Weekend Edition January 13-15, 2012
“Something terrible happened fifty years ago today when India was divided. It is time to recognize it and see if it can be understood and transcended. The survivors owe it to those who perished.”
Remembering Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955)
Saadat Hasan Manto’s centenary is being observed quietly by
friends and admirers in Lahore. No official recognition or mention. He’s
almost become a non-person. Manto died in Lahore in 1955. He was
forty-three years old. The life of one of our greatest short-story
writers had been prematurely truncated. I was eleven years old at the
time. I never met him. I wish I had. One can visualize him easily
enough. In later photographs the melancholy is visible. He appears
exhausted as if his heart were entrenched with sadness. In these his
face displays all the consequences of a ravaged liver.
But there are others. Here his eyes sparkle with intelligence, the
impudence almost bursting through the thick glass of his 1940’s
spectacles, mocking the custodians of morality, the practitioners of
confessional politics or the commissariat of the Progressive Writers.
‘Do your worst’, he appears to be telling them. ‘I don’t care. I will
write to please myself. Not you.’ Manto’s battles with the literary
establishment of his time became a central feature of his biography.
Charged with obscenity and brought to trial on a number of occasions he
remained defiant and unapologetic.
It was the Partition of India in 1947 along religious lines that
formed his own attitudes and those of his numerous detractors. The
episodes associated with the senseless carnage that accompanied the
withdrawal of the British from India loom large in Manto’s short
stories. A few words of necessary explanation might help the reader to
understand the corrosive impact of Manto on the reading public. The
horrors of 1947 were well known, but few liked to talk about them. A
collective trauma appeared to have silenced most people. Not Manto. In
his stories of that period he recovered the dignity of all the victims
without fear or favor. Even the perpetrators of crimes were victims of a
political process that had gone out of control.
In these bad times when the fashion is to worship accomplished facts
real history tends to be treated as an irritant, something to be swatted
out of existence like mosquitoes in summer, it is worth recalling that
something terrible happened fifty years ago today when India was
divided. It is time to recognize it and see if it can be understood and
transcended. The survivors owe it to those who perished. At least a
million men, women and children lost their lives during the carnage of
‘ethnic cleansing’ that overcame Northern and Eastern India as the
Punjab and Bengal were divided along religious lines.
In the months that preceded Partition, Hindus and Sikhs on one side
and Muslims on the other glared into each other’s hate-filled eyes
before embarking on frenzied blood-baths. The character and scale of
the butchery was unprecedented in Indian history. In fact even Jinnah,
as late as June 1946, was prepared to consider a federal solution as
proposed by the Cabinet Mission sent to India by the Labour Government.
It was the Congress Party which made that particular solution
impossible.
This failure meant that exactly one year before Partition, the
Hindu-Muslim riots started in Eastern India. During four days in August
1946, nearly 5000 people were killed and three times that number wounded
in Bengal. The mood in the Punjab became edgy. Fear overcame
rationality.
My mother, an active member of the Communist Party, often recalls how
in April 1947, heavily pregnant with my sister and alone at home, she
was disturbed by a loud knock on the front door. As she opened the door
she was overcome by anxiety. In front of her stood the giant figure of a
Sikh. He saw the fear on her face, understood and spoke in a soft,
reassuring voice. All he wanted to know was the location of a particular
house on a nearby road. My mother gave him the directions. He thanked
her warmly and left. She was overpowered by shame. How could she, of all
people, without a trace of prejudice, have reacted in that fashion?
Nor was she the only one. Manto’s stories help us to understand the
madness that was bursting into bloodshed.
Trains became moving graveyards as they arrived at stations on both
sides of the new divide, packed with corpses of fleeing refugees. As
always, it was the poor of town and country who were the main victims
and they were buried or burnt in hastily dug pits. Neither the song of
the nightingale nor lamps or flowers would ever grace their graves. They
are the forgotten victims of that year. No memorial in India or
Pakistan marks the killings. The Partition of India was a tragedy and a
crime. It was neither inevitable nor necessary and its traces are only
too visible in the unending anguish of the great sub-continent. Faiz
Ahmed Faiz, one of the greatest of 20th century Urdu poets, born in
what became Pakistan, spoke for many in his poem Freedom’s Dawn on August ‘47:
This leprous daybreak, dawn night’s fangs have mangled—
This is not that long -looked-for break of day,
Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades
Set out, believing that in heaven’s wide void
Somewhere must be the star’s last halting place,
Somewhere the verge of night’s slow-washing tide,
Somewhere an anchorage for the ship of heartache.
But now, word goes, the birth of day from darkness
Is finished, wandering feet stand at their goal;
Our leaders’ ways are altering, festive looks
Are all the fashion, discontent reproved;–
And yet this physic still on unslaked eye
Or heart fevered by severance works no cure.
Where did that fine breeze, that the wayside lamp
Has not once felt, blow from—where has it fled?
Night’s heaviness is unlessened still, the hour
Of mind and spirit’s ransom has not struck;
Let us go on, our goal is not reached yet.
A year later, another poet Sahir Ludhianvi, who crossed the border
and came to Pakistan could not bear the atmosphere and returned to
India. He sent an explanation in the form of a dirge addressed to
fellow-writers in Pakistan:
Friends, for long years
I have spun dreams of the moon and stars and spring for you,
Today my tattered garments hold nothing
But the dust of the road that we have travelled.
The music in my harp has been strangled
Its tunes buried by wails and screams
Peace and civilization are the alms I crave
So that my lips can learn how to sing again.
Saadat Hasan Manto, was moved to write ‘Toba Tek Singh’. Manto wrote
sparsely, each word carefully chosen. His diamond-hard prose was in
polar contrast to the flowery language of many contemporaries. He wrote
about sexual frustration and its consequences, of jealousy and how it
often led to murder. One of his stories, ‘Behind the Screen’, describes a
wife’s revenge once she discovers her husband has a secret mistress.
The wife takes the husband to his lover’s apartment and in his presence
has her body chopped into tiny pieces. The story was based on an actual
event that took place in the North West Frontier Province, bordering
Afghanistan. Manto spared his readers the real life ending: the wife
had her rival’s flesh cooked and forced her husband to eat the cooked
flesh, a striking demonstration of the saying that truth is stranger
than fiction. (footnote: cf Khalid Hasan, ‘Sadat Hasan Manto: Not of
Blessed Memory’, Annual of Urdu Studies, 4, 1984, P.85)
‘Toba Tek Singh’ is a masterpiece, set in the lunatic asylum in
Lahore at the time of Partition. When whole cities are being ethnically
cleansed, how can the asylums escape? The Hindu and Sikh lunatics are
told by bureaucrats organizing the transfer of power that they will be
forcibly transferred to institutions in India. The inmates rebel. They
embrace each other and weep. They will not be parted willingly. They
have to be forced on to the trucks. One of them, a Sikh, is so overcome
by rage that he dies on the demarcation line which divides Pakistan from
India. Confronted by so much insanity in the real world, Manto
discovered normality in the asylum. The ‘lunatics’ have a better
understanding of the crime that is being perpetrated than the
politicians who have agreed to Partition.
Few politicians on either side had foreseen the results. Jawaharlal
Nehru’s romantic nationalism portrayed independence as a long-delayed
“tryst with destiny”. He never imagined that the tryst would be bathed
in countless gallons of Indian blood. This was partially the result of a
failure by the Congress High Command to make the large Muslim minority
an offer it could not refuse.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was a second-rate
politician, but with a first-class lawyer’s brain. Initially he had used
separatism as a bargaining ploy. Even later, he genuinely believed that
the new state would simply be a smaller version of secular India, with
one difference. Here Muslims would be the largest community. He really
believed that he would still be able to spend some time every winter at
his mansion in Bombay, the only city where he had found love and
happiness.
Jinnah conceived of Pakistan as an amalgamation of an undivided
Punjab, an undivided Bengal together with Sind, Baluchistan and the
North-West Frontier Province. This would have meant that forty percent
of the Punjab would have consisted of Hindus and Sikhs and forty-nine
percent of Bengal would have consisted of Hindus. It was, alas, a
utopian nonsense. Once confessional passions had been aroused and
neighbors were massacring each other (as in the former Yugoslavia during
the last decade of the 20th century) it was difficult to keep the two
provinces united.
“I do not care how little you give me,” Jinnah is reported as saying
in March 1947 to the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, “as long as you
give it to me completely.”
A dying old man in a hurry, who could have been a willing
collaborator in establishing a single state with important safeguards
for the minority, had the Congress been capable of strategic insights,
but now he wanted his own statelet, however small and awkward it might
appear on the map.
India had come a long way in 1947. All previous rulers had attempted
to govern with the consent of the ruling elites of whatever religion.
The Mughal Emperors, themselves Muslims, had learnt this lesson very
quickly and Akbar had unsuccessfully attempted to create a new religion
synthesising Hinduism and Islam. Even the last of the great Mughals, the
religious-minded Aurungzeb did not attempt any Islamicisation of his
army: his ablest Generals were Hindu chiefs!
The British, when confronted with the nightmare of actually governing
India, realized that, despite their more advanced technology, they
would not last too long without serious alliances. They could only
govern India with the consent of its traditional rulers. The raj was
maintained by a very tiny British presence: in 1805 the pink-cheeked
conquerors numbered 31,000; in 1911 they had grown to 164,000 and in
1931 there were 168,000. In other words the British in India never
comprised more than 0.05 of the local population.
It was this fact that concentrated the finest minds of the raj on
politics and strategy. The civil servants trained by Haileybury and
other imperialist nurseries in Britain to govern a mighty sub-continent
were political administrators, often of the highest order. They learned
to speak Urdu and Bengali so that they could, when necessary,
communicate directly with peasants and administer justice. They also
learned how to divide local rulers from each other and how to fan
religious prejudices. The birth of modern Sikhism and Hinduism owes a
great deal to the British presence in India. In return, local potentates
were permitted to learn English and taught the etiquette of nibbling
cucumber sandwiches with His Excellency at Government House.
If the British had granted India self-government on the Canadian and
Australian pattern after the First World War it is unlikely that the
sub-continent would have been divided. Partition was not a planned
conspiracy by either the British or Jinnah. It came about because of a
combination of circumstance during the Forties, including the Second
World War. Jinnah backed the war effort, the Congress demanded
Independence. Some scores had to be settled. Pakistan was imperialism’s
rap on the knuckle for Indian nationalism.
Nehru and Jinnah were both shaken by the orgy of barbarism. It
offended all their instincts. But it was Mahatama Gandhi who paid the
ultimate price. For defending the right to live of innocent Muslims in
post-Partition India he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a
fundamentalist Hindu fanatic. Godse was hanged, but two decades later,
Godse’s brother told Channel Four that he regretted nothing. What
happened had to happen.
That past now rots in the present and threatens to further poison the
future. The political heirs of the hanged Godse are shoving aside the
children of Nehru and Gandhi. The poisonous fog of the religious world
has enveloped politics. History, unlike the poets and writers of the
sub-continent, is not usually prone to sentiment.
Partition was a disaster, adjacent to which there lurked another. The
two parts of Pakistan were divided by a thousand miles of India,
culture, language and political tradition. The predominantly Punjabi
military-bureaucratic elite belonged to West Pakistan, while the Bengali
majority of the population (60%) lived in East Pakistan. The refusal of
the military rulers to permit democracy led to a successful uprising in
1968. A dictator was toppled. In the elections that followed the
Bengalis of East Pakistan won a big majority. They were not permitted to
take office. The Army invaded the Eastern part of its own country.
There was a massacre of intellectuals and mass rape (Punjabi soldiers
had been told to ‘change the genes’ of Bengalis forever) followed by a
civil war. Bangladesh was born. One partition had led to another.
India, too, was severely damaged by Partition. The Nehru years
(1947-64) disguised the processes underneath, but now the Furies are out
into the open. Bombay, once the centre of cosmopolitanism is now Mumbai
and under the sway of a neo-fascist Hindu organization. In their absurd
search for a new Indian identity, the scoundrel parties have
re-discovered Hinduism and sections of the ‘secular’ Congress have
fallen into line. Communal riots have claimed tens of thousands of
lives over the last fifty years.
Manto was amongst the few who observed the bloodbaths of Partition
with a detached eye. He had remained in Bombay in 1947, where he worked
for the film industry, but was accused of favoring Muslims and was
subjected to endless communal taunts, even from those who had hitherto
imagined to be like him, but the secular core in many people did not
survive the fire. Manto came to Lahore in 1948, but was never happy. He
turned the tragedies he had witnessed or heard into great literature.
He wrote of the common people, regardless of ethnic, religious or caste
identities and he discovered contradictions and passions and
irrationality in each of them. In his work we see how normally decent
people can, in extreme conditions, commit the most appalling atrocities.
‘Cold Meat’ is one such story. In 1952 he wrote: “My heart is heavy
with grief today. A strange listlessness has enveloped me. More than
four years ago when I said farewell to my other home, Bombay, I
experienced the same kind of sadness…”
Years later he was still trying to come to grips with what had happened:
“Still, what my mind could not resolve was the question: what country did we belong to now, India or Pakistan? And whose blood was it that was being so mercilessly shed every day? And the bones of the dead, stripped of the flesh of religion, were they being burned or buried? Now that we were free who was to be our subject? When we were not free, we used to dream about freedom. Now that freedom had come, how would we perceive our past state?
“The question was: were we really free? Both Hindus and Muslims were being massacred. Why were they being massacred? There were different answers to the question; the Indian answer, the Pakistani answer, the British answer. Every question had an answer, but when you tried to unravel the truth, you were left groping.
“Everyone seemed to be regressing. Only death and carnage seemed to be proceeding ahead. A terrible chapter of blood and tears was being added to history, a chapter without precedent.
“India was free. Pakistan was free from the moment of its birth, but in both states, man’s enslavement continued: by prejudice, by religious fanaticism, by savagery.”
In a series of Open Letters to Uncle Sam he marked his displeasure at
the state of world politics and Pakistan’s Security Pact with the US.
He displayed a remarkable prescience as expressed in this extract from
his ‘Third Letter to uncle Sam’, written shortly before his death:
“Another thing I would want from you would be a tiny, teeny weeny atom bomb because for long I have wished to perform a certain good deed. You will naturally want to know what.
You have done many good deeds yourself and continue to do them. You decimated Hiroshima, you turned Nagasaki into smoke and dust and you caused several thousand children to be born in Japan. Each to his own. All I want you to do is to dispatch me some dry cleaners. It is like this. Out there, many Mullah types after urinating pick up a stone and with one hand inside their untied shalwar, use the stone to absorb the after-drops of urine as they resume their walk. This they do in full public view. All I want is that the moment such a person appears, I should be able to pull out that atom bomb you will send me and lob it at the Mullah so that he turns into smoke along with the stone he was holding.
“As for your military pact with us, it is remarkable and should be maintained. You should sign something similar with India. Sell all your old condemned arms to the two of us, the ones you used in the last war. This junk will thus be off your hands and your armament factories will no longer remain idle.
“Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is a Kashmiri, so you should send him a gun which should go off when it is placed in the sun. I am a Kashmiri too, but a Muslim which is why I have asked for a tiny atom bomb for myself.
“One more thing. We can’t seem able to draft a constitution. Do kindly ship us some experts because while a nation can manage without a national anthem, it cannot do without a constitution, unless such is your wish.
“One more thing. As soon as you get this letter, send me a shipload of American matchsticks. The matchsticks manufactured here have to be lit with the help of Iranian-made matchsticks. And after you have used half the box, the rest are unusable unless you take help from matches made in Russia which behave more like firecrackers than matches.”
Given the circumstances it is hardly surprising that he sought solace
in alcohol and drank himself to death. He had written over 200 short
stories and had no doubt of his place in literary history and left
behind the following epitaph for himself:
“Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. With him lie buried the arts of short-story telling. Here he lies underneath tons of mud still wondering if he was a better short-story writer than God.”
TARIQ ALI’s latest book “The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad’ was published by Verso.
