Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

Manto’s short fiction offers a wealth of thematic diversity. However, he is chiefly — perhaps even exclusively — remembered as a writer on Partition and prostitutes. The present selection seeks to correct this reductionist impression of a writer who is concerned more with the unique substance of his characters than with social problems and political events as the mainstay of his creative work. No surprise if he has titled some of his major stories with their protagonists’ names. This book, therefore, presents an assortment of the author’s fictional and non-fictional writing as well as three pieces by two Urdu critics. The presence of the latter may seem unconventional, if not entirely out of place, in a book that purports to be a selection of his short stories.

A translator’s choice is determined no doubt by his preferences, biases and idiosyncrasies; mine being no exception. Some of Manto’s best-known stories are here followed by a few that are less often talked about. They have been chosen to give, hopefully, a more rounded and balanced view of the author’s creative work, its delightful diversity and its underlying assumptions.

In the non-fictional pieces the author speaks directly about himself, his literary milieu and, in some, he clarifies, among other things, his position regarding the alleged ‘obscenity’ in his work — a charge frequently hurled at him by the Progressives and one that landed him, by his own admission, in the courts of law, both during British India and, later, in Pakistan, five times. The pieces also give us some idea, in a style daubed with pain and occasional humour, about the man Manto was, about his uneasy relationship with the Progressive establishment, and his immense reluctance and pain at leaving Bombay, the city he loved.

Included here are two pieces by critic Muhammad Hasan Askari (1919–78), ‘Communal Riots and Our Literature’, and ‘Marginotions’, which he contributed as a preface to Manto’s collection of Partition vignettes Siyāh Hāshiye (Black Margins). Partition? Yes, but only as a convenient classificatory term. In essence they are little stories of individuals who each work in unexpected ways when flung in the midst of a harrowing event.

Askari’s pieces are important for two reasons: (a) they critically examine the tenor of much of Urdu fictional writing inspired by Partition and show its inherent conceptual fallacies and weaknesses resulting from limiting the event to merely one of its offshoots, namely, the communal rioting and its toll in human lives and property, without any regard for its effect on both the perpetrator and the victim of oppression which, he argues, cannot by itself constitute a valid subject of literature; and (b) the uniqueness of Manto in dealing with it in purely human terms, in the actions of the oppressor and the oppressed, with a neutrality few among his contemporaries writing on the subject could rival.

The last piece, ‘Recounting Irregular Verbs and Counting She-Goats’, is presented as a defence of Manto against the charge of ‘obscenity’.

Over the years a thick layer of interpretive fog has slowly accumulated around Manto’s work. It has quite obscured the notion of (a) literary autonomy and self-sufficiency, and (b) the primary allegiance of a writer to his calling. Social scientists and historians and, now, even experts of psychoanalysis have jumped into a terrain whose natural custodians appear to have, by and large, lowered their guards and abdicated their responsibility. To a degree it was perhaps inevitable. Where Premchand, importantly, finalized as a dialectical necessity the short story’s impending break with the cloying romanticism in which such writers as Sajjad Haidar Yildirim, Niaz Fatehpuri and Laam Ahmad had plunged it, he also saddled it with a reformist purpose, later embraced in earnest by the Indian Progressive Writers. Manto, by temperament, and even more by the demands of his calling, simply could not accept any social, political, or religious purpose as the primary concern of his writing. But challenged so often as he was by his detractors and just as often put into the dock for the charge of obscenity, he felt compelled to vindicate himself by repeated attempts to explain the underlying assumptions of his art. This never allowed the discourse to rise above the narrow confines of literature as socio-politically determined. An impression was created that his writing did have a sleazy or noble purpose, but purpose all the same, which he managed to obfuscate by eloquent casuistry.

In his delightful little book Letters to a Young Novelist , Mario Vargas Llosa describes the writer as someone afflicted with a ‘tapeworm’. His own life — why, even his own will — is forfeit to this creature; whatever he does is for the sake of this grisly monster, and he feeds off of himself for his themes, like the mythical ‘catoblepas’. So writing is a calling and one writes from an inexorable inner compulsion, unlike the ‘graphomaniacs’ Milan Kundera has deplored. The compulsion arises from what some might call the wayward desire to see a different world in place of the real, with its inherited values and mores and certainties that admit to no contradiction in human action and stifle questioning.

One understands the world through the prism of one’s own imagination, which only brings forth outcroppings of subliminal desires rehabilitated or transplanted in imaginative geography. For most Manto critics, the writer and the world are the only two terms of the equation — the substantial agency of human imagination that mediates between the two is routinely thrown overboard.

Strangely, though, Manto’s stories do easily lend themselves to such easy distortion because of their deceptive proximity to workaday life (and yet the external reality of the surface is often subverted in the subterranean landscape of his work so subtly that it provokes doubt and ambiguity in what was taken as a straightforward matter). No one asks, not even the critic: Why write stories if all you want is to substantiate reality as it is? Is that what stories are meant to do? Or are they supposed to mount an exploration into the existential situation of the character (and discover, in Kundera’s words, what the novel — read fiction — alone can discover)? Is fiction not expected to create parallel worlds? Or, at the very least, scramble the elements of existing reality and conjure them back to life in dizzying combinations whose entire geometry is drawn from a playful imagination delightfully irreverent to the rules of conventional values and modes of thinking?

It is easy to interpret a story through reference to something outside of itself (say, a political or social event), but far more difficult to analyse it through an exploration of its particular mode of being, its possibility and promise — indeed its poetics. Literary critics are a sad lot; not only is their work necessarily derivative and posterior to creation, it must also formulate its criteria of success and failure from the fictional work under consideration. Few Urdu critics have tried to delve deeper into the elusive poetics of Manto’s creative world. Instead, most have attempted to analyse his stories by recourse to criteria that are organically at odds with the nature of fiction. Political events are not the measure of the success or failure of a work of art, but rather, whether or how well the work has lived up to its latent promise.

Manto may well have written ‘Toba Tek Singh’ following his brief stint in an asylum. Though doubtful, he may even have intended it to be read as ‘a scathing indictment’ of Partition. (I rather think Manto was quite taken with the character he had created and wanted to follow along with him on his existential odyssey, ready to be surprised by his every reality-defying move.) But should we read it as such? After all, paraphrasing Kundera, it is not the business of fiction to write the history of a society; it is very much its business to write the history of the individual. That Stalinism is criminal is evident to everyone, he says in ‘The Making of a Writer’, you do not have to yell it in the form of the novel. And judgement (‘indictment’) has no place in his calling. At day’s end, what remains looming on the horizon is the larger-than-life image of the protagonist, Partition having shrunk back into the distance. In a paradoxical way, it is Bishan Singh who retroactively makes history meaningful, indeed inevitable, with an insight that quite escapes the historical narratives of the apocalyptic event, and not the other way around. History merely provides the occasion to discover some hitherto unknown aspect of human existence, some truth about the character. That is, precisely, what fiction does.