Lawrence Stone Lectures. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. xv, 265 pp. (B&W photos.) US$27.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-691-15362-9.
This is a highly readable book on the life and writings of the most outstanding Urdu short-story writer Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955), by the historian Ayesha Jalal, a close relative of Manto’s; her father was his nephew.
Jalal expands her ambit from archival material, which hitherto has been her only source of writing on the Partition, to include oral history as she moves away from high politics to the stark ground reality of unprecedented violence that claimed more than a million lives and forced 14-18 million people to cross the India-Pakistan border at the time of Partition in mid-1947.
However, she expresses doubts about oral history as a reliable source for scholarly research. She remarks: “Privileging memories shaped by violent ruptures cannot but provide a distorting prism for looking into the history of the entire gamut of social and political relations” (13). It is an involved construction because there is nothing to suggest that memory should be privileged. Methodological innovation which does not privilege one source material over the other and attempts a multi-layered analysis combining high politics, the conduct of officialdom in the field, and the experiences of the people, three levels in the structure and process of the partition, is certainly an option.
Conventional historians, including Jalal, put their pens down once government reports on the partition prepared by the British ceased to be available (not written at all or those that remain classified up to this day) after the 14th of August, when power was transferred to Indian and Pakistani administrations in the partitioned Punjab. However, political scientists can link these levels in a theoretical framework to attempt a holistic and comprehensive study of that great upheaval. In my book, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012), I have demonstrated the usefulness and relevance of such methodology. Reviewers have, without exception, found the employment of oral history collected from hundreds of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs a very useful methodological innovation.
Consequently, when Jalal attempts a biography-cum-literary evaluation of Manto, she combines newspaper editorials and news items, articles on Manto, letters he wrote and received, some official documents and reports, with oral history collected through discussions and interviews with his family, relatives, friends and contemporaries. The result is an amazingly informative, even-handed, and lifelike portrait of the great writer.
Manto’s elders were from Kashmir. They were shawl merchants who settled in the Punjab. His father was a magistrate. Saadat Hasan was born to his second wife, whom his relatives never accepted. The genius grew up lonely, discriminated against, and angry. He was an unsuccessful student who found himself in the company of leftists wanting to overthrow British colonialism and imbibed that message. Long years of struggle in Lahore, Bombay and Delhi to make a living from writing fiction and film stories and scripts followed. He was victimized for allegedly writing obscene stories and dragged into courts. Married to a woman also of Kashmiri extraction, Safia, he found in her his bedrock, though he had wanted to marry a cousin whom some rich suitor claimed successfully. Together they had four children, three daughters and a son. The son was the apple of his eye but he died when still an infant. Manto could never overcome that blow.
Manto became a rebel; an anti-imperialist to the end of his life; jealously independent and irreverent, hounded by right-wing forces and ostracized by orthodox communists. He could make fun of religion. He had many close Hindu friends, including the famous actors such as Ashok Kumar and Shyam; yet wrote the Arabic numerals 786 (symbolizing the Quranic formula “I begin in the name of Allah the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful”) on the top of each story he wrote. A critic of religious fanaticism, he was simultaneously a realist convinced that religion shapes human behaviour and cannot be wished away. Jalal tries to explicate these contradictions and does it very well.
The selection of the short stories is extremely fair. The breadth of Manto’s writings covering sexuality, violence, corruption, politics, culture, individualism, class and society is amply presented. Equally, his skills, ranging from portraying tragedy and horror to sarcasm and humour and pique absurdity, are aptly demonstrated. Jalal devotes a whole chapter to the fictional letters he wrote to Uncle Sam with regard to how Pakistan would be used and exploited. He could foretell that the Americans would be promoting fanaticism and extremism in Pakistan. History has proven him right. Yet Manto left India and came to Pakistan, where under the influence of literary critic and ideologue Hassan Askari, he began to assume some typical Pakistani nationalist standpoints vis-à-vis India.
Jalal mentions that Manto used to celebrate March 23rd, the date of the 1940 Lahore resolution passed by the Muslim League demanding Pakistan. This is doubtful, because not until 1956 was that date declared the national day of Pakistan. By that time Manto was dead, succumbing to mounting debts, excessive drinking and an intellectually suffocating milieu that emerged in Pakistan as the demand for making Pakistan a proper Islamic state picked up momentum.
It is widely mentioned that Manto wrote to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (a Kashmiri Brahmin like Manto but a Hindu) urging him to vacate Muslim Kashmir just as he (a Muslim) had left India and migrated to Pakistan. If such a letter was written then Manto succumbed to the logic of the two-nation theory on which Pakistan is based. It would have been interesting to know if such a letter was written at all. Jalal has not taken it up in her discussion, which is rather peculiar.
Ishtiaq Ahmed
Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 881-883