Could Manto survive and write in these times of communal hate mongering?

I do realize that we are still several days away from celebrating Saadat Hasan Manto’s 108th birth anniversary — he was born on May 11, 1912, to a Kashmiri family, in Punjab’s Ludhiana district. Of course, those were the days when the political rulers didn’t hound the Kashmiris; when their life was secure and safe. They were not questioned and nor needled, if they moved from here to there unlike the present times.

Today I have been wondering how the literary giant Manto would have reacted to the present scenario, what all he would have written if he was alive today. If the turmoil and tragedy of that era had moved him so much that he wrote such an intense prose, then today’s dark times would have absolutely devastated him.

Perhaps, the incidents taking place in the year 2020 in our country would have been much too unbearable for him; when hunger and unemployment and internal displacements holds sway; when the well- whipped right-wing communal virus seems overtaking all other strains of foreign viruses; when scholars and students and activists are getting picked up even during the lockdown to be stuffed into the over- stuffed prisons and detention centres and the communal hate mongers and the right-wing political mafia backing them are left untouched and unarrested. How would Manto have reacted to this society where the minority communities live in fear of the police -wallah and also of the ‘politics -wallahs’ calling the shots; where voices of the young innocent crusaders for peace are getting silenced rather too ruthlessly; where patients can be not just segregated along communal lines but also heaped with bogus mischievously twisted charges; where even the death and devastation of migrant workers’ are not moving those sitting at the helm of the government of the day; where worst forms of targeted killings are taking place, which are perhaps worse than what was witnessed during the Partition.

As I think of Manto’s genius, I recall my meeting his grandnephew, Abid Hassan Minto, in New Delhi. This was around 2005, when I was a visiting professor at the Jamia Millia Islamia and the then Vice Chancellor of that university, Professor Mushirul Hassan, had hosted a progressive writers’ meet, where one could meet and interact with the who’s who in the literary world of this subcontinent. I was particularly happy interviewing Abid Hassan Minto, because I could ask him about Manto. Thankfully, he answered them without any fuss or pretence…He had travelled from Pakistan , where he was a senior advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, also, the President of the National Workers’ Party of Pakistan (NWP) and above all, a well-known writer and critic.

Before I could ask him any of the queries related to Manto, I simply had to ask him why did he spell his surname somewhat differently — Minto as against Manto?

And his detailed answer had brought forth the vital information about the clan. He had told me, “We are ethnic Kashmiris… Manto is a Kashmiri surname. Saadat Hasan Manto was my father’s paternal uncle/ chacha… My father’s grandfather had shifted from Srinagar to Amritsar. In fact, my parents were born in Amritsar and my mother was the niece of Saifuddin Kichlu. I was born in Rawalpindi in 1932, though on the eve of Partition I was holidaying in Srinagar….coming to the ‘why’ I spell my name somewhat differently is because the surname Manto was too closely associated with him, with one particular individual. My father had dropped the surname, but I chose to take it with a change in spelling.”

He also cleared the haze around all those controversies around Manto— about his mental and emotional fragility, about his visits to prostitutes and the poverty he had to struggle with. To quote him, “I got close to Saadat Hasan Manto when I came down to Lahore around 1953 to study law. He was already living there and I interacted with him regularly for two years — till he died…. Regarding he being mentally fragile, that’s just not true. No, not at all…he was not mad, on the contrary very sharp and clever. It’s just that he was an alcoholic and in those days there were no de-addiction centres or clinics for alcoholics, and anybody with alcohol-related problems was dumped in an asylum. And, regarding his name getting linked to prostitutes, I can say with great confidence that he was absolutely in love with his wife and greatly committed to her. They were happy with each other, happily married till the very end. She was also a Kashmiri like us and her family earlier shifted to Africa and later to Mumbai. And that’s where they had met and married.”

Clearing the haze still further, on those much- in-circulation stories about Manto’s visits to red light areas, he’d told me, “Maybe before his marriage, whilst he was living in Mumbai, he mixed around with all sections and all levels of people. Also, there could be an underlying factor to it, he was very concerned about, almost taken up by the non-elite and those from the socially lower strata. But, after his marriage he was devoted to his wife and except for those alcohol-related offshoots, he suffered from no other disease or problems. Another fact is that he was severely affected when his only son died as a child. Though he had three daughters but that loss played havoc and he was in deep sorrow. No, it’s not the Partition chaos that affected him as much as the death of his little son. Somehow till the end he couldn’t get over it and it had completely devastated him.”

I’m certain, if left alive and allowed to survive in today’s communally surcharged political climate, Manto would have dwelt on the many more dark realities of the day. Today there’s no dearth of the dark realities, hitting us so very severely that it gets difficult to even describe the daily round of shockers.

But Manto having already departed to a better world (I’m certain there would be no viruses, corona or the communal, up there, in Heaven!), the least we can do on his upcoming birth anniversary is to sit and read and re-read his works. Cry aloud or sob rather too subtly after reading all those too painful heart rending passages. Perhaps, the chief minister of Punjab, Captain Amarinder Singh, could think in terms of not just visiting Manto’s birthplace/ village, but also try to bring about some level of strategy to halt the spread of communal hatred out to destroy us all.

Whilst on this, I’m reminded of my earlier meetings with Muslims living in Punjab’s Malerkotla and they’d told that even during the Gujarat pogrom and also during the other anti-Muslim rioting and killings, they felt secure and safe in Malerkotla. After all, it is a township which was blessed by Guru Gobind Singh…his blessings have saved the minority population to this day, and with that kept the fabric of togetherness all too intact and ongoing.

Views expressed in the article are the author’s own