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Saadat Hasan Manto

Saadat Hasan Manto

The new issue of A Public Space includes a portfolio on Saadat Hasan Manto, an Urdu writer who lived in Bombay in the 1940s and 1950s. He is a revered name in the world of Urdu letters, perhaps best known for his Partition stories. But Matt Reeck has put together a portfolio that looks at his other great subject: Bombay. Manto’s Bombay was an immigrant city - according to the 1921 census, an amazing 84 percent of the population were immigrants, most of them extremely poor - and a large cross-section was comprised of a motley crew of exiled dreamers and the woebegone. Manto’s stories are populated with film stars and prostitutes, pimps and writers (as well as the occasional rich man), and full of the life of the street. His interest in depicting the lives of Bombay’s disenfranchised often put him at odds with the leading literary movement of his day, the Progressive Writers Movement, which saw literature as a vehicle for social uplift. The state put him on trial for obscenity five times. Manto left Bombay in 1948, a year after Partition, and moved to Lahore. But the city had a strong hold on him, and he wrote some of his best Bombay stories as an exile from the city he loved.
This is from the postscript to Yazid, a collection of his stories that was published in 1951:
It was a blow to have to leave Bombay, where I had lived such a busy life. Bombay had taken me in, a wandering outcast thrown out by even his family. She had told me, “You can live happily here on two paise a day or on ten thousand rupees. Or if you want, you can be the saddest person in the world at either price. Here you can do whatever you want, and no one will think you’re strange. Here no one will tell you what to do. You will have to do every difficult thing on your own, and you will have to make every important decision by yourself. I don’t care if you live on the sidewalk or in a magnificent mansion, I don’t care if you stay or go. I’ll always be here.” I was disconsolate after leaving Bombay. My good friends were there. I had gotten married there. My first child was born there, as was my second. There I had gone from earning a couple rupees a day to thousands - hundreds of thousands - and there I had spent it all. I loved it, and I still do!

Manto died in Lahore in 1955. The Daily Times of Pakistan remembered Manto on the fifty-third anniversary of his death last month. You can read one of the stories from the portfolio, in full, here.


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