Selected Stories: Saadat Hasan Manto

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SAADAT HASAN MANTO WROTE HIS OWN EPIΤΑΡΗ SIX MONTHS BEFORE HE died, though it does not appear on his grave in Lahore. This is what it said: 'Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lic buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing. Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is the greater short-story writer: God or he. Saadat Hasan Manto, 18 August 1954'

Born into a middle-class Kashmiri family of Amritsar, Manto showed little enthusiasm for formal education. Close to his mother and always in awe of his stern father, who scoffed at his first attempt at writing, Manto was instinctively a rebel, questioning what others took for granted. Manto considered himself a reject of the family because he was always being told to be like his older step-brothers, who were lawyers. He was fortunate in finding a mentor in the historian and journalist Bari Alig, who encouraged him to write and to translate a number of literary works, including Victor Hugo's The Last Days of a Condemned Man and Oscar Wilde's play lera. About Alig, Manto wrote, 'He it was who encouraged me to take to writing. Had 1 not run into him in Amritsar, I would either have died as an unknown man and been forgotten or I would have been serving a long sentence in jail for armed robbery.

Manto failed his school-leaving examination twice in a row; ironically, one of the subjects he was unable to pass was Urdu, in which he was to produce such a powerful and original body of work in the years to come, blooming into one of the language's great stylists. Manto entered college in Amritsar in 1931, failed his first-year examination twice, and dropped out. He was also at Aligarh for a short while but ill health forced him to abandon his studies. He neither completed his education nor was he interested in doing so, but under Bari's influence and his own inquiring and sceptical mind, he read a great deal. It is poetic justice that the very institutions where he could not complete his education now have his work placed in the textbooks they teach.

Those were heady times. Manto was a boy of seven in 1919 when the horrific Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place in Amritsar, an event that left a deep and bloody imprint on the Raj, one from which it never recovered. Not surprisingly, Manto was greatly inspired by revolutionary ideas. As he later wrote, he and his friends, walking the streets of Amritsar, would pretend that they were in Moscow launching a revolution. He was also much taken with the firebrand Punjabi revolutionary and Indian nationalist Bhagat Singh, who was hanged in Lahore for the murder of a British police officer. There was a smell of revolt in the air and, for the first time, it appeared possible to force the British out of India.