Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

I do not agree with Mumtaz Shirin’s contention that Saeeda is less a character than a ‘symbol of beauty’. ‡Surely she is an aesthetic attribute, but she is also much more. She is both attractive and aware of her tremendous attraction for men. Nothing so extraordinary perhaps. However, where she parts company with a stereotypical young South Asian Muslim woman is when she ‘unabashedly’, though not without disarming directness and honesty, mentions to Asghari the desires raging inside her, and catalogues her frustrations. She says:

I’m young. I’m beautiful. . numberless desires surge inside me. For seventeen long years I’ve nurtured them with the nectar of my dreams. How can I stifle them? [. .] Call me weak. . cowardly. . immoral. [. .] I confess before you that I cannot ravage the garden of my youth, where the vein of every leaf and flower throbs with the hot blood of my unfulfilled desires. .

And Asghari, the maid: her frequent caustic jibes at the crippled Amjad, in spite of knowing the extremely brittle state of his mind; her scathing, abrasive wit; and, above all, her hesitation in accepting Amjad’s love even though she is in love with him herself — all these raise her above the meek and obsequious world of a South Asian domestic to the plane of a fairly complex personality.

Although Majeed is not fully developed as a character, in coveting the wife of his own brother he, too, appears to be refreshingly less typical.

Melodrama is often characterized by its use of an exaggerated — a heightened, lyrical — form of language. A declamatory, excessively rhetorical style of speech is no doubt noticeable in a couple of long-winding speeches by Amjad addressed to Saeeda at the mid-point in the play and to Asghari at the end, and in a single piece where Saeeda addresses Asghari. But in these instances the elevated language appears called for by event and situation, which it dialectically supports and enhances. It does not appear tired, crude or otherwise logically non sequitur. Moreover, ‘Intensity of feeling’, as Bentley says, ‘justifies formal exaggeration in art’ (p. 204). A brief sequence of emotionally charged utterances would be inadequate ground to place the work in the category of melodrama, or sob-stuff.

Finally, one thing is sure: We certainly do not get a ‘good cry’ or a good laugh out of the play. What we do get instead is the calm of a sobering moment in which our temporarily frozen senses — because of two suicides at the end — gradually thaw out to a sense of beauty and blossoming optimism towards life’s continuity and renewal which is far in excess of our initial shock at the twin suicides. We come to accept, almost as a necessity, the suicides as the price life must pay to remain ongoing and whole. Thus the very subject of the play argues forcefully against its being a melodrama.

Manto, of course, is not interested in celebrating promiscuity per se, here as elsewhere. He, therefore, neither jeers at the invalid husband for the loss of his sexual prowess, nor, on the other hand, helps initiate the lovers in the ways of pleasure. By avoiding any explicit or implicit reference to actual sexual contact — though not to the fact of sexual attraction — between the lovers, he seems to give us a clue to his deeper purpose, which is to transcend the confining circumstances of self-indulgent sensual love itself and give it a creative, complementary role integral to the wider scheme of things.

Except for a few pieces, the balance of Manto’s work presented here is taken from his collected works published in five volumes by Sang-e-Meel Publications of Lahore (1990–95 and 2004). Where this is not the case, the source has been cited in the footnote with the piece in question.

Generally, non-Urdu words (personal names, titles, etc.) have been spelled according to common sense and South Asian custom. Diacritics have been used sparingly in the Preamble and the three article towards the end of the book.

This book of translation owes a great deal to R. Sivapriya of Penguin. Her constant encouragement helped me overcome my initial hesitation to undertake yet another translation of Manto’s stories. I would like to thank Moazzam Sheikh, who collaborated on our translation of the short story ‘Barren’, and my former students Wayne R. Husted and M. Azam Dadi for their collaboration in translating the play In This Maelstrom well over three decades ago. I would also like to thank Jane A. Shum for going over the manuscript and offering valuable suggestions for improvement. Shatarupa Ghoshal has a special claim to my deepest gratitude for her most careful editing of the manuscript and I acknowledge it with the greatest pleasure.

Muhammad Umar Memon

5 January 2015

I am talking about a time when there was absolutely no hint of war anywhere. It happened eight, maybe nine, years ago, when, quite unlike today, madness had method and tumultuous events followed a predictable course. Today — well, tumultuous events occur without rhyme or reason and throw everything upside down.

I was then employed in a film company at a monthly salary of forty rupees. Life was chugging along smoothly. I would show up at the studio at ten, feed the villain Niaz Muhammad’s two cats two paise worth of milk, write banal dialogues for a banal film, joke around for a while with the Bengali actress, ‘the nightingale of Bengal’ as she was called in those days, fawn over Dada Gora, the greatest director of his time, and return home.

Like I said, life was chugging along smoothly with the usual ups and downs. The proprietor of the studio, Hurmuzji Framji, a whimsical man of Iranian origin with big fat ruddy cheeks, was head over heels in love with a middle-aged Khoja woman. Feeling up the breasts of every newly arrived girl was his habitual pastime. There was this Calcutta whore, a Musalman, who was carrying on with her director, sound recordist and storywriter all at the same time. Carrying on meant that the tender affections of all three would remain reserved only for her.

The shooting of Ban ki Sundri was in progress. Every day, after feeding the villain Niaz Muhammad’s cats the two paise worth of milk — God only knows what kind of impression he expected to create on the studio-wallahs by keeping them — I would write dialogues for the film in some unfamiliar language. I knew absolutely nothing about the film’s story or its plot because I was merely a munshi — a pencil-pusher — in those days and didn’t pull much weight. My work only involved writing on a sheet of paper in mutilated Urdu whatever I was ordered to and what the director could understand, and hand it over. Anyway, the shooting of Ban ki Sundri was under way. Rumour was rife that Hurmuzji Framji was bringing an entirely new face from God knows where for the part of the vamp, while Raj Kishore had been assigned the role of the hero.

Raj Kishore, a native of Rawalpindi, was a handsome and healthy young man. It was widely believed that his body was very manly and had a graceful shape. I thought about his body often. It was certainly athletic and well proportioned, but I found nothing else appealing in it. Maybe that was because I myself am frightfully gangly, look more dead than alive and, besides, am given to wonder rather too much about my kind of people.

I didn’t hate him; I’ve rarely hated anyone in my life. Let’s just say that I didn’t much care for the man. The reason will reveal itself as you go along.

I absolutely loved his pure Rawalpindi accent, his language, his manner of speaking. Only in the Rawalpindi dialect of Punjabi can you find the sweetest, most endearing cadence. It has a strange kind of rugged femininity, at once sweet and mellow. Should a Rawalpindi woman talk to you, it would feel like having mango juice dribbled into your mouth. But I’m not talking about mangoes; I’m talking about Raj Kishore, whom I liked much less than that heavenly fruit.