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First published by Penguin Books India 2015
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Introduction, selection and translation © Muhammad Umar Memon 2015
Cover design by Tara Upadhyay
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or
dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-670-08690-0
This digital edition published in 2015.
e-ISBN: 978-9-352-14035-0
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Contents
Foreword
Preamble
My Name Is Radha
Scorned
Janki
Mozel
The Black Shalwar
Siraj
Sharda
Babu Gopinath
Yazeed
Ram Khilawan
Sahae
Khushia
Toba Tek Singh
The Testament of Gurmukh Singh
For Freedom’s Sake
The Last Salute
A Tale of the Year 1919
Frozen
Open It!
Empty Bottles, Empty Cans
A Progressive
Pleasure of Losing
God–Man
I’m No Good for You!
The Revolt of Monkeys
Gilgit Khan
Martyr-Maker
Recite the Kalima!
Barren
Behind the Reed Stalks
Smell
Kingdom’s End
By the Roadside
Tassels
Hindi–Urdu
Upper, Lower, Middle
Green Sandals
The Gold Ring
Turnips
In this Maelstrom (A Melodrama)
The Fifth Trial
Manto and I
(by Mehdi Ali Siddiqi)
‘Iṣmat-Farōshī (Prostitution)
The Short Story Writer and Matters of Sex
I Too Have Something To Say
Afterword
How I Write Stories
Marginotions
(by Muhammad Hasan Askari)
Communal Riots and Our Literature
(by Muhammad Hasan Askari)
Recounting Irregular Verbs and Counting She-Goats: Manto and His Alleged Obscenity
(by Muhammad Umar Memon)
Footnotes
Foreword*
The first edition of this book [Chughad] was published in Bombay. After
Partition I handed over the manuscript to Book Publishers Limited and
left for Pakistan. From here I wrote to Ali Sardar Jafri, who was then
employed at Book Publishers, saying that the only way to hasten the
publication of the book was for him to write the foreword and that I
would accept whatever he said. He replied:
Of course, I’ll write it with pleasure. However, the book doesn’t need a foreword, much
less one by me. You are well aware that our literary views are far apart. That aside, I
regard you very highly and expect great things from you.
‘In that case,’ I wrote to Jafri Sahib, ‘let the book go without a
foreword.’ But by then, as became clear from his subsequent letter, he
had already written a brief foreword and included it in the book.
Regardless of its contents, it is there in the first edition of Chughad.
However, I’ve excised it from the present edition, not because I have,
God forbid, developed a sudden enmity towards Jafri Sahib or started
hating him, but in view of the absurd furore the so-called Progressives
of Bombay have raised about my work lately, I didn’t think it was proper
to have their most active member become an appendix to my
‘reactionary’ work.
I was still in Bombay when ‘Bābū Gōpīnāth’, one of the stories of this
collection, appeared in the literary magazine Adab-e Latīf. All the
Progressives praised it to high heaven, even anointing it as the best
short story of that year. Ali Sardar Jafri, Ismat Chughtai and Krishan
Chandar especially applauded it. Krishan Chandar even gave it a
prominent place in ‘Hal kē Sā,ē’. Then, all of a sudden—God knows
what got into their heads—every single Progressive turned against the
story’s greatness. First they faulted it in hushed voices and condemned
it in whispers. But now every Progressive of India and Pakistan has
begun running it down, openly and loudly, as reactionary, immoral,
sordid and depraved.
The same treatment was meted out to another of my stories, ‘Mērā
Nām Rādhā Hai’ [My Name is Radha], though when it was first
published the Progressives could not stop applauding it, beside
themselves with enthusiasm and exhilaration. Anyway, when Ali Sardar
Jafri penned his foreword as an offering to ‘progressivism’, he wrote to
me:
I would like to know your opinion of my foreword. I’ve written it with much sincerity and
love, and I’m now thinking of writing a longish article about your short stories. So far, run-
of-the mill people have only reviled you. It is useless to expect anything better from them.
Don’t these lines cry out to have every single word in them thrown in
the face of all Progressives and let ‘reactionism’ smile quietly? In the
same letter, Ali Sardar went on to say: ‘I consider your short story
‘Khol-do’ [Open It!] a masterpiece of this period.’
The tragedy that befell the Progressives, or perhaps this story, was
its publication in Nuqūsh (Lahore), under the editorship of His Honour
Ahmad Nadim Qasimi—the guru of Pakistani Progressives and the
architect of the pithy ‘zindagī-āmoz-o-zindagī-āmez adab’—otherwise
it too would have been consigned to the dustbin of ‘non-literature,’
leaving me gawking at ‘progressivism’s’ red face.
The only reason my book Siyāh Hāshiye didn’t go down well with the
Progressives was that Muhammad Hasan Askari, whom they’d already
put on their blacklist, had written its foreword. And so, with his
characteristic sincerity and love, Ali Sardar Jafri again wrote to me:
What is this I hear from Lahore that Muhammad Hasan Askari is writing the foreword to
some new book of yours? How on earth the two of you could hit it off baffles me. I don’t
consider Hasan Askari a sincere person at all.
One really must hand it to the Progressives for mounting such an
efficient and speedy system of communication. News from here travels
in the blink of an eye to Khetwadi’s Kremlin with total accuracy. What
Ali Sardar Jafri had heard was absolutely correct. The end result was
that Siyāh Hāshiye had hardly been out before it was condemned and
trashed as a bunch of ‘reactionary’ writing. It is amazing, though, that
as Ali Sardar Jafri was drafting his preface for my Chughad, it never
dawned on him that he and Manto were two mutually exclusive entities
and that our literary views were, according to him, far apart. Alas, my
Progressive friends are averse to thinking! They consider it a negative
act.
Let me present an example of this aversion. The magazine Saverā, a
publication of Nayā Idāra, which is owned by Nazeer Ahmad
Chaudhry, is the ‘Mouthpiece of the Progressive Literary Movement’. It
has blacklisted me. In its pages I’m routinely dubbed as reactionary,
opportunistic, individualistic, hedonistic and escapist. And yet Nayā
Idāra advertises one of my books in the following words:
Saadat Hasan Manto is the standard-bearer of truth. He is armed with the double-edged
sword of truth, which he brandishes fearlessly in the thick forests of the government and
society, tearing asunder all their veils of hypocrisy and affectation. Abuse is heaped on
him, but he smiles. He marches down a path that he alone can travel, impervious to any
thought of reward or punishment.
Did I smile on reading this advertisement in the pages of Saverā?
No, I laughed my head off. Forget the subliminal message, ‘it will
greatly help the readers’, rather think: Aren’t the Progressives and their
equally progressive publishers travelling along a path which they alone
can travel, without caring a fig about their consciences? During the
recent Bhopal Conference, Ismat Shahid Latif* valiantly, and at one go,
openly disowned any of her stories that didn’t measure up to the
standard of ‘progressivism’. Why don’t these progressive publishers
take their cue from Ismat’s forthrightness? They should burn all the
books by ‘blacklisted reactionaries’. And if they were to do so, I would
surely kiss their hands.
Preamble
Any literary work that aspires to the condition of art must forget politics, religion,
and, ultimately, morals. Otherwise it will be a pamphlet, a sermon, or a morality play.
—GUILLERMO CABRERA INFANTE
By common consensus of most Urdu critics and readers of fiction,
Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–55) is unquestionably the pre-eminent
Urdu short story writer of the first half of the previous century. And even
now the popularity of this iconic writer has not waned. He is avidly read
and admired across the South Asian subcontinent and is also well
known overseas, thanks to the many translations of his choicest work
into English and other European languages. A prolific writer and, in his
early years, a translator and journalist, he managed to produce in his
short life of only forty-three years an enormous literary corpus, mostly
short stories, but also plays and works of non-fiction, collected in five
fat tomes of roughly a thousand pages each—an amazing testimony to
the astonishing range of the author’s thematic reach!
Born in Ludhiana in British India, Manto started work as a member of
the editorial staff of Masāwāt, an Urdu daily published from his native
Ludhiana. In 1936 he moved to Bombay to work as a scriptwriter for
films before moving on to Delhi in 1941. Here, he joined the Urdu
Service of All India Radio and wrote radio plays. The following year
saw him back in Bombay, where he resumed his earlier work for the
film industry.
With the political situation in Bombay deteriorating rapidly in the
aftermath of Partition, and communal rioting having erupted across the
country, Manto felt constrained to leave for Pakistan in 1948. The
move does not appear to have been motivated by ideological reasons.
In Bombay, Manto had enjoyed relative prosperity and at times even
abundance. In Pakistan he was reduced to living in financial straits,
made worse by his chronic dependence on alcohol, which led to
cirrhosis of the liver that eventually claimed his life.
Manto’s short fiction offers a wealth of thematic diversity. However,
he is chiefly—perhaps even exclusively—remembered as a writer on
Partition and prostitutes. The present selection seeks to correct this
reductionist impression of a writer who is concerned more with the
unique substance of his characters than with social problems and
political events as the mainstay of his creative work. No surprise if he
has titled some of his major stories with their protagonists’ names. This
book, therefore, presents an assortment of the author’s fictional and
non-fictional writing as well as three pieces by two Urdu critics. The
presence of the latter may seem unconventional, if not entirely out of
place, in a book that purports to be a selection of his short stories.
A translator’s choice is determined no doubt by his preferences,
biases and idiosyncrasies; mine being no exception. Some of Manto’s
best-known stories are here followed by a few that are less often talked
about. They have been chosen to give, hopefully, a more rounded and
balanced view of the author’s creative work, its delightful diversity and
its underlying assumptions.
In the non-fictional pieces the author speaks directly about himself,
his literary milieu and, in some, he clarifies, among other things, his
position regarding the alleged ‘obscenity’ in his work—a charge
frequently hurled at him by the Progressives and one that landed him,
by his own admission, in the courts of law, both during British India
and, later, in Pakistan, five times. The pieces also give us some idea,
in a style daubed with pain and occasional humour, about the man
Manto was, about his uneasy relationship with the Progressive
establishment, and his immense reluctance and pain at leaving
Bombay, the city he loved.
Included here are two pieces by critic Muhammad Hasan Askari
(1919–78), ‘Communal Riots and Our Literature’, and ‘Marginotions’,
which he contributed as a preface to Manto’s collection of Partition
vignettes Siyāh Hāshiye (Black Margins). Partition? Yes, but only as a
