Life and Works of Saadat Hasan Manto 9788185952482, 8185952485

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Life and Works o f Saadat Hasan Manto

Life and Works o f Saadat Hasan Manto

Edited by ALOK BHALLA

INDIAN IN STITU TE O F ADVANCED STUDY RASHTRAPATI NI VAS, SHIMLA-171005

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Indian Institute of Advanced Study 1997 First published 1997

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher.

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____ Published by the Secreiaij Indian Institute of Advanced Study Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla

Typeset at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla and printed at Replika Press Pvt Ltd., Delhi.

Contents

Introduction

M anto Reconsidered Gopi Chand Narang

Melodrama or...? A N ote on M anto’s “ In This Maelstrom” Muhammad Umar Memon A Dance o f Grotesque Masks: A Critical Reading o f M anto’s “ 1919 Ke Ek Baat” A lok Bhalla T he Craft o f Manto: Warts and All Keki K. Daruwala Lord Shiva o r The Prince o f Pomographers: Ideology, Aesthetics and Architectonics o f M anto Harish Narang T he Them e o f Piety and Sin in “Babu Gopinath” Varis Alvi Surfacing from Within: Fallen W om en in M anto’s Fiction Sukrita Paul Kumar M anto and Punjabi Short Story Writers Tejwant Singh Gill M anto’s Philosophy: An Explication Ashok Vohra T he W orld o f Saadat Hasan Manto Shashi Joshi

VI

Contributors

M anto in English: An Assessment o f Khalid Hasan’s Translations M . Asaduddin Saadat Hasan Manto: A N ote Bhisham Sahni

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172

A Reading o f ‘Pandit’ M anto’s Letter to Pandit N ehru Abdul Bismillah

175

Manto: The Image o f the Soul in the M irror o f Eros Devender Issar

184

Manto— The Person and the M yth Shamim Hanfi

191

Saadat Hasan Manto: Idealogue and Social Philosophy Tarannum R ia z

201

A N ote O n Some Myths About Manto Indra Nath Chaudhuri

215

Contributors

221

Acknowledgements A few years ago, a seminar on Saadat Hasan M anto would have been inconceivable. T he established literary critic found his vision o f life at the criminal edges o f cities brutal, the anxious ideologue through the m ockery o f the politics o f identity scandalous and religious preacher considered his agnosticism shameful. It was, therefore, courageous o f Professor Mrinal Miri to agree to hold a seminar on M anto at the Indian Institute o f Advanced Study. I am grateful to him and the staff at the Institute for help and support. M any o f the papers presented at the sem inar w ere in U rdu and H indi. I m ust thank H arish N arang, M. Asaddudin and Ahsan Raza Khan for translating them into English in the shortest possible time. This volume w ould never have got done w ithout the intelligent and careful support o f my wife, Vasundara.

Introduction

T he papers collected in this volum e w ere presented at a seminar on the life and works o f Saadat Hasan M anto held at the Indian Institute o f Advanced Study at Shimla in May 1996. It is, perhaps, w orth recording that the seminar was the first serious one o f its kind held on M anto either in India or Pakistan. T he fact that the w ork o f M anto had never before been the subject o f extensive discussion am ongst U rdu, H indi, Punjabi and English literary and social critics is surprising, because he is acknowledged by everyone in the Indian subcontinent to be a w riter o f extraordinary brilliance, w ho had the courage to present his milieu in ways w hich were radically different from writers w ho were his contemporaries. T he seminar was, however, also memorable because it attracted, along w ith literary critics, scholars o f history, sociology, political science and philosophy. W hile it has generally been acknowledged that Saadat Hasan Manto was one o f the finest writers o f our age, it is surprising that neither his life nor the vast range o f his w ritings have received the scrupulous critical attention they deserve. His life has been the subject o f countless anecdotes about his eccentricities and tem per, his fierce relationships w ith everyone he knew and his pitiless appraisal o f strangers, his acerbic w it and the fluent ease w ith w hich he w rote. N o one has, how ever, w ritten a comprehensive biography w hich carefully locates him in a historical period w hen ou r confidence in a trustw orthy society o f common decencies was badly shaken, and at the same time, attentively considers his readings and sources, his friendship and betrayals, his religious and political presuppositions or his restless shifts from Delhi to Bombay and finally to Lahore. D iscrim inating biographical studies o f M anto are necessary, if we have to understand why his w ork is so

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Introduction

crow ded w ith physical things that m en either collide with them or stumble over them and are always defeated by them , or why his stories are marked by the sense that we are foredoom ed to a life o f solitude, pain and sorrow. Thus, we must know m ore about M anto’s life w ithin the moral and political econom ies o f the urban centere o f colonial India in the first half o f the twentieth century and amongst people who lived either in their liminal spaces, or in their criminalised dens, or in their enclaves o f glamorous culture. Critical biographies, w hich place M anto beside his contem poraries whose social sym pathies w ere m ore lim ited, could help us realise that, because he had the singular gift o f traversing across each o f these spaces, he could record w ith empathy the lives o f the marginalised and the brutalised, and at the same tim e attack w ith sardonic hum our the carelessness o f the privileged. Finally, the most im portant contribution biographical studies o f M anto could make is to help us understand why a man like him, who had spent all his life expressing his abhorrence o f everything that was merely religious and political, and in condem ning ideas that did not emerge from the sensuousness o f lived actuality as a swindle, persuaded himself to migrate to Lahore after 1947. After all even in Pakistan he didn’t abandon his cynical belief that there was nothing which reason could do to prevent m en and wom en, Hindus and Muslims equally, from living like fools. It w ould be useful to know how M anto, once he settled in Pakistan, tried to resolve the apparent contradiction between an Islamic legal state w hich sought to throw a protective boundary exclusively around people w ho professed to belong to certain sects o f Islam, and his ' ow n inherited, sense that citizenship is the right o f anyone w ho has lived for a long time w ithin a certain territorial ¡boundary and feels at home w ithin its cultural space. If the records o f M anto’s life are fragmentary, scattered and ahistorical, a large part o f the critical commentaries ab o u t his w ritings are perfunctory, sentim ental and unscholarly. Most o f the critics w ho deal with his stories

Introduction

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before the partition, concentrate on a handful o f wellknow n ones about prostitutes, alcoholics and self-loathing writers in order to draw from them jejune morals about the worthiness o f the dow n-trodden in a callous age and the w riter’s need to descend into the abyss for knowledge. M anto is perhaps at heart a moralist, but he isn’t naive. Indeed, his strength lies in his ability to gaze hard at the real world w ithout sentimentality, illusions or hope. Even if there are fleeting m om ents in his stories w hen a prostitute dreams o f a gentler w orld or a slum -dweller forgets the stink from the urinal nearby, there is hardly a story o f his w hich doesn’t make one shudder or leave one with a feeling o f shame and disgust. He is painful precisely because he doesn’t suggest a religious, political or ethical solution to misery. T he tone o f his stories is sardonic and n asty/the actions o f many o f his characters are loathsome and the sufferings he describes are not a part o f some useful ethical scheme to persuade us to act justly but sufferings which will not let us rest in peace. M anto’s stories about the horrors o f the partition o f India have received thoughtful critical attention from a variety of people trying to make some sense o f a world in w hich m en drift, for no reason at all, and again and again, into cruelty and mindless slaughter. Part o f the fascination with these stories seems to lie in the fact that, while other writers about the partition often find a place in their narratives for moral m en w ho refuse to abandon their belief that it is better to suffer wrong than to inflict it on others and w ho refuse to accept a politics w ithout rules o f virtuous conduct, M anto mockingly asserts that all civil . societies are designed to legitimise our worst impulses and j rejects man as a creature who has any ethical sense. These stories are nightmares because they reveal that atrocities can be committed, not only by men w ho have lived for so long in violent streets that they have adopted the norms o f survival in such streets, but by any one o f us, against randomly chosen victims, in the name o f the finest political principles and God. W hat is scandalous about M anto’s

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partition stories is his radical erasure o f all social, moral or religious reasons w hich normally inform civilisations. It is n o t surprising, therefore, that his stories are fragmentary and discontinuous. They merely record instances o f terror and cries o f pain, violations and pleas for m ercy, brutal sexuality and cynical laughter. As fragments they offer no consolation, no hope o f emergence into a saner and kinder w orld. Instead, they prophesy endless days o f misery, torture, ruin, madness and waste. M anto’s primary argum ent is n o t only the Hobbesian one that w hen men are freed from responsibilities they becom e predators, but also that in a w orld w hich is as I heartless and selfish as ours there is no reason for mercy and I pity to create a safe ground for the frailty o f goodness to survive. H e shocks us even m ore w hen w e realise that the lives he wants us to witness are being lived at precisely the same historical m om ent in w hich Gandhi is pointing to im m ediate examples o f moral courage and pleading for a politics o f virtuous regard for all creatures w ho share this earth w ith us. I hope, therefore, that this volum e will encourage scholars to write comparative and historical studies w hich will place M anto w ithin the literary and political currents o f his time. Indeed, I am sure that future studies will pay close attention to the com plex m oral impulses w hich govern M anto’s literary works, as well as make careful analysis o f the texture o f his tales— the concrete images he uses to create a relentless world, the harsh rhythm s o f his prose, the grating roughness o f his diction— in order to show how successful he is in forcing us to consider the pain o f living in colonial India. — A lok B halla

Manto Reconsidered GO PI CH A ND NARANG

Saadat Hasan M anto (1912-1955) has the distinction o f being a m uch maligned and yet widely read short story w riter in Urdu. N o other Urdu fiction writer has so ruth­ lessly exposed the hollowness o f middle class morality and unmasked its sordid aspects with such telling effect. A master craftsman and a short story writer par excellence, he blazed a trail o f glory in U rd u fiction unm atched by any other writer. His way o f telling a story may well appear to be simple, but the treatment o f his subjects and themes, and the light he shed on hum an nature were marked by refreshing, rather devastating originality. His stories, one after another, sent shock waves through complacent minds. So m uch so, that some o f them w ere even branded as obscene or lewd, and he was unceremoniously expelled from the fraternity o f newly emerging progressive U rdu writers. H e was con­ sidered a reactionary and even degenerate in his thinking. He was hauled up before the law courts on the heinous charge o f peddling pornography, not once but several times. N o abuse was too great for him and no hum iliation too small. T he ‘progressives’ as well as the traditionalists bestowed these largesses on him in generous measures. But this in no way blunted the rapier-sharp thrust o f his pen, nor diminished the boldness o f his thinking. M anto spent the last years o f his life in great penury. Poverty, lack o f a regular income and excessive drinking removed him from our midst at the young age ofl/orty-three.’ It is well know n that M anto’s characters mostly comprise o f fallen and rejected members o f society, the so-called fallen and rejected w ho are frow ned upon for their depravity. Undoubtedly, his best stories, and the ones for w hich he is rem em bered most, are those in w hich he

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depicts, with great mastery, fallen w om en and prostitutes against the backdrop o f filthy lanes and slums. Here touts and pimps rub shoulders w ith tarts, drawing customers into their coils. The stories unfold their lives layer by layer, offer one revelation after another. Manto takes no sides, holds out no pleas. He only reconstructs the spectacle o f life as it passes before him. W ith ruthless objectivity, he unmasks those hypocrites w ho masquerade as the custodians o f society and w ho day and night dole out, parrot-like, moral homilies, but are in fact the lords o f oppression and solely responsible for the degradation o f w om en. Spum ed by society, these wom en are ground betw een tw o millstones. M anto does not go into the reasons for their downfall, nor does he lament over their loss o f innocence and grace. He only gives us a glimpse o f that hum ane space w hich they have vicariously created for themselves in this hell for their survival. Most o f his characters are condem ned to a sordid existence, yet they transcend it. W hile rereading M anto after a long lapse o f time, a few , things strike the mind rather sharply. M anto was a supreme ! rebel, he was up against doxa, be it in arts, literature, I customs, manners, social norms, morality or whatever. Any; thing th at was conventional, familiar, acceptable, o r ! belonged to the realm o f the so-called ashraftya (the elite, I bourgeoisie), was rejected by him and he rebelled against it vehemently. At the core o f his creative effort lies a total rejection of all forms o f doxa, and a radically different view o f literature and reality which sent shock waves through his readers as well as his contemporaries. He was way ahead o f others, and perhaps no other fiction w riter o f U rdu in his tim e was as clear about the nature o f literature as he was. T h e predom inant clim ate in U rd u at th at tim e was utilitarian and didactic as propounded by Hali in his Maqaddama and taken to ecstatic heights by A kbar Allahabadi and Iqbal. M anto, while defending his writing, said that it was painful for him to record that “After Iqbal, may his soul rest in peace, it is as if Providence has put locks on all doors o f literature and handed over the keys to just

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3

one blessed soul. If only Allama Iqbal w ere alive!” (Comments on the court case regarding “B oo,” in Dastavez, p. 57). At another point, regretfully he quips, “Most o f the respectable journalists w ho are considered to be custodians o f literature are in fact fit to be term ed, tila fvrosh i.e., peddlers in drugs for potency” (ibid, p. 57). M anto was dragged to the courts, time and again, and his patience was stretched to the utmost. O n such occasions, while facing a utilitarian readership and an equally illinformed judiciary, he seems to give the impression that for a while he too favoured the reformist role o f literature: If you cannot tolerate my stories, this means the times are intolerable. There is nothing wrong with my stories. The w rong w hich is ascribed to my stories, is in fact the rot o f the system. (“A dab-e-Jadeed,” 1944, included in Dastavez, p. 52). He goes on: If you are opposed to my literature, then the best way is that you change the conditions that m otivate such literature (ibid, p. 53). Manto here seems to be supporting the view that if social conditions change, the need for literature to attend to the woes o f fallen w om en will be obliterated. In yet another defence, he emphasises: Maybe my writings are unpleasandy harsh. But what have humans gained from sweet homilies? The neem leaves are pungent but they cleanse the blood. (“Afsana Nigar Aur Jinsi Mailan,” T he Story W riter and the Subject o f Sex, in Dastavez, p. 83). B ut these w ere simply positions o f defence to absolve him self o f the charges that were levied against him and thw art the warrants o f prosecution. In actual fact, by his terribly dispassionate realism and totally uncom promising attitude, he had introduced U rdu fiction to an absolutely

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new concept o f art, i.e., the relative autonom y o f aesthetic effect not subservient to any o f the demands o f ashrafiya morality or social reform. W hen free from the exigencies o f the judiciary and the prosecution, he elucidated his point o f view m uch more convincingly. H e knew that the questions he was involved with were m uch deeper. T hey touched the labyrinths o f the hum an psyche, and w ere perennial questions to which there are no simple answers. Thus: If humanity could have listened to the exhortations that stealing or lying is bad, then one Prophet w ould have been enough. But the list o f Prophets is large...W e writers are no Prophets, whatever we understand, true or false, w e present to our readers; w e do not insist that the readers should accept it as the only truth...W e criticise the law, but we are not law-makers, we criticise the political system, but we do not lay dow n the system; we draw the blue-prints but we are not builders; we speak o f the malady, but we do not write out prescriptions (ibid, pp. 81-82). In yet another essay, “Kasoti” (Touchstone), he said: Literature is not a com m odity like gold or silver which has a rising o r falling index. It is made o u t like an ornam ent, so it has some adulteration. Literature is not pure reality. Literature is literature or non-literature. There is no via media, as man is either man o r an ass (DastaveZy p. 84). It need not be over-emphasised that M anto’s concerns were different from those o f his contemporaries. He thus ushered in an altogether new form o f realism, which the U rdu literati took time to understand and accept. Having assimilated his Russian and French masters at an early age, M anto knew that the fire that raged w ithin him was o f a different order. In 1939, w hen he was barely twenty-seven, he w rote to Ahmad N adeem Qasm i, “W hatever the situation, I remain restless. I am not satisfied w ith anything

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around me. There is som ething lacking in every thing” (Nuqoosh, Manto Number). It is in this context that his delineation o f fallen human beings and his constructions o f fictional situations need to be reassessed. T he obvious, the familiar, or the conventional face o f reality, i.e., the doxa, never triggered his creativity, rather he always endeavoured to expose it. W hile giving an address at Jogeshwari College, Bombay, a few years before the partition, he had said in his peculiar style: In my neighbourhood if a woman is daily beaten by her husband and if she cleans his shoes the next morning, she is o f no interest to m e. But if after quarrelling w ith her husband, and after threatening to com m it suicide, she goes to see a movie, and her husband is terribly worried, I am interested in both o f them. If a boy falls in love w ith a girl— it is no m ore im portant to me than somebody ' catching a common cold...The polite, decent w om en and jj their niceties are o f no consequence to me. Obviously M anto’s fancy thrived on his disdain o f doxa. G iven his urge to look at the o th er side, the n o n conventional, the basic question about the core characters o f M anto, especially his fallen women, is w hether they are only what they seem to be? Isn’t it a paradox o f Mantoiana that the fallen characters o f Manto were misunderstood during his lifetime, and they continue to be misunderstood even after his death, though the nature o f misunderstanding in either case is different. D uring his lifetime, M anto was opposed tooth and nail, and all that was w ritten about him was trivial and perfunctory. T he criticism o f M anto was undiscriminatory, bordering on total rejection. The climate changed after his death. If he was totally rejected before, he was eulogised after his death. T he rejection all along was for reasons sentimental and highly subjective. So was the later eulogisation. Both lacked an objective, scrupulous, critical base in literary appreciation. Generally, the eulogisation o f M anto was due to his representation o f the subaltern, the socially degraded, and the perennial flesh trade and w om en’s

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right to it. T he later Mantoiana suffers from a glut o f this kind o f eulogisation, w ith the result that the image o f M anto, which has gained currency, underscores M anto as a w riter o f prostitutes, pimps and perverts; as one w ho rejoices in the portrayal o f the seamy side o f life. This perhaps calls for some reassessment. It may be recalled that M anto time and again laid stress on the maxim that “A veshya is a wom an as well, but every wom an, is n o t a veshya ’ (“Ismat Furosh,” Prostitute, in Dastavez , p. 92). He says, “W e do not go to the prostitutes* quarters to offer namaz or dorood, we go there because we can go there and buy the com m odity w e w ant to bu y ” (“Safed Jh oot,” in Dastavez, p. 73). M anto’s concern is not the commodity, but the pain, the suffering, and the loneliness o f the hum an soul that sells it. T he tw o are not the same. You can pay for the commodity, but you cannot set a price on the dignity o f the hum an soul. M anto laments the attitude that for many people the very existence o f a woman or the very nature o f the m an-wom an relationship is obscene. If this were so, why did God then create woman? He is equally critical o f the man-made codes o f morality that do not equate the two. H e asks, “ Isn’t m orality the rust on the razor-edge o f society w hich is simply there because it is left there thoughtlessly” ? H e makes it abundantly clear that he is not a sensationalist: “W hy should I take off the choli o f society, it is naked as it is; o f course I am not interested in covering it up either, because that is the job o f tailors, not o f writers” (“A dab-eJadeed,” N ew Writing, Dastavez, p. 53). It is no coincidence that time and again M anto’s insights scan the interior landscape o f these fallen and marginalized w om en. H e strongly believed that a m ajority o f these wom en, though they plied the trade, in fact despised it and possessed hearts purer than those o f men w ho came to buy them (D a sta vezt p. 88). T he semantic field o f M an to ’s characterisation needs to be examined afresh. His themes are intricately intertwined w ith the anguish, the suffering, and the loneliness o f the soul he is trying to chart. It is not the

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body b ut the being , the inner-self, or the air about the ‘misery-ness’ o f the misery which M anto tries to recapture and recreate. It shouldn’t, thus, be out o f place to take a fresh look at some o f the core protagonists o f M anto’s stories. In “ Kali Shalwar” (Black Shalwar), the most touching part is where Sultana, having been deceived by both the Khuda (God) and Khuda Bakhsh (her man) and having lost her business after m oving from Ambala C antonm ent to Delhi, feels forsaken and forlorn: Early in the m orning, w hen she came out into her balcony, a weird sight would meet her eyes. Through the haze she could see the locomotives belching out thick smoke w hich ponderously rose in columns towards the grey sky, giving the impression o f fat men swaying in the air. Thick clouds o f steam w ould rise from the railway lines, making a hissing sound and then dissipate in the air in the twinking o f an eye. Sometimes a detached bogey, . getting an initial push from the engine, kept running on the track by its ow n momentum. Sultana would feel that an invisible hand had also given a push to her life and then left her to fend for herself. Like the bogey which sw itched from one track to another under a locking device manipulated by an invisible cabinman, an invisible hand was also changing the course o f her life. And then a day would come w hen the m om entum would be spent up and she would com e to a dead stop at some unknow n spot w here there w ould be no one to take care o f her ? (The Best of Manto , ed. and trans. by Jai Ratan, p. 15). There are moments in a veshyz's life when she is only a woman, a tender-hearted woman. O n such occasions the archetypal image o f w om an shines through M an to ’s writings. Sughandhi in “Hatak” (Insult) is a frail, yet strong woman. Madho, her lover from Poona, has been making a fool o f her by taking advantage o f her and even fleecing her o f her earnings. Sugandhi, though clever, is not really so clever, since she can be fooled by simple words o f love and

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affection, and Madho is a past master at this game. Every night her new or old lover would say, “Sugandhi, I love y o u .” And Sugandhi, although she knew that the man was telling a lie, w ould m elt like wax, deluding herself in the belief that she was really being loved. Love — what a beautiful w ord it was! H ow she wished that she could dissolve the w ord and rub it over her skin, letting it seep into her being. So overpowering was her desire to love and be loved that she tried to put up w ith the vagaries o f all the m en w ho came to her. A m ong them , were the four men whose photographs now adorned her wall. Being herself essentially a good soul, she failed to understand, why men lacked this goodness o f heart. O ne day w hen she was standing before the m irror the words escaped her lips: “Sugandhi, the world has given you a raw deal.” (ibid, pp. 27-28). Isn’t the whole concept here built around the archetypal m other-im age o f wojnan? D oesn’t prem incarnate ^love) perm eate her total”existence, everything that is w ithin and w ithout; doesn’t it draw the being into its fold and put it to sublime sleep attuned to the music o f the eternal lullaby? This feeling o f deep compassion, karuna or m am ata , by whatever term you call it, flows through the w hole narra­ tive, till Sugandhi is rejected by a seth in the middle o f the night. Shocked and dejected, having finally seen through the hypocrisy o f man, she takes out her rage on M adho who happens to be visiting her at that tim e. A nguish and loneliness once again rend the soul, there is emptiness all around. T he metaphor o f a lonely shunted train deserted on the rails o f life is once again invoked in this story with telling effect thus: Sugandhi looked up startled, as if she had come out o f a reverie. T he room was steeped in an eerie silence— a silence she had never experienced before. She felt as if she was surrounded by a vacuum— as if a train on a long haul,

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after depositing the passengers en route was now standing in the loco shed, looking deserted and forlorn. An emptiness seemed to have taken root in her heart (ibid, p. 38). T he most baffling and jiu u su a l story is, “Babu Gopi N ath,” in which a neo-rich man is fond o f the company o f pimps and hangers-on, and peers and faqirs, because he main­ tains that i f one wants to deceive oneself, then there is no better place to go to than the kotha o f a veshya (den o f a prostitute) or the mazaar o f a peer (mausoleum o f a saint) since these are the places that thrive on sham and deceit. At the kotha , they sell the body, and at the mazaar they sell God. Babu Gopi N ath is involved with the young Zeenat, a Kashmiri girl, utterly naive and uncouth, who could never learn the tricks o f the trade. Babu Gopi N ath is trying to find a man to wed Zeenat so that she can have a home. To achieve this end, he is prepared to go to any length and spend all his wealth. It is an unusual situation. O n the one hand, there is an undercurrent o f dark hum our in the naivety o f Zeenat, and the cleverness o f pimps and hangerson; and on the other, it is the benevolence o f Babu Gopi N ath that permeates the events. O ne cannot help thinking that in Babu Gopi Nath, Manto has created a male protago­ nist, w ho is in fact an em bodim ent o f the qualities o f the m other-im age. T he situation is full o f irony, and it is through Babu Gopi N ath that the milk o f compassion and the spirit o f sacrifice and service flow through the story and render it unique. If there is a female parallel to Babu Gopi Nath, who else could it be but the hum ane and m otherly Janaki (in the story o f the same name) w ho, though not in the profession, is passed on from one man to another, and yet is full o f the tender feelings similar to that o f mamata for the men she comes across. She hails from Peshawar w here she was com m itted to Aziz. She cares for Aziz day and night. She tends to his needs, takes care o f his food and clothes, nurses him through his illness and lives w ith him. She comes to

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Bombay looking for a jo b and in the course o f events gets involved w ith Saeed. This is resented by Aziz. Eventually Saeed also forsakes her, but in turn she gets involved with yet another person, Narain. She adores him and bestows the same care and affection on him. M en may com e and m en may go, but Janaki remains the same, a fountain-head o f love and devotion, a goddess who nurtures her men. This leads us to consider if there w asn’t a cherished m other-im age lurking som ew here in the labyrinth o f M anto’s unconsious. N one o f his biographers has dwelt on his relationship w ith his m other, b u t w hatever sketchy information we have confirms that he had a harsh and cruel father, and a host o f step-brothers. Maybe, the only thing that made up for this deprivation was the affectionate care o f his loving m other, Babi Jan. O ne gets the feeling that M anto was profoundly familiar w ith suffering from his earliest days. Imploringly, at one point, he says, “ O God, take me away from this world! I cry where I should laugh, and I laugh where I should cry” (“Pas-manzar,” Context, in Dastavez , p. 159). His dukha, udasi and karuna* seem to have a B uddhist ring. B ut for M anto, perhaps, suffering, compassion and love were different faces o f the same reality. “ Suffering is ordained, a p red icam en t,” M anto says, “Suffering (alam /dukha) is you, suffering is me, suffering is Saadat Hasan M anto, suffering is the w hole universe” (“ Kasooti,” p. 86). H e perceived one through the other. Repeatedly, he stresses that the body can be bartered or branded, not the soul (“Ismat Furosh,” Dastavez , p. 90). He elaborates that many o f the w om en in the flesh trade are god-fearing, devotionally attached to icons and images, and observe religious rituals. Maybe because religion is that part o f their selves w hich they have saved from the trade and through which they redeem themselves. Nonetheless, Mozel is entirely different as she pokes fun * The term karuna is used by Wans Alvi for Manto, but in a different context, (see M onograph on M anto published by Sahitya Akademi, N ew Delhi, 1994).

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at religious observances, whatever their form. This is yet one m ore example o f M anto’s dialogic art in the sense Bakhtin uses it. Isn’t it amazing that one comes across such a large variety o f men and women in M anto’s fiction? Mozel is a bohemian girl o f Je wish descent; vivacious and carefree, she is full o f ridicule for religion that divides man from man. She makes fun o f the turban, kesha (hair) and o th er manifestations o f Trilochan, w ho is a Sikh. But the same playful Mozel comes to Trilochan’s rescue when riots break out in Bombay, and w ithout caring for her personal safety, saves Trilochan’s fiancée, Kirpal Kaur, and in the process becomes a victim o f the killers. O ne can see that once again a w om an o f doubtful character rises to the occasion and, through her compassion and devotion, delivers the persons around her from destruction. In this context, it is needless to belabour “B oo” (Odour), one o f M anto’s best-known stories. Suffice it to say that this story o f consummate copulation can refreshingly be read as a story o f the cycle o f seasons, falling raindrops and the soaking o f the virgin m other earth, i.e., the union o f the elements w here R andhir is Purush and the G hatin girl Prakriti, w ho lies dormant, but is the giver and receiver o f pleasure in abundant measure. “Sharda,” “Fobha Bai,” and “Burmese Girl” are some o f the other stories where the protagonists are m oved by the same underlying force o f benevolence. In “Burmese Girl,” we have a fleeting glimpse o f a girl w ho shares a flat w ith two young boys for a few days and is soon gone like a whiff o f soft breeze. Despite her short stay, she leaves behind sweet memories o f setting the house in order and infusing the whole place with an atmosphere o f affection, charm and motherliness. B ut before the boys get to know her better, she is gone. In comparison, Sharda and Fobha Bai (dialectal variation o f Shobha Bai) are actual mothers. Sharda is the com plete em bodim ent o f w om anhood as she is simul­ taneously a m other, a sister, a wife and also a whore, and none o f these roles is in conflict w ith one another. Fobha Bai has tragic strains in her, as she has to sell herself in the

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city to protect the m other within her by sustaining a young son back hom e. But the son dies, and w ith his death the w om an, w ho sold herself for his sake, is also devastated. Similarly in “Sarak Ke Kinare” (By the Roadside),(m other­ h o o d ’is ¿accomplished, but remains unfulfilled in the sense that as an unw ed and forsaken woman, she cannot bring up the child. In the dead o f night, the child is left by the roadside. Manto raises the question, “ Is the coming together o f tw o souls at a single point and the giving up o f every­ thing in a cosmic rhythm mere poetry? N o. Certainly, this is the merging o f two souls, and their rising to enfold heaven and earth and the whole universe. But then why is one soul left behind wounded, simply because she helped the other to rise to the heights o f the cosmic rhythm?” This is the kernel o f unmitigated suffering, the predica­ m ent from w hich there is no escape. T he infinite sorrow in M anto at the deeper level sustains his creativity, through which are constructed his fallen women. O nce, opening his heart to Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, he wrote: “ I, in fact, have reached a point in my thinking w here faith o r disbelief becom es meaningless. W here I understand, I do n o t understand. At times, I feel as if the w hole world is in the palm o f my hand, then there are times w hen I feel insignificant, as insignificant as an ant crawling on the body o f an elephant” (Nuqoosh, Manto Number). M anto, in his finer moments, is attuned to the symphony o f the mystery o f creation, and in this sym phony his dom inant note is the note o f sorrow . T he sorrow o f existence, the loneliness o f the soul, and that unfathomable suffering, dukha , which is part o f the music o f the infinite. Many o f his protagonists turn out to be more than life-size, more durable, more lasting than m ere frail men and w om en o f flesh and blood. T hey becom e the em bodim ent o f som ething m ore pervasive, m ore universal; that is, o f benevolence or compassion incarnate, the sublimest o f the sublime, o f the fountain-head o f mamata and karuna w hich flow through the emotional space o f M anto’s narrative, and w ith w hich we all identify.

Melodrama or . . .? A N ote O n M anto’s “In This Maelstrom” M UHAM M AD UM AR M EM ON

It is somewhat puzzling that Saadat Hasan Manto had called his play “Is Manjdhar M en” (In this Maelstrom) a melo­ drama. But is it? All the ingredients o f melodrama are absent in this play. There are no monstrously evil villains, propelled by fiendish hate, to be sure, and the main characters, even though some o f them appear less fully developed, show an amazing complexity and depth. Moreover, the very subject o f this play defies, by its ow n incontrovertible inner logic, any attempt to place the w ork in the genre o f melodrama. B ut did M anto really fully appreciate the implication o f melodrama as a dramatic form or was he using the word in its more com m on and pejorative connotations o f something non-erious, sensational and outlandishly sentimental, some­ thing naive, infantile and frivolous, something to laugh at, something that only parodies and mimics life in the crudest o f fashions for cheap, emotional gratification? I know M anto-lovers w o n ’t take it kindly, but I am inclined to think that in this play, Manto does not appear to have grasped the dramatic form o f melodrama, either to its function or to its creative possibilities. This despite the fact that am ong U rdu w riters, M anto is perhaps the most conscious o f the technical demands imposed by narrative art: and also despite the fact that “In this Maelstrom” is a very sophisticated piece o f writing. T hat M anto, w ho could stare dow n the moralist, the critic, and the law with audacious courage w hen it came to defending his choice o f subject-matter, would take a dim view o f his play does seem puzzling. B ut it can be explained. Until Eric Bentley came to vindicate it and earn for it a

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measure o f respectability in the late 1960s - too late, alas! for Manto— the form o f melodrama had all along suffered a bad reputation in the w estern literary world. T he continued prejudice against it, the bad name given to it, was the result, in most part, o f the shallow and pedestrian nature o f popular Victorian melodrama. Just how shallow and pedestrian is it? Scan through the plots o f some such dramatic pieces given by James L. Smith in his Melodrama, and you will know. But w hat was essentially a Victorian expression and possibility, determ ined by specific social factors, became the normative principle in defining the term as “a dram atic piece characterized by sensational incident and violent appeals to em otions, but w ith a happy ending” (O xford English Dictionary, as quoted in Smith, p. 5). Smith quotes a lengthy passage from Frank RahilTs The World o f Melodrama which w ould be profitable to reproduce here by way o f a w orking definition o f the genre: Melodrama is a form o f dramatic com position in prose partaking o f the nature o f tragedy, comedy, pantom im e, and spectacle, and intended for a popular audience. Primarily concerned w ith situation and plot, it calls upon m im ed action extensively and employs a m ore o r less fixed complement o f stock characters, the most im portant o f w hich are a suffering heroine or hero, a persecuting villain, and a benevolent com ic. It is conventionally moral and humanitarian in point o f view and sentimental and optimistic in temper, concluding its fable happily with virtue rewarded after many trials and vices punished. Characteristically it offers elaborate scenic accessories and miscellaneous divertisements and introduces music freely, typically to underscore dramatic effect (Smith, p. 5). In the U rdu literary world, on the other hand, w here most literary conventions, forms, and terms borrow ed from the W est have been generally understood in their western— though perhaps at times also in a som ew hat etiolated— sense, one can hardly expect significant strides towards redefining “ melodrama” beyond its inherited meaning. The

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m ore so because U rdu culture and humanities just do not have a viable tradition o f stage drama and other theatrical arts. Even now, w hen radio and television have popularized play-writing, one is struck by the generally low quality o f plays and their conspicuous lack o f any sense o f the medium. There haven’t been good plays in Urdu, much less good “melodramas.” The only thing vaguely resembling melodrama— not in the sense o f a dramatic form, but in the sense o f a grossly exaggerated and fanciful piece o f writing— are the historical romances by Abdul Halim Sharar (18601926).2 Here, how ever, every norm o f fiction-w riting is flouted w ith impunity, but the raw material is n o t unlike that from which, in a different time and place, a Victorian w ould have w oven tapestry after dazzling tapestry o f melodramatic colours. Perhaps it will be profitable at this point to briefly recapitulate the main arguments o f Eric Bentley as set forth in his The L ife o f the Drama.3 An exposition o f his views will, it is hoped, help determ ine the nature o f “ In this Maelstrom” more precisely. Bentley thinks that melodram a and tragedy, though certainly not identical, and granted that a sharp line could not always be draw n betw een them , do have a lot in common. Melodrama represents the primitive, the child in us, and, therefore, the most spontaneous, direct, and uninhibited way o f working off emotion; tragedy, on the other hand, deals w ith m aturer em otion and is artistically more restrained. “Melodrama is human but it is not mature. It is imaginative but it is not intelligent” (p. 217). Being human, o f course, does not place melodrama above tragedy, but it does rescue it from the abyss o f pedestrianism in which it had been throw n by the Victorian dramatist. W hy the melodrama has been regarded unfavorably is due, first, to the very bad examples o f it produced by the Victorian writer. B ut “it is unfair,” remarks Bentley, “to judge anything by its weakest link” (p. 196). And Smith is simply echoing Bendey’s view when he says, “Any art form

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deserves to be judged by its highest, not by its lowest achievements” (p. 14). Second, and m ore importantly, w e judge it negatively because o f the widespread tendency to regard em otion as necessarily bad em otion, to be wary, therefore, o f all em otion, and consider the ability to w ork it off uninhibitedly as som ehow demeaning. T o cry is to be a child; and, let’s accept it, all we w ant from a melodrama, indeed all it can give us, is a “ good cry.” A culture that places so little value, or perhaps none at all, on tears is not likely to highly regard a literary form whose im portant function is to make us cry and help release tension. H aving divested “cry” o f its negative contem porary anim us and produced an eloquent defense o f “ tears,” Bentley next argues that all the other standard features o f a typical melodrama— i.e., pity, which is, ultimately, self-pity; fear; exaggerated (though he prefers uninhibited) action and language etc.— are likewise n o t quite so fanciful and, therefore, unnatural as they are assumed to be. Theirs is the reality o f a child or an adult in dreams. N onm agnified feelings are m ore an ideal than a fact o f life. Reality is magnified feelings. In Bentley’s sense, then, melodrama is m ore natural than N aturalism itself w hich is “ m ore sophisticated,” but not necessarily “m ore natural” (p. 216). Som e standard features o f m elodram a: according to Bendey are: “Goodness beset by badness, a hero beset by a villain, heroes and heroines beset by a wicked w orld” (p. 200). However, the tw o most im portant elements are pity for the hero and, by extension for onself; and fear, often irrational fear, o f the villain. W hile the former represents the weaker side o f melodrama, the latter represents the stronger. Finally, exaggeration is highlighting pity and fear, both in action and dialogue. M anto’s “In this M aelstrom” is not a melodrama for a num ber o f reasons. W hile there may be some pity for the central character, Amjad— though pity alone does not, indeed should not, qualify a w ork as a melodrama— there is no fear o f the villain. The villain is just not there, let alone

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being superhuman or diabolic. Though melodramatic vision is paranoid (Bentley, p. 202), one doesn’t have to be persecuted by a real flesh and blood villain; even the landscape can oppress and persecute. M anto’s landscape, though, is invested with breathtaking beauty. M ore im por­ tantly, this beauty is not presented as axiomatic. It derives, dialectically, inch by inch as it were, from the generally positive m anner in w hich the characters react and respond to it. T hen again, while a typical melodrama rarely moves beyond pity and fear, “ In this M aelstrom” is n o t tamed, bound or otherwise defined by these categories. Although, we do feel a certain sense o f pity for Amjad, we feel a greater sympathy for his wife Saeeda and wish for her beauty and youth, now hopelessly wasting away, to blossom. Thus, whatever pity we feel for Amjad is ultimately sublimated— o r perhaps m uted— by our still greater feelings o f support and happiness for Saeeda and Majeed. “W e...grieve not,” in the words o f William W ordsworth, “rather find/Strength in what remains behind.”4 T he characters, too, are not the stock characters o f a melodrama. N either cast according to the “Progressive” formula, n o r defined by bourgeois moeurs, they vibrate w ith a life all th eir ow n. T hey are im bued w ith rem arkable individuality and amazing independence o f will, and reveal a complex psychology in their thoughts, feelings, and actions, with few, if any, parallels in Urdu drama. Thus Amjad, w ho has picked Saeeda from among countless other women to be his wife, knows that his choice doesn’t ultimately, am ount to more than the impulse to pick up the finest thing in the market. As for loving her—that, he freely admits to Asghari, he doesn’t. Still this does not stop him from wondering, “ I can’t understand why I want to keep her [i.e., Saeeda] shackled in chains whose every link is as uncertain as my life.” W ell aware o f the burgeoning, illicit love between his wife and younger brother, he appears to be strangely free o f even the slightest trace o f jealousy, so uniike, one m ight almost say, o f South Asian males. I do not agree w ith M umtaz Shirin’s contention that

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Saeeda is less a character than a “symbol o f beauty.” She is an aesthetic attribute. But she is also m uch m ore. She is both attractive and aware o f her tremendous attraction for men. N othing so extraordinary perhaps. W here, however, she em inently disqualifies herself as a young stereotypical S o u th Asian y o u n g M uslim w o m an is w h en she “unabashedly,” though not w ithout disarming directness and honesty, mentions to Asghari the desires raging inside her, and catalogues her frustrations. She says: I’m young, I’m pretty. Inside m e are numberless desires. For seventeen long years I’ve nurtured them w ith the nectar o f my dreams. H ow can I stifle th em ’...Call me weak, a coward, or even immoral...I confess I cannot tear dow n the garden o f my youth, w here the vein o f every leaf and flow er throbs w ith the h o t blood o f my unfulfilled desire... And Asghari, the maid: her frequent caustic jibes at the crippled Amjad, in spite o f her knowledge o f the extremely brittle state o f his mind; her scathing, abrasive wit; and, above all, her hesitation in accepting Amjad’s love, in spite o f being herself in love w ith him — all these raise her above the meek and obsequious w orld o f a South Asian domestic to the plane o f a fairly complex personality. Finally, M ajeed. A lth o u g h as a ch aracter h e is n o t fully

developed, but in coveting the wife o f his ow n brother, he appears to be refreshingly untypical. M elodram a is often characterized by its use o f an exaggerated— i.e., heightened, lyrical— form o f language. A declam atory, excessively rhetorical style o f speech is no doubt noticeable in a couple o f long-w inding speeches by Amjad addressed to Saeeda at m id-point in the play and to Asghari the maid at the end; and in a single piece w here Saeeda addresses Asghari. But in all these instances, the elevated rhetoric appears called for by event and situation, w hich it dialectically supports and enhances. It does not appear tired, crude o r otherwise organically non sequitur. M oreover, “ Intensity o f feeling,” as Bendey has it, “justifies

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formal exaggeration in art” (p. 204). A brief sequence o f emotionally charged utterances would be inadequate ground to place the work in the category o f melodrama. Finally, one thing is sure: we certainly do not get a “good cry” out o f the play. W hat we do get is the calm o f a sobering m om ent in w hich o u r m om entarily frozen senses—because o f two suicides at the end— gradually thaw out to a sense o f beauty and blossoming optimism toward life’s continuity which is far in excess o f our initial shock at the twin suicides. W e come to accept, almost, the suicides as the necessary price life must pay to remain on-going, continuous, whole. Manto probably didn’t have before him examples o f good melodrama; o f its “highest achievements,” as Smith would say. But he certainly had good sense. W hy, then, did he characterize a serious and far-reaching w ork o f his as being the equivalent o f “sob stuff,” a “tear jerker,” and a “poor m an’s cathartic laugh”? For the answer we will have to determine the theme o f the play, for it is here and not in its incidental likeness to this or that melodramatic element that we can hope to find the most cogent proof o f its not being a melodrama. This play underscores the relationship between a married woman and an unmarried man. In M anto’s society, just as, I believe, in most societies, this type o f relationship is not looked upon kindly and remains, w ithout mincing words, downright illicit. This particular relationship is made more complicated by the fact that the w om an’s husband has been rendered im p o ten t follow ing a train w reck p rio r to consummating the marriage, and her lover, with w hom she hasn’t yet entered into a physical relationship, is none other than her crippled husband’s younger brother. M anto, o f course, isn’t interested in celebrating promiscuity per se. He, therefore, neither jeers at the invalid for his loss o f manhood, nor, on the other hand, helps initiate the lovers in the ways o f pleasure. By avoiding any explicit or implicit reference to actual sexual contract— though not, perhaps, to the fact o f sexual attraction—betw een the lovers, he seems

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to give us a clue to his profounder purpose, w hich is to transcend the confining circumstances o f self-indulgent sensual love itself and give it a creative, complementary role integral to the w ider scheme o f things; to produce, in other words— and here I may be repeating Mumtaz Shinn’s very astute observation— a philosophy o f life and existence. It is in the scheme o f things that healthy and whole parts o f nature must com e together to renew and continue life, w hile its decaying parts m ust inevitably fade o u t o f existence. By eliminating the weak and the broken and in letting the healthy and the whole prosper, N ature simply acts out its own laws, w ithout implying contempt or disgust for the ones soon to be elim inated. And the com ing together o f two parts is, basically, a coming together o f two cognate parts. T he invalid husband him self gradually comes to have m ore than a fair inkling o f this inexorable natural logic. W hen, therefore, at the end o f the play, Amjad commits suicide, we do not react w ith shock or disbelief, or other­ wise m ourn his death. W e interpret the incident— tragic, no doubt— as a necessary point in the continuum o f life, a point which will help revitalize and preserve it. It is also, by extension, the point w here conventional m orality, fed liberally on religious ethics, must unavoidably take a back seat to hum anism . This hum anism is based upon the primacy o f instinctual forces in human nature and asserts its belief in the healing possibilities for our w ounded civili­ zation afforded by an entirely new relationship betw een sexes. If, according to Nietzsche, art’s perfection, beyond good and evil, lies in affirming, blessing, and deifying existence, this play by Manto seems to do just that. N ow the greater or at least a significant part o f M anto’s themes deals w ith what is only fact, w ith “nothing but the tru th .”5 If we do not like a given fact, so m uch the worse for us. W hen the moralist, the critic, and the law got on his tail, it was not because M anto was distorting or falsifying reality. It was because he was presenting a reality whose very presence involved a judgm ent o f these self-righteous

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people as accomplices in a conspiracy o f silence and latitudinarianism, a conspiracy w hich hated the effect but did nothing to eliminate the cause. W hether a pim p, a pinko, a floozy, a conman, an underworld character, or the sudden awakening into m anhood o f an adolescent body a la Alberto Moravia, or, finally— and this certainly does not exhaust the list o f M anto themes— a chance, illicit sexual encounter between an urban man and a m ountain woman — all are real. Facts! M anto’s society never liked these characters, feelings, experiences. But they were there and could not be simply willed away. T he society was thus in tim e forced to strike its ow n modus vivendi w ith them: a toleration o f something relegated to the blurry, hazy fringe o f consciousness. W hat, however, could not be so easily relegated to the b lu rry fringe o f consciousness was adultery in a “respectable” married woman. And even if the society did n o t like her, the prostitute perform ed a socially useful function: she bore enorm ous demands on her accom m o­ dating flesh and, thus, helped the society uphold its so-called “h o n o u r.” H ad she n o t been conveniently there, the sprightly youth o f the nobility would have, in all likeli­ hood, looked elsewhere in the direction o f “respectable” w om en to vent his passion. So, even if no love was lost betw een society and the w hore, the form er was only thankful to the latter, however obliquely and grudgingly, for her chastening presence. Regardless o f the subtler and, ultim ately, positive dimensions o f M anto’s philosophy in the play at hand, this philosophy, if not actually founded upon, at least made use o f what, eventually, could not be interpreted as anything but extra-marital sexual relationships. This the society was ill-equipped to handle, condone or tolerate. O f all evils, this alone threatened to destroy most fully the fabric o f Muslim life as defined by Islamic precepts. Let us not forget that the play was w ritten in w hat is now the Islamic R epublic o f Pakistan. It was a society which would have most certainly reacted differendy than early twentieth-century England did

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w hen D .H . Lawrence took to living w ith Frieda Weekley, the as yet undivorced German wife o f his ow n mentor. It was this threat, and society’s inability to deal with the nature o f forbidden love w ith empathy and detachm ent, that, I am strongly inclined to believe, led M anto to dub the play a melodrama. And, although, M anto m ost certainly hadn’t m eant to promote adultery, he was smart enough to know that his society was not likely to read his play any other way. And, so, fully aware o f the w ork’s far-reaching, profound im port, but also o f its scandalous properties, he proceeded to take the unintended, nevertheless very real, sting out o f it by presenting it as a joke, something bizarre one must laugh at, something that isn’t real, something that just parodies life. Everyone knows M anto was haughty, but he was also clever. His cleverness lay in getting the message across but avoiding che dire consequences that might follow. T his, perhaps, also explains the presence o f a barely perceptible jocular, almost com ic vein in some o f the dialogue, w hich, unfortunately, has escaped the notice o f even such an astute Manto critic as the late M umtaz Shirin. I am not unware o f the implications o f camouflage for art, w hatever the reasons impelling the w riter to employ it. If M anto used it knowingly, he compromised his art to that extent. B ut here there may be another possibility: the philosophy w hich he vaguely, intuitively, artistically knew to be true, had n ’t quite reached the status o f a deep conviction, the point w here the w riter m ust place his confidence in the truth o f his vision and unequivocally reject what is not supported or accepted by it as true. Hence the am bivalence in his attitu d e. It denied him the confidence to proudly ow n up the consequences o f the very humanistic vision o f life embodied in this play. This seems m ore likely the reason. M anto was not know n to turn his back, cower, flee, or compromise. Had M anto known the possibilities o f a good melodrama, would he still have called “ In this Maelstrom” one? I suspect not. W hatever else it may be— Shirin thinks it verges on tragedy— even by the m ost stringent application o f the

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canons o f the genre, “In this Maelstrom” is certainly not a melodrama. Its very them e goes far beyond the stuff even the best melodramas are made of. I have in the foregoing deliberately refrained from expounding the meaning o f the play. Most o f w hat I might have said, would have am ounted to no m ore than a mere rehashing o f the ideas o f Mumtaz Shirin (1925-73), U rdu’s finest literary critic. She was the first to notice the subtler meanings o f “In this M aelstrom” and its striking resem­ blance to D .H . Lawrence’s last novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. If we are to understand the play at all, an understanding o f these “subtler meanings” is essential. So, I think, it is only fair that, I let Shirin speak directly. In w hat follows, I translate the relevant part from the article, “Manto Ki Fanni Takm il” (Perfection o f M anto’s Art) w hich appears in her collection o f critical essays M i ‘yar. T w o works from M anto’s last period exemplify, in my opinion, the perfection o f his literary art...: “Sarak ke Kinare” (By the Roadside) and “Is Manjdhar M en” (In this M aelstrom ). B oth offer a sense o f perfection; universal breadth and profundity; and a philosophy o f life and existence. Earlier on, M anto’s attitude was largely negative and destructive in regard to spciety and life, w hich he depicted w ith relentless, brutal realism. Gradually this was replaced by an increasing regard for the positive and life-affirming values. Finally, it seems M anto had come to realize, w ith unmistakable clarity, that the creative vision o f a truly great w riter was founded, ultimately, on affirmation o f life and existence. If one could understand the deeper meanings o f “In this M aelstrom,” one would inevitably know that here M anto has show n the negative elements— i.e., those lacking vitality— hurtling down their path to annihilation, and brought together those positive elements which both renew and prom ote life. Apparently, the subject o f this play resembles that o f D .H . Lawrence’s in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Even the

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characters are, m ore o r less, the same: a husband, crippled shortly after marriage; his young, beautiful, and healthy wife; an equally healthy young man w ho can offer her life’s vigor and vitality; and a maid w ho feels sympathy and a certain attraction for the invalid. B ut M an to ’s presentation, com pared w ith Lawrence’s, is both o f a higher order and artistically m ore polished, regardless o f the fact that one is a novel and the other is a play. It offers a philosophy, w hich is lacking at least in this w ork o f Lawrence w ho had otherwise m oulded a veritable philo­ sophy around the subject o f “sex.” In Lady Chattreley’s Lover, Lawrence stresses the elements o f harm ony and perfection in physical relationships— and no m ore; M an to, on the other hand gives his subject an unmistak­ able aesthetic quality and attitude. And even though he, too, extrapolates the same m eaning from vigour o f life as does Lawrence, namely, sex is the font o f life’s vigour and vitality, he also stresses those other elements w hich give life a sense o f beauty, wholeness, and perfection. B eauty is thus a positive elem ent in “ In this M aelstrom ,” and so are youth, love, physical health, pleasant feelings and the ability to love. These elements are present, m ore or less, in the wife and her husband’s younger brother. Evidendy, this is n o t the case w ith the husband w ho, following the accident which has left him paralyzed, becomes a negative element, no longer able to either affirm or support life. H ere it is w orth m entioning that unlike Lawrence, M anto’s treatm ent o f the invalid husband is blissfully free o f any undertone o f contem pt. O n the contrary, he fully sympathizes w ith this character; indeed, he even assigns the extreme anguish, torm ent and struggle o f this character a prom inent place in the play. T he husband fully realizes that his wife has a perfect right to be amorously inclined towards his brother, w ho alone can truly give her the healthy and positive love she deserves; that it is only natural that the tw o gravitate towards each other; and that, finally, w ith his crippled body, psychological impediments, and feeling o f inferio­

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rity he has becom e a negative elem ent w hom one can pity but not love. Love he finds only in the maid w ho is herself unw orthy o f being loved, and ugly to boot— ugliness being in itself a negative attribute. W hile both these negative elements can come together, their union is n ot likely to produce anything positive. “T hat is the reason why, .when they finally do unite, it is in death and n ot in life...C om pared w ith Saeeda and M ajeed as characters, they are powerful and touching no doubt, but negative all the same. Although Amjad does not have the stature o f a truly tragic hero (for this play by M anto goes a touch beyond melodrama to almost the point o f tragedy), his pain and his tragic death do not fail to evoke in us the feelings o f pity and horror necessary for tragedy. Still, Amjad is a passive, almost masochistic character. His im potence is now here m ore vividly portrayed than w hen he asks Saeeda to lie down on the bed and proceeds to act out in his imagination the events that normally transpire on the w edding night. At first joyous and exhilarating, this imaginary scene quickly dissolves into one o f utter failure and devastation. And although he tries to keep himself amused and derive some jo y out o f life, following his ow n paralysis, these abilities progressively decline. The presence o f tow ering mountains and beautiful natural scenes around him— though no longer accessible— signifi­ cantly add to his pain and misery. Likewise, Saeeda’s breathtaking beauty, too, becomes a source o f unm iti­ gated torm ent for him. Being an extrem ely sensitive person, he quickly lapses into a state o f mind in which he is constantly assailed by thoughts o f defeat and destruc­ tion, death alone offering the only possible release. Saeeda appears less a character than a symbol o f beauty— the beauty which Amjad had wanted to possess but which turned into a source o f suffering. She certainly isn’t lacking in sympathy for her husband; indeed she even tries to curb to a certain extent her natural attraction for Majeed; however, her inner moral struggle appears

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superficial and muted, while Majeed, in spite o f being Amjad’s brother, shows not even the slightest trace o f any struggle at all. All he wants is to escape his maelstrom, and does not hesitate to announce to Saeeda, w ithout remorse or qualms, that Amjad is well on his way to death and that life has its ow n special, vital demands that can be met in their union. Therefore, in spite o f being relatively less significant, the characters o f Saeeda and Majeed becom e symbols o f life’s renew al and vitality. C ertainly it can n o t be considered an artistic flaw on M anto’s part that he chose to give them less im portance. In Em ile B ro n te ’s incomparably brilliant novel W uthering H eights, too, the characters (i.e., young Catherine and Eamshaw) who are a source o f life’s renewal appear altogether ordinary and com m onplace w hen com pared to th e to w erin g , passionate, and powerful personalities o f H eathcliff and Catherine. However, these two plain and utterly ordinary characters display that healthy equilibrium which is all too necessary for life. And, although, “In this M aelstrom” presents Amjad’s tragedy, at the end o f which death emerges dominant and trium phant, it also offers, through Saeeda and M ajecd’s inevitable union, a subtler allusion to the affirmation o f life. Here, then, it can be reasonably assumed, M anto’s creative vision has becom e expansive enough to trans­ form the individual and the particular into the general and the universal.6

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. L ondon: M e th u e n , 1973.

2. For further information on him and his works see Ralph Russell, “The Developm ent o f the M odem Novel in U rdu,” in T.W . Clark, ed., The Novel in India, its Birth and Development (London: George Allen and U nw in, 1970), pp. 122-32; and M uhammad Sadiq, A History of Urdu Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 329-34. 3. 1964 rpt.; N ew York; Atheneum, 1967.

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4. Lines from his Ode to Innocence. 5. Alllusion to a short story by Manto, for which see Famq Hassan and Khalid Hasan, eds., Nothing But the Truth (M ontreal: Dawson College, 1978). 6. Mi'yar, Lahore: Naya Ida rah, 1963, pp. 274-80. Translated by Muhammad Umar Memon.

A Dance of Grotesque Masks: A Critical Reading o f M anto’s “ 1919 Ke Ek Baat” ALOK BHALLA

1 M anto’s first set o f stories about the partition, like “ Toba T ek Singh,” “Thanda Gosht” or “Siyah Hashye,” w ritten soon after 1947, are vituperative, slanderous and bitterly ironic. They are terrifying chronicles o f the dam ned w hich locate themselves in the middle o f madness and crime, and promise nothing more than an endless and repeated cycle o f random and capricious violence in w hich anyone can becom e a beast and everyone can be destroyed. M anto uses them to bear shocked witness to an obscene world in which people become, for no reason at all, predators or victims; a world in which they either decide to participate gleefully in m urder, o r find themselves unable to do anything but scream w ith pain w hen they are stabbed and burnt or raped again and again. M anto makes no attem pt to offer any historical explanations for the hatred and the carnage. H e blames no one, but he also forgives no one. W ithout senti­ mentality or illusions, w ithout pious postures or ideological blinkers, he describes a perverse and a corrupt time in which the sustaining norms o f a society as it had existed are erased, and no moral or political reason is available. M anto w rote a second set o f stories about the partition betw een. 1951 and 1955. U nfortunately, these stories are neither as well know n and docum ented, n o r as syste­ matically analysed as the previous ones. They are, however, significant stories because, together w ith the earlier ones, they create out o f the events that make up the history o f our independence m ovem ent, an ironic m ythos o f defeat, hum iliation and ruin. If the first set o f stories are frag­ mentary, spasmodic and unrem ittingly violent, the second

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set o f stories are m ore complex in their em plotm ent and m ore concerned w ith the deep structural relationship between the carnage o f the partition and hum an actions in the past. W hile rage and hopelessness still mark the second set o f stories, and fear and violence still bracket the beginning and the end o f each one o f them, the past is more intricately braided into the texture o f the main narratives than it is in the first set o f stories, and the incidents are more symbolically charged. They should, perhaps, be classified as historical tales w h ich seek to give a “ retrospective intelligibility” (Ricoeur, p. 157) to the terror o f the parti­ tion. Each o f them tries to locate, at every instance and right dow n the chronological line from 1947 back to the beginnings o f the nationalist struggle, those rifts, breaks and fissures in our social, political and religious selves w hich always enabled the monstrous to slip into our living spaces. If the first set o f M anto’s stories about the partition are derisive tales o f a degenerate society, the second set o f stories are both parables o f lost reason and demonic parodies o f the conventional history o f the national movement. The trium phant rom ance o f nationalism, in the official Indian and Pakistani historiography, ends w ith the victory o f a sovereign people (even if they are themselves divided by religion) over an illegitimate colonial power, as well as, with the establishment o f law governed societies. For M anto, however, 1947 is n ot a celebrative, an epiphanic, moment. It is, rather, the culmination o f a regular and repeated series o f actions— I should like to call them “bloody tracks”— which invariably disfigure all the geographical and temporal sites o f the nationalist struggle (I am fully conscious o f the melodramatic wildness o f the phrase, as well as, its dark opposition to the calmer and more wonder-filled notion o f “pilgrim tracks” in the Gandhian discourse on nationalism which led towards the ethically good). As he looks back, after the partition, over the years during w hich the nationalist struggle was waged, he finds countless examples o f characters, ideas and actions which always end in vileness, stupidity and cruelty. Indeed, for him, the “ideological

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drive” (R icoeur, p. 157) o f the entire nationalist past is towards the carnage o f the partition. Unlike other writers w ho saw the violence o f the partition as an aberration in the peaceful and tolerant rhythms o f our social and religious life, and so turned to the past for consolation and retrieval o f values, M anto refuses to believe that the past was another kind o f place and another kind o f time (for other stories see my Stories About the Partition o f India). T he partition, he is convinced, is not an unfortunate rupture in historical time, b u t a continuation o f it. Each o f the bloody tracks backwards into time makes him realise that violence is the characteristic o f every chronological segment o f the history o f India from the beginning o f the century to 1947; the nasty, the intolerant, the vengeful is always there at every m om ent; the “doctrine o f frightfulness” (G andhi’s phrase quoted in Draper, p. 211) is not only an aspect o f colonial rule, but is also a structural part o f the struggle against it. T he Gandhian intervention at each instance is m erely a temporary and precarious recovery o f the ground for virtue, clarity, will and peace. M anto, however, makes it clear that the “punctuated equilibrium” (Stephen Jay G ould’s phrase) that Gandhian politics occasionally succeeds in achieving, is inevitably swept aside and rejected as a sign o f weakness, hypocrisy and naivete. Violence always takes over every significant segment o f the nationalist past and transforms India before 1947 into a place which is as strange, pernicious and foul as the present— a place where one can see nothing m ore than a dance o f grotesque masks.

2 T he story, “ 1919 Ke Ek Baat,” was w ritten in 1951 and published in a volume entitled Yazid. The tide o f the story demands some attention. T he casual inconsequentiality o f the phrase “Ek Baat” deliberately confronts our presupposi­ tions about the events w hich happened in 1919 which, officially sanctioned nationalist historiography assures us, foredoom ed the British em pire. In all the official and

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popular historical versions, 1919 is a sinister year w hich finally revealed to everyone that Britain’s claim to being an enlightened culture was a sham and that its real intention in India was to continue to inflict “racial hatred” on its people. By keeping the date 1919 in the tide agnostically unqualif­ ied by any modifiers, M anto makes it clear that he has neither chosen the date arbitrarily nor has any interest in displacing our com m only shared assumptions about w hat the date signifies in the history o f British colonialism. Indeed, M anto affirms unambiguously that for him 1919 signifies the loss o f the legitimacy o f the British rule, by making the narrator say at the very beginning that, had Sir Michael O ’Dwyer n ot lost his head, 1919 would never have becom e a “blood-stained” m om ent in the history o f colonial India.1 But, the incongruity in the tide between the story as being nothing more than an account o f a randomly selected incident and the momentousness o f the historical events w hich encircle it, makes one suspect that, while , M anto may not be concerned w ith redrawing the “map o f ! truth” (Kermode, p. 130) o f the year 1919, he is interested \ in offering an im pertinent, even scandalous, reading o f a well known temporal segment o f the nationalist discourse. Further, the tide, w hen considered along with the date in which the story is told in the text (which is the same as the year in w hich it was published, i.e. 1951), indicates that M anto is deliberately structuring an entirely fictional event, a “feigned plot” (Ricoeur, p. ix), which pretends to be an authentic eye-witness account o f happenings in real time, w ithin tw o different conjunctions o f historical facts. T he first frame is, o f course, provided by the partition and the entire inventory o f dates, names, murders and slogans that gives it its factuality. T he crazed presence o f the partition, M anto seems to insist, intrudes into any interpretative account o f our nationalist history. The second frame is constructed out o f a densely vectored series o f events in 1919, like the R ow latt Acts and the violent protests against them from Bombay and Ahmedabad to Delhi, Lahore and Amritsar, General D yer’s arrogance

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and his callous genocide, Gandhian satyagraha and its sad failure to prevent enthusiastic mobs from doing rather “heinous deeds” (Gandhi’s characterisation o f m ob violence in a letter toJ.L . Maffey, Collector o f Ahmedabad, on April 14, 1919 but w ithout any knowledge o f the shootings at Jallianwalla Bagh the previous day).2 It is evident that M anto’s intention is to persuade us to read the “odd” incident described in his story w ithin the spaces created by those tw o sets o f historical facticities. He invites us, I think, not only to puzzle out the m eaning o f the bizarre fictional incident narrated by the storyteller w ithout asking about its truthfulness, but also to recognise that there is a profound link betw een the tw o historical dates that frame.the incident. From his position as a cultural and existentiaí^xij¿ in Lahore in 1951, he wants to suggest that, while 1919 doesn’t cause or prédict in any mechanical way the horrors o f the partition, it contains, w hat Paul R icoeur calls, the initial conditions that make them possible; 1919 is merely a part o f the sequentiality o f events that lead up to 1947. T o use R icoeur again, one could argue that M anto thinks that once 1947 has happened, one can retrospectively find in the fragmentary and disconnected incidents o f 1919— amongst o ther historically significant dates in the nationalist history explored in other stories— a narrative w hich could be said to prefigure the brutality o f the partition. (Often in history, R icoeur says, “Action is not the cause o f result— the result is part o f the action,” p. 136). In m aking such a connection betw een 1919 and 1947, M anto seems to indicate that his real purpose in recording an incidental story is to pass a “teleological judgem ent,” not on the British and their indefensible colonial adventure, but on us as Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. 1919, as he reads the year from his perspective as a reluctant and confused m igrant to Pakistan in 1951, seems to be a part o f a chronicle w hich foretells our doom as a civilisation. It is, as if, M anto is on a historical quest backward in time from 1951, and w hat he finds on his journey back to 1919 is one o f the many “bloody tracks” in our national past.

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3 T he story is told five years after the partition by an unnamed narrator to an unidentified listener on a train which moves across unmarked political and geographical space. Given that the story is, as the narrator repeatedly and insistendy reminds the listener, being told a few yean after the partition, the lack o f geographical markers and o f national demarcations is as significant as the definite time w hich frames the entire text. B oth the narrator and the listener speak quite specifi­ cally about the fate o f Amritsar between 1919 and 1951, but M an to ’s text itself quite deliberately obliterates the cartographic spaces across w hich the travellers themselves are m oving. W hat is im portant here is n o t the fact o f liminality, which is com m on to all journeys, but the erasure o f political boundaries. Fernand Braudel insists that a civilisation is as much a “cultural area,” or a set o f achieve­ ments and activities w ithin identifiable spaces, as it is an understanding about the modes o f living on earth w hich have slowly accumulated over long durations o f time (Cf. O n History). M anto’s travellers, w ho d o n ’t have religious, national or cultural identities, m ove across a blank geo­ graphical space. Given that the journey is being undertaken after 1947 when so m uch religious and cultural pride was being attached to boundaries, I suspect that by obliterating all signs o f territorial demarcations, M anto wants us to understand that maps d o n ’t bestow virtue, that sharply defined religious enclaves don’t ensure the sanctity o f moral practices w ithin them and that the separation o f com ­ munities from each other doesn’t legitimise their cultures. H e also wants to render it impossible for any group to make self-righteous claims about its ow n innocence o f intentions or to pretend that its ow n acts o f violence were merely acts o f retaliatory revenge. In 1947 it was very clear that many people, irrespective o f their claims to a particular nationality, had behaved both foolishly and pitilessly. W hat they had succeeded in creating were not cultural spaces, but their ow n kingdoms o f death, their ow n areas o f moral void,

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w here there were no distinctions between the religious and the vile, the killers and the victims; their actions had not only dehum anised them , but had also contam inated and humiliated everyone. It is quite appropriate, therefore, that in M anto’s fable the travellers start out, like millions o f refugees and migrants during the partition, from some­ w here and are carried forward by the sheer m om entum o f circumstances towards now here; their jo u rn ey itself has neither a locality, a purpose or a meaning. 4 Before trying to make sense o f the dismal tale told by the narrator, it is w orth recalling that the story itself is being written by Manto. In 1951, he is in Lahore. If the narrator is a battered refugee in search o f a hom e, M anto is an anguished migrant w ho has found a destination b u t w ho knows that his days o f melancholy will never end. H e had lived in Lahore once. But his memories, his companions and his writings belong to other cities— cities w hich are now in another country. H e knows that the cities w here he had forged his identity as a w riter and as a person have becom e inaccessible and have changed in unrecognisable ways. The place he has now m oved to, Lahore, is n o t hom e; it is merely a place to w hich he has been forced by circum ­ stances to escape to. So is Pakistan, which for him is nothing m ore than a new nam e for an old geographical space. Unfortunately, Lahore is incapable o f offering him either consolation or hope. T he longer he lives there, the m ore he realises, as his stories like “Shaheed Saz,” “ D ekh Kabira R o y a,” “Savera,” “Jo Kal Aankh M eri K huli,” or “ M ere Sahib” also reveal, that it is a city w here the dementia o f the past is exaggerated by the miasmic corruption o f the present, and w here everything promises to add in m ore extravagant ways to life’s misery in the future. Unlike Intizar Husain, for w hom migrancy and exile are the conditions which define a Muslim and so enable each believer to regard his particular migration out o f a stable comm unity into liminal spaces as a

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secular variation o f the grand and sacred narrative about hijrat, M anto is far too horrified by the actuality o f the sufferings o f the migrants themselves, be they H indus, Muslims or Sikhs, to see in their journeys into exile any­ thing more than an endless repetition o f the days o f solitude, exhaustion and waste that they have already endured. If, as Salman R ushdie says, “exile is a soulless country,” M anto know s from his o w n personal experiences that th e cartographers o f that sad place are cynics and bigots, fools and brutes, merciless killers and rapists, and that its boundaries are drawn by smoke, massacres, ash, rubble and the shattered skulls o f children. All he can now do, as a migrant, an exile and a refugee in Lahore in 1951, is ‘T o meditate amongst decay, and stand / A ruin amidst ruins” (Byron). 5 I should, perhaps, notice here the first words o f the narra­ to r w ith w hich the story opens: “Yeh 1919 ke baat hai Bhaijan ...” (In 1919, it so happened bhaijan ...).O f course, every traditional afsana o r dastan begins in a similar manner. O n the one hand, therefore, the narrator seems to be following the conventional formula for hooking a listener by beginning abrupdy and arbitrarily so as to arouse his curiosity. W hat is significant, how ever, in the political context o f the narrative, is not the acknowledgement o f the traditional forms o f storytelling, but the fact that the narrator begins to speak, as the train moves across blank spaces, at a particular m om ent o f o u r history w hen our assumptions about our sense o f our selves had been shattered and the presence o f other hum an beings had become suspect and dangerous. There is no cause for the narrator to speak; no one has asked him a question and no one has invited him to give an answer or an explanation. Indeed, as we know from the other stories about the partition, it would have been safer for him to remain silent.3 Yet, he does begin to speak,

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hesitantly and cautiously at first, then in b roken and disconnected sentences as he begins to feel safe. H e gives bits and pieces o f inform ation about him self and makes fragmentary historical references. His sentences still trail away in to silence and all that remains betw een each sentence fragment is the relentless fury o f the iron wheels o f the train on iron rails. H e picks up his sentences again as if trying to overcome his ow n internal doubts, apprehensions and fears. It is obvious that it is an effort for him to fill the silence betw een the people in the com partm ent w ith his words and his story. B ut slowly his voice overcomes the em pty space, the mistrust and the dread that separate him from his fellow passengers. His opening words are the first tentative moves to restore the realm o f hum an speech w hich had till recently become the site o f scrcams and rage, o f cries o f supplication and pain, and o f hysterical slogans filled w ith hate and curses (Manto had recorded the ruin o f language a few years earlier in the strange fragments about the partition published under the title “Siyah Hashye”). As the narrator emerges into language and begins to discover the elementary structures o f stories, he acquires a sense o f him self and the listeners as hum an presences w ho are similar in kind. Language w hich had earlier transformed people into phantoms, once again begins to fulfil, how ever tentatively and m om entarily, its primary function o f establishing a human com m unity. Yet, since M anto’s text tells a story o f doom, at the end language crumbles back into silence and all that remains once again is the hallucinatory clatter o f iron wheels on iron rails. Further, the narrator addresses the listener, w ithout first asking him about his religion and national identity or revealing his own, as bhaijan (literally, brother ). He does so, not only at the beginning, but w ith a certain insistence, throughout the story. The narrator’s use o f the w ord bhaijan is deliberate, since in another context he uses the m ore familiar and colloquial w ord yaar (friend) to address another person in the story. O f course, the narrator is making use o f the strategy w hich storytellers often employ to intercalate

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the listener into the narrative. Given, however, the fact that 1947 also represents the culmination o f a long sequence o f efforts to dismember a cohesive society and the sense o f kinship between people o f different religions, the narrator’s attempt to establish brotherhood with the listener should be read as a gesture o f in-gathering and o f community making. Since the listener quietly accepts the narrator’s call to brotherhood as a proper rite o f address, the w ord bhaijan seeks to re-establish the grace o f companionship (Hannah A rendt’s phrase) destroyed by the partition. At the end o f the tale, however, this act o f com m union turns out to be misleading and false. T he listener n o t only suspects the veracity o f the narrator’s tale, but also fails to find in it anything which w ould console him for all the dislocation he has suffered or offer him hope for a different future. Unsure about the meaning o f the story he has heard, all that remains for him is derision and bewilderment. Contrary to the deliberate m anner in w hich the geo­ political space is left unmapped, the chronological sequence in the story is carefully crafted. W hile the story itself is narrated in 1951, it has two temporal locations— a few days in 1919 and 1947. Given the fact that the story is really a meditation on the partition and the reasons for the violence w hich accom panied it, M anto ’s main concern is w ith showing that, though the massacres o f 1919 and o f 1947 occurred in radically different political circumstances and had different victims and killers, their ethical causes and consequences were similar— as they always are in every condition in w hich people use force to achieve the ends they desire. The use o f mindless power, both in 1919 and 1947, converted living things into corpses as ruthlessly as it transformed those w ho employed it into grotesques (I am using here Simone W eil’s formulation). In M anto’s under­ standing, 1919 haunts 1947 as its malignant shadow. Unlike M anto, however, the narrator o f the tale is blind to the relationship betw een the incidents o f 1919 w hich preoccupy his fascinated attention and the violence o f the partition. T he listener, too, is spellbound by the narrator’s

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story and his ow n dreams o f violent revenge and is, therefore, unable to see the bloody tracks that lead from the stupidity o f m ob violence in the streets o f Amritsar in 1919 to the massacres o f 1947. Both the narrator and the listener are so deeply entrapped in their ow n dark fantasies o f suffering and retaliatory justice that they neither offer an explanation for the horrors they have witnessed n o r find a vision o f a m ore hopeful future. T he scepticism o f the listener, how ever, w hich calls to question m any o f the interpretations o f the narrator’s tale, enables us to break the hypnotic control o f the storyteller and his tale, and thereby makes it possible for us to pass a reflective judgem ent both on the fictional and the historical events described.4

6 In order to reveal that the ethical presuppositions regarding violence which govern the events o f 1919 and 1947 are the same, M anto employs a complex narrative strategy. H e tells tw o stories simultaneously which demand to be read against each other— the enigmatic story told by the narrator and the nationalist story. B oth begin w ith the R ow latt satyagraha and Jallianwalla Bagh and end w ith freedom and the holocaust o f the partition. T h e first is, o f course, the fictional incident w hich the narrator describes to the listener. It demands that we pay attention to the sequence o f events and the chronological order in w hich they occur because, like the listener, we have no knowledge o f them prior to their being narrated. T he events, w hich the narrator is so passionately concerned with, happen in Amritsar over four days— from the 9th to the 12th o f April, 1919. T he dates are important because they show that Manto*s primary interest is not w ith the reprehensible genocide by General Dyer at Jallianwalla Bagh on 13th April 1919, but w ith the protesters against the R ow latt Act and their actions a few days before April 13th. T he second story, w hich is familiar both to the narrator and the listener, though each o f them has his ow n way o f

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understanding it, is inscribed w ithin the narrator’s story. The narrator assumes that, since the listener’s experiences in the past are similar to his own, he also shares w ith him an elementary knowledge o f the facts that make up the history o f the nationalist m ovem ent from 1919 to 1947. He, theref­ ore, tells the second story with the help o f bits and pieces o f information marking only important dates and names. These fragments o f historical data are scattered at random through­ out his ow n narration o f the fictional tale. The problem for the listener, how ever, is that since the nationalist story is inextricably woven into the fictional tale, the reliability o f the narrator’s version o f the events is suspect. M anto, I think, wants the listener, and by extension the reader, to continuously check each o f the references the narrator makes against know n and verifiable facts, in the same way as he wants the listener to resist the temptation o f accepting the fictional tale by the narrator as being truthful. It is by following the intricate manner in which the two stories are w oven into each o th er that M anto’s intentions becom e clear. T he careful way in which im portant dates are noted suggests that at the heart o f M anto’s text is neither euphoria over the freedom o f India nor anger over the brutality o f Jallianwalla Bagh, but the barbarity o f the partition in 1947 and the stupidity o f violent street politics in 1919. T he first fragm entary sentence by the narrator (“ It happened in 1919 ...”) is intentionally ambiguous. By placing the actual year 1919 and all that we (along with the listener) are presumed to know about it within a fictional frame, the narrator not only brings to our attention both the historical narrative and the invented story, but also makes us wonder about the epistemological relation between the tw o. The narrator’s strategy is clever and tantalising. W e don’t know if we are being invited to suspend disbelief and enter a fictional realm w hich uses historical references primarily to achieve the effect o f reality, or if we are being asked to think about the m anner in which the events o f 1919 are a part o f the structure o f the fictional narrative and constitute the meaning o f the text.

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Immediately after the curious opening statem ent whose intention is not clearly graspable, the narrator drops the fictive narrative. Unselfconsciously, he slips into a long and rambling account o f the nationalist m ovem ent from M archApril 1919 to 1947, cobbled out o f bits and pieces o f factual inform ation, m em ories o f actual events w itnessed and personal opinions regarding their importance in the last few decades o f the colonial period. O u r initial response to all that he has to say in quick succession about Gandhi, Dr. Satyapal, D r. K itchlew, Sir M ichael O ’D w yer, General Dyer, the R ow latt Acts, or the great communal killings o f 1947, is that he is only going over a history that w e already know — that he is merely offering, like a dull story-teller on a long train journey, a meandering entry into the fictional world that he actually wants to reveal to us. W e give— along w ith the listener— our lazy consent to the truthfulness o f his account because, at first glance, it doesn’t seem to be different from the standard inventory o f names and places w hich mark the years betw een 1919 and 1947 in all the familiar romances about our nationalist history in approved text-books. It is not surprising that the iirst factual detail the narrator gives us is about the arrogant stupidity o f Sir M ichael O ’D w yer and his decision to arrest Gandhi u nder the Defence o f India Act. He reiterates the popular belief that O ’D w yer’s act led to the massacres at Jallianwalla Bagh and to the eventual downfall o f the British empire. In doing so the narrator makes O ’D w yer into the familiar villain o f any nationalist rom ance. Since a nationalist rom ance is selfjustificatory, and like the mythical figure o f ouroboros, it “reconstitutes itself by swallowing its ow n tail” (Jerome Bruner, p. 19), w e don’t pay m uch critical attention to the perfunctory reference to O ’D w yer and the exem plary interpretation o f the entire incident by the narrator. W e accept the narrator’s version as a part o f a teleologically driven history, in w hich the inevitable victory at the end condemns the British as the enemies o f freedom and offers consolation to those w ho had endured pain in order to

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obtain it. As in any nationalist fable, we are neither tem pted to pay sufficient attention to the facts w hich are being offered, nor to consider the manner in w hich they are being interpreted, nor to judge the end to w hich they are being presented. W e are lulled by the fact that the ritual invocation o f the perfidy o f O ’D w yer has been uttered, and the suffering o f those w ho had struggled against him and his kind has been vindicated. T he m om ent, however, we rem em ber that the story is being told in 1951 by a narrator w ho sees him self as an aimless and bitter wanderer after the partition, the references to 1919, O ’D w yer and others cease to be a part o f a trium phant nationalist fable about reprehensible colonialists and innocent Indians. Instead o f being intelligible and followable as a simple tale o f victory o f good over evil, it becomes entangled in a complex netw ork o f political ideas, moral problems and actual historical actions w hich demand “herm eneutic alertness” (Jerome B runer’s phrase, p. 10). W e are forced to look for answers to questions about the colonial period and the freedom m ovem ent w hich are comprehensible both within the actual historical context as well as the fictional narrative. W e w onder, for example, w ho the narrator is? W hat is his national or religious identity? W hose national narrative is he concerned w ith w hen he talks about the end o f the British em pire and freedom? In w hat historical context are w e being required to interpret the events o f 1919? W hat do the narrator, the listener and Manto think about the right o f a people to resist laws framed by a foreign power? W hat means do they think are ethically permissible to resist such laws? W ho were, according to them, responsible for the great religious killings o f the partition? Thus, the chronology o f the fictional narrative dislocates all that O ’Dwyer and 1919 signify in the history o f colonial India. R ead in this manner, the opening fragment, instead o f being a part o f the banal repetition o f the nationalist’s history which is already know n and exists before M anto’s story, becomes a part o f the new scandalous history o f the

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independence m ovem ent and the partition w hich M anto really wants to tell. M anto’s subversive narrative doesn’t end w ith freedom in 1947, but crumbles into fear and silence. It shows that for him there is no ethical difference betw een the degenerate logic o f the colonial administration, the blind fury o f the mobs o f 1919 and the m urderous fanatics o f 1947— they are all a part o f the same awful history o f massacres. W edged in between the tw o fragmentary sentences about the “agitation” (M anto uses the English word) in Punjab against the R ow latt Acts and the ban on Gandhi’s entry into the state, is a reference to Amritsar. T he narrator, suddenly and w ithout any demand for clarification by the listener, interrupts his opening sentence to specify that his concern is not with what happened in Punjab as a whole but only w ith events in Amritsar. T he narrative placement o f Amritsar in the fissure betw een tw o broken sentences w hich together claim that the decline o f the British empire began in April 1919 is w orth noticing. In the fictional narrative, if April 1919 is identified as the chronological origin o f the challenge to colonialism, Am ritsar is the place in the political map o f India where the legitimacy o f a foreign law is radically questioned for the first time. Both the narrator and the listener accept this interpretation in an unproble­ matic way. In doing so, they give their unquestioning acquiescence to the version o f the nationalist rom ance in w hich Amritsar is only recalled as a place w here first Sir Michael O ’D w yer misread the m ood o f the crow d w hich had taken out a procession on Ram naum i day on April 9th, and then General D yer shot dow n unarm ed citizens w ho had gathered peacefully in an open field to celebrate Baisakhi on April 13. For them, Amritsar is simultaneously a place w here H indus, Muslims and Sikhs had agitated together against a foreign pow er and where the British had added another “bloody page” to their dark history o f colonialism. T h e m om ent, how ever, w e recall M an to ’s narrative strategy, this simple structuring o f the conflict o f 1919 turns out to be naive and seriously flawed. M anto

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makes it impossible for us to forget our ow n complicity in the violence that swept across the Indian subcontinent between 1919 and 1951. Thus, M anto tem porarily suspends the flow o f the narrative in order to focus our attention on Amritsar. The city itself is bracketed by references to two contrary tenden­ cies that invariably marked the freedom m ovem ent— the passion o f the mobs which lead to widespread violence and Gandhian satyagraha with its ethical com m itm ent to peace­ ful means and self-sacrifice. Amritsar was as m uch a site o f contestation between the two modes o f political action as any other city in the country. The nationalist romance, as we know, is amnesiac towards the former and is content to repeat the truth o f the latter as a ritualistic mantra w ithout elaborating on how it actually w orked in practice. Since M anto is looking for reasons why we, as Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, failed to adhere to the most elementary principles o f our religious thought and killed each o ther w ith the ferocity o f beasts, it is not surprising that he chooses as a narrator an ordinary man, w ho is ambivalent towards the moral implications o f the action that must be undertaken to achieve freedom. The narrator, as the rest o f the story makes clear, is respectful towards Gandhi and is yet fascinated by the politics o f violent revenge; he wants to believe that the protesters in Amritsar were peaceful, but longs to justify those w ho fought the British in the streets. It is this ambi­ guity o f response that makes the story he has to tell w orth listening to, because it gives an insight into some o f the reasons for o u r descent into com m unal frenzy and murderousness in the 1940’s. Further, Amritsar o f 1919 is framed by the narrator w ithin two distinct experiential moments in the history o f the city. B oth these m om ents lie outside the fictional narrative. The first experience that frames Amritsar and which, o f course, M anto shares w ith the narrator, is the traumatic one o f the partition and the communal carnage that followed. Amritsar o f 1951 is represented as a city o f death and sorrow— a city o f where life is nasty, brutish and

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uncertain. The narrator, like M anto, sees himself as an exile from it and knows that it is impossible for him to ever return to it. T h e second m om ent in the com m unal history o f Amritsar, w hich is used by the narrator to frame the im aginary story he wants to tell, in spite o f his ow n encounters w ith horror, is about life in a society o f rich h etero g en eity . M anto, him self, I suspect, is m ore antagonistic towards Amritsar before 1919. His general cynicism w ould never have perm itted him to see any place as an example o f an ideal community— though he may have permitted himself to concede to the narrator that, in contrast to w hat Amritsar did becom e, it wasn’t really such a bad place to live in for anyone. For the narrator, how ever, Amritsar before 1919 is a model o f a desired community. H e speaks o f it nostalgically as a place where Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were aware o f their different traditions and yet had an inward regard for each other as members w ho shared similar conditions o f living, being and suffering— w here they felt no sense o f estrangem ent from each other and couldn’t imagine any cause for it in the future. Such an acknow ledgem ent o f Amritsar as a place o f communal peace is significant since it is made in 1951 by a narrator w ho has been a witness to religious killings. Speaking out o f his ow n intense sense o f bewilderment, the narrator is quite deliberately constructing a communal history o f the city in such a way as to call into question the basic assertions o f the proponents o f the tw onation theory who claimed that for historical reasons it was both impossible for the H indus and the Muslims to find civic spaces where they could live together and to make a com m on political cause against the British. It is quite obvious, however, that for the narrator the notion that the two communities were irreconcilably different is an illusion. That is why in his very next narrative move, he confidendy asserts that none o f the com m unities had any hesitation either in acknow ledging Gandhi as a M ahatm a or in accepting the leadership o f Dr. Kitchlew and Dr. Satyapal

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w ithout being concerned with their religious identities. If, as the narrator insists, the enmity between the Hindus and the Muslims was neither natural nor culturally fated, then why did the partition occur? It is the search for an answer to that question w hich makes the reference to G andhi’s role in the protests against the R ow latt Acts and the priority he is accorded in the chronology o f the story w orth considering in detail. Perhaps the first thing one needs to com m ent upon is the fact that the respectful invocation o f Gandhi is by a man w ho has suffered during the partition. In a story about the politics o f debasement and hate, for the narrator Gandhi remains, even years later, a Mahatma, a figure o f humanitas, a man w ho is recognised as an example o f virtue by everyone because he understands that freedom and equality require nothing m ore than the capacity to be responsible towards oneself and attentive towards others.5 After the partition, the narrator refers to Gandhi in an attem pt to recover out o f the ruins some shards o f dignity. Yet, as the story unfolds, we realise that since the story the narrator really wants to tell us is about the failure o f just vengeance, the presence o f Gandhi is meant to be seen as a sign o f our civilisational failure which is so profound that nothing can save us. T h e second noticeable thing about the G andhian m ovem ent in the text is that its emphasis on clarity o f thought, elegance o f rational conduct and dignity o f co­ operative living, is negated by the m elodram a o f the fictional narrative which follows it w ith its celebration o f mass enthusiasm, casual bravado, and dangerous voluptuous­ ness. For the narrator and the listener, Gandhi is, in spite o f their professed admiration for him, ethically and politically incomprehensible; a shadowy presence w ho disappears once the m om entum o f a story about a desperate “martyrdom ,” w ith an aura o f scandalous eroticism, picks up. Historically, in 1919, Gandhi was so appalled by the mindless violence o f the protests against the Row latt Acts in Lahore, Ahmedabad, Calcutta, Gujranwalla etc., that he broke dow n in public in Ahmedabad on the 14th o f April

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and undertook a three day penitential fast to atone for the acts o f his followers. Significandy enough, though his fast began on the 14th o f April, he had no knowledge o f the shootings at Jallianwalla Bagh the day before. Further, from M arch to May 21, 1919, he issued a series o f tw enty-one “ Satyagraha Pamphlets” in w hich he repeatedly appealed to people that a satyagraha did not admit o f violence. H e urged Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs to desist, even under the gravest provocation, from acts o f pillage, incendiarism, extortion, m urder and rape. Searching for ways o f enabling people to realise that they had the right to define themselves as autonom ous individuals w ho could be free only if they made the ethical a part o f their political actions, he urged them to take vows o f self-suffering and humiliation, prayer and self-discipline, abhayadan (the assurance o f safety to the innocent as a sacred duty) and religious tolerance. O nly then, he was convinced, we could see ourselves and each other as members o f a com m unity instead o f brutes in a crow d and participants in a duragraha. A satyagraha vow was a deliberate, self-critical and thoughtful act which could not be made w ithout a profound awareness o f the presence o f the other and o f his right to be different. It not only restored to each one the right to choose responsibly for himself, it also laid dow n a m inim um moral programme for everyone which was achievable in daily practice. Since M anto’s fictional story is not about nostalgically recovering the past, but about the inconsolable grief over o u r collective descent into Hobbesian jungles, it is not surprising that the narrator quickly forgets Gandhi. As the narrator continues w ith his tale, we realise that for M an to the presence o f Gandhi is only a tem porary stay against insanity. The narrator, oblivious o f everything he had said in his historical pream ble to the story, begins to gleefully describe the street politics o f Amritsar before the 13th o f April w hich he had witnessed. In his version, Amritsar becomes a city o f labyrinths, rumours and desperate actions. Crowds surge through its streets looking for victims so that they can exorcise their own sense o f humiliation and defeat.

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For the narrator, the marauding crowds, which he reads in term s o f popular images borrow ed from the French R evolution, are signs o f the resurgence o f vitality, a return o f courage. He fails to understand, despite his horrified sense o f the partition, that m ob actions are always random , unpredictable and callous, that they have the terrifying fluidity o f nightmares. U nlike the disciplined ethicality o f the responses o f the satyagrahis, the behaviour o f mobs is invariably foolish and cruel because those w ho are swept away by frenzy have neither the time for thought nor the patience for justice (cf. Simone Weil, p. 34). According to M anto’s text and the available historical records, the furious excitement o f the mobs in Amritsar soon after the arrest o f Gandhi and the expulsion o f Dr. Satyapal and Dr. Kitchlew, was archetypal. Convinced o f their ow n righteousness and charged with a sense o f grievance and shame, they roamed the city streets in search o f a pharmokos, a sacrificial victim whose m urder w ould give them a sense o f pow er (cf. N orthrop Frye, p. 149). Given that the preferred victims o f lynch mobs during riots are often w om en (Hans Magnus Enzensberger, p. 22), it is not surprising that Miss Sherwood became their most famous victim. The attack on her was used by the British to legitimise all their mythic fears o f vicious Indian hordes and redeem their ow n retaliatory brutality a few days later at Jallianwalla Bagh. W hile Gandhi saw the ill-willed animosity towards Miss Sherwood as a sign o f the “mental lawlessness” (The Collected Works o f Mahatma Gandhi.Vol. 15, p.230) o f the weak, there were some like the narrator w ho regarded it as a necessary act o f m urder in any struggle for political redem ption. W hat startles one about the narrator’s confession is not merely the fact that he has forgotten his earlier expressions o f adm iration for Gandhi— a moral amnesia he shares w ith many— but the specific context o f his ow n tale in which he recalls Miss Sherwood and the gratuitous violence o f his tone. A ccording to the actual historical accounts, Miss Sherwood was a doctor w ho had worked for fifteen years

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for the Zenana Missionary Society in Amritsar. O n April 10th, after hearing about the riots in the city, she had gone on her bicycle to the five schools under her charge so as to send the six hundred or so Hindu and Muslim girls hom e. It was during her rounds that she was attacked by the mob. She was beaten mercilessly by young m en w ho shouted slogans in favour o f Gandhi and freedom (a fact not recorded by the narrator). Later, she was carried into the house o f a H indu shopkeeper, w here h er w ounds were washed and she was protected from further attacks by people w ho came back to kill her (for details o f the incident see Draper, pp. 65-66). T he narrator’s reference to Miss Sherwood comes, not at the p o in t w here it ought to have in th e historical chronology o f events, but at a m om ent o f crisis in the fictional story w hen political violence, racial contem pt, verbal derision and coarse eroticism become indistinguish­ able aspects o f each other. There is a long and difficult sense o f emptiness after the narrator finishes describing the story o f Thaila, the protagonist, w ho attacks some British soldiers in the streets o f Amritsar on 10th April 1919, and is shot dead by them . For the narrator, it is a tale o f unacknow ­ ledged m artyrdom in the cause o f freedom. For a m ore objective critic o f the story, how ever, it is a predictable adolescent romance full o f bravado and enthusiasm b u t o f little political significance. In the embarrassed silence that follows the end of the story, the listener feels as if the wheels are repeating, with dull mechanical regularity, the last phases o f the narrator, “Thaila is dead, Thaila is buried...Thaila is dead, Thaila is buried...” These fragmentary phrases, echoed by the clatter o f wheels, seem to reduce the story o f Thaila to a m undane and inconsequential incident. Ironically, the narrator fails to see that there is a disturbing gap between his ow n expressed admiration for Gandhi and his agony over the death o f Thaila, and that there are tw o political possi­ bilities indicated w ithin his ow n narrative. Thaila’s sponta­ neous decision to kill a British soldier may be full o f exultation and energy, but it can’t be read as an act w hich is

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either personally redemptive or nationally desirable. He is a drunkard, a braggart, a gambler and a bully. T here is nothing in the story to indicate that he is a man concerned w ith national questions. He acts merely on the impulse o f the m om ent. It is, therefore, surprising to find that Leslie Flemming, in her study o f M anto, is oblivious to M anto’s ironic rage and applauds Thaila as a political activist and bemoans his fate. T o do so is not only sentimental nonsense, but is also, in Gandhian terms, an abdication o f ethical and political will to the whims o f a hooligan (The Collected Works o f Mahatma Gandhi, N o. 15, p. 234). If Thaila has political legitimacy and is a martyr, then so is Dyer; both are m irror images o f each other, for the will to pow er o f one is countered by the will to destruction o f the other. Thaila doesn’t have the intelligence to ask if freedom is w orth having at the cost o f such murders; D yer lacks the moral grace to consider if the Empire is w orth saving. In M anto’s dem onology o f the nationalist m ovem ent, they are both nasty examples o f w hat William Blake identifies as the that grotesque condition w hen “the soul drinks m urder and revenge applauds its ow n holiness.” There is a further slippage between Gandhian ethicality and politics, and the narrator’s unreflecting modes o f thought and action. T he narrator tells the listener in grave tones that the most tragic aspect o f his tale is yet to follow. Immediately afterwards, however, he forgets his rage over Thaila’s death. Instead, he begins to describe in sensuous details, the mujra Thaila’s sisters used to perform for the entertainm ent o f their customers in Amritsar. The listener feels uncom fortable as the narrator loses him self in his recollections o f the night world o f a sexual epicure. The narrator, however, is incapable o f noting that there is little difference betw een his desire to ‘colonise’ and ‘raid’ the bodies o f the dancing girls for his ow n delight and the coercive politics o f the Empire. It is beyond his capacities to acknow ledge, w hat moral politicians from G andhi to Sim one W eil have consistently pointed out, that the voluptuary and the coloniser are the same; and that both are

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so intoxicated by their pow er to possess and defile their victims that they themselves become grotesques. After a while, the narrator emerges from his sexual fantasia and resumes his story. He describes how, soon after Thaila’s death, some British soldiers heard about his sisters and dem anded that they dance for them . H e bitterly condemns those Indians w ho told the British soldiers about Thaila’s sisters as “toadies” who, like all collaborators, always put themselves “voluntarily at the service o f vile p o w er” (the formulation is K undera’s, p. 125) in order to increase the pain o f the defeated. It is during the description o f this lurid incident that he suddenly recalls the historically factual attack on Miss Sherwood and inscribes it into his fictional narrative. It is, perhaps, w orth noting here that in the larger framework o f M anto’s text, attacks such as the one on Miss Sherwood were for Gandhi a violation o f abhayadan, w hich was not only an important duty o f a satyagrahi, but was also the “first requisite o f religion” (The Collected Works O f Mahatma Gandhi. Vol. 15, pp. 222). T he narrator, w ho has already forgotten Gandhi, unexpectedly bursts into rage, and in an act o f compensatory retaliation calls her a chudel (a bitch). His verbal assault is, o f course, a sign o f the fact that he is still so deeply m arked by his m em ories o f social defilement that he hopes to recover for himself some sense o f pride. The irony is that while he curses Miss Sherwood and is touched by the fate o f Thaila’s sisters, he fails to see that the entrapment o f the dancing girls is not only similar to the predatory attack on the English woman but is also one o f its causes. W hat is shocking, however, is that he forgets that betw een 1947 and 1951 enraged m obs o f Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had applauded public acts o f sexual debauchery and had ju stified th em as fair compensation for their political and religious humiliation at the hands o f each other. To take only one example o u t o f many, Kamalabehn Patel recalls that “200 w om en w ere made to dance naked for the whole night” in the central hall o f the Durbar Sahib in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, and that many people had “enjoyed the unholy show.”7

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W hile the narrator effaces an obscene present, his memories are still haunted by a past in which nostalgia and pain, loss and desire are strangely mingled. W h en he resumes his story, at first he offers a fairly conventional com m ent about the inability o f people to believe that even dancing girls can have feelings. Then, he adds, with seeming innocuousness and w ithout any challenge by the listener, th at “this country has n o sense o f self-respect.*’ T he statem ent becomes treacherous, however, the m om ent we recall that it is being made in 1951 by a narrator w ho doesn’t know where he belongs. In the absence o f the name o f the nation, we wonder if the country he refers to is India o r Pakistan? W e also w onder if he is so profoundly lost in th e shadowlands o f m em ories that he unselfconsciously assumes that, as in the past, the two new countries shall continue to share the same civilisational space and a com m on history— and hence, o f course, be equally involved in the present shame? The ambiguity o f the narrator and the listener towards the form ation o f the tw o nations is bew ildering. Indeed considering that one reason for the violence o f those days was to ensure that the demarcation betw een the tw o countries was deeply and ineradicably engraved in the minds o f the people, the forgetfulness o f the narrator and the listener adds to the phantasmagoria o f the story and o f the times. T he narrator’s tale has tw o different, b u t equally scandalous endings. In the first version, Thaila’s sisters rip off their clothes, dance naked before the British soldiers and then give a sexually graphic speech, charged with nationalist rhetoric, about their b rother’s sacrifice for his country’s freedom . M ixing politics, eroticism and death, they ecstatically invite the soldiers to “pierce” their “beautiful perfum ed bodies” w ith the “hot irons” o f their lust. They also, however, request the soldiers to let them “spit o n their faces.” After a pause, the narrator, w ith tears in his eyes, adds that the soldiers responded to the passionate defiance o f the sisters by shooting them dead. In the second version, w hich the narrator admits is m ore truthful w hen he is

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questioned by the listener, the sisters perform a mujra for the entertainment o f the soldiers. The ending o f the first version satisfies the narrator’s offended pride, while the ending o f the second corresponds to his sense that the times are utterly depraved. W hat he doesn’t realise is that ethically there is no difference betw een melodramas o f retaliatory violence or o f base surrender; that both are w ithout m eaning, w ithout purpose and w ithout end; that as Blake says, “T he beast and the w hore rule w ithout controls...” For M anto, the writer, contemplating the partition from Lahore in 1951, there is a physical, moral and political logic w hich links the profane desires o f the narrator, the massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh, the prurient delights o f the British soldiers and the fatal fraternities o f mobs from 1919 to 1947. Together, they form a random anthology o f incidents in an awful and inexorable tragedy o f a degenerate society. All he can do, as he records these tales, is to lament— and lamenta­ tion, as we know from religious and psychological sources, is that state o f inconsolable sorrow in w hich one feels that nothing more purposeful will ever offer itself again.

REFERENCES 1. The Congress report on Jallianwalla Bagh concludes that O ’Dwyer “invariably appealed to passion and ignorance rather than to reason” (p. 7). It adds that “he invited violence from the people so that he could crush them ” (p. 23). The report also records a meeting between Raizada Bhagat R am and O ’D w yer w hich gives some indication o f the latter’s frame o f mind during the R ow latt satyagraha. Bhagat Ram told O ’Dwyer that the meetings had been peaceful and added, “T o my mind it was due to the soul force o f Mr. Gandhi.” Hearing that, O ’Dwyer raised his fist and said, “Raizada Sahib, remember, there is another force greater than Gandhi’s Soul-force” (p. 44). Punjab Disturbances. V ol.l. The official British report also condemned Dyer’s acts as “inhuman and un-British” (p. xxi), but added that “he acted honesdy in the belief that what he was doing was right...(p. xxii).” T he Indian members of the British Com m ission refused to endorse these views. Punjab Disturbances 1919-20. Vol. 2. 2. O n 18 April 1919, Gandhi admitted that his call for civil dis­

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obedience against the Rowlatt Acts was a “Himalayan blunder.” Cf. Judith Brown, Gandhi: A Prisoner of Hope. 3. In the stories about the partition by M anto and others (as in numerous accounts o f the Jewish holocaust— and incidentally, in spyfiction), speech can often lead to betrayal and death. This is, o f course, contrary to the assumption o f saner societies in which speech enables the world to come into being and ensures the on-goingness o f life. 4. It is perhaps worth recording that, while there are coundess stories in which hypnotic or mesmeric control leads to brutal death (e.g. Poe or Dickens etc.), tales o f enchantment ran also result in redemptive release from irrational fears or social rage (e.g. The Arabian Nights at one end and Freud at the other). 5. The H unter Commission report also records that in Punjab in 1919 Gandhi was respected as a rishi by the Hindus and as a wali by the Muslims. Punjab Disturbances. Vol 2, p. 36. 6. General Dyer, for instance, told the H unter Commission, “I felt w om en had been beaten. W e look upon women as sacred...” He added, that the street where Miss Sherwood had been beaten “ought to be looked upon as sacred...” (p. 61). Punjab Disturbances. Vol. 2. 7. Kamalabehn Patel, “Oranges and Apples,” India Partitioned. Vol. 2. Ed. Mushirul Hasan.

W O R K S C IT E D A re n d t, H a n n a h . Between Past and Present. H a rm o n d s w o rth : P en g u in , 1977. B halla, A lo k . Stories About the Partition o f India. N e w D elh i: H arp er C ollins, 1995. B raudel, F ernand. O n History. T rans. Sarah M atthew s. C hicago: U niv ersity o f C hicago Press, 1980. B ro w n , J u d ith . Gandhi: A Prisoner o f Hope. N e w D elhi: O x fo rd U niversity Press, 1989. D raper, Alfred. Amritsar: The Massacre that Ended the Raj. L ondon: M acm illan, 1981. E nzensberger, H ans M agnus. Civil War. Trans. Piers Spence and M artin C halm ers. London: G ranta Books, 1994. F lem m in g , Leslie. Another Lonely Voice: The Life and Works o f Saadat Hasan Manto. Lahore: V anguard, 1985. Freud, S igm und. “ M o u rn in g and M elancholia,” Collected Papers. V ol. 4. Tans. Jo an R iviere. L ondon: H o g arth Press, 1925. Frye, N o rth ro p . A n Anatomy o f Criticism. N e w Y ork: A th en eu m , 1969.

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G an d h i, M ohandas K aram chand. The Collected Works o f Mahatma Gandhi. Vol. 15. A hm edabad: N avjcevan Press, 1965. G o uld, S tephen Jay. Bully fo r the Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History. N ew Y ork: N o rto n , 1991. H asan, M ushim l. India Partitioned: The Other Face o f Freedom. T w o volum es. N e w D elhi: R o li Books, 1995. H usain, Intizar. Leaves and Other Stories. Trans. A lok Bhalla an d V ishw am itter Adil. N e w Delhi: H arp er Collins, 1993. K erm o d e, Frank. The Genesis o f Secrecy: O n the Interpretation o f Narrative, C am bridge, Mass.: H arvard U niversity Press, 1979. K u n d era, M ilan. The A rt o f the Novel. T rans. Linda A sher. N e w Y ork: H arp er and R o w , 1986. O ’D w y e r, M ich ael. India A s I Knew It. D elhi: M ittal, 1988. Punjab Disturbances: 1919-1920. T w o volum es. 1920; rpt. N e w D elhi: D eep Publications, 1976. R ic o e u r , Paul. Tim e and Narrative. V ol. 1. T rans. K ath leen M cL au g h lin a n d D a v id P ellauer. C h icag o : U n iv e rsity o f C hicago Press, 1984. W eil, Sim one. Intimations o f Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks. L ondon: A rk Paperbacks, 1987.

The Craft of Manto: Warts and All KEKI N. DARUWALLA

K now ing how easily hagiography comes to us, and how nonchalandy we take to adulation— like kaaz and murghab to water— I propose to take a wry and a rather astringent look at Saadat Hasan Manto. Hagiography, let me hasten to add, w ould be the wrong term to apply to an unbelieving, harddrinking rationalist like M anto. His claim to literary aposdehood is understandable. B ut an attem pt needs to be made to balance things out: betw een his cynicism and the sentimentality that still creeps in; the dow n to earth story let dow n by the lack o f all sense o f place; the obsession w ith the partition that ignored the political movements that led to it; the uncertain landing after an imaginative leap. But before we take these up, the essentials need to be put down. Saadat Hasan’s commitment to truth was so passiof nate and complete, that it has to go unchallenged. His worst j enemies can’t accuse him o f sectarianism. And he was totally unselfconscious about his impartiality towards the H indu and the Muslim— there was no deliberate attempt to match Sikh atrocities w ith Muslim ones to arrive at some phoney balance. H e was above such obvious artifice. His heart was in the right place invariably, and his scorn for the hypocri­ tical and the sanctimonious was unmitigated. And he made the fanatics look not only evil, but also foolish. His social realism has been m uch talked about. In fact, his entire oeuvre fits so snugly into the slot that one can’t even think o f putting a different tag on it. And yet w hen he lets his hair dow n as in “Siyah Hashye” Black Marginalia, he can surprise you w ith the reach o f his imagination and the heights it could scale. “ Siyah Hashye” could pass off as “existential belle letters” as such pieces were called in USA once. The half page story “ Fifty-Fifty” shows M anto taking an imaginative leap that w ould put him

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at par w ith the most new fangled o f the modems. It is a surreal story about a man spotting a big w ooden box, presu­ mably in a riot. Since he can’t lift it alone, he asks for help and the tw o o f them take it to a safe place and fight over the supposed booty. The man wants to give the helper only one fourth. T he other wants fifty-fifty. Then they open the box and a man comes out o f it. “H e was holding a sword in his hand and he immediately cut the tw o m en into halves, fiftyfifty.” This piece is worthy o f a Borges or a Cortazar. M anto rose to fame due to the brilliance, the uniqueness o f his vision and the controversial nature o f his writing. The Indian middle class, ever prone to a mix o f prudishness and hypocrisy in the thirties and forties was shocked out o f its wits. And M anto, o f course, revelled in w hatever shocked them , be it “ obscenity” or sudden violence, or the dramatic and brutal m anner in w hich he unm asked hypocrisy. It appears he spent a literary lifetime revelling in his role as the enfant terrible o f Urdu literature. And there was, o f course, the love-hate relationship w ith the Progressive W riters U nion. Like all writers, he was trapped by his times. In ' 1933, four young progressive writers namely Sajjad Zahir, A hm ed Ali, Rashid Jahan and M ahm ud uz-Zafar, all o f w hom were dissatisfied w ith the mildly reformist approach to fiction o f Premchand and his followers, brought out together an electrifying collection o f short stories entitled Angare (Live Coals).1 T he stories, w hich included one by M anto, “were consciously revolutionary, openly ridiculing religion and suggesting the oppressiveness o f traditional and social institutions, especially those relating to w om en.” Meanwhile, in London, in N ovem ber 1934, some Indian students led by M ulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zahir, m oved by the anti-fascist activity o f E uropean writers, had organised the Indian Progressive Writers Association. Later, Sajjad Z ahir and Ahm ed Ali established the All India Progressive Writers Association, holding its first meeting in L ucknow in April 1936, a m eeting presided over by Premchand. As Leslie Flemming shows both the manifestoes issued in London in 1935 and Lucknow in 1936, espoused

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(a) nationalism, and (b) literature as a force for social uplift in India. The Lucknow manifesto stated, “W e want the new literature o f India to m ake its subject the fundam ental problems o f our lives. These are the problems o f hunger, poverty, social backwardness and slavery.”2 T he first issue o f N ay a Adab (April 1939) defined progressive literature as follows: “In our opinion progressive literature is that literature which looks at the realities o f life, reflects them, investigates them and leads the way toward a new and better life...” T he Russian influence o n Manto is well-known. He after all started his literary career as a translator o f Russian stories. Thus, the crucible in w hich his writing was cast was mainly influenced by the French realists— Maupasant and Balzac— and the Russian writers from Tolstoy to Gorky. T he critical attention he received got focussed on his sensational stories like “B u ” (Odour) or “Thanda G osht” (Cold Meat) due to which, and for other reasons, he fell out w ith the progressives. T hus, the critical attention was directed to the more virulent and shocking aspects o f his writing, the sudden violence and the seamy side o f life that he portrayed, especially o f the demi-monde. The partition stories also took a fair share o f critical attention. T he characters that peppered his stories were out o f the ordinary, often coming from the detritus o f society. T he whore, the pimp, the street dada josded for place with those w ho fought for freedom. And there were, o f course, the religious bigots, both H indu and Muslim, w hom he reviled. His characters, thus acted as magnets for criticism, both for and against. His themes— the loss o f innocence (but not o f grace)— attracted the critics. So did his vision later, terrifying, and nihilistic yet moral in its own unique way. His stories on the partition and on prostitutes had a rivetting political and social relevance. If his craft attracted the critic’s eye, it was more in passing. It is this aspect w hich I propose to take up. M anto w rote the classical short story, directed to a purpose, with a well-fleshed middle and definitive ending. The character played an important part.

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T he m odem short story w hich can be just the presen­ tation o f a mood, or a sense o f loss; where the ending, such as there is, is left hanging in the air like a wisp o f mist in the moutains; where the past o f the character does not have to be delineated, had not caught up with Manto as yet. Looking at the plot structure o f many o f his stories one notices the flaws— the vagueness in regard to detail, the predeterm ined end, at times an overdose o f melodrama perhaps unconsciously imbibed through his association with the film world. Sometimes even normal logic is not adhered to, and hence verisimilitude becomes a victim. O ne gets the impression that events are being channelized pell-m ell, w ithout m uch regard to their verisemblance, to a pre­ ordained end. The fates decree, as it were, and the furies drag the story by the hair to the guillotine. “ Swaraj Ke Liye,” (The Price o f Freedom) is a story about two young ardent Congressites, Shahzada Ghulam Ali and Nigar, w ho fall in love. T he story is set in Amritsar quite a few years after the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. G hulam Ali makes a name as a fiery young Congress w orker. Every few days a ‘dictator’ is appointed to the Congress camp and Ghulam Ali is the 40th ‘dictator’ to take over since his predecessors have been sent to prison. In this position one does not last for m ore than a few days before being sent to jail. T he scene is set. Post Jallianwalla Bagh Amritsar and two fervent Muslim Congress workers. T hen enters the Baba. He heads an ashram and carries a halo about him. All political movements in Amritsar take place w ith his blessings. O n e is n o t left guessing about w hat M anto thinks o f ashrams: “I had seen many ashram inmates in my time. There was something lifeless and pallid about them, despite their early m orning cold bath and long walks. W ith their pale faces and swollen eyes, they som ehow always reminded me o f cow ’s udders.” T o a full-blooded man like Manto this is how an ashramite would appear. T he artifice creeps in w hen it is the Baba w ho joins G hulam and N igar in wedlock. H ow a H indu Baba, heading an ashram, joins tw o Muslims in marriage is never

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explained, perhaps because it is not explainable. T he Baba asks Nigar to join the ashram and makes a long speech at the w edding w here he states that the sexual link was not as im portant as it was made out to be in a marriage. “A true marriage should be free o f lust,” he says. T he sanctity o f marriage was m ore im portant than the gratification o f the sexual instinct. All this stirs G hulam Ali w ho states, trembling w ith emotion, “I have a declaration to make. As long as India does not w in freedom, Nigar and I will live n o t as husband and wife but as friends.” H e asks N igar w hether she w ould like to m other a child w ho w ould be a slave from the m om ent o f his birth? She w ouldn’t. After marriage Ghulam Ali is bundled off to jail for eight months. After he returns they obviously live together, but w ith sexual abstinence. The return to conventional life is hum ­ drum and boring, compared to the excitement o f their days w ith the Congress. Many years later, the narrator meets him and finds that he is now doing well and owns shoe shops. H owever, he does not stock rubber footwear. Ghulam Ali hates rubber, the reason being the use o f condoms w hich he and N igar resorted to in order to keep their vow to the Baba that he w ould not father a child in an enslaved India. Later he gives up condoms and has children but the bitter antipathy against rubbers lingers. T he story ends w ith his child coming into the shop with a balloon, and Ghulam Ali in a tantrum , pouncing on the balloon and bursting it and throw ing the ugly rubber out o f the shop. T he story reflects detailed, almost blow -by-blow plotting, and also shows M anto’s cockiness w hich seems to declare that he can carry off almost anything. B ut the basic flaw in the story remains— the Baba being substituted for the Qazi. A H indu Baba was perhaps needed because he had to talk about freedom and perhaps hint at sexual abstinence. That is one thing a Qazi w on’t do at a nikah. M anto’s distrust o f ashrams also comes through w hen he talks about N igar joining the ashram. “W hy should she, w ho was herself pure as a prayer, raise her hands to heaven?” T he ending, o f course, is superb— the child’s balloon being pricked but one

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can’t forget the flaw in the story— the Hindu Baba marrying tw o Muslims and preaching sexual abstinence in the bargain. There is critical speculation to the effect that the Baba really stands for Gandhiji. H e is held in great respect and his views are similar to Gandhi’s. All one can say here is that if M anto had to induct G andhi into the story, he should have managed it with greater finesse. A nother trait o f M anto’s is the total lack o f any local detail, whatsoever. His sense o f geographical spaces was vague and undefined. He was bom in Amritsar, yet the only reference you get in his stories based in Amritsar, is possibly Jallianwalla Bagh. Coocha and galli, lane and mohalla, street and road— everything is nameless, paved w ith anonymity. W hat does this reveal? Either he was too impatient to plot and w ork out an idea carefully. T hat w ould have meant visually capturing an area and putting in the details— all o f which can get a litde tedious for the writer, and certainly for an impatient genius. T he second alternative is to concede that he was too arrogant to bother about such detail as names and places. W orse still, he may have even thought that this was not necessary. For me, setting the scene is very important. Either you create a place out o f your imagination and fill in the detail as you wish. That can be very exciting at least to start with. O r you research and stick to detail. M anto does neither and that’s a pity. Y ou lose out both on authenticity and local flavour. If he thought that all that there was to a short story was to w ork out an idea, then he did poor service to his craft and his art. His Jews, Anglo-Indians, Christians and Parsis are stereo­ typed and two dimensional. Take “M ozel,” a story set in Bombay, about a Jewess, Mozel, and Sardar Trilochan Singh w ho falls in, and then out, o f love w ith her. And there is Kirpal Kaur w hom Trilochan finally falls in love w ith and w hom Mozel saves. N ow Manto lived for years in Bombay. You could have expected some detail. At the height o f the riots, Mozel simply clad in a kaftan sets out w ith Trilochan

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to rescue Kirpal Kaur. N ot one place is ever named, as if M anto was writing in a nameless limbo. Kirpal Kaur lives in a mohalla w ith her blind m other and crippled father. H er brother Niranjan “lived in another suburb”. Mozel works “in one o f the big department stores in the Fort area.” Here at least he pin-points something. W hen the two set out to save Kirpal, w ho lives in a Muslim locality, this is how M anto describes it, “T hey came to a street which led to the mohalla where Kirpal Kaur lives.” N ow if that’s all the local flavour you need, then someone sitting in Bhiwandi could write a story about a Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazis. Except for Mozel the other characters are tw o dim en­ sional and lifeless. M ozel’s end is heroic and bloody, and the other characters seem to be there to provide a chance for her to carry her part through. It could be said that Mozel was M anto’s answer to the general denigration o f and the onslaught on the Jews. But this would be far fetched. There is a terrifying image at the end— three gunny sacks dripping blood. A nd there is hum our. W hen Trilochan Singh kisses M ozel on the lips for the first and the only tim e, she says, “Phew . I already brushed my teeth this morning. Y ou needn’t have bothered.” M anto’s intentions are transparent. H ere he sets out to prove that this scantily clad Jewess, w ho is free with her love, is a bolder and better person than the rest o f the characters put together. M anto’s sympathies w ith the waifs and strays o f our society are obvious. A t times a surge o f compassion seems to spark off a story. Some o f those are unsuccessful. His heart is in the right place and he w rites against the m ale’s exploitation o f the wife, the wom an, the prostitute. But strong feeling does n ot necessarily make for strong art. Take one o f the w orst examples o f M anto w riting — at least as he comes out sieved through translation. The story I refer to is “By the R oadside” (Sarak Ke Kinare) and is included in Khalid Hasan’s anthology o f M anto’s stories. The story starts as follows:

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Yes, it was this tim e o f year. T he sky had a washed blue look like his eyes. The sun was mild like a joyous dream. T he fragrance from the earth had risen to my heart, enveloping my being. And, lying next to him, I had made him an offering o f my throbbing soul. He had said to me: “You have given me what my life had always lacked. These magic moments that you have allowed me to share have filled a void in my being. My life w ould have rem ained an emptiness w ithout your love, something incomplete. I do not know what to say to you and how, but today I have been made whole. I am fulfilled. Perhaps I no longer need you.” And he had left, never to come back. N ow this is as bad a start as you can ever get. N othing is defined. There are cliches like “The sun was mild like a joyous dream” w hich perhaps hints at an early w inter sun. W ere they living in a house, a kholi, a chaw/? W hat had the fellow walked out of? And where had the bugger gone— to the war? to the high seas? T o the next kotha? T he dialogue is as phoney as it can get. He says, “These m om ents we have shared have filled my emptiness. T he atoms o f your being have made me complete. O ur relation­ ship has come to its pre-ordained end.” Firstly no one talks like this. Secondly, there is no logical nexus betw een his having becom e “com plete” through “the atoms o f her being” and their relationship coming to an end. She protests. He answers, “The honey w hich bees suck from half-opened flowers can never adorn the flowers or sweeten their bitterness.” This is worse than some third rate serial on Zee TV or Doordarshan. T he story is supposedly w ritten by a w om an w ho is betrayed, or rather deserted by her man. But there isn’t a single feminine touch to the writing. In fact M anto loses his concentration, as for instance, in the following passage: “A w om an can weep. She cannot argue. H er supreme argu­ ments are (sic) the tears which spring from her eyes.” This is not how a woman w ould write. This is exactly how a male

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from Punjab would write. W orse follows. W hen the man is about to go he says, “ If you m ust leave, I cannot hold you back, but wrap these tears in the shroud o f your handkerchief and take them away and bury them somewhere, because w hen I cry again, I w ould know that you once perform ed the last rites o f love.” This is M anto’s compassion getting mixed up w ith sentimentality at its worst. T he story “Sarak Ke Kinare” (By the Roadside) is about a man w ho walks out on his woman perhaps without realising that she is pregnant. It ends with a postscript: T he police have found a new -born baby by the roadside. Its naked body had been wrapped in w et linen w ith the obvious intention that it should die o f cold and exposure. H ow ever, the baby was alive and has been taken to hospital. It has pretty blue eyes.3 Here the end seems premeditated. M anto seems to have worked backwards. W hatever precedes the end has been put together in a slam bang fashion to ensure the surprise ending, if it can be called a surprise. A short story needs a lot o f staff work, as we say in bureaucratic parlance. A lot o f details have to be filled in to set the scene as it were, and get it right. M anto’s staff work often failed him. I must, however, add that U rdu scholars tell me that this is one story where Manto completely veered away from his usual style. T he style is remarkable for its high pitched lyricism and the story could almost be taken as a prose poem if w e allow our imaginations some liberty. But in translation the lyricism does not come through. M eldram a creeps in often, for instance in “ T handa G osht” (Cold Meat) where Kalwant Kaur finds her rioting lover, Ishwar Singh, unable to perform in bed. His foreplay turns her o n.“Ishar Sian, you have shuffled me enough, it’s tim e to produce your trum p,” she says languidly. H e tells her w hy he can’t. H e had slaughtered six members o f a family w ith his kirpan and the seventh, a beautiful woman, he carried away only to discover during the sex act that she

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was already dead. Here the bizarre and the melodramatic dovetail into each other as Ishwar Singh withdraws from or consumates necrophilic sex. Kalwant Kaur stabs him in fit o f jealous rage even before he makes his near necrophilic confession. The story is dramatic enough, as it is. T hat final dagger-thrust was unnecessary. W hy should she stab him at all? W hy must sexual death be duplicated by physical death or hurt? There are occasions w hen M anto does not seem to know w hen to stop. T he story “Khuda Ki Q asm ” (I Swear by God) is told by a liaison officer who supervises the recovery o f abducted w om an, and so comes to India often. In Jalandhar he notices a near mad M uslim w om an in dire straits looking out desperately for her missing daughter. The officer, for some reason, tries to convince the old unkem pt w om an that her daughter is dead. H e hopes thereby to facilitate her return to Pakistan. T he w om an retorts that no one could kill her daughter because she is so beautiful. So beautiful that no one could dream o f even lifting his hand against her. Then, on one o f his trips, the liaison officer sees the old w om an at the Farid Ka C how k at Amritsar, still searching for her daughter. H e wants to persuade her to accompany him to Pakistan. As he crosses the road to talk to her, he notices a couple passing by. “The w om an’s face was covered w ith a short veil. The man accompanying her was a young Sikh, very robust and handsome...” T he Sikh recognizes the m other and points her out to the woman. She lifts her veil to take a look at the old w om an and the liaison officer sees her “exquisitely (sic) beautiful, rosy face framed w ithin her w hite chaddar.”5 “Y our m o th er,” the Sikh tells her. B ut h er daughter squeezes his arm and says “Let’s go.” T he m other recognizes h er and cries o u t to the officer that she has seen her daughter. Seeing how she has been ignored by the daughter he tries to convince her that her daughter is dead. “ I swear in the name o f God she is dead,” he says. “ Hearing this the wom an fell in a heap on the ground.”

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N ow that last bit was unnecessary. The agony o f it all had been brought out through the beautiful daughter spuming her mad m other w ho has been brought to this state in the endless search for her daughter. W hy does M anto have to w ring out m ore pathos by killing the poor woman at the end? T he story does symbolize the death o f relationships as Leslie A. Flemming avers. But the relationship is already dead w hen the daughter turns her face from the mother. It is her collapse w hich is unnecessary. She w ould have becom e an even more tragic figure if she had wandered around like a ghost, looking for her daughter. Physical death, in any case, was not a scarce com m odity during the partition. It was all around. And one feels quite petty in pointing out one odd detail. N o Muslim woman would dare wear a veil in Amritsar in M arch 1948 (there were no Muslim w om en in Amritsar by 1948). T he veil would have attracted hooligans. It would have also been an open invitation to the police to seize her and deport her to Pakistan. N o burkas were seen in East Punjab in 1948. Yet M anto’s compassion is palpable throughout the story w hich starts w ith a general discourse on the fate o f abducted wom an on both sides o f the new border. M anto works himself into a passion when he thinks o f raped w om en now big w ith child. “W ho w ould be the ow ner o f w hat lay inside these stomachs? Pakistan or India?...And w ho would bear the responsibility o f these nine m onths o f travail? Pakistan o r India? Will all this be duly recorded in the account books o f man’s inhumanity or nature’s callousness? B ut was there any page still left blank to make more entries?”6 T here is passion here and compassion and the w renching exposure o f filial indifference and ingratitude. And yet the death o f the old m other was not necessary. T he surprise has to be left till the very end, o f course, and in his bid to shock there is a sudden eruption o f violence and death at the end o f the tale. In “Sau Candle Power Ka Bulb” (A H undred Candle Power Bulb) a prostitute who is kept w orking overtime by her pim p, and hence unable to

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sleep, smashes his head w ith a stone and then snoTes away peacefully. The ending in “M ozel” is in keeping w ith the heroic endings o f our Bombay films. The thing to note is that violence is often used by M anto to round o ff a story effectively. A question w hich has not, perhaps, been probed is the insularity one encounters in M anto. Politically, he hardly ever reaches beyond Jinnah and Gandhi, Jallianwalla Bagh and the partition. H e lived in m om entous tim es— the Spanish Civil W ar, the Great W ar, the rise o f fascism, the Jew ish holocaust. T hey were times o f doctrinal wars— Nazism and Facism versus Com m unism . And the dem o­ cracies had, o f course, taken all three o f them on. He w orked for a time w ith the All India R adio, and so should have been sensitive to events on the w orld stage. For instance, Iqbal was alive to every global cross current. But in M anto’s corpus there is hardly any such m ention, as if the doors o f his m ind were closed to w hat was happening in Europe or Asia or N orth Africa. This is not strictly true. As shown in his “Chacha Sam Ke N am K hatoot,” (Letters to Uncle Sam) or his letter on Kashmir, M anto was very alive and sensitive to political currents. B ut unless they referred to either the freedom struggle on the subcontinent, or to the stupidity o f the partition, they never made an appearance in his fiction. Secondly, the Lahore R esolution on the form ation o f Pakistan, was passed by the Muslim League in 1940. Surely, M anto must have seen the writing on the wall. A sensitive person, as all good writers are supposed to be, was expected to see what this would lead to. For instance, English poetry o f the thirties broods all along and is sprayed w ith premonitions o f the com ing war. But M anto, in his stories w ritten right till 1946, seems oblivious o f things to come, as if he never sensed or saw the shadow advancing over the Indian subcontinent. And yet there are stories w here he transcends it all. “H atak” (Insult) is an absolute shocker, w here Sugandhi after driving out her worthless lover, M adho, lies dow n

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w ith her mangy dog in her bed. Though the last half o f the story moves on an em otional high, it can never be called melodramatic. The story builds its ow n explosive dynamism as it goes along. Sugandhi moves from passivity to action.The end is nihilistic as Sugandhi ends up in utter moral despair. A note o f utter despair is also struck in regard to hum an relationships.And M anto has been very careful about his craft. T he detail has been filled in meticulously. Take this description o f Sugandhi’s room: In one com er o f the room on a wooden bracket lay her cosmetic-rouge for her cheeks, red lipstick, face pow er, combs, metal hairpins. A parrot lay asleep in a cage hanging from a long peg, its neck hidden in the plumage on its back. Pieces o f raw guava and rotten orange peels lay scattered inside the cage, m osquitoes and m oths hovering over them. N ear the bed stood a cane chair, its back soiled by the oily heads constandy resting against it. By the side o f the chair rested a beautiful teapoy on which lay a portable gramophone, covered with a tattered piece o f black cloth and used gram ophone needles lay scattered all over the floor. R ight above the gramophone hung four framed photographs. A little apart from these photographs, facing the door hung a glossy picture o f Lord Ganesha, almost hidden under a layer o f fresh and dry flowers. The picture had been peeled off from a bale o f cotton cloth and framed. N ear the picture was a small alcove in w hich was kept a cup o f oil and a small clay lamp. In the stuffy, airless room the flame o f the lamp stood up straight like a sandal paste mark on a devotee’s forehead. Ashen residues o f burnt joss-sticks lay curled on a w ooden bracket.4 This is M anto at his best, the m ind keen and alert and carrying on a dialogue w ith the surroundings, as it were. “Siraj” is the story o f a betrayed woman w ho finds herself in a w hore-house after the man she eloped with walked out on her. She comes to Bombay, and despite her “profession” keeps her virginity intact. T hen she goes back to search for

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h e r betrayer, walks o u t on h im and takes to the “profession.” It is a perfect story w ith a surprise, psychologi­ cal twist at the end. In many o f his stories, including “ A M atter o f H onour,” “Kali Salwar” (The Black Trousers) or “Naya K anoon” (The N ew Constitution), one encounters a perfection o f sorts. “The N ew C onstitution” can be called a parable not only on the 1935 Governm ent o f India Act, but also on the ‘Gradual' hom e rule being doled out in driblets by the British to the Indians. It is deservedly treated as a classic. There are quite a few others o f such ilk. Many o f his bad stories one can put dow n to the pressures o f penury and m eeting deadlines, or drink, w hich killed him at the young age o f forty-three. Q uite a few o f his stories glitter even today like perfecdy cut diamonds. And if one achieved such perfection even in a handful o f stories, despite the handicaps o f a footloose life-style and hard drinking, one should be beyond the cavil o f petty reviewers like yours truly.

NOTES AND REFERENCES *This paper is based exclusively on translated M anto texts, namely stories rendered into English by Tahira Naqvi (The Life and Works of Saadat Hasan Manto. Introduction by Leslie Flem m ing, Lahore: Vanguard Books), Khalid Hasan (Kingdom's End and other stories, London: Verso) and Jai R atan (The Best of Manto, Delhi: Sterling Publishers). W hile one has great respect for the translators, most Urdu scholars aver that these translations are just about adequate and at times do not do justice to the richness and resonance o f the texts. 1. The Life and Works of Saadat Hasan Manto, Leslie A. Flemming. Lahore; Vaguard Books, 1985. 2. Ibid. 3. Kingdom’s End and Other Stories, translated by Khalid Hasan. London: Verso. 4. The Best of Manto: A Collection of his Short Stories, translated by Jai Raton. Delhi: Sterling. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid.

Lord Shiva or The Prince o f Pomographers: Ideology, Aesthetics and Architectonics o f M anto H ARISH NARANG

Let me begin this paper by referring to a few incidents relating to M an to ’s literary life. W hen “B u ,” a w ellknow n story by M anto, was published in the annual num ber (1944) o f Adab-e-Lateef, the daily, Prabhat, pub­ lished from Lahore, observed that such stories “clearly corrupt the minds o f young boys and girls and pollute public tastes.” 1 In fact, the editor o f Prabhat w ent on to demand a three-year imprisonment for the likes o f M anto for w riting ‘dirty* stories. This was the typical reaction o f a ‘purist*. W riting in Taraqqi Pasand Adaby Ali Sardarjafari observed that such stories were made o f “stinking stu ff’ and that “it is their stink which makes them reactionary.”2 It was the typical reaction o f a progressive writer. W hen M anto resumed writing stories after migrating to Pakistan— it was quite an effort and after quite some time, as he him self tells us— his second story “Khol D o ” was banned by the governm ent o f Pakistan— strange as it may seem— for “breach o f public peace.”3 In fact, the cautious Pakistan governm ent w ent on to impose a six-m onth ban on the magazine, Naqoosh, which had published the story. “Thanda G osht,” w hich was written earlier than “Khol D o ” but was published later, also attracted legal ire— this tim e on the usual charges o f obscenity. H ow ever, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, deposing before the Press Advisory Council, o f w hich he him self was the C onvenor, while absolving the story o f the charge o f obscenity, faulted it for not fulfilling “those higher objectives o f literature because in this (story) there is no satisfactory solution to the basic problems o f life.”4

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Summing up M anto’s life, H anif R ane observed that Saadat Hasan M anto suffered from “as bloated an ego as that o f Lenin or M uham m ad Ali Jinnah.”5 Similar senti­ ments had been expressed about him in his life-tim e by Devendra Satyarthi in his story “Naye D evta.”6 At the other extreme o f opinion is M umtaz Shirin, w ho stated that although, “ In the process o f internalising the poison o f life in his stories, M anto had becom e a cynic, he had full faith in man; like Maupassant, he makes us aware that while man has filth, evil and ugliness in him , yet humanity is beautiful.”7 T here have been very few writers in the history o f w orld literatures w ho have evoked— on second thought, I consider ‘provoked’ a more appropriate expression— such extreme reactions from reviewers and readers, priests and laymen, lawyers and judges, critics and creative writers. And as is evident from the above, these extreme reactions w ere completely contradictory as well. M anto has be^p, for instance, accused o f being both a com m unist and a reactionary at the same time, and if that is n o t w eird enough, by the same person and for the same piece o f w riting.8 H e has been called an extremely obscene w riter w ho tried to corrupt young minds w ith cheap titillating descriptions (see quotation at ‘1* above) as well as a w riter w ith “a spiritual experience”9 w ho could pen a story like “Toba T ek Singh.” His stories have been considered a threat to the national peace o f Pakistan and have been banned (see quotation at ‘3’ above), but he has also been hailed as the greatest story w riter w ho did n o t only Pakistan b u t the en tire Indian su b co n tin en t proud. Strangely enough, M anto elicited similar extrem e contra­ dictory reactions even in his death: M anto is dead. W ell, the w orld is rid o f an obscene writer. However, I am at a complete loss to understand the reaction o f these Pakistanis— organising meetings, passing resolutions, w riting articles, bringing out special

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numbers o f magazines. And all this on the death o f an obscene writer! W hy all this hullabaloo...10 And if this confusion were not enough, Manto made it worse by calling himself “a fraud o f the first order” 11 who could have done better by taking up a “gentlem an’s profession like serving the government, or selling ghee or inventing some miracle drug .” 12 And on yet another occasion, he suggested that his grave carry the following inscription by way o f an epitaph: H ere lies buried Saadat Hasan M anto. And buried in his heart are all the secrets and techniques o f story writing. Buried under tons o f soil, he is w ondering w ho is a greater story writer— God or he himself.13 N ow , how do we discover the real M anto among these various Mantos? H ow do we find out which of the evalua­ tions about him is closer to the truth? Is he really an obscene w riter w ho is a threat to civilised societies? O r, is he really a great story w riter w ho took upon himself the onus o f exposing the hypocrisy behind the facade o f civility? Well, to answer these questions and to understand the true significance o f his art we need to examine— as is the case w ith all literary evaluations— M anto’s ideology, aesthetics and architectonics. But this leads us to the next set o f questions about him . Does M anto have an ideology— he w ho not only always denied having one but w ho denounced those aligned one way or the other? Secondly, and m ore significantly, does M anto have an aesthetics— he w ho relished writing on the filthy and the ugly, the sick and the stinking, the violent and the venom ous? A nd finally, does M anto have a definite technique o f story w riting w hich makes him n o t only different from his contemporaries like Krishan Chander, Is m a t C h u g ta i a n d R a j i n d c r S in g h B c d i b u t f r o m o t h e r

story writers o f the Indian subcontinent? Scattered amongst his non-fictional writings— defences and depositions, essays and epistles— are scores o f state­

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ments, brief and elaborate, w hich deal w ith the definition o f literature, its relationship with society, the responsibility o f a writer, the role o f didacticism in creative writing, the nature and significance o f language and o f literature, the significance o f style and m etaphor, and similar issues. It shall be my endeavour in the following pages to construct M anto’s ideology, his aesthetics and his architectonics from these observations. M anto considered literature to be som ething very serious and he defined it as the pulse o f a nation, o f a community. T o quote him: Literature is n ot a dead body, w hich a doctor and his students can place on a table and begin to dissect. L iterature is n o t a disease b u t is its alternative. Literature is n ot a medicine to be adm inistered in a prescribed m anner and quantity. Literature is the pulse o f a nation, a com m unity— literature gives news about the nation, the com m unity to w hich it belongs, its health, its illness. Stretch your hand and pick up any dust-laden book from an old shelf—the pulse o f a bygone era will begin to beat under your finger-tips.14 D iscussing the subject m atter o f literatu re— any literature— M anto linked it up w ith the tw o most basic needs— he calls them hungers— o f hum an life. T he first one is for food and the second for the proxim ity and possession o f the opposite sex. All hum an activities, M anto observed, could be reduced to these two kinds o f hunger and the tw o types o f relationships spawned by these hungers, namely, one, betw een food and the hum an stom ach and tw o, betw een m an and w om an. These, according to him , have been the m ost ancient o f relationships— since time im m em orial— and are eternal. He observed: T h at’s why whatever social, cultural, political-and warrelated problems there are around us today, these tw o “hungers” are at the bottom o f them all. If we lift the

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veil from the face o f the current war then we shall see that behind mountains o f dead bodies, there is nothing but “hunger” for nationhood.15 M anto believed that a w riter— any w riter— in any part o f the world— progressive or reactionary, old or young— was faced w ith all kinds o f social problems. “ H e selects from amongst those and writes about them. Sometimes in favour, sometimes against.” 16 H ow does a w riter go about selecting, from amongst hundreds and thousands, those problem s on w hich he wishes to focus his attention? M anto has com m ented o n this aspect in detail, providing us w ith a significant opportunity to peep into his mind. “A w riter picks up his pen only w hen his sensibility is h u rt,” said M anto w hile defending his story, “D huan,” against charges o f obscenity in the court o f the Special Magistrate, Lahore. “I don’t rem em ber it clearly now since so m uch time has elapsed,” observed M anto, “but surely I must have been hurt on seeing some situation, gesture or incident that provokes the pen o f a writer.”17 Elaborating again on the choice o f a subject, M anto observed in his lecture at Jogeshw ari College, Bombay, that routine situations o f life did n o t interest him: W hen a wom an in my neighbourhood gets beaten by her husband every day and then cleans his shoes, she gets no sympathy w hatsoever from me. B ut I feel a strange kind o f empathy for a woman in my neighbour­ hood w ho fights w ith her husband, threatens to com m it suicide and then goes away to see a film, keeping her husband on tenterhooks for two hours.18 Again, it was not just physical events w hich m otivated Manto: A w om an w ho grinds grains the w hole day and then sleeps soundly at night can never be the heroine o f m y stories. Instead, a rank sinful prostitute w ho stays awake

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at night but w ho while sleeping during the day, gets up suddenly from a nightmare in which old age is knocking at her door, may be the heroine o f my story.19 M anto was to attract a lo t o f flak— R aja Sahib M ehm udabad was merely one o f the many w ho criticised him severely20— for m aking prostitutes the principal characters o f his stories. R eferring to his choice, M anto observed: If any m ention o f a prostitute is obscene then her existence too is obscene. If any m ention o f h er is prohibited, then her profession too should be prohibited. D o away w ith the prostitute, reference to her w ould vanish by itself.21 Defending his right to talk o f prostitutes, he said: W e can discuss lawyers openly. W e can talk about barbers, washermen, vegetable sellers and inn-keepers. W e can tell tales about thieves, petty criminals, dupes and those who way-lay. W e can spin yams about djinns and fairies...why can’t we think o f the prostitute? W hy can’t we pay attention to her profession? W hy can’t we say something about those people w ho visit her?22 Developing his defence further, M anto observed that it was a w riter’s prerogative to show society “the face o f its weakness.” The house o f a prostitute is in itself a dead body which society carries on its shoulders. Until it is buried some­ w here by society, there will be discussions about it. This dead body may be highly decomposed, it may be stinking, it may be terrifying, it may be frightening, but there is no harm in looking at its face. Does it bear no relation to us? Are w e not related to it at all? Well, once in a while, we rem ove the shroud and peer at its face and also show the same to others as well.23

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As I have shown elsewhere,24 it is not just prostitutes, b u t m ost people on the periphery— the M angus, the Bishen Singhs, the Neetis, the Sugandhis, the Shankars and the Thaila Kanjars— w hom M anto chose to make the subjects o f his stones. And his choice was no accident but a conscious socio-political act o f empathy w ith those sections o f society w ho survive o n the fringes— those hapless victims o f m an’s exploitation at the hands o f fellow men. A nd these people on the periphery— as M anto believed and depicted— not only show a greater sense o f humanist values than those w ho occupy the core, but also carry forward whatever is o f perm anent significance in a hum an society which finds itself in turmoil. The question o f looking for the intention o f the author is significant in the case o f M anto from another p oint o f view as well. M anto repeatedly stated that he never resorted to didacticism in his stories. R e fe rrin g to “D huan” again, M anto observed: In this story, I have taught no lessons, given no lectures on moral behaviour, since I do not consider myself to be either a preacher or a teacher o f morals.25 In another essay— “Afsananigar Aur Jinsi Masail”— he stated categorically that “w e writers are not prophets. W e look at a phenom enon, a problem from various points o f view in various circumstances and whatever we m ake o f it, we present to the world at large but we never force the w orld to accept our point o f view.”26 Such statements by M anto led his critics to deduce— absolutely enoneously, o f course— that M anto had no lessons to teach, and no morals to preach. M uham m ed Hasan Askari, for instance, observed: M anto did through his stories w hat an honest (honest not in matters political but honest in a literary sense) and a true literateur ought to have done while w riting in those circumstances and so immediately after the events. H e puts the question o f good or bad beyond the pale o f

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controversy. His point o f view is neither political nor social, nor even moral but literary and creative. M anto only tried to understand the relationship between acts o f cruelty and the various points o f view o f the perpetrator and the victim o f cruelty.27 N o t only does the above evaluation completely ignore the essential point o f view expressed by M anto in his stories, it is full o f the most obvious contradictions. It was Thomas Hardy w ho had once defined a good story as one w hich “slaps us into a new awareness.” If there is one w riter whose stories fit the bill, it is M anto. N o t only his w ell-know n stories like “Kali Salwar,” “B u,” “D h u a n ,” “K hol D o ,” “T handa G o sh t,” “ O opar, N eeche aur D arm ian,” “Babu G opinath,” “H atak,” “Naya Q an o o n ” and “Toba T ek Singh,” but also scores o f those really ‘capsule’ ones published under “Siyah Hashye” and “D ekh Kabira R oya” slap one— nothing less— into a new socio­ political and, m ore significantly, m oral awareness. T he point to rem em ber is that although M anto did not state his moral at the end o f the story, he did have one w hich can be deduced from his intentions implicit as in his stories. As he him self put it, stories like “Kali Salwar,” w ere not written for pleasure. A w ork o f literature being a social document, events— big or small— in the life o f a society or a nation inspire its writers to create literary texts around them. Some events, how ever, are o f such an intensity or a cataclysmic nature that instead o f provoking a w riter’s sensibility into action, they shock it into a sudden numbness o f complete inaction. His sources o f inspiration appear to dry up suddenly and, how ever, hard he may try, he is not able to— at least temporarily— use his creative talent. This is precisely what happened to Saadat Hasan M anto w hen he migrated to Pakistan in the w ake o f the division o f a single nation state— India— into tw o independent entities— India and Pakistan. M anto was completely confounded, not as much by the geographical divide as by the cultural chasm created

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by it. As he him self put it later, recalling those days o f great confusion and crippling dilemmas: For three m onths, I could n o t decide anything. It seemed as if a num ber o f films w ere being projected onto the same screen at the same time. All m ixed up: sometimes the bazaars o f Bombay and its streets, some­ times the small, swiftly m oving trams o f Karachi, and those slow-moving mule-carts, and sometimes the noisy hum drum o f the restaurants o f Lahore. I simply could not make out where I was. The whole day I w ould sit in my chair, lost in thought.28 This, directly and adversely, affected M anto’s writing: ...I prepared myself for w riting but w hen I actually sat dow n to write, I found my m ind divided. In spite o f trying hard, I could not separate India from Pakistan and Pakistan from India. T he same puzzling questions rang repeatedly in my mind: W ill the literature o f Pakistan be different? If so, how? W ho has claims to whatever was w ritten in undivided India? W ill that be divided too? Are the basic questions confronting the Indians and the Pakistanis not the same? W ill U rdu go out o f use there? W hat form will U rdu acquire here in Pakistan? Is our state a religious state? W e will, o f course, be loyal to the state but will we have the freedom to criticise the state? W ill our circumstances after partition be any different from those under the British?29 M anto was responding to the debate initiated by M oham m ed Hasan Askari about the status and nature o f Pakistani adab. Apparently, like his ow n Bishen Singh, alias Toba Tek Singh, M anto found himself stranded on the no m an’s land between the “two streams. O ne o f life and the other o f death. Between the two lay the dry land w here hunger and thirst co-existed w ith excessive eating and drinking.”30 Finally, Manto settled down to write light essays on subjects like “Types o f Noses” and “W riting on

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W alls” for Imroz. And as he him self tells us, gradually his style acquired a “ tinge o f satire.” M an to did not feel this change in him self and he penned sharp and incisive essays like “T h e Q uestion Arises” and “W hen I O pened M y Eyes this M orning.” H e felt that his creative faculties had finally found a way o u t and he began to w rite w ith renew ed vigour. Earlier, M anto had undergone another similar phase o f literary limbo. In a letter from Bombay, w ritten in O ctober, 1945, to his friend A hm ed N adeem Q asm i, M anto had observed th at he had becom e “ extrem ely lazy and idle” and that he found the act o f w riting “a meaningless physical exercise.” T h en he w ent on to explain the reasons for such a state o f mind: T h e fact o f the m atter is that this atom bom b has shocked me out o f my wits. Every activity appears to be meaningless.31

2 I w ould now like to shift the focus o f this essay from the content o f M anto’s story w riting to the form and style o f his writing. M anto paid equal, if not m ore, attention to the form o f story-w riting as to its content. Let me begin w ith a few o f his observations about the language o f literature since it is not M anto’s views b u t his language which came in for close scrutiny and criticism— not only by his critics but by the courts as well. D efending himself against the charge of obscene w riting in his “D huan” and “Kali Salwar,” M anto had made a very perceptive sociolinguistic observation: In language very few words are obscene in themselves, it is their usage which makes even the purest o f words obscene. I believe nothing is obscene in itself, but even a chair or a bowl can becom e obscene through presen­ tation in an obscene manner— things are made obscene on purpose.”32

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In fact, there is no lim it to considering a w ord— any w ord— as obscene. M anto tells us about the observation by a witness for the prosecution— Lala N anak Chand Naaz— w h o considered the use o f the w ord aashiq by Ismat Chugtai in her story “Lihaaf,” as obscene w hich elicited a smile even from the Special Magistrate, R ai Sahib Lala Sant R am .33 Similarly, defending the use o f some swear words in his story “Thanda G osht,” M anto had observed that “ Ishar Singh has his ow n style o f conversation. Thousands o f people use the words w hich the w riter has put in his m o u th in their everyday lives. This act o f his is not unnatural. T he same can be said o f K ulw ant K aur as w e ll.” 34 It is their everyday usage in non-belligerent situations w hich makes these so-called swear-words lose their abusive character. M anto gives us the example o f the swear w ord saala which is considered an abusive term in north India. H ow ever, w hen it is used in the following situations, it is not abusive: Hamaara baap saala achha admi tha cr Saala hamse mishtek ho gaya35

However, M anto made a more significant and aesthetic observation, w hen he was asked in return— “ H ow could w e have expected sophisticated language from a crude and uncouth character like Ishar Singh?” “If the w riter had put civilised and sophisticated words in his m outh,” observed M anto, “the very basis o f realistic w riting w ould have gone; in fact, I would say, the story would have acquired a very crude form and art w ould have sunk low to the level o f mischief.”36 It is, therefore, quite clear from the above that M anto believed in the use o f everyday language w h ich he presented in a matter o f fact manner:

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If I w ant to w rite about a w om an’s breasts, I call them the breasts o f a woman. Y ou cannot refer to a w om an’s breasts as peanuts, a table or a razor.37 He w ent on to question the wisdom o f not presenting a thing as it is: “W hy should ju te be presented as a piece o f silk cloth...can denying reality help us becom e b etter hum an beings?”38 M anto was very particular not only about the language o f his literary w riting but about other literary devices as well. H ere is an example o f his use o f euphem ism . Euphem ism , as we know, is a device used by writers to describe those taboos and events w hich are likely to offend the sensibilities o f their readers. W hen M anto w anted to describe the sexual act betw een Ishar Singh and Kulwant Kaur in his “Thanda G osht”— and this we know from the story is very crucial since it is during this act that Kulwant Kaur discovers his temporary im potence and suspects it to be because o f some other w om an in Ishar Singh’s life— M anto sought the help o f a game o f cards. After Ishar Singh had gone on with the foreplay for far too long and w ithout the expected results, an im patient Kulwant Kaur says: “ Ishar Singh, you’ve shuffled the deck sufficiently well. N ow throw the card.”39 Such careful concealment, and yet he has been accused o f obscene w riting. Let us look at another literary device— the metaphor— w hich is an essential element o f a w riter’s aesthetics. This is what G .C. Narang, an em inent critic o f U rdu literature, has to say about the use o f m etaphor by Manto: N o doubt, M anto’s language can be highly suggestive but it cannot cast itself in the mould o f m odem express­ ion which is replete with symbolism and metaphor.40 This observation, to my mind, is as m uch off the mark as another statement by Narang, w ho w hen drawing up a distinction betw een M anto and Krishan C hander, had observed that w hile the form er was “ interested in the

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seamy side o f sex, the latter (was interested) in dramatising hum anism .’*41 It is really difficult to decide w ho is a greater hum anist writer— M anto o r Krishan Chander? In fact, the poser that those w ho write o f ‘seamy side’ o f life could not dramatise humanism is in itself wrong. But to return to my argum ent about M anto’s use o f metaphors, I reproduce below a passage from M anto’s story “Kali Salwar” to show h o w effectively M anto uses m etaphors to capture the predicam ent o f the principal character, Sultana, w ho is a prostitute: T here was a big, open maidan on the left in w hich w ere laid out innum erable rail lines. W hen these rail lines shone in the sun, Sultana would look at her hands o n w hich were visible blue veins exactly like the rail lines. In the big, open maidan, engines and trains w ould m ove about the w hole day. Sometimes hither, som e­ times thither. The chukk-chukk and phukk-phukk o f the engines w ould resound the whole day. Early mornings, w hen she got up and came to the balcony, she w ould see a strange sight. T hick smoke billowed in the mist, rising to the hazy skies in the shape o f fat and heavy men. Big clouds o f steam too w hich w ere em itted noisily vanished into thin air in the twinkling o f an eye. Sometimes w hen she saw the coaches o f a train that had been pushed loose by an engine, m oving about on the rails, she thought o f herself. She w ould think that she too had been pushed and let loose onto the rails o f life by someone and she was m oving automatically. O ther people w ere shifting the points and she was m oving ahead— w here to she did not know. A day would come when the m om entum o f the push w ould gradually cease, and she w ould stop som ew here at some destination which she had not seen before.42 This is how M anto him self has com m ented o n this passage: “W hat b e tte r sym bols could there b e for discerning readers? I have attem pted to present the true picture o f Sultana’s life w ith the help o f those symbols and

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m etaphors.”43 This com m ent as well as the above quota­ tion from “Kali Salwar,” shows that M anto was quite capable o f using the metaphorical m ode o f writing w hen it was called for. M anto is a great stylist. His concern for style, besides presenting a character o r a situation in its m atter-of-fact realistic manner, as has been shown above, also includes precision and appropriateness o f words and expressions. Replace one o f them and the whole story may fall flat on its face. This is so obviously evident in the capsule stories in “Siyah Hashye” and “D ekh Kabira R o y a.” Even the so-called nonsense words and collocations in M anto’s stories are not only indispensable but also memorable. R em em ber the expressions dharantakhta and anti ki panti po from “Babu G opinath,” or the expression opar the gar gar the annex the bedhyana the mung the daal o f the lalten from “Toba T ek Singh.” M anto— it may appear to be incon­ gruous— is also a great votary o f stylistic sophistry and he expected such suaveness even from those w ho abused him. M aking fun o f the crude style adopted by some o f his critics, M anto commented: I say, if you want to throw stones at me, do throw them in a sophisticated manner. I am not ready to have m y head split open by someone who does not know h o w to split open heads with stones. If you do not know how to do so, do learn it— if you can learn to say your prayers, learn to keep fasts, and learn to participate in literary meets, you should also learn the art o f throwing stones at others...If you want to abuse me, do so gladly...but only in a suave manner. D o n ’t ruin the taste in your m outh, nor hurt my sentiments. For me, the sophistry o f style is the only touchstone.44

3

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3 Finally, a few words about M anto’s architectonics o f storyw riting. First, the physical environm ent in w hich he created his stories. R eplying to a question— H ow do you w rite your stories?— M anto observed: I sit on the sofa in my room , get hold o f a pen and paper, say bismillah and begin writing a story— my three daughters are around, making a noise. I talk to them , arbitrate in their sundry quarrels. I also prepare a salad for myself—look after the gyest, if one happens to drop in—b ut go on writing the story.45 It is interesting to n o te here th at w h en B uchi Emecheta, a renow ned Nigerian w om an novelist observed to an interviewer that she w rote her novels in the kitchen, in the presence o f her five children indulging in their various activities, the interview er, a lady, was shocked into disbelief and she protested against the choice o f such a m undane physical environm ent for as serious an activity as creative writing. But, perhaps, both M anto and Em echeta wish to be in close touch w ith the routine physical reality o f daily life while giving reign to the flights o f their fancy. It does not, however, mean that M anto could always write at will— whenever, w herever and under all circumstances. I have already m entioned above that events like the parti­ tion o f the country and the dropping o f the atom bom b over Japan during the Second W orld W ar had alm ost paralysed his creative faculties, although tem porarily. Similarly, he describes a situation w hen his inspiration simply refused to oblige him: I put pressure on my m ind to bring out a story— I try to be a story writer. I smoke cigarette after cigarette but no story emerges from my m ind. Finally, I lie dow n exhausted like a barren w om an...I change sides, get up, feed my sparrows, swing my daughters around, rid the house o f the rubbish, collect at one place all the small

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shoes w hich are scattered around, but as for the dam n story, which I feel is lying somewhere in my pocket, it refuses to shift to m y mind and 1 feel miserable.46 However, M anto’s inspiration is not som ething purely intuitive and irrational. It is a well thought-out activity. In another essay called “M anto,” he sheds light on the same physical circumstances o f his craftsmanship: W hen he wants to write a story, he’d think about it at night. H e ’d be confused, h e ’d get up at five in the m orning and w ould like to extract it out o f the m orning newspaper b ut w o n ’t succeed. T hen h e ’d go to the bathroom and w ould like to cool his head so as to be able to think. B ut h e ’d fail once again. Irritated, h e ’d pick up a quarrel w ith his wife for nothing; failing once again, he’d go out to buy a paan. The paan would conti­ nue to lie on his table and he’d be struggling— in vain— w ith the plot o f his story...finally, in sheer retaliation, he’d pick up a pen or pencil and after w riting 786 on the top, he’d begin the story w ith the first sentence that cam e to his mind,,*,“Babu G o p in a th ,” “ H a ta k ,” “M um m y,” “T oba T ek Singh,” “M ozel”— all these stories, he’s written in the same fraudulent manner.47 In fact, after a lot o f thought and effort, M anto had standardised for him self certain aspects o f the architectonics o f story writing and could produce reasonably good stories w henever commissioned. As he grew older, M anto w rote excessively, primarily to m eet the expenses o f his daily drink. The manner and the speed with w hich he produced some o f these stories— not all o f them are above average, although stories like “ Aulad,” are very good— provides us w ith ample evidence o f his having honed the architec­ tonics o f story w riting very well. Let me illustrate this through the analysis o f one such story, “Aankhen,” w ritten during this period. Towards the end o f his life, M anto w ould often throw a challenge to all and sundry: “Give me a sentence and I will

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turn it into a full-fledged story, right here, under your very eyes.” O ne day a young poet— Farhaad Zaidi was his name— gave Manto the following sentence: In her whole body, I liked her eyes the best. R ight in the presence o f half a dozen people, amidst the din and noise o f the office o f Naqoosh, M anto took a piece o f paper, picked up his pen, wrote 786 on the top, which as we know is saying the Bismillah, and then w rote the title— “A ankhen.” T hen he copied the sentence— In her w hole body, I liked her eyes the best. H ere are some o f the sentences which followed it: Those eyes were exactly like the headlights o f a car in a dark night, w hich we notice first o f all. Please do not think that those eyes were beautiful. N o t at all. I can differentiate betw een beautiful and ugly. Forgive me ’ for saying so, but they w eren’t beautiful; despite that, they were terribly attractive.48 These sentences give us a very good insight not only into M anto’s architectonics but also his aesthetics. First o f all, he finds a very unusual simile for the eyes— like the headlights o f a car in a dark night. It is a very modernist— or shall I say very post-m odernist— simile. Secondly, he shocks us by observing that the eyes were not beautiful. T he statement surprises us since it is in apparent contra­ diction to the statement in the opening sentence— In her w hole body, I liked her eyes the best. But he resolves the contradiction in the next statement— that “despite that, they were terribly attractive.” M anto then goes on to weave quite a complicated plot, full o f twists and turns, the culm ination o f w hich is that those attractive eyes have no seeing pow er in them — they are stone blind. And in the last sentence is also M anto’s signature, namely the unexpected ending. It is interesting to observe here that as a part o f his craftsmanship, M anto

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led his readers up the garden path by confronting them w ith unexpected endings story after story. W e get a similar insight into M anto’s craftsmanship about story w riting through a radio-play w hich M anto w rote under the title, “Aao Kahani L ikhen.” Lajwanti, one o f the three recurrent characters in a num ber o f plays by M anto, suggests to h er husband, Kishore, another recurrent character, that they write a story joindy. Kishore says that he does n o t know how to write one, although he can narrate one. T h e story he chooses to narrate goes as follows: O nce there was a girl named Naani. She had a sister called Nahani and her brother was called Bisaula. Naani set up three villages o f w hich two were already set up and the third could not be set up. The one w hich could not be set up was visited by three potters. T w o o f them w ere physically handicapped while the third had no hands...The one w ho had no hands made three bowls; tw o were broken and the third had no bottom ...the one w hich had no bottom was used for cooking three grains o f rice...49 T he m anner in w hich the story proceeds gives us a chance to ‘k n o w ’ M an to ’s m ind about the craft o f constructing stories. At each stage an unusual elem ent is introduced. O f the three villages proposed to be set up, two were already set up and the third could not be set up, or o f the three potters tw o were physically handicapped and the third had no hands, or o f the three pots tw o were broken and the third had n o bottom , etc. And then o f the three choices offered, the last one w hich is the most unusual o f the three is picked up to com pound the bizarre elements: the village which could not be set up is visited by three potters or the potter w ho had no hands made three bowls or the bowl w ithout a bottom is used for cooking rice, etc. W hat follows in the play w hen they begin to construct a story is an interesting see-saw battle in w hich Lajwanti

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introduces an element or a situation w hich forces a certain kind o f continuation, w hile in his tu rn her husband, Kishore, always manages to give it an unexpected twist to foil her expected continuation, so that towards the end Lajwanti grows really desperate and picks up a quarrel with Kishore for blocking all her attem pts to make the story m ove in a certain direction and proceed in a particular manner. As stated above, this is what M anto always does w ith his ow n stories as well— he introduces an elem ent w hich raises-in his readers certain expectations. T hen he gives the story an entirely unexpected twist. This he 3oes in situation after situation, in story after story. His reader is ever hopeful o f his making one false m ove and the story falling flat on its face but it never happens. In fact, M anto said as m uch w hen he com pared him self w ith a ropedancer H e is a person who never walks on a straight, smooth road but walks on a taut rope. People expect him to fall any m om ent b u t the shameless fellow that he is, he has not fallen to date.50 T o sum up then, Manto is an outstanding story writer o f o ur times w ho belongs not just to Pakistan or to the Indian subcontinent but to the larger heritage o f w orld literatures. His story “Toba T ek Singh” could be counted amongst not only his best b u t amongst the best ever w ritten. M anto’s choice o f prostitutes and pimps and people living on the periphery o f society as subjects was not accidental. It was an essential part o f his ideology— an ideology w hich fore­ grounded the lives o f the marginalised and the subaltern w ith the clear objective o f not only changing the course o f the majority discourse but to subvert it. T he use o f matterof-fact language, unusual similes and m etaphors and an incisive, satirical style w ere a part o f the same aesthetic . strategy o f subversion. T he technique o f giving his stories strange, unexpected and at times w eird endings was not v w ithout prem editated objectives. Slapping his readers into a new social awareness for subverting the status-quo and

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bringing about fundamental changes into the societal set up. H e is thus not, as made o u t to be by M uham m ad Sadiq, “a prince o f pom ographers,”51 but he is, as Krishan C hander put it, in a very telling m etaphor, “the Lord Shiva o f U rdu literature, w ho had drunk to the dregs, the poison o f life and then had gone on to describe in great details its taste and colour.”52

N O TES AND REFERENCES /

\

1. C ited in Balraj M enra and Sharad Datt, Dastav&ujrtA. 4, N ew Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1993, p. 19. The translation o f this and all subsequent quotations in this paper are mine. I am grateful to Professor G .C . N arang and M .G. Vassanji for going through the paper and making some very valuable suggestions. .. 2. Cited in D evinder Issar (ed.), Manto Adalat R e Kathghare Men. Delhi: Indraprasth Prakashan, 1991, p. 51. --— 3. Ibid., p. 97. 4. Ibid., p. 107. 5. D evinder Issar (ed.), Mantonama. Delhi: Indraprasth Prakashan, 1981, p. 33. 6. D evendra Satyarthi wrote his, “Naye Devta,” in retaliation to M anto’s “Taraqqi Pasand” in which he had made fun o f Satyarthi. 7. Ibid., p. 25. 8. Ali Sardar Jafari praised, am ong others, the story “B u” in an article published in Qaumi Jang (Bombay) in February, 1945. T he same Ali Sardar Jafari attacked the same story for its reactionary contents, a few weeks later. 9. Aga Babar, “M anto Aur Veshya” in Mantonama, op.cit., p. 36. 10. C ited in Manto Adalat Ke Katghare Me, op.cifc,y p. 9. 11. Saadat Hasan M anto in Dastavez, vol. 4, op.cit., p. 177. 12. M anto, “Pas Manzar,” ibid., p. 133. 13. Mantonama, op.cit., p. 13. 14. “Kasaud” in Dastavez, vol. 4, op.cit., p. 61. 15. “Afsana Nigar Aur Jinsi Masail,” ibid., p. 56. 16. Ibid. 17. “ Tehriri Bayan,” ibid., p. 41. 18. “Adab-e-Jadeed,” ibid., p. 27. 19. Ibid.

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20. Ibid., p. 26. 21. “Safed Jhooth,*’ in Dastavez, vol. 4, op.cit., p. 50. 22. Ib id 23. “ Safed Jh o o th ,” in Dastavez,vol. 4, op.cit., p. 50. 24. Harish Narang, “Images from Periphery: Politics, M anto and M orality,” in Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, voL 1, N ov., 1994, pp. 62-78. 25. “Tehriri Bayan,” op.cit., p. 41. 26. Dastavez, vol. 4, op.cit., p. 56. 27. M uham m ed Hasan Askari, “Hashiya Aarai” in Mantonama, op.cit., p. 238. 28. M anto, “ Zahm ate-M ihre-D arakhshaan,” in Dastavez, vol. 4, p. 77. 29. Ibid.. pp. 77-78. 30. Ibid. 31. R eproduced in Dastavez, vol. 4, op.cit., p. 191. 32. “ Tehriri Bayan,** ibid., pp. 39-40. 33. Ibid., p. 35. 34. Dastavez, vol. 4, p. 96. 35. Ibid., p. 97. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., p. 42. 38. Ibid., p. 97. 39. M anto, “Thanda Gosht,” Dastavez, vol. 2, p. 270. 40. Gopi C hand Narang, Urdu Language A n d Literature, N ew Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1991, p. 147. 41. Ibid., p. 133. 42. “Safed Jh o o th ” Dastavez, vol. 4, op.cit., p. 51. 43. Ibid. 44. Dastavez, vol. 4, op.cit., p. 62. 45. M anto, “Main Afsana Kyon Likhta H oon,” Dastavez, vol. 4, p. 175. 46. Ibid., pp. 175-76. 47. Dastavez,vol. 4, op .cit, p. 179. 48. Dastavez, vol. 1, op.cit., p. 393. 49. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 19. 50. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 178. 51. M uham m ad Sadiq, Twentieth Century Literature, Karachi: Royal Book Company, 1983, p. 305. 52. K rishan C hander, “M anto:U rdu Adab Ka Shankar” in Mantonama, op.cit., pp. 30-31.

The Them e o f Piety and Sin in “Babu Gopinath” V A R IS ALVI

Love oscillates betw een piety and sin and, in the conflict betw een the tw o (that is, betw een commands and prohi­ bitions), acquires multidimensional and myriad meanings. It is only in the best o f romantic poetry that this tension manifests itself in its infinite variety. O therw ise in the com m on poetic tradition there is contem pt for sin, glorifi­ cation o f love and ridicule o f piety. “Babu G opinath” not only exemplifies th e m etaphoric p ow er o f rom antic poetry, it also possesses its ow n unique range o f metaphors w hich add to this n o tio n o f love. It is essential to understand these metaphors in order the grasp the essence o f the story. Babu Gopinath is such a lover o f ghazals, that he even has the courage to let the wom an he loves spend a night w ith a stranger so as to hear a courtesan sing. H e is a dervesh o f the brothel and is com pletely im m ersed in worldly affairs— but it must be rem em bered that he also has the capacity to be detached from both. His attachments are n ot possessive. H e admires the body, b u t does not exploit it. His sin is sin. Yet it neither exalts nor degrades him. H e is neither a saint w ho worships a prostitute as a deity, n o r is he a cynic like M oham m ad Shafiq Tusi (another sinful character in the story) w ho cannot see a wom an in a prostitute and goodness in a woman. Speaking about Zeenat, a prostitute, G opinath says, “Zeenat is a very good w om an, b ut alas she is too noble— I am not interested in w om en w ho look like wives.” He is capable o f understanding the w om anhood and hum anity o f a prostitute. That is w hy he never exploits the body o f a woman.

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In R ajinder Singh B edi’s story, “Kalyani,” M ahipat, w ho is a counterpart o f M oham m ed Shafiq, sees Kalyani only as a prostitute. W hen Kalyani shows him her child, he can neither tolerate the w om an in the prostitute n o r the m o th er in the wom an. For M ahipat, w hen a brothel begins to resemble a hom e, it becomes hell and h e runs away from it. Shafiq at least is possessed by th e dark beauty o f lust and he never exploits the w om an he does n o t like. In contrast, Yasin, the ow ner o f Nagina H otel, is m erely licentious. He neither loves a w om an like Gopi­ nath nor worships the body like Shafiq. In his debauchery there is the pettiness o f an ignoble shopkeeper w ho knows h o w to exploit the goodness o f others. Thus, while poor Zeenat waits for him at a hotel, he uses her car to take a C hristian girl he has began to fancy o u t for a ride. G opinath’s com m ent on this incident is as follows; M anto Sahib! W hat sort o f man is he? If he is fed up, he should tell her. Z eenat is also a strange w om an. She knows w h at’s going on, bu t she never tells him to arrange for his ow n car if he wants to make love to that Christian w om an...W hat shall I do M anto Sahib! She is good and gentle. I don’t know what to do. O ne should be a little clever. H e makes the effort to turn Z eenat into a clever prostitute. The problem , however, is that she is neither interested in love nor sin. She surrenders her heart to Shafiq w ith the same indifference w ith w h ich she surrenders her body to Yasin or to any other customer. It is as if none o f them is a part o f her existence. She neither sees herself as a prostitute nor as a mistress. She needs som eone w ho can make her aware o f her innate goodness, w ho can awaken the wom an in her. According to Gopi­ nath, she needs* a man w ho can protect her, take care o f h er and give her a sense o f belonging. O ne w ho may or may not love her (she doesn’t need love), but w ould never treat her as a prostitute or a mistress. In other words, she

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needs a husband and a hom e for only then can she discover her womanliness, her m otherhood and her humanity. Sin leads G opinath towards sainthood and Zeenat to ­ wards domesticity. Shafiq and Yasin are content to be sinful. Zeenat, however, wants to reform. Gopinath revels in his life o f sinful pleasures, yet he is not so completely absorbed in it as to w ant to make debauchery the goal o f his life. B ut what is the goal o f his life? Perhaps nothing. Because he regards everything as a fraud and an illusion. Here we must consider G opinath’s existential condition. At some p o in t in his life he realises that life has n o meaning; that life is m erely a dream and hum an beings shadows. T hat is w hy he either says nothing or feigns ignorance w hen A bdul, his servant, spends only ten or tw enty rupees out o f the hundred G opinath gives him , and then either pockets the rest, or pretends to have dropped the m oney or asserts that his pocket was picked. Similarly, he knows that not everyone w ith a runny nose and a drooling m outh is a saint, yet he continues to seek the company o f Ghaffar, w ho is a fraud dressed in saintly rags. H e understands the reality o f the society in w hich he lives and yet is detached from it. It is as if he lives in a dream and prefers to continue to sleep and dream. O ther people are acceptable to him only if he can see them as shadows in a dream. Gopinath is the son o f a miserly bania. After his father’s death he inherits ten lakhs o f rupees. H e doesn’t hoard them. H e receives them as if they have come to him in a dream; he squanders them as if he were living in a dream. G opinath doesn’t have m uch faith in life. He is an intelligent man, but he doesn’t use his intelligence to give a shape to his life. He wastes his life, just as he squanders his m oney. Life for him is as fleeting as wealth. T o save m oney like a miser or to treat life’s wealth prudently is against his dervesh-like nature. H e likes to keep the com pany o f the p o o r and o f vagabonds. Perhaps they are like him and make no effort to give a meaning to their life or to shape it. He feels that

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a man can live w ith them w ithout pretence. For a man like Gopinath that is essential because he can’t lead a life o f duplicities. Even if he wants to, he can’t be a hypocrite, for the dissolute life he has chosen for himself has already ripped off all masks. T he w orld o f the respectable, the noble, the wellm annered and the influential is n o t for G opinath. The duplicitousness that is required to live in it is against his temperament. He feels suffocated in such a world. In order to survive in it, the real self, w hich is a battlefield o f idiosyncrasies, has to hide behind a rich and glamorous facade. In a brothel, how ever, there is no pretence, no dem and to construct an artificial moral self. T here m en behave according to their innate natures. In a brothel, the measure o f their goodness cannot be found in conventional morality. Indeed» Manto creates a figure like G opinath not to pass moral judgem ents but to discover the sources o f creative energy. Gopinath is neither cunning nor a hypocrite. H e cannot live in the practical w orld, because he has never been cheated by life. Indeed, a person like Gopinath can either be a cynic or a sanyasi; the idiosyncrasies o f eros can either lead him to the brothel and the experiences o f sensual pleasures or make him into a religious quester for w hom life is a dream and the w orld an illusion. H e is the kind o f person w ho can either swallow the bitter truth o f life’s insignificance or set out in search o f some transcendental truth. In any case, what he knows o f the world is a result o f his experiences in it. A nd experiences are all that really m atter to Gopinath. He doesn’t care w hether they are base or exalted, physical or spiritual. M anto is not interested in portraying him either as a M ahatm a or as a rom antic soul w ho worships beauty, elegant feelings and noble habits. H ad he done so, he w ould have w ritten a caricature o f a rom antic and a philosophical tale. G opinath w ould then have sparkled in the story like a bright star and the marriage o f Z eenat w ould have been an example o f the most exalted idealism.

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Further, the life o f deception and deceit in the brothel w ould have acquired an aura o f nobility. Gopinath w ould have, at the end, found peace and consolation. H e w ould, how ever, have lost that energising restlessness w hich enables him to understand that it is the pow er o f eros w hich refuses to allow life to be neglected even w hen it seems meaningless. He is genuinely interested in w om en and feels comfortable in the colourful atmosphere o f the b ro th e l For him, pleasure is not an escape from life; it is, rather, an attempt to pounce upon life. He does, however, realise that while a w om an may be like a lamp w hich can illuminate a night o f pleasure, she can’t keep the dark shadows o f life away forever. Gopinath, in his innocence, his openness, his longing for happiness, is the very antithesis o f the moralist whose life is pure, good, principled and sterile. A moralist is dignified and responsible. N o one can, however, tell w ith certainty if a moralist is really as straightforward and righteous as he pretends to be. G opinath, on the other hand, is b o th a good man and a ruffian. By portraying him thus, M anto has called to question all our normative moral standards. Gopinath is not a pillar o f society. He is merely a lover o f ghazals, and as such is no more perm anent on the path o f life than a footprint. G o p in ath ’s ordinariness is in conform ity w ith the realistic plot o f the story. It is the very absence o f real evil in him that saves th e story from becom ing e ith e r emotional or theatrical. It is also the absence o f nobility in G opinath that prevents the story from sliding in to melodrama. Gopinath arranges the marriage o f Zeenat, his mistress, to someone else. Had he done so out o f noble motives, we w ould have w ept w ith Zeenat and found consolation in tears. Further, had he arranged her marriage cynically, w e w ould have seen it as m erely an o th er example o f the evil perpetrated by feudal lords, w ho have no com punction in getting rid o f their mistresses by m arrying them off to their servants. M anto’s story is, how ever, m ore complex. Here Z eenat’s marriage seems

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like a satisfactory solution to G opinath’s problem s. It enables Gopinath to help give Zeenat the kind o f security he could not have her given. H e knows that temperamen­ tally he is not the marrying kind, and he is also aware that he is rapidly sliding into bankruptcy. An interesting aspect o f G opinath’s character is that in his relationship w ith the prostitutes there is neither the sophistication o f the N aw abs o f L ucknow n o r the cheapness o f the Mawalis o f Bombay. H e is, instead, an ordinary person w ith ordinary preoccupations. And he is happy as he is. H e says: M anto Sahib! I am not interested in music, but I enjoy going o u t and waving a ten or tw enty rupee note before a singer. I love to take out a note, show it to her, watch her get up with an elegant gesture, and walk up to m e to receive it. It gives m e pleasure to stuff the note in one o f my socks and watch her bend dow n to get it. T here are many such meaningless things w hich w e libertines enjoy. Otherwise, w ho doesn’t know that parents put their children in brothels and believers their Gods in tombs and graveyards. It is obvious that Gopinath is quite aware o f the reality o f the world. H e knows that a brothel and a Pir’s tom b are fraudulent places, and chat there can’t be better sites for people w ho w ant to deceive themselves, and Gopinath deceives him self because at some ju n ctu re o f his life, he realises that life is meaningless. Yet, his urge for life is so strong that he does not allow his know ledge o f the meaninglessness o f existence to so overpow er him as to make him com m it suicide. Camus says that people do not make rational decisions to kill themselves, because it isn’t reason but the desire for life w hich enables man to carry on. The paradox is, however, that it is precisely Gopinath’s sense o f life’s deceptions that makes him fully aware o f the romance o f life. He is like a rom antic artist w ho longs to live w ithout inhibitions—although M anto portrays him as a

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person w ho is ignorant o f poetry and literature, and as one w ho has little know ledge o f music. M anto insists on show ing that Gopinath is an ordinary man and n o t a bohem ian artist in revolt against the constraints o f a moral society. H ad he been a bohem ian rebel, Zeenat’s marriage w ould have merely been an example o f a decadent life. M anto is n o t interested in w riting such a stereotypical story. For him a bohem ian life, w here sexuality is debased and cowardly, and where the pow er o f eros is sick, tired and jaundiced, holds no interest. G opinath’s life in the brothel is robust and manly. An ordinary person, his erotic life has none o f the hypocrisies, restrictions and neuroses o f people in a cultured society. Gopinath loves Zeenat like a beloved, b u t he arranges her marriage as if she were his daughter. Love, he believes, can assume various forms. At the first glance it appears that in this seemingly realistic story, Gopinath is a rom antic character. B ut the m om ent one sees Gopinath, seated on a couch smoking his hukkah, bless Zeenat, one realises how far rem oved he is from a figure o f romance. Here it is w orth recalling Mary M cC arthy’s com m ent about Madame Bovary. She says that the only rom antic character in the novel is the drab and uninteresting husband o f Emma. T he peculiarity o f a great w riter is that he doesn’t convey romantic feelings through characters w ho are typically handsome, young and dashing. Gopinath is a man o f feelings and passions. He lives only for the sake o f experiences— even if the experiences are as worthless as those o f offering m oney to a singer and teasing her. H e is an epicure. As he him self confesses, “W hen I am penniless, instead o f going to a brothel, I shall go to the tom b o f a Pir.” H e is not concerned about the reality o f the brothel or the Pir’s tomb. B oth have interest­ ing experiences to offer. H e doesn’t visit either as a supplicant. H e visits them because in the sinful atmosphere o f the brothel and the sacred ambience o f a Pir’s tom b, he finds com fort and delight. T he fact that both are places o f deception and fraud doesn’t call into question the authen­ ticity o f his experiences there. Indeed, did W ordsw orth

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never d o u b t that his experience o f a sacred po w er throbbing behind the spectacle o f nature was an illusion; yet for him the experience o f the secret beauty o f nature was real. Further, he conveyed that experience in such lovely melodies that it was also real and true for his readers. O f course, G opinath’s experiences are neither lofty nor sublime. T hey are utterly comm on. They are so mundane that M anto neither participates in them nor invites us to do so. W e do, however, realise that G opinath’s life w ould be barren and meaningless w ithout them. In the last scene o f the story, in w hich we see Zeenat sitting on a bed decorated w ith flowers, M anto enters the room and breaks the charming illusion. Seeing a profes­ sional prostitute dressed as a virginal bride, he can’t stop himself from asking, “W hat kind o f joke is this?” N o one, how ever, laughs. Z eenat’s eyes fill w ith tears, and she says, “D o n ’t make fun o f me, B haijan.” H er quietly spoken plea, transforms the scene; instead o f com edy, it turns into a scene charged with tragic irony. W hat M anto him self considers deception, is real for G opinath and Zeenat. For Gopinath, Zeenat is simulta­ neously a prostitute and a bride. In his eyes, she is a woman w ho had once played the part o f a prostitute, but is now sitting before him as a bride. W ho knows w hat the real character o f a w om an is? Anyway, the m om ent Zeenat dresses up as a bride, she ceases to be his mistress. G opinath’s romantic feelings as a lover are transformed into fatherly affection. As far as he is concerned, it is n o t his beloved’s marriage he has arranged, but his daughter’s. G opinath is a vagabond in the market place o f beauty and it is essential for him to have m oney to spend. H e is not a miser. H e squanders m oney. In the brothel every transaction is made in cash. Anyone w ho has money can be a custom er. G opinath spends w ith abandon. H e is not w orried about the day w hen he w ould have no m oney left. He is a rake w ho is intoxicated by life; but he is also a realist w ho knows that the w orld is a mistress w ho is

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faithful to no one. He is familiar w ith the etiquette o f a brothel; he knows how to depart elegantly. Gopinath knows that he is a debauchee, but he doesn’t demand faithfulness from Zeenat. Responsible to no one, he knows it w ould be w rong to ask Zeenat to sacrifice herself to him. T he relation betw een the two o f them is complex. They are attached to each other, and yet are aware o f the fact that any demand for perm anence would be fatal for both o f them . That is why he finds a husband for her, and she agrees to the arrangement. The m om ent the marriage is arranged, G opinath’s love for Zeenat ceases to be blind and selfish, and becomes completely selfless. Perhaps, G opinath is childlike and innocent. It is also possible to say that his celebration o f the marriage o f Zeenat, a prostitute, as if it were the marriage o f a virgin, is no better than deceitful play, akin to the marriage o f dolls w hich children perform; that it is fraud, an aspect o f life’s illusions. Yet for G opinath, it is real, it is truthful. Gopinath is really a wise fool w ho knows that if life were a dream in which we w ere shadows, it would be better to live as if we were real and our actions had consequences. That is w hy he doesn’t w ant M anto at the end to break the illusion. W hen M anto mocks at Zeenat dressed as a bride and she weeps, G opinath caresses her affectionately, and looks at M anto with disdain. W hile M anto, the story writer, forgets that there is reality in the fictional structures he creates, Gopinath, the man w ho lives a life o f illusions, is undeceived by the drama o f Z eenat’s marriage, w hich he enacts, and its reality. T he narrator o f the story is M anto himself. H e is involved in the events, b u t maintains a satirical distance from all that he observes. Considering the provocativeness o f the story, the m anner in w hich M anto participates in the story reminds one o f an adroit ring master w ho puts his head into a tiger’s m outh and still manages to com e out alive. M anto is so successful that he describes the events w ithout becom ing sentimental or grandiose. His role in the story is complex. H e refuses to give G opinath and

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Z eenat advice. Instead, he watches their lives take their ow n inexorable course. There are, how ever, times w hen he can’t be a mere spectator. For example, w hen he is told that the real reason for taking Zeenat to Bombay is to help her to become a clever prostitute and allure a rich man, he is shocked. H e writes: W hen I learnt from G opinath the reason why he took Zeenat to Bombay, I was baffled. I couldn’t believe that such a thing was possible. B ut later w hen I observed things m ore closely, my doubts w ere removed. It was Babu G o p in ath ’s earnest desire that Z eenat should becom e the mistress o f a good, rich man in Bombay and extract m oney from different people. At first, M anto’s sympathies are w ith Gopinath w hen he sees him being fleeced by worthless people. But w hen he realises that G opinath is a w eak victim o f clever hunters, his sympathies turn into reproaches and irritable criticism. M anto’s ironic and hum orous asides add to the realism o f the story w ithout diminishing our sympathy for G opinath. This is evident even in the following remarks in w hich he compares G opinath unfavourably w ith the Zam indar o f Sind to w hom Zeenat is married : G hulam Hussain was w earing an elegant suit. H e acknow ledged people w ho came to congratulate him w ith a smile. H e was a large man. Beside him Babu Gopinath seemed like a quail. Y et, despite this ironic description, o u r interest in G opinath does not diminish. W e w onder about him m uch after he caresses Zeenat affectionately and walks out o f the room . Having completed his one mission in life, he leaves Bombay and we continue to w onder if he spends the rest o f his days in the shadow o f a Pir’s tomb. M anto’s attitude towards the other characters is not neutral. He takes sides, expresses his likes and dislikes and passes judgem ents on them . Z eenat, for instance, is

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presented w ith great psychological insight. Instead o f merely being an ordinary Kashmiri kabutari (pigeon), she emerges as a tender and graceful w om an. W hen M anto sees her for the first tim e at Babu G opinath’s place, he describes her as follows: H er face was round and her com plexion was fair. O n entering the room, I at once realised that she was the Kashmiri Kabutari w hom Sando had m entioned in the office. She was a very neat and clean wom an, w ith short hair w hich seemed to have been trim m ed but was not. H er eyes w ere bright and sparkling. From her counte­ nance it appeared that she was extremely frivolous and inexperienced. Apart from her frivolity, w hat M anto highlights here is neatness and cleanliness. In order to understand the reason for this emphasis, it would be useful to compare her w ith the prostitutes M anto describes in h er tw o stories. T he stories are: “ Shanti” and “ Siraj.” T he prostitutes in both are young like Zeenat. Shanti, w ho is also from Kashmir, is careless and indifferent towards the dress, m ake-up and manners. She only talks business, and walks away w hen it is over. Siraj smokes marijuana. She is ill-tem pered and rude. She is also dirty and doesn’t bathe for days. Zeenat, on the other hand, is described by M anto as “a woman o f good social disposition; a w om an o f few words, who is simple, neat and clean.” T he fact is that both Shanti and Siraj are heartbroken. They have been deceived by their lovers. Zeenat has not faced any tragedy in life. Shanti and S iraj a re a g g re ssiv e an d b u m w ith th e d e sire fo r v e n g e a n c e

against the man who betrayed them . T heir rage destroys them. In contrast, Zeenat is indifferent towards life. This is perhaps because she has achieved many things and had many experiences in a short span o f time. She lacks the m aturity w hich comes as one struggles to make a life. Everything has come m uch too easily to Zeenat. She is also frivolous. Frivolity is a charm in a young girl, but in an

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adult it is a sign o f shallowness. Thus, w hen M anto rebukes her w hen he learns that she has been pushed into the trade by Sando and Sardar, she casually answers: “ I do n o t know anything Bhaijan. I do w hat these people tell m e.” M anto’s response is interesting: I wished I could sic w ith her and make her underscand that w hat she was doing was w rong. Sando and Sardar w ould even sell her for their ow n gain. B ut I didn’t say anything. Zeenat was so foolish, unambitious and lifeless that she irritated me. She was a w retch w ho didn’t know the w orth o f her ow n life. Even if she had to sell her body, she could have been more discrete. Indeed, I was very sad to see her. She w asn’t interested in smoking, drinking and eating; nor was she interested in telephone conversations or even the couch on which she often relaxed. W atching her flirt with Shafiq, M anto says, “ I did not like her flirtation w ith Shafiq. I found it vulgar.” M anto doesn’t present her as an oppressed and afflicted woman. She is both pleasant and well-mannered, frivolous and inexperienced, disinterested and vulgar at the same tim e. This is w hat distinguishes her from the prostitutes represented in works by lesser writers. Describing her relationship w ith Gopinath, M anto says: “D id she love Gopinath? I couldn’t tell from her actions. It was, however, obvious that Babu Gopinath cared for her a lot and did everything to make her comfortable. But I didn’t realise that there was some sort o f strain betw een the tw o o f them. I mean that despite being very close to each o th er there appeared to be some reserve betw een th em .” T here is no secret bond betw een them that gives the story its final twist. Had they loved each other, the final w edding scene would have been sentimental in the m anner o f H indi films. Zeenat w ould then have broken do w n and th anked G opinath for his kindness and generosity w ith moist eyes.

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The marriage o f Z eenat to someone else at the end o f the story is a proper and inevitable solution to the variety o f complications in the story. For Zeenat, it promises a new life and new experiences. For G opinath, it is a release from difficulties. H e doesn’t regard her marriage as either a moral or an im m oral act. For him it is m erely another occasion. He washes the hands o f the guests and helps to feed them. T hen, he quietly slips out o f Z eenat’s life. Beside the bridegroom , he looks like a quail. H ad there been no h u m o u r in M anto’s eloquent narrative, Gopinath w ould have seemed like a forlorn lover and the story w ould have been nothing more than a painful elegy on the death o f romantic love. W hat ensures that the story does not fall into sentimentality are the last sarcastic words o f M anto w hen he sees Z eenat dressed as a bride. G opinath is h urt by them . M anto writes, “T h e faith w hich Babu Gopinath had in me seemed to break.” It was w ith this assertion o f faith betw een them that the story had opened: “T he frequency o f our meetings increased. I liked Babu Gopinath, b ut he had faith in me. That is why he respected me more than others.” T he story “Babu G opinath” is a brilliant exploration o f the com plex play o f em o tio n s b etw een differen t characters. M anto refuses to stay confined w ithin the conventional parameters o f good and evil in his assessment o f the characters, and thus succeeds in infusing them w ith such a living force that w henever we think about them they reveal new qualities. Translated from U rdu by Ahsan Raza Khan

Surfacing from Within: Fallen W omen in M anto’s Fiction SUKRITA PAUL KUM AR

By now, feminist criticism has already popularized the need for voicing the absent, the silenced and the inarticulate. And it was nearly five decades ago that a significant w riter in U rdu had the vision to present pulsating glimpses o f the invisible and silent wom an, the w om an fallen from the mainstream society o f honourable ladies and gentlemen. In a num ber o f M anto’s stories, there is an im pending sense o f immediacy w ith which one confronts a totally degenerate society, a w orld o f enslaved w om en, o f w om en com ­ modified and consumed in accordance to the unquestioned fact o f male sexual need and the principle o f supply and demand. Indeed, one does not have to be a wom an writer to creep in to the inner terrain o f the psyche o f the oppressed or the exploited female. M anto demonstrates an androgynous sensibility in unravelling the existential stirrings o f w om en w ith as much sensitivity as he does those o f m en. A writer o f his calibre did not have to be a woman to perceive the dehumanization o f a society w hich nourished the callous male exploitation o f female sexuality. There is an inevitability in the narration o f such stories as “ H atak,” “M um m y,” “Babu Gopinath,” and many others. M anto just had to tell these stories, which gradually merged into a lung confessional tale o f human civilization recorded in literature. H e did not have to weave any formalistic patterns, nor did the experiences o f his stories seek the support o f any mythology or romance. There is an unusual directness about his stories in w hich he presents a specific kind o f consciousness o f women sobbing w ithout tears, remaining out o f general sight; of w om en who are made to sell their virtue in the market before they are castaway. They live in

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an infernal underworld, invisible to ‘respectable’ society which pleads ignorance o f its existence. Ironically, n o t only has this society produced this world, it also provides it full sustenance. Society’s hypocritical indifference to such a w orld is n o t just a quiet consent to its existence. In fact, it is due to the vested interests o f patriarchal society that prostitu tio n survives because it does not seem to threaten any o f its fundamental principles. Let it be so then! But not so w ith M anto, a writer w ho could see through the pretension o f a ‘moral’ law erecting its mythology o f the good and the bad on a laissez-faire economics o f male sexuality. He needed no masks o f metaphors and symbols to construct the reality o f that ‘other’, which has been pushed into the seclusion o f a black world, if only to satiate men sexually so that they lead a so-called normal domestic life based, ironically, on chastity and the homely virtues prescribed for their women. From amongst the no.t-so-talked-about M anto’s stories is “M ahm uda,” the story o f a woman pushed into prostitution for sheer survival. Mustakeem is a sympathetic male witness, anguished but unable to do anything to save Mahmuda from slipping into her gruesome circumstances. H e is draw n tow ards her extraordinarily beautiful big eyes on his wedding day. A keen attentiveness about her settles into his consciousness for ever and he follows her life w ith acute sensitivity through the news from his wife. A simple girl o f a hum ble background, M ahm uda is m arried to a railway employee w ho turns into an eccentric maulvi w ithin tw o years o f his marriage, w ith poor Mahmuda left alone to fend for herself. Mustakeem finds himself getting more and m ore concerned about the fate o f Mahmuda, but from a distance. T he greater his sympathy, the greater the alertness o f his wife. W hen M ahmuda is driven to ‘bad ways’ because o f her husband’s indifference and his lack o f propriety, Mustakeem wishes to save her and bring her home. Kulsum, his wife, will not hear o f it. He knows he could give her shelter, save her from falling into an abysmal w orld and marry her to a respectable man. But Mustakeem is incapable

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o f action and like hundreds o f other m en and w om en o f ‘respectable’ society, he becomes an accomplice in contri­ buting to the degeneration o f humanity. In his inaction lies his consent; and, w ith his consent, the fraudulence o f his sensitivity is certified. Towards the end o f the story, he introspects, “ If only I could have resisted m y wife...she’d have been upset only for a while and perhaps would have gone away to her parents for a few days. It w ould have saved M ahm uda from subm itting to that filthy existence. W hy did I not save her? D id I have honest intentions? Had I been honest and truthful, Kulsum w ould have com e around soon enough. I have com m itted a great crime, I have sinned.” 1 His introspection makes him weed out the falsity o f his position. But all such debating and confessions are like “the last dose o f oxygen to a dying p atien t.” H e may be redeemed psychologically. But not Mahmuda. As fate would have it, tw o and a half years later, after the partition, at Karachi, M ustakeem comes face to face w ith the image o f M ahmuda made up as a vulgar market prostitute surrounded by people cracking dirty jokes with her. Before he can run away and escape an encounter, M ahm uda addresses him, inviting him to a “first class paan” and announcing that she had attended his wedding. M ustakeem is absolutely and totally frozen. W hat seems to surface in him is the thought that M ahm uda was at one tim e very m uch a respectable wom an o f his ow n social set-up. And that she could have remained there if he had helped. H e feels a guilty participant in her downfall. This is indeed a tragedy o f inaction w hich is quiedy enacted over and over again in society to make it possible for som e people to continue abusing hum an existence. T h e mental proxim ity o f M ahm uda and a growing abstract relationship w ith her could not elicit any action from Mustakeem, a typical middle-class person who could find cerebral avenues o f escape and remain a coward. Talking o f Kulsum, M ustakeem’s wife, M anto dismisses her as a wom an typical in her jealousy and “possessiveness,” incapable o f transcending her self-centredness to help save a

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fellow woman. Perhaps her ow n insecurity is cause enough for her denial o f shelter to Mahmuda. She may after all end up losing her husband to Mahmuda if she were to give her a place in the house! But that is obviously not the focal point o f the story. M ahm uda’s transition from being a modest, I demure subject to a legendary object o f consumerist passion, * is perceived through the inert consciousness o f Mustakeem. W hat is implied is the functional complicity in the brutali­ zation o f w om en in society. From Mahmuda, sitting as an exhibitionist at a paan-shop, M anto takes us to the very centre o f a prostitute’s existence, to her dreary room in his story “H atak.” W ith R ajender Singh B edi’s complex story “Kalyani” as the backdrop, “Hatak” seems a simple, straightforward, but very powerful story o f the alienated, deadened prostitute com ing alive through a sense o f utter humiliation. A stereotyped repre­ sentation o f Sugandhi w ould have merely yielded an anaes­ thetized picture o f a prostitute w ith layers o f social prejudice and obscurantist beliefs. For Sugandhi to breathe in flesh and blood in the story, M anto had to simply cut across all the pretensions o f a hegem onic sexist approach. T o cross the threshold and peep into the other’s consciousness does not mean just a single step. It is a dive, a journey demanding com m itm ent, perseverance, courage and stoicism, because to cross this threshold is not to step into safety but night­ mare; it is a plunge into the vague unconnected territories o f the mind. Entering Sugandhi’s room in the beginning o f the story, one gets a sense o f the macabre which is accentuated by the sound o f the tingling silver coins tucked inside Sugandhi’s blouse, vibrating as she breathes heavily “w ith the silver melting and dripping into her heart.”2 There is not just this one point, but a whole shifting subliminal line o f thresholds to be crossed to reach the disjointed territories o f the protagonist’s mind. Sugandhi’s chatter w ith Jam una about the tactics and strategies she uses w ith various m en, is merely a show o f theoretical knowledge. In actual fact, the story tells us that she is intensely emotional, and that at the

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slightest suggestion o f w arm th from a man, she would melt into total submission and, yet, remain forever hungry for love. She likes to remain suspended between a sense o f being and non-being, and feels suffocated with so much air “above her, below her, and around her.” The immensity o f desire, and the need for a totality create in her an unending demand for love. She deliberately blinds herself to the lie uttered by her male customer every night, “Sugandhi, I love y o u .” She slips into an illusion o f love and believes she could love any man w ho comes to her. She wonders why m en do not possess that kind o f goodness. And yet at the height o f her feelings, Sugandhi wishes to take her man into her lap and put him to sleep, patting and singing to him. The make-believe world o f love constructed by Sugandhi has w ithin its folds M adho, w ho is very prom inent in sustaining her dream. W ith a husband-like propriety over her, M adho provides nourishm ent to the starved Sugandhi through his regular visits, unfulfilled promises o f material help and meaningless utterances. But Sugandhi is happy to live that lie since there is no possibility o f living its truth anyway. In Mahmuda, the fact o f prostitution is shorn o f all m yth or magic. T h e m otivating factors leading to prostitution are indicated as economic exigency com bined with the lack o f a social structure for destitute wom en, and the callousness o f so-called ‘sensitive* fellow human beings. In “H atak,” we are face to face w ith an already prosti­ tuted Sugandhi w ho sustains her essential w om anhood by constructing a lie motivated by emotion and an urgent need to love. The depths o f her womanhood remain intact. She is not a negativity, an absence or a ‘deviant*, because she has not internalized the inevitable social judgm ent pronounced on such women, that is “ She is evil.” The cleavages and the tensions operating at the various levels o f her consciousness, converge into an intense m om ent o f deep realization. Sugandhi is rejected by a mere “O oun!” by the Seth; the male surveyor spits at the object on display. It’s not as if she has never been rejected before. But this happens to be the

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m om ent w hen she has to face the reality o f her existence, squarely staring at her. These moments o f humiliation chum out the entire truth o f her being; and, the m yth o f love has to explode. Sugandhi’s interior m onologue at this point o f the story strips her naked. She goes through an existential anguish precisely because she is capable o f an intense inw ard journey. T he requisite capacity to liberate herself from exploitation has been retained in her and she has kept her emotional and human self alive, even if it is w ith the help o f a lie. But that lie, the make-believe has to be demolished— M adho has to go. Sugandhi acts from the centre o f h er being w hen she turns him out after articulating concretely the fraudulence o f their relationship. But then, there is no knowing what is false and what is true! The vacuum and the horrifying silence surrounding her after M adho’s departure has to be filled up— by perhaps another lie. She picks up her diseased dog and puts him on her bed, next to herself. I think o f some lines from Amy Levy’s poem Magdalen here: And there is neither false nor true; But in a hideous masquerade All things dance on, the ages through And good is evil, evil good; N othing is known o r understood Save only pain.3 It is the w riter’s sheer com m itm ent to authenticity that makes the w riter articulate such a m inutely specific consciousness o f an individual, in this case that o f a wom an w ho is a prostitute— so specific and yet so universally relevant. Such a literary discourse lends order to experience and makes possible the active participation o f the reader. T he intense m om ent o f hum iliation makes Sugandhi see herself as a victim, an object for the male to accept or reject. Inevitably, this throws open the possibilities o f psychic rebellion, transformation and a new future. Life has to go on but only after its existent lie is exposed. The end o f the story is the beginning o f a fresh journey after crossing a series o f

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crises. “ Hatak” forges a forbidden social liaison across the divisions o f moral law and sexual myth. Sugandhi, then, moves from dream to waking, establishing the autonomy o f a w om an’s existence, after having made a definite choice o f demolishing the make-believe world, so consciously created and maintained by her. From am ongst M anto’s various female characters, the wom an w ho emerges as one o f the most potent, indepen­ dent and androgynous personalities, is Mrs. Stella Jackson o f the story entitled “M um m y.” Pilar o f H em ingw ay’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Gertrude Stein stand alongside Stella Jackson, not only in generating a sense o f freedom around themselves, but also in initiating other m en and wom en into a life o f authentic action. Morally upright, strong o f convic­ tion and experienced in life, these w om en become the axis around w hom a large num ber o f people revolve, seeking psychological support, m aternal care and em otional protection. Stella Jackson is “M um m y,” a w om an w ith an independent status w hich is a direct result o f her ow n interaction w ith reality. She will, therefore, not fit into any prefabricated role model. N o r will she be a party to any complicity in the brutalization o f w om en. All those m en— Chadha, R anjit Kumar, Ghareeb Niwaz, and many others w ho come to her are like her adopted children. W ith a cat­ like attentiveness, she keeps track o f each one o f them ; w hile in a drunken state, they are not allowed to take liberties with her young girls. Even her favourite, Chadha, is slapped and turned out o f her house w hen he tries to get at Philis, a m ere fifteen year-old girl. Chadha ultim ately respects M ummy for having checked his animal instincts. It is she w ho spontaneously takes over the responsibility o f nursing him w hen he falls seriously ill. T h e story lists a num ber o f instances when M um m y comes to the rescue o f one o r the other, dem onstrating her generosity, the capaciousness o f her heart and readiness to help with all her resources. T he entire credit for the trium ph o f truth, that o f R am singh’s confession and the subsequent burial o f the m urder case in the court, goes to M um m y’s conviction and

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advice that Ramsingh should simply narrate the truth. B ut then, eventually, the same M ummy is turned out o f the city for being a prostitute. It is here that the w riter gets carried away and blatantly makes Chadha indulge in sloganeering, upholding the character o f M ummy and offering her to all those w ho may swim in the wave o f perversion. She has, after all, the capacity to be everyone’s Mummy! Contrasted w ith this is the sharpness o f the indictm ent o f the world which, in any case, keeps juggling truths and falsehoods, to and fro: Augusta W ebster’s poem “A Castaway* uses the language of the market: O ur tradesmen, w ho must keep unspotted names And cheat the least like stealing what they can: Our...all o f them, the virtuous worthy men W ho feed on the w orld’s follies, vices, wants And do their businesses o f lies and shams Honestly reputably, while the world Claps hands and cries “good luck,” which o f these trades, T heir honourable trades, barefaced like mine, All secrets brazened out, would shew more white?4 If an old ‘harlot’ can be compassionate and a universal m other in the story “Babu Gopinath,” M anto locates a male counterpart o f a similar temperament in the person o f Babu Gopinath. Gopinath takes Zeenat under his wings. She is an inexperienced, almost naive young girl. She could very well have become a toy in his hands, an object for entertainment, exhibition and sexual exploitation. But Babu Gopinath cares for her with a paternal passion and wants her to settle dow n on her own. Love for Zeenat includes his care, respect and an anxiety for her w ell-being. He persists in making all efforts to introduce her to other m en o f means so that she may end up getting some support. His selfless involvement and sense o f fulfilment w hen her marriage is fixed w ith a wealthy zamindar are evident. A lover turned father, Babu Gopinath does not allow anyone to insult or hurt her. T he story ends with a touching scene in which Babu G opinath

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becomes tearful when the narrator cracks a joke at Z eenat’s expense. A single example o f fictional representation o f how w om en became victims o f male prowess in the holocaust o f the partition is to be found in M anto’s w ell-know n story “K hol D o .” Every man, be it her ow n father, registers as a sexually starved aggressive male to the w om an w ho has gone through the horrendous experience o f a series o f rapes. T he w riter captures and reveals the damaged psychology o f the wom an-victim w ho has surrendered her sense o f being and has becom e a m echanized sexual object involved in involuntary action. By taking a few examples from M anto’s fiction, this paper attempts to show how the writer succeeded in m apping a so-called ‘fallen w om an’s’ m ind so authentically. It is not as if M anto had any conscious feminist agenda to present. But, in the selection o f his subject for fictional delineation as well as in exploring the centrality o f female consciousness, M anto’s feminism is implicitly present. W hile this is one im portant aspect o f his art, there is indeed a large chunk o f his fiction dealing with male consciousness as well. W hether m ale or female, M anto is know n for his perceptive delineation o f the oppressed, the exploited and the victimized. M anto’s unusually alert antennae were turned towards authenticity in life and he subjected each hum an being to sensitive scrutiny. Human beings were not mere abstractions to him. His fierce com m itm ent to life inevitably introduced th e voice o f dissension in his art as well as in his life, salvaging the dignity o f hum an existence in the face o f established systems and norms. In fact, the apparently gory w orld o f his art records the aesthetic gesture o f reclamation and solidarity by identifying intense moments o f cognition o f hum an anguish and by arousing compassion for the oppressed. T he stories discussed in this paper betray the strain o f that social morality which founds its whole system o f good and evil on the sexual propriety o f w om en. T o impose any labels on M anto will undoubtedly lim it the

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scope o f his art. Given a feminist reading, his stories show how literature can becom e a potent w eapon in disturbing the established modes o f existence through a sensitive focussing on a generally ‘excluded* aspect o f hum an consciousness. As Helen Cixous remarks in The Newly Bom W om an: “T hat w hich is not obliged to reproduce the system, that is w riting...it invents new worlds.”5 M anto could just n ot accept pigeon-holed and straight-jacketed ideas and systems. That was the tragedy o f his life, and was ironically also a point o f salvation for his art w hich succeeds in truly sensitizing humanity. REFERENCES 1. From M anto's story “M ahm uda.” Saadat Hasan Manto ki Kahaniyan, ed. Narendra M ohan. N ew Delhi: Kitabghar, 1992. T he translation into English is mine. 2. Ibid. From the story “ H atak." The translation into English is mine. 3. Amy Levy, “Magdalen,” in A Minor Poet and Other Verse, London, 1984, p. 71. 4. Augusta Webster, “A Castaway,” in Portraits, 3rd edition, London, 1993, pp. 38-9. 5. Helen Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Bom Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. M anchester Manchester University Press, 1986. Originally published in France as La Jenne Nee in 1975.

Manto and Punjabi Short Story Writers TEJW A N T SINGH GILL

1 T h e partition o f India in 1947 has produced a vast range o f fictional and non-fictional writings in U rd u , H indi, Punjabi, Sindhi, English and Bengali. W hile the am ount o f w ork produced about those traumatic times is large, the quality is uneven. O ne can, however, assert that the finest short/ stories about the period w ere w ritten by Saadat Hasan M anto. For him the partition was an overwhelming tragedy. His pow er as a w riter lay, perhaps, in the fact that he found him self in opposition against those “forces o f tradition, conservatism and especially religion,”1 w hich he felt were responsible for the horrors. In M anto’s case, how ever, the experience o f defeat against cultural forces also b ro u g h t w ith it n ew explanations and n ew perceptions. In contrast, other writers, particularly those in Punjab, w here com m unal carnage was the m axim um , rarely succeeded in w riting stories w hich were capable o f presenting anything m ore than realistic and graphic accounts o f violence. For Punjab the partition was a nightm are. In 1947, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs slaughtered each other w ith a kind o f ferocity that the land had never witnessed. W hat was shocking was that we had always looked upon Punjab as a place w here people had been living w ith in an integrated cultural com m unity for centuries. T he measure o f the disruption caused by the partition can be gauged from the fact that m illions o f people w ere forced to m igrate from Punjab, m ore than tw o lakh people w ere massacred and about fifty thousand w om en were sexually

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violated.2 It is not surprising that for ordinary Punjabis, the partition was an incomprehensibly diabolical event. 2

In this regard M anto’s writings are a rare exception for several reasons. First, his writings, from their beginnings in “Siyah Hashye” (Black Margins) to their culmination in the apocalyptic endings o f his great stories “Thanda Gosht” (Cold M eat), “Khol D o ” (O pen Up) and “T oba T ek Singh,” articulated all the terror, irrationality, brutality and inhum anity that the partition had projected in every sphere o f life. In other words, multiple motifs w ent into the production o f those writings. Second, they w ere couched in a bare, grim and ironic language that, w ith its B rechtian recklessness and d o w n -to -e a rth bluntness, subverted the m ost settled o f com m itm ents. T h ird , its effect was to internalise the vision o f a world that was no longer com m unitarian; caught in the lab y rin th o f communalism, it had in fact turned predatory. “Siyah H ashie,” in Khalid Hasan’s English translation under the tide Partition: Sketches and Stories,3 comprises o f thirty-tw o anecdotes o f varying length. If a couple o f them are o f several pages each, then there are others w hich are n o t even one page long and in very m any cases the sketches are not m ore than five or six lines in length. So overwhelming is their impact and chilling their effect that they leave, irrespective o f their size, the reader w ith no option but to look for w hat lies beyond the .texts. For example, in “ For Necessary Action,” a supposedly Muslim couple, seeks shelter in a house whose new occupants are Jains. G row ing desperate at th eir co n fin em en t, the husband and wife come out o f their hide-out and give themselves up to the new occupants. They are ready to be killed at the hands o f their custodians w ho out o f reverence for their peace-loving religion refuse to oblige them. All the same, they hand them over to the non-Jain residents o f a neighbouring locality for necessary action i.e.

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cold-blooded m urder. This brief anecdote shows how during the partition cold-blooded m urder had becom e the order o f the day. M ore than that, it connotes how religious benevolence sanctified for ages, had turned malevolent. If, in this anecdote, professed non-violence becomes a ruse for practiced violence, then in “Mistake R em oved” the security measures dictated by com m onsense, invite calamity for the unfortunate person. A H indu nam ed D haram C hand gets circum cised so that he can pass through an area occupied by the Muslims. This very subterfuge proves calamitous for him w hen he reaches a H indu dom inated area. The custodians o f religion there chop off his penis w ith all the sadistic pleasure at their command. Likewise in “Jelly” all the innocence reserved for childhood in the local folklore and literary discourse, turns barbarous when the coagulated blood o f the ice-seller looks like jelly to the child. H ow before the dance o f the evil-spirits, the life o f those w ho were spared, turns out to be a fate worse than death becomes evident in “O u t o f C onsideration.” In this three-lin ed anecdote a w oe­ begone person’s daughter is spared her life only to be raped. In h er otherw ise circum spective study, Leslie A Flem m ing calls these pieces “intellectual jo k es” w hich foreshadow his “later sarcasm” and suggests that M anto had yet to feel “deeply the pain o f partition.” T here may be an elem ent o f truth in this objection if it is assumed that the message lies only in what the text denotes. If w hat its textuality connotes is received along w ith it, then this objection does n ot seem valid enough. Nevertheless, her objection to M oham m ad Hasan Askari’s contention that “man, even in his real shape, is acceptable to M anto, how ever he may be. He has already seen that m an’s humanity is tenacious enough so that even his becom ing a w ild animal cannot extinguish this hum anity,” is not w ithout its grain o f truth.4 M anto’s celebrated short stories, are not open to objec­ tions o f the type Flemming makes. If they are accountable,

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it is to a seamless and boundless counterpoint in w hich “ various them es play o ff one another, w ith only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organised interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the w ork.”5 In other words, it is their w hole trajectory o f production, reception and effect that can be challenged, but only by reckoning them w ith the contention that “ there is no docum ent o f civilisation w hich is not at the same time a docum ent o f barbarism.”6 T he first story that comes to m ind is “Thanda G osht” (Cold Meat).7 In this story Kulwant Kaur, the hot-blooded mistress o f Ishwar Singh, flies into wild rage on suspecting that during his looting spree he has been w ith another woman. For all the fore-play in w hich he indulges through biting, sucking, smacking, kissing and licking, he cannot make love to her. W ild w ith rage, she calls the o ther wom an a creature from hell. Provoked by his reluctance to reveal h er identity, Kulwant Kaur takes his sw ord and mortally w ounds him. In his last moments, partly o u t o f penitence and partly to recompense for his mistress’s rage, Ishwar Singh tells her that he had tried to make love to a young wom an after killing six members o f her family. At the m om ent o f entering her, he had found o u t that she was dead, i.e. cold meat that he him self becomes at the end o f the story. Violence as the sole leitm otif o f the story permeates every aspect o f its structure and texture. If looting, plun­ dering and killing comprise its nightmarish history, then impotence, hacking and blood-curdling screams are aspects o f its catastrophic sexuality. Although the nightmarish and catastrophic message o f the story is overwhelming, Askari reads hope in Ishwar Singh’s rem orse. M a n to ’s ow n assertion that, “ even at the last limits o f cruelty and violence, o f barbarity and bestiality, he does n o t lose his hum anity,”8 is a pointer in that direction. W hether this last glim m er o f rem orse can provide sustenance to a life

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convulsed w ith violence is problematic. T o derive from it the possibility o f a new range o f experience and new horizon o f hope is to transfigure a glimmer into revelation. M ore excruciating than “Thanda G osht” is M anto’s story “Khol D o ” (Open It)9 in which the predatoriness that m arked the form ation o f Pakistan u nder the ruse o f Koranic dispensation is laid bare w ith brutal lucidity. The central character o f the story is an old man w ho has lost his daughter Sakeena, while escaping from marauders. Feeling that his existence has lost all m eaning and purpose, he trudges from one place to another in search o f her. At last, he beseeches the razakars, w ho preten d to be social workers, to help him to recover her. After ten days o f praying and waiting, the old man finds himself by the side o f the unconscious body o f a girl w hom the razakars had found on the roadside several days earlier. D uring those days they had presumably gang-raped her. N o w onder w hen the doctor asks the old man to open the w indow , the half-dead girl automatically pulls her salwar dow n. T hough the doctor is shocked and ashamed, the old m an is beside him self w ith jo y w hen he realises that his daughter is alive. T h e story shows that Pakistani society, from the m om ent o f its inception, had turned brutal despite the theological ideals held forth in its defense. By making Pakistan the locus for this horrendous incident, M anto does n o t exonerate the rest o f India. T he fate o f Sakina was not exceptional. B ut for it to occur in Pakistan was an inexcusable crime. Manto believed that brutality could not extinguish hum an concerns, particularly those w hich drew sustenance from filial and fraternal feelings. W hether they could bring a derailed society back on the path o f humanity is, however, a problematic question. T h e m ost disturbing o f M anto’s stories is “T oba Tek S ingh,” 10 in w hich an asylum is offered as a paradigm o f the country. In actuality, the inhabitants o f asylum emerge as better persons than the citizens o f both Pakistan and India. As if eager to bring the treatm ent o f the partition to

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•the point o f culm ination, M anto begins this story w ith anecdotes rem iniscent o f “ Siyah H ashye.” T w o insane persons, a M uslim and Sikh, pose as Jinnah and Master Tara Singh and wrestle w ith the am biguity that stares them in the face due to the vivisection o f the country. Ultim ately, th e story focuses on an old Sikh, Bishan Singh, w ho can speak only in nonsense syllables. His whole effort is directed towards finding out w hether Toba T ek Singh, a place in Punjab, has been allotted to Pakistan. N o one can enlighten him on this score. At the border, learning from a liaison officer that the place has gone to Pakistan, he refuses to cross over to the Indian side. Left standing w ith his feet on both sides o f the border, he collapses: Before the sun rose, a piercing cry arose from Bishan Singh w ho had been quiet and unm oving all the time. Several officers and guards ran towards him; they saw that the man, w ho for fifteen years had stood on his legs day and night, now lay on the ground prostrate. Beyond a w ired fence on one side o f him was Hindustan and beyond a w ired fence on the other side was Pakistan. In the middle, o n the stretch o f land w hich had no name, lay Toba T ek Singh (p. 9). For all the surreal identity that M anto constructs at first betw een the subcontinent and the lunatic asylum, and the disparity that he then inserts betw een the tw o, there is som ething in his critique that keeps it floundering. This lack is a result o f his failure to visualise an alternative way o f living, som ething at w hich the medieval G uru-K avis and S u fi-S h a irs w ere so adept. For exam ple, in his memorable com position about Babar’s invasion o f India, Guru Nanak (1469-1539) exposes the predatoriness o f the invaders, the im potence o f the native rulers, the hypocrisy o f the priests and the helplessness o f the people. H e even questions God for His accountability and thereby visualises a system in w hich violence will have no place:

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C reator T hou art o f all, If the mighty beat the mighty There is no cause for complaint. B ut should the mighty lion fall on the herd the ow ner has to answer. T he dogs have lost diamonds and jewels And are unaware like the dead. T hou Thyself bringest all together and then pull all apart, All this is T hy greatness.11 Likewise, the great Sufi-Shair , Buie Shah (1680-1758), laments over the misery that has befallen the Punjab: C om e to me, O Love, T he gates o f hell have opened, Punjab has fallen on evil days It is like the deepest hell. T he twelfth century has opened its jaws C om e sometime beloved o f all, Betw een the sky and earth, Y our woes are killing me. Bulle, the beloved, will com e to my house And quench the fire blazing in m e.12 For all that, he does n o t obliterate from his m ind the feasibility o f some alternative way o f living. W ith all his agnosticism, w hy M anto should have kept him self aloof from the influence o f these medieval writers, particularly the Sufi-Shairs is very baffling indeed. All the m ore so because in his non-conform ist way o f living he was not unlike them, indeed, M anto shared a structure o f feeling w ith G halib, th o u g h his experiences w ere different. Perhaps he could not keep at bay the cynicism that Ghalib’s agnosticism was free from. Maybe colonial rule had made all the difference and he had no option but to look w ith cynicism upon the people, w ith an element o f compassion reserved o f course for the fallen section i.e. prostitutes, pimps and the deprived ones.

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3 M ost o f the Punjabi short stories13 on the partition pale into insignificance before those o f M anto. They either go off the mark or are inane as far as the laying bare o f terror, brutality and inhum anity goes. Factors responsible for the partition are recalled or referred to in several o f these short stories. T heir treatm ent, how ever, now here matches the bewildering lucidity brought to bear upon them in “Toba T ek Singh” th ro u g h strategies o f identification and distinction, etc. In “Janam Bhoom i" (Native Land) w ritten by Devendra Satyarthi (1908-), love for one’s birth-place is held responsible for the indignities suffered by the people. T o o m uch love, even if it is for o n e’s place o f birth, is sinful because it violates the notions o f detachment sanctified by th e traditional Indian ethos. In “ Phatu M arasi” (Phatu, the low caste) by G urbachan Bhullar (1937-) the responsibility for horror rests on a supernatural pow er seeking retribution. As the interlocutor recalls, “ It was a deluge m y lord, a dark deluge. T he sanity o f all vanished into thin air. N one is to be blamed for that. It was some deluge that G od had ordained (p. 155). Surely, this inane rem ark mystifies the reasons for the brutality o f the partition. Q uite the opposite o f w hat M anto aimed at in his stories. O th e r than these m undane factors, there are o ther factors that are held responsible for this horrendous occurrence. In Satyarthi’s story, the blame is apportioned to the British w ho altered the complexion o f life. N o doubt they did that for their ow n interests but for the Indians first to approve the alteration and then to push the British out, was sinful. In another story “C hattu” (Mortar), w ritten by a wom an writer, Sukhwant Kaur M ann (1937-), the blame for all the ensuing dislocation is reserved for Jinnah and Jawaharlal N ehru in almost in equal measure. N o w onder w hen the news broadcaster m entions their names, the aged wom an in the story begins hurling abuses upon both o f them. Here, the aim is to underscore the responsibility

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that rested on the political leaders. B ut instead o f being made the leitmotif, it is only hinted at. As the partition became im m inent, a sweeping change took place in the life o f the people. There are several short stories in w hich the lineaments o f this change acquire graphic description. At least tw o short stories are worthy o f m ention in this regard. O n e is “Bhua Fatim a” (Aunt Fatima) by Balwant Gargi (1916-) in w hich the focus is upon the change taking place in the behaviour o f the people: “T h e ditch o f hatred betw een the Muslims and the H indus was getting deeper. Leaders on b o th sides were raising slogans in favour o f their respective religions. In temples and mosques, kirtans and qawalies w ere in full swing. Slogans w ere being trum peted from b o th the sides...Fanaticism was at its heig h t” (p. 215). T h e short story “U lahm a” (Complaint) by K ulw ant Singh V irk14 (1920-1987) takes into account the change that intrusively gets into the feelings and em otions o f the people and segregates members o f one com m unity from those o f the other. T he basis for this change is laid by rumours o f riots. M erging into the atmosphere, they begin to determ ine the environm ent itself. T hus begins the change that alienates the villagers from their hearths, homes, crops and even domestic animals that were once so inextricably a part o f their lives. Driven by some unaccountable impulse, they have to find refuge in camps. The following descrip­ tion highlights the nuances this change involved: W ithin a day o r so, ploughing came to a standstill. Those w ho used to sow seeds in the field, felt estranged. O f what use was the sowing o f crops w hich they could not later on harvest? There was talk o f burning dow n the houses w hich till then had been kept spick and span by them . T hey now thought o f nothing else leaving the place. Gradually, all the H indus o f the area left for refugee camps as crickets fly to one side w hen water flows into the field from the other. W ithin a w eek or so, the H indus and Sikhs had segregated themselves

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from the M uslim population ju st as village w om en separate grains o f one sort from those o f another by w innow ing them. O nly, the lucky ones w ere destined to get shelter in refugee camps. For others m uch horror was in store. “Bhootan D i K hed” 15 (Play o f Evil Spirits) by Sant Singh Sekhon (1908) bears ample witness to the horror o f the partition. T he story begins w ith a graphic description o f fifty M uslims, including w om en, children and aged persons, kept confined in the dharamshala o f a village. T hey can go nowhere and even defecating and urinating is a problem for them. T hen they are driven in groups o f ten each to a nearby field to be done to death. In this case, the tide turns because there is am ongst them a beautiful w om an w ho charms one o f the killers so much that w hen she consents to marry him, these helpless beings are reprie­ ved. In Gurbax Singh Preetlari’s “M ubina Ke Sukina”16 (Mubina or Sukina) mortal panic grips the whole village, so m uch so that w ell-to-do persons have great difficulty in rescuing themselves from the w rath o f the marauders. Here, a couple have to leave behind the infant daughter whose wailing could at any tim e jeopardise their life. Similarly, “Heera M irg” (The Antelope) by M ohinder Singh Sama (1926-) describes how hell breaks loose upon a village as a result o f which innocent men and w om en lose their lives and become playthings for the murderous spree indulged in by the witch-hunters. N o less harrow ing was the sexual violation o f w om en often com m itted w ith impunity. O f course, the voracity o f the rapists in these stories does not match w hat their counterparts em body in M an to ’s stories. Likewise, the affliction o f the victims is not altogether as deadening or traum atic though it is depicted w ithout any am biguity whatsoever. A typical example is provided by Kartar Singh D uggal’s (1916-) “Kulsum ” (Kulsum)17 in w hich an old man, supposedly a village priest, locks up a young girl in his dark house in order to offer her as a gift to the young

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school master. Tall, w ell-built and fair as she is, the school master tries to have sex w ith her forcibly. T he young girl resists his advances, at first meekly and then ferociously, almost like a lioness. T hen, she pleads w ith him to marry her w ith all the earnestness at her com m and. Grossly insensitive to her largely conventional but at the same time solemn feelings, he gets offended and walks o u t o f the room in disgust. T aking um brage over h er alleged arrogance, the old man goes in and rapes her in no time. The school master enters the room again, this time to find her in a dishevelled state. All these stories are replete w ith motifs w hich M anto has also grappled w ith. W herever, as in Kartar Singh Duggal’s story, the m otif seems to be borrowed, it ends up as a pale repetition o f M anto’s masterly treatm ent. W hen it marks a departure, as in Sant Singh Sekhon’s or Kulwant V irk’s story, it does not go far enough to expose the horrors o f the partition. T h e engagem ent they promise with the dramatic aspect o f the partition does not offer any new perspectives and explanations. 4 T he following stories, in w hich the primary leitm otif o f fear, estrangem ent, ravishm ent and rape is held in counterpoint by the secondary m otif o f a new horizon o f hope, seek to carry this engagement towards an alternative view o f the partition. T hey, thus, aspire to go beyond M anto in the dissemination o f a message if n o t in the whole trajectory o f their production, reception and effect. T he first story to come to m ind in this regard is Kartar Singh D uggal’s, “ Pakistan H am ra H ai” (Pakistan is O u rs).18 This is the story o f a young H indu girl w ho, in order to escape the turm oil, seeks shelter w ith a Muslim family. O therw ise a desperado, the young m an o f the family falls in love w ith this girl and marries her. So pow erful is the marital bond betw een them that she refuses to go to India w hen the armymen come to recover

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her for repatriation. H er forthright reply to them is: “ I w o n ’t go, I shall never go. These trees are ours and so are their leaves. This plant that I have been watering is yet to grow ”(p. 91). In this plea is latent the effort to undo the partition through invoking a deep attachment for the marital bond and one’s natal home that reclaims the natural ambiance for its support. Though a source o f sustenance to the man and w om an concerned, it cannot replace the political decision arrived at for m alevolent reasons by the politicians. In Kulwant Singh V irk’s short-story “Khabal” 19 (Perennial Grass) renew ed kinship is visualised as a way o f facing, if n o t o f undoing, the disastrous consequences w hich the partition has brought in its trail. It concerns a young m arried w om an from a Sikh family w ho is abducted by a Muslim and kept in a dilapidated house in a village w hich can’t be easily reached. T he recovery-officer, him self a Sikh, goes there against all odds so as to rescue h er for her sake, if not for that o f h er com m unity and country. The miserable condition in w hich he finds the w om an almost bewilders him: In that house made o f brick and mud, the abducted wife o f another man lay helplessly before me on a cot. I could not think o f an uglier image o f m an’s inhum anity to man. Abducted, raped and humiliated, she lay quietly and still. There was not one from her caste, com m unity, religion or village w ith her. N o one had told her that she could once again be with the people w ho w ere dear to her. Perhaps, if some one had told her, she w ould have refused to believe him. After all, how could any one rescue her from such a big and strong country like Pakistan? It was foolish even to dream o f such an attempt (p. 207). W hen the recovery-officer tells her that he w ould come to take her after a few days, she pleads for quite a different sort o f favour. H er plea to him is to put her in contact w ith her sister-in-law w ho had been abducted by persons o f the

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nearby village. She wants that young girl, w hom she had brought up like a daughter, to be w ith her. O nly then would she be able to fine a good match for her and forge a kinship to sustain her through life. In Sant Singh Sekhon’s20 two stories, historical memory and cultural heritage are sought to be invoked so as to make this sustenance not only veritable but efficacious as well. In his story “Jitt T e Haar” (Victory and Defeat), the central character, M ehardin, w ho is the chief o f a Muslim village in the vicinity o f the Sikh population, finds no heresy in persuading his brethren to convert to Sikhism. W hat disposes him to do so is not fear o f the turm oil raging around at that m om ent o f time. It is rather the retrospective feeling, that th eir ancestors had done som ething w rong by reneging their cultural patrim ony several centuries back, w hich n o w strengthens his disposition in this direction. Added to it is his innate instinct that, in the absence o f any kinship and cultural alignm ent, they as m ohajirs, will n o t feel at hom e in Pakistan, the terrain o f which is likely to be alien, and that too n ot ju st in a geographical sense. F urther strength accrues to M eh erd in ’s position from the exam ple o f Malerkotla w here the Muslims and Sikhs lived peacefully if n ot amicably even during the dark days w hen killings and abductions w en t on in other areas. This was in gratitude to an earlier ruler o f the state, w ho in the court o f the Subedar o f Sirhind, had raised his voice against the m artyrdom o f the younger sons o f G uru G obind Singh. H ow M ehardin’s m ind, although racked by conflicting feelings, arrived at a resolve o f this sort is best conveyed through the following intricate sentence: In those days, swayed by mixed feelings, M ehardin, the village chief, thought about the varying historical stages and decided that it w ould be the undoing o f a historic w rong if he could persuade his brethren to convert to Sikhism and repair the rupture since then undergone with the neighbouring Sikh nationality (p. 96).

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His brethren readily agree to his suggestion and quickly begin to integrate w ith the Sikhs. Inter-m arriages take place lending credence to the hope that the area between Delhi and Amritsar will acquire a new cultural configura­ tion. This is the best illustration o f society taking history into ow n hands not only to defeat the divisive tactics o f the polity but to also organise a better future. How ever, the governm ents o f India and Pakistan arrive at an agreem ent to repatriate Muslim, H indu and Sikh w om en from both sides. M ehardin’s ow n daughter, Zeenat, w ho had m arried a Sikh, is also repatriated. H ow ever, her husband, like the legendary R anjha w ho assumed several subterfuges to recover H eer, also reaches Pakistan and settles w ith h er th ere. T h ereafter, th e ir life passes peacefully and they occasionally visit India to see their relatives. T hey are happy that their marital bond is secure. But, the failure o f M ehardin’s dream o f a cultural unity does not bother them at all. In the next story “A m anat” (Trust), the same issue figures only to m eet w ith a similar denouem ent. In this story, there is a Muslim girl w ho, as her family is getting ready to migrate, slips away and seeks shelter w ith a Sikh boy for w hom she professes a fondness. T hey get married but she is soon forced to go to Pakistan. Delivered to her family there, she is married off to a collateral w ho for her beauty’s sake, accepts her though she is pregnant from her first husband. A son is bom to her and to entrust him to his rightful father, she returns to India under the pretext o f visiting her relatives in Malerkotla. She meets her former husband w ho has so far kept his vow not to marry and w ho is gratified to get his son. As a token o f gratitude and o f further identification, he registers a legal deed to transfer his land to his son. The story ends w ith his tearful farewell to the w om an w ho was earli.er his wife and then the m other o f his son, the rightful heir o f his property. T he denouem ent o f both the stories rests on a decision which does not take into account the cultural problematic that impelled the characters to take recourse to exceptional

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thinking and feeling. This shows that the egoistic and passional content which had anim ated their unconscious does not becom e a part o f their political consciousness and ethical conscience. As a result the agenda that the good sense o f these writers has projected for a national-popular u n ificatio n o f the P unjabi p eo p le is likely to be evanescent. This dilutes the texture o f these stories, and the failure o f the writers to infuse alternative richness is catastrophic a portent for the Punjabi imagination as the partition was for the history o f the region. So true is W alter B enjam in’s prescient observation here:. “ Every image o f the past that is not recognised by the present as o n e o f its o w n concerns th reaten s to disappear irretrievably.”21 W hether the Punjabi writers will accept the challenge o f this irretrievable disappearance into an irrevocable reality, is a question to w hich there is yet no viable answer. R E FER EN C ES 1. E.J. Hobsbawn, The Age of Capital. London: Sphere Books, 1977, p. 304. ¿SC 2. Millions on the Move, Government o f India Publications, p. 10. 3. N ew York: Viking, 1991. 4. The Life and Works of Saadat Hasan Manto. Lahore: Vangaurd, 1985, p. 74. 5. Edw ard Said, Culture and Imperialism. London, C hatto and W indus 1993, pp. 59-60. 6. W alter Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 257-258. 7. Stories About the Partition. Volume I, II, III edited by Alok Bhalla. N ew Delhi: Harper Collins, 1994. “Thanda Gosht” figures in the first volume under the tide “Cold M eat” on pp. 91-97. 8. “Riots and Refugees: The Post-partition Stories o f Saadat Hasan Manto,*’ paper presented at the 4th Punjab Studies Conference Columbia 12-14 April 1973. 9. Alok Bhalla, vol. II, pp. 69-73. 10. Alok Bhalla, vol. Ill, pp. 1-9. 11. Q uoted in A History of Punjabi Literature by Sant Singh Sekhon, Patiala: Punjabi University, 1993, vol. 1, p. 208. 12. A History of Punjabi Literature, vol. I, 1996, p. 218. 13. Reference may be made to Desh-Vand dian Kahanian, edited by Jaswant Deed and published by N ew Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995.

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Most o f the illustrations are drawn from this collection. The w riter of this paper has himself rendered them into English. 14. K ulw ant Singh Virk, Meriatt Sharesht Kahanian (My Best Stories). D elhi: N av y u g Publishers, 1980, p. 54.

15. Sant Singh Sekhon, Sekhon dian Kahanian (Sekhon’s Stories). Jalandhar Central Publishers, 1966, pp. 181-187. 16. Its English translation is available in Stories About the Partition of India, vol. Ill, pp. 181-190. Included under the tide “The Abandoned C hild,” it is wrongly attnbuted to Gurm ukh Singh Musafir. Actually, the story is by Gurbax Singh Preedari. 17. For an English translation see Stories About the Partition of India, vol. Ill pp. 91-95. 18. Jaswant Deed, Desh-Vand Kahanian (edited). 19. Alok Bhalla, vol. I, p. 207. His English translation o f the tide as “W eeds” is negative in its connotation and, therefore, seems inappropriate. 20. These tw o stories figure in his collection Sianpatt (Sagacities). Ludhiana: Lahore Book Shop 1982. Its preface is written by the author o f this paper. 21. W alter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 257.

M anto’s Philosophy: An Explication ASHOK V O H R A

I do not write on a black-board w ith a black chalk. I use a w hite chalk so that the darkness o f the black­ board is m ore pronounced. — Manto T he corpus o f stories, short stories, pen-portraits and other w ritings left behind by M anto continue to puzzle and surprise us. T hey are full o f contradictions. Some o f them portray an adolescent’s dreams o f the possible outcom e o f a stray affair w ith a woman, o r the visions o f a teenager in love w hich are thoroughly rom antic and idealistic; others are dow n to earth in describing the stark realities o f a cruel, strife-torn w orld broken into narrow w ater-tight segments by gender, religion, econom ic disparities, class and caste barriers. Som e o f his stories are com passionate and sym pathetic to the oppressed and exploited sections o f society, especially to prostitutes, w ho, for M anto, are the paradigms o f the middle class exploitation. O ne can say that a prostitute in M anto’s stories is a symbol o f the oppressed and exploited class o f society. She represents the hapless class o f people w ho find themselves, by force o f circumstances, in a given situation, and have such a w eak will that they cannot even think o f changing it, not to talk o f revolting against it. T hey accept their fate and continue to believe that they are doom ed to lead the life they are leading. In short, one can say that they are fatalists. Naturally, they are objects o f o ur sympathy as w ell as pity. This can be dem onstrated by taking the representative examples o f M an to ’s portrayal o f the characters o f Sultana, Zeenat, Sugandhi and Sarita. Sultana in “ Kali Salwar,” w h o se brothel is near a railway yard, on watching “a railway coach that m ust have been given a push by an engine and was

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m oving along the tracks by itself was rem inded o f her ow n life. She thought that someone had given her a push on the rails o f life and left her, and that she was going along all by herself; other people gave the signals and she w ent along. W here she was headed for she did not know. She knew that one day, w hen the force o f the push weakened she w ould stop somewhere, at a place w hich she knew nothing about.”. And M anto describes Zeenat in “Babu G opinath” thus: “ T o the lim it o f annoyance, Z eenat was a w om an w ithout understanding, w ithout desires and w ithout life. T he poor thing didn’t even have a sense o f value.” She is depicted as a passive and dependent w om an w ho is driven to the extreme. Sugandhi in “H atak” is happy because she has to be happy though there is no reason for her to be happy. H er life is as eventless as ever. “ Still she wishes that her days should go on passing the same way. She does not have to bother about making more m oney since she has no desire to construct buildings or improve her life.” Likewise, Sarita in “ Das R upaye” entertains customers not because she wants to, but because others tell her to. And M angu o f “ Naya K anoon” traces the cause o f H indu-M uslim riots to a Pir’s curse. H e believes that as a result o f this curse, India would always be ruled by foreigners. W hile M anto’s treatm ent o f such lum pen characters in some o f his stories is empathetic, his other stories dealing w ith the same section o f society make fun o f them and are thoroughly sarcastic. But irrespective o f the genre to which the stories belong, they are thoroughly humanitarian and compassionate. His characters though egoistical, resdess and rebellious show a remarkable com bination o f rebellious individualism and humanistic regard for their fellowmen. Some o f his stories are full o f the hope o f a better tom orrow for m ankind, whereas his anguish at the present state o f affairs in many o f his stories culminates in a kind o f deep cynicism in w hich even the possibility o f redem ption is completely discounted. It is because o f these contradictory traits in M anto that Abu Said Quraishi called him a raham dil dahshat pasand, a kind-hearted terrorist. T he reason for

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ascribing this contradictory title to him can be traced to the fact that “in all his stories M anto seems to have struggled w ith tw o basic and opposing tendencies— a hum anistic tender regard for other people and an anarchistic desire to rebel against all restraints. T hat neither tendency fully subdued the other, was perhaps the reason for his puzzling and contradictory behaviour and writing.,’1 This contradiction can be resolved if we look at the philosophy w hich lies behind his writings. At the outset it m ust be noticed that, unlike his contemporaries, M anto’s stories are not set in the countryside, nor are they about poverty-stricken peasants o r the problems o f the rural folk. Instead they are about the working class urbanites. This is primarily because M anto did not write about things w hich he was not directly acquainted with, or had little knowledge of. But this should not lead one to think that M anto w rote only about matters which he direcdy experienced. Krishan Chander made this mistake. W hen commenting on M anto’s story “Lalten,” he observed: “Most o f the story seems to me to be about M anto’s ow n experiences. In its parts and in its final words, the sadness and weariness w hich are apparent seem themselves to be parts o f M anto’s rom antic life.”2 M anto explicitly states in his article “K asoti” th at, “Literature does not portray the personal experiences o f the author. An author picks up his pen not to w rite details about his ow n personal w ork-a-day life, or to give a description o f his personal happinesses, sorrows, likes and dislikes, nor does he report on his personal health o r sickness. His descriptions are likely to contain the tears o f his sad sister, your smiles and the laughter o f a poverty-stricken labourer.” He is o f the firm opinion that the m om ent a piece o f literature is adjudged on the basis o f the author’s ow n experiences, achievements and failures, happinesses and sorrows, it becomes lifeless. It was M anto’s resolute conviction that literature is a m irror o f reality. W ith changing reality there is a change in literature also. A writer picks one issue or the other w ith w hich society is confronted at a given time and he writes

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about it. H e writes sometimes in favour o f it and sometimes against it. Sometimes the writings are quite palatable to the society at large, and the powers that be in particular, but at o th er times they may be repulsive. An author is n o t a prophet. His main task is to depict reality as he perceives it w ith all sincerity. An author, M anto said, “ sees one thing, one problem in different conditions and from different angles, and w hatever he understands he presents to the w orld but he never forces the world to accept it.”3 T hat is why “literature” according to him “ is n o t a sickness, but rather a response to sickness. It is also not a medicine w hich has to be used according to a prescription. Literature is a measure o f the temperature o f its country, o f its nation. It informs o f its health and sickness.”4 Secondly, M anto, unlike his contemporaries like Prem chand, Suhail Azimabadi, Ali Akbar Husaini et al, does not take a socially oriented view o f literature as an instrument o f social reform. His writings, therefore, are n o t reformist in character. They do not contain sympathetic portraits o f the poor and the dow ntrodden. N o r do they make the funda­ m ental problems o f our life like hunger, poverty, social backwardness and slavery their subject. His works neither prescribe no r proscribe anything. In fact M anto in his “Afsana N igar A ur Zinsi Masail,” categorically asserts that “we (the litterateurs) are not legislators, nor do we prescribe or proscribe anything; legislating and administrating is the jo b o f others. W e pass comments on the rulers but w e are not the rulers. W e draw maps o f the buildings but are not ourselves the builders. W e tell others what they are suffering from but w e do not own the chemist’s shop.” It is precisely for this reason that Manto does not even explore the social problems created by poverty, oppression, caste and religious barriers. Manto, on the other hand, makes man in his social setting the centre o f all his stories. Like Locke and Rousseau, he believes in the essential goodness o f man. It is social conditioning which robs man o f this goodness. As he says: “ O ne man is not very different from the other. The mistake

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com m itted by one can be com m itted by the other also. If one w om an can set up a shop to sell her body, so can all the w om en, o f the world. B ut it is not m en who are the w rong-doers, the w rong-doers are the circumstances in w hich m en com m it mistakes and have to live with their consequences.”5 Like Sartre, he believes that men have an infinite capacity to transcend their given situation. All m en and. w om en, irrespective o f their social-cultural-politicalreligious-economic standing, are equally capable of comm it­ ting praiseworthy and blam eworthy acts. Those w ho are high up in the social hierarchy can fall below their best moral standards. They can be hypocritical, dishonest, and insensitive to human needs. O n the contrary, those w ho are at the bottom o f the social scale can be honest and humane w ith pure and pious motivation. T he character o f Mammad Bhai shows that those who can kill a person w ithout even batting an eyelid, those w hom we consider to be dare-devils and paragons o f courage, may at heart be really scared o f even an injection needle. W e occupy different stations in life, sometimes because o f our ow n peculiar social situations, and sometimes because o f our innate capacities, but one thing is certain that each one o f us, irrespective o f our status in society, the culture and age w e belong to, has the innate desire to be appreciated, admired and accepted. Manto recognised this desire as basic. His writings, therefore, provide reassurance to the oppres­ sed, the dow ntrodden and the neglected that they are good. His story “H atak” clearly demonstrates this. Askari, while com m enting on “Siyah Hashye,” wrote: “ Man, even in his real shape, is acceptable to M anto, how ever he may be. He has already seen that man’s humanity is tenacious enough so that even his becom ing a wild animal cannot extinguish this humanity. M anto lias confidence in tliis hum anity.”6 M anto himself stressed this when defending the charge o f obscenity levelled against him for his story, “Thanda Gosht,” he said: “ ...even at the last limits o f cruelty and violence, o f barbarity and bestiality, he does not lose his humanity. If Ishwar Singh had completely lost his hum anity, the touch o f the dead

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wom an would not have affected him so violendy as to strip him o f his manhood.”7 Just as Man to believed in the perennial goodness o f man, he also believed that there were certain aspects o f hum an life w hich are universal and enduring. These according to him are: “roti, aurat aur takht” (bread, w om an and the throne). According to him , “M an felt the pangs o f hunger in the ancient days, and continues to feel them even now. He had the desire to be pow erful earlier and even n o w . He continues to love wine and poetry as he did in the days gone by. T hen w hat has changed?...N othing. It is only w hen man is tired o f bread, w om an and pow er that he thinks o f God whose nature is m uch more mysterious and difficult to grasp than any o f these.”8 Hunger, according to him , is the m other o f all problems. It arose w hen Adam felt hungry for the first time. A nother kind o f hunger arose w hen the first m an m et th e first woman. Both these hungers are at the back o f m ost o f the social, economic, political problems. They are also the cause o f most crimes and follies. Manto was convinced o f the fact that, “Hunger teaches us to beg, it encourages us to commit crimes, it forces us to become prostitutes. It teaches us to be selfish, lonely and isolated. Its attack is very fierce and all encompassing and it hurts us deeply. H unger produces madness, madness is n o t the cause o f hunger.”9 So, he concluded that all literature— w hether m odem , medieval or ancient, deals w ith th e m ost ancient o f relationships betw een bread and hunger, between man and wom an. So much so that “even the religious books, some o f w hich are said to be gospels, deal w ith the relationship betw een bread and hunger, betw een m an and w om an.” 10 M anto was asked: if the relationship betw een man and w om an and bread and hunger, is so perennial that it has been the subject m atter o f discussion from the most ancient religious books to the most m odem writers, then why is there a need to take them up again and again? M anto replied som ew hat elliptically: “Had the w hole world stopped telling lies when it was told to do so once, one messiah w ould have been

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sufficient; B ut as we all know the list o f messiahs is long.” 11 H e admits, though, that there is no fundamental difference betw een the problems faced by the litteratuers o f today and those faced by the litteratuers o f yester-years. Both o f them w rite in the idiom and m anner w hich is most suitable to their times. And that is w hat makes the literature o f each epoch novel and unique. Man, in whose humanity M anto has an inalienable faith, is invariably confronted w ith perennial problems. He has to make a choice. Man is, to use a Sartrian phrase, condemned to choose. “W hen he chooses to love a woman, the parable o f H eer-R anjha is made. If he chooses to love bread, the philosophy o f Epicurus takes birth. H e becomes Sikander, Chengiz or Taim ur when he chooses to love power. And if he chooses to love God, he is transformed into a Buddha.*’12 M anto, probably under the influence o f Freud, chose to w rite prim arily on the m an-w om an relationship. H e completely ignored the spiritual aspect o f this relationship. Justifying his choice, he said, “O u r age is an age o f strange contradictions— woman is close yet very far. At some places she is fully dressed, but at other places she is completely naked. At some places she is seen in the guise o f a man, and at others w e are confronted w ith m en in the guise o f w om en.” 13 H e set before himself the aim o f drawing a good and effective portrait o f society and did n o t bother about his critics. In his ow n words: “ I am only a painter (photographer) and those w ho have an ugly face do not like the m irror.” 14 H e took upon himself the task o f painting a realistic picture o f society. Literature, according to him “ ought to present life as it is, not as it was, nor as it ought to b e .” 15 M anto’s view o f literature can be compared w ith W ittg e n ste in ’s m eth o d o f d o in g p h ilosophy. Like W ittgenstein, M anto too simply puts everything before us as it is and neither explains n o r deduces anything. Since everything is open to view, there is nothing to explain either. And like him, Manto does not use lengthy narratives to describe either the settings o f his story or his characters. Instead, he uses just a few words to describe them.

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M anto disliked hypocrisy, pretence, and the double standards prevalent in society. W herever he saw these he ‘inwardly’ fumed (cf. “Chughad”). His aim in his stories was to expose these evils. T hat is why he made prostitutes the subject o f his stories. Thus, M anto, speaking through Babu Gopi N ath, in the story by the same title, replying to the question: “W hy do you like prostitutes’ houses and holy m en’s places?” says, “Because in those tw o places, from the floor to ceiling, there is nothing but deception. For the man w ho wants to deceive himself, there are no better places than these.” M anto presents a realistic exposition o f the psychological states o f the people found in these places. H e also gives a detailed account o f their hum an interaction and their social relationships. In all his stories, M anto emphasises that exploitation results from dependence. This can be seen from the characters o f Sugandhi and Sultana. H e narrates in a down to earth manner, the helplessness o f the poor, the downtrodden and the underdog and depicts realistically, “the mental and emotional states bom under the influence o f this helplessness.” 16 T o narrate this and to express his point o f view, M anto does not hem and haw. W hat he has to say he says clearly, w ithout any jargon and w ithout any artifice, in the most direct manner. H e does not try to make up w ith words what is not there in reality. In the words o f M oham m ad Ali Sidiqqui, “ In his m ind and ideas there is no holding back, no deceptive cover...there is no desire to impress or be impressed. H e is not afraid o f calling good good and bad bad.” 17 M anto, talking about his style o f w riting, admits, “T here is no equipm ent for beautification in my parlour, there is no shampoo, there is no machine to produce trinkets. I do not know how to do make up... I do not know the art o f replacing expletives w ith nice and polite words...” 18 His sincerity o f purpose and his love for putting what he sees in society in simple and plain words was responsible for his inherent dislike o f classical poetry. Infact, he dislikes classical poetry so m uch that he calls it “mental masturbation,” for it invariably camouflages

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even the most ugly reality under the cover o f pleasant words and w ord constructions. M anto has the capacity to percieve and examine the bitter truth, and the courage to express it w ith o u t any camouflage— either o f words or o f circum ­ stances. H e does not compromise at any level— w hether it is in the use o f expletives o r the choice o f com m on place words. N othing is hidden, nothing is exaggerated. Every­ thing, how ever obscene o r unsayable it may be, is said in the most straightforward manner, that is, w ithout subterfuge o r exaggeration. There is no attempt at philosophising or artificial theorising. He is conciously revolutionary. In “Sarak Ke Kinare,” he boldly asks the question: “W hose law is this? Earth’s? H eaven’s?...or that o f those w ho made it?” H e openly ridicules religion (for example, in “M ozel”); makes fun o f God by saying that he is hungry for prayers, and points to the oppressiveness o f traditional social institutions w ithout any hesitation (as in “Ji Ayah Sahab” and “Khuni T huk”). His capacity for calling a spade a spade does not even spare the dead. He reacts strongly w hen one M r. ‘Buniyadi’ reminds him that it is customary, all over the civilized world, to talk about the dead, even if they were o n e ’s enemies, in reverential tones. He says, “I detest strongly the civilization in w hich it is customary to send the character and the personality o f a person after his death to a laundry. So that after it is cleansed o f its blemishes, it is hung in a com er at the mercy o f G od.” 19 M anto has been accused by some academic critics, like R ashid Ahmed Siddiqqui, o f taking pleasure in giving lurid descriptions o f a w om an’s physique and charged w ith erotic and obscene writing. Some critics have called him a man w ith a perverted taste w ho exploits sexuality as an end in itself in his stories. N othing can be farther from tru th than this. As far as M anto’s description o f sex is concerned, one has to note that he does not cut off sex from lived life. In his narrations sex is not detached from life, rather it is made an instrum ent for understanding and explaining life. For him sex is not an isolated event or an accident in a person’s life. His descriptions o f sex are m atter o f fact. T hey neither

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create a liking, nor a hatred for sex. They are neutral and objective. They do n ot tantalize us. Sex is seen as a natural urge. He uses sex both for understanding and explaining the beautiful as well as the ugly aspects o f life. It is only after exam ining the sexual urge that M anto arrives at the conclusion that the suppression o f this natural urge leads to many imbalances both in the individual and the society. His story “Panch D in” demonstrates this very effectively. In it the main character, the school teacher, w ho had throughout his life, in favour o f a false public image, refused to acknowledge the attraction he had felt for the girls he taught, announces from the death bed, “I killed a desire, but I didn’t realize that after this murder, I w ould have to shed a lot m ore blood.” As far as the physical descriptions o f a w om an are concerned, one can easily say that instead o f arousing the passions, these descriptions produce a feeling o f revulsion for sex. For example, w ho would, after reading the following description o f Sugandhi in “Hatak,” be ever aroused: “She slept on a large, teak bed. H er arms, exposed all the way to her shoulders, were spread out like the bows o f a lyre from w hich the paper had com e off after having been left out in the wetness o f the night. Protruding from the left underarm was a heavy fold o f flesh which had, from being squeezed excessively, turned a bluish hue; it seemed that a segment o f skin from a plucked chicken had been applied to that spot.” Only a pervert can be aroused by a description w hich uses analogies like “skin from a plucked chicken” for the description o f a w om an’s skin, or “bows o f a lyre from w hich the paper had com e o f f ’ for the description o f a w om an’s arms. This kind o f description can only arouse a feeling o f revulsion. It w ould be equally w rong to say that M anto has a gender bias. For he always wonders how ‘h e’ could feel fulfilled w hen ‘she’ feels robbed. In fact M anto’s aim, as has already been said, was to expose the social evils, the loneliness and alienation prevalent in society. His descriptions are intended to expose the oppressors w ho demean wom en. T heir object is not to

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titillate, b u t to arouse in the reader a sympathy for the victim and disgust for the perpetrators. T he descriptions are focussed on the trauma and em otional turm oil o f the oppressed in order to evoke sympathy for him and disgust for the oppressor and exploiter. Since his aim is to illustrate the consequences o f social evil, he has to depict that evil. M anto first expressed surprise w hen his story “Thanda G osht” was term ed obscene by saying: “ It pains me to learn that a story, w hich tells that a hum an being, even after becom ing a devil, cannot escape being a hum an being is thought to be obscene. ’20 Later, M anto him self replied to the charge o f obscenity by saying: “W hat can I do if this story is obscene? T he event on w hich it is based was itself obscene. Today, the whole o f society is obscene.”21 In fact, he beckoned people to read his stories if they wanted to be acquainted w ith society'. H e said: “ If you find my stories unbearable then this age is unbearable...I am not seditious. I do not want to stir up people’s ideas and feelings. H ow can I take off the blouse o f a culture and civilization w hich is already naked? I do not even try to dress it because that is n o t m y jo b . It is the jo b o f a tailor.”22 M oreover, in “M ozel,” he questioned, “Can there be any kind o f dress in which one may not become immodest, o r through w hich your gaze can’t travel?” In the enterprise o f exposing society, M anto is not at all bothered about critics. He holds critics in low esteem and believes that “criticism can only destroy a flow er by plucking its petals, it cannot put them together to make a com plete flow er.”23 He thinks that critics are redundant because, “There have been innumerable critics, but none o f them could help remove the drawbacks o f literature.”24 H ow right he was about the critics can be shown by taking the example o f Hanif Rane, one o f his critics, who like the p rophet o f doom had predicted that “ N obody shall be interested in the works o f M anto after his death.” This seminar and the continuous sale o f M anto’s works over the years prove how wrong H anif R ane was. T he prediction w hich M anto had made w hen he said, “ ...it is also possible

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that Saadat Hasan may die, but M anto will not die,” is a reality today.

NOTES 1. Leslie A. Flemming, The Life and Works of Saadat Hassan Manto, Lahore: Vanguard, 1985, pp. 1-2. 2. Manto, Bombay: Kitab Publishers, 1948. 3. “Afsana Nigar aur Jinsi Misail.” 4. “Kasoti.” 5. “Afsana Nigar aur Jinsi Misail.” 6. “Hashiyah Arai.” 7. “Byan:Thanda Gosht.” 8. “Kasoti.” 9. “Afsana Nigar aur Zinsi Misail.” 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. “Kasoti.” 13. “Afsana Nigar aur Jinsi Misail.” 14. Mehdi Ali Siddiqui, “Manto M en Adalat M ein.” 15. In M anto’s letter dated November, 1938 to Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi. 16. Ibadat Barelvi, quoted in The Life and Works of Saadat Hasan Manto, op.cit., p. 49. 17. Mehdi Ali Siddiqui, “Manto M en Adalat M ein.” 18. “Ganje Farishte.” 19. Ibid. Among the m odem writers, Khushwant Singh is the only one who follows Manto in this respect both in word and deed. 20. “Byan: Thanda Gosht.” 21. Mehdi Ali Siddiqui, op. rit. 22. Q u o ted in D evendra Issar, “U rdu Ka W eh Yugantakari Kahamkar.” 23. “Kasoti.” 24. “Saadat Hasan M anto.”

The W orld of Saadat Hasan Manto SHASHI JOSHI

T h e three axis through w hich I w ould exam ine the relationship betw een the literary imagination and rendition o f the history o f M anto’s times, as it pours into the narrative o f the partition are: (a) the axis o f cultural stereotypes; (b) the category o f cultural visibility w hich these stereotypes impart to people; (c) the cultural pow er that they appear to acquire o r negate through their visibility or invisibility respectively. W e need a language beyond fixed categories o f good and evil, o f victims and victimizers, and an obsessive focus on violence as an act o f insanity, barbarism , pathology.1 T he very nature o f language and narrative, w hich Lyotard views as agonistic, generating a discourse o f conflicting oppositions revolving around a struggle, can be revealed in the words spoken by characters in the partition stories. H ow does conflict get deposited in, and in turn produce, cultural significations? Exam ining cultural stereotypes and their visibility as it is apprehended by those involved in conflict, may help us comprehend how the binaries evolve. B ut first, I w ould like to com m ent on Alok Bhalla’s critique o f what he calls “communal stories.” His basic point Is that these stories do not condem n both sides equally and do not uphold the principle o f “correct rememberance.” I w ould go along with Veena Das and Ashish Nandy w hen they speak o f much o f the literature on the partition as “inauthentic, because...violence from one side is equally balanced w ith violence from the other. Thus, the descrip­ tion o f violent, inhuman acts perpetuated upon those travel­ ling by train com ing from Lahore w ould be matched by another description o f similar, gruesom e acts to w hich travellers com ing from Amritsar were subjected. If a prosti­

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tute gave shelter to tw o w om en whose bodies had been mutilated by rioters then one could be certain that one o f those w om en would be a Hindu and the other a Muslim.”4 As for “correct rememberance,” literature, I believe, can­ n ot perform a balancing act like the legendary scales o f justice. It m ust portray a slice, how soever thin, o f life view ed through the eyes o f its protagonist. An act o f rememberance is always partial, incom plete and fragmen­ tary. There are conflicting versions o f ‘truth’ and they have to be recounted in their one-sidedness and not inflict con­ trived resolutions on the readers’ intelligence and sensibility. I tend to view M anto as being almost alone in grasping the fragmentation o f ‘tru th ’ during his times and that is why the authorial voice is absent from his partition stories. The victims and victimizers could belong to any community, but do not inhabit the same story and no attem pt is made to establish parity betw een the monstrosities com mitted by all. M anto could well have identified w ith M asood Ashar’s helpless conclusion: “T ruth has so many faces. O ne m an’s truth can negate another m an’s truth. And w hen so many versions o f truth clash, everything becomes an absurdity, loses all m eaning, all sense.”5 T he result is M anto's Kafkaesque stories, most o f all, “ Fundanen” (Pompoms). M ore specifically, I read the three stories characterized by Alok Bhalla as communal narratives, rather differently. For him , Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi’s “Parmeshwar Singh” seeks “to evoke sublime pathos for the Muslims as victims” and caricatures the Sikh character, Parmeshwar Singh. In my reading o f the story, the bond betw eem the Sikh and the Muslim boy is palpable. T he love Parmeshwar offers to Akhtar, though initially rebuffed by fear in the child’s heart, gradually breaks through to the child and the child begins to trust him. Yet, he cannot replace the child’s lost w orld — the cultural world o f his socialization o f the Azan and the Koran. N o r can he substitute the child’s m other, whose m em ory is not an abstraction for A khtar b u t a warm , sensuous m em ory o f a wom an w ho read the namaz and gave him a drink o f water with a bismillah.

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Amar Kaur, Parmeshwar’s wife, w ho cries for h er own lost son, is as real as Akhtar in her rejection o f the child. Instead o f her Kartar w ith hair in a bun, w ith a com b in it, she has a child reciting “qul huwallah-ho-ahad” under her roof. Gradually, as the child’s hair begins to grow , she begins to soften, and feels happy w hen she touches his hair, bringing out the strong physicality o f the m other and child bond. T he day he can tie his hair in a bun, she says, they w ould name him Kartar Singh. Nevertheless, she weeps: “Kartar is that w ound in my heart w hich will never hear*. A nd seeing the wildly powerful love between a m other and child in his neighbour’s house, Parmeshwar begins to move towards the finale o f his story in which he walks A khtar to the border so that he can find his m other. At one level, the cultural stereotypes imbedded in the situation are too strong to be overcome easily, at another, the cultural symbolism th a t pervades o u r senses as we seek o u r em otional sustenance in the familiar sounds and images, is conveyed by the story. In “Avtar: A H indu M yth,” Gulam Abbas, according to Alok Bhalla, “invokes H indu myths to suggest that since the H indus had over m illennium s betrayed their gods by indulging in the most reprehensible forms o f killings, their gods had now decided in disgust to abandon them and send a new avtar on earth in a Muslim household. T h ere is, o f course, no hint o f the history o f massacres b y the Muslims.”6 I was stunned to read this passage. The story, as I read it, poignandy brings hom e a truth, that w ithin the God-filled cosm ology o f the H indus th ere is no b a rrie r o f untouchability betw een H indu Gods and Muslim victims. T h e evil unleashed into the midst o f the Muslims in the lonely valley ends in a fantastic, messianic dream-fulfilling sequence o f the new Avtar Kalki, bom to a poor, besieged M uslim . It is an im aginatively constructed story that encapsulates the heartrending cry o f Muslim grief in this instance: “W hat crimes had your victims committed? That they believed in a different form o f worship than yours?

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That their style o f life was different? Is that such a big crime that they should be exterminated?” T he entire story could well have been narrated to us by M ohandas Gandhi and no one w ould have called him communal. Must Abbas, because he is a Muslim, square the circle o f history by trying to balance his account o f Hindu violence with accounts o f “massacres by the Muslims?” Krishna Sobti’s “W here is my M o th er” is accused o f playing upon the popular H indu fear o f the Pathan as a mindless killer. But from the outset, the Pathan is shown to be in the grip o f ideology-fighting to create a n ew country for which the self had to be sacrificed; he Wias tearing across the country, with no m om ent to look at the m oon and stars, fighting a revolutionary war, a jihad. W here is the m ind­ lessness? In fact, Sobti’s Pathan is a stereotype ingrained as a deathlike fear in the girl w hom he rescues. It reveals the pow er o f the stereotype and o f prejudice, despite the care the Pathan lavishes on her. All his attempts to reach out to her are m et w ith paranoia. W hen she pleads: “Send me to the camp. They will kill me here— they will kill m e...” the steel bands o f his ideology snap and “Y unus K han was forced to low er his eyes. He no longer felt like a brave, powerful and ruthless soldier. He felt miserable, helpless... w eak.” Compassion and pity break through his jihad. The image and memory o f his dead sister, N ooran, w hich first compelled him to save the girl, re-emerges and fills his voice w ith kindness only to be m et by the girl’s terror o f him. T o my m ind, S obti’s Pathan is the co u n terp art to Parmeshwar Singh and the denouem ent o f b o th stories leaves them equally tragic figures longing for relationships they have lost. Parmeshwar Singh’s heartbreaking longing for his son and the Pathan’s tender memories o f his sister have n o t preven­ ted them from going o n sprees o f looting and orgies o f killing. T he critical mom ents in their lives are w hen both adopt children from the other community. These are seen as moments o f individual weakness by those around them and, perhaps, also by themselves. T heir strength is felt in their

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collectivity. Çlearly, as long as the sense o f em pow erm ent and self-significance gets concentrated in the collective, the hum ane individual is in a m inority. Thus, m om ents o f “weakness” cannot change or obliterate the deep-seated fears generated by th e stereotypes w hich, in turn, feed further terror. “Y ou are a M uslim—you will kill m e,” screams Sobti’s girl child, while Parmeshwar Singh’s wife and the child, A khtar, exchange frightened shouts of: “Y ou are a mussalla!” and “Y ou are a Sikh!” W hat makes bodies o f flesh and blood, w ith the same limbs and eyes, the repositories o f collective identity? The cultural significations o f their collective give them a sense o f visibility and power, and the body bears their burden. T here is a close relationship betw een perceptions o f collective cultural pow er, the symbols o f cultural visibility and the cultural stereotypes in daily life. It is thus that the body becomes the repository o f cultural symbolism because cultural visibility is possible only through the body. In sum: cultural pow er gets concentrated and deposited in the signification o f collective visibility and this visibility is concretized in the body. Therefore, to violate and destroy the body is to make the culture o f the o ther’s collective invisible. Making it invisible appears to disintegrate cultural pow er and make it disappear. The mutilation and extermi­ nation o f the body therefore is deeply implicated in notions o f ‘us’ and ‘them ,’ and the play o f pow er between them. T he w om an’s body is the site o f the fiercest, most brutal contest and w om en emerge in all narratives as trophies o f victory or blots on collective honour. Simultaneously, w om en are the greatest threats to m an’s stereotype o f masculinity— the biggest chink in his arm our. A w om an transgresses all codes o f colour, race, religion and caste the m om ent a man controls her body. It is in the laboratory o f her body that the real mixing o f blood is accomplished. C ultural pow er is m aintained, asserted or negated by maintaining, asserting or negating cultural visibility. Since cultural visibility is inscribed on the body in terms o f

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cultural significations, and inside the body in term s o f cultural stereotypes, the violation o f the body becomes the key to the destruction o f cultural power. Cultural pow er and hono u r is further heightened by castrating the masculine ‘other by violating and conquering ‘his* wom en. Destroying the male may negate im m ediate cultural visibility but cannot destroy the potential for its resurrection. T he m etaphor o f ‘beejnash’ is inapplicable as long as wom en are left unpossessed and undestroyed. W om en, in almost ail the partition stories, exist betw een the fixed categories o f communities, their ow n significations dependent upon the m en w ho possess or violate them, and appear as truly liminal figures o f communal ambiguity. (The daughter in M anto’s “ Khuda Ki Kasam,” and Ayesha in Ibrahim Jalees* “A Grave Turned Inside-O ut”). T here is, thus, a basic conclusion to my disagreement w ith Bhalla and to m y alternative readings o f the stories: Literature cannot be “used” to “explain” a holocaust— it can only be felt as many truths, many fragments o f painful reality and o f actually lived lives. T he most im portant feature o f these stories that emerges, in my view, is the p o w er o f prejudice and cultural stereotypes. As I searched through other partition stories, to see w hether those in w hich the authorial voice expresses dismay and pain in so many words, eschew all stereotypes, I discovered a fundamental com m o­ nality in them. All the authors, despite their ow n obvious sorrow and alienation from the m acabre reality they described, employed the same stereotypes to portray the people and society around them. Thus, I reached another conclusion: society is made visible only through the prevai­ ling stereotypes and the language o f prejudice that prevails widely. W ithout this society becomes invisible. Because these stereotypes do n o t help us build a moral ending to the stories, o r to assert the basic goodness and love that we desire to experience and to overcome the difference from the ‘other*, they are o f no less value to our understanding. In fact, they help us to penetrate the inner w orld of- the victims and v ictim izes by providing the

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language o f insight into the times and those w ho peopled it. Bhisham Sahni’s “The Train Has R eached Amritsar,” is a good example o f how individuals throw n together, never­ theless, transmit messages o f their collectives. Despite rioting in a few places, the train from Lahore to Delhi finds the author am ong passengers full o f apparent camaraderie: “nothing had changed in the way people talked to each other or joked together.” T he stereotypes, however, conti­ nue their ow n existence: (a) the ‘dalkhor’ Babu is weak, says the Pathan; share our meat and become strong like us— else travel in the ladies compartment, (b) the Sardaiji explains to the Pathans: the Babu w o n ’t take food from them because they didn’t wash their hands (they are dirty people, goes the message), (c) w hen unw anted passengers clamber into the com partm ent, everyone shouts at them but “the Pathan, blind w ith rage” lands a kick on the w om an’s stomach, (d) w hen the train passes by a city in flames “each passenger was nervous and suspicious about his neighbour.” W hen they discover the burning city was W azirabad, a pre­ dominantly Muslim area, “ the Pathans became less tense, the silence amongst the H indus and Sikhs became m ore om inous.” (e) w hen the Babu hid on the floor in fear, the Pathan mocked: “O coward, are you a man or a woman? Y ou are a disgrace to all men!” (£) the arrival o f Harbanspura and Amritsar— H indu and Sikh areas— loosened the babu’s tongue and he hurled abuses at the Pathans. “You dared to kick a H indu women, you bastard ...” (g) in his “ow n area” now the Babu hits a Muslim trying to get into the moving train and knocks him off. There was an all prevailing perception o f ‘our areas’ and ‘their areas’ even in ‘norm al’ times as we know from history. Literature is replete with such symbolism as well. W azirabad or Harbanspura, Khalsa Mohalla or Islamabad Basti (in Ashk’s “The Fodder-Cutting M achine’), Q adirpur o r Jatunagar (in Intizar H usain’s “An U nw ritten Epic”). T here was a notion o f cultural hegem ony in one’s ‘ow n area*— and it drew upon historical m em ory and m yth. Intizar H usain’s “An U n w ritte n E pic” captures this

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discourse sharply: “...friends put on their shrouds, asked for their mothers” blessings, committed their wives to God, and marched into the battlefield w ith such valour and majesty that they revived the mem ory o f wars fought in ancient tim es...N or were the jats w anting in character and cere­ mony. They came o u t m ounted on caparisoned elephants, lighting up the night w ith their torches.” Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s story, “T he D eath o f Sheikh B urhanuddin,” is one o f the most incisive descriptions o f the stereotypes o f cultural visibility. Sheikh B urhanuddin’s narration o f his hatred for the Sikhs racial characteristics, the habits and customs o f this strange com m unity bears no relation w ith any person’s qualities or character. Both these are derived from the stereotypes im bedded in cultural symbols and their visibility: Sikhs were persons w ith long hair like w om en, but w ere bearded like savages, making a public exhibition o f bathing in their underpants, they poured all kinds o f filth, like curds, into their hair— curd from the shop o f a dirty sweetm eat seller. T hey w ere incredibly filthy— they never shaved their heads. Naturally, the revulsion at their bodily culture led to B urhanuddin’s view that “all Sikhs are stupid and idiotic.” Yet, “they would not accept the superiority o f the Muslim, and w ould strut about like bantam cocks twirling their mustaches and stroking their beards.’9 T he denouem ent in the story comes w ith the physical death o f B urhanuddin’s Sikh neighbour and in the m eta­ physical death o f the Sheikh’s fixed notions o f good and evil communities, as the Sardar cuts across communal, cultural and political boundaries by sacrificing his ow n life for the Sheikh’s. C ontradictory subject positions emerge in their relationship w ith th e shifting pow er relations o f com ­ munities as the backdrop. T h e cultural sym bolism o f Sheikh B u rh a n u d d in ’s “bantam -cock” Sardar is the epitome o f cultural visibility. H ow ever, anything can becom e the carrier o f the “enemy’s” cultural assertion. “W e can’t tolerate any signs o f H induism ,” yells M odabber and points at a tulsi plant that

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grows in the courtyard o f a house he has occupied, in Syed Waliullah’s “The Story o f the Tulsi Plant.” W hile, Sohrab, the horse ow ned by an old Muslim, turns into a sacrificial lamb in the chronicle o f riots narrated by Ramesh Chandra Sen’s “The W hite H o n e.” The Pundit Chintaram, a scholar o f Persian and Arabic, w ho calls himself a hum ble slave o f Akka-e-Nam dar, his spiritual teacher Hazrat Maulana, and had mastered every w ord o f the Koran, must have his Hindu bodi chopped off w ith a sickle in “The Shepherd” by Ashfaq Ahmed. Bhisham Sahni’s child boy, Pali, in the story o f the same name is, in the collective perception, a Hindu boy wearing a Muslim cap, while Qasmi’s Akhtar in “Parmeshwar Singh,” is a Muslim boy wearing a Sikh’s kesh and turban. The pain in the heart o f Parmeshwar, w hen he walks Akhtar towards the border and the tears in Zenab’s eyes when she sends Pali away to India, are individual sorrows. They are culturally invisible in their collectivity. The caps, the kesh, and the bodi are public statements o f this collective culture and ai;e the signs and symbols o f their visibility. These stereotypes have not only a long history but are a part o f reality we do not like to acknowledge: that the mass o f people in the H indu and Muslim communities have lived a back to back existence over centuries. W hen we ask poignandy: how do people forget and wipe out their past of living together, we often don’t examine the nature o f their life together, their discourses and mind-sets that build inclusion and exclusion deep into their psyches despite their shared daily lives. R eal togetherness is a pro d u ct o f generations whose hearts reach out to each other, not when their bodies mingle together at the Pir’s dargah or in the Dussehra mela. The awareness o f mortality, a common human fate, and the similarity o f their relationships enable people to live side by side peacefully over long periods o f time. Nevertheless, to live beside each other is not to live with each other. That comes only as a culm ination o f a conscious project to break through inherited stereotypes. However, the pow er

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narrative is extremely strong and exaggerated betw een the comm unities o f the subcontinent. Collective assertions o f p o w er and bravery versus collective weakness and cow ardice are the hallmark o f their discourse and are imbricated in all literacy texts. T he dialogue o f the partition stories is studded w ith the terms ‘us’ and ‘them ’, ‘w e’ and ‘they’. The discourse o f their characters frames the language o f the writers as they paint the men and w om en who people their canvas. The language o f these people, as much as the events they witnessed, stands testimony to the boundaries and divisions o f the times. Almost all the stories on the partition reveal that ordinary, ‘norm al’ people are participants or, at the least, com plicitous, in the acts o f violence or bloodshed. W hether they are shaken to the core by their ow n bestiality as in Manto's “Thanda Gosht,” or gloat bitterly w hen their ‘ow n’ people setde scores w ith the enemy as in N .G . G ore’s “A M outhful o f W ater, a M outhful o f Blood”: “Did I disapprove o f these things? N o. Honestly, no. I myself did not look for anyone; didn’t shove a knife between anyone’s ribs; didn’t drag any Muslim young w om en into my house— that is true...B ut w hat’s the point in denying that I felt a sneaky jo y in watching these neutering acts com m itted by others?...In every one o f their acts, I was their partner in imagination.” Amrit R ai’s train passengers exemplify the complicity o f the spectator as they narrate w ith “pleasurable attention” stories o f abducted w om en while employing the m etaphor o f the ‘goonda’: “whereas in the past, only Muslim goondas had been courageous enough to do such deeds, now even the Hindus and Sikhs had proved to the Muslims that they were braver goondas!” Lakhs o f m en had died, lakhs o f children had been orphaned, lakhs o f w om en violated and, lakhs o f people were vicarious participants through the discourse o f the ‘goonda’s hooliganism’.9 T he powerful depiction o f conflict, based on cultural and historical differences, by various writers calls into question some o f their stories’ attempts at introducing compas­

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sionate, self-sacrificing and benign endings. Like all utopic m oments, they leave us with a lingering question about how long it (the resolutions o f their tales) can last in the ‘real* w orld o f separateness, stratification, mis-communication and silence. Categories o f thinking and strategies o f literary cons­ truction w hich present the desire to make connections across boundaries, are precious and moving. B ut they cannot erase the materiality o f divisions. W riters w ho faith­ fully recount even partial, one-sided, culture-specific narra­ tives, need to be taken seriously if we w ant to deconstruct the pow er o f different discourses. Does M anto’s writing steer clear o f all streotypes? The only story that describes the cultural visibility o f his characters is “M ozel.” Interestingly, it is also the only one w hich presents a utopic vision o f a character sacrificing her life for another. W e are made to recognize cultural symbolism and differences in this story: “I cannot marry y o u ,” says Mozel to Tirlochen, because “you are a Sikh." Mozel, in her short hair, ugly lipstick and frocks that barely hide her nudity, Trilochen with his long hair, beard and turbal, Kirpal Kaur the virtuous, virginal, religious Sikh girl— these are all cultural stereotypes. But they are external to the bonds o f love and compassion that exist betw een hum an beings. M anto presents his characters’ cultural symbols b u t im m ediately sets about transcending their visibility, and Sikh, Jew, Muslim, Hindu loose the burden that all systems o f signification carry in society. Through apprehensive Sikh eyes, he gazes at ‘Staunch Muslims’, the “Miyan bhais who are mean and ruthless.” T hrough M ozel’s verbal assault on T rilochen, M anto tears into the cultural signification o f Sikhs; their “silly underw ear,” their beards and hair. The same T rilochen w ho accuses M ozel o f ridiculing his religion, gets his beard shaved and his hair cut and feels, “w ith absolute certainty that he had been carrying an unnecessary burden o f hair w hich really had no m eaning.” M anto has not a shred o f symptahy for cultural symbolism

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but he also has no insight into what makes people do what they do. N evertheless, w hen M ozel refuses to m arry him , Tirlochen begins growing his hair again and slides back into the cultural visibility o f his collective. I think M anto grasped the cultural signification in society though he despaired o f it. T o present the core sameness in the hearts and bodies o f all human beings, M anto has only to remove Tirlochen’s beard and hair, slip Mozel’s dress over Kirpal Kaur’s head, and in an act o f defiant symbolism on behalf o f humanity, against superficial cultural visibility, leave Mozel to die com­ pletely naked. The dying Mozel pushes away the meaning­ less essentialism o f religion that is vested in T irlochen’s turban: “Take away., .this religion o f yours.” W hat system o f signification, what world view, what discourse links the cultural symbolism o f collectives to their mass consciousness despite the individual, personal trajec­ tories o f their lives, is not part o f Manto's literary imagina­ tion. The fact that the course o f his ow n life changed so dramatically when he felt compelled to move to Lahore also did not lead him to explore these questions. The only sane voice inside a lunatic asylum while the world outside goes mad (Toba Tek Singh) is the most well know n and most obvious o f M anto’s constructions. More ruthless is “Khol D o ” in its rejection o f the ideology o f a religious community in the face o f evil. The community o f the trusted protectors is an illusion, a monstrous fraud, for the fence eats the field and the revolution devours its own children. “The Dog o f Titwal” is contested territory: it was hard to say w hether “he died a noble death” or “he died a dog’s d eath .” M anto mocks at the foolish gullibility and mindlessness o f people vis-a-vis discourses o f pow er and authority. There is a constant tension between dream and reality: w ould those w ho killed the dog die as patriots or would they die the death o f cruel fools for their country, religion or cause? The venom in H indus and Muslims butchering each other did not lie outside o f them, it was the

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result o f a Pir’s curse (Cf. “Naya K anoon”). T he term “curse” strongly implies an irrational force that takes over human beings. M anto’s rejection o f all ideology, religious or political (see his treatment o f political activity as rhetoric in “Student U nion C am p” and “Sharabi,” his irreverence for national­ ism: “D o or Die— M ein langot ka pakka R ahoonga”; and towards leftism: “whisky to aise gale se utar kar pet me inqilab-zindabad likhti chali gayi” (in “Babu Gopinath”); his contemptuous references to drooling dervishes and swearing by “Randi ka kotha aur pir ka mazar” in the same breath— assiduously created an absolute disbelief in any ideology o f pow er or salvation. N one o f his stories offer solutions to evil, neither systemic, nor individual. At the most the characters o f “Ji Aya Sahib” and “Khuni T h u k ” employ subversive strategies— the weapons o f the weak. W hile other writers on the partition convey the evil and irrationality o f their characters in their collective existence by treating them as distorted b u t recognizable beings, M an to ’s characters are surreal— they defy recognition because their inner worlds are hidden from us. O nly their deeds bear witness to their existence. M anto’s was an extremely individualistic, anti-status quoist literary interven­ tion carrying the impress o f angry radicalism even in his prepartition stories. From the outset o f his writing career, all his characters were lonely and isolated beings and connections betw een their evil and inhum anity, and their collective existence in society, were not part o f his intellectual para­ digm. Humanity— or the lack o f it— was M anto’s obsession, its sociology is left to us to decipher. There was, and is, a tendency am ong literary critics to extract M anto’s ‘politics’, his ‘social co n cern ’ and his ‘ideology’ from his w riting. A sensitive being and an insightful writer o f life and its parables o f existence such as M anto has no need o f proving his social concern. All the ‘progressive’ writers around M anto were busy trying to connect men and w om en’s social and economic status to their characters’ lives and to provide systemic solutions to

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their problems. Many o f them vulgarized their ‘concern’ by im bueing their w riting and fictional characters w ith an ideology o f ‘com m itm ent’, political ‘action’ and ‘interven­ tion*, often producing caricatures o f life and people. They were, unlike M anto, not reflectors and philosophers on life but social engineers o f existence turned literateurs. The consistent theme underlying M anto’s writing is, on the other hand, that one cannot find rational explanations for hum an actions. T he impenetrable recesses o f hum an souls offer no simple answers, therefore, he is not interested in going into them. If one man can rape and kill, all men can do so. If one woman can prostitute herself, all wom en can do so. The ‘biological m en’ w ho exploit the w om en (the Seth in “Saugandhi” and the pimp Hamid) are not morally or emotionally identical in their maleness, in their relationships to women. For Manto, the hum an condition w ith its ugliness/beauty, vice/virtue, sharafat/badmashi, greed/generosity, cruelty/com passion is holistic and his concern transcends their sociological or political explana­ tions. T he dram a/banality or heroics/tragedy o f life are different colours on a m oving screen— the cinem atic imagination par excellence. It is in this sense that statements on M anto’s ‘politics’ or his ‘investigation’ o f society fall incredibly short o f his creative and sensitive writing. In “Tamasha,” the terror that envelopes Khalid’s father is juxtaposed against the innocent ignorance o f Khalid— no ‘politics’, no ‘ideology’, no ‘history’ can displace or rationa­ lise this terror. Likewise, an act o f courage, spontaneous ‘bravery’ that is quintessentially an explosion o f anger and moral rage, cannot be ‘explained’ politically and ideolo­ gically (M uham m ed Tufail in “ 1919 Ki Ek Baat”). The narrator o f “ 1919”— a political participant in the organized protest m ovem ent based on nationalist ideology, can only describe Tufail’s “heroism .” At most he can cherish it as admirable— an act o f solitary courage in the face o f bullets as “some fell and the rest fled.” Just as M anto surely cherished the spark o f Bhagat Singh’s singular intervention while he busied himself in writing o f dismal and dark lives.

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Even in the overtly political theme in “Naya K anoon,” M angu, the Tonga driver, transcreates the fragments o f conversations he overhears, not into a political conception, b ut into a millionarian act o f deliverance. T he vision o f Indian freedom and the liberation o f the poor such as himself, flashes like lightening in his imagination only to be extinguished on the appointed day. Mangu had been made a m onkey of, one hears Manto snigger, on the first o f April. W hat makes people leap from their existence as sons and fathers, husbands and householders, into a dance o f death and destruction and becom e butchers and rapists before sinking back to an ‘ordinary* life? T he link betw een ‘normality* and apparent ‘pathology’ is not one that he came to grips with. Far more incisive than others, w ith a cutting edge as sharp as the weapons used by his characters, Manto's stories provide little insight into the w orld-view and stereotyped prejudices o f the killers w ho people his stories. There are two, small exceptions. The brief, cryptic piece, “Khad** from “Siyah Hashye” and the title story from his c o lle ctio n Yazid , both penned after M anto’s arrival in Lahore, show a glimmer o f cultural specificity. “Khad” has insight into the inner w orld o f a Sikh for w hom the chopping o f his ‘kesh’ and shaving o f his beard were clearly worse than death, and he kills himself. T h e logical, pragmatic tone o f his friend w ho narrates the episode in ten short sentences, on how he failed to persuade the ‘stupid’ Sikh to detach his em otion from such external symbols like hair which, nourished with curd, would grow back within the year, does not appear to have M anto’s sympathy. The one w ord title M anto gives the story— “Khad” (Manure) is an ironic com m ent on the friend’s superficial rationalisation o f deeply felt wounds. The sarcasm o f “Khad” lies in the friend’s assumption that cultural symbols are external to the respect or humiliation o f the self and leave no scars on one’s being. “Yazid,” is the story o f Muslim survivors in a Pakistani village w ho hear o f India’s tyranny in changing the course o f the river which nurtures their fields and lives. Karimdad,

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the protagonist o f this story, argues w ith logical coldness that everything is fair in war and all means legitimate against o n e ’s enem y. H e contem ptuously dismisses toothless fulminations against India as futile and im potent. A culture specific anger bares itself in Manto's ending to the story, w hen Karimdad names his new born son ‘Yazid’ (tyrant) w ho w ould undo the tyranny o f the enemy. Put together, “K had,” “Yazid” and M anto’s “O pen Letter to ‘Pandit’, Jawaharlal N ehru,” suggest a new emotion and insight into the angers and feelings o f collectivities which have been rent asunder. Alok Bhalla’s comments on Manto are most perceptive. M anto's w orld-view , as it emerges from his reading, and w hich I fully share, is the unrelieved, relentless journey o f the damned. The stories, to quote Bhalla, “are w ritten by a man w ho knows that after such ruination there can neither be any forgiveness nor any forgetting. Those who have seen the carnage can only stand and wait for death...the inhuma­ nity o f the partition has so obliterated the moral realm that there is nothing left to retrieve and nothing to hope for... language betrays, and ordinary people...becom e ruthless killers...horror is unflinchingly observed and recorded...to make us understand that we are all accomplices in the making o f a barbarous world and that now nothing can save us.” T he sad and weary message of “Siyah H ashye” is condensed in M anto’s two line bitterness, tided “Aram Ki Jaroorat”: “Mara nahin...dekho abhi jan baki hai” “Rehne de Yar...main thakgaya hooni”

If there is any hope left in the worid, it is this: the body will tire o f blood-letting. ‘J u n o o n ’, passion o r violence, is expressed through the body, w ith cries o f frenzy, running after victims, endlessly wielding the weapons o f destruction and setting persons and homes on fire. W hen rape and pillage cross the threshold o f exhaustion then, perhaps, there may be respite.

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I believe that Manto's bludgeoning impact on our minds, and the em otional freezing we experience akin to the cauterising o f our arteries, is because he is the voice o f our times. M anto appears to belong less to the past than to the present, when all ideologies, beliefs and language reveal litde about the ‘nature o f m an’ celebrated and discussed in centuries past. His stories are anti-ideology, anti-heroic, anti-salvationist; the figure o f the amoral, Nietzchean man, prefiguring the end o f all ideologies and the pitiless logic o f the future, grows out o f his words and challenges all reason and rationality. T he w orld o f a Sartrean nightm are from which there is no exit fills our unconscious. N othing is prescribed. N othing is proscribed. T o draw attention to the Neitzchean, amoral characters that people Manto's fiction is not to ascribe these characteristics to the author. Critics often collapse the personna o f his fictional protagonists with the authorial value system or personality. N othing could be farther from the truth. M anto's ow n bruised values and concerns, the acute observation o f degraded lives and disintegrating morals, leaves the world w ith a tattered vision. It was not his business to patch the tear in the fabric o f reality w ith his own visionary hopes. It is in this manner that he emerges as anti-ideological— not as the valueless artist but as opposed to offering ‘ideology’ as resolution o f and salvation for individuals and societies. A w riter such as M anto cannot be a reference and a source for social scientists going about their rational activity o f trying to understand the past. He can only be a reflection o f the self-exiled consciousness. Manto's emotionless, dead pan, icily constructed stories testify to the iron that had entered his soul. The ‘so-called homo-sapiens’ that M anto refers to somewhere are recognizable in their physicality but not in any other moral feature o f their anatomy. Such a perception o f w hat was happening around him could only provoke mad laughter and sarcasm, as Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims chasing each other w ith knives and swords became hunters and prey, when blood and water mixed together on the road and rem inded a child o f jelly, w hen Sikhs were

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‘halaled’ and Muslims were ‘jhatkaed*, w hen the division or ‘taqsim* o f loot was the first step to the ‘taqsim’ o f bodies and w hen the tearing open o f a sack o f sugar disgorged human entrails. NOTES 1. Concepts such as cultural power, cultural contest and cultural assertion have been worked out in the broader framework of a struggle for cultural hegemony in Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh, Struggle for Hegemony in India: Culture, Community and Power, 1941-47, vol. 3. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1994. 2. Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Post-modem Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1979. 3. Bhalla, Alok (ed), Stories About the Partition o f India, vol. 1. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 1994,, p. xv. 4. Das, Veena (ed). The Word and the World. N ew Delhi: Sage, 1986, p. 180. 5. Ashar, Masood, “Versions o f T ruth” in Khalid Hasan and Faruq Hassan (eds), Versions of Truth. New Delhi: Vikas, 1983, p. 51. 6. Bhalla, op. cit., p. xvii. 7. The stories referred to in the pages that follow are available in Alok Bhalla (ed), Stories About the Partition of India, 3 volumes. Leslie A. Flemming, The Life and the Works of Saadat Hasan Manto. Lahore: Vanguard, 1985, Khalid Hasan and Faruq Hasan (eds), Versions of Truth, and Satish Jamali, Manto Ki Sarvshreshth Kahaniyart. Allahabad: Satyam Prakashan, 1991. N o separate footnotes are provided. 8. As Jean Paul Sartre wrote, “W e cannot overlook the dialectical relationship between authorized, authorizing language and the group which authorizes it and acts on its authority.*' See my discussion o f the activation and restoration o f cultural memory and the connection betw een restored memory and its content o f fantasy, in Struggle for Hegemony in India, vol. 3, pp. 77-86. 9. For a discussion o f the stereotype of a ‘Muslim as a Rapist’ in Premchand’s writings, see Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh, op.cit. “W om en and Sexuality in the Discourse o f Communalism and Communal Violence,” pp. 194-258. According to Sudhir Kakar, “The Litmus Test o f Revivalism and Fundamentalism remains the attitude towards sex rather than power.” See his Colours of Violence. New Delhi: Viking, 1995. His understanding o f power is very reductionist and overlooks sexuality as a mode o f acquiring power. See my review of Kakar, The Hindu, 17 December, 1995. 10. Alok Bhalla, “Introduction,” op. cit., vol. I.

Manto in English: An Assessment o f Khalid Hasan’s Translations M. ASADUDDIN

Manto began his literary career as a translator. Bari, his liter­ ary and ideological mentor, introduced him to the worlds o f the English, the French and the Russian writers. He read, am ong others, V ictor H ugo, Maupassant, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin and Gorky w ith passionate involvement. O n B ari’s suggestion, he undertook the translation o f H u g o ’s the Last Days o f the Condemned and called it Sarguzasht-e-Asir. Later, he translated Oscar W ilde’s Vera, a collection o f Russian stories and two plays by Chekhov into Urdu. It is reasonable to surmise that his apprenticeship as a translator made him aware o f both the inadequacy and extraordinary pow er o f words in conveying or com m uni­ cating hum an experience. In his autobiographical essay, “Saadat Hasan,” he alludes to his incessant, sometimes vain, search for the most appropriate word. N o wonder that in his best writings one finds evidence o f the w riter’s effort to exploit all the nuances and associations o f words and even non-verbal elements o f expression. It seems that a resurgence in M anto studies is on the anvil for a variety o f reasons. O ne o f them pertains to the growing interest in the partition o f India in 1947. Even half a century after this cataclysmic event, historians and social scientists are no closer to comprehending this phenom enon in all its complexity. They are now looking beyond the official historical documents to literary and semi-literary narratives w hich are sometimes m uch m ore insightful in illum inating critical hum an situations. If literature is supposed to m irror life, it is entirely valid to assume that the dom inant attitudes, assumptions and the angst o f an epoch will find expression in the creative writings o f that period

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and social scientists will do well to take cognizance o f this fact. A recent endeavour o f putting together such writings can be found in the two volume anthology, India Partitioned: The Other Face o f Freedom edited by M ushirul Hasan The one writer w ho has been given primacy in this anthology is M anto. However, besides the fact o f the partition, about which Manto writes with searching insight and muted rage, the cult o f violence that is raging around us today makes him increasingly relevant. W ith uncanny intuition, he reveals the darkness that sometimes lies at the core o f the human heart and erupts in all its ferocity w hen the civilised values o f restraint and discipline are throw n to the winds and men turn into brutes.

1 Translation may be considered as the reincarnation o f a writer in a different language and culture; a bad and irres­ ponsible translator can do great damage to a writer, falsifying his image and distorting the true im port and spirit o f his works. T he politics involving selections from a w riter and the translator’s perspective can become crucial because a particular view o f the writer may be projected which is not consistent w ith or may even be to the detrim ent o f his whole corpus or his total image. O ne is rem inded o f the translations o f Tagore’s poetry into English by the poet himself and others in the early decades o f this century, which resulted in building up his image as an oriental mystic and prophet, at the cost o f his genius as a poet, playwright and fictionalist, an image which subsequent translators o f Tagore have tried to dispel. T he recent translations o f Tagore by William Radice have been done from an altoge­ ther different perspective. A.K. Ram anujan’s competence in translating U .R . Ananth M urthy’s Samskara has remained undisputed, b u t some scholars think that his elaborate footnotes and the afterword, appended to the translation, tend to divert the reader’s attention from the novel to anthropology. The translations o f Ghalib’s poetry by Ahmed

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Ali, Y usuf Husain and R alph Russell, and those o f Faiz Ahm ed Faiz’s poetry by Victor K iem an, N aom i Lazard, Agha Shahid Ali and Shiv K. Kumar have different degrees o f competence and inadequacy. All this is m entioned here merely to emphasise the point that now , w hen M anto *s appeal seems to be acquiring trans-national dimensions, one has to be very careful about the translations through w hich this appeal is being mediated. The English translations o f M anto’s stories are scattered over innum erable literary magazines and anthologies. Among the magazines the most notable are—-Journal o f South Asian Literature, Pakistan Review, and Thought. The antholo­ gies are truly numerous, sometimes representing Urdu short stories from the Indian subcontinent or South Asia, and sometimes arranged under some overarching themes. In the latter group fall three most recent works— the first one is the three volume compilation, Stories About the Partition of India, which contains four o f M anto’s stories and two short pieces from “Siyah Hashye.” The translations are by Alok Bhalla and Tahira Naqvi. The second anthology is India Partitioned: The Other Face o f Freedom (2nd edition) m entioned earlier, which contains translations o f all the thirty two pieces from “Siyah Hashye” (Black Margins) by Mushirul Hasan. T he third anthology is Orphans of the Storm: Stories on the Partition o f India w hich has four M anto stories, one translated by Khushwant Singh and the three others by Khalid Hasan. Alok Bhalla’s translations o f M anto are, as he claims, quite close to the text except for some m inor inaccuracies. Mushirul Hasan’s translations had some blemishes in the first edition which have been removed in the second conveying, as they stand now , fairly adequately the splintered and fragm ented quality o f the original. K hushw ant Singh’s translation o f “Toba Tek Singh” cannot compare favourably with some other competent translations o f this classic M anto story, though one is pleasantly surprised to see that he has reverted this tim e to the original title from his earlier translation o f it as “Exchange o f Lunatics.” Apart from these translations spread in magazines and

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anthologies, five collections, exclusively devoted to M anto’s stories and sketches, have been published in English so far. T he earliest among them is Black M ilk translated by Hamid Jalal w hich contains six stories by M anto in English translation. This collection was quickly censored and very few copies survived the iron hand o f the thought police in Pakistan. This was followed by Tahira N aqvi’s translation o f 17 o f M anto’s stories published in Leslie A. Flem m ing’s book on M anto entitled Another Lonely Voice. T h o u g h Tahira Naqvi has achieved considerable fame in recent yean as a competent translator o f Ismat Chugtai’s novels and short stories, her translations o f M anto’s stories belong to an earlier period and, though they are free from distortions and inaccuracies, they cannot be called very distinguished. In India, Sterling Publishers published the collection The Best of Manto which contains fifteen stories translated by Jai Ratan. Jai Ratan, a veteran translator w ho translates from Hindi, Punjabi and U rdu, has his ow n notions about translation and narrative logic and reorders his material making small changes here and there. Among all M anto’s translators in English, the best know n to date is Khalid Hasan. He has translated and edited tw o collections o f M anto’s stories and sketches— the first one is Kingdom's End and Other Stories and the second one is titled Partition; Sketches and Stories. Since both o f them have been quite widespread in their circulation and have been extremely popular w ith scholars and general readers, I propose to concentrate on them and demonstrate how Hasan’s translations raise important issues about the objectives o f a translator, as well as the pitfalls and ethics o f translations. 2 Khalid H asan’s English is good and idiomatic and his translations fulfil the criterion o f readability in the target language. This seems to be the secret o f the popularity o f his anthologies. A non-U rdu reader will be immediately taken in by the lucidity o f his prose and the clever turn o f phrase

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and will be tempted to trust his competence and judgem ent as a translator. But as one compares his translations w ith the original, one is horrified by the kind o f liberties he takes w ith the original and the distortions he makes in his translations. Hasan commits all the errors o f an inordinately adventurous translator. He changes the titles o f stories w ithout any valid reason, leaves out big chunks o f the original, summarises descriptive paragraphs and dialogues, changes the order o f sentences, eliminates ellipses, flattens out uneven contours and cultural angularities of the original and sometimes, through not as frequendy, adds his ow n bit for the benefit o f readers not acquainted w ith Indo-Islamic culture and the history o f the subcontinent. It will be my endeavour to substantiate these allegations with illustrations from his translations. First, the change o f titles. Hasan translates the tide o f the spine-chilling story, “Thanda Gosht,” as “Colder than Ice.” In fact, several translators have translated it either as “Colder than Ice,” or “Cold, Like Ice,” and one wonders w hat makes them do so. The story ends w ith the phrase “colder than ice” (Kulwant Kaur placed her hand on Ishar Singh’s which was colder than ice) and if M anto had so wanted he would have retained it as the title. The euphemistic phrase “colder than ice” does not evoke the rawness and im m e­ diacy o f Ishar Singh’s experience as the phrase ‘cold m eat” or “a lump o f cold flesh” does. The keyword here is “meat” or “flesh” that serves as a m etaphor bringing out the horri­ fying implications o f m an’s descent into bestiality w here a w om an’s body becomes the contested site for conquest, violence and sexual assault. Another instance of this kind o f unimaginative change o f title by Hasan is evident in case o f the story, “Khol D o .” Hasan translates it as “R eturn.” It is crystal clear that the unbearable nature o f the traumatic experiences o f Sakina, Sirajuddin’s daughter, has been telescoped in her gesture o f lowering the shalwar following the utterance o f the two words, “khol d o ” (open it). The neutral w ord “return” is not only insipid as a title divesting the original o f its terrible impact, but changes the whole

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emphasis by shifting the focus from the daughter s trauma to the father’s frantic search to find his daughter. M oreover, the change o f the title in English to “R e tu rn ” becomes more problematic if we remember that Joseph Conrad has a celebrated story by that name and M anto’s story offers neither any parallel nor any counterpoint to it. T hen Hasan translates “Sarkandon Ke Peeche” as “W ild Cactus” where the more literal “Behind the Reeds” would have been more appropriate because the preposition “behind” (“peeche” in the original) conveys the shady goings-on and thus brings out well the thematics o f the story. Besides, Hasan’s title lends itself to a kind o f symbolic interpretation w hich M anto, in all probability, had never intended. Similarly, he translates the title “Saheb-e-Karamat” as “A M an o f G od” whereas “The M an o f Miracles” would have been closer to the text and m ore appropriate. H asan’s unw arranted irreverence may be mistaken by an unwary reader for M anto’s and if it is foregrounded in the title then the story will lend itself to an altogether different kind o f reading. There are a few more instances o f this kind in the two collections. Secondly, the most serious o f all Hasan’s errors is his omission o f large chunks o f the original in his English translation. He leaves out not only sentences but paragraphs, even pages, doing great violence to the original text. For instance, in “Naya Q anoon” (The N ew Constitution), a story o f about 3,500 words, the total omission amounts to about 500 words. In “Titw al Ka K utta” (The D og o f Titwal), a 3,000 words story in the original, Hasan leaves out a total o f about 400 words. In “Mozel” which runs into 7,500 words in the original, the omission totals about 700 words. And so on and so forth. H owever, the story that bears the brunt o f Hasan’s pair o f scissors is “Swaraj Ke Liye” where he omits a total o f about 1100 words o f the original which also includes a full page in Urdu print. N ow , if Hasan’s omissions pertained to seemingly superfluous or supporting details o f description or atmosphere building o r interm inably long character portrayal, though such

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omissions are certainly unethical and not permissible, one w ould at least try to make some sense o f it. M anto is a writer w ho can by no means be called prolix. This makes Hasan’s heavy dose o f editing absolutely gratuitous. In fact, some o f the omissions by Khalid Hasan form an integral part, or essential elements o f character portrayal, or the thematic core o f the story. As an illustration o f this, one can take up the story “Naya Q anoon.” After introducing the protagonist Ustad M angu, the tonga driver, in the opening four lines Hasan leaves out the following part: Pichhle dino jab ustad Mangu ne apni ek sawari se Spain mein jang chhirh jane ki afwah suni to us ne Gama Chaudhry ke chore kandhe per thapki de kar muddabirana andaz mein peshan goi ki thi, (