[raajveer]

Manto was in Bombay when he heard the news about Pakistan: the British, quitting India at last, had decided in their haste to let the Muslim-majority regions in the east and west become a separate country. To a man like Manto—a Muslim who grew up in Sikhism’s holiest city, who derived his livelihood from the cosmopolitan film business and had many Hindu friends—this religious designation of a landmass must have seemed unreal. “Where were they going to inter the bones that had been stripped of the flesh of religion by vultures and birds of prey?” Manto would ask later, and not wholly rhetorically, recalling the plunder and flag-waving and killing that had broken out all around him. “Now that we were free, had subjection ceased to exist? Who would be our slaves? Thousands of Hindus and Muslims were dying all around us. Why were they dying?”

The answers were distressingly near. Even in Bombay, now a part of “secular” India, “the communal atmosphere was becoming more vicious by the day.” At the Bombay Talkies film studio where Manto was employed, Hindu staffers began sending anonymous letters to the management, demanding the removal of Muslims from high posts and threatening “everything from murder to the destruction of the studio.” Manto, suddenly a Muslim among Hindus, panicked. He “stopped going to Bombay Talkies.” He “began to drink heavily” and “all day long” would “lie on [his] sofa in a sort of daze.”

Much has been made of Manto’s decision in that difficult hour to flee to Pakistan. His friend Ismat Chughtai, herself a Muslim writer and self-avowed progressive who stayed on in India, saw in it a proof of Manto’s opportunism. She quotes him as saying that “the future looks beautiful in Pakistan” because Muslim migrants could now “get the houses of people who’ve fled from there.” But once in Lahore, now Pakistan, Manto was inconsolable. “Despite my best efforts,” he writes, “I could not dissociate India from Pakistan and Pakistan from India.” What was such a writer—one who saw maddening continuities where borders had been drawn—to do?

He could begin by putting down his most immediate impressions of the partition violence. “Siyah Hashiye” (“Black Margins”), published in October, 1948, is a collection of “sketches,” some as short as a paragraph: in “Jelly,” a murdered ice vendor’s blood has merged on the road with ice melted from his pushcart, and a child who drives past it in a horse-carriage mistakes it for jelly. In “Warning,” a rich man is dragged out of his house by a mob and kicked to the ground. The mob is about to kill him when the man gets up, removes the dust from his clothes “with great dignity” and “wagging a finger at the rioters” says, “You can kill me, but I am warning you, don’t you dare touch my money!” In “The Garland,” another mob, this one in Lahore, frantically descends on the statue of a Hindu philanthropist (Hindus began to flee Lahore as soon as it was “given” to Pakistan). One of the rioters is about to place a garland of shoes around the statue’s neck when he is shot by police and taken to the hospital—a hospital built by the same Hindu philanthropist. And this is what happens in “Modesty”:


The rioters brought the train to a stop. Those who belonged to the other religion were methodically picked out and slaughtered. After it was all over, those who remained were treated to a feast of milk, custard pies and fresh fruit.

Before the train moved off, the leader of the assassins made a small farewell speech: “Dear brothers and sisters, since we were not sure about the time of your train’s arrival, regretfully we were not able to offer you anything better than this most modest hospitality. We would have liked to have done more.”

That is all there is: murder—methodical and quick—followed by a feast and an ingratiating speech. Note the withholding of tags: we don’t know the location of the massacre or the religion of the killers. All we have is a spurt of base instincts. (Including false modesty, present even in carnage.) Though “Modesty” is unrelated in plot or sequence to the other sketches in “Siyah Hashiye,” it fits in the whole—like a snapshot in a slide show. Taken one at a time, these sketches enact the speed, randomness, and anonymity of the partition violence; cumulatively they expose the partition—the coming-into-being of two flag-waving nation-states—as little more than an orgy of loot and blood. Manto’s eye for irony here is sharp as ever. And the fragmented feel of his “sketches” represents a formal breakthrough—Manto has blasted away the conventions of the short story and arrived at a jagged approximation of the partition trauma.

But the timing of “Siyah Hashiye” was off. The literary scene in Pakistan had already broken down into factions: on one side were the progressive writers, now taking cues from the Soviet Union and calling for a socialist reform of the new state, which was the project of “a few reactionaries, capitalists and feudal landlords”3; and on the other side were “liberal” writers who disdained “Art for the sake of the Party” and were more inclined to peddle the idea of a fragile and imperiled new state in need of “nation-building.” In such a fight, of what use were Manto’s writings, which offered Pakistan neither a Communist cure nor a patriotic facelift?

He was punished. The progressives called “Siyah Hashiye” reactionary; Manto responded by saying that he didn’t “care at all about ‘Progressivism.’” His next story about the partition, titled “Thanda Gosht” (“Cold Flesh”), was even more unmindful of the literary temperature: Ishwar Singh, a Sikh recently returned from a round of partition killing, can’t bring himself to make love to his mistress. The mistress suspects him of infidelity—why else can’t he get it up? In a fit of jealousy she stabs Ishwar Singh with his own dagger. Bleeding to death, Ishwar Singh admits that he tried to rape an unconscious Muslim girl, only to find her already dead (the “cold flesh” of the title). While it makes some literary stabs (death as contagion, etc.), “Thanda Gosht” is, ultimately, a racy little thing, relying on that last shocking detail for effect—and may well live up to a charge of sensationalism.

But in Pakistan the charge brought against “Thanda Gosht” was much more serious. A local bureaucrat named Chaudhry Muhammad Hussain, “one of Manto’s old tormentors,” took the story to mean that “we Muslims are so utterly without a sense of honor that Sikhs can rape even our dead daughters.”