by RAKHSHANDA JALIL
The progressives who marginalised him can now redress an old wrong
Centenaries are useful occasions for reflection and understanding. In the case of someone as contentious as Saadat Hasan Manto, his hundredth birth anniversary, on May 11, offers an occasion to make amends. Of course, those who regard Manto as a writer of a “certain” sort of stories would do well to study his oeuvre to understand its range and complexity. But, more importantly, those forces and those writers’ blocs — now diminished and depleted — which marginalised and mocked Manto during his lifetime can redress an old wrong. I am referring to the influential group of writers called the “progressives”, who had established the Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936 and in the years leading up to Partition set themselves up as a controlling authoritarian body.
Put simply, if the progressives had an ideology, Manto had a world view; both had their roots in the Russian revolution, both gave unequivocal emphasis to social change. In the early years, the progressives were willing to ignore Manto’s lack of ideology since he kept churning out story after story about the working class, especially the outcast and the marginalised. A story like “Naya Qanoon” (New Law) was, in fact, widely acknowledged by the progressives and found a place in the many anthologies edited by progressive critics and editors. The story’s central character, Mangu the Coachman, who believes a new law has been passed that has given independence to India, takes on an English Tommy and in the process becomes an emblem of the subaltern’s desire for freedom. In his unlettered, untutored, instinctive defiance of British rule and in his impetuous headlong rush to throw off the imperial yoke, Mangu became the progressives’ version of Everyman. Till the 1940s, the progressives were content to let Manto be; while they were happy enough to appropriate the more political stories in his first two collections — Aatish Parey (1936) and Manto ke Afsane (1940) — trouble began to brew with the third collection Dhuan (1942). One story, “Boo”, in particular, irked the progressives, causing Sajjad Zaheer, founder-member of the increasingly powerful PWA, to publicly condemn it at a conference in Hyderabad in October 1945. A resolution against obscenity was drafted (a resolution that included references to Manto, Ismat Chughtai and Miraji); fortunately, the move to pass it was scuttled by the maverick Maulana Hasrat Mohani who called the assembly of writers to make a judicious distinction between obscenity and latif havasnaki (“refined sexual desire”)!
The Indian Express for more
(Thanks to Harsh Kapoor of SACW)