Manto’s
Birth Centenary 1912-2012
Fahmida Riaz
MANTO
[Courtesy: Dawn, January 1 2012]
Shocked in disbelief. That is what I felt when I heard from a very responsible Pakistani publisher, back from a recent visit to India, that the works of Sa’dat Hasan Manto are being published in Pakistan after editing and censoring out unacceptable passages. It took sometime before I could accept that the guardians of morality and piety in our homeland could easily do it. When he was alive, living in Lahore, eking out a living with his pen, court cases for obscenity were filed against him and to save him from being sentenced to years of hard labour in jail, his friends had to declare him insane. He was sent to a mental hospital where he had to spend some time and returned to the outside world, the bigger mad-house, as he called it, with his classic masterpiece, Toba Tek Singh, a short story that is the pride of Urdu fiction, a literary marvel so subtle, moving and hilarious that it remains unsurpassed in its finesse to this day. One wonders and wonders how did he strike upon such a brilliant idea.
What was Toba Tek Singh?
In the wake of the partitioning of the subcontinent,
heart-rending bloodshed and mayhem reigned everywhere. There
was an exchange of population as millions of Muslims, Hindus
and Sikhs left for territories, which were now Pakistan and
India, and were assigned to them according to their respective
religions. There was a transfer of assets and perhaps the two
young States exchanged Hindu, Sikh and Muslim prisoners.
Setting his story in the pagal
khana (mental asylum), Manto envisions an exchange of
Hindu, Sikh and Muslim lunatics. Having heard of what was
happening in the outside world, some inmates of the mental
asylum have adopted the identities of several leaders of
Congress and the Muslim League.(One of them thinks he is
Master Tara Singh) There is much sloganeering of “Long
Live” and “Down With” enlivening the mental hospital.
One of these inmates is known as Toba Tek Singh because he
belongs to this small town in Panjab and in what he mumbles
incoherently, only the words Toba Tek Singh can be deciphered.
“You have to go to India”, he is told. “Where is Toba
Tek Singh?”, he asks. No one is sure, but someone tells him
that it has come to Pakistan, or perhaps gone to India. How
could Toba Tek Singh come and go, and not be where it remained
since eternity? His feeble, insane mind fails to accept the
truth of the situation. He refuses to go anywhere and while
being pushed and pulled by the Indian and Pakistani Border
Security Forces, falls dead on the borders of Pakistan and
India.
Manto was permanently, and
most virulently attacked for ‘obscenity’ all his life. He
was labeled a ‘sex maniac’ who indulged in wallowing in
filth and dirt. Let us, for our enlightenment look at one of
his lesser- known short stories, Nangi
Awazain (Naked Sounds). The main protagonists are two
brothers, Bholo and Gama. (He chose the names of two
well-known wrestlers perhaps to leave us in no doubt about
their fabulous manliness). They live in an extremely
over-crowded hovel, a block of tiny flats in a slum of Lahore.
When Gama gets married, he tries very hard to consummate the
marriage. But the voices and sounds in the dark so inhibit him
that he can not perform. This incapacity becomes known to
others and the bride leaves him after a few days, leaving him
distraught and nearly insane. Was this story about sex, and
failure of performance etc.? No. As any reader could discern,
it is about the human need for privacy of which our
overwhelming urban population is deprived in over-crowded
sleeping quarters. Manto perceived of sexuality as energy, a
life force, delicately interwoven in the human persona. This
enraged his detractors, our moral brigade, because for them
sex was Oh so shameful and dirty, something to be most
secretly and stealthily enjoyed in the dark recesses of the
mind, hence the very word tied their innards into millions of
knots. To suffer the indignity of living his brief life among
such ideologues was the tragic fate of one of the greatest
writers in world literature.
In Boo
(Smell), another short story for which he was tried in the
courts for obscenity, he tells you about the wedding night of
a well-to do bridegroom, with the daughter of a rich family,
the bride smothered in gold jewelry and most expensive French
(chemical) perfumes, and how at this critical moment he
remembers a poor Ghatan, a working class Marathi woman whose
soiled blouse and
the flesh underneath exuded the scent of rain-soaked earth.
For Manto, the sexual act was co-mingled with the elements,
with water and earth and the winds. The short story exposes
how gold and brocades and all the riches we aspire for,
suffocate the beauty and sanctity of pure desire and union,
which was meant by nature to be like the ‘scent of
rain-soaked earth’.
Manto was born on 11th
May, 1912, in Samrala in Ludhiana District. Educated in
Amritsar, he began writing at an early age. His literary
career began with extensive translations of Russian literature
of his time. His first collection of short stories was
published in 1936. He moved to Bombay where, to make a living,
he began to write for movies, edited film magazines and wrote
plays for the radio.
In 1948 he came to Lahore and settled down here. Most of his great short stories reflect these turbulent times. Manto died in 1955, in Lahore. •
