Manto's daring short stories written during subcontinent partition

The short-story writer Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) deserves to be thought of as the patron saint of modern South Asian fiction for at least three reasons. First, Manto was personally and artistically impacted, in a way that he transformed into enduring narrative prose, by the massive cataclysm of history that was the partition of colonial India in 1947 into two nation states, the Hindu-majority India and the Muslim-majority Pakistan. The decision sparked off the largest two-way migration in history, with millions of Hindus and Sikhs in what was suddenly Pakistan crossing into India and millions of Muslims in what was now a smaller India attempting to flee to Pakistan. Both sides leapt at each other's throats on the long, strife-torn route, generating a bloodbath - and more lastingly, memories that were passed down for generations afterwards - that may take hundreds of years to heal. This event generated the enduring politics of distrust between the two great powers of the subcontinent, which between them account for more than a quarter of the world's population today. What Manto wrote then in the light of what he had known, heard or witnessed - and what he did with this material artistically, within the four walls of his own independence as a writer of fiction - make him an eerie and thrilling writer to this day. Second, Manto's daring and iconoclastic writing served as a kind of declaration of independence from the main narrative tenets and orthodoxies of his times, which was that fiction should be "socially relevant" in its content, that it locate the personal within the larger realm of the public sphere, and that it deal coyly and euphemistically - or at best metaphorically - with the subject of bodily functions. Manto was in his lifetime repeatedly charged by his critics (many of them writers themselves) with obscenity, and was even taken to court for what was seen as the outrageous licentiousness depicted in his work. But what his critics saw as a determined emphasis on the bawdy, Manto merely understood to be a determined emphasis on the body - as a site for pleasure and violence, trust and treachery, a house for yearnings of mind and spirit as well as its own longings. The world of the prostitutes, pimps, waifs, wastrels and debauchees that he wrote about in story after story was a universe that existed in reality - as much a centre of Bombay (now Mumbai) as the film world or the world of polite society - and was stratified and impacted by religion, politics, ideology, migration and economics as interestingly as any middle-class or radical world. The current of defiance embodied by Manto is one of literature's most necessary currents; its spirit was given voice by the French-Arabic writer Tahar Ben Jelloun at the Jaipur Literature Festival earlier this year when he remarked, bitingly, of censorship, "What bothers censorship is the representation of reality and not reality itself." To Manto, the writer must think through every sphere of human life, including one's private life. If he is the frankest sensualist in Indian literature, it is because he knows (as did the 18th-century Italian adventurer Giacomo Casanova in his magnificent 12-volume autobiography The Story of My Life) that sensuality is not without its own rules or ethical codes. For this reason, he speaks as powerfully to the 21st century as he did to his own. From : The National