Selected Stories,
Saadat Hasan Manto
translated by Khalid Hasan,
Penguin, Rs 295

In his introduction to this elegant selection of Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories, translator Khalid Hassan tells us what the great writer wrote as his own epitaph, months before he died (though these words do not appear on Manto’s grave in Lahore): “Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie 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.”

Based on the 28 stories in this volume, it would have to be a close contest. Manto’s life was as eventful as much of his fiction. The Amritsar-born Kashmiri, born into a family of lawyers, rebelled against following the family profession, failed his school-leaving examinations twice in succession; failed his first-year exams in college; dropped out of Aligarh; and turned, instead — under the mentorship of historian and journalist Bari Alig — to translation and writing. It was a fortunate move, because the very Urdu in which he failed would later become the language in which Manto would produce his considerable corpus of writing — consisting of 22 collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three collections of essays, two collections of reminiscences and several film scripts. In Urdu Manto would not only chronicle Partition but also write about sexuality, urban life and most of all the down-and-out inhabitants of city streets, especially in the Bombay that he loved so intensely — the sex workers, shopkeepers and deadbeats whom high literature generally chose to ignore.

... contd.