This week we will post some excerpts and notes from the two Manto events
hosted in New York earlier this month. These are informal presentation
notes culled from larger, more detailed projects by the writers, and are
reproduced here to share a sense of the discussions.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Richard Delacy: Manto and the Perverse Pleasure of Middle Class Abjection (May 11, 2012)
In this short piece, I would like to focus on Manto as a short story writer who is not so much a chronicler of the seedy, salacious underworld of Bombay, not so much an observer of its minutiae, and of everyday practices, not so much a portrayer of the often sad, alienated personalities in the world of commercial cinema in the 1930s and 1940s, although he was of course all of these things. I do not want to concentrate on his obviously profound concern for the marginalized, for the oppressed, for those lower class figures exploited by capital and rejected by so-called ‘polite’, or ‘middle class’ society, although he did indeed craft many stories that are, at their heart, deeply humanist in terms of their sympathetic treatment of such pathetic subjects. Rather, I would like to pose a simple question, and perhaps talk a little bit about the stories in the volume Chugd (‘Owl’, or ‘Stupid’), that was published at the time Manto moved from Bombay to Lahore, via Karachi in 1948.
The question that has haunted me since I first picked up Manto’s short stories many years ago as an undergraduate, and then began to read about his growing iconic status around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Partition, is rather simple. Why Manto? What is it about the man, and his short stories, that has bestowed on him this now iconic status among the intellectual and cultural elite of South Asia? For surely no other writer has engendered such a response among this particular class of consumers in the subcontinent. I ask this in the spirit of being something of an iconoclast, which I think that Manto would perhaps have appreciated. What is it about his writings or what he represents for us, that is, the middle class, that has transformed him so completely into the vernacular writer par excellence? It doesn’t matter where you turn, whether one is talking about Bombay, the Partition of India, or communal violence in post independence India, it would seem that it is obligatory to cite Manto and his short stories.
I think that it is important to ask this question, particularly because Manto’s iconic status has grown to such mythical dimensions, particularly since the fiftieth anniversary of Independence and Partition in 1997. It was at that time that Manto suddenly emerged on the radar of social historians, in their efforts to uncover the ‘human’ dimension to the tragedy of the Partition of British India in 1947. This is not to say that his importance was a fabrication, only that prior to this he was mostly only celebrated among a very select, narrow group of writers, in other words by his peers, in South Asia. While I don’t want to suggest that he was ‘rediscovered,’ it is certainly the case that the 1990s brought about a fresh enthusiasm for his writings.1
There are several reasons for this.
Firstly, it would appear critical that Manto wrote in Urdu, the language that also came to be celebrated in the 1990s as a symbol of an ecumenical, syncretic, secular culture for a particular class, a class that could, ironically, for the most part no longer actually read the Nastaliq script, but who were searching for some symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity in a world still characterized by significant communal unrest and a sense of a growing intolerance towards religious minorities in India by right wing Hindu nationalists. I would not like to minimize Manto’s achievements as a short story writer by suggesting that his prominence can be reduced to his personal ethnicity, or to the language he chose to write in, but I do believe that Urdu came to be valorized at this time as a language that represented a utopian world from before the colonial period. In reality, by the 1990sthe Urdu language (or perhaps more accurately the Nastaliq script), had become entirely obsolete in north India outside of crumbling departments of language and literature in major universities, and its token inclusion on road signs in the capital.2
Secondly, given that he came into prominence again around the fiftieth anniversary of Partition and Independence, Manto’s preeminence can be said to lie in his reputation as the Partition writer par excellence. Indeed, this is why many social historians turned to his work at this particular moment in history. Historians such as Ian Talbot, Gyan Pandey, Ayesha Jalal, Susie Tharu and others lionized his writings and his life, primarily for his stories that focused on the brutality, inhumanity and utter senselessness of the Partition and the violent transference of populations in the west of the country. In particular, his collection of short vignettes Siyah Hashiye (Black Marginalia) were heralded as the most powerful, confronting examples of literary responses to the Partition, examples of the violence that offered the reader little sense of redemption and hope, leaving him or her bewildered and as incoherent as the characters in perhaps Manto’s most famous partition story, “Toba Tek Singh”.
I have always wondered what it is about these macabre, often grotesque stories that have so captivated us. Why it is that social historians have found in Manto’s writings a more meaningful response to the Partition?What it is about the grotesque, about the uncanny, about the horrific nature of some of his stories that so attracts us?
If we take a closer look at the volume under review in this particular celebration of Manto’s 100th birth anniversary, Chugd, and indeed, Manto’s engagement with the world of Bombay in the 1930s and 1940s, I think that there are several answers that suggest themselves to these questions. Often it is said that Manto reserved his most strident critique for the middle classes in his time. The problem with this is the very nomenclature ‘middle class’. Like the masses, with which we have an equal obsession as the Other, it is always suggested that the middle class is out there, that is, spatially at a distance from us. And yet, we are precisely the middle classes. And so, there is something particularly interesting to me about the fact that Manto seeks, often in a very modernist literary style in which there is no moral to the tale, and in many stories no great semblance of a narrative even, to put on display for the consumption of the middle class its own abjection. And there is nothing more abject that taking a perverse pleasure in reading about one’s own abject state.
Is there something about 1930s and 1940s Bombay that engenders such a response by this particular story teller? Many of Manto’s discursive, (non)narratives are about a particular class of inhabitants, and the seemingly utter irrelevance of their lives. They are dislocated, dissolute, alienated, purposeless, often seemingly emasculated by capital, incapable to acting in any decisive manner. They are concerned with base, mundane affairs, with opportunism, and with self loathing. They can only indulge themselves in prurient entertainment, in pleasures of the flesh and alcohol. Their lives seem utterly random, inconsequential, lacking in any political or social conviction. Manto’s stories are full of licentious descriptions of prostitutes and pimps, meaningless parties, sycophants and pathetic characters who populate this city. He is both demonstrating in his storytelling how emasculated the middle class had become, and giving them precisely the wanton stories in which they took so much pleasure. There is nothing so abject than a class that takes pleasure in its own abjection, in its own despair.
Manto’s stories are thus deeply ironic. They appear on the surface to reinforce humanity through their seemingly sympathetic portrayals of sex workers, alienated Mumbaikars and so on, but in reality, they reinforce this pathos by giving us the very prurient descriptions that we crave. It must be remembered that these stories were produced for a minuscule percentage of the population. The middle class (those who had some education and worked in salaried positions, but were not possessors of finance capital - that is, not wealthy industrialists) consisted of no more than approximately five percent of the population at the time that he wrote. While this is a conservative figure, it doesn’t strike me as being inaccurate. Manto’s stories, then and now, are celebrated precisely because they critique the very class that reads them. This suggests that the perverse pleasure that is to be derived from them is one that has to do with the abjectness of the capitalist enterprise.
What is engendered is a self-loathing at a fundamental level, which says much about the nature of this particular city as the most important embodiment of capitalism in India at the time Manto and others inhabited its spaces. In other words, Manto’s stories show up the abject nature of the capitalist enterprise, that so enslaves the worker to the point where all he or she can do is take pleasure in is their own abjectness. That is they become the flawed, the minor, the anti-heroes of his stories. There are no great figures to be found in his discursive, anecdotal urban writings. These stories are not supposed to inspire. They seem destined to mire the middle class further in its own flaws, in its own lack of humanity. The middle class reader can take pity on the sex worker who is exploited by the system, knowing well that he or she will be able to do little to change the situation of that exploitation. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Manto’s stories is not their humanism, which we can celebrate in the manner of Herbert Marcuse’s notion of ‘affirmative culture’, the affirmation of cultural values that are unattainable in a world given over to capitalism exploitation but that may be upheld in literary texts, but that he so often ironically reminds us of the shallowness of middle class piety and the pleasure of middle class abjection.
(Please do not cite without permission)
Notes:
1In his introduction to one of the first collections of translations of Manto’s stories in1987, Khalid Hasan argues that Manto’s work at that time was little known outside of India and Pakistan. Khalid Hasan, Kingdom’s End and Other Stories (Delhi:Penguin Books, 1987),p.1.
2 On these points, see my unpublished MA thesis, “The Making of Manto: The Construction of a Literary Icon” (Clayton, Victoria: Department of History, Monash University, 1998)
-------------------------------------------------
Richard Delacy is Preceptor in Hindi-Urdu with the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. He is at present a doctoral candidate in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, working on post-liberalization novel writing in Hindi, particularly novels written by non-traditional groups, such as Dalits (Ajay Navaria) and semi-urban female writers like Maitreyi Pushpa.
The question that has haunted me since I first picked up Manto’s short stories many years ago as an undergraduate, and then began to read about his growing iconic status around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Partition, is rather simple. Why Manto? What is it about the man, and his short stories, that has bestowed on him this now iconic status among the intellectual and cultural elite of South Asia? For surely no other writer has engendered such a response among this particular class of consumers in the subcontinent. I ask this in the spirit of being something of an iconoclast, which I think that Manto would perhaps have appreciated. What is it about his writings or what he represents for us, that is, the middle class, that has transformed him so completely into the vernacular writer par excellence? It doesn’t matter where you turn, whether one is talking about Bombay, the Partition of India, or communal violence in post independence India, it would seem that it is obligatory to cite Manto and his short stories.
I think that it is important to ask this question, particularly because Manto’s iconic status has grown to such mythical dimensions, particularly since the fiftieth anniversary of Independence and Partition in 1997. It was at that time that Manto suddenly emerged on the radar of social historians, in their efforts to uncover the ‘human’ dimension to the tragedy of the Partition of British India in 1947. This is not to say that his importance was a fabrication, only that prior to this he was mostly only celebrated among a very select, narrow group of writers, in other words by his peers, in South Asia. While I don’t want to suggest that he was ‘rediscovered,’ it is certainly the case that the 1990s brought about a fresh enthusiasm for his writings.1
There are several reasons for this.
Firstly, it would appear critical that Manto wrote in Urdu, the language that also came to be celebrated in the 1990s as a symbol of an ecumenical, syncretic, secular culture for a particular class, a class that could, ironically, for the most part no longer actually read the Nastaliq script, but who were searching for some symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity in a world still characterized by significant communal unrest and a sense of a growing intolerance towards religious minorities in India by right wing Hindu nationalists. I would not like to minimize Manto’s achievements as a short story writer by suggesting that his prominence can be reduced to his personal ethnicity, or to the language he chose to write in, but I do believe that Urdu came to be valorized at this time as a language that represented a utopian world from before the colonial period. In reality, by the 1990sthe Urdu language (or perhaps more accurately the Nastaliq script), had become entirely obsolete in north India outside of crumbling departments of language and literature in major universities, and its token inclusion on road signs in the capital.2
Secondly, given that he came into prominence again around the fiftieth anniversary of Partition and Independence, Manto’s preeminence can be said to lie in his reputation as the Partition writer par excellence. Indeed, this is why many social historians turned to his work at this particular moment in history. Historians such as Ian Talbot, Gyan Pandey, Ayesha Jalal, Susie Tharu and others lionized his writings and his life, primarily for his stories that focused on the brutality, inhumanity and utter senselessness of the Partition and the violent transference of populations in the west of the country. In particular, his collection of short vignettes Siyah Hashiye (Black Marginalia) were heralded as the most powerful, confronting examples of literary responses to the Partition, examples of the violence that offered the reader little sense of redemption and hope, leaving him or her bewildered and as incoherent as the characters in perhaps Manto’s most famous partition story, “Toba Tek Singh”.
I have always wondered what it is about these macabre, often grotesque stories that have so captivated us. Why it is that social historians have found in Manto’s writings a more meaningful response to the Partition?What it is about the grotesque, about the uncanny, about the horrific nature of some of his stories that so attracts us?
If we take a closer look at the volume under review in this particular celebration of Manto’s 100th birth anniversary, Chugd, and indeed, Manto’s engagement with the world of Bombay in the 1930s and 1940s, I think that there are several answers that suggest themselves to these questions. Often it is said that Manto reserved his most strident critique for the middle classes in his time. The problem with this is the very nomenclature ‘middle class’. Like the masses, with which we have an equal obsession as the Other, it is always suggested that the middle class is out there, that is, spatially at a distance from us. And yet, we are precisely the middle classes. And so, there is something particularly interesting to me about the fact that Manto seeks, often in a very modernist literary style in which there is no moral to the tale, and in many stories no great semblance of a narrative even, to put on display for the consumption of the middle class its own abjection. And there is nothing more abject that taking a perverse pleasure in reading about one’s own abject state.
Is there something about 1930s and 1940s Bombay that engenders such a response by this particular story teller? Many of Manto’s discursive, (non)narratives are about a particular class of inhabitants, and the seemingly utter irrelevance of their lives. They are dislocated, dissolute, alienated, purposeless, often seemingly emasculated by capital, incapable to acting in any decisive manner. They are concerned with base, mundane affairs, with opportunism, and with self loathing. They can only indulge themselves in prurient entertainment, in pleasures of the flesh and alcohol. Their lives seem utterly random, inconsequential, lacking in any political or social conviction. Manto’s stories are full of licentious descriptions of prostitutes and pimps, meaningless parties, sycophants and pathetic characters who populate this city. He is both demonstrating in his storytelling how emasculated the middle class had become, and giving them precisely the wanton stories in which they took so much pleasure. There is nothing so abject than a class that takes pleasure in its own abjection, in its own despair.
Manto’s stories are thus deeply ironic. They appear on the surface to reinforce humanity through their seemingly sympathetic portrayals of sex workers, alienated Mumbaikars and so on, but in reality, they reinforce this pathos by giving us the very prurient descriptions that we crave. It must be remembered that these stories were produced for a minuscule percentage of the population. The middle class (those who had some education and worked in salaried positions, but were not possessors of finance capital - that is, not wealthy industrialists) consisted of no more than approximately five percent of the population at the time that he wrote. While this is a conservative figure, it doesn’t strike me as being inaccurate. Manto’s stories, then and now, are celebrated precisely because they critique the very class that reads them. This suggests that the perverse pleasure that is to be derived from them is one that has to do with the abjectness of the capitalist enterprise.
What is engendered is a self-loathing at a fundamental level, which says much about the nature of this particular city as the most important embodiment of capitalism in India at the time Manto and others inhabited its spaces. In other words, Manto’s stories show up the abject nature of the capitalist enterprise, that so enslaves the worker to the point where all he or she can do is take pleasure in is their own abjectness. That is they become the flawed, the minor, the anti-heroes of his stories. There are no great figures to be found in his discursive, anecdotal urban writings. These stories are not supposed to inspire. They seem destined to mire the middle class further in its own flaws, in its own lack of humanity. The middle class reader can take pity on the sex worker who is exploited by the system, knowing well that he or she will be able to do little to change the situation of that exploitation. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Manto’s stories is not their humanism, which we can celebrate in the manner of Herbert Marcuse’s notion of ‘affirmative culture’, the affirmation of cultural values that are unattainable in a world given over to capitalism exploitation but that may be upheld in literary texts, but that he so often ironically reminds us of the shallowness of middle class piety and the pleasure of middle class abjection.
(Please do not cite without permission)
Notes:
1In his introduction to one of the first collections of translations of Manto’s stories in1987, Khalid Hasan argues that Manto’s work at that time was little known outside of India and Pakistan. Khalid Hasan, Kingdom’s End and Other Stories (Delhi:Penguin Books, 1987),p.1.
2 On these points, see my unpublished MA thesis, “The Making of Manto: The Construction of a Literary Icon” (Clayton, Victoria: Department of History, Monash University, 1998)
-------------------------------------------------
Richard Delacy is Preceptor in Hindi-Urdu with the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. He is at present a doctoral candidate in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, working on post-liberalization novel writing in Hindi, particularly novels written by non-traditional groups, such as Dalits (Ajay Navaria) and semi-urban female writers like Maitreyi Pushpa.
Debashree Mukherjee: The Lost Films of Sa'adat Hasan Manto (May 11, 2012)
Manto moved to Bombay in 1936 and worked in close association with the film world till 1948. During these two decades, the 1930s and 40s, more than 2000 talkie films were produced in Bombay. Today, less than 5% of these films are preserved in the National Film Archives of India. Among the missing 95% percent were eight films that were written by Manto himself. Manto is as much a mythic figure today as the early Bombay film industry. Manto’s representations range from the enigmatic rebel intellectual to a perverse writer of obscene stories, while Bombay cinema in the 1930s and 40s is either celebrated as the glorious studio era or dismissed as a period of formulaic commercial cinema. Today, let us go back to Manto’s missing filmography to take a second look at the diverse cultural and political forces that Bombay cinema was entangled in at the time.
Manto worked in the film industry as a script and dialogue writer. However, cinema is a richly collaborative craft and as such it would be naïve to try to invest any direct authorship in the figure of the film writer. That said, here is a Manto filmography compiled with the help of Manto’s own writings. I have not seen any of the films on this list. They are not available in the usual official archives and studios. Without a film or screenplay on which to base my readings, I have worked with film synopses, reviews and other clues available in song booklets, advertisements, and Manto’s own Bombay stories. [Any additions, corrections, and clues from readers are welcome]:
Kisan Kanya (dir. Moti B. Gidwani, 1938)
Imperial Film Company was established in 1926 and soon became one of the leading film companies of the subcontinent. In an autobiographical sketch titled "Meri Shaadi," Manto tells us that by 1937, the company had lost much of its early glory and reputation. The studio was on the road to financial ruin and ‘Seth’ Ardeshir Irani was desperately trying to get the company back in business. Irani had made a name for his studio by giving India its first talkie film, Alam Ara, in 1931. Now he wanted to revive the company’s fortunes by presenting the next filmic technological landmark – the subcontinent’s first colour film. Moti B. Gidwani, a freelance filmmaker trained in Britain, was hired to direct this prestigious venture. At the time, Manto was working at Imperial as an in-house screenwriter and he wrote what became Kisan Kanya. However, the director, Gidwani was now faced with a dilemma: “How was he to tell the Seth that the writer of India’s first colour film was a lowly munshi?” Manto and Gidwani agreed that Ardeshir Irani would only buy the script if it had a prestigious name attached to it. A certain Professor Ziauddin, who taught Persian in Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan University, agreed to lend his name as the story writer!
Manto self-deprecatingly characterizes his job profile at Imperial as that of a munshi, or a hack writer on the payrolls of the company, hired more for skill than talent. Manto’s anecdote, amusing though it is, serves to highlight the great divide between two kinds of cultural institutions and two forms of writing – Imperial Film Co. vs Shantiniketan; screenwriting versus literature. Borrowing Prof Ziauddin’s name and affiliation underscores the film industry’s intense anxiety at this time about its dubious cultural status and its primarily lower class audiences. With the coming of sound and the consolidation of the studio system, the industry saw the emergence of entrepreneur-producers like Bombay Talkies’ Himansu Rai, Rajkamal’s V. Shantaram, and Filmistan’s Shashadhar Mukherjee who wanted to remake the film industry as an organized, regulated domain employing ‘respectable’ workers, producing social reform content, and appealing to intellectually ‘sophisticated’ audiences.
The language debate in film historical writings on Bombay cinema is an ongoing and conflicted one. In an essay titled "All Kinds of Hindi: The Evolving Language of Hindi Cinema," Harish Trivedi strives to demonstrate how Bombay cinema has always been a Hindi cinema, in a Sanskritic register, and that it is naïve, nostalgically secularist to call it a Hindustani cinema. In a characteristic generalization, Trivedi states that ever since Achhut Kanya (1936), “films set in villages” used a “kind of constructed Hindi dialect” in order to “authenticate all representations of village life in Hindi cinema, from Ganga Jumna (1961) through Teesri Kasam (1966) to Lagaan (2001). Thus, according to Trivedi, Urdu was ruled out of these village films because “Urdu had always been an urban language.”
Directly contradicting Trivedi’s view is Manto’s own statement in a story from Chughad titled ‘Mera Naam Radha Hai.’ It might be safe to surmise that the film he refers to as Ban Sundari is not a city film:
“… every day I would write dialogues in a difficult language for that ‘Jungle Beauty’ [Ban Sundari]. I can only vaguely recall the story or plot of the film. This is mainly because in those days I was hired as a munshi, whose job is to simply follow orders and hand over penciled dialogues in a half-baked Urdu that the director would just about understand.”
- Manto Ki Kahaniyan, ed. Narendra Mohan. New Delhi: Kitab Ghar, 2004, pp220
If even the director of the film did not understand the Urdu Manto wrote, then surely something other than mass intelligibility, authenticity, or verisimilitude was a criterion for dialogue choices. This was a period of intense linguistic contestation in Northern India, and the debates over Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani definitely impacted Bombay cinema. The relative newness of talkie technology made this a period of tentative linguistic experimentation and the logic of popular cinema ensured that film dialogues were determined by a combination of commercial, artistic and cultural aspirations. Based on prevalent debates within the Bombay film industry in these years, it appears that films shifted strategically between a Sanskritized Hindi and a Persianized Urdu – often self-consciously deploying Hindustani as the preferred register for film writing.
Mud or Apni Nagariya (dir. Gunjal, 1940)
“Mud (Hindustan Cinetone’s new release at the Pathe) is one of the rare instances when a progressive Hindustani writer has found expression on the screen. Sa’adat Hasan Manto, well-known in Urdu literary circles as a young, radical writer with original ideas, is the author of Mud. …[The new title] Apni Nagariya has a romantic rather than a realistic significance. And it somewhat confuses the main issue and we are led to believe that the theme is Village versus City instead of being Capital versus Labor.”
- Bombay Chronicle, 01/02/1940
Apni Nagariya’s promotional taglines, “A New Kind of Story”, “Entertainment and Instruction Both In One!”, and the above cited review in the Bombay Chronicle newspaper, reference the cultural and political ferment of the period. The Progressive Writers’ Movement contributed much to the Hindustani cinema of Bombay in terms of themes, writers as well as politics. It is significant that most of these leftist writers decided to live and work in Bombay and embraced the film industry. Writers like Krishan Chandar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Kaifi Azmi, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Ali Sardar Jafri, Majaz, Shahid Latif and Ismat Chughtai were not only dedicated to writing a new social and linguistic idiom through literature but were also engaging with cinema in serious ways.
Aamir Mufti, in an essay on Manto and the Urdu short story in the 1940s, puts forth the thesis that Urdu, with its steady retreat to the borders of the nation project, allowed the Progressives to distance themselves from grand visions of nationhood and citizenship, at the same time as they disavowed a stultified Urdu literary tradition. This argument might well explain why the Progressives took to film writing with such gusto, when their Hindi peers consciously shunned this supposedly lowly form. It is against the backdrop of these varied cultural forces, that one should read a film like Apni Nagariya. The classed and somewhat romantic tendencies of the city’s young and earnest socialists can be seen in the lyrics of the first song in Apni Nagariya, titled "Mazdoor":
Mazdoor mazdoor/ Worker, worker
Jag naiyya khevanhaara/ The oarsman of the world
Mazdoor mazdoor/ Worker, worker
Dhan mehnat karke kamaayen/ Work hard to make your wealth
Sone ke mahal banaayen/ Build castles of gold
Aasha hai yeh hamaara/ This is our hope
Mazdoor mazdoor/ Worker, worker
Dhanvaan kamaaye daulat/ The rich amass riches
Din raat kare tu mehnat/ While you toil day and night
Hai sar pe bojh karaara/ You carry a heavy load on your head
Mazdoor mazdoor/ Worker, worker
Duniya to sukh se soye/ The world sleeps in peace
Tu dhoop mein eenth dhhoye/ You carry bricks in the searing sun
Anyay ye jag hai saara/ This world is an unjust place
Mazdoor mazdoor/ Worker, worker
(Lyrics: Pandit Indra, Dr. Safdar ‘Aah’. Translations mine.)
The history of working-class struggles in the Bombay region through the 1920s and 30s is well-documented. Trade unions were a dynamic part of the city’s imagination; workers were active in anti-imperial struggles, and Bombay’s cotton mill-workers were creating history with their strikes. Newspapers like the Bombay Chronicle regularly covered various worker-related stories. The ‘mazdoor’ had become an urban symbol of subaltern agency and resistance against oppression. A spate of ‘working-class’ films was released during these years.
Manto’s 1940 film, Apni Nagariya, is a parable about the inequalities fostered by capitalism and the need for the wealthy to recognize the dignity of the laboring classes. The plot revolves around a trope that became quite familiar in the 1930s and 40s: the evil capitalist factory-owner versus his disgruntled striking workers. The capitalist, in Apni Nagariya, has a college-educated daughter, Sushila, who is beautiful and an icon of modernity. The class conflict is played out via the improbable love story between an honest factory-worker and the enemy’s daughter. Interestingly, the onus of societal change rests with the heroine, as she must negotiate with the workers and signal a new democratic model of management. Could it be that the film industry had turned socialist?
Manto echoes this question, in his portrait of the music composer, Rafique Ghaznavi:
“… I landed at Hindustan Movietone owned by Seth Nanoobhai Desai… I had written the story for a movie called Keechad [renamed Apni Nagariya] which he had liked because it was based on socialist ideas. I never understood why the Seth, every inch a dirty capitalist, had taken a shine to it.”
- Manto, "Rafique Ghaznavi", in Bitter Fruit, 2008, 475
The focus on the working class in films of the time, cannot be explained solely by the presence of socialist Progressive writers in the industry. The wartime twilight economy of black marketeering, soldiers waiting for war to erupt in India, and the increasing wealth of the industrial elite, changed the atmosphere of the city and impacted filmic content. Another prominent writer of the time, Upendranath Ashk remembers: “Cinema halls were always crowded during the war years, filled up mainly by soldiers, uneducated workers and artisans.” Going for a show of Taqdeer (Mehboob, 1943) in Delhi, Ashk remembers being startled that the balcony was filled with the same class of people as the stalls. He notes that the “white-collar crowd shifted to halls like Odeon and Plaza (in Delhi).” He then makes another interesting observation: “Sashadhar Mukherjee’s formula films [Filmistan Studio] and the films of his imitators had one factor in common: the hero would invariably be an illiterate, unemployed or delinquent youth. The heroine would be educated or wealthy and would fall hopelessly in love with our socially unworthy hero.” This observation implicitly suggests that given the changing audience demographic, producers sought to attract a new class of viewer by creating romantic protagonists they could identify with. That this dramatic characterization was gendered is apparent as it was the heroine who generally took on the role of the bourgeois other. But the imagined sphere of spectators was a fractured and heterogeneous one. Just as the balconies were filled with workers and soldiers, so were there ‘other’ theatres like Odeon and Plaza.
…
Note: I have not included in my Manto filmography a 1954 film by Minerva Movietone, titled Mirza Ghalib. This is because I am primarily interested in the films made while Manto was actively employed in Bombay film studios and also how these films allow us to revisit an under-researched pre-Independence period.
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Debashree Mukherjee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her dissertation tracks a history of work and material practice in the late colonial Bombay film industry. She is a trained filmmaker and has worked in the mainstream Bombay film industry on films such as Vishal Bhardwaj's Omkara. She was a researcher with Sarai-CSDS on their ambitious ethnographic project titled "Publics and Practices in the History of the Present." Before starting her M.Phil degree in the School of Arts and Aesthetics at JNU, she tried her hand at several professions in Bombay including archivist, scriptwriter, and cameraman.
Manto worked in the film industry as a script and dialogue writer. However, cinema is a richly collaborative craft and as such it would be naïve to try to invest any direct authorship in the figure of the film writer. That said, here is a Manto filmography compiled with the help of Manto’s own writings. I have not seen any of the films on this list. They are not available in the usual official archives and studios. Without a film or screenplay on which to base my readings, I have worked with film synopses, reviews and other clues available in song booklets, advertisements, and Manto’s own Bombay stories. [Any additions, corrections, and clues from readers are welcome]:
- Kisan Kanya (1938), prod. Imperial Film Company, Scenario and Dialogues by Manto [Story by Prof. M. Ziauddin of Shantiniketan]
- Apni Nagariya (1940), prod. Hindustan Cine Tone, Story by Manto
- Chal Chal Re Naujawan (1944), prod. Filmistan, Dialogue by Manto
- Begum (1945), prod. Taj Mahal Pics, ?
- Naukar (1945), prod. Sunrise Pictures, Story and Dialogue by Manto
- Aath Din/Eight Days (1946), prod. Filmistan, Screenplay & Dialogue by Manto
- Shikari (1946), prod. Filmistan, Screenplay & Dialogue by Manto
- Jhumke (1946), prod. Chitra Productions, Story by Manto
Kisan Kanya (dir. Moti B. Gidwani, 1938)
Imperial Film Company was established in 1926 and soon became one of the leading film companies of the subcontinent. In an autobiographical sketch titled "Meri Shaadi," Manto tells us that by 1937, the company had lost much of its early glory and reputation. The studio was on the road to financial ruin and ‘Seth’ Ardeshir Irani was desperately trying to get the company back in business. Irani had made a name for his studio by giving India its first talkie film, Alam Ara, in 1931. Now he wanted to revive the company’s fortunes by presenting the next filmic technological landmark – the subcontinent’s first colour film. Moti B. Gidwani, a freelance filmmaker trained in Britain, was hired to direct this prestigious venture. At the time, Manto was working at Imperial as an in-house screenwriter and he wrote what became Kisan Kanya. However, the director, Gidwani was now faced with a dilemma: “How was he to tell the Seth that the writer of India’s first colour film was a lowly munshi?” Manto and Gidwani agreed that Ardeshir Irani would only buy the script if it had a prestigious name attached to it. A certain Professor Ziauddin, who taught Persian in Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan University, agreed to lend his name as the story writer!
Manto self-deprecatingly characterizes his job profile at Imperial as that of a munshi, or a hack writer on the payrolls of the company, hired more for skill than talent. Manto’s anecdote, amusing though it is, serves to highlight the great divide between two kinds of cultural institutions and two forms of writing – Imperial Film Co. vs Shantiniketan; screenwriting versus literature. Borrowing Prof Ziauddin’s name and affiliation underscores the film industry’s intense anxiety at this time about its dubious cultural status and its primarily lower class audiences. With the coming of sound and the consolidation of the studio system, the industry saw the emergence of entrepreneur-producers like Bombay Talkies’ Himansu Rai, Rajkamal’s V. Shantaram, and Filmistan’s Shashadhar Mukherjee who wanted to remake the film industry as an organized, regulated domain employing ‘respectable’ workers, producing social reform content, and appealing to intellectually ‘sophisticated’ audiences.
The language debate in film historical writings on Bombay cinema is an ongoing and conflicted one. In an essay titled "All Kinds of Hindi: The Evolving Language of Hindi Cinema," Harish Trivedi strives to demonstrate how Bombay cinema has always been a Hindi cinema, in a Sanskritic register, and that it is naïve, nostalgically secularist to call it a Hindustani cinema. In a characteristic generalization, Trivedi states that ever since Achhut Kanya (1936), “films set in villages” used a “kind of constructed Hindi dialect” in order to “authenticate all representations of village life in Hindi cinema, from Ganga Jumna (1961) through Teesri Kasam (1966) to Lagaan (2001). Thus, according to Trivedi, Urdu was ruled out of these village films because “Urdu had always been an urban language.”
Directly contradicting Trivedi’s view is Manto’s own statement in a story from Chughad titled ‘Mera Naam Radha Hai.’ It might be safe to surmise that the film he refers to as Ban Sundari is not a city film:
“… every day I would write dialogues in a difficult language for that ‘Jungle Beauty’ [Ban Sundari]. I can only vaguely recall the story or plot of the film. This is mainly because in those days I was hired as a munshi, whose job is to simply follow orders and hand over penciled dialogues in a half-baked Urdu that the director would just about understand.”
- Manto Ki Kahaniyan, ed. Narendra Mohan. New Delhi: Kitab Ghar, 2004, pp220
If even the director of the film did not understand the Urdu Manto wrote, then surely something other than mass intelligibility, authenticity, or verisimilitude was a criterion for dialogue choices. This was a period of intense linguistic contestation in Northern India, and the debates over Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani definitely impacted Bombay cinema. The relative newness of talkie technology made this a period of tentative linguistic experimentation and the logic of popular cinema ensured that film dialogues were determined by a combination of commercial, artistic and cultural aspirations. Based on prevalent debates within the Bombay film industry in these years, it appears that films shifted strategically between a Sanskritized Hindi and a Persianized Urdu – often self-consciously deploying Hindustani as the preferred register for film writing.
Mud or Apni Nagariya (dir. Gunjal, 1940)
“Mud (Hindustan Cinetone’s new release at the Pathe) is one of the rare instances when a progressive Hindustani writer has found expression on the screen. Sa’adat Hasan Manto, well-known in Urdu literary circles as a young, radical writer with original ideas, is the author of Mud. …[The new title] Apni Nagariya has a romantic rather than a realistic significance. And it somewhat confuses the main issue and we are led to believe that the theme is Village versus City instead of being Capital versus Labor.”
- Bombay Chronicle, 01/02/1940
Apni Nagariya’s promotional taglines, “A New Kind of Story”, “Entertainment and Instruction Both In One!”, and the above cited review in the Bombay Chronicle newspaper, reference the cultural and political ferment of the period. The Progressive Writers’ Movement contributed much to the Hindustani cinema of Bombay in terms of themes, writers as well as politics. It is significant that most of these leftist writers decided to live and work in Bombay and embraced the film industry. Writers like Krishan Chandar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Kaifi Azmi, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Ali Sardar Jafri, Majaz, Shahid Latif and Ismat Chughtai were not only dedicated to writing a new social and linguistic idiom through literature but were also engaging with cinema in serious ways.
Aamir Mufti, in an essay on Manto and the Urdu short story in the 1940s, puts forth the thesis that Urdu, with its steady retreat to the borders of the nation project, allowed the Progressives to distance themselves from grand visions of nationhood and citizenship, at the same time as they disavowed a stultified Urdu literary tradition. This argument might well explain why the Progressives took to film writing with such gusto, when their Hindi peers consciously shunned this supposedly lowly form. It is against the backdrop of these varied cultural forces, that one should read a film like Apni Nagariya. The classed and somewhat romantic tendencies of the city’s young and earnest socialists can be seen in the lyrics of the first song in Apni Nagariya, titled "Mazdoor":
Mazdoor mazdoor/ Worker, worker
Jag naiyya khevanhaara/ The oarsman of the world
Mazdoor mazdoor/ Worker, worker
Dhan mehnat karke kamaayen/ Work hard to make your wealth
Sone ke mahal banaayen/ Build castles of gold
Aasha hai yeh hamaara/ This is our hope
Mazdoor mazdoor/ Worker, worker
Dhanvaan kamaaye daulat/ The rich amass riches
Din raat kare tu mehnat/ While you toil day and night
Hai sar pe bojh karaara/ You carry a heavy load on your head
Mazdoor mazdoor/ Worker, worker
Duniya to sukh se soye/ The world sleeps in peace
Tu dhoop mein eenth dhhoye/ You carry bricks in the searing sun
Anyay ye jag hai saara/ This world is an unjust place
Mazdoor mazdoor/ Worker, worker
(Lyrics: Pandit Indra, Dr. Safdar ‘Aah’. Translations mine.)
The history of working-class struggles in the Bombay region through the 1920s and 30s is well-documented. Trade unions were a dynamic part of the city’s imagination; workers were active in anti-imperial struggles, and Bombay’s cotton mill-workers were creating history with their strikes. Newspapers like the Bombay Chronicle regularly covered various worker-related stories. The ‘mazdoor’ had become an urban symbol of subaltern agency and resistance against oppression. A spate of ‘working-class’ films was released during these years.
Manto’s 1940 film, Apni Nagariya, is a parable about the inequalities fostered by capitalism and the need for the wealthy to recognize the dignity of the laboring classes. The plot revolves around a trope that became quite familiar in the 1930s and 40s: the evil capitalist factory-owner versus his disgruntled striking workers. The capitalist, in Apni Nagariya, has a college-educated daughter, Sushila, who is beautiful and an icon of modernity. The class conflict is played out via the improbable love story between an honest factory-worker and the enemy’s daughter. Interestingly, the onus of societal change rests with the heroine, as she must negotiate with the workers and signal a new democratic model of management. Could it be that the film industry had turned socialist?
Manto echoes this question, in his portrait of the music composer, Rafique Ghaznavi:
“… I landed at Hindustan Movietone owned by Seth Nanoobhai Desai… I had written the story for a movie called Keechad [renamed Apni Nagariya] which he had liked because it was based on socialist ideas. I never understood why the Seth, every inch a dirty capitalist, had taken a shine to it.”
- Manto, "Rafique Ghaznavi", in Bitter Fruit, 2008, 475
The focus on the working class in films of the time, cannot be explained solely by the presence of socialist Progressive writers in the industry. The wartime twilight economy of black marketeering, soldiers waiting for war to erupt in India, and the increasing wealth of the industrial elite, changed the atmosphere of the city and impacted filmic content. Another prominent writer of the time, Upendranath Ashk remembers: “Cinema halls were always crowded during the war years, filled up mainly by soldiers, uneducated workers and artisans.” Going for a show of Taqdeer (Mehboob, 1943) in Delhi, Ashk remembers being startled that the balcony was filled with the same class of people as the stalls. He notes that the “white-collar crowd shifted to halls like Odeon and Plaza (in Delhi).” He then makes another interesting observation: “Sashadhar Mukherjee’s formula films [Filmistan Studio] and the films of his imitators had one factor in common: the hero would invariably be an illiterate, unemployed or delinquent youth. The heroine would be educated or wealthy and would fall hopelessly in love with our socially unworthy hero.” This observation implicitly suggests that given the changing audience demographic, producers sought to attract a new class of viewer by creating romantic protagonists they could identify with. That this dramatic characterization was gendered is apparent as it was the heroine who generally took on the role of the bourgeois other. But the imagined sphere of spectators was a fractured and heterogeneous one. Just as the balconies were filled with workers and soldiers, so were there ‘other’ theatres like Odeon and Plaza.
…
Note: I have not included in my Manto filmography a 1954 film by Minerva Movietone, titled Mirza Ghalib. This is because I am primarily interested in the films made while Manto was actively employed in Bombay film studios and also how these films allow us to revisit an under-researched pre-Independence period.
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Debashree Mukherjee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her dissertation tracks a history of work and material practice in the late colonial Bombay film industry. She is a trained filmmaker and has worked in the mainstream Bombay film industry on films such as Vishal Bhardwaj's Omkara. She was a researcher with Sarai-CSDS on their ambitious ethnographic project titled "Publics and Practices in the History of the Present." Before starting her M.Phil degree in the School of Arts and Aesthetics at JNU, she tried her hand at several professions in Bombay including archivist, scriptwriter, and cameraman.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Ali Mir: Manto and the Progressives (May 11, 2012)
If you have been reading any of the
copious amounts of material being written about Manto this year, you
couldn’t have failed to notice that eventually, he is always set up
against the Progressives. In this narrative, Manto comes across as the
fierce individual who refused to succumb to the party line of the
progressives, who are seen as taking their marching orders from a party
apparatus, and sometimes from Moscow. It is also noted that the
Progressives disawoved Manto (not to mention Ismat Chughtai) and
condemned him because of the obscenity of his writings. This much has,
by now, due to the sheer force of repetition, become common knowledge,
aided partly – I claim – by the desire of many, particularly those in
Urdu academic circles, to bracket and dismiss the progressives, and
where this proves difficult such as in the case of Faiz, to appropriate
them. The real story of Manto and the Progressives is, of course, quite
different and far more complicated. And while I cannot do any real
justice to it in a short talk, my purpose is to offer some glimpses of
its trajectory, taking as the focal point the foreword of the first
edition of Chughad, written on Manto’s request by the progressive ideologue, Sardar Jafri.
Shahr ki raat aur main naashaad-o naakaara phiroon
Shahr ki raat aur main naashaad-o naakaara phiroon
Jagmagaati jaagti sadkon pe aawaara phiroon
Ghair ki basti hai kab tak dar-ba-dar maara phiroon
Ai gham-e dil kya karoon, ai vahshat-e dil kya karoon
Night falls in the city, and I roam, unhappy and unfulfilled
Like a nomad on the bright, wide-awake streets
In unfamiliar neighborhoods, wandering from door to door
Sad heart, anxious heart, what should I do?
Ek mahal ki aad se nikla vo peela maahtaab
Jaise mullah ka amaama, jaise banye ki kitaab
Jaise muflis ki jawaani, jaise bewa ka shabaab
Ai gham-e dil kya karoon, ai vahshat-e dil kya karoon
From behind a palace rises the yellow moon
Like a mullah’s turban, like a moneylender’s ledger
Like the youth of poor, like the beauty of a widow
Sad heart, anxious heart, what should I do?
No, this isn’t by Manto, but by Majaz, a poet of the progressive writers’ movement. I begin with this because I think it is a poem Manto could well have written (oddly enough, both Manto and Majaz were born within a few months of each other, and both drank themselves to death in 1955) since it reflects the inchoate, ineffable, and tragic rage of the human being caught in a world that is neither comprehensible nor changeable.
Manto came to Bombay in 1936, the same year that the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) held its first meeting in Lucknow, inaugurating a period in Urdu literature that was dominated by a progressive and often, an explicitly socialist, sensibility. For a period of time, the PWA was such a strong force that it defined the cultural agenda for a broad generality of Urdu writers. While it was by no means a front of the Communist Party, most of its stalwarts were card-carrying communists, many of whom worked and lived in the Sandhurst Road headquarters of the party and in the Andheri commune. The charismatic General Secretary of the party, P.C. Joshi, wanted to foster a “culture squad” and cultivated the presence of writers and poets.
In the touching account of her life Yaad-e Rahguzar (Memories of a Journey), Shaukat Kaifi describes the relationship of the progressives with a city whose heady milieu was peopled by India’s best know Urdu writers, poets, and artists including Sajjad Zaheer, Kishen Chander, Sahir Ludhianavi, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Ismat Chughtai, Razia Sajjad Zaheer, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Sultana Jafri, Safia Akhtar, Kaifi Azmi, Sardar Jafri, Dina Pathak, Rajender Singh Bedi and scores of others, all of whom shared a conviction that art could be deployed in the services of progressive social transformation.
As Shaukat’s account details, progressivism was in the air in Manto’s Bombay, and he breathed it deeply. When he burst on to the scene, Manto was embraced by the Progressives whole-heartedly. Ahmed Ali (one of the co-authors of Angaare, the short-story collection that sparked the PWA) writes: “No novelist or short story writer has been consistently acclaimed by the political section of the Movement as “Progressive” in the sense that Faiz has been, with the exception of Saadat Hasan Manto”.
When Manto decided to move to Pakistan, he had left his manuscript of Chughad with Kutub Publishers. He wrote to Sardar Jafri asking him if he would write the foreword adding, “whatever you write will be acceptable to me.” He received Jafri’s reply: “I will be very happy to write the foreword, though your book needs none, and certainly not one by me. You know that our literary outlooks differ considerably, but despite this I respect you a lot and harbor great hopes for your work.”
Jafri’s respect for Manto’s craft is evident in the foreword, but the bloom, by now, was clearly off the rose. Jafri writes: “Manto’s craft is a jewel that sparkles on the tip of his pen. He paints vivid pictures of those characters whose humanity has been snatched from them by the capitalist rule, who have been turned into savages by a society that is founded on the principle of loot. Manto looks into the depths of their souls and sees the human heart beating within.” But not content with his praise, Jafri launches into a critique. There are other kinds of people in the world too, he says, those who have taken the path of struggle and resistance in order to recover their lost humanity. But Manto is not concerned with them. The trouble with Manto, according to Jafri, is that though he loves human beings, though he sees the wretchedness of society, and though he has shown the ability to launch a strident critique against the capitalist system, he no longer recognizes the true enemy, nor does he realize that his real weapon is his pen, which is far more powerful than any bullet. But notwithstanding Manto’s shortcomings, the place where he currently stands is not too far removed from a revolutionary position, one that the early Manto clearly inhabited, and to which a return is eminently possible. “Whenever I read a story by Manto,” Jafri writes, “I am reminded of our first meeting. This happened 15 years ago. I had just recited a poem at the Muslim University Union when a student approached me and invited me to his room. On his wall hung a picture of Victor Hugo, and books by Gorky lay on his table. He said to me: ‘I too am a revolutionary.’”
Jafri concludes with the following, asking for a return of that young man: “Today, the masses are on the road to revolution. Their enemy is right in front of their eyes. The demon of capitalism is on its way out. This caravan of people, its entire army calls out to Saadat Hasan Manto: Bring the sharpness of your pen, the loftiness of your thinking, and the intensity of your emotions. You are ours, and there is no place for you in the entire world, except among our ranks.”
While one can hardly argue with Jafri’s right to critique Manto’s work, a foreword to his book was an odd place to articulate it. An understandably peeved Manto excised it from the 1950 edition published in Pakistan, replacing it with a tirade against the Progressives titled "Taraqqi Pasand Socha Nahin Karte" (Progressives don’t think). While continuing to express his respect for Jafri, Manto respectfully declined to use a foreward written by the leading light of a group, some of whose members had dismissed him as a reactionary.
While many of Manto’s early stories were enormously appreciated by the progressives and given the pride of place in their publications, a certain discontent had started to creep in with some of his work. Sajjad Zaheer expressed this about Manto’s story "Bu" (Odour) during the Hyderabad conference of the PWA in October 1945 claiming that “the portrayal of the sexual perversions of a satisfied member of the middle class, no matter how much reality it is based on, is a waste of the writer’s and the reader’s time.”
The Hyderabad conference is inextricably tied to Manto, because of the attempt by the progressives to pass a resolution denouncing obscenity. Hyderabad was ruled by the Nizam, whose feudal apparatus supported and nurtured a communal rank-and-file. The presence of the PWA in the city had riled up this section, and the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen had launched a full-scale attack on the progressives in the media and the public sphere. The accusations were standard-issue: Progressives advocate heresy, irreligiousness and immorality. Charges of progressive literature being obscene were amplified because of Manto’s work, and because a subsection of the movement – which at this time was following the policy of a big-tent, united front – had been writing stories with sexual themes. In his memoir about the movement, "Raushnai", Zaheer writes that keeping this climate in mind, “some of us considered it appropriate to make it clear through a resolution that obscenity was against the rules of Progressiveness”. It was doubtless an ill-advised move, an attempt to deflect the criticism of a group that should have been taken head on or simply ignored. Fortunately, the resolution, which the leadership had expected to be passed without fuss by a membership that had been lulled into sleepy ennui by long speeches, was scuttled in a dramatic fashion by the irrepressible Maulana Hasrat Mohani, who pointed out that the problem with the resolution lay in the fact that obscenity was impossible to define, and that the vast majority of Urdu and Farsi poetry could and would be considered obscene by the fundamentalists who the resolution was geared at appeasing. The Maulana proposed a friendly amendment asking that the resolution while condemning obscenity should simultaneously announce that the progressives endorsed sophisticated eroticism, a phrase that the Maulana claimed could describe much of his own work. Worrying that this would make them a laughing stock, the leadership withdrew the resolution in its entirety.
While the entire story of Manto v. the Progressives on the issue of obscenity is fascinating in its detail, I hardly have the time for a fleshed out narrative here. It is useful to keep the following in mind though:
1) The obscenity resolution was couched in general terms, and was a poorly thought out response to a perceived crisis, as Zaheer himself later admitted.
2) The resolution was never passed by the PWA.
3) Manto was charged with obscenity, first by the colonial government, then by the government of Pakistan, not by the PWA.
4) When Manto and Chughtai were first charged, Sardar Jafri wrote a piece in Qaumi Jang in their support, titled "Ye Adab Aur Tahzeeb Pe Hamla Hai" (This is an attack on literature and culture).
5) Most of Manto’s work that was deemed obscene, including "Khol Do" and "Thanda Gosht", both of which were written after Chughad and Jafri’s preface, were published in progressive journals. Khol Do was brought out by Nuqoosh, which was edited by Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, while Khol Do was published in Javed, which was edited by Arif Abdul Mateen a member of the communist party.
6) No progressive was a witness for the state in the trial, while a host of anti- and ex-progressives including Shorish Kashmiri, and M.D. Taseer were trotted out by the prosecution. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a prominent progressive, was one of the most vocal defendants of Manto at the trial.
7) If the Progressives had a problem with Manto’s “obscenity” in general, they would have condemned all his “obscene” stories. But that was not the case. In a letter written to Manto, Sardar Jafri refered to "Khol Do" as “the masterpiece of our age”.
By early 1948, in response to the Progressives' relentless critique of the state, a liberal anticommunist intellectual front began coalescing in Pakistan, centered around Muhammad Hasan Askari and M.D. Taseer. Explicitly and self-consciously anti-Progressive – and simultaneously, pro-state and pro-ruling party – the members of this front attacked the Progressives on both aesthetic and political grounds. In July 1948, Askari's essay "Adab aur riyasat se wafadari ka masala: Taraqqi-pasandon pe kari tanqeed," charged the Progressives with disloyalty to the state. The essay was the first in a series that laid the groundwork for attacks on the Progressives which involved the proscribing of publications, ubiquitous harassment and frequent imprisonment. And they set the stage for the eventual banning of the PWA following the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case.
Manto had only recently become estranged from the Progressives, and in what must have been a fit of pique, asked Askari to write the preface of his new book. Askari made full use of this opportunity. Echoing the established Cold War propaganda in which communists were accused of preying on human misery, Askari wrote about “writers who looked forward to human tragedies of a vast scale” as well as “political and social chaos” because they provided rich literary raw-material for their next project. “And as God provides sugar to the lover of sweets,” Askari proclaimed sardonically, so were these literary vultures provided with “many such opportunities to exploit the misery of others.” Referring in particular to the Progressive approach to Partition, Askari poked fun at what he saw as their “obsessive” focus on ensuring that the blame for the violence did not fall on any particular community. Manto’s alliance with Askari created a huge commotion, and much of what followed between him and the progressives was a fallout of this drama.
Despite the periodic bad blood between Manto and a certain section of the PWA, neither side fully disawoved the other. For the most part, they were fellow travelers. Even at the height of his annoyance, Manto took care to point out that he had no issue with progressivism, it was just that he was upset by “the strange leaps of so-called progressives”. And a reading of Manto’s “Letters to Uncle Sam” written in the year preceding his depth clearly reveals both his fissures with the progressives and his abiding respect and affection for them.
To laud Manto for being an iconoclast while criticizing the Progressives for their didactic focus on social structures is to caricature and flatten both. The Progressives were hardly a homogeneous lot and their work is characterized by an incredible variety in both form and content. There is, broadly speaking, a lot of congruity between Manto’s ideas and those of the progressives. His idea of realism sat well with that of the progressives. In his famous speech to students at Jogeshwari College in Bombay, he said: “If you are not familiar with the time period we are passing through, read my stories. If you find them unbearable, that means we are living in an unbearable time.” If there was a significant break, it was in what the Progressives would have thought of as Manto’s jaded, pessimistic, and cynical view of human nature, something that did not sit well with the PWA (after all, “optimism” and “life-affirming art” were its calling cards).
Manto laid out his position in his Jogeshwari College speech: “If I take off the blouse of culture and society, he said in his speech, then it is naked. I do not try to put clothes back on… that is not my job.” He would have laughed at Faiz’s lines: Dil na umeed to nahin, nakaam hi to hai; Lambi hai gham ki shaam, magar, shaam hi to hai (The heart is merely unsuccesful, not without hope; the evening of sorrow is long, but it is only an evening). The coming of the dawn wasn’t a moment of celebration for this writer whose own preference is signaled in the title of the preface to the collection Thanda Gosht – “zahmat-e mahr-e darkhshaan” – a phrase he borrows from a Ghalib couplet:
Larazta hai mera dil, zahmat-e mehr-e darkhshaan par
Main hoon voh qatra-e shabnam, ke ho khaar-i-bayabaan par
My heart trembles at the thought of the trouble the bright sun will soon take and rise
For I am the drop of dew that rests on a thorn in the wild
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Ali Mir is an Urdu poet, activist and scholar. As lyricist, dialogue and screenwriter, he has worked with Indian director Nagesh Kukunoor on several films, including Iqbal (2005), Dor (2006), Bombay to Bangkok (2008) and Aashayein (2010). He is the author of Anthems of Resistance: A Celebration of Progressive Urdu Poetry (New Delhi: India Ink, 2006), and is now completing work on his next book project Faiz Ahmed Faiz: The Poet as Revolutionary, forthcoming from Left World Books. He is Professor of Management at William Paterson University.
Ai gham-e dil kya karoon, ai vahshat-e dil kya karoon
Night falls in the city, and I roam, unhappy and unfulfilled
Like a nomad on the bright, wide-awake streets
In unfamiliar neighborhoods, wandering from door to door
Sad heart, anxious heart, what should I do?
Ek mahal ki aad se nikla vo peela maahtaab
Jaise mullah ka amaama, jaise banye ki kitaab
Jaise muflis ki jawaani, jaise bewa ka shabaab
Ai gham-e dil kya karoon, ai vahshat-e dil kya karoon
From behind a palace rises the yellow moon
Like a mullah’s turban, like a moneylender’s ledger
Like the youth of poor, like the beauty of a widow
Sad heart, anxious heart, what should I do?
No, this isn’t by Manto, but by Majaz, a poet of the progressive writers’ movement. I begin with this because I think it is a poem Manto could well have written (oddly enough, both Manto and Majaz were born within a few months of each other, and both drank themselves to death in 1955) since it reflects the inchoate, ineffable, and tragic rage of the human being caught in a world that is neither comprehensible nor changeable.
Manto came to Bombay in 1936, the same year that the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) held its first meeting in Lucknow, inaugurating a period in Urdu literature that was dominated by a progressive and often, an explicitly socialist, sensibility. For a period of time, the PWA was such a strong force that it defined the cultural agenda for a broad generality of Urdu writers. While it was by no means a front of the Communist Party, most of its stalwarts were card-carrying communists, many of whom worked and lived in the Sandhurst Road headquarters of the party and in the Andheri commune. The charismatic General Secretary of the party, P.C. Joshi, wanted to foster a “culture squad” and cultivated the presence of writers and poets.
In the touching account of her life Yaad-e Rahguzar (Memories of a Journey), Shaukat Kaifi describes the relationship of the progressives with a city whose heady milieu was peopled by India’s best know Urdu writers, poets, and artists including Sajjad Zaheer, Kishen Chander, Sahir Ludhianavi, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Ismat Chughtai, Razia Sajjad Zaheer, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Sultana Jafri, Safia Akhtar, Kaifi Azmi, Sardar Jafri, Dina Pathak, Rajender Singh Bedi and scores of others, all of whom shared a conviction that art could be deployed in the services of progressive social transformation.
As Shaukat’s account details, progressivism was in the air in Manto’s Bombay, and he breathed it deeply. When he burst on to the scene, Manto was embraced by the Progressives whole-heartedly. Ahmed Ali (one of the co-authors of Angaare, the short-story collection that sparked the PWA) writes: “No novelist or short story writer has been consistently acclaimed by the political section of the Movement as “Progressive” in the sense that Faiz has been, with the exception of Saadat Hasan Manto”.
When Manto decided to move to Pakistan, he had left his manuscript of Chughad with Kutub Publishers. He wrote to Sardar Jafri asking him if he would write the foreword adding, “whatever you write will be acceptable to me.” He received Jafri’s reply: “I will be very happy to write the foreword, though your book needs none, and certainly not one by me. You know that our literary outlooks differ considerably, but despite this I respect you a lot and harbor great hopes for your work.”
Jafri’s respect for Manto’s craft is evident in the foreword, but the bloom, by now, was clearly off the rose. Jafri writes: “Manto’s craft is a jewel that sparkles on the tip of his pen. He paints vivid pictures of those characters whose humanity has been snatched from them by the capitalist rule, who have been turned into savages by a society that is founded on the principle of loot. Manto looks into the depths of their souls and sees the human heart beating within.” But not content with his praise, Jafri launches into a critique. There are other kinds of people in the world too, he says, those who have taken the path of struggle and resistance in order to recover their lost humanity. But Manto is not concerned with them. The trouble with Manto, according to Jafri, is that though he loves human beings, though he sees the wretchedness of society, and though he has shown the ability to launch a strident critique against the capitalist system, he no longer recognizes the true enemy, nor does he realize that his real weapon is his pen, which is far more powerful than any bullet. But notwithstanding Manto’s shortcomings, the place where he currently stands is not too far removed from a revolutionary position, one that the early Manto clearly inhabited, and to which a return is eminently possible. “Whenever I read a story by Manto,” Jafri writes, “I am reminded of our first meeting. This happened 15 years ago. I had just recited a poem at the Muslim University Union when a student approached me and invited me to his room. On his wall hung a picture of Victor Hugo, and books by Gorky lay on his table. He said to me: ‘I too am a revolutionary.’”
Jafri concludes with the following, asking for a return of that young man: “Today, the masses are on the road to revolution. Their enemy is right in front of their eyes. The demon of capitalism is on its way out. This caravan of people, its entire army calls out to Saadat Hasan Manto: Bring the sharpness of your pen, the loftiness of your thinking, and the intensity of your emotions. You are ours, and there is no place for you in the entire world, except among our ranks.”
While one can hardly argue with Jafri’s right to critique Manto’s work, a foreword to his book was an odd place to articulate it. An understandably peeved Manto excised it from the 1950 edition published in Pakistan, replacing it with a tirade against the Progressives titled "Taraqqi Pasand Socha Nahin Karte" (Progressives don’t think). While continuing to express his respect for Jafri, Manto respectfully declined to use a foreward written by the leading light of a group, some of whose members had dismissed him as a reactionary.
While many of Manto’s early stories were enormously appreciated by the progressives and given the pride of place in their publications, a certain discontent had started to creep in with some of his work. Sajjad Zaheer expressed this about Manto’s story "Bu" (Odour) during the Hyderabad conference of the PWA in October 1945 claiming that “the portrayal of the sexual perversions of a satisfied member of the middle class, no matter how much reality it is based on, is a waste of the writer’s and the reader’s time.”
The Hyderabad conference is inextricably tied to Manto, because of the attempt by the progressives to pass a resolution denouncing obscenity. Hyderabad was ruled by the Nizam, whose feudal apparatus supported and nurtured a communal rank-and-file. The presence of the PWA in the city had riled up this section, and the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen had launched a full-scale attack on the progressives in the media and the public sphere. The accusations were standard-issue: Progressives advocate heresy, irreligiousness and immorality. Charges of progressive literature being obscene were amplified because of Manto’s work, and because a subsection of the movement – which at this time was following the policy of a big-tent, united front – had been writing stories with sexual themes. In his memoir about the movement, "Raushnai", Zaheer writes that keeping this climate in mind, “some of us considered it appropriate to make it clear through a resolution that obscenity was against the rules of Progressiveness”. It was doubtless an ill-advised move, an attempt to deflect the criticism of a group that should have been taken head on or simply ignored. Fortunately, the resolution, which the leadership had expected to be passed without fuss by a membership that had been lulled into sleepy ennui by long speeches, was scuttled in a dramatic fashion by the irrepressible Maulana Hasrat Mohani, who pointed out that the problem with the resolution lay in the fact that obscenity was impossible to define, and that the vast majority of Urdu and Farsi poetry could and would be considered obscene by the fundamentalists who the resolution was geared at appeasing. The Maulana proposed a friendly amendment asking that the resolution while condemning obscenity should simultaneously announce that the progressives endorsed sophisticated eroticism, a phrase that the Maulana claimed could describe much of his own work. Worrying that this would make them a laughing stock, the leadership withdrew the resolution in its entirety.
While the entire story of Manto v. the Progressives on the issue of obscenity is fascinating in its detail, I hardly have the time for a fleshed out narrative here. It is useful to keep the following in mind though:
1) The obscenity resolution was couched in general terms, and was a poorly thought out response to a perceived crisis, as Zaheer himself later admitted.
2) The resolution was never passed by the PWA.
3) Manto was charged with obscenity, first by the colonial government, then by the government of Pakistan, not by the PWA.
4) When Manto and Chughtai were first charged, Sardar Jafri wrote a piece in Qaumi Jang in their support, titled "Ye Adab Aur Tahzeeb Pe Hamla Hai" (This is an attack on literature and culture).
5) Most of Manto’s work that was deemed obscene, including "Khol Do" and "Thanda Gosht", both of which were written after Chughad and Jafri’s preface, were published in progressive journals. Khol Do was brought out by Nuqoosh, which was edited by Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, while Khol Do was published in Javed, which was edited by Arif Abdul Mateen a member of the communist party.
6) No progressive was a witness for the state in the trial, while a host of anti- and ex-progressives including Shorish Kashmiri, and M.D. Taseer were trotted out by the prosecution. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a prominent progressive, was one of the most vocal defendants of Manto at the trial.
7) If the Progressives had a problem with Manto’s “obscenity” in general, they would have condemned all his “obscene” stories. But that was not the case. In a letter written to Manto, Sardar Jafri refered to "Khol Do" as “the masterpiece of our age”.
By early 1948, in response to the Progressives' relentless critique of the state, a liberal anticommunist intellectual front began coalescing in Pakistan, centered around Muhammad Hasan Askari and M.D. Taseer. Explicitly and self-consciously anti-Progressive – and simultaneously, pro-state and pro-ruling party – the members of this front attacked the Progressives on both aesthetic and political grounds. In July 1948, Askari's essay "Adab aur riyasat se wafadari ka masala: Taraqqi-pasandon pe kari tanqeed," charged the Progressives with disloyalty to the state. The essay was the first in a series that laid the groundwork for attacks on the Progressives which involved the proscribing of publications, ubiquitous harassment and frequent imprisonment. And they set the stage for the eventual banning of the PWA following the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case.
Manto had only recently become estranged from the Progressives, and in what must have been a fit of pique, asked Askari to write the preface of his new book. Askari made full use of this opportunity. Echoing the established Cold War propaganda in which communists were accused of preying on human misery, Askari wrote about “writers who looked forward to human tragedies of a vast scale” as well as “political and social chaos” because they provided rich literary raw-material for their next project. “And as God provides sugar to the lover of sweets,” Askari proclaimed sardonically, so were these literary vultures provided with “many such opportunities to exploit the misery of others.” Referring in particular to the Progressive approach to Partition, Askari poked fun at what he saw as their “obsessive” focus on ensuring that the blame for the violence did not fall on any particular community. Manto’s alliance with Askari created a huge commotion, and much of what followed between him and the progressives was a fallout of this drama.
Despite the periodic bad blood between Manto and a certain section of the PWA, neither side fully disawoved the other. For the most part, they were fellow travelers. Even at the height of his annoyance, Manto took care to point out that he had no issue with progressivism, it was just that he was upset by “the strange leaps of so-called progressives”. And a reading of Manto’s “Letters to Uncle Sam” written in the year preceding his depth clearly reveals both his fissures with the progressives and his abiding respect and affection for them.
To laud Manto for being an iconoclast while criticizing the Progressives for their didactic focus on social structures is to caricature and flatten both. The Progressives were hardly a homogeneous lot and their work is characterized by an incredible variety in both form and content. There is, broadly speaking, a lot of congruity between Manto’s ideas and those of the progressives. His idea of realism sat well with that of the progressives. In his famous speech to students at Jogeshwari College in Bombay, he said: “If you are not familiar with the time period we are passing through, read my stories. If you find them unbearable, that means we are living in an unbearable time.” If there was a significant break, it was in what the Progressives would have thought of as Manto’s jaded, pessimistic, and cynical view of human nature, something that did not sit well with the PWA (after all, “optimism” and “life-affirming art” were its calling cards).
Manto laid out his position in his Jogeshwari College speech: “If I take off the blouse of culture and society, he said in his speech, then it is naked. I do not try to put clothes back on… that is not my job.” He would have laughed at Faiz’s lines: Dil na umeed to nahin, nakaam hi to hai; Lambi hai gham ki shaam, magar, shaam hi to hai (The heart is merely unsuccesful, not without hope; the evening of sorrow is long, but it is only an evening). The coming of the dawn wasn’t a moment of celebration for this writer whose own preference is signaled in the title of the preface to the collection Thanda Gosht – “zahmat-e mahr-e darkhshaan” – a phrase he borrows from a Ghalib couplet:
Larazta hai mera dil, zahmat-e mehr-e darkhshaan par
Main hoon voh qatra-e shabnam, ke ho khaar-i-bayabaan par
My heart trembles at the thought of the trouble the bright sun will soon take and rise
For I am the drop of dew that rests on a thorn in the wild
--------------------------------------------------------------
Ali Mir is an Urdu poet, activist and scholar. As lyricist, dialogue and screenwriter, he has worked with Indian director Nagesh Kukunoor on several films, including Iqbal (2005), Dor (2006), Bombay to Bangkok (2008) and Aashayein (2010). He is the author of Anthems of Resistance: A Celebration of Progressive Urdu Poetry (New Delhi: India Ink, 2006), and is now completing work on his next book project Faiz Ahmed Faiz: The Poet as Revolutionary, forthcoming from Left World Books. He is Professor of Management at William Paterson University.
Matt Reeck: Manto and Social Realism (May 11, 2012)
Allegory and psychological realism are at opposite ends of the spectrum of fictional modes. Social realism is, in a way, a tenuous concatenation of the two. It has the take-away value, the moral, of allegory. It also purports to have psychological realism’s nuanced depictions of the mental states of characters who are meant to be as unique in their psychology as individuals in the world. While the term “social realism” is invoked in discussions of the Progressives, it has little worth as a description of Manto’s work.
While social realism’s fiction should center on oppressed characters, the reader is meant not only to become acquainted with such characters but to see them overcome their obstacles. Social realism is meant to provide social redress. An oppressed character is meant to become a model for oppressed people to see routes out of their misery.
We can look to Chughad to see that Manto’s goals are far from those of social realism. From this volume, Aftab Ahmad and I have translated “Babu Gopi Nath” and “Janaki.” In the first, the main character is not, I would argue, the title character but Zinat. Zinat is an anomaly in Manto’s work as she is a prostitute who isn’t willful. In fact, she has a sad-sack personality: woebegone, spiritless and passive. In the end, she marries a rich man, but this is hardly a sign of her redemption or triumph. Manto laughs at her wedding because he finds the supposed sanctity of the ceremony ludicrous. We see that marriage itself is a symbol of what she really wants and what Babu Gopi Nath wants for her—society’s respect. But Manto’s laughter shows she still doesn’t have it, not even from one of those closest to her.
“Janaki” also does not follow a program of social redress. Janaki is an attractive young woman come from Peshawar with aspirations to enter the film world. Her course into this world is full of hardship: she loses the support of her former lover, Aziz; her honor is belittled by Narayan (when he teases her about her bra size); Sayid, her first Bombay lover, cruelly turns his back on her; she falls from a commuter train, injuring herself; and she falls so ill with a fever and bronchitis that she is on the brink of death.
Yet, despite all this, she doesn’t reject this world and its suffering. Rather, in the story’s last scene, Manto finds her sleeping with Narayan. Though Manto vouches for Narayan’s character, and in fact Narayan is the one who nurses Janaki back to health, Janaki has not made a conscious, informed choice about entering into this new world where women are readily exploited, but she seems rather to have simply fallen into it, or to have fallen prey to its disputable charms.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here are some excerpts from Matt Reeck’s translation of "Janaki":
Janaki
It was the beginning of the racing season in Pune when Aziz wrote from Peshawar, “I’m sending Janaki, an acquaintance of mine. Get her into a film company in Pune or Bombay. You know enough people. I hope it won’t be too difficult for you.”
It wasn’t a question of being difficult, but the problem was I had never done anything like that before. Usually the men who take girls to film companies are pimps or their like, men who plan to live off the girls if they can get a job. As you can imagine I worried a lot about this, but then I thought, “Aziz is an old friend. Who knows why he trusts me so much, but I don’t want to disappoint him.” I was also reassured by the thought that the film world is always looking for young women. So what was there to fret about? Even without my help, Janaki would be able to get a job in some film company or other.
Four days later Janaki arrived, and after such a long journey—from Peshawar to Bombay, and then from Bombay to Pune. As the train arrived, I started to walk along the platform because she would have to pick me out of the crowd. I didn’t have to go far because a woman holding my photo descended from the second-class compartment. Her back was to me. Standing on her tiptoes, she started looking through the crowd. I approached her.
“You’re probably looking for me,” I said.
…
She sat down in a chair.
“What’s the problem?”
When she smiled, her sharp lips became thinner. Now they opened. Again she wanted to say something but couldn’t find the courage. She got up, picked up my pack of cigarettes, took one out and lit it.
“Please forgive me, but I just can’t quit.”
I learned later that she didn’t just smoke but smoked with a vengeance. She held the cigarette in her fingers like a man and took a deep drag. In fact, she inhaled so deeply that her daily habit was the same as a normal person’s smoking seventy-five cigarettes.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
Annoyed, she pounded her foot on the floor like a young girl.
“Hai, Allah! How can I tell you?” she asked. Then she smiled. Her teeth were extraordinarily clean and shiny. She sat down, and trying to avoid my gaze, she said, “The problem is that I’m fifteen or twenty days late and I’m scared that …”
Until then I hadn’t understood, but when she stopped so abruptly I thought I finally knew what was going on.
“This happens often,” I said.
She took another deep drag and blew out the smoke in a thick rush.
“No,” she said, “I’m talking about something else. I’m afraid I’m pregnant.”
“Ah!” I exclaimed.
She took a final drag and then stubbed out the cigarette in the saucer. “If I am, it’ll be a big problem,” she went on. “This happened once in Peshawar, but Aziz Sahib brought some medicine from a doctor friend, and then everything was okay.”
“You don’t like kids?”
She smiled. “Sure, I like them. But who wants to go through the trouble of raising them?”
“You know it’s a crime to have an abortion.”
She became pensive. In a voice full of sadness, she said, “Aziz Sahib said this too, but, Saadat Sahib, my question is, how is it a crime? It’s a personal matter, and the people who make the laws know an abortion is very painful. Is it really a serious crime?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “You’re a strange woman, Janaki.”
Janaki also laughed. “Aziz Sahib says so too.”
As she laughed, tears came to her eyes. I have noticed that when sincere people laugh, they always cry. She opened her bag, took out a handkerchief, and wiped away her tears. Then in an innocent manner, she asked, “Saadat Sahib, tell me, is what I’m saying interesting?”
…
------------------------------------------------------------------
Matt Reeck is a poet and translator based in Brooklyn. His poetry is forthcoming in Ahsahta Press' anthology The Arcadia Project, and translations are forthcoming in Two Lines, eXchanges, and The Brooklyn Rail's best-of-fiction anthology. This fall will see the release of the first issue of his magazine Staging Ground. Along with co-translator Aftab Ahmad, he has prepared a manuscript of Manto's Bombay fiction titled, Bombay Stories.
For the complete text of this translation, see:
http://pratilipi.in/2010/01/janaki-saadat-hasan-manto/
While social realism’s fiction should center on oppressed characters, the reader is meant not only to become acquainted with such characters but to see them overcome their obstacles. Social realism is meant to provide social redress. An oppressed character is meant to become a model for oppressed people to see routes out of their misery.
We can look to Chughad to see that Manto’s goals are far from those of social realism. From this volume, Aftab Ahmad and I have translated “Babu Gopi Nath” and “Janaki.” In the first, the main character is not, I would argue, the title character but Zinat. Zinat is an anomaly in Manto’s work as she is a prostitute who isn’t willful. In fact, she has a sad-sack personality: woebegone, spiritless and passive. In the end, she marries a rich man, but this is hardly a sign of her redemption or triumph. Manto laughs at her wedding because he finds the supposed sanctity of the ceremony ludicrous. We see that marriage itself is a symbol of what she really wants and what Babu Gopi Nath wants for her—society’s respect. But Manto’s laughter shows she still doesn’t have it, not even from one of those closest to her.
“Janaki” also does not follow a program of social redress. Janaki is an attractive young woman come from Peshawar with aspirations to enter the film world. Her course into this world is full of hardship: she loses the support of her former lover, Aziz; her honor is belittled by Narayan (when he teases her about her bra size); Sayid, her first Bombay lover, cruelly turns his back on her; she falls from a commuter train, injuring herself; and she falls so ill with a fever and bronchitis that she is on the brink of death.
Yet, despite all this, she doesn’t reject this world and its suffering. Rather, in the story’s last scene, Manto finds her sleeping with Narayan. Though Manto vouches for Narayan’s character, and in fact Narayan is the one who nurses Janaki back to health, Janaki has not made a conscious, informed choice about entering into this new world where women are readily exploited, but she seems rather to have simply fallen into it, or to have fallen prey to its disputable charms.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here are some excerpts from Matt Reeck’s translation of "Janaki":
Janaki
It was the beginning of the racing season in Pune when Aziz wrote from Peshawar, “I’m sending Janaki, an acquaintance of mine. Get her into a film company in Pune or Bombay. You know enough people. I hope it won’t be too difficult for you.”
It wasn’t a question of being difficult, but the problem was I had never done anything like that before. Usually the men who take girls to film companies are pimps or their like, men who plan to live off the girls if they can get a job. As you can imagine I worried a lot about this, but then I thought, “Aziz is an old friend. Who knows why he trusts me so much, but I don’t want to disappoint him.” I was also reassured by the thought that the film world is always looking for young women. So what was there to fret about? Even without my help, Janaki would be able to get a job in some film company or other.
Four days later Janaki arrived, and after such a long journey—from Peshawar to Bombay, and then from Bombay to Pune. As the train arrived, I started to walk along the platform because she would have to pick me out of the crowd. I didn’t have to go far because a woman holding my photo descended from the second-class compartment. Her back was to me. Standing on her tiptoes, she started looking through the crowd. I approached her.
“You’re probably looking for me,” I said.
…
She sat down in a chair.
“What’s the problem?”
When she smiled, her sharp lips became thinner. Now they opened. Again she wanted to say something but couldn’t find the courage. She got up, picked up my pack of cigarettes, took one out and lit it.
“Please forgive me, but I just can’t quit.”
I learned later that she didn’t just smoke but smoked with a vengeance. She held the cigarette in her fingers like a man and took a deep drag. In fact, she inhaled so deeply that her daily habit was the same as a normal person’s smoking seventy-five cigarettes.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
Annoyed, she pounded her foot on the floor like a young girl.
“Hai, Allah! How can I tell you?” she asked. Then she smiled. Her teeth were extraordinarily clean and shiny. She sat down, and trying to avoid my gaze, she said, “The problem is that I’m fifteen or twenty days late and I’m scared that …”
Until then I hadn’t understood, but when she stopped so abruptly I thought I finally knew what was going on.
“This happens often,” I said.
She took another deep drag and blew out the smoke in a thick rush.
“No,” she said, “I’m talking about something else. I’m afraid I’m pregnant.”
“Ah!” I exclaimed.
She took a final drag and then stubbed out the cigarette in the saucer. “If I am, it’ll be a big problem,” she went on. “This happened once in Peshawar, but Aziz Sahib brought some medicine from a doctor friend, and then everything was okay.”
“You don’t like kids?”
She smiled. “Sure, I like them. But who wants to go through the trouble of raising them?”
“You know it’s a crime to have an abortion.”
She became pensive. In a voice full of sadness, she said, “Aziz Sahib said this too, but, Saadat Sahib, my question is, how is it a crime? It’s a personal matter, and the people who make the laws know an abortion is very painful. Is it really a serious crime?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “You’re a strange woman, Janaki.”
Janaki also laughed. “Aziz Sahib says so too.”
As she laughed, tears came to her eyes. I have noticed that when sincere people laugh, they always cry. She opened her bag, took out a handkerchief, and wiped away her tears. Then in an innocent manner, she asked, “Saadat Sahib, tell me, is what I’m saying interesting?”
…
------------------------------------------------------------------
Matt Reeck is a poet and translator based in Brooklyn. His poetry is forthcoming in Ahsahta Press' anthology The Arcadia Project, and translations are forthcoming in Two Lines, eXchanges, and The Brooklyn Rail's best-of-fiction anthology. This fall will see the release of the first issue of his magazine Staging Ground. Along with co-translator Aftab Ahmad, he has prepared a manuscript of Manto's Bombay fiction titled, Bombay Stories.
For the complete text of this translation, see:
http://pratilipi.in/2010/01/janaki-saadat-hasan-manto/
Friday, May 4, 2012
Manto Birth Centenary in New York City, 2012
This year, 2012, marks the birth centenary of Sa'adat Hasan Manto,
popularly recognized as one of the greatest Urdu writers of the
twentieth century. Manto is also a deeply contradictory figure who has
managed to evoke strong reactions ranging from cult following to
outright hostility. His bald sketches on the trauma, violence, and
dehumanization of the Partition are justly celebrated today. At the
same time, he has had an outsider status in the established literary
histories of South Asia as he does not easily fit into conventional
categories. His critiques of imperialism, his unabashed discussion of
sexuality, his focus on the fringes of urban modernity, and his harsh
exposés of the most celebrated film personalities of the 1930s and 40s,
are not as widely discussed or circulated as they ought to be.
The Hindi and Urdu Programs at NYU, in conjunction with the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, the Kevorkian Center, and the Institute for Public Knowledge are organizing an event to both celebrate and complicate these radical and polarizing aspects of Manto's work and legacy.
Do join us for two sessions that will explore diverse aspects of Manto’s prolific career.
Manto's Bombay: Conversations on his Birth Centanary
Friday, May 11, 2012. 6pm - 8pm
Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University
RSVP: http://www.facebook.com/events/324856224245733/
“Main chalta-phirta Bambai hoon” – Sa’adat Hasan Manto, 28th October, 1951
Sa’adat Hasan Manto embarked on an intense love affair with Bombay in 1936 when he first arrived in the city as a journalist. Over the next decade he slipped into various roles in the city as writ er, film scenarist, editor, and flâneur. This symposium looks at Manto’s relationship with Bombay by placing at the centre a collection of stories titled "Chughad". Published in 1948, "Chughad" was the last set of stories written by Manto before he moved to Lahore after the Partition. Here we see Manto playing the flâneur- chronicler who fluidly traverses multiple urban sites and picks up impressions, traces, and insights along the way. Many of these stories are set against the backdrop of the Bombay film industry and offer provocative views on gender and work in a self-consciously modernizing city.
Our panelists will come together on Manto’s birthday to digressively take up the provocations offered by "Chughad". We hope to have a discussion on alternative urban histories, the fraught work of translation, the literary radicalism of the Progressives, and mythic narratives around Bombay city, Manto, and the film industry.
Keynote Lecture (6pm)
Gyan Prakash, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University
Panelist Discussion (7pm)
Ali Mir, William Paterson University
Matt Reeck, New York-based Writer and Translator
Bilal Hashmi, New York University
Debashree Mukherjee, New York University
Richard Delacy, Harvard University
Rereading Manto's "Letters to Uncle Sam" in Perilous Times. With Saadia Toor
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
6:00 pm at Alwan for the Arts
Sponsored by NYU's Hindi and Urdu Programs, the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and the Institute for Public Knowledge.
Pakistani activist Saadia Toor will lead a discussion on the contemporary relevance of the Manto's pithy and irreverent "Letters to Uncle Sam" (1951-1954), written from Lahore in the final years of the author's life, and in the shadow of the Cold War.
Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad will give a bilingual reading from Reeck's new English translations of Manto's Letters. Bilal Hashmi will serve as moderator and discussant.
The Hindi and Urdu Programs at NYU, in conjunction with the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, the Kevorkian Center, and the Institute for Public Knowledge are organizing an event to both celebrate and complicate these radical and polarizing aspects of Manto's work and legacy.
Do join us for two sessions that will explore diverse aspects of Manto’s prolific career.
Manto's Bombay: Conversations on his Birth Centanary
Friday, May 11, 2012. 6pm - 8pm
Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University
RSVP: http://www.facebook.com/events/324856224245733/
“Main chalta-phirta Bambai hoon” – Sa’adat Hasan Manto, 28th October, 1951
Sa’adat Hasan Manto embarked on an intense love affair with Bombay in 1936 when he first arrived in the city as a journalist. Over the next decade he slipped into various roles in the city as writ er, film scenarist, editor, and flâneur. This symposium looks at Manto’s relationship with Bombay by placing at the centre a collection of stories titled "Chughad". Published in 1948, "Chughad" was the last set of stories written by Manto before he moved to Lahore after the Partition. Here we see Manto playing the flâneur- chronicler who fluidly traverses multiple urban sites and picks up impressions, traces, and insights along the way. Many of these stories are set against the backdrop of the Bombay film industry and offer provocative views on gender and work in a self-consciously modernizing city.
Our panelists will come together on Manto’s birthday to digressively take up the provocations offered by "Chughad". We hope to have a discussion on alternative urban histories, the fraught work of translation, the literary radicalism of the Progressives, and mythic narratives around Bombay city, Manto, and the film industry.
Keynote Lecture (6pm)
Gyan Prakash, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University
Panelist Discussion (7pm)
Ali Mir, William Paterson University
Matt Reeck, New York-based Writer and Translator
Bilal Hashmi, New York University
Debashree Mukherjee, New York University
Richard Delacy, Harvard University
Rereading Manto's "Letters to Uncle Sam" in Perilous Times. With Saadia Toor
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
6:00 pm at Alwan for the Arts
Sponsored by NYU's Hindi and Urdu Programs, the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and the Institute for Public Knowledge.
Pakistani activist Saadia Toor will lead a discussion on the contemporary relevance of the Manto's pithy and irreverent "Letters to Uncle Sam" (1951-1954), written from Lahore in the final years of the author's life, and in the shadow of the Cold War.
Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad will give a bilingual reading from Reeck's new English translations of Manto's Letters. Bilal Hashmi will serve as moderator and discussant.
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