Credit: Newyorker via Wasim Sroya
In the south of Pakistan, where Hindus have lately been kidnapped for ransom and their daughters forcibly converted to Islam, Hindu families have started fleeing to India in trains. As they waved to their relatives from train windows, possibly for the last time, many Hindu girls contorted their faces and wept. To the north, near an industrial city, policemen poured paint over Koranic verses inscribed on Ahmadi graves. This is because Ahmadis have no right to Koranic verses in Pakistan: the law classifies them as non-Muslims and the media regularly portrays them as treacherous deviants from the faith. Still higher up, in a scenic mountain valley, Shias were pulled out of buses, lined up and shot dead by gunmen who may or may not belong to one of Pakistan’s many banned sectarian outfits. And just two weeks ago, not far from the pristine capital, a mob of a hundred and fifty Muslims ran after a mentally handicapped, low-caste Christian girl, wanting to burn her alive for having held in her hand—this was the rumor in her neighborhood—a singed Islamic manual.
In the rest of the country, the end of Ramadan was celebrated with the usual fanfare, show of color, and generosity of spirit.
The hysterical synchronicity of these happenings is typical of the Pakistan encountered nowadays in the news. It is also Manto-esque, which is to say that it feels like it could have been imagined, in exactly these tones, with just such a flatly ironic counterpoint for an ending, more than fifty years ago by a man called Saadat Hassan Manto, the writer whose centennial is being marked this year in Lahore amid an unshakeable and vaguely shaming sense of déjà vu.
In May, for instance, in a darkened auditorium in Lahore, two actors stood on a spotlit stage and read out Manto’s “Dekh Kabira Roya” (“Kabir Saw and Wept”), a story he wrote soon after Pakistan’s creation. It shows the medieval Indian poet Kabir, a sayer of contrary things, freakishly transplanted in the streets of a “newly independent state.” Kabir is still in the Indian subcontinent (people have castes here), though it is now the middle of the twentieth century (intellectuals are arguing about Stalin). All around him citizens are excitedly going about the implementation of new laws. Only Kabir is “grief-stricken”; he bursts into tears when he sees, on the top of a building, a desecrated statue of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi (it has been bound up in jute fiber because the religion in the new state forbids idolatry), and again when he hears a general urging his troops to “fight the enemy on empty stomachs.” Elsewhere in the new state, people are listening to sermons about the importance of beards and veils, while prostitutes with “ravaged and anxiety-ridden faces” ponder a new law that requires them to find husbands in thirty days.
such a low profile Ummah has fallen to. Shame on them.
Some so called Muslim does not know what Allaah (S.W.T.) SAYS IN THE NOBLE QURAAN.
after Ayatul Kursi the verse is:” LET THERE BE NO COMPULSION IN RELIGION “.
please encourage the people to read Al Quraan, understand & practise upon it.
So, now Manto is the “seer” of Pakistan, at least the present state of it. Manto who, by his own admission, wrote when he needed money, by saying something like: I often try to sit at my desk to write but cannot yet when needs press me, a short story comes out of my pocket and I write it up.
Anyone who writes to be sold would sensationalize stories picked from contemporary news. Most of his post-partition stories come under that.
Dekh Kabeera Roya is a little different but reminds me of Shaukat Thanawi’s Sodeshi Rail (National Railways). When changes come or are in the offing, a writer with imagination can come up with a piece like that. But then something happening as imagined is mere coincidence. I would hate awarding a sainthood for that.
Finally and let me be fair. The man was a great writer, in that his work intrigued by raising some new points whether or not he was trying to earn a living. For instance I like his short story, Bu (Odor). Even though a bit Maupassant-esque, it was something new in the setting of pre-partition India and it addressed feelings and actions whose mention was taboo.
Manto was a very sensitive and kind man too and I say it based on Asmat Chughtai’s testimony, though I would not mention the episode that she used to draw that conclusion. The point is the man was a human being and a good writer, who lived his life as it suited him, let’s leave it at that and let’s not try to canonize him for one mere flight of fancy.