Saadat Manto - Naked Voices: Stories And Sketches

Naked Voices, Stories & Sketches is one of the most authentic collections showcasing the best of Saadat Hasan Manto as a great storyteller and an honest commentator of all times.

In this collection of sixteen stories and three sketches, Manto brazenly celebrates the warts of a seemingly decent society, as well as its dark underbelly tired and overworked prostitutes in The Candle's Tears or Loser All the Way; ruthless as also humane pimps in The Hundred Candle Watt Bulb and Sahay; the utter helplessness of men in the face of a sexual encounter in Naked Voices and Coward; and the madness perpetrated by the Partition as witnessed in By God! and Yazid. In one of the three sketches, which form part of this collection, the author brilliantly reveals himself to the world in a schizophrenic piece titled Saadat Hasan, calling Manto the Writer a liar, a thief and a failure! And in another titled In a Letter to Uncle Sam, Manto superbly couches his anti-imperialistic views in an innocent letter from a poor nephew to a capitalist and prosperous uncle in America.

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-55) is one of the finest Urdu short story writers. Provocative, outrageous, scandalous, sometimes even blasphemous, Manto was the original enfant terrible of Urdu literature. Cocking a snook at society, literary norms and most notions of propriety, Manto touched the hearts of many with his convincing and utterly original portrayal of human fallibility.

Rakhshanda Jalil has edited two collections of short stories: an anthology called Urdu Stories and a selection by Pakistani women called Neither Night Nor Day. She has published five works of translations: Premchand's short stories, titled The Temple and the Mosque; a collection of satirical writing in Hindi by Asghar Wajahat titled Lies: Half Told; thirty-two satirical cameos by Saadat Hasan Manto, titled Black Borders; nazms by Urdu poet Shatryar, called Through the Closed Doorway; short stories by Intizar Husain called Circle and Other Stories; and a collection of Premchand's short stories for children called A Winter's Tale and Other Stories. Her translations have appeared in a number of journals and magazines; she has also co-authored, with Mushirul Hasan, Partners in Freedom: Jamia Millia Islamia and written Invisible City, a collection of essays on the little-known monuments of Delhi. She contributes regularly on issues of faith and community to major English newspaper and journals; co-edits Third Frame, a journal devoted to literature, culture and society; and works as Media & Culture Coordinator at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Earlier, she taught English at the universities of Delhi and Aligarh.

In an impudent epitaph written for himself a year before his death, Saadat Hasan Manto wrote: Here (Manto) lies buried and buried in his breast are all the secrets of the art of story-telling. Immodest, yes, but by no means outrageous, for it is true that whatever the merits of Mantos style and craft, he was a storyteller par excellence. He had the rare gift of being able to narrate the most blood-curdling events with faithful accuracy and an unsparing eye for detail.

Dismissed variously as a voyeur, a purveyor of cheap erotic thrills, a scavenger of human misery, a compulsive scraper of the wounds of a sick and ailing society, or at best a mere rapporteur and no more, Manto upset every conceivable notion of literary propriety and license. An under-achiever all through school and college (he even flunked in Urdu!), Manto drifted through various jobs in All India Radio and the Bombay (now Mumbai) film industry before he found his true calling as a storyteller. Like his near contemporary, Ismat Chughtai, he too loved to handle bold and unconventional themes that had so far been taboo in Urdu literature. However, unlike Chughtais homely and colourfully idiomatic language, Manto chose a stark, spare, almost staccato style, unembellished and unaffected, deliberately shorn of all appendages of style and convention.

Never one to impose his own interpretation of events, Manto could look at people and events with a consciousness uncoloured by notions of nationalism, religion, morality, least of all sentimentality. He wrote what he saw and felt, and wrote compulsively and prodigiously. In the forty- three years that he lived, he published twenty-two collections of short stories, one novel, five (some say seven) collections of radio plays, three collections of essays and two collections of sketches of famous personalities (one called, rather evocatively Bald Angels!). Though much of his writing was in the nature of command performances to feed the twin demons of drink and acute, chronic poverty there is still a great deal in his vast and variegated oeuvre that is touched by greatness. Of his various collections, many stories appear in more than one collection, occasionally appearing under different names. Always hard up, Manto was known to sell his stories to different publishers at different times, sometimes he would tweak a story or its ending to make it somewhat different.

Manto, meaning weight in Kashmiri, belonged to a family of wealthy Kashmiri traders who had moved to the plains and settled in Lahore. His grandfather, a dealer in pashmina, later went to Amritsar where the family prospered but remained deeply, quintessentially, religious. Mantos father, Maulvi Ghulam Hasan married twice and had twelve children in all. Manto, born from the second wife, was in awe of his stepbrothers who were not only older but much better educated. While he was fond of his mother, his relations with other family members remained distant. He lived in especial dread of his father, who had retired as a sub-judge from Samrala, a town near Ludhiana, and returned to Amritsar to live in the Kucha Vakilan neighbourhood of the old city. Mantos rebellious streak can be traced to living under threat from the sharp edge of his fathers acerbic tongue and authoritarian ways. Harshly critical of films, theatre, music and other forms of plebian entertainment, Maulvi Ghulam Hasan wanted Manto to study hard and do as well as his other sons, who had studied abroad and become barristers. He despaired of Mantos growing irreligiosity and impertinence. Yet, despite all his chaffing against his fathers harshness, Manto dedicated his first collection of short stories, Aatish Parey (Slivers of Fire), to his father and hung his somewhat grim and disapproving portrait in his room.

Bent upon ploughing his own furrow from an early age, Mantos early waywardness and willfulness soon took the form of an idiosyncratic individuality. Having failed twice in the intermediate exam, Manto embraced a life of hedonism with single-minded dedication. Gambling, drinking, smoking charas, keeping the company of idle but idealistic and impetuous men like himself, these were Mantos trivial pursuits all through the early 1930s. Things would have continued along this trajectory of despair and dissipation had Manto not met Bari saheb, editor of Mussavat. Bari saheb introduced Manto to the great Russian novelists, to the skilfully crafted stories of Oscar Wilde and Guy de Maupassant, to Victor Hugos Les Miserables and, most significantly, the curious possibility of earning a living by wielding the pen. Manto took to dabbling in revolutionary poetry, writing articles for magazines, translating Wilde and Hugo with the enthusiasm of the neo convert.