Saadat Hasan Manto - Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto

TRANQUEBAR PRESS

Aakar Patel has worked in the textile industry and in journalism. He has edited newspapers in English and Gujarati for the Dainik Bhaskar Group and for the Mid Day Group, where he also oversaw the Urdu daily, Inquilab .

He writes columns for the Mint Lounge and Express Tribune , published from Pakistan.

TRANQUEBAR PRESS

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First published in English by TRANQUEBAR, an imprint of westland ltd 2014

Copyright Nusrat Jalal 2014

Translated from the Urdu by Aakar Patel 2014

This translation Aakar Patel 2014

First e-book edition: 2014

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-93-84030-18-6

Typeset by Ram Das Lal

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circulated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) may be made without written permission of the publishers.

Contents

Introduction

Why Read Saadat Hasan Manto?

Saadat Hasan Manto was an Indian trapped in Pakistan. This was his misfortune, and it was ours too. His identity didnt come from religion and it came only partially from geography. It came mainly from his belonging to our culture, about which he wrote with great skill.

He reluctantly fled his beloved Bombay at Partition, complaining all the time against M A Jinnahs stupidity, but worried for the safety of his three little girls. His observations of Mahim and Bhendi Bazaar, while the city was at its most violent, have been reproduced in these pieces. We can no more blame him for going than we can our grandfathers for staying.

Manto was not particularly educated, and had dropped out of Aligarh Muslim University after being an indifferent student. From a migrant Kashmiri family, he lived in Amritsar in those days, and came to Bombay after his fathers death to make a career as a journalist. Sleeping in the office of the paper he worked for, he got occasional work writing scripts for Bollywood (which wasnt known by that name then).

As a writer of films, he was not very good. Certainly he was not successful. There are no great hits to his name, and in fact the big-budget movie that he wrote on debut was, he tells us, a flop. However, his charisma attracted some of film industrys most powerful people, such as Ashok Kumar, to him. While only in his twenties when he was a junior writer, many of them attended his wedding in Mahim. Legends connected to the industry, such as the journalist Baburao Patel, were fond of Manto and helped him along in his career possibly because they suspected he had a hidden talent.

This talent was for producing his magical short stories. It made him the Maupassant of India. The liberal environment of British Bombay and its mixing of many cultures produced the fertile material that Manto needed for his writing, particularly his short fiction, but also his essays. His outstanding skill was for grasping Indianness. Stories like Bu , about a man in a flat who seduces a peasant woman and is intoxicated by the aroma of her armpit, represent for many the high watermark of Hindustani writing. It is difficult to think of better literature in our languages than his. This is the reason why, in his dismissal of Indians writing in languages other than English, Salman Rushdie made Manto the exception.

Living and working in Bombay was the happiest phase of Mantos life. If it had not been for Partition, he would have lived and worked here till he died. But he recognized the viciousness that had been unleashed, and though he disliked it and was dismayed by it, he surrendered to its inevitability.

Manto accepts the fault and the culpability of his co-religionists first. This is something very few of us can still do in the subcontinent.

Anyway, it isnt surprising that he left Bombay, given his young family and the barbarism of those days, but the story of why he didnt return remains a mystery.

He died in Lahore at forty-two, having written the best critique of the creation of Pakistan and the lunacy of the puritanical State. A couple of pieces in this collection show how far- and clear-sighted he was about what the future would bring to a nation created in the name of religion.

One thing that emerged from Mantos migration was his transformation as a writer. The playfulness of Bombay was gone. His darkest pieces, and some absurdist ones, were written in the new country. Often, it is said, he scribbled pieces standing up in newspaper and magazine offices, taking his money in cash and being driven off in a tonga to get his fix of alcohol. Manto is thought to have drunk himself to death. However, in his writing one can find references only to beer, and his consumption of it during his years in Bombay was moderate. In fact only a bottle a day, as he reveals in the wonderful essay on his wedding. In another of his pieces, My Fifth Trial (Part II) or Paanchvan Muqaddama (II), he refers to downing fifteen bottles of beer on a train journey along with a companion, but he brandishes the figure as a threat to fellow passengers.

Manto is seen as a Pakistani writer because he wrote in Nastaliq, now a foreign script in India but the standard one then used by Punjabis and even in Hindi cinema of the Forties. Those who have read him in the original, or even heard his words recited by Naseeruddin Shahs magnificent troupe which performs his works, will know Mantos language as that of Bollywood: simple and plain Hindustani. He is an easy man to translate in that sense.

He is a great Indian writer, who wrote in an Indian language to an Indian audience about his Indian experiences. This is why he should be read in any language he can be accessed in. Most of these pieces were written for newspapers, and except for two, so far as I know, none have been translated before. I have edited, clipped, trimmed and rewritten a few of them, perhaps more than I should have. For this, Manto will forgive me.

Why I Write

In his lovely flat in Lahores Lakshmi Mansion, which was given to him as refugee property, Saadat Hasan Manto wrote his pieces trying to scratch out a living. In this one he answers a question many writers are asked: how do you write? The Paris Review magazine has a section in which it asks writers to explain the way in which they go about their work. Manto was never interviewed in such a fashion, but here he attempts to tell us anyway. The flat he writes about, I visited many years ago. One of his daughters, Nighat, still lives there with her husband, Bashir Patel.

Ladies and gentlemen, Ive been asked to say how it is that I write. Now I dont really understand the question and what how means. My dictionary informs me it means in what manner?

What can I say about this?

The best way of putting it is to say, well, I sit on a sofa in my living room, pile up a sheaf of paper, unscrew the cap of my fountain pen and begin to write.