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The Politics of Exclusion By Sarmad Sehbai
Tossing the empty bottle he shouts,
‘Oh world! Your beauty is your ugliness.’
The world stares back at him
Their bloodshot eyes rattle with the question
‘Who nabs the pillar of time
By the noose of his drunken breath?
Who dares to break into dim corridors?
Of twisted conscience?
Who intrudes upon poisonous dens?
Of demonised souls?
Through icy glasses his rude glance
Chases us like a footfall
Foul monster!’
Bang! Bang!
- Majeed Amjad, Poem
for Manto
aadat
Hasan Manto, a red rag to both conservative and progressive writers, was
feared by the reactionary press, the state and the literary mafias of his
times. All his life he fought the bigoted social reformers, ideologues and
religious fanatics, facing various court trials with a heroic smile. His
characters were not the mouthpieces of ready-made truths who would
sermonise from a pulpit as saviours; neither Noori na Naari, neither
angelic nor satanic, Manto’s Adam was born out of mud. Manto
spent the prime of his youth in Bombay and Delhi where he celebrated his
poverty and prosperity, his successes and failures with the same zest for
life. In 1948, betrayed by his friends, Manto decided to leave Bombay and
move to Pakistan in the hope of a better life in the new country. He was
disturbed by the communal riots and the gruesome scenes he had witnessed
during the migration. With his failing health and two dependent daughters,
he couldn’t figure out his whereabouts: “all day long I would sit on
the chair lost in my thoughts not knowing what to do.” Lahore was far
from welcoming. The doors of Radio Pakistan were closed to him and the
reactionary press was hounding him for his bold writings. After a few
months he wrote Thanda Gosht for
which another trial was ready for him. Manto
could have survived all those slams and slurs but what threw him into
total despair was the attitude of his own friends who expelled him from
the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in 1949. What had created panic
among the progressives was first, a book Siyah
Haashiye, and then Urdu Adab,
a literary journal, through which Manto included writers from all schools
of thought without bias. Siyah
Haashiye was a book of black jokes about the callous killings during
the riots. It showed a terrifying despair where one could not tell
laughter from a scream. Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, the secretary-general of the
Punjab branch of PWA, said after reading the book: “What I can see is a
field littered with dead bodies where the writer is stealing cigarette
butts and money from their pockets.” Qasmi’s critique was as callous
as the callousness of the characters in the book. On the
publication of Urdu Adab, edited
jointly by Muhammad Hasan Askari and Manto, Qasmi as the spokesman of the
PWA, wrote an open letter to the latter: “Get rid of the opium of
art for art’s sake; bring Askari into your fold by converting him to the
art for life. Our movement is based on owning, understanding and
respecting the suffering of the masses.” Qasmi guided Manto like a
protective father, fearing that Manto could be spoilt by Askari’s
“influence of decadent French writers like Baudelaire, André Gide and
Flaubert.” In
November 1949, at the all-Pakistan conference of PWA, a resolution was
passed against certain writers including Hasan Askari, Manto and,
according to Abdul Salam Khurshid, Qurratulain Hyder, whose name was later
withdrawn. While Manto didn’t react directly at the time, he later
(1951) wrote in Jaib-e-Kafan: “I was angry that Alif [Qasmi] had misunderstood me,
doubted my intentions … I am depressed. I earn through my writings by
working day and night. I have my wife and children, if they fall sick and
if I were to beg for money going door to door I will be really disturbed.
Art is autonomous and is an end in itself. It’s no one’s monopoly and
it cannot be hegemonised by ideology. The government takes me as a
communist and the communists take me as a reactionary.” Probably during
the same period he wrote his epitaph which was inspired by Ghalib’s
couplet, “ya rab zamana mujh ko mitata hey kis liay/loh-e-jahaan pe
harf-e-mukkarrar nahin hoon mein [Oh God, why is Time rubbing me off? I am
not a letter twice written on the slate of the world].” Urdu Adab was closed down after the publication of only two
issues. In the first two issues both the progressive and non-progressive
writers were published but soon after an ‘office order’ by the PWA
forced the progressive writers to boycott the journal. Many of them
requested Manto to return their work to them. A desperate and visibly
intimidated Arif Abdul Matin wrote to Manto: “for God’s sake return
the manuscript of my play; it is no longer possible for me to get it
published in Urdu Adab as our union has decided not to cooperate with certain
writers.” Qasmi also withdrew his request for Manto’s story which
earlier he had wanted to publish in Nuqoosh:
“I had asked for your story before the decision by the union to avoid
publishing those authors who don’t agree with the progressive
movement.” Why
was Manto considered a threat to the progressives? Could it be
‘obscenity’ that had offended them in the context of the newly-founded
Islamic Republic of Pakistan? But Faiz Ahmed Faiz had appeared in his
defence at the trial of Thanda Gosht,
and had not found the story obscene. According to Intizar Hussain, writing
in Saadat Hussan Manto — After 50 Years (GC University, Lahore 2005),
the reason for Manto’s exclusion “was all about the reaction of
progressives to the Partition of India.” Quoting Askari, he says, “the
progressives in their opposition to Partition were implying that had there
been no demand for a Muslim country there would have been no communal
riots.” Even this doesn’t appear plausible. If the progressives were
not in favour of a Muslim state, why would Faiz, a staunch progressive, be
the first and one of the very few commissioned officers who opted for the
newly established state of Pakistan, and continued his job with the
Pakistan Army and the Inter-Services Public Relations? And why would he
write an editorial in the Pakistan Times on “the glorious role” of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad
Ali Jinnah in “the birth of a major state and the liberation of a major
nation.” In Siyah
Haashiye or Urdu Adab, Manto did not appear to advocate a separate country but
simply brought out the barbaric humour out of the killing of people in the
name of religion. Manto in his writings had never defended one religion
against another. Mozel, a Jewish woman, dies while saving a young Sikh,
Tirlochan. While she is dying, Tirlochan tries to cover her naked body
with his turban, but she sneers back: “Take away your religion.” In Thanda Gosht, it is the “wretched blood” of the wounded Ishar
Singh that topples religion, caste and race. As to the demand for
Pakistan, Manto who had property in Amritsar didn’t claim anything after
Partition except for an ice store in Lahore and that too was denied to
him. “Those
who were talking of freedom of expression were resented by the
progressives,” says Syed in Noori
na Naari. But why should the progressives resent Manto when in their
manifesto they had committed “to promote the freedom of expression”?
They were struggling for the freedom of expression and so was he; they
were “respecting the suffering of the masses” and he was going through
suffering; they were talking about poverty and he was living it; they were
romanticising the fallen man and Manto himself was the fallen man. So what
caused such a reaction to the most gifted short story writer of his times?
Muzaffar Ali Syed further elaborates, “immediately after the Second
World War, the leaders of bourgeoisie socialism were ready to collaborate
with the bourgeoisie — they were willing to sacrifice Mira ji, Manto and
[Noon Meem] Rashid.” Perhaps
all that has been said are mere polemics of their times but there could be
more than meets the eye. Sometime
in the mid-1930s, on a foggy Night
in London, young Sajjad Zaheer saw “The Light.” In Nanking
restaurant, amongst a coterie of like-minded male writers, Zaheer,
lovingly called Banne Miaan, announced the manifesto of the PWA.
Zaheer’s novel A Night in London
established him as an icon of social commitment. The novel featured Hiren
Pal, a committed freedom fighter who leaves his beloved Sheila Green to
pursue the ideals beyond the love of a woman. This motif became a template
for the progressive writers, “Aur bhi gham hein zamanay mein mohabat kay
siwa [There are other woes in the world, apart from the woes of love]”. The
‘othering’ of the female to assert the progressive mission created a
binaric schizophrenia between the love of woman and social reality. The
deferral of anima, the feminine side of male, is to repress the mother,
the womb, the unconscious and to assert the father. As [French
psychoanalyst] Lacan states: “When ideologues preach, they assert the
patriarchy and it’s phallic.” Manto renames Qasmi as Alif, the
vertical alphabet of Urdu language. The unbending thrust of ‘Alif’ is
suggestive of phallic oppression. In his playful irreverence, Manto calls
Zaheer an armchair communist, Faiz an afimi
(lotus eater), and his own guru Bari Aleeg, a coward and a runchhor (unreliable – the one who deserts battlefield). He prays
to God to turn Chiragh Hasan Hasrat into Stalin who could dictate from
behind the iron curtain. For Manto, they were the oppressive fathers who
in Freudian terms would tell the child not to play with his genitals. Mumtaz
Shirin says: “Manto has presented the mother in the image of the
prostitute.” In her book Noori na
Naari, she discovers Manto in myth and religious archetypes. For her,
Manto juxtaposes the holy mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, the sinful
whore; the sacred and the profane. Manto’s heroines don’t queue up
with the hearth-bound bibis or the drawing-room ladies of the elite; they stand out mostly
as sex workers fighting for bare existence in a male’s world of
exploitation and human degradation. With detached limbs and body parts as
utility props they are the disfigured image of Madonna; damaged Eros. The
loss of mother is the loss of womb, the loss of compassion, love and
humanity in a society, which is admonitory, tabooed and restrictive like
the punishing father. Manto
resurrects the ghost of the feminine side, otherwise banished by the
progressive patriarch, and by giving her a voice topples the despotic
father figure of reform, pity and sympathy. Manto brings out the mother
from the womb of a prostitute and confronts the oppressive father. He
shatters the romantic ideal of the progressives by bringing out Sheila
from their closets. He strips off her romantic trappings and places her
next to Janki and Saugandhi. Perhaps this act of Manto made the
progressives run for lights; he had nabbed “the pillar with the noose of
his drunken breath.” His rude glance will keep chasing us like a
footfall for many ages to come. •
Sarmad Sehbai, poet, playwright and drama director. London. June 2012 photo Amarjit Chandan
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