“Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of story writing. Under mounds of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is the greater story writer – God or he.” (Manto’s self-composed epitaph)

The decision of Pakistan’s civilian government to accord the highest civilian honor to Saadat Hasan Manto comes as a minor, though significant, attempt at our national course correction. It took fifty seven years and a light year of denial for the state to recognize the worth of our great writer and commentator. Even though Manto dreaded the idea of a posthumous award, the conferment of a top state honour is a debt that Pakistan’s anti-intellectual and repressive state owed to the genius of our times.

Saadat Hassan Manto was born on 11 May 1912 in united Punjab’s Ludhiana district. In a literary, journalistic, radio scripting and film-writing career spread over two decades, he produced at least 250 stories, scores of plays and a large number of essays. He also worked with the All India Radio. Perhaps the best years of his life were spent in Bombay where he became associated with leading film studios. Manto also wrote a dozen films, including Eight Days, Chal Chal re Naujawan and Mirza Ghalib. The last one was produced into a movie after he moved to Pakistan in January 1948.

After 1947, Manto was shoddily treated by the new state of Pakistan. This towering writer had become a sensation even before his migration to Pakistan. Manto’s scathing irony and the proclivity to subvert conventional wisdom was already well recognized. But it was the senseless and horrific violence of the partition which gave a new dimension to his writings, and made him both into a story-teller par excellence and a social historian of immense depth and variety.

In Pakistan Manto was tried for ‘obscenity’ and the right wing launched a full-fledged campaign against him. It is a bitter irony of our confused society that in 2012, Pakistan’s Supreme Court has entertained petitions from an Islamic party representative and a former judge against television channels airing Indian programmes and thereby spreading ‘fahashi’. Manto’s chilling story “Thanda Gosht” – a no-holds-barred indictment of violation of woman’s body and desecration of humanity invoked the ire of puritans. It is a separate matter that the story has gained global traction and acclaim.

As Ayesha Jalal says Manto was ‘vulgar’ because what he saw in his surroundings was vulgar to him. It was the environment that caused him to attain that degree of directness in his writings. Manto was faced with over half a dozen charges of obscenity, three of which occurred before Partition and three after he moved to Pakistan. Even out of these, the court found only two stories in which he had transgressed the law and was liable to punishment. It would be unjust to call a writer’s work obscene just on the basis of two stories. But then we are good at defying logic. (more…)

Found a great excerpt from Mohammed Hani’s novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes where he recounts on his time at the Pakistani military academy during General Zia’s regime.

ONCE UPON a time, when I was 18, I found myself locked up in Pakistan’s military academy’s cell along with my friend and partner-in-crime, Khalid. We had thought we were doing charity work but the Academy officers obviously didn’t share our ideals. We had been caught trying to help out another classmate pass his chemistry exam, something he had failed to do twice already and this was his last chance to save himself from being expelled. The logistics of our rescue effort involved a wireless set improvised in the Sunday Hobbies Club, a microphone concealed in a crepe bandage around the left elbow of our academically challenged friend, and a Sanyo FM radio receiver. We were running our operation from the rooftop of a building next to the examination hall. We were caught red-handed, whispering a reversible chemical equation into the transistor. We were in breach of every single standard operating procedure in the Academy rule book, and faced certain expulsion. We had just started our glorious careers and now we faced the prospect of being sent home and having to explain to our parents how, instead of training to become gentlemen-officers, we were running an exam-cheatingmafia from the rooftop of the most well-disciplined training institute in the country.

For two days, while we waited in that cell to find out about our fate, we planned our future. Khalid, always the worldly-wise one in this outfit, immediately decided that he was going to join the merchant navy and travel the world. I tried hard to think what I would do. I came from a farming family where even the most adventurous members of our clan had only managed to branch out into planting sugarcane instead of potatoes. Education, jobs, careers were absolutely alien concepts. The Academy was supposed to be my escape from a lifetime that revolved around wildly fluctuating potato crop cycles. And here I was, already a prisoner of sorts, facing a journey back to a life I thought I”d left behind. Maybe I’ll become a teacher, I said vaguely. The farmers in my village used to show some vague respect to teachers in the primary school I attended.Or a mechanic. I was a member of the car-maintenance club in the Hobbies Club, after all. It was considered an elite club since there was no car to maintain. It was basically a Hobbies Club for people who hated hobbies.I can’t even change a bloody tyre, Khalid reminded me. We managed to stave off the impending expulsion through a combination of confession and denial: we lied (we were listening to cricket commentary on the transistor radio), we grovelled (we were ashamed, ashamed, ashamed of our un-officer like behaviour) and we pleaded our undying passion for defending the borders of our motherland. They looked at our relatively clean records, our sterling academic achievements, let us off the hook and awarded us a (more…)

By Vidya Rao

The streets of some cities, they say, are paved with gold. This city’s streets are paved with stories. Doubtless, they were also paved with gold once, but this would have been before the British pounced upon it and shook its pagoda tree. Which was how they referred to the looting of India that each ‘nabob’ of the East India Company systematically carried out. Though, to give the devil his due, it was the British that are considered to have founded the city. (more…)