He couldn’t be resting in peace. Today, he’s a legend. During his all-too-short lifetime, his writing was charged with obscenity in his birth-land India, as well as in Pakistan where he had migrated following the partition of the sub-continent.
At the age of 42, Saadat Hasan Manto whose 105th birth anniversary falls today (11 May), passed away of cirrhosis of the liver.
Indeed, the story of the Ludhiana-born Urdu writer who covered the jagged beat of human sufferance in the style of a compassionate reporter, is perfect material for a biopic. One has been completed in Pakistan, documenting the seven years spent in Lahore by the author of scores of short stories, essays, stage and radio plays, and film scripts. At home, actor-director Nandita Das, has been researching the manifold facets of Manto, a project which will hopefully find enlightened funding.
Portraits in Black and White
Not many of Bollywood’s present-day heavyweights are aware of the literary virtuoso’s tryst with cinema, or of the pen-portraits of charismatic film personalities whom he knew up close and personal. Translated from Urdu to English, these essays are contained in the slim paperback Stars From Another Sky, besides forming a section of Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto.
The portraits – the word ‘sketches’ wouldn’t do them justice – are crammed with scandalous anecdotes, replete with the good, the bad and the narcissistic traits of his subjects of inquiry, and above all parenthesised with an attitude of professional equality.
Manto’s takes on the denizens of show business were catalysed essentially during his freelancing stint as a film writer. He wrote prolifically for films, including Kisan Kanya (debatably lored to be India’s first colour film) revolving around rural oppression, Chal Chal Re Naujawan fired by the spirit of nationalism during the British Raj, and the biopic of Mirza Ghalib released in 1954.
Plus there were Apni Nagariya, Begum, Shikari, Jhumke and Eight Days, on which precious little information is accessible.
Of Terror, Sex and Booze Binges
Screen stars weren’t the only ones who interested Manto. Babu Rao Patel, the editor of the strident magazine, FilmIndia is remembered to this day as a terror, particularly for his rabidly communal editorials. Yet Manto conceded that the “foolish and sometimes frivolous” Patel had a soft corner for the poor. Around then, postmen weren’t allowed to use elevators at high-rise buildings. Patel wrote so belligerently on this snooty practice that it was finally discontinued.
Clearly, Manto could see through pretence, monitor adulterous affairs non-judgmentally, and report the fact that quite a few of the widely admired heroines of the era came from the kothas. He could point out a majority of the heroes, producers and directors of the 1940s hopped in and out of bed, without ever looking back at the brood of children they had sired.
Casual sex, the impermanence of love, indifference to an incalculable number of women, booze binges, Buicks and imported Craven A cigarettes flashed as status symbols, and nights soaked in sher-o-shairi, here’s a world which Manto lights up with a powerful battery of words.
Girl Shy Ashok Kumar
Bemused, Manto writes, “I always found it odd that Ashok should be scared of women when hundreds of them were willing to jump if he told them to jump. His mailbag would be full of love letters from thousands of girls, but I do not think he ever read more than a hundred of them in his life.”
The evergreen hero was a doting friend. But when Manto was asked by another writer to leave a meeting which was discussing the script for Dadamoni’s film Majboor, the writer told himself, “Manto bhai this street will lead you nowhere…so I took the side lane that brought me to Pakistan where I was soon tried for obscenity for writing a story called Thanda Gosht.”
Lonely Nargis
Nargis is showcased as a shy girl, not a classic beauty, who longed for girl pals of her own age. And so chattered away with the young women in Manto’s family.
The concluding lines on Nargis, described as the Narcissus of Undying Bloom, touch emotively upon her parents:
“Mohan Babu’s big, handsome eyes have been closed for many years and Jaddan bai has been lying under tons of earth for a long time, her heart full of unrequited desires. As for her daughter, Baby Nargis, she stands at top of the make-believe ladder we know at the movies, though it’s hard to say if she’s looking up, or if she is looking down at the first rung on which she put her child’s foot many years ago.”
A Certain Regard
Uncharacteristically, Manto is scathingly rude about the yesteryear vamp Kuldip Kaur, especially so about her on and off liaison with the then upcoming Pran. Sitara Devi, is chauvinistically portrayed as a man-eater.
By comparison Naseeem Banu the ‘fairy queen’ gets off lightly. She is caught in her vulnerable moments: her husband Ehsan had asthma and she had a permanent cold. She would avoid green chillies. They would have light arguments over their meals “but when you caught them looking at each other, you detected love.”
Unbridled regard is reserved for the light-eyed actor Shyam who died following a fall from horseback while shooting for the film Shabistan. Manto wrote, “He is still alive in the person of all those women whose stoles of silk and muslin once brought shade to his loving heart. And he is alive in my heart, which grieves because when he was dying, I could not stand over and shout, ‘Shyam zindabad’.”
Come to think of it when Saadat Hasan Manto died, not many cried, “Saadat zindabad.”
(This story is from The Quint’s archives and was first published on 11 May 2016. It is being republished to mark Saadat Hasan Manto’s birth anniversary.)
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