An open letter to India and Pakistan from Manto

Dear Bombay folks,

Because that’s what the subcontinent is for me. One large ever expanding, ever subsuming Bombay city: a microcosm for the macrocosm we exist in. Those years I spent in Bombay made me what I am today. I am a walking, wandering Bombay. Wherever I would go, I would create a world of my own. That is what is Bombay. It is not just a city. It is an idea that roots itself independent of time and space. And it is a self-nourishing idea, sustaining itself and the one who believes in it. Therefore, when I say “Bombay folks” I mean both Indians and Pakistanis. If you are offended by this greeting, then feel free to be. Others taking offence to my words has been least of my worries.

You’d be wondering why the dead is awake and writing this letter 60 years later. It wasn’t for nothing I got this epitaph engraved on my tomb:

“Here lies Sa’adat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets of storytelling in his breast. Weighed down by the earth he wonders still: Who is the greater writer, God or he?”

Though it is another thing that like this present fake world, my epitaph and my tombstone are also not original anymore - a cheap imitation of what once was my grave. But hindsight makes that epitaph almost prophetic. As if God took cue from my writings and changed his script.

I once wrote I fear this government would stitch a medal to my shroud, which would be an insult to the blemish of love I carry. I hear on my 100th birth anniversary, the government of Pakistan awarded me Nishan-e-Pakistan, its highest civilian honour. I am quite convinced that the bureaucrat or the minister who recommended my name has never read a word from me, leave alone this apprehension of mine.

I remember just before my death, disappointed with both India and Pakistan, I wrote a series of letters to Uncle Sam. In one of the letters, I exhorted Uncle Sam to continue his military aid to Pakistan irrespective of India’s grovelling. I remember telling Uncle Sam, “You are really worried about the integrity of this largest Islamic sultanate of the world and why not, as our mullahs are the best antidote to Russia’s communism.” I knew the best way for the Americans to counter the Soviet was to infuse territories in its influence with the termite of radical Islam. 

I remember ending my exhortation with these words: "The purpose of military aid as far as I understand it is to arm these mullahs, I’m your Pakistani nephew but I am aware of all your machinations but this heightened intelligence is all thanks to your politics (God save it from the evil eye). If this sect of mullahs is armed American-style, then the Soviet Union will have to pick up its spittoon from here, even whose gargles are mixed up in communism and socialism."

Thirty odd years after my death I hear these Jihadi Mullahs freed Afghanistan from the Soviet Union. Though it is another thing that the same evil rears its head as ISIS in Iraq and Syria and al Qaeda everywhere, when you would sow poison, what else do you expect to reap. The sad part is that Uncle Sam is still not taking heed and is persisting with the same sell-arms-stow-my-house-with-cash policy.

I remember once writing a note “Save India from its leaders.” The self-serving hedonist leaders raised the bogey of either an endangered nation or religion and channelised people’s fear for their own purpose in those days. I remember writing, “These people who are commonly known as leaders, view politics and religion as that crippled, lame and injured man, displaying whom our beggars normally beg for money. These so-called leaders go about carrying the carcasses of politics and religion on their shoulders and to simple-minded people who are in the habit of accepting every word uttered to them in high-sounding vocabulary, they bandy about that they will breathe new life into this carcass.” The truth is, “when these leaders cry their hearts out telling people that religion (or nation) is in danger there’s no reality to it. Religion (or nation) is not something which can be endangered. If there is a danger, it is to these leaders who endanger religion to achieve their own ends.” Things have gone worse now. But I guess people of these nations have nothing to complain about. You deserve what you get. Your political leaders are as much a representation of you as your self-gloating, publicity driven, selfie-obsessed, gluttonous, conspicuously consuming, apathetic society. It was pretty evident from the support a filmstar got post his conviction for a hit-and-run case.

I have been accused of derogatorily portraying women. It is quite laughable. And if my critics take umbrage to my mocking, then please look at the way women still find even daily existence a daunting task in our countries. Sixty years later, we have still not been able to free our societies of gender bias, and in fact, men have found newer ways of reinventing their ugliness. Manto would continue holding a mirror to you till eternity with his women, who are truly liberated. Gender just an aspect of their existence, as it is of yours.

I remember writing once: “The times we’re living through right now, if you are ignorant with it then please read my stories. If you find my stories intolerable then that means the society we live in is intolerable. There are no shortcomings in my writings, whatever shortcomings are attributed to me are in fact the shortcomings of the society we live in.”

And I guess this rings true even louder today.

- Sa’adat Hasan Manto

(Few of the original Manto quotes are Raza Naeem’s translations and the others mine. The insertion in parenthesis in one of the original Manto quotes is mine.)