Saadat Hasan Manto and Bapsi Sidhwa: Authors of Indian Subcontinent's Political Cataclysms With Moving Dexterity

 

Partition Literature refers to the vast body of writings (novels, stories, poems, essays) from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh focusing on the trauma, displacement, violence, and enduring legacy of the 1947 Partition, exploring themes of identity, memory, familial division, and communal conflict through personal and collective narratives, highlighting the human cost of a historical event. Key works include Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man and stories by Saadat Hasan Manto, often exploring the subhuman life of refugees and the divided minds of the subcontinent’s people who were victimized by vicious political intrigues and interreligious hostilities.

First let’s take a look at the creative works by Saadat Hasan Manto (1912—1955) who was a noted 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 gets 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 Gosht” (“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.

The novel Ice Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa explores the tremendous anarchy and communal mayhem that occurred during the Partition of India in 1947. The political and social upheaval engendered by independence and Partition included religious intolerance that led to mass violence, killings, mutilations, rapes, dismemberments, and the wholesale slaughter of infants, children, men, and women, along with the displacement of millions of refugees—Hindus fleeing to India and Muslims fleeing to Pakistan.

Told from the first-person perspective of Lenny Sethi, a Parsee child who is about 4 years old when the novel begins and approximately 10 years old at the end, the novel portrays the complicated and shifting political and social ramifications of the Partition of India into two countries: a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. Lenny and her family attempt to quietly endure the partition that transforms Lahore, India into Lahore, Pakistan in August 1947.

Simultaneously, the novel operates as a coming-of-age novel delineating the parallel growth and formation of identity within the protagonist, Lenny, and the country, Pakistan. Both suffer severe growing pains, as Lenny’s child-like vision becomes a quickly-maturing voice reporting upon the violence she witnesses, the many friends who are lost, the friends who are betrayed by their former friends and neighbors due to religious differences, and the terrible human cost of dividing one country into two along brutally enforced religious lines. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Parsees all vie for survival.

As a minority group, the Parsee people first seek alliance with other ethnic groups to help protect them, but then quickly resolve to stay on the sidelines of the growing battle, hoping to hide in plain sight. In fact, Lenny’s idyllic childhood, during the first third of the novel, serves as an idealistic backdrop, displaying the ethnic and religious harmony that existed in Lahore prior to the independence and Partition of India. Lenny’s pampered, secure childhood mirrors the peace that precedes the slaughter of Partition. This peaceful coexistence highlights the later terrors of religious intolerance. In this way, Sidhwa unfolds the macrocosm of the civil war through the microcosm of Lenny’s life.

Other parallels also link private life with the larger world. Lenny’s nursemaid, Ayah, attracts a multi-ethnic crowd of admirers that mirrors the complex ethnic compositions of both India and Pakistan. The breakdown of Pakistani and Indian society into violent ethnic and religious groups mirrors the breakdown of the previously harmonious relationships between ethnicities and religions in Lenny’s world.

The novel’s themes explore human understanding of being both a social insider and a social outsider depending upon a person’s caste, religion, ethnicity, and economic status. It also examines the experience of being handicapped; the effects of religious and racial conflicts; the subjugation of women through arranged child marriages and prostitution; obsessions with sexuality; and the dangers of politically-motivated violence. By using a child for the novel’s narrative voice and perceptions, Sidhwa confronts the histories of India and Pakistan and their social, historical, and political complexities with humor and compassion.

However, Lenny’s childhood contains many horrors once Partition occurs. These horrors culminate with the ultimate dreadfulness of her own betrayal of her beloved Ayah to the Ice-candy-man and his Muslim thugs. Even her family is confounded by her action; she can barely forgive herself.

The last third of the novel demonstrates the united efforts of Lahori women, across ethnic and religious lines, to repair some of the damage perpetrated during Partition and its aftermath. Since parents hide painful truths from their children, and Lenny has proven that she cannot be trusted, Lenny’s mother hides her own secret work, which involves dangerous, illegal trade on the black market to earn money used to rescue women from enforced prostitution and sex slavery. Lenny only learns about this work near the end of the novel, when her Godmother demonstrates her power and authority by locating and stealing Ayah back from the Ice-candy-man. Lenny’s mother’s work enables them to send Ayah back home to her family in Amritsar, India. Perhaps the novel’s most hopeful sign for the future of Pakistan is that these women come together to help one another, regardless of ethnicity or religion.


Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury is a
contributor to different English
newspapers and magazines.