Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

And yet, inasmuch as Manto’s stories are genuine literary creations, they also do not fail to affect us morally, though this was not Manto’s primary purpose. Creating was all he was after. What surprises us during unusual circumstances is not the extraordinary character of events and acts but, rather, very ordinary and everyday things. Perhaps it is neither surprising nor unexpected that after killing two hundred women and children a killer would string their skulls to wear as a trophy around his neck. When killing becomes commonplace it fails to terrify, but when we watch the killer’s anxiety over dirtying the train compartment with the blood and gore of his victims, we feel a disquieting chill run down our spine. Murderers’ uninterrupted killing does not create horror; what does create horror is that such sticklers for cleanliness could kill with impunity. Ultimately, it is the juxtaposition of opposites, of paradoxes, of contradictions that confers upon a piece its ultimate meaningfulness. The most extraordinary acts during extraordinary conditions tell us only that those conditions can reduce man to the state of animal. But his preoccupation with very ordinary things as he commits an exceptional act gives us a deeper and a more fundamental insight about him: he is both human and animal at the same time, all the time. The frightening aspect here is how he could bear being animal in spite of his humanity, which is not without its comforting aspect: with all his bestiality man can never entirely rid himself of his humanity.

Both aspects — the frightening and comfort-giving — exist side by side in Manto. Man in these jocular vignettes appears in all his helplessness, folly, refinement and purity. Manto’s laughter is dipped in vitriol; nonetheless it consoles us too. It is no small achievement to say out loud that even during extraordinary conditions man’s interest in very ordinary things and his equally mundane inclinations simply couldn’t be suppressed. Manto neither portrays man as oppressor nor as oppressed. He only points out that man is a strange creature, a compound of discordant elements, and then he keeps quiet.

This, in a manner of speaking, does create quite a poignant feeling of despair. However, if you look at man’s contradictory nature closely, it will not fail to inspire a feeling of true optimism either. Had he been only entirely good or entirely bad, he would be extremely dangerous. What gives us hope is that one can’t be sure about man — he can be good, but then again he can be bad. Additionally, he is caught within the bonds of his humanity; he can’t become an angel, any more than Satan can. However much he may strive to become exceptional, the demands of everyday life will drag him back to his limits. The power of ordinary quotidian life is such that if he cannot become an exceedingly good man, neither can he be an extraordinarily bad one. This ordinary life will always straighten out his crookedness and knock him back into shape.

The most prominent merit of these stories is the acknowledgment of precisely this power and greatness of quotidian existence. Other writers endeavour to shepherd Hindus and Muslims back to the Straight Path by shaming them. However, after we are done reading their short stories, we are never sure whether their exhortation will bear fruit or not. Manto, on the other hand, wishes to shame no one nor drag anyone to the Straight Path. He tells mankind, with a highly ironical smile, that try as hard as you may to wander off the Straight Path, you are unlikely to go very far. In that sense, Manto displays an unfailing confidence in the nature of man, while others insist on seeing man only in a particular light. Before accepting him they foist some conditions on him. Manto accepts him in his true colours, regardless of what they may be. He has seen that man’s humanity is so strong that his barbarity simply cannot extinguish it. It was this humanity in which he had placed his trust.

These tiny droll vignettes of Manto are the most harrowing and most optimistic piece of writing to emerge in the entire corpus on communal riots. His horror and optimism have nothing to do with the horror and optimism of politicians or the pure-hearted servants of humanity. They are the horror and optimism of a writer. Disputation and reflection play no part in them. If anything does, it is a solid creative experience. Which is Manto’s singular distinction.

The communal riots of 1947 constitute an enormous national tragedy for Muslims. They have touched every one of us, some more than others, but nobody has escaped their effect. Perhaps such an event is unprecedented in world history. Because of the proximity of the incident, many authors wrote about the riots as a duty, others as a harrowing personal experience. In any case, in the space of the past ten or eleven months a goodly number of short stories and poems have appeared on the subject. Some readers find them satisfactory, others complain that our writers have ignored the Muslim point of view, and still others feel that it is best that writers steer clear of adopting an unambiguous point of view and just concentrate on the hope for a glorious future for mankind.

Well, there are opinions and opinions — always. However, the questions that needed to be asked have not been asked: Can such events, in and of themselves and purely as events, ever be the subject of literature, quite apart from their importance in the history of mankind or of a nation? What effect might they have in shaping life several centuries hence? What stimulation might they provide for someone to reflect on human nature or other major questions? And, how might they help a philosopher reaching a theoretical conclusion?

Even though it may be hard, we must put our personal and collective afflictions aside when looking for answers to such questions. After all, writers are a hard-hearted lot. Human history goes back a few million years. God alone knows what all has happened and what may yet come to pass. If literature should show deference, how many individuals or groups should it show deference to — is there no end? If we want to find a truly satisfactory answer to the question, we need to put aside our sense of victimhood, at least for a while.

We can make our exploration somewhat easier by picking a similar cataclysmic event and looking at the literary responses to it. The First World War produced a lot of literature. How much of it is alive today? W.B. Yeats (1865–1939), with the ruthlessness and granite objectivity of a true writer in regard to The First World War, unequivocally stated that he had not included a single poem about the war in his new collection because passive sympathy is not a subject of literature. It is worth remembering here that another poet who wrote about the war stated in no uncertain terms that the balance of his poetry sprang from its pain.

The point is this: literature articulates emotional experiences and passivity is not an experience, though it may be called a ‘feeling’. If riots mean murder and mayhem and carnage, physical pain and misery, the inescapable conclusion is that they cannot be viable subjects of literature, regardless of all the anguish we may feel on account of our emotional attachment. The most significant literature about national catastrophes and the physical suffering of an entire group of people is found in some parts of the Old Testament. But what makes it literature is not their account of the slaughter and plunder of countless Jews, the rape of their women, or the banishment of a whole nation. What makes it literature is something quite different. Jews believed that they were God’s chosen ones and the object of His love and favour, and yet they had to endure all this. The telling contradiction between belief and reality caused immense spiritual torment for the Jews and their inner selves were ravaged by the conflict between doubt and certainty, hope and hopelessness, fear and boldness, rebellion and loyalty. It was this complex spiritual experience of the Jewish people that conferred upon the lament of their Hebrew prophets the status of the loftiest literature. Hence, the subject of these sections of the Old Testament is not the trials and tribulations of a group but its collective experience.