Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

As for explaining away the work of a writer by relating it back to his biography, characters are seldom the mirror-image of the writer’s persona. Even when they appear to bear strong resemblance to certain individuals around us, they remain entirely composite — something Manto has expressed himself:

Literature isn’t a portrayal of an individual’s own life. When a person sets out to write, he doesn’t record the daily account of his domestic affairs, nor does he mention his personal joys and sorrows, or his illness and health. It’s entirely likely that the tears in his pen-portraits belong to his afflicted sister; the smiles come from you, and the laughter from some down-and-out manual worker. To weigh them against one’s own tears, smiles and laughter is a grievous error. Every creative piece seeks to convey a particular mood, a particular effect and a specific purpose. If that mood, effect and purpose remain unappreciated, the piece will be nothing more than a lifeless object. *

If Sahae, Mozel, Babu Gopinath, Toba Tek Singh, Radha, Janki or Saugandhi impinge upon our consciousness with indomitable force, it is precisely because, in the balance of his major works, Manto saw none of them as a typical representative of their social or religious group or as one shaped by its determinants. (Was Mozel a representative of the Jewish community of Bombay and her character shaped by its values?) More often, he saw each one in deathly opposition to the certainty of inherited values. Which, at any rate, is the business of fiction. If his characters behave contrary to conventional logic, it is because they act in consonance with fictional logic and ‘a law that is stronger than the laws of reason and the world’. Only in the hospitality of fictional spaces can polarities coexist without one trying to eliminate the other. Manto’s genius lay in recognizing these characters as discrete entities, and history, or social and religious determinants, as merely the backdrop against which each of them, in his or her own eccentric way, stumbled through their particular existential trek.

To read ‘Mozel’ as a story about Partition would be to ignore the simultaneous presence of the many contradictory forces and paradoxes in her complex personality. Partition did not give birth to Mozel or shape her behaviour; it only furnished Manto with the occasion to explore and subsequently reveal a truth about the eponymous character. Any traumatic event would have worked just as easily for such exploration and activated her inherent tendencies that only surface, unexpectedly, towards the end of the story.

Manto knew too well that most humans live and breathe in the obscuring haze of contradictory impulses and that certainties — the arbiter of human behaviour so predisposed to doling out reward and punishment — are the prerogative only of ideologues, whether religious or political. Fiction can ill afford certainties, and judgement on their basis even less. Take, for instance, Sahae: ‘A staunch Hindu, who worked the most abominable profession, and yet his soul — it couldn’t have been more radiant.’ *He was a pimp in Bombay who ran a brothel and dreamed of making thirty thousand rupees so that he could return to his native Benares and open a fabric shop. Religious devoutness here exists in perfect symbiosis with the demands of a ‘filthy’ profession. It is a meeting of opposites. In real life, a devout man would not come anywhere near a whorehouse, much less run it, though in the same life most people would display an amazing motley of contradictory impulses. Sahae will remain forever suspect to conventional morality. We may side with this morality but we cannot deny his behaviour as a possibility of being, even if it exists only in the liminal spaces of the imagination, even if we only admit to its nebulous existence grudgingly.

Can one call Esther’s transformation towards the end of Sándor Márai’s novel Esther’s Inheritance †even remotely logical? Robbed and duped by the same swindler, ‘that piece of garbage’, all her life, she is still willing to sign her last possession over to Lajos. She does not believe a word of what he is saying, yet she finds that his statement—‘there is a law that is stronger than the laws of reason and the world’ (p. 143) — contains a substantial core of truth. In the real world, even if this ambiguous truth does not change anything, its potential existence cannot be barred from our consciousness. Many of Manto’s characters, too, display such logical but entirely human contradictions.

Life is not the Straight Path leading to heaven for a writer. It is, rather, a trek riddled with potholes and detours and mind-boggling surprises, leading eventually to an infinite, mirror-encrusted maze of giddying, colliding images. The coffin has been lowered into the freshly dug grave for burial, the mourners stand around in a semicircle, the priest is only halfway through intoning his eulogy for the dearly departed when a ‘neurotic gust of wind’ lifts the hat off Papa Clevis’s head and drops it at the edge of the grave. Eventually it will tumble into the grave, but for now Clevis, hesitating between should he or shouldn’t he pick it up, lets his gaze crawl along the erratic course of the bobbing hat. The attention of everyone in the small band of mourners has wavered. No one is listening to the eulogy any more; instead their eyes are riveted on the comic drama unfolding before them. The funeral loses its gravitas and laughter is born. *

Such utter disregard for decorum, such hilarity in the most solemn moment of grief and loss — only a writer can think of such contrary situations because he is not beholden to the rules of conventional decorum. He cannot be tamed by the tyranny of conventional behaviour or some social, political or jingoistic agenda. Literature, as Manto says, is

an ornament, and just as pretty jewelry isn’t always unalloyed gold, neither is a beautiful piece of writing pure reality. To rub it over and over again on the touchstone like a nugget of gold is the height of tastelessness. . [It] is either literature or it is the worst kind of offense. . an outrageous monstrosity. †

And to those who censured him for immorality and obscenity, instead of delving into the tortuous by-lanes of his art, his unequivocal answer would be: ‘By all means, call me names. I don’t find that offensive — swearing isn’t unnatural — but at least do it with finesse so your mouth doesn’t begin to stink and my sense of decency isn’t injured.’ ‡

Lamentably, too often Manto has been drafted into the service of one social or political issue or another. The greater part of the critical commentary on his writing has mainly focused on prostitutes (a social phenomenon) and Partition (a political event).

Of course the remnants of the Progressives and a fair bunch of those too eager to deny fiction its radical autonomy would likely rush to declare — teary-eyed, I might add—‘Hatak’ (Spurned) as yet another story about the debasement of women. They would go for the nearest truncheon, in the absence of a cleaver, to bash the head of a society intent on sending its womenfolk to eke out a living by selling their charms and the physical repository of those charms. They would not fail to stick a feather in Manto’s cap for exposing this crass injustice, the sordid underbelly of society. And they would also dig up a motive for his doing this: infinite compassion for the downtrodden, disenfranchised female of the South Asian subcontinent.

To speculate on why a woman chooses to sell her body is the business of sociologists, to judge the morality of such a choice is the business of the custodians of morality. Is it also the business of fiction? Was it Manto’s business? No, the business of fiction is to see what she makes of this life, independently of the circumstances that brought her to this choice.