Manto lives on

Islamabad: Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) was the greatest Urdu short-story writer and a dramatist.

Today the people of the sub-continent are celebrating his birth anniversary highlighting his significance in the Pakistan-India partition era.

Manto was born in Paproudi village of Samrala, in the Ludhiana district of the Punjab in a Muslim family of barristers on 11 May 1912.

The 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 and read Russian and French authors.

Manto was a writer whose life story became a subject of intense discussion and introspection.

During the last two decades, many stage productions were done to present his character in conflict with the harsh socio-economic realities of the post-partition era. Danish Iqbal’s stage Play Ek Kutte Ki Kahani presented Manto in a new perspective on occasion of his birth centenary.

On 18 January 2005, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, Manto was commemorated on a Pakistani postage stamp.

In 2012, on 14 August which is Pakistan’s Independence Day, Saadat Hasan Manto was posthumously awarded the Nishan-e-Imtiaz award (Distinguished Service to Pakistan Award) by the Government of Pakistan.

In 2015, Pakistani actor and director Sarmad Khoosat made and released a movie, Manto, based on the life of Manto.

In 2018, the British Broadcasting Corporation named the work Toba Tek Singh among the 100 stories that shaped the world, alongside works by authors like Homer and Virginia Woolf.

The 2018 film Manto, made by Nandita Das and starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui, is a Bollywood film based on the life of Manto.

Manto’s basic contribution to Urdu literature (with respect to partition) is that he considered the killing of thousands of people during migration as a massacre of humanity rather than of any single religion. He said: Don’t say that a hundred thousand Hindus or a hundred thousand Muslims have been massacred. Say two hundred thousand human being have been slaughtered.

This was Manto’s message at the time when religious division was at its peak. People were divided – rather isolated – on religious differences and did not consider killing a major crime against humanity. In such times, Manto rose as a messenger of humanism in the subcontinental literature. He wrote dramas like ‘Toba Tek Singh’ (name of a village in Pakistani Punjab), in which he highlighted the miseries of partition.

But is Manto relevant today? Yes! He definitely is relevant. His criticism on the hypocritical societal values, his attitude towards social taboos and ethos, and his whimsical remarked towards United States makes him a living legend. Manto, as Zahida Hina rightly says, was a visionary.

Manto’s writing can today help Pakistan to come out from the abyss of extremism which is increasing day by day. The cultural and political crises which Pakistan is facing today were seen years ago by Manto in his article ‘Allah ka bara fazl ha’ (God’s benevolence is infinite).