One of the greatest raconteurs of twentieth century, Saadat Hasan Manto declares that he was forced to write when his wife routinely demanded that he put bread on the table for the family. He doesn't attribute any genius to his skills as a writer and convinces his readers that the stories flowed even the minded his daughters or tossed a salad. Equally, Manto treats his tryst with Bollywood with disdain. And unmasks the cardboard lives of tinsel town. Two of Manto's favourite and recurring themes-women and Partition-find special mention as he brings to focus the bizarre morality in the context of feminine beauty and the futile presence of religiosity in the creation of a nation he was to adopt later in life.
In the two new essays included in this edition, he writes of issues that continue to be matters of debate and concern in our times: the burqa and free speech.
This unique collection of non-fiction writing, translated by well-known author and journalist Aakar Patel, showcases Manto's brilliance while dealing with life's most mundane things-graveyards, bumming cigarettes, a film crew with motley characters from mythology and sharp dissection of what ails the subcontinent even after seven decades-Hindi or Urdu, vile politicians and the hopelessness of living under the shadow of feat.
What would Manto have made of India after 2014 certainly, he would have found it familiar and understood it in profound ways He knew and had seen things through his lived experience that we in our generation are discovering decades later. Manto had also first witnessed, in the 1930s and 1940s, the militant Hindu nationalism that has infected our politics. Back then, of course, it was the Congress that was pushing it, and now it is another party the idea that the Indian nation contains a religious element and that this element is the rightful possession of only one group of people while the rest must suffer is not new.
Manto would not at all have been surprised, let alone shocked, at the fact that independent India in 2022 had no chief minister, minister in the Union cabinet or legislator in Parliament from the ruling party belonging to the Muslim community He would, however, have been alarmed to learn that the ruling party has no Muslim MLAs among the thousands of legislators it controls in more than astonishing and unprecedented in a dozen states. This is astonishing and unprecedented our history Tens of millions of Muslims across India have no real representation and no voice in the current Government.
The Bharatiya Janta Party's crude calculation is that in a polarized society kept permanently on edge. Hindus will vote for Hindus and Muslims will vote for Muslims and that is the way India is. Manto would have been familiar with this argument because it was the basis of Partition.
The Muslim demand of separate electorates and guaranteed seats in provinces and the Centre was unacceptable to the Congress-which was made up of 97 per cent Hindus. The compromise formula-that the Union government control only limited power and thus allow the minority-dominated eastern and western parts of India some degree of autonomy in governance-was also unacceptable to the Congress leadership. These were the root causes of Partition. It was neither Muslim perfidy nor the evil desire of one man to break up Bharat Mata. That, however, is the way in which we have been taught history, but Manto would have appreciated the absurdity of it all, given that the history is documented. More than just appreciating it, Manto would have written about the events in a manner that not only would have exposed the truth, revealed the absurdity of the situations but also shown the consequences faced by the common people.
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