A song for Manto

Bol, ke lab azaad hai tere,

Bol, zubaan ab tak teri hain,

Tera sutwan jism hai tera —

Bol, ke jaan ab tak teri hain

(Speak, for your lips are yours; speak, for your tongue is still your own; this straight body still belongs to you; speak, because you are still alive)

They did speak, the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the writer Saadat Hasan Manto, because their lips were theirs. Faiz wrote these words in a prison in Pakistan, after being arrested on charges of plotting to overthrow the Liaquat Ali Khan government. As always, he spoke at length, through his powerful imagery.

As did his contemporary Manto, the Urdu author and playwright born in Ludhiana in British India.

Though Manto died in 1955, almost three decades before Faiz breathed his last, the two names are often taken together in the context of writing that mirrored the grey, uncomfortable truths of the society they lived in; words that won hearts, enraged the State and disrupted their own lives.

Manto, who wrote short stories, essays, novels and radio plays, was charged with obscenity in both India and Pakistan, the country he migrated to after 1947, while Faiz spent four years in jail from 1951 to 1955. Even in the ’80s, with President Zia-ul-Haq at the helm, his poetry was banned from being recited in public in Pakistan. Manto and Faiz were also among the intellectuals who, in the late ’40s, often assembled at Lahore’s Pak Tea House for debates and discussions.

The two revolutionary writers have come together once again, in the form of a song in a biopic on Manto. Nandita Das’s latest film, with Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the lead, which has been released in theatres today.

Man of the moment: Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Manto in the Nandita Das biopic

Coming right at the end of the film, ‘ Bol ’ captures the resilience with which Manto kept refuting the charges of obscenity even as he crumbled inside and hit the bottle. The song, set to tune by Sneha Khanwalkar of Gangs of Wasseypur and Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! fame, was first recorded with Ustad Rashid Khan.

Months later, after a chance meeting at a cultural festival in Bhubaneswar in January 2018, Das approached Vidya Shah, a Delhi-based singer and musician, with a proposal. “I’ve known Nandita for decades now. She has heard me perform at various events, including the Jashn-e-Rekhta festival in Delhi where she attended my session on Begum Akhtar... We’d spoken about doing something together and then she heard me again at Bhubaneswar,” Shah tells BL ink . Within a week or so, Das called her up to discuss adding a female voice to the ‘ Bol ’ track.

“She felt that it would add to the track. I knew she was making a film on Manto and here was my chance to be a part of it. I agreed immediately,” adds Shah. In early February, she flew to Mumbai for the recording. After a day’s rehearsal, under the supervision of the “intelligent and most professional” Khanwalkar, Shah recorded her part of the song based on Raag Yaman.

Shah was given a basic track to practise on. “Because it’s Urdu, diction was top priority. Being asked to add to a song that Rashid bhai has recorded — he is one of the finest artistes in India — did make me a little nervous, but I just followed whatever Sneha said,” says Shah. It wasn’t until the first week of September that she heard the final version.

“It’s only then that I understood Sneha’s vision for the song,” she says.

For a song that is set against the background of many upheavals — the Partition, for example, which agonised a non-practising Muslim such as Manto — Khanwalkar’s composition sounds calm and unhurried.

Shah was impressed by the inclusion of a rap song in a film on Manto. Raftaar’s ‘ Mantoiyat’, which includes dialogues from the film in Siddiqui’s voice, harps on the hypocrisies of civil society that Manto exposed through his writing: “Off off off hain, dimaag sabka off hain/ Zamana kya kahega/ Iska hi toh sabko khauff hain (Everyone’s brains seem to be off, they can only think of what the world will think)”. Shah admits that she was a little wary about having a rap song in a film like this, “but only until I heard the track a few weeks ago”. Also in the film is ‘ Nagri, nagri’, a ghazal by the progressive Urdu poet Meeraji, sung by Shankar Mahadevan.

Shah’s Manto connection does not start with this biopic. Her bond with Faiz’s poetry is also not new. It was at least 15 years ago that she first heard of ‘Bol’ . “I have often sung ‘ Hum dekhenge ’ , his other famous nazm , at events. But ‘ Bol ’ is a poem that I came across while watching a documentary, in which Shabana Azmi mentioned it. I found the lyrics attractive. Later, I heard several renditions of it, including Tina Sani’s on Coke Studio Pakistan ,” she says.

Manto is a name that Shah first heard in school. “I read his stories in the Devanagri script. His obsession with truth — rather, being truthful — is a quality that still endears him to readers. And the many translations of his works have made him more accessible, which is why he is still is a talking point,” she says.