Saadat Manto: My Name Is Radha

Let’s now look at Urdu short stories that deal with the riots to see what kind of political or social outlook they espouse. Our evaluative standard will be to explore whether a writer has distorted reality in adopting his specific point of view. Does he believe what he says? For even when someone writes for a non-literary purpose, he cannot be absolved of the responsibility to speak the truth. A writer does not serve the nation by supporting it with lies; rather he serves it through writing that inspires certainty and confidence in the populace when the nation is facing a critical moment, and he believes his nation is in the right. Regardless of which point of view is adopted, a writer has to speak the truth in all circumstances. We shall employ this touchstone in our analysis of Urdu short stories on the riots. So far, the bulk of such stories more or less support a few specific ideas. The basic theme is that the barbarity witnessed during the riots was terribly heinous. The purport of such stories is to create aversion towards that barbarity and, along with it, explore its cause. Generally such barbarism is not found among humans; it was a product of the political conditions and the hatred for which the British were responsible. They had created it to promote their own political interests. The partition of India was one of their machinations. Had there been no partition, there would have been no rioting. Hindus and Muslims would have lived together as brothers. It is hoped that this hatred will soon evaporate and brothers will again embrace each other. Actually, some writers believe that India and Pakistan will again become one country. In such stories the writer makes every effort not to assign blame to either of the two protagonists and pegs it, instead, on the English. The result is that atrocities are shown in equal measure on both sides, without the least regard for what transpired in East Punjab — one would search a dictionary in vain to find the right words to describe it.

Well then, this is more or less the intellectual background of these short stories. Their conceptual webbing is so weak that the writer himself would hardly believe it. Only a sly or artless person would believe that the hatred was merely an offshoot of British politics. Even if we suppose the writer’s intention is pure, the fact that he himself does not believe what he is recording, and that he knows he is deluding himself, let alone others, still remains. This kind of writing, all of it, lacks honesty. It is lifeless and hollow, devoid even of a modicum of rhetorical eloquence because the entire conceptual framework is a fabrication. These stories are not only false; they have a dangerous aspect to them. They are bubbling with vitriolic propaganda against Muslims and Pakistan. It is possible all of this is unintentional and quite innocent, but the cumulative effect does go against Muslims. For one thing, Muslims are blamed disproportionately for causing the riots; for another, Partition is identified as the root cause of unrest and anomie, while the fact is that Partition, that is, the establishment of Pakistan, has been the most cherished political ideal of Muslims. These stories attempt to create scepticism among Muslims with regard to the basic principles behind the creation of Pakistan.

Our writers (that is, those who support Pakistan) have made no reasonable attempt to counter this ‘literary’ onslaught. After all, we might also try, at least now and then, to serve the nation a bit, but this does not mean that we should malign India and spread intolerance towards it. Let others indulge in name-calling. We should mind our own business. All we want from our writers is for them to tell us what we have experienced and why. We do not need elegies and laments about the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who were massacred. In and of itself, even the death of lakhs of people does not mean much. Indeed, if even fifty lakh of our men die as self-respecting human beings battling tyrants, this is something to celebrate. It would, however, be a tragedy if even five of our men fled the battlefield to save themselves. We only want our writers to subject our characters to a relentless scrutiny and tell us what our tragedy has been. Tell us: Does our character measure up to our traditions? We do expect at least this bit of national service from our writers. Not a critique of others but of our own nation.

Alas, thus far our writers have not acquitted themselves of this responsibility. Just one little book, recently published, is all there is to show, Qudratullāh Shahāb’s (1917–86) Yaā Khudaā ! [Oh, God!]. This is an invaluable work of short fiction, and I am inclined to go so far as to recommend it to every single literate Pakistani as a must-read . It begins with a preface by Mumtaaz Shirin (1924–73) in which she has analysed literature focusing on the riots. She has demonstrated how writers, swept away by the wrong kind of humanity and justice, have tended to lie even to themselves and have deliberately avoided presenting the reality they experienced and observed, thus harming both literature and Pakistan, because some people are spreading propaganda against Pakistan in the guise of literature. Shirin Sahiba must be complimented for her frankness and intellectual honesty. Shahāb Sahib does not depict an act of human compassion in his story. He has not called the atrocities and cruelty committed by others to account as much as he has the perverseness of Pakistanis themselves. If his book is against anyone, it is the Pakistanis. The tragic story of its female protagonist Dilshād is not drawn from the barbarity of the Sikhs alone, her real tragedy lies in finding Pakistanis so terribly different from what she had imagined them to be. Shahāb Sahib has portrayed this tragic aspect of her life with rare artistic finesse. Whatever vitriol he could pack into his irony is expended on himself, not on others. The book is not devoid of a certain measure of ‘sentimentality’, but since we are examining it from the perspective of ‘goal-oriented literature’, such an objection would be out of place here. Shahāb Sahib has been both daring and honest in his criticism of the moral character of Pakistanis. If Pakistani writers continue with the same fearlessness and honesty with which Pakistani literature is beginning, I see a great future for literature in Pakistan.

A second sign for Pakistan’s possibly great literary future comes from the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–1955) that are written against the backdrop of the communal riots. In truth, they are not about the riots at all; if anything, they are about ‘man’—man in particular circumstances. I feel a sense of pride in discovering that it is a Pakistani writer who has risen above the others in treating the experiences of the riots in a befitting literary manner, diverting his mind from creating senstionalism to produce a true literary work. Rising above all manner of interests, Mano has only sought human meaning and truth — which is precisely what literature is all about.

Saadat Hasan Manto’s non-fictional piece ‘ ‘Iṣmat-Farōshī ’ *—selling of virtue: prostitution — is an impassioned defence of women who practice the world’s oldest profession. He goes into great detail arguing vigorously for prostitution’s similarity to every other profession, and hence, deserving of respect. We do not look down on a typist, or even a sweeper woman, why should we ride roughshod over a bawd? All three do what they do in order to earn a living.

No exceptional intelligence is required to detect in the back of this almost pathological engagement with prostitutes, Manto’s defence of himself against frequent charges of obscenity. (I say pathological for good reason: Manto not only wrote a goodly number of stories in which the vaishiya occupies centre stage, he also revisited her in quite a few of his articles, as if he was obsessed with, indeed fixated on this much maligned being.) The Karachi judge Mehdi Ali Siddiqi, in whose court Manto was tried for ‘Upar, Neeche, aur Darmiyan’ (Upper, Lower, Middle), considered him ‘the greatest Urdu short story writer after Munshi Premchand’ †but nevertheless fined him twenty-five rupees for the offence, which infuriated Manto. Later, in a friendly meeting, Manto asked the judge how the fine reconciled with ‘greatest writer, etc.’ The judge replied that he would give him the reason at a later time. And he did. By then Manto was dead, perhaps being repeatedly grilled by the inquisitors Munkar and Nakeer of the Divine Supreme Court.