Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

It is about time that we discarded the myth about Manto tacitly following some Progressive — Socialist — Reformist agenda in his fiction; if anything, he was following his own agenda as a writer true to his calling.

I believe it should be evident by now that at the time of writing, a writer’s loyalty rests only with himself and his work, not with his society, country and his nation, which is not to deny his role as a citizen. Long ago Muhammad Hasan Askari, perhaps the single most perceptive early critic of Manto, had underscored this role in his article ‘Communal Riots and Our Literature’ *by graphically setting it apart from Manto’s role as a writer. He gives the example of some French writers who had, during the tumultuous period of the Second World War, started to produce a series of underground books with the title Les Éditions de Minuit . They were given a major literary award after France became free but declined to accept it. Everything they had written, they said, was simply to serve the nation. It was not literature, nor had they written it as literature.

The fashionable, entirely unwarranted and uncritical classification of Manto’s corpus by social scientists and historians into stories about (a) Partition and (b) prostitutes ignores the primary function of literature. As Askari comments:

Actually, literature is indifferent to who is behaving like an oppressor and who is not. [. .] Its business is to observe the internal and external behaviour of the oppressor and the oppressed during commission of oppression. Insofar as literature is concerned the external act of oppression and its equally external complements are meaningless. [. .] These stories are not about communal riots ( fasādāt ). They are about human beings. *

Could one call Elie Wiesel’s Night a novella about the Holocaust? Is it not rather about the little Jewish boy, the elect of God, who had, as François Mauriac puts it, ‘lived only for God and had been reared on the Talmud, aspiring to initiation into the cabbala, dedicated to the Eternal’ †—the boy who was condemned to witness the horror of the death of God in the depths of his soul and subsequently did not bow to Him?

The unwarranted preoccupation with society at the expense of the individual has, in my opinion, done grave injustice to Manto as a writer — injustice in the sense that socio-political analyses rarely rise above reductionist interpretations of works of literary art. What I have tried to do in my selection is to steer clear of such external determinants and see them as stories about particular individuals. This is reflected, I hope, in the way I have grouped the stories, and even more in the way Manto himself has chosen to title some of his major stories after the names of their protagonists (Radha, Janki, Siraj, Mummy, Khushia, etc.). I have tried to dispel, as best as I can, the notion that the only legacy Manto has left us is his pathological obsession with prostitutes and Partition and join those who wish to restore to his stories the dignity of a world created with love, immense imagination and humanity.

Manto’s major stories, and recently some minor ones, have been translated so often that yet another translation would perhaps seem unwarranted. Initially I was hesitant to undertake this project. Would it be possible to transport into the target language in a readable way, without making too many compromises, the particular ambience of some of his stories and their cultural specificity? Would I be able to tone down, suppress, add or subtract, rearrange content or rewrite simply as a concession to the sensitivities of the English reader? And I also did not think that it would be right to clutter a book of short stories with cultural notes in order to make a story properly glow and resonate for the reader. Some Manto characters breathe in a fictionally recreated cultural space of the Punjab. The swear words they use stubbornly resist translation and whatever may be found by way of their English equivalents sounds not just unnatural but grotesque. Take, for instance, ‘ santokh sar ke kachhve ’, ‘ Oaye Bābā Tal ke karāh parshād ’ or ‘ Oaye khinzīr ke jhatke ’ in ‘The Last Salute’. Or the pun on the word ‘ kār ’ (car) and the compound ‘ kār-sāz ’ in ‘Babu Gopinath’, which does not mean ‘car-maker’ but rather one, usually God, who is able to find a way, put things right, or make something unexpectedly come true for you. I have therefore left them in the original. If I were to translate the sentence ‘He heard her clear her throat and then start to sing the ghazal by Ghalib which begins with the line ‘ Nukta-chīñ hai gham-e dil. . ’ (‘Kingdom’s End’) as ‘He heard her clear her throat, then in a very soft, low voice she sang him a song,’ wouldn’t the omission of this inconspicuous little detail about Ghalib and especially about the particular ghazal result in the loss of the allusion that has a bearing on the story? This verse of Ghalib indirectly suggests a lot about the state of the woman’s mind and her emotions because in her culture women are not supposed to be so open and direct about their feelings for men. The generic word ‘song’ fails to summon up this complexity for the reader. It also suppresses another fact: Manto’s enduring fascination with Ghalib, whose poetry he often quotes in his stories and his non-fiction pieces. Maybe all this is less important for the reader. For me it was not. I decided to bite the bullet. But, of course, I might have done a better job. I have tried to remain as close to the original as I possibly could. As for my failures, which are many, I beg the reader’s indulgence.

Besides stories and non-fiction, Manto also wrote radio plays and at least one stage play, Is Manjhdār Mein ( In This Maelstrom ), for which he chose the subtitle ‘A Melodrama’.

It is puzzling why Manto called it a ‘melodrama’, which it is not for a number of reasons. Eric Bentley, after rehabilitating ‘tears’ (which only reflect our anxiety not to appear vulnerable in this modern age) as a perfectly natural phenomenon and part of the human condition, defines the main ingredients of melodrama as pity, fear of villain and exaggerated or elevated language . *While there may be some pity for the central character Amjad — though pity alone does not, indeed should not, qualify a work as melodrama — there is no fear of the villain. The villain is just not there, let alone being superhuman or diabolic. Though melodramatic vision is paranoid †one does not have to be persecuted by a real flesh-and-blood villain; even the landscape can sometimes oppress and persecute. Manto’s landscape, though, is invested with breathtaking beauty. More importantly, this beauty is not presented as axiomatic. It derives dialectically from the generally positive manner in which the characters react and respond to it. Then again, while a typical melodrama rarely moves beyond pity and fear, In This Maelstrom is not defined by this attribute. Although we do feel a certain sense of pity for Amjad, we feel greater sympathy for his wife Saeeda and wish for her beauty and youth, now hopelessly wasting away, to blossom.

The characters, too, are not the stock characters of a melodrama. Neither cast according to the ‘Progressive’ formula, nor defined by bourgeois moeurs , they vibrate with a life all their own. They are imbued with remarkable individuality and amazing independence of will, and reveal a complex psychology in their thoughts, feelings and actions. Thus Amjad, who has picked Saeeda from among countless other women to be his wife, knows that his choice amounts to no more than the impulse to pick up the finest thing in the market. As for loving her — that, he freely admits to the maid Asghari, he does not. Still this does not stop him from wondering: ‘I can’t understand why I want to keep her shackled in chains whose every link is as uncertain as my life.’ Well aware of the illicit love between his wife and younger brother, he appears to be strangely free of the slightest trace of jealousy, so unlike, one might almost say, most men.