Sunil Sethi: Manto's forgotten aspects

When the end came on January 18, 1955, it was bitter, agonising and self-inflicted. All night Saadat Hasan Manto had spewed blood at his home in Lahore; and in the morning, rejecting importuning by his family to be taken to hospital again, he covered his head under his quilt, muttering: “Let this disgraceful life end ... let me die here in peace.” Minutes before breathing his last, he defiantly demanded a glass of whisky. He was not quite 43.

Among the hosannas being heaped on the birth centenary of this sad, strange, mad genius who refashioned the Urdu short story in the modern idiom and recorded the trauma of Partition like no other, some aspects of Manto’s tumultuous life and work have gone unrecorded. In his ancestral village near Samrala in district Ludhiana, devout fans and followers are creating a memorial – in effect, a dirge for divided Punjab – but Manto’s creative impetus was fuelled by cities, not the countryside.

Though some of his best-known stories, of madness and slaughter – such as “Toba Tek Singh” and “The Dog of Titwal” – are set in the no man’s land between frontiers, it was the intellectual companionship of Amritsar, where he was educated, and the unfettered freedom of Bombay’s film industry in the 1930s and 1940s, where he was a screenwriter, that fired his creative imagination. He adored Bombay’s filmi duniya; leaving the friendship of actors such as Ashok Kumar and Shyam, and fearing persecution as a Muslim at Filmistan studios, he left for Pakistan in 1948 after his family had migrated. The move shattered him emotionally, intensifying the bouts of dipsomania that finally consumed him. Extravagant by nature, psychiatrically depressive, he wrote at demonic speed, and rued “...I have failed to find a place for myself in this country called Pakistan, which I love greatly... That is why sometimes I am to be found in a lunatic asylum and sometimes in a hospital.”

It is a mark of literary genius that successive generations, rather than contemporaries, will find in its outpourings a resonance that reflects their own condition. Manto’s reputation has soared since his death; the Pakistani novelist Mohammed Hanif recently wrote that he is surprised at the ever-growing, often expensively produced editions of his work available. Yet it is curious that in the adulatory chorus few mention the name of the one man whose singular passion has kept Manto’s flame alive. And this is Khalid Hasan, the Pakistani journalist and author, whose translations of the writer’s fiction, memoirs, letters and assorted prose have yielded a rich harvest.

Khalid Hasan’s Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto (Penguin, 2008) is the comprehensive, masterly compendium of the writer’s life and work. Scrupulously gathered from obscure, long-defunct journals and newspapers, these contain Manto’s frequently salacious accounts of the film industry; a revealing account of Jinnah’s personal life as told by his chauffeur; and the tragically affecting Uncle Manto, a written account by his nephew Hamid Jalal of the writer’s punishing descent into alcoholism. The bond between the two was so close that Jalal showed it to his uncle — and Manto, being Manto, unflinchingly read it and permitted publication of his own private hell.

Linguistically, Manto is an oddity. He was a poor student, failing his school-leaving exams twice, including in Urdu, the language he remade in his gritty, provocative style. His nephew recalled that they always spoke in Punjabi, not Urdu. His prose is inflected with the sharp, satirical and raffish humour of Punjabi heard in Amritsar’s inner city.

As a stylist, however, I believe Manto’s technique is cinematic, not literary. The inspired psychological drama of characters, the haunting close-ups and long shots and the deliberately jumpy narrative of rough cuts are redolent of film imagery.

It is right that this son of Punjab, who died broken and in penury, is being celebrated on both sides of the border. And it is about time that Saadat Hasan Manto be lionised everywhere.