Saadat Hasan Mantoਸਆਦਤ ਹਸਨ ਮੰਟੋ

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 that had settled in Amritsar. His father, Khwaja Ghulam Hasan, was a sessions judge, a stern man who wanted his son to become a lawyer. Manto grew up mostly in Amritsar, and by every account he was a poor student: he failed his matriculation examination twice, once even in Urdu, the language he would one day reshape. What he did have was a restless curiosity and a love of reading that school could not measure.

Early life in Amritsar and a false start at Aligarh

Manto was educated at the Muslim High School in Amritsar and briefly at Hindu Sabha College, which he left without a degree. In 1933 the scholar Abdul Bari Alig recognised his talent, encouraged him to read the great Russian and French story writers, and pushed him to write. Manto had already written his first story, Tamasha, a searing response to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, when he was barely out of his teens. In July 1934 he joined Aligarh Muslim University, but left within a year, after a tuberculosis scare and months in a sanatorium at Batote. His first collection of stories, Atish Paray, appeared from Lahore in 1936.

Bombay, radio and the film years

Manto moved to Bombay, the city he loved most, and found work editing the film weekly Mussawir and writing scripts and dialogue for the Hindi film industry. In 1941 he joined All India Radio in Delhi, and the two years that followed were among the most productive of his life: he wrote radio plays at speed, and his stories of Bombay life, of sex workers, pimps, actors and clerks, gained him both fame and trouble. He returned to Bombay in 1942, worked with the Filmistan studio and later Bombay Talkies, and counted actors such as Ashok Kumar among his close friends. His sketches of film people, written with affection and malice in equal measure, remain some of the sharpest writing on the early Bombay cinema.

Partition and the move to Lahore

The Partition of 1947 broke Manto's world in two. Communal tension inside the film industry and the departure of colleagues for Pakistan unsettled him, and in early 1948, after his wife Safia and their children had gone ahead, he sailed for Karachi and settled in Lahore. He never really recovered from the move. In Lahore he became the centre of the circle that gathered at the Pak Tea House, wrote for newspapers to survive, and produced, in a few feverish years, the stories on which his reputation rests. In Toba Tek Singh, an inmate of a Lahore asylum refuses to choose between India and Pakistan and dies on the border line itself. Thanda Gosht, Khol Do and Kaali Shalwar looked at the violence of Partition without flinching, and without sparing any community.

Trials for obscenity and the last years

Manto 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. He was never convicted. He defended himself with wit, arguing in court and in print that he only held up a mirror to society, and that a reader who found his stories unbearable was really finding society unbearable. The Lahore years were hard in other ways: money was short, publishers paid little, and his drinking, worsened by the trauma of migration, steadily destroyed his health. He died in Lahore on 18 January 1955, aged forty two, and was buried in the Miani Sahib Graveyard.

Why is Manto still read today?

Manto wrote twenty two collections of short stories, a novel, five collections of radio plays, essays and sketches, an output Britannica puts at more than two hundred and fifty stories. His prose is plain, fast and unsentimental, and it ends, again and again, with a twist that leaves the reader unsettled. He wrote about people his society preferred not to see, and he refused to divide them into heroes and villains. Manto himself was clear about his Punjabi roots beneath the Urdu: 'Behind my Urdu, it is the Punjabi tongue that speaks.' Pakistan awarded him its highest civilian honour, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, in 2012, fifty seven years after his death, and two feature films, in 2015 and 2018, have told his life. For readers in Punjab, on both sides of the border, he remains the writer who told the truth about 1947 when few others would.