to Zafar’s house. We arrived in front of a darkened entrance. Near an open drain, a bitch tended to her family of fluffy grey puppies. A flight of steep stone stairs, chipped at the edges, led up to a pale green door and a landing, lit by a single light.
Zafar had warned me many times on the way how small his house was. ‘But the hearts of the people in it are big,’ he added. I had imagined his house would be a small flat, with a kitchen, a bathroom, two rooms perhaps, at least room enough to stand up, to walk around. But Zafar’s house was a single room, no bigger than a carpet, covered with sheets of chequered cloth. Its pistachio green walls were high and there were shelves all around, stacked to the ceiling with hard suitcases and trunks so that it felt almost like being in a godown. Everything was neatly in its place: a sewing machine with a pink satin cover, necessary where clothes are repaired often; a little shelf with holy Zam Zam water, oils and a pair of scissors; green-covered copies of Zafar’s new book. There was no kitchen, just a ledge with pulses and grains stacked high on one side. Its stone surface was used for washing, the water disappearing through an opening in the floor. The bathroom was a single metal sheet, leading to a drain. Everything was hanging—towels, toothbrushes, clothes, including a green bra, all heaped over a nylon rope. The air was fetid and filled the little room.
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