Part Of The Process: Saadat Hasan Manto
Part of the Process is a series in which we chronicle the often turbulent, usually absurd and always interesting lives of authors we admire. It’s not easy to be a writer in the 21st century, but in a strange way, reading about the trials and tribulations of those who seem to have ‘made it’ can be a reminder that it has always been a difficult process.
One of the best known South Asian writers from the era just before Independence and partition, Manto has had a lot written about his work and his legacy, from biopics to biographies to critiques. But the actual facts of his life and the journey of his career felt like a perfect fit for this series, particularly during the month of both Indian and Pakistani Independence. His life is also a case study of sorts, a reflection of turbulent times, addiction and great creativity.
Manto was born in 1912 at Samrala, near Ludhiana. His father, Maulvi Ghulam Hussain, married twice and Manto’s mother was his second wife. Ghulam Hussain’s family was not happy with his second marriage, he constantly belittled Manto and this was the first source of bitterness in young Saadat’s life. Manto’s biographers suggest that this lack of fatherly affection was compensated for by his mother, Bibi Jaan, and could be a potential reason why his female characters are usually far more sympathetic than the male ones.
He received his early education at a Muslim High School in Amritsar, where he twice failed his matriculation examination. By 1930, when his father died, Manto had failed three times and was fed up with education. In addition, his natural restlessness, the source of his creativity as well as later his alcoholism, was growing. In 1931, he was admitted to the Hindu Sabha College but dropped out after his first year due to poor results, drifting between drinking and gambling.
A big turning point in his life came in 1933, at age 21, when he met Abdul Bari Alig, a scholar and polemic writer who encouraged him to find his true talents by reading Russian and French authors. Bari encouraged Manto to translate Victor Hugo's The Last Day of a Condemned Man into Urdu, which Manto reportedly did in less than fifteen days. The book was later published by Urdu Book Stall, Lahore as Sarguzasht-e-Aseer (A Prisoner's Story). He then translated Oscar Wilde’s Vera into Urdu. In 1934, he published Tamasha, his first original story in Urdu, under a pseudonym in Abdul Bari Alig’s Urdu newspaper Khalq. The story was about the Jalianwala Bagh massacre.
In 1934, Manto joined Aligarh Muslim University, where he got associated with a literary circle who would later become the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association. Due to a bout of tuberculosis, his stint at the university was cut short and he stayed at a sanatorium in Kashmir in order to recover. Soon after, he moved to Lahore to look for work and began writing for Paras magazine, with a salary of just Rs. 40 per month. Reportedly, he often took home only 15 rupees and was paid in alcohol, but also published his first collection of short stories.
In late 1936, Manto was invited to edit the weekly magazine Musawwir in Bombay and moved there. His time in Mumbai was among the most productive and formative of his career. He began to work with the newly burgeoning film industry there, getting a job first at the Imperial and Saroj companies before joining Cine Tone, where he was paid 100 rupees a month. In 1939, his mother insisted upon his marriage to Safiya Begum, a girl he had reportedly never met. Due to Manto’s reputation as a drinker and provocateur, his relatives severed ties with him and even his sister did not attend his wedding.
In August 1940 he was dismissed from the editorship of Musawwir and started working for another magazine called Karwan at a lower salary. Dissatisfied in his work, he applied to All India Radio in Delhi through a writer he knew, and moved to Delhi in 1941. The next eighteen months were prolific for Manto, as he published over four collections of radio plays, continued to write short stories and released his next collections. But due to growing differences with his colleagues, he left his job and returned to the film industry in Bombay in 1942.
This second phase in Mumbai was prolific for Manto - he wrote screenplays for a few films, he continued to write stories and essays, and became close to various writers of the time including Ismat Chughtai, Upendranath Ashk, and the actor Ashok Kumar. He also became increasingly disillusioned after the initial hope of Independence. As a resident of Bombay, Manto had intended to stay in India after partition. In 1948, his wife and children went to Lahore to visit relatives. During this time, as stories of the atrocities of partition riots reached him, in the midst of occasional communal riots in Bombay, he decided to migrate to Pakistan, and left by ship, heartbroken. He stayed a few days in Karachi, finally settling at Lahore with his family.
Manto was deeply affected by the horrible events he witnessed during the partition of the subcontinent. He expressed his agitation several times in his work, and many of his most famous stories are about this period. He wrote, “If you are unaware of the times through which we are passing, read my short stories. If you cannot tolerate them, it means this age is intolerable…How can I disrobe civilization, culture and society when it is in fact already naked?”
In the seven years following his return to Lahore, Manto sank into depression and alcoholism, reportedly due to being unable to return to Bombay and the many trials he faced in newly Islamizing Pakistan for his provocative short stories. He was tried several times for obscenity and was sentenced to 3 months imprisonment and 300 fines in Pakistan. One such trial ended with a warning from Sessions Judge Munir that he was being let off easy with just a fine, but would be sent to jail for many years if he did not stop writing his obscene stories, driving him further into depression despite testimonies from esteemed authors and artists of the time including Faiz Ahmad Faiz. In the early 1950s Manto wrote a number of essays entitled “Letters to Uncle Sam” which are distressingly prophetic on the direction that Pakistan was to take.
His wife and relatives tried admitting him into Lahore Mental Asylum on Jail Road as his addiction to alcohol increasingly took a toll on his health. He also faced financial hardships, being forced to move in with his wife’s family and writing that despite being the author of nearly twenty books and hundreds of stories, he could not afford a house to live in and could ‘barely afford a tonga home and a glass of whiskey’. He died in January 1955 due to liver cirrhosis, and the subcontinent lost perhaps its most iconic writer of that period. But even decades later, his legacy grows and his work remains amongst the greatest South Asian writing, with hundreds of short stories, plays, screenplays and various other works still relevant.
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