Mottled Dawn

About the book

Mottled Dawn is a collection of fifty sketches and stories by Saadat Hasan Manto about the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, translated from Urdu into English by Khalid Hasan and published by Penguin in New Delhi in 1997. It is the fullest single volume of Manto's Partition writing in English. Twelve of the stories had first appeared in English in Hasan's earlier collection Kingdom's End (Verso, 1987); the rest, with the exception of 'Jinnah Sahib', had first appeared in his collection Partition (1991). The book's second half is made up of the short sketches from Manto's Siyah Hashiye (Black Margins), some of them only a line or two long, which tell the story of Partition tersely, in a few sentences each. A new edition in 2011 added a foreword by the novelist Daniyal Mueenuddin.

What stories are in Mottled Dawn?

The book opens with Manto's most famous story, Toba Tek Singh. In a Lahore asylum, the inmates are to be exchanged between India and Pakistan, and Bishan Singh, a Sikh who has stood for years in the same spot, refuses to choose a country. He dies on the strip of land between the two borders, belonging to neither. In Khol Do, known in English as The Return, a father is mad with joy to find his daughter alive after the violence of Partition, not knowing what was done to her. In Thanda Gosht, or Colder Than Ice, a man discovers he has raped a woman who was already dead, and finds himself impotent afterwards; Manto was tried in court for the story. The Assignment, The Dog of Titwal and The Last Salute follow soldiers and officials through the new border, and in The Last Salute, Indian and Pakistani soldiers who once served in the same regiment face each other in Kashmir, and the dying Ram Singh cannot help saluting his former officer, now a Pakistani captain.

Mozail tells of a Jewish girl in Bombay who helps rescue a Sikh girl for her former lover. In A Tale of 1947 the main character, Mumtaz, is based on Manto himself: he leaves Bombay for Pakistan after his best friend admits he could have killed him in revenge for his uncle's murder in Lahore. Between the stories sit the sketches from Siyah Hashiye: brief scenes of looting, revenge and sudden kindness, each told in a few lines. The full contents run from Toba Tek Singh and The Return through The Woman in the Red Raincoat, The Price of Freedom, The Dutiful Daughter and A Tale of 1947, down to short pieces with plain titles such as Wages, Cooperation, Division, Luck and God Is Great.

The title: Faiz's 'mottled dawn'

The title is a translation of a line from Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poem about independence, 'Dhaag Dhaag Ujala', which pictures the dawn of freedom as stained and patchy, not bright. Faiz wrote of a dawn that had come, but not the dawn that had been promised. Manto's book takes the same view of 1947: independence arrived, but it arrived with massacres, abductions and the uprooting of millions, and the stories refuse to celebrate it. The phrase has stuck to Partition literature ever since, and the book is often the first place English readers meet Manto's Partition writing.

Khalid Hasan, the translator

Khalid Hasan (1934-2009) was a Pakistani journalist and writer, born in Srinagar, who migrated with his family to Pakistan during the violence of 1947. He began in journalism with the Pakistan Times in Lahore in 1967, served as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's first press secretary, spent five years in Pakistan's foreign service, in Paris, Ottawa and London, and later worked as a correspondent in Washington, D.C. He published more than forty books, but he is best known for his translations: the short stories of Manto and the poems of Faiz. His Manto translations include Kingdom's End (1987), Partition (1991) and Mottled Dawn (1997). He died in Washington, D.C., on 5 February 2009, and Pakistan awarded him the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in 2010. His introduction to Mottled Dawn sets out the book's moral centre: to Manto, what mattered was not what religion people were, but where they stood as human beings, and nothing could justify inhumanity or the taking of life.

The author

Saadat Hasan Manto was born on 11 May 1912 in Paproudi village, near Samrala in Ludhiana district, into a Punjabi Muslim family of Kashmiri ancestry, and grew up mostly in Amritsar. He was a poor student who failed his matriculation examination twice, once even in Urdu, the language he would one day reshape. He moved to Bombay, worked in the film industry and at All India Radio, and in early 1948, after Partition, sailed for Karachi and settled in Lahore. There, in a few feverish years, he wrote the stories on which his reputation rests. He was tried six times for obscenity, three times in British India and three times in Pakistan, for stories including Kaali Shalwar, Bu, Thanda Gosht and Khol Do, and was never convicted. He died in Lahore on 18 January 1955, aged forty two. His output ran to twenty two collections of short stories, a novel, five collections of radio plays, essays and sketches, more than two hundred and fifty stories in all. Pakistan awarded him its highest civilian honour, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, in 2012.

Reception and legacy

Mottled Dawn has become the standard English introduction to Manto's Partition writing, kept in print by Penguin and reissued in 2011 with a foreword by Daniyal Mueenuddin. One reviewer praised Hasan's translation for opening Manto to readers who could not read him in Urdu, and for the plainness with which the stories land in English. The same reviewer called the collection a people's history of Partition, an honest and impartial account in a field where most accounts are partisan or reduced to statistics. The book's value for readers in Punjab is direct: Manto was born near Samrala, wrote in the language of the Punjab's streets, and refused to divide the violence of 1947 into the crimes of one community and the innocence of another. His line, quoted on his own page in the Kosh, still sums up the book: 'Behind my Urdu, it is the Punjabi tongue that speaks.' Readers who finish Mottled Dawn will find the individual stories in the Kosh, including Toba Tek Singh, Thanda Gosht and Siyah Hashiye.