Siyah Hashiyeسیاہ حاشیے

Siyah Hashiye (Black Margins) is Saadat Hasan Manto's 1948 collection of very short pieces about the everyday violence of the Partition of India. Written in Lahore in the months after Partition, it strips the short story down to vignettes and prose poems, some only a line or two long, that record killing, looting and madness without heroes, explanations or happy endings. It is often called Manto's most unsettling work on Partition.

About the book

Siyah Hashiye was published in Lahore in 1948, the year after Partition and the year Manto himself migrated to Pakistan. He had intended to stay in Bombay, where he had worked in films since 1935, but as stories of the Partition riots reached him, and as communal tension rose in Bombay itself, he left by ship for Karachi and settled in Lahore with his family. The book was written out of that first year as a refugee, and it reads like it: urgent, stripped bare, and unwilling to look away. It was one of twenty-two collections of short stories Manto published in a writing life of barely twenty years.

What does Siyah Hashiye mean?

Siyah means black, and hashiye are the margins of a page, the notes written in the margin. The title says what the book is: notes from the edge of history, not its main text. English readers meet it under two titles. Jennifer Dubrow, who has written about the book as prose poetry, calls it Black Margins. Rakhshanda Jalil's English translation is called Black Borders, and gathers thirty-two of the pieces. Either way, the image is the same: the dark writing in the margin, where the official story leaves things out.

What is in the book?

The pieces are very short, some only a line or two long, and they all tell the story of Partition tersely. There are no developed plots and no heroes. A mob, a train, a refugee column, a corpse, a madman: each piece sets down a single scene of violence and stops. The brevity is the point. Manto refuses the comfort of a story that explains, judges or forgives. He gives the reader the event itself, in plain language, and leaves it there. Read one after another, the pieces accumulate into a picture of a society in which ordinary people were drawn into revenge and killing, and in which brief moments of human feeling still broke through, unexpectedly, in the middle of the violence.

Why did Manto write it this way?

The form was a deliberate break. Manto had spent the 1930s and 1940s writing full-length stories about Bombay's poor, its prostitutes, pimps and labourers, and he had been tried six times for obscenity, three times before Partition and three times after, and never convicted. After 1947, the ordinary short story, with its beginning, middle and end, could not hold what he had seen. In Siyah Hashiye he borrowed from the ghazal and from modern free verse, and paid close attention to the look of words on the page, producing something between story and poem. Scholars read it as troubling the line between the progressive writing of his generation and the modernist experiments around him: an anti-poetry for a time when poetry itself seemed inadequate. The violence of Partition, in this reading, broke literary form as surely as it broke cities.

ਲੇਖਕ

Saadat Hasan Manto was born on 11 May 1912 at Paprodi village in Samrala, Ludhiana district, into a Punjabi Muslim family of Kashmiri ancestry. He failed his matriculation twice, drifted through college, and found his calling in 1933 when he met the scholar Abdul Bari Alig, who set him reading Russian and French writers. He moved to Bombay in 1935, edited film magazines, and wrote dialogues and scripts for the Hindi film industry. His first story, Tamasha, about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, appeared in the paper Khalq, and his first collection, Atish Paray, in 1936. In all he published twenty-two collections of short stories, a novel, radio plays, essays and sketches. He died in Lahore on 18 January 1955, of cirrhosis of the liver, aged forty-two.

Reception and legacy

Among Manto's Partition writings, Siyah Hashiye is often singled out as the most powerful and the most unsettling. Jennifer Dubrow, a scholar of Urdu literature, calls it perhaps the most powerful and unsettling work of fiction on the Partition. Some of its pieces reached English readers through Khalid Hasan's Mottled Dawn, a collection of fifty Partition stories and sketches whose reviewer traces its sketches to Siyah Hashiye, and Rakhshanda Jalil's Black Borders gathers thirty-two of the pieces in English. The book stays in print in Urdu, and it is still the Manto book readers are sent to when they want the shortest, sharpest account of what 1947 did to ordinary people: no heroes, no villains in the abstract, only human beings, and what they did to each other.