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“Upar di gur gur di annexe di bedhiyana di moong di daal of di Pakistan and Hindustan of di durr phitey mun” The James Dean of India’s literary circles, Manto died in 1955, aged just 43. During his short and tumultuous life, he put out a body of work that challenged genres, almost deliriously churning out 22 collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three collections of essays, two collections of personal sketches and innumerable movie scripts. This included the story for Mirza Ghalib, the first Hindi film to win the National Award in 1954. Also read: Adaptation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s Kaali Shalwar on stage “Over the years, there have been other translations of Manto, particularly in Hindi. Perhaps the 100th anniversary spurred some additional interest in him in 2012,” says Karthika. “What may be changing is another aspect. For very long, we’ve read Manto so unquestioningly, seemingly putting him on a pedestal, that fresh readings of his work may provide an opportunity for re-thinking and recasting. The time may just be right for more reasoned discussions of what Manto’s work actually stands for,” says Karthika. Between covers Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto, edited and translated by Aakar Patel, Tranquebar Press, Westland (2014) A disturbing influence At times Manto’s writing created such savage imagery it ended up leaving you disturbed. Karthika recalls once such scene from Khol Do, where a teenage riot victim has been assaulted so many times that she undoes the cord of her shalwar in a reflex, when her father comes looking for her in a hospital room and the doctor says “Khol do,” referring to the windows. The storytelling itself is so impactful that the language and the form become secondary. Penguin India managing editor R Sivapriya says that it might be an appropriate time to pay a tribute to the literary Manto, as opposed to the Partition Manto or the Bombay Stories Manto. Also read: Manto's 'Intzaar' staged in India Manto’s grandniece Ayesha Jalal, professor of History at Tufts University, says notwithstanding his misleading characterisations by officialdom, Manto has always had an ardent following in Pakistan. “I think his Partition writings have the same sort of impact on literary connoisseurs in Pakistan as anywhere else in the world,” she says, though she adds that “he continues to have his detractors who insist on portraying his realistic depictions of the human dimension of Partition as ‘obscene’.” Even while he was still alive, Manto invited numerous charges of obscenity and was tried for his short stories, on both sides of the border: most famously for Boo, Khol Do and Thanda Gosht. Maximum chronicler For more than a decade, between 1936 and 1948, Manto worked in Bombay’s film industry, creating scripts, magazine articles and short stories. Also read: In his daughters, Manto returns home Journalist Aakar Patel contends that no writer, either before or after him, not even Behram ‘Busybee’ Contractor, ‘got’ Bombay as well as Manto did. Patel attributes this to two reasons.
Brilliance in shadows The shadowy world of society outcasts was what fascinated Saadat Hasan Manto the most. Ismat Chugtai once said about him that Manto picked out pearls “from the jilted squalor and refuse of life.” Drawn to the dark side, the writer took his readers with him into the noir worlds of prostitutes, pimps, waifs, wastrels and debauchees. But his genius was never in doubt. That is why, when Salman Rushdie called him the undisputed master of the modern Indian short story, his legion of admirers in the subcontinent, the Manto-nafees, were not surprised. In 2015, it will be 60 years since Manto died of cirrhosis of liver. That is also the year when the copyright on his works goes into the public domain, so expect a slew of new translations. Patel is looking forward to it. “What I would like is for Manto’s entire works – there are seven volumes in Urdu – to be transliterated, in Devnagari and also in Roman Urdu (meaning the English alphabet). Manto thought Hindi and Urdu were the same and laughed at those who emphasised the differences.”
Aatish Taseer, Translator of Manto: Selected Stories Ayesha Jalal, Manto’s grandniece, writer of The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide
From : Hindustan Times July 25, 2014
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