What do you think of when you think of Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto? Invariably, and never without a pang of social conscience, Partition and prostitutes. Arguably the best short story writer of India, Manto today is the anguished god of delinquents, pariahs, the oppressed, the abused, the morally derelict and assorted sinners. Mostly he is invoked by the India-Pakistan peace corps, and often drafted for the cause of Hindu-Muslim harmony by sundry conscience-keepers of the nation. The Manto we have come to have 60 years after his death is a noble deity who presides over the salvation of the socially oppressed and the politically marginalised.

The real Manto, the flesh-and-blood-and-alcohol Manto, would have refused to play the role of the deity we have fashioned for him. He was a professional writer, and as good or bad as they come. It will be a gross injustice to describe writers as just good or bad. Like their characters, they come in various shades and often have little ideological or political coherence about them. Manto was not the iconoclast that we now like to think he was. In the way of Mirza Ghalib, Manto too drank like a fish but abstained from pork. He was petty, spiteful, grumpy, waspish and a pompous braggart — certainly not the person you can trust with the cause of the downtrodden or Hindu-Muslim unity.

When Manto wrote about a prostitute, he was not writing to tell you about the evil society that forced her into it and now offers her no escape. Committed only to his craft as a writer and to no ideology or politics, his aim was to portray the character as truly and interestingly as he could. That’s why his fiction is about characters and not ideas.

Academic, critic and translator Muhammad Umar Memon has published a new translation of Manto’s stories and non-fiction to rescue Manto the writer from Manto the ideologue. How often do you come across a literary book that calls the preface or the foreword a ‘preamble’? Funnily, Memon has written a ‘preamble’ to his translation. And not funnily enough, for the pompous word seems to be chosen to indicate Memon’s magisterial sweep and juridical intent — he sets out to take the kink out of the canon that exalts Manto as an ideologue at the expense of Manto the writer. “Manto’s short fiction offers a wealth of thematic diversity. However, he is chiefly — perhaps even exclusively — remembered as a writer on Partition and prostitutes. This present selection seeks to correct this reductionist impression of a writer who is concerned more with the unique substance of his characters than with social problems and political events as the mainstay of his creative work,” Memon writes.

In his attempt to amend the Manto clause in the constitution of the critics, Memon has more in his arsenal than just a ‘preamble’: apart from Manto’s fictional and non-fictional pieces, he has included three pieces by two Urdu critics too.

“Manto knew too well that most humans live and breathe in the obscuring haze of contradictory impulses and that certainties... are the prerogative only of ideologues, whether religious or political,” Memon writes in his ‘preamble’. He cites the example of Sahae, the protagonist in the story by the same name. Sahae is a devout Hindu and a pimp who runs a brothel in Bombay, and dreams of making ₹30,000 so that he could return to his native Benares and open a fabric shop. “In real life, a devout man would not come anywhere near a whorehouse, much less run it, though in the same life most people would display an amazing motley of contradictory impulses. Sahae will remain forever suspect to conventional morality,” he argues.

Memon rightly says Manto’s fiction is too easy to be mistaken for ideology or political commentary. That’s why those of the left-liberal inclination and, in fact, all progressive people today like to consider Manto as a fellow-traveller. Now that explicit sexual references in fiction no longer provoke most people, many of us would believe we won’t have been offended by Manto. But wasn’t it the progressive left of the day who had castigated Manto for obscenity in his fiction? If Manto comes back as a writer today, he will not be lynched on social media by right-wing trolls, as it may seem to us. It takes far less than Manto to offend them. Most certainly he would offend the left-liberals and the progressives. Memon argues Manto does not belong to any politics, however progressive it is.

For all his fine argument and mighty attempt at bending the canon, Memon cannot settle the issue once and for all. The question will yet remain: Do we read Manto to enjoy his literary workmanship as we read Chekhov, or we read him to jolt us out of the comfort we have come to develop with our unbearable realities?

On a lighter note, Memon could have a stronger case for Manto’s lack of political commitment if he had appreciated his Punjabi roots. A good Punjabi, like Manto, is not true to any ideology but his peg (drink) and his mouthful of gaahl (abuses). At the end of the day, isn’t that all that matters?

Dharminder Kumaris a Delhi-based journalist

Related Topics