Historically speaking, society at large is fiercely territorial in its attempts to safeguard what it believes to be the norm. The artist as deviant, chronicler or prophet is always a threatDuring his centennial year, one is struck by the force of his ironic prose, couched in a deceptive simplicity that remains as fresh as when it was first written. Manto?s wry, sardonic humour is aimed as much at himself as it is at the ?establishment? and much of what he writes takes on a special relevance in contemporary Pakistan.
The move from Bombay to Lahore a few months after the partition of one of the great land masses of the world left Manto crippled by poverty, shadowed by notoriety and bitterly unhappy.
Yet, these debilitating circumstances (including his own failing health) did not prevent him from writing. Apart from his better known plays and fiction, Manto offers a prolific store of lesser known but admirable prose in which the persona of the writer is unabashedly presented as the perpetually broke, struggling writer. It is a portrait that is the very antithesis of the romantic image so often pandered to in film and story by lesser writers.
Manto lived, as he graphically describes it himself, in a state of constant flux. During his early Bombay days after he left Amritsar where he was briefly a student of Faiz, the filthy kholi that he calls home ?rains? bedbugs and has only two bathrooms for 40 families. His immediate challenge, as he explains in Meri Shaadi is to arrange for accomodation for his bride who is expected to join him after a year long engagement. His efforts range from unabashed begging for long overdue remuneration for his scripts to resorting to the kindness of friends to lend him a few pieces of furniture. The writings offer a riveting contrast to our own taken-for-granted easy access to creature comforts which, in large measure ostensibly contribute to the ?civilised man?s? sense of civility and sanity.
Much of Manto?s life reads like a roller coaster running off track. From periods of debilitating poverty to periods of excess, where in his own words he spent ?hundreds of thousands of rupees? during his successful stint as editor of Mussawir and scriptwriter at Bombay Talkies, where he befriended the likes of Ashok Kumar, through to the bitter years of want in Lahore, where he died penniless. Manto was dogged by a sense of his own destiny.
Chronicling his years in Bombay lurching from one unpaid job to the next in the city that presently sells dreams to millions, Manto records the story of an embryonic film industry starting to find its feet. The wry details he surrenders about the travails of the Bombay film industry and his sorrow at the death of the Lahore film studios as well-known artists and directors left for India make excellent historical reading. In this respect, the writer?s value as a social historian has been largely overlooked and merits some research into the film history of the subcontinent.
It is unfortunate that Manto?s stature as a literary figure, or a social historian by default, has been sadly overshadowed by an overriding sense of moral outrage at the overtly sexual content of his work. Censured and forced to leave the Progressive Writers Movement, Manto?s choice of content was defended only by Faiz ? on the basis of the right to freedom of speech and Sibt-e-Hasan who labelled the move an act of ?literary terrorism?! Neither India, nor Pakistan at a later stage were prepared to put up with a literary maverick?s efforts to expose the naked savagery that lies hidden under the thin veneer of our skins. Scratching the surface lets the beast loose as he proves with his highly shocking (at the time) work such as Khol do, Kaali Shalwar and Thanda Gosht ? narratives, which highlighted the insanity unleashed during the Muslim/Hindu exodus to their respective promised lands. Though sexual violence against women returns as a common theme in his writing, the piece de resistance remains the heartbreakingly masterful Toba Tek Singh, written after a particularly harrowing incarceration as an inmate of a lunatic asylum for purposes of ?drying out?.
Historically speaking, society at large is fiercely territorial in its attempts to safeguard what it believes to be the norm. The artist as deviant, chronicler or prophet is always a threat. Be it Gaugain, Picasso, Lawrence, Wilde, Ismat or Fehmida, challenges to our sense of propriety and attempts to fracture gender confines are punishable offences. Outraged sensibilities tried Manto half a dozen times for obscenity, both before and after 1947, but the writer, unlike Wilde and Lawrence, was never convicted.
As with many great creative geniuses, recognition proved elusive during Manto?s lifetime. Ironically, even the film Ghalib for which he had written the script b?came a blockbuster in India when it was released only after he had migrated to Pakistan. Always convinced of his own stature as a writer of import and writing for the most part as a dispassionate onlooker in a tone as bland as boiled rice, Manto could also be deliberately provocative, soliciting responses ranging from outrage to grudging admiration.
The college dropout, voracious reader and prolific writer, Manto produced a vast body of work. During his year-long stint with the Urdu service of All India Radio, Delhi (1941-42), he produced four collections of radio plays. Plays, short stories, fiction, translations, Manto tried his hand at all genres, including the elusive form of the essay. The majority view of Manto as a genius wasted by his own intemperance is at odds with what Manto produced. It takes enormous courage to live in abject poverty constantly tormented by one?s personal demons on a daily basis. In fact, one may well posit that it was this very intemperance that helped Manto dispassionately strip the thin skin of probity that society envelops itself in. Ghalib ?s own words evidence such an approach when he writes, Bey-mai kise hai, taaqat-e aashob-e aagahi (Without wine, who has the strength to counter the terror of awareness?).
It is this very strength which allows Manto to describe the brutality he sees around him in such graphic detail. The leitmotif that runs through much of his work is an extreme sensitivity to the cicatrice left by the partition of the subcontinent. In his literary and real life, responding to the maelstorm of violence unleashed by partition Manto writes, ?Don?t say that a hundred thousand Muslims and a hundred thousand Hindus died....say that two hundred thousand human beings died...Muslims thought that by killing Hindus they had killed the Hindu religion but it lives on. Hindus celebrated that they had destroyed Islam by killing a hundred thousand Muslims but Islam did not receive a scratch...religion, faith, belief, conviction, creed, all this resides not in the body but in the spirit. How can it be annihilated with knives and guns??
The measure of great art is always tested by time. The greater the work the more meaningful it becomes over the ages. While Manto?s literary stature is constantly debated, it is perhaps his humanism that is his legacy. ?Literature is either literature or not,? he writes. ?Man is either man or not, he cannot be a donkey or a house or a table...Saadat Hasan Manto is a human being and every human should be progressive.?
The writer is Academic Advisor Lahore Grammar School and can be reached at navidshahzad@hotmail.com
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