Mithyl Banymandhub
On the inside cover of Contemporary short stories – An Anthology (1991) selected and translated into English by Jai Ratan is the following note. “The modern Urdu short story, which took root in India and Pakistan not many years ago, has today become a vibrant art form with writers from both countries contributing to its growth and status. It can boast of a wealth of literature as yet little known outside the Urdu world.” Jai Ratan’s concise and variegated anthology “presents to the discriminating English reader a selection of stories comparable in excellence to short fiction written in any other language.”
A Writer Who Deserves Attention
I can appreciate Urdu literature thanks to the works of the cognoscenti who are conversant with both the source language and that into which they want readers from other climes and cultures to peruse it. Something is definitely lost along the way but I console myself with the belief that the message the short story writer wants to convey remains the same in essence. It has been thus possible for me to go through the works of Munshi Premchand, Rajindar Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, Ghulam Abbas, Intizar Hussain, Qurratulam Hyder, Surendra Prakash, Iqbal Majeed and Saadat Hasan Manto. The latter’s Toba Tek Singh which I am never tired of reading has been praised in different literary quarters. 
Over the years, I have purchased as many books as I could on Saadat Hasan Manto. During his last visit to India, Dr.O.N.Gangoo brought a copy of My Name is Radha: The Essential Manto for me. The work is published by Penguin and is translated by Muhammad Umar Memon, a well-known and respected name in the literary world. Among the magazines I have carefully preserved over the years is an issue of Outlook dated 27 July 2015 in which features a review by Aakar Patel who is the translator of why I write essays originally written in Urdu by Saadat Hasan Manto. Ankar Patel hails Muhammad Umar Memon’s book as “A translation faithful to the original and a sampling of Manto’s rarer non-fiction” which renders this book worthy of reading.
I found, since the days I spent on the campus of the university of Delhi to the present, that a writer of the caliber of Saadat Manto, though controversial, deserves attention. Over the years, I have came to discover many facets of his life and literary career.
Fascination for the Unconventional
Saadat Hasan Manto was born on May 11, 1912, in Samrala. It is located twenty-two miles away from Ludhiana and lies on the way to Chandigarh. His father was a very stern man, his mother was of a sweet disposition and was very pious. She doted on Manto and he found solace and comfort in her company. All the other members of the family were indifferent to him. Out of love he used to call her “Bibi Jan”.
He received his early education at the M.A.O Middle and High School at Amritsar and later joined the Muslim High School, Sharifpura, Amritsar. He was not interested in his textbooks. It is said that instead he had a liking for the books which his teachers disapproved of. His fascination for the unconventional was a childhood trait. As a young boy he once walked barefoot on live coals in public at the prompting of a local showman named Allah Rakha. He passed his matriculation with great difficulty. Manto’s biographers never fail to mention that he did not succeed in Urdu of all subjects. Those were the days when he would sit in Jalianwalla Bagh, dreaming of ways and means to overthrow the British rulers. It was during this period that he met Bari Alig and Ata Mohammed Chiahti who had come to Amritsar to edit the daily Siv.
One day Manto requested Bari Alig to enlighten him and his friends with his views on Capital Punishment. Bari Alig mentioned Victor Hugo’s The Last Days of the Condemned. Manto had a copy of the book and brought it for Bari Alig. He decided to gradually develop in Manto an interest in Urdu journalism. The next step was to create in him a liking for Urdu literature. Manto soon started reading the works of Victor Hugo, Lord Lytton, Gorky, Chekhov, Pushkin, Gogol, Oscar Wilde and Guy de Maupassant. At the request of Bari Alig he translated The Last Days of the Condemned into Urdu within “fifteen days of assiduous labour” and “the generous help of the dictionary.” This version was published under the title Aseer kie Sarguzasht (The life story of a Prisoner). He next embarked on a translation of Oscar Wilde’s Vera, in collaboration with his friend Hasan Abas.
Manto then turned his attention to some Russian short stories which were published in magazines like Humayun and Alamgir. Hassan Abbas and he joined the new weekly Khulk which Bari Sahib had started. It is in this publication that Manto’s first original short story Tamasha appeared anonymously.
In January 1936, he received a letter from Nazir Ludhianvi, requesting him to reach Bombay at the earliest. Nazir Ludhianvi, the owner of Mussavar weekly, requested him to work as its editor. He left Nazir Ludhianvi’s publication in 1940 and started editing Babu Rao Patel’s caravan but gave up the job after seven months. Babu Rao Patel is known to people of my parents’ generation as the editor of Film India, which was available in Mauritius and which I had the pleasure of perusing from time to time.
Manto’s Dream
In January 1941 he left Bombay for Delhi where he joined All India Radio as a dramatist. This was a productive period from the literary point of view. His colleagues were Upendra Nath Ashk, Krishan Chander, Devender Satyarthi and N.M. Rashid. Manto’s talent blossomed. Within one and a half years he wrote more than a hundred plays which were broadcast on radio. Side by side, he wrote short stories. In Mottled Dawn (1997), words which are borrowed from one of the versions of The Morning of Freedom by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who happens to be one of my favourite poets, Khalid Hasan quotes the following lines,
This mottled dawn
This night-bitten morning
No, this is not the morning
We had set out in search of
Khalid Hassan who has translated fifty sketches and stories of partition dedicates his work “to the memory of Saadat Hasan Manto and his dream of a subcontinent where people will live as people, irrespective of religion, caste or colour, where hatred shall stand abolished, where hypocrisy shall have no sway, where religion shall only ennoble those who follow it, not divide them in warring tribes.” The book includes “unforgettable stories like Toba Tek Singh, The Assignment, The Return, colder than Ice and many more, burning alive the most traumatic episode in the history of the subcontinent.”
Toba Tek Singh
In his review of Umar Memon’s My Name is Radha: The Essential Manto, Aakar Patel writes, My random and eccentric test to inspect the quality (and tone) of a Manto translation is as follows: Go straight to Toba Tek Singh, Manto’s most famous work on partition. Turn to the paragraph in which a Muslim lunatic who reads the newspaper Zamindar is asked: Maulvi sahab, yeh Pakistan kya hota hain? He replies: Hindustan mein woh ek aisi jagah hai, jahan ustray bante hein. Now, see how that line is offered by the translator as a test of how he approaches Manto.
Khushwant Singh translated the word (ustray) as cut throat razor, clearly communicating the menace of the word and of the line that Manto intended. Aatish Taseer in his translation used (razor blades), which missed the point entirely. Mohammed Umar Menon renders the line thus: ‘It is a place in India where they make straight razors. I like this formulation. It expects the reader to know something about blades, but it retains the physical form of the ustra. The book retains that spirit in a larger sense and this is a more, literal translation of Manto than some have attempted…”
The Best Of Manto – A Collection of his short stories edited by Jai Ratan presents to the discriminating English reader Saadat Hasan Manto, the most controversial short story writer, in Urdu. His ruthless exposure of the hollowness of middle-class morality has sent shock waves throughout the Urdu speaking world. Manto was accused of expressing pornography and hauled up before courts. The then newly emerging “progressive” writers considered him to be a reactionary.
The fifteen short stories in his collection reflect Manto’s deep human concern about the lot of what Frantz Fanon has referred to as “The Wretched of the Earth”. Rarely has the dark and ugly world of the streetwalker, for instance, been written with such perception as in his writings. He is pained at the human being’s foolishness and religious intolerance as he reacts to the shattering experience of loot, arson and killing in communal riots. His candid portrayal of the physical element in the man-woman relationship outraged the morality of the forties and fifties.
His Last Years
Manto spent the last ten years of his life in Pakistan. They proved productive from the literary point of view. He wrote fast and he wrote till the last days of his life. He had by that time become a hardened alcoholic. It is sad to note that it was only after he had satisfied his craving for liquor that he turned his attention to the needs of his family. He drank so much that his health which had never been so good inevitably deteriorated. He died on January 18th,1955, at the age of forty-three. He still had a lot to offer to his readers.
Bibliography
- Hasan, Khalid. Mottled Dawn-Fifty sketches and stories of Partition. India: Penguin (1997)
- Wardhavvan, Jagdish Chander. The Life of Saadat Hasan Manto. New Delhi: Roli Books (1998)
- Ratan Jai Ed Contemporary Urdu Short Stories – An Anthology. India: Sterling Publishers (1991)
- Hasan, Khalid Ed. The unicorn and the Dancing Girl. India: Allied publishers (1988)