Misinterpretation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s Stories Under Ultra Conservative Social Inhibitions

Saadat Hasan Manto was an established journalist, short-story author and Indian film screenwriter living in Bombay (Mumbai) at the time of partition. He was born to a Muslim family in the predominantly Sikh city of Ludhiana, Punjab, present-day India. Partition violence later led him to move from Bombay to Pakistan. He is most famous for his collections of short stories which were written in Urdu and covered controversial topics. His stories on partition were seen as controversial because they engaged with the emotional impact of partition at a moment in time when few public figures were willing to talk about this. He was tried several times for obscenity and some of his stories were banned.

Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story “The Dog of Tetval” is an example of one of his many stories on partition. It is a microcosm for the violence between the two sides, telling the story of a fight on the mountainside between two groups of Pakistani and Indian soldiers and a dog that appears. Both groups befriend the dog, declaring it is Pakistani or Indian, and write this on a collar to be seen by the other side. The two sides fire shots at the dog as it moves between their groups and it is killed.

Manto was already an established writer before August 1947, but the stories he would go on to write about partition would come to cement his reputation. Though his working life was cut short by an addiction to alcohol, leading to his death at 43, Manto produced 20 collections of short stories, five collections of radio dramas, three of essays, two of sketches, one novel and a clutch of film scripts. He wrote about sex and desire, alcoholics and prostitutes, and he was charged with obscenity six times. In his journalism, he predicted the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan. But it is for his stories of partition that he is best remembered: as the greatest chronicler of this most savage episode in the region’s history.

He may be largely unknown in the west, but as the 70th anniversary of partition looms next year, there has been a re-emergence of interest in the life of Manto. A Pakistani biopic was released in September 2015 and in May 2016 in Cannes it was announced that a new Indian film would be made about the writer who has been compared to DH Lawrence, Oscar Wilde and Guy de Maupassant. This film was later on made and released in Bollywood in 2022 with the title “Manto”.

Saadat Hasan Manto was born into a middle-class Muslim family in the predominantly Sikh city of Ludhiana in 1912. In his early 20s he translated Russian, French and English short stories into Urdu, and through studying the work of western writers he learned the art of short story writing. He usually wrote an entire story in one sitting, with very few corrections, and his subjects tended to be those on the fringes of society. The historian Ayesha Jalal, (who is Manto’s grand-niece) wrote in her book about him, The Pity of Partition: “Whether he was writing about prostitutes, pimps or criminals, Manto wanted to impress upon his readers that these disreputable people were also human, much more than those who cloaked their failings in a thick veil of hypocrisy.”

One such story “Bu” (“Smell”) was about a sexual encounter between a prostitute and a rich young man who is intoxicated by the smell of her armpits. It prompted the first of Manto’s run-ins with British law – he was charged with obscenity but not convicted. “Manto’s stories were radical in their own time and they are still radical,” says the author and academic Preti Tanuja. “Manto does not shy away from the idea that women have sexual needs and their own sexual vision that has nothing to do with being in love with someone else.” In “My Name Is Radha” a male character is raped by a woman; in “Thanda Gohst” (“Cold Meat”) a Sikh man returns home and is stabbed by his wife during sex when he confesses to raping a corpse. “Reading Manto made you realize that literature did not always have to conform,” says the author Mohammed Hanif, whose work shares the black humour and political bite of Manto, “It does not always have to tell polite stories.”

It has to be admitted that Saadat Hasan Manto is not a popular author with conservative and bigotic readers in South Asia. Actually most of his stories were misjudged and misinterpreted through ultra conservative inhibitions and severely illiberal lenses.


Kavya Saha is a freelance columnist
based in Mumbai. She obtained MA in
South Asian Studies from Mordovia
State University, Russia.