My Name Is Radha

Preamble

By common consensus of most Urdu critics and readers of fiction, Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–55) is unquestionably the pre-eminent Urdu short story writer of the first half of the previous century. And even now the popularity of this iconic writer has not waned. He is avidly read and admired across the South Asian subcontinent and is also well known overseas, thanks to the many translations of his choicest work into English and other European languages. A prolific writer and, in his early years, a translator and journalist, he managed to produce in his short life of only forty-three years an enormous literary corpus, mostly short stories, but also plays and works of non-fiction, collected in five fat tomes of roughly a thousand pages each — an amazing testimony to the astonishing range of the author’s thematic reach!

Born in Ludhiana in British India, Manto started work as a member of the editorial staff of Masāwāt, an Urdu daily published from his native Ludhiana. In 1936 he moved to Bombay to work as a scriptwriter for films before moving on to Delhi in 1941. Here, he joined the Urdu Service of All India Radio and wrote radio plays. The following year saw him back in Bombay, where he resumed his earlier work for the film industry.

With the political situation in Bombay deteriorating rapidly in the aftermath of Partition, and communal rioting having erupted across the country, Manto felt constrained to leave for Pakistan in 1948. The move does not appear to have been motivated by ideological reasons. In Bombay, Manto had enjoyed relative prosperity and at times even abundance. In Pakistan he was reduced to living in financial straits, made worse by his chronic dependence on alcohol, which led to cirrhosis of the liver that eventually claimed his life.

Manto’s short fiction offers a wealth of thematic diversity. However, he is chiefly — perhaps even exclusively — remembered as a writer on Partition and prostitutes. The present selection seeks to correct this reductionist impression of a writer who is concerned more with the unique substance of his characters than with social problems and political events as the mainstay of his creative work. No surprise if he has titled some of his major stories with their protagonists’ names. This book, therefore, presents an assortment of the author’s fictional and non-fictional writing as well as three pieces by two Urdu critics. The presence of the latter may seem unconventional, if not entirely out of place, in a book that purports to be a selection of his short stories.

A translator’s choice is determined no doubt by his preferences, biases and idiosyncrasies; mine being no exception. Some of Manto’s best-known stories are here followed by a few that are less often talked about. They have been chosen to give, hopefully, a more rounded and balanced view of the author’s creative work, its delightful diversity and its underlying assumptions.

In the non-fictional pieces the author speaks directly about himself, his literary milieu and, in some, he clarifies, among other things, his position regarding the alleged ‘obscenity’ in his work — a charge frequently hurled at him by the Progressives and one that landed him, by his own admission, in the courts of law, both during British India and, later, in Pakistan, five times. The pieces also give us some idea, in a style daubed with pain and occasional humour, about the man Manto was, about his uneasy relationship with the Progressive establishment, and his immense reluctance and pain at leaving Bombay, the city he loved.

Included here are two pieces by critic Muhammad Hasan Askari (1919–78), ‘Communal Riots and Our Literature’, and ‘Marginotions’, which he contributed as a preface to Manto’s collection of Partition vignettes Siyāh Hāshiye (Black Margins). Partition? Yes, but only as a convenient classificatory term. In essence they are little stories of individuals who each work in unexpected ways when flung in the midst of a harrowing event.

Askari’s pieces are important for two reasons: (a) they critically examine the tenor of much of Urdu fictional writing inspired by Partition and show its inherent conceptual fallacies and weaknesses resulting from limiting the event to merely one of its offshoots, namely, the communal rioting and its toll in human lives and property, without any regard for its effect on both the perpetrator and the victim of oppression which, he argues, cannot by itself constitute a valid subject of literature; and (b) the uniqueness of Manto in dealing with it in purely human terms, in the actions of the oppressor and the oppressed, with a neutrality few among his contemporaries writing on the subject could rival.

The last piece, ‘Recounting Irregular Verbs and Counting She-Goats’, is presented as a defence of Manto against the charge of ‘obscenity’.

Over the years a thick layer of interpretive fog has slowly accumulated around Manto’s work. It has quite obscured the notion of (a) literary autonomy and self-sufficiency, and (b) the primary allegiance of a writer to his calling. Social scientists and historians and, now, even experts of psychoanalysis have jumped into a terrain whose natural custodians appear to have, by and large, lowered their guards and abdicated their responsibility. To a degree it was perhaps inevitable. Where Premchand, importantly, finalized as a dialectical necessity the short story’s impending break with the cloying romanticism in which such writers as Sajjad Haidar Yildirim, Niaz Fatehpuri and Laam Ahmad had plunged it, he also saddled it with a reformist purpose, later embraced in earnest by the Indian Progressive Writers. Manto, by temperament, and even more by the demands of his calling, simply could not accept any social, political, or religious purpose as the primary concern of his writing. But challenged so often as he was by his detractors and just as often put into the dock for the charge of obscenity, he felt compelled to vindicate himself by repeated attempts to explain the underlying assumptions of his art. This never allowed the discourse to rise above the narrow confines of literature as socio-politically determined. An impression was created that his writing did have a sleazy or noble purpose, but purpose all the same, which he managed to obfuscate by eloquent casuistry.

In his delightful little book Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa describes the writer as someone afflicted with a ‘tapeworm’. His own life — why, even his own will — is forfeit to this creature; whatever he does is for the sake of this grisly monster, and he feeds off of himself for his themes, like the mythical ‘catoblepas’. So writing is a calling and one writes from an inexorable inner compulsion, unlike the ‘graphomaniacs’ Milan Kundera has deplored. The compulsion arises from what some might call the wayward desire to see a different world in place of the real, with its inherited values and mores and certainties that admit to no contradiction in human action and stifle questioning.

One understands the world through the prism of one’s own imagination, which only brings forth outcroppings of subliminal desires rehabilitated or transplanted in imaginative geography. For most Manto critics, the writer and the world are the only two terms of the equation — the substantial agency of human imagination that mediates between the two is routinely thrown overboard.

Strangely, though, Manto’s stories do easily lend themselves to such easy distortion because of their deceptive proximity to workaday life (and yet the external reality of the surface is often subverted in the subterranean landscape of his work so subtly that it provokes doubt and ambiguity in what was taken as a straightforward matter). No one asks, not even the critic: Why write stories if all you want is to substantiate reality as it is? Is that what stories are meant to do? Or are they supposed to mount an exploration into the existential situation of the character (and discover, in Kundera’s words, what the novel — read fiction — alone can discover)? Is fiction not expected to create parallel worlds? Or, at the very least, scramble the elements of existing reality and conjure them back to life in dizzying combinations whose entire geometry is drawn from a playful imagination delightfully irreverent to the rules of conventional values and modes of thinking?

It is easy to interpret a story through reference to something outside of itself (say, a political or social event), but far more difficult to analyse it through an exploration of its particular mode of being, its possibility and promise — indeed its poetics. Literary critics are a sad lot; not only is their work necessarily derivative and posterior to creation, it must also formulate its criteria of success and failure from the fictional work under consideration. Few Urdu critics have tried to delve deeper into the elusive poetics of Manto’s creative world. Instead, most have attempted to analyse his stories by recourse to criteria that are organically at odds with the nature of fiction. Political events are not the measure of the success or failure of a work of art, but rather, whether or how well the work has lived up to its latent promise.

Manto may well have written ‘Toba Tek Singh’ following his brief stint in an asylum. Though doubtful, he may even have intended it to be read as ‘a scathing indictment’ of Partition. (I rather think Manto was quite taken with the character he had created and wanted to follow along with him on his existential odyssey, ready to be surprised by his every reality-defying move.) But should we read it as such? After all, paraphrasing Kundera, it is not the business of fiction to write the history of a society; it is very much its business to write the history of the individual. That Stalinism is criminal is evident to everyone, he says in ‘The Making of a Writer’, you do not have to yell it in the form of the novel. And judgement (‘indictment’) has no place in his calling. At day’s end, what remains looming on the horizon is the larger-than-life image of the protagonist, Partition having shrunk back into the distance. In a paradoxical way, it is Bishan Singh who retroactively makes history meaningful, indeed inevitable, with an insight that quite escapes the historical narratives of the apocalyptic event, and not the other way around. History merely provides the occasion to discover some hitherto unknown aspect of human existence, some truth about the character. That is, precisely, what fiction does.

As for explaining away the work of a writer by relating it back to his biography, characters are seldom the mirror-image of the writer’s persona. Even when they appear to bear strong resemblance to certain individuals around us, they remain entirely composite — something Manto has expressed himself:

Literature isn’t a portrayal of an individual’s own life. When a person sets out to write, he doesn’t record the daily account of his domestic affairs, nor does he mention his personal joys and sorrows, or his illness and health. It’s entirely likely that the tears in his pen-portraits belong to his afflicted sister; the smiles come from you, and the laughter from some down-and-out manual worker. To weigh them against one’s own tears, smiles and laughter is a grievous error. Every creative piece seeks to convey a particular mood, a particular effect and a specific purpose. If that mood, effect and purpose remain unappreciated, the piece will be nothing more than a lifeless object.^*

If Sahae, Mozel, Babu Gopinath, Toba Tek Singh, Radha, Janki or Saugandhi impinge upon our consciousness with indomitable force, it is precisely because, in the balance of his major works, Manto saw none of them as a typical representative of their social or religious group or as one shaped by its determinants. (Was Mozel a representative of the Jewish community of Bombay and her character shaped by its values?) More often, he saw each one in deathly opposition to the certainty of inherited values. Which, at any rate, is the business of fiction. If his characters behave contrary to conventional logic, it is because they act in consonance with fictional logic and ‘a law that is stronger than the laws of reason and the world’. Only in the hospitality of fictional spaces can polarities coexist without one trying to eliminate the other. Manto’s genius lay in recognizing these characters as discrete entities, and history, or social and religious determinants, as merely the backdrop against which each of them, in his or her own eccentric way, stumbled through their particular existential trek.

To read ‘Mozel’ as a story about Partition would be to ignore the simultaneous presence of the many contradictory forces and paradoxes in her complex personality. Partition did not give birth to Mozel or shape her behaviour; it only furnished Manto with the occasion to explore and subsequently reveal a truth about the eponymous character. Any traumatic event would have worked just as easily for such exploration and activated her inherent tendencies that only surface, unexpectedly, towards the end of the story.

Manto knew too well that most humans live and breathe in the obscuring haze of contradictory impulses and that certainties — the arbiter of human behaviour so predisposed to doling out reward and punishment — are the prerogative only of ideologues, whether religious or political. Fiction can ill afford certainties, and judgement on their basis even less. Take, for instance, Sahae: ‘A staunch Hindu, who worked the most abominable profession, and yet his soul — it couldn’t have been more radiant.’^* He was a pimp in Bombay who ran a brothel and dreamed of making thirty thousand rupees so that he could return to his native Benares and open a fabric shop. Religious devoutness here exists in perfect symbiosis with the demands of a ‘filthy’ profession. It is a meeting of opposites. In real life, a devout man would not come anywhere near a whorehouse, much less run it, though in the same life most people would display an amazing motley of contradictory impulses. Sahae will remain forever suspect to conventional morality. We may side with this morality but we cannot deny his behaviour as a possibility of being, even if it exists only in the liminal spaces of the imagination, even if we only admit to its nebulous existence grudgingly.

Can one call Esther’s transformation towards the end of Sándor Márai’s novel Esther’s Inheritance^† even remotely logical? Robbed and duped by the same swindler, ‘that piece of garbage’, all her life, she is still willing to sign her last possession over to Lajos. She does not believe a word of what he is saying, yet she finds that his statement—‘there is a law that is stronger than the laws of reason and the world’ (p. 143) — contains a substantial core of truth. In the real world, even if this ambiguous truth does not change anything, its potential existence cannot be barred from our consciousness. Many of Manto’s characters, too, display such logical but entirely human contradictions.

Life is not the Straight Path leading to heaven for a writer. It is, rather, a trek riddled with potholes and detours and mind-boggling surprises, leading eventually to an infinite, mirror-encrusted maze of giddying, colliding images. The coffin has been lowered into the freshly dug grave for burial, the mourners stand around in a semicircle, the priest is only halfway through intoning his eulogy for the dearly departed when a ‘neurotic gust of wind’ lifts the hat off Papa Clevis’s head and drops it at the edge of the grave. Eventually it will tumble into the grave, but for now Clevis, hesitating between should he or shouldn’t he pick it up, lets his gaze crawl along the erratic course of the bobbing hat. The attention of everyone in the small band of mourners has wavered. No one is listening to the eulogy any more; instead their eyes are riveted on the comic drama unfolding before them. The funeral loses its gravitas and laughter is born.^*

Such utter disregard for decorum, such hilarity in the most solemn moment of grief and loss — only a writer can think of such contrary situations because he is not beholden to the rules of conventional decorum. He cannot be tamed by the tyranny of conventional behaviour or some social, political or jingoistic agenda. Literature, as Manto says, is

an ornament, and just as pretty jewelry isn’t always unalloyed gold, neither is a beautiful piece of writing pure reality. To rub it over and over again on the touchstone like a nugget of gold is the height of tastelessness. . [It] is either literature or it is the worst kind of offense. . an outrageous monstrosity.^†

And to those who censured him for immorality and obscenity, instead of delving into the tortuous by-lanes of his art, his unequivocal answer would be: ‘By all means, call me names. I don’t find that offensive — swearing isn’t unnatural — but at least do it with finesse so your mouth doesn’t begin to stink and my sense of decency isn’t injured.’^‡

Lamentably, too often Manto has been drafted into the service of one social or political issue or another. The greater part of the critical commentary on his writing has mainly focused on prostitutes (a social phenomenon) and Partition (a political event).

Of course the remnants of the Progressives and a fair bunch of those too eager to deny fiction its radical autonomy would likely rush to declare — teary-eyed, I might add—‘Hatak’ (Spurned) as yet another story about the debasement of women. They would go for the nearest truncheon, in the absence of a cleaver, to bash the head of a society intent on sending its womenfolk to eke out a living by selling their charms and the physical repository of those charms. They would not fail to stick a feather in Manto’s cap for exposing this crass injustice, the sordid underbelly of society. And they would also dig up a motive for his doing this: infinite compassion for the downtrodden, disenfranchised female of the South Asian subcontinent.

To speculate on why a woman chooses to sell her body is the business of sociologists, to judge the morality of such a choice is the business of the custodians of morality. Is it also the business of fiction? Was it Manto’s business? No, the business of fiction is to see what she makes of this life, independently of the circumstances that brought her to this choice.

In his non-fictional piece ‘^‘Iṣmat-Farōshī’,^* (selling of virtue: prostitution) — an impassioned defence of women who practise the world’s oldest profession — Manto goes into great detail arguing vigorously for prostitution’s similarity to every other profession, and hence, deserving of respect. We do not look down on a typist, or even a sweeper woman, why should we ride roughshod over a bawd? All three do what they do in order to earn a living. In other words, a prostitute does not forfeit her right to be an individual by the choice of her profession. We must go past her profession to see her human possibility.

In ‘Spurned’, Manto leaves the protagonist’s reasons for selling her flesh entirely opaque, or rather, creatively vague, as any good writer would. He is not interested in telling us why she opted to become a fille de joie. Was it a forced or bad marriage? Had her husband ditched her and, thus disgraced, she could not return to her parental home? Was she abducted and raped? (This is precisely what happened to many Hindu women during Partition. Many interviews with such women in Ritu Menon’s Borders and Boundaries: How Women Experienced the Partition of India attest to the fact that, after being repatriated to India, these women chose to live and die in an ashram rather than return to their ancestral homes and bring ill-repute to their families.) Or was it domestic abuse or sexual violence? Dire poverty? What? In a devilish vein, one might also posit that she turned tricks simply because she loved sex, though this possibility should quickly be ruled out because the story does not offer any compelling grounds for such an assumption. In fact, Saugandhi’s ‘mind considered sexual intimacy patently absurd’, and yet ‘Every limb of her body yearned to be worked over, to exhaustion, until fatigue had settled in and eased her into a state of delightful sleep.’ No, Manto does not give us a clue. He refrains because it is not important for him or for us to know. On the other hand, he forecloses any possibility of our being tempted, or being rash enough, to ask by deftly slipping a tiny detail into the narrative: ‘Of course, she didn’t look quite as fresh and vibrant as she did five years ago when she lived with her parents, unencumbered by any cares whatsoever.’

So there was a time, not so long ago, when Saugandhi lived a carefree life with her parents. Between that time and selling her body in a seamy neighbourhood of Bombay there lies a dark abyss into which Manto does not delve, nor does he invite us to look. Whatever happened in the intervening period is anyone’s guess, but any reason that might be suggested will have absolutely no bearing on the story or its protagonist. Manto, rather, wants us to know what happened this particular night when she was spurned and rejected by a pot-bellied seth who came along in his fancy car, pointed the beam of his flashlight at her, and sounded his disapproval with a cryptic ‘Oh no!’ Manto wants us to know how she dealt with this gut-wrenching denial of her being, this denial of who she was, by initiating a veritable ontology of selfhood.

A man feels the need for a woman, runs to the nearest brothel and finds himself one. End of story. Manto would not be doing that, would he? And if he were, what is the point of the story. No, he wants to deal with Saugandhi as a woman, yes, a woman very much her own, not simply some type that can be enlisted for a dramatic dressing down of society. What society is like is for us to decide, independently of whether it has any critical role to play in the story at hand. Manto wants to deal with Saugandhi as an individual — a fille de nuit, yes, but unlike any of her sisters in the profession. In her unexpected reaction lies the falsity of any overt or covert notion of an agenda to take society to task.

As it is, the greater number of Manto prostitutes really do not behave as one might expect them to. In the end, they vehemently resist categorization into a particular type. Many if not all — such as Siraj and Shakuntala — jealously guard their virginity by not letting any ‘passengers’ (Manto’s favourite word for a prostitute’s client) ride their train. And they all seem to crave love and suffer from its absence in their desolate lives. Siraj had willingly eloped with her lover, who ran away during the night leaving her asleep in the hotel. This clouded her entire existence. Only after she had exacted her vengeance — turning the tables on her fickle lover by spending a whole night with him and then abandoning him in like manner, throwing her burqa over him while he slept at that — could she recover. Society plays little, if any, part in this drama, or in the story ‘Shārdā.’ Sharda gives herself physically to Nazir in a manner he had never experienced before, but she is unwilling to enter the profession or allow her sister to enter it. When she leaves Nazir, who does not believe in love, she does so with a dignity few ‘respectable’ women could rival. Zeenat, the Kashmiri kabutri in ‘Babu Gopinath’, eventually settles down with the respectable Hyderabadi landowner Ghulam Ali. And Kanta opens the door for her pimp Khushia while she is stark naked. Khushia does not like this show of immodesty. ‘You could have let me know you were bathing. I would have come back another time.’ She smiles and throws every ounce of his male pride into a tumultuous vortex with her answer, ‘When you said it was Khushia, I thought, “What’s the harm. It’s just our Khushia. Let him come in.”’

And Navab of ‘Behind the Reeds’, as the narrator tells us, ‘wasn’t averse to her profession’. When her mother, or ‘whoever she was’, introduces her to her first man, the terribly simple and naive girl thinks that this is how young women ‘were initiated into their youth’. She gets ‘accustomed to her prostitute’s existence’ and believes that her life’s ultimate purpose lay in sleeping with men, and she quite liked the expensive silks and jewellery they brought as gifts. There is no trace of regret in her acceptance of this life. But ‘she was every bit an indecent young woman — which is how our noble and chaste ladies are wont to look upon her and her ilk — but truth be told, she didn’t realize even for a moment that she was living a life of sin’.

If we look at these women as individuals, all the talk about society’s role in reducing them to a life of ignominy and want loses much of its force. Manto doesn’t use ‘Spurned’ as an occasion to spill his guts against society’s treatment of ‘fallen’ women. (Nor do these women themselves indulge in this exercise.) He is far removed from handing out judgements. In fact, he would not even use the word ‘fallen’ to describe these women because of its judgemental overtones. Rather, he is using the story as an occasion to discover some truth about the person that Saugandhi is. And in doing so, he shrewdly guards his role as a narrator, never once surrendering his neutrality and objectivity. This is in contrast to a story such as ‘Nannhī ki Nānī’ (Tiny’s Granny), where Ismat Chughtai has smothered the individuality of the granny and turned her into a veritable mouthpiece for the author to vent her righteous anger against society. Manto never allows his narrator to transform into an interventionist, not even when the narrator bears his own name, which happens quite often in his stories. At several points in the short story ‘Sirāj’, Manto purposely alerts us to the fact that as a writer-narrator he has no right to inject his own reactions and thoughts into the story. For instance, ‘This was more than enough detail for me. How I reacted to it is my concern, not something I should tell you, not as a short story writer anyway.’ And, I would rather not talk about the backstory my mind had woven for Siraj, […].’ What lingers in our minds after we are done reading ‘Shārdā’ is her immense grace and dignity, not how good she was at sex, but her love for Nazir. Giving herself so tenderly, so fully was a consequence of that love, not the result of some pathology of eroticism or promiscuity.

It is about time that we discarded the myth about Manto tacitly following some Progressive — Socialist — Reformist agenda in his fiction; if anything, he was following his own agenda as a writer true to his calling.

I believe it should be evident by now that at the time of writing, a writer’s loyalty rests only with himself and his work, not with his society, country and his nation, which is not to deny his role as a citizen. Long ago Muhammad Hasan Askari, perhaps the single most perceptive early critic of Manto, had underscored this role in his article ‘Communal Riots and Our Literature’^* by graphically setting it apart from Manto’s role as a writer. He gives the example of some French writers who had, during the tumultuous period of the Second World War, started to produce a series of underground books with the title Les Éditions de Minuit. They were given a major literary award after France became free but declined to accept it. Everything they had written, they said, was simply to serve the nation. It was not literature, nor had they written it as literature.

The fashionable, entirely unwarranted and uncritical classification of Manto’s corpus by social scientists and historians into stories about (a) Partition and (b) prostitutes ignores the primary function of literature. As Askari comments:

Actually, literature is indifferent to who is behaving like an oppressor and who is not. [. .] Its business is to observe the internal and external behaviour of the oppressor and the oppressed during commission of oppression. Insofar as literature is concerned the external act of oppression and its equally external complements are meaningless. [. .] These stories are not about communal riots (fasādāt). They are about human beings.^*

Could one call Elie Wiesel’s Night a novella about the Holocaust? Is it not rather about the little Jewish boy, the elect of God, who had, as François Mauriac puts it, ‘lived only for God and had been reared on the Talmud, aspiring to initiation into the cabbala, dedicated to the Eternal’^†—the boy who was condemned to witness the horror of the death of God in the depths of his soul and subsequently did not bow to Him?

The unwarranted preoccupation with society at the expense of the individual has, in my opinion, done grave injustice to Manto as a writer — injustice in the sense that socio-political analyses rarely rise above reductionist interpretations of works of literary art. What I have tried to do in my selection is to steer clear of such external determinants and see them as stories about particular individuals. This is reflected, I hope, in the way I have grouped the stories, and even more in the way Manto himself has chosen to title some of his major stories after the names of their protagonists (Radha, Janki, Siraj, Mummy, Khushia, etc.). I have tried to dispel, as best as I can, the notion that the only legacy Manto has left us is his pathological obsession with prostitutes and Partition and join those who wish to restore to his stories the dignity of a world created with love, immense imagination and humanity.

Manto’s major stories, and recently some minor ones, have been translated so often that yet another translation would perhaps seem unwarranted. Initially I was hesitant to undertake this project. Would it be possible to transport into the target language in a readable way, without making too many compromises, the particular ambience of some of his stories and their cultural specificity? Would I be able to tone down, suppress, add or subtract, rearrange content or rewrite simply as a concession to the sensitivities of the English reader? And I also did not think that it would be right to clutter a book of short stories with cultural notes in order to make a story properly glow and resonate for the reader. Some Manto characters breathe in a fictionally recreated cultural space of the Punjab. The swear words they use stubbornly resist translation and whatever may be found by way of their English equivalents sounds not just unnatural but grotesque. Take, for instance, ‘santokh sar ke kachhve’, ‘Oaye Bābā Tal ke karāh parshād’ or ‘Oaye khinzīr ke jhatke’ in ‘The Last Salute’. Or the pun on the word ‘kār’ (car) and the compound ‘kār-sāz’ in ‘Babu Gopinath’, which does not mean ‘car-maker’ but rather one, usually God, who is able to find a way, put things right, or make something unexpectedly come true for you. I have therefore left them in the original. If I were to translate the sentence ‘He heard her clear her throat and then start to sing the ghazal by Ghalib which begins with the line ‘Nukta-chīñ hai gham-e dil. .’ (‘Kingdom’s End’) as ‘He heard her clear her throat, then in a very soft, low voice she sang him a song,’ wouldn’t the omission of this inconspicuous little detail about Ghalib and especially about the particular ghazal result in the loss of the allusion that has a bearing on the story? This verse of Ghalib indirectly suggests a lot about the state of the woman’s mind and her emotions because in her culture women are not supposed to be so open and direct about their feelings for men. The generic word ‘song’ fails to summon up this complexity for the reader. It also suppresses another fact: Manto’s enduring fascination with Ghalib, whose poetry he often quotes in his stories and his non-fiction pieces. Maybe all this is less important for the reader. For me it was not. I decided to bite the bullet. But, of course, I might have done a better job. I have tried to remain as close to the original as I possibly could. As for my failures, which are many, I beg the reader’s indulgence.

Besides stories and non-fiction, Manto also wrote radio plays and at least one stage play, Is Manjhdār Mein (In This Maelstrom), for which he chose the subtitle ‘A Melodrama’.

It is puzzling why Manto called it a ‘melodrama’, which it is not for a number of reasons. Eric Bentley, after rehabilitating ‘tears’ (which only reflect our anxiety not to appear vulnerable in this modern age) as a perfectly natural phenomenon and part of the human condition, defines the main ingredients of melodrama as pity, fear of villain and exaggerated or elevated language.^* While there may be some pity for the central character Amjad — though pity alone does not, indeed should not, qualify a work as melodrama — there is no fear of the villain. The villain is just not there, let alone being superhuman or diabolic. Though melodramatic vision is paranoid^† one does not have to be persecuted by a real flesh-and-blood villain; even the landscape can sometimes oppress and persecute. Manto’s landscape, though, is invested with breathtaking beauty. More importantly, this beauty is not presented as axiomatic. It derives dialectically from the generally positive manner in which the characters react and respond to it. Then again, while a typical melodrama rarely moves beyond pity and fear, In This Maelstrom is not defined by this attribute. Although we do feel a certain sense of pity for Amjad, we feel greater sympathy for his wife Saeeda and wish for her beauty and youth, now hopelessly wasting away, to blossom.

The characters, too, are not the stock characters of a melodrama. Neither cast according to the ‘Progressive’ formula, nor defined by bourgeois moeurs, they vibrate with a life all their own. They are imbued with remarkable individuality and amazing independence of will, and reveal a complex psychology in their thoughts, feelings and actions. Thus Amjad, who has picked Saeeda from among countless other women to be his wife, knows that his choice amounts to no more than the impulse to pick up the finest thing in the market. As for loving her — that, he freely admits to the maid Asghari, he does not. Still this does not stop him from wondering: ‘I can’t understand why I want to keep her shackled in chains whose every link is as uncertain as my life.’ Well aware of the illicit love between his wife and younger brother, he appears to be strangely free of the slightest trace of jealousy, so unlike, one might almost say, most men.

I do not agree with Mumtaz Shirin’s contention that Saeeda is less a character than a ‘symbol of beauty’.^‡ Surely she is an aesthetic attribute, but she is also much more. She is both attractive and aware of her tremendous attraction for men. Nothing so extraordinary perhaps. However, where she parts company with a stereotypical young South Asian Muslim woman is when she ‘unabashedly’, though not without disarming directness and honesty, mentions to Asghari the desires raging inside her, and catalogues her frustrations. She says:

I’m young. I’m beautiful. . numberless desires surge inside me. For seventeen long years I’ve nurtured them with the nectar of my dreams. How can I stifle them? [. .] Call me weak. . cowardly. . immoral. [. .] I confess before you that I cannot ravage the garden of my youth, where the vein of every leaf and flower throbs with the hot blood of my unfulfilled desires. .

And Asghari, the maid: her frequent caustic jibes at the crippled Amjad, in spite of knowing the extremely brittle state of his mind; her scathing, abrasive wit; and, above all, her hesitation in accepting Amjad’s love even though she is in love with him herself — all these raise her above the meek and obsequious world of a South Asian domestic to the plane of a fairly complex personality.

Although Majeed is not fully developed as a character, in coveting the wife of his own brother he, too, appears to be refreshingly less typical.

Melodrama is often characterized by its use of an exaggerated — a heightened, lyrical — form of language. A declamatory, excessively rhetorical style of speech is no doubt noticeable in a couple of long-winding speeches by Amjad addressed to Saeeda at the mid-point in the play and to Asghari at the end, and in a single piece where Saeeda addresses Asghari. But in these instances the elevated language appears called for by event and situation, which it dialectically supports and enhances. It does not appear tired, crude or otherwise logically non sequitur. Moreover, ‘Intensity of feeling’, as Bentley says, ‘justifies formal exaggeration in art’ (p. 204). A brief sequence of emotionally charged utterances would be inadequate ground to place the work in the category of melodrama, or sob-stuff.

Finally, one thing is sure: We certainly do not get a ‘good cry’ or a good laugh out of the play. What we do get instead is the calm of a sobering moment in which our temporarily frozen senses — because of two suicides at the end — gradually thaw out to a sense of beauty and blossoming optimism towards life’s continuity and renewal which is far in excess of our initial shock at the twin suicides. We come to accept, almost as a necessity, the suicides as the price life must pay to remain ongoing and whole. Thus the very subject of the play argues forcefully against its being a melodrama.

Manto, of course, is not interested in celebrating promiscuity per se, here as elsewhere. He, therefore, neither jeers at the invalid husband for the loss of his sexual prowess, nor, on the other hand, helps initiate the lovers in the ways of pleasure. By avoiding any explicit or implicit reference to actual sexual contact — though not to the fact of sexual attraction — between the lovers, he seems to give us a clue to his deeper purpose, which is to transcend the confining circumstances of self-indulgent sensual love itself and give it a creative, complementary role integral to the wider scheme of things.

Except for a few pieces, the balance of Manto’s work presented here is taken from his collected works published in five volumes by Sang-e-Meel Publications of Lahore (1990–95 and 2004). Where this is not the case, the source has been cited in the footnote with the piece in question.

Generally, non-Urdu words (personal names, titles, etc.) have been spelled according to common sense and South Asian custom. Diacritics have been used sparingly in the Preamble and the three article towards the end of the book.

This book of translation owes a great deal to R. Sivapriya of Penguin. Her constant encouragement helped me overcome my initial hesitation to undertake yet another translation of Manto’s stories. I would like to thank Moazzam Sheikh, who collaborated on our translation of the short story ‘Barren’, and my former students Wayne R. Husted and M. Azam Dadi for their collaboration in translating the play In This Maelstrom well over three decades ago. I would also like to thank Jane A. Shum for going over the manuscript and offering valuable suggestions for improvement. Shatarupa Ghoshal has a special claim to my deepest gratitude for her most careful editing of the manuscript and I acknowledge it with the greatest pleasure.

Muhammad Umar Memon

5 January 2015