Enlightenment in the Colony by Mufti Aamir R.;Mufti Aamir R. R.;

Author:Mufti, Aamir R.;Mufti, Aamir R. R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

CHAPTER FOUR

Saadat Hasan Manto

A GREATER STORY WRITER THAN GOD

WHEN SAADAT HASAN MANTO died in 1955 at the age of forty-three, from liver ailments caused by years of excessive drinking, he reportedly left behind an epitaph he had written for himself: ‘‘Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. With him lie buried all the arts and mysteries of short story writing. Under tons of earth he lies, wondering if he is a greater short story writer than God.’’1 At the time he was firmly established as one of the greatest practitioners of the Urdu afsna or short story form, but was also considered an enfant terrible, with a reputation for zealous drinking and carousing in the urban demimonde. He was widely criticized within the literary world and beyond for relatively explicit handling of sex in his stories and had been tried several times, by both colonial and post-colonial governments, for violating obscenity laws. And he had been hounded out of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA), the umbrella organization of nationalist writers founded in 1936, which had initially welcomed him as a patriotic and committed writer. At the time of his death his connections to the association had long been severed, his erstwhile friends now accusing him of having abandoned realism, of being obsessed with abnormal personality and the morbid.2 He had barely survived the Partition of India in 1947, both physically and artistically, suffering a paralyzing breakdown on his arrival in the now Pakistani city of Lahore from Bombay, where he had spent much of his artistic life associated in one way or another with the Hindustani film industry. The Partition and its aftermath became an obsessive theme in his later writing, and his stories of this period are widely considered among the most forceful accounts of the trauma of India’s national fragmentation. It is often for these that he is most remembered.

Given this enormous historical density to Manto’s life and career, how may we begin to unpack the semantic baggage of his self-chosen epitaph in a register other than the biographical? What are the arts and mysteries of short story writing? What is this debris under which they lie buried?Who is Manto? Who or what is God? To mock God and his Creation is, of course, to invoke the powers of the demonic. Irony itself, as Lukacs once noted, is inherently demonic. For the novel form, which Lukcs considered ‘‘the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God,’’ irony consists in ‘‘the freedom of the writer in his relationship to God, the transcendental condition of the objectivity of form-giving.’’ In turning to irony, modern subjectivity achieves, Lukcs writes, the highest freedom that one can achieve in a Godless world. To be possessed of a demon is to ‘‘overreach [oneself] in ways that have no reason and cannot be explained by reason, challenging all the psychological or sociological foundations of [one’s] existence.’’3 Manto’s ironic epitaph is first a commentary on the type of formgiving that is the Urdu or short story, this concrete modern bid to give subjective ‘‘freedom’’ a form.

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