Saadat Hasan Manto

Saadat Hasan Manto felt deeply and wrote strongly; his work invigorates and disturbs.

- Urvashi Butalia

RECENTLY, at a one-day session of the Karachi Literature Festival in London, I listened to actor Nimra Bucha read from Saadat Hasan Manto’s short pieces in Urdu. The occasion was a session on the Partition, where artists, performers and storytellers were presenting artistic and literary works. The hall was packed, we were in London, you would have expected that the reading would be in English. But Nimra chose to read in Urdu. Manto, she said, was best understood in the language in which he wrote. Her powerful, moving reading, Manto’s powerful, searing prose, made for an electric, charged moment.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Saadat Hasan Manto was perhaps Pakistan’s most famous writer. In his short life – he died when he was a mere 48 years old – he produced a formidable body of work, comprising short stories (his forte), journalistic articles, prose pieces, plays, a novel, commentaries and more. Writing was like oxygen to him, and he could not live without it, just as he could not live without his other passion, liquor – which was what killed him in the end. But the intensity with which he wrote, and the depths of pain, despair and cynicism in what he wrote about might equally well have killed him. Readers who come to Manto again and again often wonder how one man could have carried so much rage and despair inside him. Shortly before he died, he composed his own epitaph: “Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of story writing. Under mounds of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is the greater story writer – God or he.”