feeds from sacw.net
print versionThe New Yorker, 30 August 2012
Online Only
by Ali Sethi
In the south of Pakistan, where Hindus have lately been kidnapped for ransom and their daughters forcibly converted to Islam, Hindu families have started fleeing to India in trains. As they waved to their relatives from train windows, possibly for the last time, many Hindu girls contorted their faces and wept. To the north, near an industrial city, policemen poured paint over Koranic verses inscribed on Ahmadi graves. This is because Ahmadis have no right to Koranic verses in Pakistan: the law classifies them as non-Muslims and the media regularly portrays them as treacherous deviants from the faith. Still higher up, in a scenic mountain valley, Shias were pulled out of buses, lined up and shot dead by gunmen who may or may not belong to one of Pakistan’s many banned sectarian outfits. And just two weeks ago, not far from the pristine capital, a mob of a hundred and fifty Muslims ran after a mentally handicapped, low-caste Christian girl, wanting to burn her alive for having held in her hand—this was the rumor in her neighborhood—a singed Islamic manual.
In the rest of the country, the end of Ramadan was celebrated with the usual fanfare, show of color, and generosity of spirit.
The hysterical synchronicity of these happenings is typical of the Pakistan encountered nowadays in the news. It is also Manto-esque, which is to say that it feels like it could have been imagined, in exactly these tones, with just such a flatly ironic counterpoint for an ending, more than fifty years ago by a man called Saadat Hassan Manto, the writer whose centennial is being marked this year in Lahore amid an unshakeable and vaguely shaming sense of déjà vu.
In May, for instance, in a darkened auditorium in Lahore, two actors stood on a spotlit stage and read out Manto’s “Dekh Kabira Roya†(“Kabir Saw and Wept†), a story he wrote soon after Pakistan’s creation. It shows the medieval Indian poet Kabir, a sayer of contrary things, freakishly transplanted in the streets of a “newly independent state.†Kabir is still in the Indian subcontinent (people have castes here), though it is now the middle of the twentieth century (intellectuals are arguing about Stalin). All around him citizens are excitedly going about the implementation of new laws. Only Kabir is “grief-stricken†; he bursts into tears when he sees, on the top of a building, a desecrated statue of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi (it has been bound up in jute fiber because the religion in the new state forbids idolatry), and again when he hears a general urging his troops to “fight the enemy on empty stomachs.†Elsewhere in the new state, people are listening to sermons about the importance of beards and veils, while prostitutes with “ravaged and anxiety-ridden faces†ponder a new law that requires them to find husbands in thirty days.
Kabir moves between these scenes, crying all the while.
A religious leader says to him, ‘Why do you weep, my good man?’
Kabir—his medieval contrariness has been transformed in these circumstances into a kind of innocence—wants to know how the prostitutes will ever find husbands.
And the religious leader, who is a creature of the state and has a working knowledge of its laws, laughs because “it was the funniest thing he had ever heard.â€
Around me in the darkened auditorium I heard sighs and whispers and even a few gasps. They expressed several things at once: the audience’s mortified recognition of the “newly independent state†; a wearied familiarity with the weeping Kabir; and amazement that Manto, writing all those years ago, had pointed out the very features—the warlike generals and fire-breathing mullahs and rampaging vigilantes—that have come to stand for the sorry state of Pakistan.
On my way out I heard a bewildered man say to his companion, “But it was like he could see the future….â€
And it was this feeling, hard to resist in a time of widespread social unease, that sent me looking in Manto’s work for signs of a seer.
***
He was born in 1912 in the prospering northwestern state of Punjab, then a valued frontier and “bread basket†of British India. Saadat 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,†1 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.†2
There was also Amritsar, Manto’s home city, then a hub of mutinous activities. It was here, in the spring of 1919, when Saadat was seven years old, that 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.)
For the next few years, Manto revelled in the excitements of the age. His stint at Aligarh Muslim University, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, had him falling in with the Progressive Writers’ Association, whose aim was to overhaul the whole of Indian literature. The Indian canon in their view was insular and passive, a remnant of long-vanished courts; it should now give way to a literature that “looks at the fundamental problems of our life.†In some of his early stories we find Manto dabbling in the usual Progressive themes (the brutality of the colonial state, the “flushed faces†of student radicals). But his taste for unromantic ironies and surprise endings, and his broad identification with the condemned, were to lead him away from the Progressives’ camp. “Bu†(“Odor†), a story Manto wrote in the early forties, is emblematic of this shift. It shows a chance sexual encounter between Randhir, a rich young man who is bored with sex, and a rain-drenched working-class girl who takes shelter one night in his Bombay apartment. Randhir asks the girl to change out of her wet clothes; a button on her blouse gets stuck; he tries to help her undo it, and ends up touching her breasts, which come “trembling into view.†They fuck. Randhir is transfixed by the girl’s smell, which is both “unpleasant and pleasant†; he seeks it “in her armpits, her hair, her breasts and navel and every other part of her body….†Later, when he has been restored to his secure and sensationless life, Randhir can’t get over that smell, which reminds him of the monsoon (“the raindrops were flushing the stars of their milky light†) and that night of sexual ecstasies. The story’s last scene shows him sitting beside his new bride, “the daughter of a magistrate, a graduate, the heartthrob of the boys of her college,†an ideal woman who has nevertheless “failed to kindle his masculine interest.â€
“Bu†is hauntingly atmospheric, the sex in it a matter of merge-and-release, a miracle of communication (Randhir and the girl talk only through their “eloquent†panting and “expressive†use of hands and lips), even an intimation of divine oneness: at one point the two are “like a little bird that soars into the blueness of the sky, higher and higher, until it becomes a motionless dot.†From this state there can only be a comedown: Randhir returns to his social reality (does it not feel, after his recent flight, like a socially constructed unreality, the very opposite of what is primal and true?) and finds himself trapped in a marriage to a woman of his own class, a carefully chosen, socially coördinated wife. In this well-made bed, Randhir is condemned to remember and regret.
But in nineteen-forties India, “Bu†’s subtleties fell on many deaf ears. In Lahore Manto was charged with a British-colonial law for “obscenity†and summoned to court. And within the Progressive Writers’ Association, his story was read in narrowly political terms: while some writers praised Manto—wrong-headedly—for exposing the licentiousness of the upper classes, others scorned him for dwelling indulgently on the subject, so that his story was “a waste of the writer’s and reader’s time†and was “as much an expression of escape from the most important demands of life as old fashioned reactionism.â€
Mercifully, India was still big enough, and Manto’s place in it small enough, for such judgments not to matter, at least not for long: in the years between Aligarh and the court trial for “Bu,†Manto had got married, become a father, and found a job as a scriptwriter in Bombay. This was Manto’s favorite city, a place where he could, as he later wrote, “be happy … on two pennies a day or on ten thousand rupees a day,†where he could “live on the footpath or in a magnificent palace†; it didn’t matter in Bombay—no one would “subject†him here “to moralizing.†In Bombay’s seedy-shiny film world, surrounded by the chatter of the demimonde and the stacked-up pages of film scripts, a bottle of Deer Brand Whisky well within his reach, Saadat and his stories felt right at home.
But the partitioning of India, in 1947, would end that feeling for good.
***
Manto was in Bombay when he heard the news about 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. To a man like Manto—a Muslim who grew up in Sikhism’s holiest city, who derived his livelihood from the cosmopolitan film business and had many Hindu friends—this religious designation of a landmass must have seemed unreal. “Where were they going to inter the bones that had been stripped of the flesh of religion by vultures and birds of prey?†Manto would ask later, and not wholly rhetorically, recalling the plunder and flag-waving and killing that had broken out all around him. “Now that we were free, had subjection ceased to exist? Who would be our slaves? Thousands of Hindus and Muslims were dying all around us. Why were they dying?â€
The answers were distressingly near. Even in Bombay, now a part of “secular†India, “the communal atmosphere was becoming more vicious by the day.†At the Bombay Talkies film studio where Manto was employed, Hindu staffers began sending anonymous letters to the management, demanding the removal of Muslims from high posts and threatening “everything from murder to the destruction of the studio.†Manto, suddenly a Muslim among Hindus, panicked. He “stopped going to Bombay Talkies.†He “began to drink heavily†and “all day long†would “lie on [his] sofa in a sort of daze.â€
Much has been made of Manto’s decision in that difficult hour to flee to Pakistan. His friend Ismat Chughtai, herself a Muslim writer and self-avowed progressive who stayed on in India, saw in it a proof of Manto’s opportunism. She quotes him as saying that “the future looks beautiful in Pakistan†because Muslim migrants could now “get the houses of people who’ve fled from there.†But once in Lahore, now Pakistan, Manto was inconsolable. “Despite my best efforts,†he writes, “I could not dissociate India from Pakistan and Pakistan from India.†What was such a writer—one who saw maddening continuities where borders had been drawn—to do?
He could begin by putting down his most immediate impressions of the partition violence. “Siyah Hashiye†(“Black Margins†), published in October, 1948, is a collection of “sketches,†some as short as a paragraph: in “Jelly,†a murdered ice vendor’s blood has merged on the road with ice melted from his pushcart, and a child who drives past it in a horse-carriage mistakes it for jelly. In “Warning,†a rich man is dragged out of his house by a mob and kicked to the ground. The mob is about to kill him when the man gets up, removes the dust from his clothes “with great dignity†and “wagging a finger at the rioters†says, “You can kill me, but I am warning you, don’t you dare touch my money!†In “The Garland,†another mob, this one in Lahore, frantically descends on the statue of a Hindu philanthropist (Hindus began to flee Lahore as soon as it was “given†to Pakistan). One of the rioters is about to place a garland of shoes around the statue’s neck when he is shot by police and taken to the hospital—a hospital built by the same Hindu philanthropist. And this is what happens in “Modesty†:
The rioters brought the train to a stop. Those who belonged to the other religion were methodically picked out and slaughtered. After it was all over, those who remained were treated to a feast of milk, custard pies and fresh fruit.
Before the train moved off, the leader of the assassins made a small farewell speech: “Dear brothers and sisters, since we were not sure about the time of your train’s arrival, regretfully we were not able to offer you anything better than this most modest hospitality. We would have liked to have done more.â€
That is all there is: murder—methodical and quick—followed by a feast and an ingratiating speech. Note the withholding of tags: we don’t know the location of the massacre or the religion of the killers. All we have is a spurt of base instincts. (Including false modesty, present even in carnage.) Though “Modesty†is unrelated in plot or sequence to the other sketches in “Siyah Hashiye,†it fits in the whole—like a snapshot in a slide show. Taken one at a time, these sketches enact the speed, randomness, and anonymity of the partition violence; cumulatively they expose the partition—the coming-into-being of two flag-waving nation-states—as little more than an orgy of loot and blood. Manto’s eye for irony here is sharp as ever. And the fragmented feel of his “sketches†represents a formal breakthrough—Manto has blasted away the conventions of the short story and arrived at a jagged approximation of the partition trauma.
But the timing of “Siyah Hashiye†was off. The literary scene in Pakistan had already broken down into factions: on one side were the progressive writers, now taking cues from the Soviet Union and calling for a socialist reform of the new state, which was the project of “a few reactionaries, capitalists and feudal landlords†3; and on the other side were “liberal†writers who disdained “Art for the sake of the Party†and were more inclined to peddle the idea of a fragile and imperiled new state in need of “nation-building.†In such a fight, of what use were Manto’s writings, which offered Pakistan neither a Communist cure nor a patriotic facelift?
He was punished. The progressives called “Siyah Hashiye†reactionary; Manto responded by saying that he didn’t “care at all about ‘Progressivism.’†His next story about the partition, titled “Thanda Gosht†(“Cold Flesh†), was even more unmindful of the literary temperature: Ishwar Singh, a Sikh recently returned from a round of partition killing, can’t bring himself to make love to his mistress. The mistress suspects him of infidelity—why else can’t he get it up? In a fit of jealousy she stabs Ishwar Singh with his own dagger. Bleeding to death, Ishwar Singh admits that he tried to rape an unconscious Muslim girl, only to find her already dead (the “cold flesh†of the title). While it makes some literary stabs (death as contagion, etc.), “Thanda Gosht†is, ultimately, a racy little thing, relying on that last shocking detail for effect—and may well live up to a charge of sensationalism.
But in Pakistan the charge brought against “Thanda Gosht†was much more serious. A local bureaucrat named Chaudhry Muhammad Hussain, “one of Manto’s old tormentors,†took the story to mean that “we Muslims are so utterly without a sense of honor that Sikhs can rape even our dead daughters.â€
Manto was back in the dock.
A protracted court trial in Lahore had him worrying about the punishment, which came to three years in jail and a fine of three hundred rupees. Manto appealed the verdict. Eventually, after a lot of worrying (and drinking), he was let off the hook by a judge who wore a conspicuously Islamic beard. (“If I sentence Saadat Hassan Manto,†the judge had said with a Manto-esque smile, “he will go around telling everyone that he was sentenced by a man with a beard.†)
Manto now found himself in the singularly unfortunate position of being branded a “progressive†by the state and a “reactionary†by the progressives. In an essay written at this time and addressed to his readers, Manto admits to feeling “a strange melancholy.†He had “rebelled against the great upheaval that the partition of the country caused†and recovered from that “sea of blood†some “pearls of regret.†(He means his partition stories.) But these pearls had found no place in Pakistan. Manto the writer had suffered, but so had Manto the man: “My present life is full of hardship. After working day and night, I barely make enough to fulfill my daily needs. The fear that keeps gnawing at me is that were I to die suddenly who will look after my wife and three little daughters?â€
There was in Pakistan at this time at least one remaining source of reassurance for such a writer. About to lock the unstable new state into a Cold War alliance, the U.S. was looking for well-disposed Pakistani writers to help realize its earliest projections of soft power. Manto seems to have come into America’s sights for his attack on the progressive writers. One day he was visited by a man from the U.S. Embassy who offered him five hundred rupees for one of his stories. (The going rate was fifty.) Startled, Manto told the American he wrote in Urdu and not in English. But the American said he needed the story in Urdu “because we have a journal that is published in the Urdu language.†Manto insisted on taking no more than three hundred rupees and told the American that what he wrote would “not be to your liking, nor will I give you the right to make changes.†The American never went back to Manto for the story. Nevertheless, Manto fulfilled his pledge, however creatively: in place of the story he produced a “Letter to Uncle Sam.†In this letter Manto uses the voice of an “obedient nephew†writing to his “Most Respected Uncle,†cleverly mimicking the formalities of a traditional adult-child and, by implication, patron-client relationship. In between gauche-sounding, plausibly nephew-like admissions (“I can never understand why so many of your people wear glasses†) and horny asides (“Uncle, your women are so beautiful†), Manto makes a statement such as this: “As long as Pakistan needs wheat, I cannot be impertinent with you.†The resulting letter has a curiously menacing feel, like a cartoon that flares repeatedly into lifelike horror. In this way, in the course of just a few pages, Manto draws attention not only to the enforced nature of his performance but also to what lurks around it: the exploitative and toxic relationship between master and slave.
In subsequent letters this discordance becomes more audible: Manto’s fourth “Letter to Uncle Sam,†written in February 1954, has him brashly telling Uncle that his “admiration and respect for you are going up at about the same rate as your progress towards a decision to grant military aid to Pakistan.†The nephew then gives Uncle Sam some earnest advice: “[You] must sign a military pact with Pakistan because you are seriously concerned about the stability of the world’s largest Islamic state, since our mullah is the best antidote to Russian communism. Once military aid starts flowing, the first people you should arm are these mullahs.†And then, a few lines later, the nephew looks Uncle Sam in the eye: “I think the only purpose of military aid is to arm these mullahs. I am your Pakistani nephew and I know your moves. Everyone can now become a smart ass, thanks to your style of playing politics.â€
It is worth noting that in 1954 America’s romance with Pakistan was only just getting started. U.S. funding of Pakistani jihadis was still two decades away, the blowback from that cynical move and the breakdown of U.S.-Pakistan relations another five decades into the future. But Manto had put his finger to the wind and sensed the coming disaster. Or so it seems to us today. The fact is that when he wrote his prophetic letters to Uncle Sam, Manto was already an alcoholic. (“Had this whiskey been distilled in your country,†he told Uncle Sam, “you would have destroyed the distillery with an atom bomb….†) To recover his senses he was sent again and again to the local sanatorium.
But even in this last bleary phase of his life, Manto remained himself: unable to abide by any constitution, least of all his own, a compulsive ironic. It was these faculties—he might have called them his tics—that had throughout made him undermine conventional narratives, but creatively, so that in effect he seemed to have mined those narratives for hard truths. Often this method failed, as in his supercilious stories. But just as often it struck gold. Indeed, many of the reigning narratives of Manto’s time—the “two-nation theory†that eternally separates India from Pakistan, the Soviet-style Communism of the progressive writers, the pacts of mutual interest between America and Pakistan—have now fallen apart in ways that make Manto’s mockeries of them sound extra-worldly.
This is not to deny the power of Manto’s vision. His seeing, despite censure from ideologues, in the partition violence of 1947 the rapid breakdown of a social contract—something that was “not an aberration†4 in the region’s history, and not a matter of “politics†alone—was indeed visionary, and makes him a writer of special interest for anyone who cares about Pakistan, where so many forms of random-seeming violence now crowd the news. (A good introduction for English-speaking readers is “Kingdom’s End,†a selection of Manto’s stories translated by Khalid Hasan.)
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.â€
This month, 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.
1. This and other essays appear in “Manto,†a recent selection of his writings edited by his niece and daughter.
2. See Leslie Flemming’s brisk and informative “Another Lonely Voice: The Urdu Short Stories of Saadat Hassan Manto.â€
3. For more on these debates, see Saadia Toor’s “The State of Islam.â€
4. An interview with Manto’s niece, the Tufts historian Ayesha Jalal.
Ali Sethi is the author of “The Wish Maker,†a novel.
Illustration by Jashar Awan.
Read more The New Yorker,
30 August 2012
Online Only
Page-Turner - Criticism, contention, and conversation about books that matter.
« Book News: Free Kindles, Ye Olde Insults
Main
Book News: Writing at Bread Loaf, Naming the Rainbow »
August 30, 2012
The Seer of Pakistan
Posted by Ali Sethi
jamanto_opt.jpg
In the south of Pakistan, where Hindus have lately been kidnapped for ransom and their daughters forcibly converted to Islam, Hindu families have started fleeing to India in trains. As they waved to their relatives from train windows, possibly for the last time, many Hindu girls contorted their faces and wept. To the north, near an industrial city, policemen poured paint over Koranic verses inscribed on Ahmadi graves. This is because Ahmadis have no right to Koranic verses in Pakistan: the law classifies them as non-Muslims and the media regularly portrays them as treacherous deviants from the faith. Still higher up, in a scenic mountain valley, Shias were pulled out of buses, lined up and shot dead by gunmen who may or may not belong to one of Pakistan’s many banned sectarian outfits. And just two weeks ago, not far from the pristine capital, a mob of a hundred and fifty Muslims ran after a mentally handicapped, low-caste Christian girl, wanting to burn her alive for having held in her hand—this was the rumor in her neighborhood—a singed Islamic manual.
In the rest of the country, the end of Ramadan was celebrated with the usual fanfare, show of color, and generosity of spirit.
The hysterical synchronicity of these happenings is typical of the Pakistan encountered nowadays in the news. It is also Manto-esque, which is to say that it feels like it could have been imagined, in exactly these tones, with just such a flatly ironic counterpoint for an ending, more than fifty years ago by a man called Saadat Hassan Manto, the writer whose centennial is being marked this year in Lahore amid an unshakeable and vaguely shaming sense of déjà vu.
In May, for instance, in a darkened auditorium in Lahore, two actors stood on a spotlit stage and read out Manto’s “Dekh Kabira Roya†(“Kabir Saw and Wept†), a story he wrote soon after Pakistan’s creation. It shows the medieval Indian poet Kabir, a sayer of contrary things, freakishly transplanted in the streets of a “newly independent state.†Kabir is still in the Indian subcontinent (people have castes here), though it is now the middle of the twentieth century (intellectuals are arguing about Stalin). All around him citizens are excitedly going about the implementation of new laws. Only Kabir is “grief-stricken†; he bursts into tears when he sees, on the top of a building, a desecrated statue of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi (it has been bound up in jute fiber because the religion in the new state forbids idolatry), and again when he hears a general urging his troops to “fight the enemy on empty stomachs.†Elsewhere in the new state, people are listening to sermons about the importance of beards and veils, while prostitutes with “ravaged and anxiety-ridden faces†ponder a new law that requires them to find husbands in thirty days.
Kabir moves between these scenes, crying all the while.
A religious leader says to him, ‘Why do you weep, my good man?’
Kabir—his medieval contrariness has been transformed in these circumstances into a kind of innocence—wants to know how the prostitutes will ever find husbands.
And the religious leader, who is a creature of the state and has a working knowledge of its laws, laughs because “it was the funniest thing he had ever heard.â€
Around me in the darkened auditorium I heard sighs and whispers and even a few gasps. They expressed several things at once: the audience’s mortified recognition of the “newly independent state†; a wearied familiarity with the weeping Kabir; and amazement that Manto, writing all those years ago, had pointed out the very features—the warlike generals and fire-breathing mullahs and rampaging vigilantes—that have come to stand for the sorry state of Pakistan.
On my way out I heard a bewildered man say to his companion, “But it was like he could see the future….â€
And it was this feeling, hard to resist in a time of widespread social unease, that sent me looking in Manto’s work for signs of a seer.
***
He was born in 1912 in the prospering northwestern state of Punjab, then a valued frontier and “bread basket†of British India. Saadat 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,†1 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.†2
There was also Amritsar, Manto’s home city, then a hub of mutinous activities. It was here, in the spring of 1919, when Saadat was seven years old, that 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.)
For the next few years, Manto revelled in the excitements of the age. His stint at Aligarh Muslim University, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, had him falling in with the Progressive Writers’ Association, whose aim was to overhaul the whole of Indian literature. The Indian canon in their view was insular and passive, a remnant of long-vanished courts; it should now give way to a literature that “looks at the fundamental problems of our life.†In some of his early stories we find Manto dabbling in the usual Progressive themes (the brutality of the colonial state, the “flushed faces†of student radicals). But his taste for unromantic ironies and surprise endings, and his broad identification with the condemned, were to lead him away from the Progressives’ camp. “Bu†(“Odor†), a story Manto wrote in the early forties, is emblematic of this shift. It shows a chance sexual encounter between Randhir, a rich young man who is bored with sex, and a rain-drenched working-class girl who takes shelter one night in his Bombay apartment. Randhir asks the girl to change out of her wet clothes; a button on her blouse gets stuck; he tries to help her undo it, and ends up touching her breasts, which come “trembling into view.†They fuck. Randhir is transfixed by the girl’s smell, which is both “unpleasant and pleasant†; he seeks it “in her armpits, her hair, her breasts and navel and every other part of her body….†Later, when he has been restored to his secure and sensationless life, Randhir can’t get over that smell, which reminds him of the monsoon (“the raindrops were flushing the stars of their milky light†) and that night of sexual ecstasies. The story’s last scene shows him sitting beside his new bride, “the daughter of a magistrate, a graduate, the heartthrob of the boys of her college,†an ideal woman who has nevertheless “failed to kindle his masculine interest.â€
“Bu†is hauntingly atmospheric, the sex in it a matter of merge-and-release, a miracle of communication (Randhir and the girl talk only through their “eloquent†panting and “expressive†use of hands and lips), even an intimation of divine oneness: at one point the two are “like a little bird that soars into the blueness of the sky, higher and higher, until it becomes a motionless dot.†From this state there can only be a comedown: Randhir returns to his social reality (does it not feel, after his recent flight, like a socially constructed unreality, the very opposite of what is primal and true?) and finds himself trapped in a marriage to a woman of his own class, a carefully chosen, socially coördinated wife. In this well-made bed, Randhir is condemned to remember and regret.
But in nineteen-forties India, “Bu†’s subtleties fell on many deaf ears. In Lahore Manto was charged with a British-colonial law for “obscenity†and summoned to court. And within the Progressive Writers’ Association, his story was read in narrowly political terms: while some writers praised Manto—wrong-headedly—for exposing the licentiousness of the upper classes, others scorned him for dwelling indulgently on the subject, so that his story was “a waste of the writer’s and reader’s time†and was “as much an expression of escape from the most important demands of life as old fashioned reactionism.â€
Mercifully, India was still big enough, and Manto’s place in it small enough, for such judgments not to matter, at least not for long: in the years between Aligarh and the court trial for “Bu,†Manto had got married, become a father, and found a job as a scriptwriter in Bombay. This was Manto’s favorite city, a place where he could, as he later wrote, “be happy … on two pennies a day or on ten thousand rupees a day,†where he could “live on the footpath or in a magnificent palace†; it didn’t matter in Bombay—no one would “subject†him here “to moralizing.†In Bombay’s seedy-shiny film world, surrounded by the chatter of the demimonde and the stacked-up pages of film scripts, a bottle of Deer Brand Whisky well within his reach, Saadat and his stories felt right at home.
But the partitioning of India, in 1947, would end that feeling for good.
***
Manto was in Bombay when he heard the news about 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. To a man like Manto—a Muslim who grew up in Sikhism’s holiest city, who derived his livelihood from the cosmopolitan film business and had many Hindu friends—this religious designation of a landmass must have seemed unreal. “Where were they going to inter the bones that had been stripped of the flesh of religion by vultures and birds of prey?†Manto would ask later, and not wholly rhetorically, recalling the plunder and flag-waving and killing that had broken out all around him. “Now that we were free, had subjection ceased to exist? Who would be our slaves? Thousands of Hindus and Muslims were dying all around us. Why were they dying?â€
The answers were distressingly near. Even in Bombay, now a part of “secular†India, “the communal atmosphere was becoming more vicious by the day.†At the Bombay Talkies film studio where Manto was employed, Hindu staffers began sending anonymous letters to the management, demanding the removal of Muslims from high posts and threatening “everything from murder to the destruction of the studio.†Manto, suddenly a Muslim among Hindus, panicked. He “stopped going to Bombay Talkies.†He “began to drink heavily†and “all day long†would “lie on [his] sofa in a sort of daze.â€
Much has been made of Manto’s decision in that difficult hour to flee to Pakistan. His friend Ismat Chughtai, herself a Muslim writer and self-avowed progressive who stayed on in India, saw in it a proof of Manto’s opportunism. She quotes him as saying that “the future looks beautiful in Pakistan†because Muslim migrants could now “get the houses of people who’ve fled from there.†But once in Lahore, now Pakistan, Manto was inconsolable. “Despite my best efforts,†he writes, “I could not dissociate India from Pakistan and Pakistan from India.†What was such a writer—one who saw maddening continuities where borders had been drawn—to do?
He could begin by putting down his most immediate impressions of the partition violence. “Siyah Hashiye†(“Black Margins†), published in October, 1948, is a collection of “sketches,†some as short as a paragraph: in “Jelly,†a murdered ice vendor’s blood has merged on the road with ice melted from his pushcart, and a child who drives past it in a horse-carriage mistakes it for jelly. In “Warning,†a rich man is dragged out of his house by a mob and kicked to the ground. The mob is about to kill him when the man gets up, removes the dust from his clothes “with great dignity†and “wagging a finger at the rioters†says, “You can kill me, but I am warning you, don’t you dare touch my money!†In “The Garland,†another mob, this one in Lahore, frantically descends on the statue of a Hindu philanthropist (Hindus began to flee Lahore as soon as it was “given†to Pakistan). One of the rioters is about to place a garland of shoes around the statue’s neck when he is shot by police and taken to the hospital—a hospital built by the same Hindu philanthropist. And this is what happens in “Modesty†:
The rioters brought the train to a stop. Those who belonged to the other religion were methodically picked out and slaughtered. After it was all over, those who remained were treated to a feast of milk, custard pies and fresh fruit.
Before the train moved off, the leader of the assassins made a small farewell speech: “Dear brothers and sisters, since we were not sure about the time of your train’s arrival, regretfully we were not able to offer you anything better than this most modest hospitality. We would have liked to have done more.â€
That is all there is: murder—methodical and quick—followed by a feast and an ingratiating speech. Note the withholding of tags: we don’t know the location of the massacre or the religion of the killers. All we have is a spurt of base instincts. (Including false modesty, present even in carnage.) Though “Modesty†is unrelated in plot or sequence to the other sketches in “Siyah Hashiye,†it fits in the whole—like a snapshot in a slide show. Taken one at a time, these sketches enact the speed, randomness, and anonymity of the partition violence; cumulatively they expose the partition—the coming-into-being of two flag-waving nation-states—as little more than an orgy of loot and blood. Manto’s eye for irony here is sharp as ever. And the fragmented feel of his “sketches†represents a formal breakthrough—Manto has blasted away the conventions of the short story and arrived at a jagged approximation of the partition trauma.
But the timing of “Siyah Hashiye†was off. The literary scene in Pakistan had already broken down into factions: on one side were the progressive writers, now taking cues from the Soviet Union and calling for a socialist reform of the new state, which was the project of “a few reactionaries, capitalists and feudal landlords†3; and on the other side were “liberal†writers who disdained “Art for the sake of the Party†and were more inclined to peddle the idea of a fragile and imperiled new state in need of “nation-building.†In such a fight, of what use were Manto’s writings, which offered Pakistan neither a Communist cure nor a patriotic facelift?
He was punished. The progressives called “Siyah Hashiye†reactionary; Manto responded by saying that he didn’t “care at all about ‘Progressivism.’†His next story about the partition, titled “Thanda Gosht†(“Cold Flesh†), was even more unmindful of the literary temperature: Ishwar Singh, a Sikh recently returned from a round of partition killing, can’t bring himself to make love to his mistress. The mistress suspects him of infidelity—why else can’t he get it up? In a fit of jealousy she stabs Ishwar Singh with his own dagger. Bleeding to death, Ishwar Singh admits that he tried to rape an unconscious Muslim girl, only to find her already dead (the “cold flesh†of the title). While it makes some literary stabs (death as contagion, etc.), “Thanda Gosht†is, ultimately, a racy little thing, relying on that last shocking detail for effect—and may well live up to a charge of sensationalism.
But in Pakistan the charge brought against “Thanda Gosht†was much more serious. A local bureaucrat named Chaudhry Muhammad Hussain, “one of Manto’s old tormentors,†took the story to mean that “we Muslims are so utterly without a sense of honor that Sikhs can rape even our dead daughters.â€
Manto was back in the dock.
A protracted court trial in Lahore had him worrying about the punishment, which came to three years in jail and a fine of three hundred rupees. Manto appealed the verdict. Eventually, after a lot of worrying (and drinking), he was let off the hook by a judge who wore a conspicuously Islamic beard. (“If I sentence Saadat Hassan Manto,†the judge had said with a Manto-esque smile, “he will go around telling everyone that he was sentenced by a man with a beard.†)
Manto now found himself in the singularly unfortunate position of being branded a “progressive†by the state and a “reactionary†by the progressives. In an essay written at this time and addressed to his readers, Manto admits to feeling “a strange melancholy.†He had “rebelled against the great upheaval that the partition of the country caused†and recovered from that “sea of blood†some “pearls of regret.†(He means his partition stories.) But these pearls had found no place in Pakistan. Manto the writer had suffered, but so had Manto the man: “My present life is full of hardship. After working day and night, I barely make enough to fulfill my daily needs. The fear that keeps gnawing at me is that were I to die suddenly who will look after my wife and three little daughters?â€
There was in Pakistan at this time at least one remaining source of reassurance for such a writer. About to lock the unstable new state into a Cold War alliance, the U.S. was looking for well-disposed Pakistani writers to help realize its earliest projections of soft power. Manto seems to have come into America’s sights for his attack on the progressive writers. One day he was visited by a man from the U.S. Embassy who offered him five hundred rupees for one of his stories. (The going rate was fifty.) Startled, Manto told the American he wrote in Urdu and not in English. But the American said he needed the story in Urdu “because we have a journal that is published in the Urdu language.†Manto insisted on taking no more than three hundred rupees and told the American that what he wrote would “not be to your liking, nor will I give you the right to make changes.†The American never went back to Manto for the story. Nevertheless, Manto fulfilled his pledge, however creatively: in place of the story he produced a “Letter to Uncle Sam.†In this letter Manto uses the voice of an “obedient nephew†writing to his “Most Respected Uncle,†cleverly mimicking the formalities of a traditional adult-child and, by implication, patron-client relationship. In between gauche-sounding, plausibly nephew-like admissions (“I can never understand why so many of your people wear glasses†) and horny asides (“Uncle, your women are so beautiful†), Manto makes a statement such as this: “As long as Pakistan needs wheat, I cannot be impertinent with you.†The resulting letter has a curiously menacing feel, like a cartoon that flares repeatedly into lifelike horror. In this way, in the course of just a few pages, Manto draws attention not only to the enforced nature of his performance but also to what lurks around it: the exploitative and toxic relationship between master and slave.
In subsequent letters this discordance becomes more audible: Manto’s fourth “Letter to Uncle Sam,†written in February 1954, has him brashly telling Uncle that his “admiration and respect for you are going up at about the same rate as your progress towards a decision to grant military aid to Pakistan.†The nephew then gives Uncle Sam some earnest advice: “[You] must sign a military pact with Pakistan because you are seriously concerned about the stability of the world’s largest Islamic state, since our mullah is the best antidote to Russian communism. Once military aid starts flowing, the first people you should arm are these mullahs.†And then, a few lines later, the nephew looks Uncle Sam in the eye: “I think the only purpose of military aid is to arm these mullahs. I am your Pakistani nephew and I know your moves. Everyone can now become a smart ass, thanks to your style of playing politics.â€
It is worth noting that in 1954 America’s romance with Pakistan was only just getting started. U.S. funding of Pakistani jihadis was still two decades away, the blowback from that cynical move and the breakdown of U.S.-Pakistan relations another five decades into the future. But Manto had put his finger to the wind and sensed the coming disaster. Or so it seems to us today. The fact is that when he wrote his prophetic letters to Uncle Sam, Manto was already an alcoholic. (“Had this whiskey been distilled in your country,†he told Uncle Sam, “you would have destroyed the distillery with an atom bomb….†) To recover his senses he was sent again and again to the local sanatorium.
But even in this last bleary phase of his life, Manto remained himself: unable to abide by any constitution, least of all his own, a compulsive ironic. It was these faculties—he might have called them his tics—that had throughout made him undermine conventional narratives, but creatively, so that in effect he seemed to have mined those narratives for hard truths. Often this method failed, as in his supercilious stories. But just as often it struck gold. Indeed, many of the reigning narratives of Manto’s time—the “two-nation theory†that eternally separates India from Pakistan, the Soviet-style Communism of the progressive writers, the pacts of mutual interest between America and Pakistan—have now fallen apart in ways that make Manto’s mockeries of them sound extra-worldly.
This is not to deny the power of Manto’s vision. His seeing, despite censure from ideologues, in the partition violence of 1947 the rapid breakdown of a social contract—something that was “not an aberration†4 in the region’s history, and not a matter of “politics†alone—was indeed visionary, and makes him a writer of special interest for anyone who cares about Pakistan, where so many forms of random-seeming violence now crowd the news. (A good introduction for English-speaking readers is “Kingdom’s End,†a selection of Manto’s stories translated by Khalid Hasan.)
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.â€
This month, 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.
1. This and other essays appear in “Manto,†a recent selection of his writings edited by his niece and daughter.
2. See Leslie Flemming’s brisk and informative “Another Lonely Voice: The Urdu Short Stories of Saadat Hassan Manto.â€
3. For more on these debates, see Saadia Toor’s “The State of Islam.â€
4. An interview with Manto’s niece, the Tufts historian Ayesha Jalal.
Ali Sethi is the author of “The Wish Maker,†a novel.
Illustration by Jashar Awan.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/the-seer-of-pakistan.html#ixzz265hAU9u3
