Saadat Hasan Manto

Saadat Hasan Manto was born on May 11, 1912 in Samrala, a small town in the Ludhiana district of Punjab, then part of British India ^[1]. His family were Kashmiri Muslims who had settled in Punjab, and his father, Ghulam Hasan Manto, worked as a judge in the local courts. The household was strict and the father remote; Manto was the only son of his father's second wife, Sardar Begum, and grew up somewhat apart from his older half brothers ^[2].

The family later moved to Amritsar, the city that shaped Manto's imagination more than any other in his youth. He was an indifferent student who failed his school leaving examination twice, reportedly stumbling in Urdu, the language in which he would later write his finest work ^[2]. He briefly enrolled at Hindu Sabha College and later at Aligarh Muslim University, but ill health and restlessness cut both stints short.

Amritsar in the 1920s carried the memory of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, when British troops fired on an unarmed crowd. The event haunted the city's young men, and it left a mark on Manto. One of his earliest stories, Tamasha, drew on that atmosphere of colonial violence seen through a child's eyes ^[3]. The facts of Saadat Hasan Manto's beginnings, a failed student in a wounded city, give little hint of the output to come.

The decisive encounter of Manto's youth was with Abdul Bari Alig, a journalist and historian he met in Amritsar around 1933. Bari introduced the aimless twenty one year old to Russian and French literature and pushed him to translate Victor Hugo's The Last Days of a Condemned Man into Urdu, published in 1933 as Sarguzasht-e-Aseer ^[3]. Translation work on Hugo, Oscar Wilde and Russian writers gave Manto a craftsman's education that formal schooling never had.

His own fiction followed quickly. Through the 1930s he published stories in journals associated with the Progressive Writers' Movement, the left leaning literary current then dominant in Urdu letters, though his relationship with the progressives would later sour when they judged his work insufficiently ideological ^[1]. His first collection, Aatish Paray, appeared in 1936.

In 1936 Manto moved to Bombay to edit a film weekly, beginning a long association with the city's movie industry. Apart from an interlude in Delhi in 1941 and 1942, when he wrote plays and features for All India Radio at a remarkable pace, he remained in Bombay until 1948, writing screenplays and stories for studios including Filmistan and Bombay Talkies ^[4]. The radio years alone yielded several volumes of drama, and his Bombay fiction, populated by pimps, chorus girls, washermen and struggling writers, established the territory he would make his own ^[4].

Any account of Saadat Hasan Manto's achievements begins with the Partition stories. After the division of India in 1947, Manto wrote a body of fiction about the massacres and displacements that scholars widely regard as the most powerful literary response to that catastrophe ^[5]. Toba Tek Singh, published in 1955, imagines the inmates of a Lahore asylum being exchanged between India and Pakistan like territory; its lunatic hero, who dies in the no man's land between the two states, has become an emblem of Partition's absurdity ^[1].

Other stories from these years are equally unflinching. Khol Do follows a father searching for his abducted daughter and ends on one of the most devastating final lines in Urdu fiction. Thanda Gosht portrays a rioter undone by his own atrocity. Siyah Hashiye, a 1948 collection of very short sketches, records Partition violence in fragments, some only a few lines long, stripped of commentary ^[5]. Manto refused to assign blame to any single community, a stance that angered partisans on all sides.

Beyond Partition, his range was wide. Stories such as Bu, Kali Shalwar and Hatak examined sexuality and the lives of sex workers with a frankness unprecedented in Urdu writing ^[1]. His nonfiction included sketches of Bombay film personalities collected in Ganjay Farishtay, and the satirical Letters to Uncle Sam, written in the early 1950s, which mocked the emerging alliance between Pakistan and the United States with an irony that readers still quote ^[6]. In all he published around two dozen story collections, a novel, five radio play collections and multiple volumes of essays in roughly twenty years ^[2].

Manto was prosecuted for obscenity six times, three times in British India for the stories Dhuan, Bu and Kali Shalwar, and three times in Pakistan for Thanda Gosht, Khol Do and Upar Neeche Aur Darmiyan ^[2]. The colonial cases ended without conviction. In Pakistan, a court fined him in the Thanda Gosht case in 1950, a verdict later set aside on appeal, and the repeated litigation drained his money and health ^[5].

He defended himself with arguments that are still cited in South Asian debates about censorship. If his stories were unbearable, he maintained, it was because the times were unbearable; he claimed only to hold up a mirror to society. He famously insisted that he wrote nothing that was not already true of the world around him ^[6].

The trials made him notorious and, in the long run, canonical. Writers and lawyers in both India and Pakistan continue to invoke his cases when free expression comes under pressure, and the court records themselves have become part of his literary legend ^[5].

Manto married Safia Deen in 1939 in Bombay. The couple's first child, a son named Arif, died in infancy, a loss that shadowed Manto deeply; three daughters, Nighat, Nuzhat and Nusrat, survived him ^[2]. Safia's steadiness anchored a household that her husband's earnings, always precarious, could barely support.

He was a man of contradictions noted by everyone who knew him: fastidious in dress, sharp tongued, generous, quarrelsome and loyal. In Bombay he formed close friendships in the film world, including with the actor Shyam, whose death in 1951 he mourned in a memorable essay. His pen portraits of colleagues were affectionate and merciless in equal measure ^[4].

Alcohol was the constant of his adult life and ultimately its destroyer. In Lahore his drinking worsened as work dried up and the obscenity cases multiplied. His family committed him to the psychiatric ward of a Lahore hospital for treatment at one point, an experience that fed directly into Toba Tek Singh ^[5].

Manto left Bombay for Lahore in January 1948, months after Partition. He wrote later that the decision tormented him; Bombay had given him a livelihood and an identity, and he never fully reconciled himself to the move ^[5]. In Pakistan he found no film industry to sustain him and survived by selling stories to newspapers and journals, often writing a piece in a single sitting to pay for the day's needs.

The Lahore years, for all their misery, were astonishingly productive. Much of his greatest work, including Toba Tek Singh, Thanda Gosht and the Uncle Sam letters, dates from this final period of poverty, prosecution and declining health ^[6]. He often composed in the offices of friends' publications, surrounded by the literary circle that gathered around Lahore's tea houses.

Cirrhosis of the liver killed him on January 18, 1955 at his home on Hall Road, Lahore. He was forty two ^[1]. He was buried in the city's Miani Sahib graveyard. Months before dying he had drafted his own epitaph, a characteristic joke in which he wondered whether he or God was the greater short story writer; his family, wary of offense, did not place it on the grave ^[2].

Manto's reputation has grown steadily since his death, and the Saadat Hasan Manto biography industry now spans both sides of the border he distrusted. Ayesha Jalal, the Pakistani American historian and his great niece, published a study of his life and times with Princeton University Press in 2013, and translators including Khalid Hasan, Aatish Taseer, Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad have carried his stories to English readers worldwide ^{[5] [7]}.

Official recognition came late. Pakistan issued a postage stamp in his honor in 2005, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, and in 2012, his birth centenary, the state conferred on him the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, its highest civilian award, a striking turn for a writer its courts had once prosecuted ^[8]. In India, the centenary brought new editions, conferences and stage adaptations.

His afterlife in performance has been vigorous. Nandita Das directed the biographical film Manto in 2018 with Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the title role, and a Pakistani film and television treatment by Sarmad Khoosat appeared in 2015 ^[8]. Toba Tek Singh is taught across South Asia and beyond, and writers on communal violence, censorship and displacement return to him constantly. The plainest of Saadat Hasan Manto facts is this: a man who died broke and condemned is now read as the conscience of Partition.