[raajveer]

Manto was back in the dock.

A protracted court trial in Lahore had him worrying about the punishment, which came to three years in jail and a fine of three hundred rupees. Manto appealed the verdict. Eventually, after a lot of worrying (and drinking), he was let off the hook by a judge who wore a conspicuously Islamic beard. (“If I sentence Saadat Hassan Manto,” the judge had said with a Manto-esque smile, “he will go around telling everyone that he was sentenced by a man with a beard.”)

Manto now found himself in the singularly unfortunate position of being branded a “progressive” by the state and a “reactionary” by the progressives. In an essay written at this time and addressed to his readers, Manto admits to feeling “a strange melancholy.” He had “rebelled against the great upheaval that the partition of the country caused” and recovered from that “sea of blood” some “pearls of regret.” (He means his partition stories.) But these pearls had found no place in Pakistan. Manto the writer had suffered, but so had Manto the man: “My present life is full of hardship. After working day and night, I barely make enough to fulfill my daily needs. The fear that keeps gnawing at me is that were I to die suddenly who will look after my wife and three little daughters?”

There was in Pakistan at this time at least one remaining source of reassurance for such a writer. About to lock the unstable new state into a Cold War alliance, the U.S. was looking for well-disposed Pakistani writers to help realize its earliest projections of soft power. Manto seems to have come into America’s sights for his attack on the progressive writers. One day he was visited by a man from the U.S. Embassy who offered him five hundred rupees for one of his stories. (The going rate was fifty.) Startled, Manto told the American he wrote in Urdu and not in English. But the American said he needed the story in Urdu “because we have a journal that is published in the Urdu language.” Manto insisted on taking no more than three hundred rupees and told the American that what he wrote would “not be to your liking, nor will I give you the right to make changes.” The American never went back to Manto for the story. Nevertheless, Manto fulfilled his pledge, however creatively: in place of the story he produced a “Letter to Uncle Sam.” In this letter Manto uses the voice of an “obedient nephew” writing to his “Most Respected Uncle,” cleverly mimicking the formalities of a traditional adult-child and, by implication, patron-client relationship. In between gauche-sounding, plausibly nephew-like admissions (“I can never understand why so many of your people wear glasses”) and horny asides (“Uncle, your women are so beautiful”), Manto makes a statement such as this: “As long as Pakistan needs wheat, I cannot be impertinent with you.” The resulting letter has a curiously menacing feel, like a cartoon that flares repeatedly into lifelike horror. In this way, in the course of just a few pages, Manto draws attention not only to the enforced nature of his performance but also to what lurks around it: the exploitative and toxic relationship between master and slave.

In subsequent letters this discordance becomes more audible: Manto’s fourth “Letter to Uncle Sam,” written in February 1954, has him brashly telling Uncle that his “admiration and respect for you are going up at about the same rate as your progress towards a decision to grant military aid to Pakistan.” The nephew then gives Uncle Sam some earnest advice: “[You] must sign a military pact with Pakistan because you are seriously concerned about the stability of the world’s largest Islamic state, since our mullah is the best antidote to Russian communism. Once military aid starts flowing, the first people you should arm are these mullahs.” And then, a few lines later, the nephew looks Uncle Sam in the eye: “I think the only purpose of military aid is to arm these mullahs. I am your Pakistani nephew and I know your moves. Everyone can now become a smart ass, thanks to your style of playing politics.”

It is worth noting that in 1954 America’s romance with Pakistan was only just getting started. U.S. funding of Pakistani jihadis was still two decades away, the blowback from that cynical move and the breakdown of U.S.-Pakistan relations another five decades into the future. But Manto had put his finger to the wind and sensed the coming disaster. Or so it seems to us today. The fact is that when he wrote his prophetic letters to Uncle Sam, Manto was already an alcoholic. (“Had this whiskey been distilled in your country,” he told Uncle Sam, “you would have destroyed the distillery with an atom bomb….”) To recover his senses he was sent again and again to the local sanatorium.

But even in this last bleary phase of his life, Manto remained himself: unable to abide by any constitution, least of all his own, a compulsive ironic. It was these faculties—he might have called them his tics—that had throughout made him undermine conventional narratives, but creatively, so that in effect he seemed to have mined those narratives for hard truths. Often this method failed, as in his supercilious stories. But just as often it struck gold. Indeed, many of the reigning narratives of Manto’s time—the “two-nation theory” that eternally separates India from Pakistan, the Soviet-style Communism of the progressive writers, the pacts of mutual interest between America and Pakistan—have now fallen apart in ways that make Manto’s mockeries of them sound extra-worldly.

This is not to deny the power of Manto’s vision. His seeing, despite censure from ideologues, in the partition violence of 1947 the rapid breakdown of a social contract—something that was “not an aberration”4 in the region’s history, and not a matter of “politics” alone—was indeed visionary, and makes him a writer of special interest for anyone who cares about Pakistan, where so many forms of random-seeming violence now crowd the news. (A good introduction for English-speaking readers is “Kingdom’s End,” a selection of Manto’s stories translated by Khalid Hasan.)

A little before his death, in 1955, Manto had worried—it is hard to tell whether he was being sarcastic as usual—that the Pakistani government might one day “find itself pleased with me and place a medal on my coffin, which would be a great insult to my commitment to what I believe in.”

This month, on the occasion of Pakistan’s sixty-fifth birthday, in the year of Manto’s hundredth, the Pakistani government did just that: after years of neglect and denial, it gave in to a Manto-esque irony and awarded him the Nishan-e-Imtiaz (“Sign of Distinction”) medal.