My Name Is Radha

Marginotions^* Muhammad Hasan Askari

A new literary movement has added some priceless gems to Urdu fiction in the past ten years. However, incontrovertibly, much of the new short story seems to be inspired not so much by the writer’s inner creative passion as by external conditions and events, regardless of whether they had relevance for the writer personally or his milieu. Perhaps it was the result of the then prevalent belief that man’s inner life could by changed simply by changing his outside conditions. So this is how it has been generally. Whenever our writers have slumped creatively, they have not blamed themselves for it or worried about rekindling their creative fires by internal effort; rather, they have sat back smugly, attributing their lack of creativity to the absence of external events requiring expression in literary creation. Some six or seven years ago I heard an Urdu short story writer, who had gained considerable popularity by writing stories about poverty, slavery and Kashmir, say that spring tide would break over literature should the Japanese invade India and cause a lot of commotion.

God has an uncanny way of making wishes come true — the Japanese did not attack India but famine did. One became rich by selling rice on the black market, another amassed heaps of popularity by churning out story after story about the calamity. Nothing wrong about it: whatever happens in the world happens for the good of man. Famine, in those days, became such a hot and hallowed subject that even students dropped writing about their sexual experiences in favour of the starving humanity, arrogantly confident that no editor of a literary periodical would dare turn down their work, and if he did, he would be chastised for being stony-hearted and utterly insensitive. In short, our writers had a field day thanks to the Bengal famine. Story after story popped out — events, emotions, everything was there for the taking, so why toil over it.

The fury of famine had barely subsided when the seamen’s strike broke out; elsewhere a riot erupted during victory celebrations. Well, one thing or the other kept the business going. And when 1947 rolled along, it was like an unbidden windfall from God Almighty. You could write a tragic story, a comic essay, grate your teeth over man’s life, or expose the machinations of the colonial powers — anything and everything was game. If you had had enough of these, well, generate some heat by stories of the violation of women’s bodies, peppering the accounts now and then with a dash of uncommon incidents of human kindness and compassion in the midst of crass brutality, only to wonder at the end with utter naivety: Have Hindus and Muslims banished their reason? Brothers until yesterday, why are they so hell-bent on spilling each other’s blood today? As for the danger that you may be taking sides, that’s no problem at all. If five Hindus were butchered in the beginning of the story, make sure that you even out the number of the slain on either side — kill off five Muslims towards the end of the story. The blame for the atrocities should be distributed equally. The crux is this: you should prove your love for humanity, pure heartedness, impartiality and desire for peace, without offending the sensibilities of anyone.

If someone is a skilled tightrope walker, doesn’t he have a claim on our admiration? Shouldn’t we praise him? After all, expressing one’s noble sentiments and thereby stirring up the noble sentiments of others, too, is a way of serving the cause of humanity. The trouble with noble sentiments, though, is that they can’t create literature. I don’t have some imaginary and inoperable criterion before me as I say this. The fact is literature on fasādāt (riots) has failed to abide by the very conditions it has imposed upon itself, the primary condition being that writers will speak the truth, nothing but the truth. At the same time, they are worried about offending Hindus and Muslims. Impartiality is taken to mean that neither party be portrayed as more culpable than the other. This literature wants to condemn zulm (inequity), cruelty and brutality, but shies away from calling inequity what it is. No, it doesn’t want to assume that responsibility. We do not demand this kind of truth — falsehood from literature as we do from books on history, sociology or politics. Our demand from a writer is not that he should speak truth about an ideology or the external world but that he should speak truth about himself. Writers on riots may have written truthfully about the whole world, but they certainly haven’t about themselves. They go to great lengths to hide their natural inclinations and partiality, although it is a biological necessity for such feelings to surge during traumatic upheavals such as Partition. If these writers truly want to make their stories meaningful in human terms, it is imperative that they admit their own human weaknesses before all else. One can’t create true literature by looking away from truths and falsehoods within oneself. Such looking-away can produce only popular literature because the common reader too only wants to assure himself that his noble sentiments haven’t deserted him.

Actually, literature isn’t at all concerned with who is oppressing and who is not. Its main concern is to observe the inner and external attitude of the oppressor and the oppressed when an act of outrage is being committed. External acts of aggression and their equally aggressive complements are entirely meaningless insofar as literature is concerned. Our writers look only at the social aspect of tyranny, turning a blind eye to its effect on the inner lives of the oppressed and the oppressor. Guns and swords abound in their stories, but never the living hand that pulls the trigger or the equally alive chest that receives the bullet or the wound. God forbid, it is not my intention to question their sincerity. Certainly some are truly good-hearted and good-intentioned. However, ordinary good heartedness and good intention perform no useful function in literature. They wish to incite emotions of intense abhorrence towards aggression among readers, by portraying external acts of inequity. But unless we know the human background of an act, its mere external demonstration is unlikely to produce any long-lasting, palpable and deeply meaningful reaction in us. We can love or hate humans, not oppressors and the oppressed.

One method used by our writers on riots to excite revulsion against tyranny is to create dread among readers by enacting graphic scenes of horror before them. But the carnage of 1947 is so fresh in our mind, its devastation so vivid in the memory of those who witnessed or heard about it from their close friends, that the mere recital of an inventory of atrocious acts leaves them cold. Their nerves are no longer frayed when they read about the rape of a few women or the slaughter of some children. This period is so extraordinary that singular acts of oppression have become commonplace. Exceptional events no longer register with people or even arouse their curiosity, let alone their moral sense. So those riot stories weren’t literature, but the pity is they didn’t fulfil their social purpose in a fitting manner either: what they offered didn’t even amount to news.

Manto, too, has written on communal riots: comic vignettes and short fictional pieces. A gross error on my part to say ‘on communal riots.’ His stories are not about communal riots; they are about the human beings who appear in them in different forms, as prostitutes, as spectators, and so on. But they are basically humans — the only difference being that they have been portrayed as either oppressors or oppressed — and communal riots in particular circumstances. Manto hasn’t bothered about a social purpose at all. If man could be reformed by exhortation alone, Mr Gandhi wouldn’t have lost his life. Manto nurtures no grandiose notions about the efficacy of short stories to reform nor has he saddled himself with such a responsibility. True, he narrates some incidents, but is careful to steer away from judging them as good or bad. He doesn’t curse the oppressor nor does he shed tears for his victim, or label the oppressor as necessarily evil and the oppressed as a good person. The communal riots that have taken place on the Indian subcontinent are an exceedingly complex phenomenon, enmeshed as they inextricably are in not just a history that goes back quite a few centuries but also an equally-long future. The nearness of the events doesn’t allow one to label them good or evil so flippantly. A sensible writer at least cannot stoop to the level of politicians and issue indictments about such harrowing incidents. Manto has done what any honest — honest not in its political meaning — writer who is writing in the immediate aftermath of those harrowing conditions and events ought to do. Manto has entirely flung the question of good and evil out of the discussion. His perspective is neither political, nor sociological nor moral. If anything it is literary and creative. He has only tried to see the relation of an act of oppression with the different demands of the personality of the oppressor and his victim. What other impulses, besides the desire to tyrannize impels an oppressor? How much space does inequity claim for itself in the oppressor’s cerebrum? Does he lose interest in other activities of life or does he participate in them? Manto excites neither emotions of compassion nor of anger or hate. He only invites the reader to reflect in a literary and creative manner on man’s psyche, his character and his personality. If he does wish to excite an emotion, it is the one that behooves a true artist, viz., a feeling of infinite wonder and curiosity about life. In the entire corpus on communal riots the only thing that merits to be called a human document are these stories.^*

And yet, inasmuch as Manto’s stories are genuine literary creations, they also do not fail to affect us morally, though this was not Manto’s primary purpose. Creating was all he was after. What surprises us during unusual circumstances is not the extraordinary character of events and acts but, rather, very ordinary and everyday things. Perhaps it is neither surprising nor unexpected that after killing two hundred women and children a killer would string their skulls to wear as a trophy around his neck. When killing becomes commonplace it fails to terrify, but when we watch the killer’s anxiety over dirtying the train compartment with the blood and gore of his victims, we feel a disquieting chill run down our spine. Murderers’ uninterrupted killing does not create horror; what does create horror is that such sticklers for cleanliness could kill with impunity. Ultimately, it is the juxtaposition of opposites, of paradoxes, of contradictions that confers upon a piece its ultimate meaningfulness. The most extraordinary acts during extraordinary conditions tell us only that those conditions can reduce man to the state of animal. But his preoccupation with very ordinary things as he commits an exceptional act gives us a deeper and a more fundamental insight about him: he is both human and animal at the same time, all the time. The frightening aspect here is how he could bear being animal in spite of his humanity, which is not without its comforting aspect: with all his bestiality man can never entirely rid himself of his humanity.

Both aspects — the frightening and comfort-giving — exist side by side in Manto. Man in these jocular vignettes appears in all his helplessness, folly, refinement and purity. Manto’s laughter is dipped in vitriol; nonetheless it consoles us too. It is no small achievement to say out loud that even during extraordinary conditions man’s interest in very ordinary things and his equally mundane inclinations simply couldn’t be suppressed. Manto neither portrays man as oppressor nor as oppressed. He only points out that man is a strange creature, a compound of discordant elements, and then he keeps quiet.

This, in a manner of speaking, does create quite a poignant feeling of despair. However, if you look at man’s contradictory nature closely, it will not fail to inspire a feeling of true optimism either. Had he been only entirely good or entirely bad, he would be extremely dangerous. What gives us hope is that one can’t be sure about man — he can be good, but then again he can be bad. Additionally, he is caught within the bonds of his humanity; he can’t become an angel, any more than Satan can. However much he may strive to become exceptional, the demands of everyday life will drag him back to his limits. The power of ordinary quotidian life is such that if he cannot become an exceedingly good man, neither can he be an extraordinarily bad one. This ordinary life will always straighten out his crookedness and knock him back into shape.

The most prominent merit of these stories is the acknowledgment of precisely this power and greatness of quotidian existence. Other writers endeavour to shepherd Hindus and Muslims back to the Straight Path by shaming them. However, after we are done reading their short stories, we are never sure whether their exhortation will bear fruit or not. Manto, on the other hand, wishes to shame no one nor drag anyone to the Straight Path. He tells mankind, with a highly ironical smile, that try as hard as you may to wander off the Straight Path, you are unlikely to go very far. In that sense, Manto displays an unfailing confidence in the nature of man, while others insist on seeing man only in a particular light. Before accepting him they foist some conditions on him. Manto accepts him in his true colours, regardless of what they may be. He has seen that man’s humanity is so strong that his barbarity simply cannot extinguish it. It was this humanity in which he had placed his trust.

These tiny droll vignettes of Manto are the most harrowing and most optimistic piece of writing to emerge in the entire corpus on communal riots. His horror and optimism have nothing to do with the horror and optimism of politicians or the pure-hearted servants of humanity. They are the horror and optimism of a writer. Disputation and reflection play no part in them. If anything does, it is a solid creative experience. Which is Manto’s singular distinction.