Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

As to the reasons for this crisis we should try looking not so much in literature as in our own minds. This is not a difficult thing to do. If we ourselves wander off the straight path of literature, we shouldn’t say that the path has moved away from us.

Politics has its own place. It’s not fair to use literature to get to it. Likewise, it is wrong to use the labyrinthine by-lanes of politics to arrive at a literature worthy of its name.

No matter how much one touts the greatness of Soviet Russian literature, the fact is, it is plain hypocritical. It isn’t literature — no, it is not. It is something else. Just look at anything written by a contemporary Russian author.

Literature cannot be monopolized, now or ever. It cannot be made to order by handing out contracts. ‘Literature is stagnant’ is a sham, just as ‘Islam is in danger’ is a sham. It is nothing more than a slogan yelled from the top of the minaret until a few months ago by the very same people who proclaimed after Partition that it is the Progressive writers who have saved the honour of literature. The poor were dying but the Progressive writers revived them through the gift of their own blood. Why, then, so soon after the incarceration of a handful of members, has the life of literature been thrown into jeopardy? Isn’t it amazing!

I’m very down-spirited today. I was accepted as a Progressive at first; then suddenly I was turned into a reactionary. Now again these muftis are thinking to anoint me a Progressive. And the government, so fond of its counter-fatwas, considers me a die-hard Progressive — a pinko, a communist. And now and then, in extreme irritation, it accuses me of writing smut and drags me to the court. On the other hand, the same government openly advertises in its publications that Saadat Hasan Manto is a great short story writer of our country and that his pen remained active even during the recent cataclysmic period. My sad heart trembles at the thought that this whimsical government might not refrain from pinning some medal on my shroud, which would be the greatest insult to my scarred love.

Since Partition I have presented to you the following books, in quick succession. They will help you understand unequivocally the state of my mind:

1. Talkh, Tursh, aur Shīrīñ

2. Lazzat-e Sañg

3. Siyāh Hāshiye

4. Khālī Bōtlēñ, Khāli Dibbē

5. T.hand.ā Gōsht

6. Namrūd kī Khudā ,ī

7. Bādshāhat kā Khātima

And now this, my latest collection. Only two short stories in it, ‘Yazīd’ and ‘San 1919 kī Ēk Bāt’, have been published earlier; the rest are entirely new. How long it took to be completed and published can easily be gauged from a perusal of the relevant dates. I had just started on ‘Mummy’, the last story of the collection, when, on 16 October, the news of the assassination of Khan Liaquat Ali Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, arrived and greatly upset me. Soon thereafter my second daughter Jajia came down with a terrible case of typhoid. This also kept me agitated for several days, with the result that the completion of the work was delayed.

Honourable ladies and gentlemen!

I’ve been asked to explain how I write stories.

This ‘how’ is problematic. What can I tell you about how I write stories? It is a very convoluted matter. With this ‘how’ before me I could say I sit on the sofa in my room, take out paper and pen, utter bismillah , and start writing, while all three of my daughters keep making a lot of noise around me. I talk to them as I write, settle their quarrels, make salad for myself, and, if someone drops by for a visit, I offer him hospitality. During all this, I don’t stop writing my story.

If I must answer how I write, I would say my manner of writing is no different from my manner of eating, taking a bath, smoking cigarettes, or wasting time.

Now, if one asked why I write short stories, well, I have an answer for that. Here it goes:

I write because I’m addicted to writing, just as I’m addicted to wine. For if I don’t write a story, I feel as if I’m not wearing any clothes, I haven’t bathed, or I haven’t had my wine.

The fact is, I don’t write stories; stories write me. I’m a man of modest education. And although I have written more than twenty books, there are times when I wonder about this fellow who has written such fine stories — stories that frequently land me in the courts of law.

Without my pen, I’m merely Saadat Hasan, who knows neither Urdu, nor Persian, nor English nor French.

Stories don’t reside in my mind; they reside in my pocket, totally unbeknownst to me. Try as hard as I might to strain my mind, hoping for some story to pop out, trying equally hard to be a short story writer, smoke cigarette after cigarette, but my mind fails to produce a story. Exhausted, I lie down like a woman who cannot conceive a baby.

As I’ve already collected the remuneration in advance for a promised but still unwritten story, I feel quite vexed. I keep turning over restlessly in bed, get up to feed my birds, push my daughters on their swing, collect trash from the house, pick up little shoes scattered throughout the house and put them neatly in one place — but the blasted short story taking it easy in my pocket refuses to travel to my mind, which makes me very edgy and agitated.

When my agitation peaks, I dash to the toilet. That doesn’t help either. It is said that every great man does all his thinking in the toilet. Experience has convinced me that I’m no great man, because I can’t think even inside a toilet. Still, I’m a great short story writer of Pakistan and Hindustan — amazing, isn’t it?

Well, all I can say is that either my critics have a grossly inflated opinion of me, or else I’m blinding them in the clear light of day, or casting a spell over them.

Forgive me, I went to the toilet. . The plain fact is, and I say this in the presence of my Lord, I haven’t the foggiest idea how I write stories.

Often when my wife finds me feeling totally lost and out of my wits, she says, ‘Don’t think, just pick up your pen and start writing.’

So I follow her advice, pick up my pen and start writing, my mind totally blank but my pocket crammed full of stories. And all of a sudden a story pops out on its own.

This being the case, I’m forced to think of myself as not so much a writer of stories but more as a pickpocket who picks his own pocket and then hands over its contents to you. You can travel the whole world but you won’t find a greater idiot than me.

A new literary movement has added some priceless gems to Urdu fiction in the past ten years. However, incontrovertibly, much of the new short story seems to be inspired not so much by the writer’s inner creative passion as by external conditions and events, regardless of whether they had relevance for the writer personally or his milieu. Perhaps it was the result of the then prevalent belief that man’s inner life could by changed simply by changing his outside conditions. So this is how it has been generally. Whenever our writers have slumped creatively, they have not blamed themselves for it or worried about rekindling their creative fires by internal effort; rather, they have sat back smugly, attributing their lack of creativity to the absence of external events requiring expression in literary creation. Some six or seven years ago I heard an Urdu short story writer, who had gained considerable popularity by writing stories about poverty, slavery and Kashmir, say that spring tide would break over literature should the Japanese invade India and cause a lot of commotion.