The many voices of Manto

Though they evoke revulsion, depictions of violence also occasionally convey moral decay and force one to confront the existence of unthinkable realities.

- Shafey Kidwai

Urdu short-story writer Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955), who saw it as an elemental instinct that can serve as a vehicle for existential revelation, understood the potential of violence to reflect the innate wickedness of humankind. Manto’s graphic literary response to the catastrophe of Partition has cemented his stature.

His harrowing writing about communal strife, political repression and sexual exploitation stemming from the cruelty of these new borders puts him in a category alongside two chroniclers of the Holocaust, Primo Levi (1919-1987) and Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951).

There has been a proliferation of translations over the past three decades but the Anglophone world still hasn’t been exposed to the thematic diversity of his lean, ironic prose. Manto’s essential identity is not tied to Toba Tek Singh, Babu Gopi Nath, Hatak, Phundane Ram Khilawin and the like. He also told familiar stories in an unsettling, psychologically ambiguous idiom, and these stories, a trove of the unsaid, rendered with extraordinary candour, are seldom translated or anthologised. In Bismillah and Other Stories, translator and literary historian Rakshanda Jalil presents 25 of Manto’s less-discussed stories.