Written by Randeep Singh

The Urdu short-story writer Manto was charged with obscenity six times for his short-stories,
three times in India before 1947 (‘Dhuan,’ ‘Bu,’ and ‘Kali Shalwar’) and three times in Pakistan
after 1947 (‘Khol Do,’ ‘Thanda Gosht,’ and ‘Upar Neeche Darmiyaan’). He was fined only in
one case. The charges of obscenity haunted him nevertheless until his death: “I am not a
pornographer but a story writer,” he would defend himself.

Under section 292 of the Indian Penal Code and the Pakistan Penal Code in Pakistan’s early
years, a book or writing would be considered obscene if “it is lascivious or appeals to the
prurient interest or if its effect … if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt
persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the
matter contained or embodied in it.”

The book or writing would not be found obscene however if it was “justified as being for the
public good on the ground that such book, … writing… is in the interest of … literature, art … or
other objects of general concern.”

Manto wrote about his experiences at the trial and appeal hearing of “Thanda Gosht” between
1949 and 1952. A witness at trial for Manto, Syed Abid Ali Abid, the Principal of Dayal Singh
College, testified: “from Wali to Ghalib, everyone at some time, has written what is generally
labeled as obscene. Literature can never be obscene. And, what Manto writes is literature.”

One witness, Dr. Saeedullah, gave Manto the title of “musavvar-e-hayaat,” the painter of life.
Soofi Tabassum, a professor of Government College, deposed that “immoral writing is where the
sole object of the writer is to undermine morality” and that “Thanda Gosht” did not affect public
morality.

In Manto’s testimony, “Thanda Gosht” was a story “telling human beings that they are not
separated from humanity even with they become animal like.” Like Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary which had also been charged with obscenity, “Thanda Gosht” was a serious story filled
with melancholy. As for the potentially corrupting influence of his stories on the public, Manto
remarked, “my stories are for healthy people, normal beings, not for minds who dig up carnal
meanings in innocent and pure things.”

The case of Manto is relevant to the question of what is art and what is obscenity. The following
questions are worth considering:

1. What is the artists’ intention in writing the story (to arouse sexual excitement etc.)?
2. Is the sexual element of the story the primary or dominant value of the story or is it
subordinated to the writer’s aesthetic goals?
3. How does the reader experience the story? Does it appeal more to his or her aesthetic
judgement or mostly to his or her senses and carnality?
4. Does the aesthetic experience of reading the story do away with the reader’s “practical,
operational” ways of viewing its characters and situations as if they were real people or
situations?
If the story’s primary or overriding goal is to sexually arouse the reader, then the work can be
considered obscene. If the story’s primary or overriding goal though is to use sexual or erotic
scenes for some larger artistic purpose related to theme, setting etc., the story can be considered
literature. A story moreover may have sexual situations or scenes which by themselves may be
considered obscene but which have some meaning in the story’s overall context.

In “Thanda Gosht,” Manto tells the story of Isher Singh, a Sikh, who tried to rape an already
dead Muslim girl, a heap of “cold flesh.” In “Khol Do,” a brutalized, unconscious girl on the
verge of death, Sakeena, opens her shalwaar qameez after the doctor examining her utters the
words “khol do” (‘open’) to a nurse to open a window. The suggestion of raping a corpse or a
girl opening her shalwaar on hearing the words “open (it)” by themselves may have been
obscene; in their proper context, they illustrate the extent to which women were brutalized in the
Punjab in 1947.

Manto was not only holding up a mirror to the dirt, hypocrisy and puritanism in Indian and
Pakistani society; he was showing a way out of it. Ismat Chughtai wrote in her memoir “Kaghazi
Hai Pairahan” that Manto’s “flinging it (dirt) about makes it visible and one’s attention can be
called to the need of cleaning it.” His stories unsettle us because they take us to the darker
corners of our psyche, to desires repressed and to the ugliness that results. South Asia still
struggles with the brutalization of women, sexual repression, sexual abuse, a growing AIDS
menace and with discussing sex or sexuality openly.

Manto is still holding up the mirror to ourselves.

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912 to 1955, born in Lahore, Pakistan and with long term ties to Bombay)
is considered the greatest of Urdu language short story writers. Most of his best known works
centered on the horrible human costs of the partition of India). He began his literary career as a
translator of the works of writers like Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde, Nikolai Gogol, and Anton
Chekhov into Urdu. (I think he translated the English versions of the Russian writers but I would
like to be corrected if I am wrong in this.) His stories are dark stories about a very dark period
of history. Much of the blame for what happened belongs on the shoulders of the British.

"The Assignment" is a heartbreaking story of betrayal, of evil returned for generations of good,
of senseless violence and meaningless cruelty and deaths of the innocent, deaths with no reward
but the temporary satiation of blood lust and religious hatred.

There is a sad paradox about religious hatred. All major religions advocate kindness toward
fellow humans, none advocate the killing of children of religions other than your own but this is
what religious based political views lead to in India after Independence (and of course in
countless other places and times in history).

The story is a very simple one. (I feel bad as I wish everyone could read this story but it is not,
as far as I know, available online.) A man once helped in a very important way a another man
who was a member of another religious group and for many years afterwards the helped man
made a gesture every year toward the family of the other man to show his gratitude. It was a
cross religious bond that meant a great deal to both families and both used it to teach their
children to avoid the hate that consumes so many. I will tell the ending here as few will be able
to read it and the story is so beautifully crafted that this will not spoil it. One day the grandson
of the helped man comes in his place to the other family and tells them his grandfather is no
longer able to come. They talk of the great family bonds. As the man leaves in a scene stark
with terror, the grandson tells a group of men outside the house, carrying torches, that he has
done his duty and points out the house of their religious enemies. The men say they will now do
their duty and we know the family will all, including young children with so much respect for the
grandfather, probably die in the fire when their house is set ablaze.

This is a story of horrible betrayal and pointless cruelty told in a beautiful way. If you can read
this story, I wish you would.

The Partition, as Manto saw it

From the battleground that was the Partition, emerged some of the finest literature of the
subcontinent. Manto's was the best
Prasenjit Chowdhury Kolkata
Muslims living in Hindu localities began to leave for safer places; Hindus in Muslim majority
areas followed suit. Full-scale communal violence erupted in Amritsar. However, retired judge
Mian Abdul had a bull-headed conviction that the storm would blow over. Therefore, he chose
not to move his family. His two children, a boy of eleven and a girl of seventeen, and his old
servant who was pushing seventy, were the three who kept him company. His daughter Sughra
was not so convinced because "there were too many fires in too many places" and the "sky was
always lit by conflagrations like giants spitting out flames."
Things indeed belied Mian sahib's predictions as they went from bad to worse. Mian sahib had a
stroke and was laid up. All the dispensaries were closed. And Mian sahib's condition worsened
by the day. Desperately, Sughra scolded their servant who mostly kept near Mian sahib's bed as
he coughed and fought for breath: "What good are you? …There was a time when servants used
to sacrifice their lives for their masters." Akbar, the servant, left for good. The festival of Eid was
only a night away. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. No, it was not Akbar. It was perhaps
Gurmukh Singh whom Mian sahib once did a great favour by getting him acquitted in a false
legal suit. It wasn't Gurmukh Singh but his son Santokh Singh, assigned to do an errand by his
departed father — to fulfil his father's farewell wish — all the way from his village to deliver a
bagful of siwwaiyaan to Mian sahib on the occasion of Eid, as his father always did to register
his lifelong gratitude.
The paternal assignment over, Santokh left. But outside the door were four veiled men, wanting
to know if he had done the job his father had entrusted him, that is, delivered the token gift from
his father to Mian sahib. Then they set about doing their job. They had burning oil torches with
them and cans of kerosene oil and explosives.
The above account, which could well be of modern-day Naroda Patiya in Gujarat or even
Mumbai, is of The Assignment, a famous story by Saadat Hasan Manto, south Asia's foremost
and possibly most controversial Urdu short story writer. Endowed with a literary genius capable
of exploring topics as diverse as the socio-economic injustice prevailing in the subcontinent,
love, sex, incest, prostitution, and the typical hypocrisy of traditional sub-continental men,
Manto is chiefly remembered as the literary exponent of the Partition and its accompanying
horrors.
Here comes a seamless collection of vintage Manto containing some 28 stories, translated and
introduced brilliantly by Khalid Hasan who has done a great service to non-Urdu readers. Manto
wrote more than 250 short stories and his claim to abiding literary fame owes a lot to this genre.
It is always a difficult task to choose from the works of as prolific and gifted a writer as Manto
who, during his career, published 22 collections of stories, seven collections of radio plays, three
collections of essays, and a novella. The most representative stories are those that pick up the
disturbing overt acts as well as undercurrents of the Partition which, to Manto, was not a
celebrative or epiphanic event but an overwhelming tragedy stories such as Toba Tek Singh, The
Return, The Assignment, and Colder Than Ice are retained in this collection, though to the
unfortunate exclusion of stories like Thanda Gosht and Dhuan. Many consider Thanda Gosht
(Cold Meat) to be the best piece of imaginative prose written about the communal violence of
1947. Hasan could also have included in his introduction a brief outline of Manto's translated
works and perhaps the original titles of his stories — pointing out which names had been
retained and which changed.
Why did Manto fall back again and again on the theme of Partition? Wrote Manto: “I came to
accept this nightmarish reality (Partition) without self-pity or despair. I tried to retrieve from this
man-made sea of blood pearls of a rare hue, the single-minded dedication with which men killed
men, the remorse felt by some, and the tears shed by murderers..." He did not always scour the
tragedy for bloodshed but sometimes just made fun of the absurdity of the whole exercise. Take
Toba Tek Singh, Manto's most memorable classic. While thousands are involved in the
unprecedented communal frenzy that follows the announcement of Partition, the inmates of a
mental asylum find themselves in a strange situation. The authorities have decided that while the
Muslim inmates can stay back, the Hindu and Sikhs will have to go to India. This creates
confusion because the inmates have not heard of Pakistan. A Sikh inmate refuses to leave
because, when he was brought in, the asylum was in India. What follows is confusion, confusion
and more confusion. One lunatic gets so frazzled with the India/Pakistan question that one day he
climbs a tree and refuses to come down, saying he prefers neither India nor Pakistan and wants to
live on the tree. One Bishen Singh, who has been standing for 15 years in the asylum, lies face
down on the ground with India on one side and Pakistan on the other, on a no man's land. This is
sharp literary irony about the falsity of man-made borders.
Ishwar Singh fails to rise to the occasion while making love to his wife Kalwant Kaur. As part of
an arsonist gang he has killed six Muslim men with his kirpan. But his sexual tragedy stems from
the beautiful girl he carried away to "gorge" on a "mouthful of this luscious meat", first thinking
to "shuffle her a bit" but later deciding to "trump her right away", only to discover that he carried
away a dead body, "a heap of cold flesh". This is Colder than Ice, yet another bone-chilling tale
by Manto.
Take the plight of Sirajuddin in the story The Return (originally titled Khol-do and rated as his
greatest by Manto himself) who loses his daughter Sakina in Lahore on their journey from
Amritsar to Lahore. In riot-ravaged Lahore, Sirajuddin, fleeing a trail of arson and fire, is forced
to leave his wife — lying dead with her stomach ripped open — to save Sakina. The abducted
Sakina is finally found by her father in a hospital where she lies in a traumatised state, raped not
only by her abductors but her rescuers as well. The distraught father, unmindful of the ravages
done to the body of his beautiful daughter and perhaps of the death of her soul, is happy to get
his daughter back physically alive. The story is a powerful pull between physical life and moral
death and, for its sheer brevity, is a masterpiece.
The Last Salute is a moving tale about two friends who belonged to the same village, had a
shared childhood, but were condemned to fight one another because they served two armies of
two different nations squabbling over Kashmir. The New Constitution, another Manto classic
first published in 1937 as New Law, tells the story of Ustad Mangu, a tongawallah in Lahore,
who discovers that the 1935 Government of India Act is a sham because the new law means
nothing to colonised people like him.
But to sample the raw basic power of Manto, readers have to go into stories such as Odour where
it is the smell of the women and the language of their bodies that talks to Randhir, and the
unwashed perfume of one dark girl under a tamarind tree that sets his senses afire. Manto's other
heroes are people who live on the fringes of society and inhabit stories such as Siraj and Babu
Gopi Nath. Stories that talk of base primal passions, like The Wild Cactus, Mummy", The Room
with the Bright Light, and Mozail, not only show Manto exploring the ritual of sex, the frills of
love, and the taboos of polygamy, but also reveal, what many considered, his dangerously non-
conformist strains.
So what was the story of this story writer? Do some old-timers recall a scriptwriter working for
Bombay Talkies? The man had a glowing Kashmiri complexion and a thick crop of long brown
hair. He loved to wear a light brown gabardine shirwanee with silken trousers and saleem shahi
shoes. As a wayward adolescent he hobnobbed with the rakes and layabouts of Amritsar in their
slovenly environment, though he was in constant dread of his stern father. In his house in Kucha
Vakilan, he kept his makeshift room meticulously tidy. He arranged pen, pencil, inkpot and
paper neatly before sitting down to read or write. It is ironical that though his room was lined
with books he failed his matriculation examination twice and, only with great difficulty,
managed to pass on the third attempt, in the third division. The man was Manto.
In the largest exodus in recorded history, among millions of refugees who migrated across the
brand new border after India was partitioned in 1947, Manto too, in the January of 1948, left
Bombay behind to move to Lahore, Pakistan. At the time of his departure from India, Manto was
working for the well-known studio Bombay Talkies. In Bombay he had spent his happiest,
financially well-off, and most creative part of his life and he forever regretted leaving the city.
Even during his difficult last years in Lahore, suffering from persecution and poverty, Manto
continued to write with nostalgia and affection about Bombay, the place from which he had been
exiled: "That was the city I loved. That is the city I still love."
The new Pakistan dashed his hopes. During his years in Bombay, he had written with great relish
about film stars, prostitutes, and drinking. The horrors of the Partition compelled Manto to write
about violence in a critical and graphic way. Pakistan tried him again and again on charges of
obscenity. Often reviled and misunderstood, Manto died of liver cirrhosis in 1955, at the age of
43, a broken man.
Virtually drinking himself to death in Lahore, he, like Ghalib, wrote his own epitaph on August
18, 1954, six months before his death: "Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all
the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing. Under tonnes of earth he lies, still
wondering who among the two is the greater short-story writer: God or he, Saadat Hasan
Manto." In a godless universe that made a tragedy like the Partition happen, Manto is perhaps the
supreme exponent of the sub-continent's Partition literature — a man who played a game of dice
with his own fortune.

about the story

"Toba Tek Singh" is surely the most famous story about Partition, and very possibly the best one.
I'd argue that it is in fact the best, and that most of the other good candidates are also by Manto.
This story was one of his last ones; it was published in "Phundne" (Lahore: Maktabah-e Jadid) in
1955, the year of his death.

Every reader at once realizes that it's a powerful satire, and also a bitter indictment of the
political processes and behavior patterns that produced Partition. But the author's brilliant
craftsmanship lies partly in the fact that there's not a single word in the story that tells us so. The
story presents itself as a deadpan, factual, non-judgmental chronicle of the behavior of certain
lunatics in an insane asylum in Lahore. It thus shares the conspicuously effective technique of
Jonathan Swift's *"A Modest Proposal"*.

The story is told by a reliable but not omniscient narrator who speaks as a Pakistani, and seems
to be a Lahori. The narration is for the most part so straightforward that the narrator's voice
seems even naive (or faux-naif, depending on how we want to read it). The narrator reports to us
with apparent matter-of-factness a series of events that are not quite as straightforward as they
appear. The time frame, for one thing, is oddly jagged. The first two paragraphs take us to the
Wagah border itself, where the lunatics are described as having already arrived. Then we drop
abruptly into a very long flashback: we return to an earlier time, when the inmates in the Lahore
asylum first learn of the proposed exchange. We follow their reactions and behavior, until at the
very end of the story we once again arrive at the time and place of the first two paragraphs.

A much greater oddity is that the whole story, as we're told in the first sentence, takes place "two
or three years after Partition," so it seems highly implausible that not only the lunatics, but the
people around them as well, can't figure out where Toba Tek Singh is; the district isn't even
anywhere near the border, so after "two or three years" there could hardly be any confusion. But
it's a tribute to Manto's narrative skill that on the first reading, this question doesn't even occur--
and perhaps not on the second or third reading, either.

We don't meet the main character until well into the story, when we've gone through an
illustrative sequence of other lunatics. The narrator reports that everyone calls the main character
"Toba Tek Singh" (though in the whole course of the story we never actually hear anyone doing
so); but the narrator himself always refers to him by his full name, Bishan Singh. Does he do this
pointedly, as a sign of respect, and to differentiate himself from the others? And when he seeks
to interpret Bishan Singh's outbursts, he always qualifies his suggestions with a respectful
"perhaps," to show that he is not privy to Bishan Singh's inner life, but is only speculating.

Whatever the reason, the narrator's carefulness in this respect enables him to set up a wonderfully
elegant, haunting, ambiguous conclusion. After Bishan Singh gives a single loud shriek and
collapses, the narrator locates him in a no-man's-land between the two new nations' barbed-wire
borders. My translation is entirely literal: "In between, on that piece of ground that had no name,
lay Toba Tek Singh." We know of course that the person Bishan Singh lay there. But since the
narrator never calls this person by that name, he's able to force us to the additional reading that
the real location of the village Toba Tek Singh is between the two new states' sharply
demarcated borders. But if the village is there, then in what sense exactly, and in whose eyes? Is
Bishan Singh sane or mad, conscious or delirious, alive or dead? With wonderful subtlety and
literary restraint, the author allows us-- and thus also forces us-- to invent our own ending.

Because of its simple and deliberately repetitive use of language, the story also provides
excellent reading practice for students learning Urdu. For more on the Urdu text, see *About the
Text*. My translation is almost as literal as it can possibly be. This is partly for the convenience
of students, and partly because I love translations that try to bring you right up against the very
grammar, the very sentence structures, of the original.

And my translation is literal also as a form of reaction against Khalid Hassan's extremely free
one, which is widely available in print; see for example Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and
Stories of Partition (New Delhi, Penguin India, 1997, pp. 1-10). Khalid Hassan, who wrote such
a fine and sympathetic *memoir* of Manto, apparently felt quite free to "transcreate" his literary
idol's greatest story. As only one example, though a particularly irritating one, here is the start of
section [08]. The original is, like the whole of the story, stark and simple in almost a minimalist
way; my translation reflects those qualities, as you can easily check for yourself in the Urdu text:

He had one daughter who, growing a finger-width taller every month, in fifteen years had
become a young girl. Bishan Singh didn't even recognize her. When she was a child, she wept
when she saw her father; when she'd grown up, tears still flowed from her eyes.

Khalid Hassan, by comparison, takes away some information that the author wanted us to have
(the poignant emphasis on the daughter's gradual growing up over the years, and her continuing
silent grief), and adds a fair amount of other "information" that he himself invents (including a
whole final sentence of obtrusive padding):
When he was first confined, he had left an infant daughter behind, now a pretty young girl of
fifteen. She would come occasionally, and sit in front of him with tears rolling down her cheeks.
In the strange world that he inhabited, hers was just another pretty face.

I'm sure Khalid Hassan did this sort of damage with no evil intentions, but only carelessly, and
perhaps seeking somehow to "help" or please the English reader. For more discussion of this
kind of work, see M. Asaduddin, "Manto Flattened: An Assessment of Khalid Hasan's
Translations," in *Annual of Urdu Studies 11*.

I want to thank Sania Chaudhry for special help, and also the other members of the "Readings in
Urdu Literature" class, Spring 2005, for their enjoyment, encouragement, and many good
suggestions in the making of this project.