the assignment by saadat hasan manto

2 Rules of Writing

Saadat Hassan Manto: “The Assignment”

Author’s notes: .

Content warnings for self-harm, political violence, sexual violence.  

I consistently refer to Manto’s hometown as “Bombay” rather than Mumbai. I do this for two reasons. The lesser reason is that “Bombay” is simply Portuguese for “Beautiful Bay,” whereas Mumbai is short for “Mumbadevi” and the change was made in 1995 at the instigation of Hindu nationalist groups. The greater reason is because my partner continues to use “Bombay” as the name of her hometown and it would be ludicrous of me to diverge from her practice as if I knew better than she. I would stand justly accused, in the words of a particularly picturesque Bombay phrase, of “teaching your father to fuck.”

What’s so Special about “The Assignment” by Saadat Hassan Manto?

“The Assignment” by Saadat Hasan Manto is a story I like to give my writing students when I want to desolate them. Lots of stories make you cry; lots of stories make you think sad, sweet thoughts about mortality or loss. Or about the state of the world and how much of the work of justice yet remains. “The Assignment” hits harder than any of them. It’s such a uniquely troubling story that I’ve never been able to articulate to my personal satisfaction why. 

There are lots of stories that hurt to read. And lots of stories you can use to mess with your students. By which I mean teach them how to write well. By which I kind of mean mess with them. There are stories where the dog dies at the end, which is a cheap trick but boy does it work (full disclosure: yeah I’m guilty of this; in my first-published short story , the dog doesn’t quite die at the end but that last trip to the vet is days or weeks away at most). 

Why does it so often seem like that’s the point of a short story: to ruin your readers’ day? It’s all the more impressive that, against such a tough field, “The Assignment” is uniquely traumatizing to readers.

What’s it About?

I will link the story here , and honestly, it’s better if you read it. Not just because it’s one of the greatest short stories ever written, but because me telling you what happens does as much justice to the original as those movie-captions that say “heroic music playing.” 

The quick-and-dirty is this: The year is about 1948. India has yanked itself free of the UK but now Pakistan and India are going their separate ways, and not amicably. With the riots of Partition happening all around Amritsar, there is a knock at the door of a bedridden Muslim judge. His daughter reluctantly answers to find, not Gurmukh Singh (the old Sikh man who used to visit every Ramadan to deliver a small present to the judge), but rather Gurmukh’s son Santokh, here to carry out his father’s yearly errand.

The son extols the judge’s virtues and waxes poetic as he describes his late father’s gratitude to the judge for long-ago dismissing a frivolous lawsuit. He then bestows the small package and goes on his way. All, it seems, is, if not well, then certainly not as bad as it could be. But once away from the home, Santokh is approached by–

Okay I lied. I’m not going to tell you the story. I tried a couple times but I can’t bring myself to type the words. It’s just too good a story. Go read it . I’ll wait.

Let’s Talk Themes and Ideas

You’re back? Good. Where to begin? Let’s start with those topoi, those commonplaces, that are so useful in a writer’s task of compressing a short story down to the fewest possible words. One character in the story is a stern but fair old judge. One character is a vulnerable young woman. And one is an earnest but dubiously trustworthy young man. The setting is a city that is tearing itself apart with rioting. 

We’ve seen these characters b efor e–in one form or another–in tales and novels aplenty. They might be Karenin, Anna, and Vronsky; or Mr. Bennet, Lydia, and Wickham. Or, with slight alterations, they might be Ram, Sita, and Ravan. As readers, we are primed to sympathize with these characters. And we are primed to predict where they will go and what will happen to them based on our expectations. Manto even throws in, as if for good measure, an old trustworthy servant who proves disloyal (or maybe he simply proves mortal).

With typical characters and a typical-enough setting, we have the ground laid for a typical story. This is a phenomenon that I’ve heard referred to as “ tone armor .” One expectation when reading any short story is that things will end badly. You have much greater odds of dying in a short story than of getting laid . But even if things end badly. You can at least hope that it will have been worth it. That you the reader will be able to finish “Daisy Miller” or “Ivan Ilyich” or “Benito Cereno” and say: “Well it’s too bad what happened to them… but what a ride!” 

Suffering but without Hope

A lot of stories in the realist tradition are like this. They give you hope in oblique ways: “Okay the main character died but at least…” That sort of thing. And “The Assignment” looks like it’s going to be that sort of story. All three main characters have the potential to drape themselves with a kind of tragic glory: the elderly Muslim judge in a Sikh neighborhood who will not be intimidated into leaving. His daughter who stays with him out of a sense of filial piety. A young Sikh man who has it in him to make a choice in the direction either of callousness or compassion.

Add to that the depth of suffering depicted in the story: in a few penstrokes, Manto puts us in the world of The Partition of India . A world in which there are no good choices. Surely in such a world, one character making one Good Choice will be like a candle in the darkness. When Santokh Singh starts heroically speechifying about debts of honor, it’s basically a fait accompli that he’s going to do something heroic to save the innocent girl on the cusp of womanhood… or die in the attempt.

But that speech ends the way heroic speeches end in real life: with nobody particularly doing anything and everything running its course as it would have if the heroic speech had not been heroically speechified. I remember reading that speech and its aftermath for the first time and being so crushed. I wanted so desperately for someone to do something. And yet, on subsequent rereadings, I can’t find Santokh Singh uniquely villainous. 

Manto and the Theme of Choices

Nobody in this story makes particularly Good Choices. Or even acts particularly well. There is the judge himself. Is he staying in his home out of courage? No; just denial. There are an 11-year-old kid and a servant, both of whom act basically how you’d expect them to act. The judge doesn’t have any answers, so it would be absurd to expect them to have any, either.

There’s a 17-year-old-girl who acts how you’d expect her to in such an emergency. Without an avenue to express her displeasure to her sick father, and so taking it out on those around her. And there’s a young man who could either act with compassion towards the people his father has told him to honor or could side with the rioters in perpetrating violence against this prominent Muslim. But he is the one we focus on th e most because his actions have the greatest consequences. And yet his actions are simple. He obeys his father in delivering the gift. Then he obeys the laws of necessity and survival in leaving the house to its fate.

Why is it that such a simple action should b e so ups etting? By doing both the right thing and the wrong thing, he degrades his act of kindness into something cruel and cold. And elevates the violence visited on the judge’s house to levels of horror and tragic irony rarely seen outside of Shakespeare.

Manto’s Story through Successive Rereadings

So much for a summary of some of the characters and themes of the story. But the mark of a good story is that it changes not once upon rereading, but again and again. Or rather, the changes in the reader are reflected in the story upon each rereading. My last time through, I was struck by the character of the girl. On the surface, she is a bully. Her father tells her to stay put and so she stays put. But then, since she cannot stand up to her father, she screams at the servant instead, prompting him to go out in search of medicine, whereupon the servant disappears, either killed or fled.

Upon returning to the story again, though, I was struck with new compassion for her when it occurred to me that she is the one most at risk. All of the characters in the story face death, but she faces the possibility, no, the likelihood, of being raped before she dies. All of this is very much on her mind. She has been looking out over the city like a princess in a fairy-tale wondering when her death, and worse, will come. So it’s not that surprising that her habits in this story are not the best–unable to reason with her father but venting her wrath on the servant. She’s going through a lot.

Keep Calm and Carry On

There is a pattern here: each of the characters does their best to act as if they are in a normal situation. The judge sets the tone with his not-to-worry attitude. The daughter goes to answer the door as if the city were not roiling with violence. The young man delivers his package as if it were a normal Ramadan. Talks to the girl as if it were a normal Ramadan. Then engages in a few words of casual conversation with a handful of men as if they were not holding blades and bombs. The characters in the story have all decided that they don’t have the mental bandwidth, or the language, to think about what was going on, and so have decide to act as if everything were perfectly normal. The results are… chilling.

Manto and his City

There’s another character in this story that I didn’t notice until… Well until just now, really. The city of Amritsar. Manto was a city-boy at heart, and the push and pull of all of the competing and cooperating wills making up a city was his element. A city is, in its way, a beautiful thing: so many people from so many different places all working together to create a home; a habitat.

Before Partition, Manto is reminding us, Amritsar was a city, where, as cheesy as it sounds, rich and poor and Sikh and Muslim looked out for each other at least a little bit. And now that city; that cooperation is on fire. It’s hard not to hear echoes of Manto’s beloved Bombay in this story.

How I Discovered Manto and What his Work Means to Me

A side note: it’s only by chance that I read this story at all. Manto is not well known outside of South Asia and its diaspora. I came to this story late. My partner is a fan of Manto’s work. Like Manto, she is a product of Bombay, India’s cosmopolitan city, and it was there I first read this story. Bombay, when Manto lived there, was an international city, because the various parts of India, though under British control, were still independent nations and princely states. And it was in this soup of languages and cultures that Manto wrote his stories and his radio-plays. 

Manto and Bombay

Manto loved Bombay so much. And, having been there a few times; having ridden its crowded commuter rails and petted its stray dogs and tasted its ostentatiously spicy street food, I can’t claim to understand; but I can claim to have begun to see what he saw. The beauties and textures of Bombay are unique. When he was forced by Partition to flee to Lahore in the newly created Pakistan, Manto drank himself to death within a matter of years.

Manto and Pakistan

It’s a special kind of “fuck you” not only to Pakistan but to the political realities on both sides of that even-now-not-officially-defined border to die of alcohol poisoning in a Muslim country. I suspect that such a thought occurred to him; may even have been foremost among his thoughts as he spiraled. But mostly I think he was just sad and angry, and, above all, trapped. 

He had been brought up on obscenity charges three times while living in Bombay in the years of British control. But he had the friends and the resources to ride those waves. As a refugee to the newly-created Pakistan, he was poorer and lonelier than he had been. And so those waves battered him, and he drowned. More often than not, what seems to be courage is actually a social and financial cushion. And what seems to be cowardice in succumbing to self-destructive impulses is the lack of a social and financial cushion.

Manto and the Rules and the Obscenity Trials

From what I’ve read, it was those obscenity trials that broke Manto. It was people following the rules and demanding he do the same. And “The Assignment” hurts so much to read because the characters in it are following the rules. The judge follows that unwritten rule that says: life will return to normal so let’s not make a fuss and start acting rash. The judge’s daughter follows the rules of filial piety, so she does not contradict her father’s dictum even though she is the one who, from the roof of their substantial house, has been watching Amritsar erupt in flames while he, bedridden, has not.

And Santokh Singh has followed his father’s directive to honor Judge-sahib. He has not only followed his father’s dying wish to the letter; he has thrown in some appropriate words to elevate and beautify the gesture. To make the gesture into an island of sweetness in the midst of such devastation.

Good. So that’s it then. Everyone followed the rules and everything worked out for the best. Right?

Manto and the Current War in Gaza

In fraught circumstances, people cling to the rules that suit their fancy, even as they abandon the ones that inhibit it. In fact, “following the rules” makes it easier, not harder, to act horribly. My social media feed is lighting up with Zionist friends, relatives, and acquaintances proclaiming that Israel is not a colonizer. Whatever else you can say about them, Israel is treating Gaza and the West Bank as colonies. You can’t claim not to be a colonizer and build settlements on land that doesn’t belong to your country or cut off the water supply to a country of two million . (They turned the water back on. After facing international pressure.) 

I took this article into the topical, partly because current events are weighing heavily on my mind these days, but partly because that was Manto’s courage. Manto wrote unflinchingly about a fraught political era. That era was seventy-fiv e years ago, and has begun to fade from living memory, so it takes a special jolt to remind us that he wrote these stories back then . When these events were unfolding. When these events were still controversial.

Now these Stories are History, But…

Those seventy-fiv e years (and half a world’s distance beside, for many of us) serve as psychological insulation. You get a different feeling clicking on an article about a writer who lived and worked during a conflict that now exists only in history books. You prepare yourself differently for that article. That article isn’t going to touch you. Not as deeply. 

I hav e always appr eciat ed Manto’s ability to write forceful and beautiful stories about ordinary people living in out-of-the-ordinary times. But th e mor e I writ e, th e mor e I appr eciat e how difficult it is to writ e about your own tim e and plac e. Manto did not write about safely distant events. He wrote about events that were so present and so real that they killed him. We all need our distractions from the cares of the world. But it is a mistake for literature to provide those distractions too reliably, and with too open a hand. 

Read a Great Story; Let it Change your Life

It’s not enough to read Manto from afar, and tut-tut over the sad things that happened s ev enty-fiv e years ago. It’s not enough to read about things that happened s ev enty-fiv e years ago and say: “If only people had acted differently.” These things are happening. Now. You act differently.

So here we are. Israel, a country I grew up loving; a country I have visited twice; a country where I have friends and, until the recent and rather hurried evacuation, family; Israel needed to be pressured as recently as a month ago to provide water to Gaza so two million people would not choke to death on parasites and infections. Call your congressperson. Join a picket line. Go on strike. Do something.

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Adam Katz, PhD (he/his) is the editor of 2 Rules of Writing. Born and raised in New York, Adam is a teacher and tutor with over ten years’ experience, and a writer since… it’s hard to say. Shortly after graduating from Columbia University, Adam began to tutor young people one-on-one, usually in English, Writing, Math, or standardized testing. As part of the PhD program at Stony Brook, Adam taught classes in Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. In recent years, Adam has been developing a curriculum based on the idea that creative writing is a better tool for learning how to write than the formulaic essays one practices in English and History classes. Outside of these pages, Adam’s work has been published by Spoonie Press, Academy Forum, and Capital Psychiatry.

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2 thoughts on “ Saadat Hassan Manto: “The Assignment” ”

It’s easy to spot historical fiction books that try to “recapture the moment.” But the idea of a book that was written exactly in the times which it describes is rare. it kinda reminds me of Anne Frank.

That’s a fair analogy. You’re right about the rarity. A lot of people say “that was a different time.” But when i read Manto I don’t think “that was a different time, leastwise not ethically. There was atrocity and there was outrage. Same as now.

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The Assignment by Saadat Hasan Manto Summary

“The Assignment” by Saadat Hasan Manto is set in Amritsar during a time of intense communal riots between Hindus and Muslims. The violence has grown so severe that people from both communities have started moving to areas where their own community is in the majority, hoping to find safety. Despite this, retired judge Mian Abdul Hai is confident that the unrest will soon pass, as it had in the past.

Mian Abdul Hai lives with his daughter Sughra, his young son Basharat, and their elderly servant Akbar in a three-story house. As the riots worsen, Mian Abdul Hai stocks up on food, believing that the trouble will be temporary. Sughra, however, becomes increasingly worried, especially as the city burns and there are no longer fire engines to put out the fires. Nights are filled with terrifying slogans and the glow of distant fires.

When the power and water supplies are cut off, Sughra suggests moving to a safer Muslim locality. But Mian Abdul Hai refuses, convinced that the violence will soon end. His condition deteriorates when he suffers a stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed and unable to speak clearly. Sughra and Basharat are left to care for him as the situation around them continues to worsen. Shops are closed, and there is no medical help available.

One day, in desperation, Sughra sends Basharat out to find help, but he quickly returns, terrified after seeing a dead body and rioters in the street. Sughra realizes they are truly alone and prays for their safety. Old Akbar, who is suffering from severe asthma, tries his best but is unable to help much. One day, he disappears, possibly in search of help, but does not return.

As Eid approaches, Sughra remembers the past celebrations and feels the stark contrast with their current situation. On the eve of Eid, there is a knock on the door, which frightens Sughra and Basharat. When Basharat looks through a hole in the door, he sees a young Sikh man standing outside. Sughra is afraid but opens the door when her father reassures her that it is Gurmukh Singh.

However, it is not Gurmukh Singh, but his son Santokh. Gurmukh Singh, who had always brought homemade noodles to Mian Abdul Hai on Eid as a gesture of gratitude for a past kindness, has died. On his deathbed, he made his son promise to continue the tradition. Santokh has come to fulfill this promise, showing a deep respect and gratitude that transcends the communal divide.

After delivering the noodles, Santokh leaves and encounters a group of men carrying torches and kerosene, preparing to commit an arson attack. They ask if he has completed his assignment, and he nods, giving them implicit permission to proceed with their destructive plan.

“The Assignment” highlights the horror of communal violence but also shows moments of human kindness and loyalty that shine through. Despite the chaos and hatred, Manto portrays the strength of personal bonds and the power of gratitude and compassion even in the darkest times.

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Seventy-five Years After Indian Partition, Who Owns the Narrative?

Before it was an edict, and a death sentence, it was a rumor. To many, it must have seemed improbable; I imagine my grandmother, buying her vegetables at the market, settling her baby on her hip, craning to hear the news—a border, where? Two borders, to be exact. On the eve of their departure, in 1947, after more than three hundred years on the subcontinent, the British sliced the land into a Hindu-majority India flanked by a Muslim-majority West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), a thousand miles apart. The boundaries were drawn up in five weeks by an English barrister who had famously never before been east of Paris; he flew home directly afterward and burned his papers. The slash of his pen is known as Partition.

A tidy word, “Partition.” Amid what the Punjabis call the raula —the “uproar”—the region convulsed with violence, Hindus and Sikhs on one side, Muslims on the other. Entire villages were massacred. Neighbors turned on each other. It’s estimated that a million people were killed, and that seventy-five thousand women and girls were abducted and raped, a third of them under the age of twelve. Millions of refugees fled in one of the largest and most rapid migrations in history. “Blood trains” crisscrossed the fresh border, carrying silent cargo—passengers slaughtered during the journey. Cities transformed into open-air refugee camps, like the one in Delhi to which my grandmother escaped in the night, alone with her children, feeding the baby opium, the story goes, so he would not cry. Bhisham Sahni’s “Tamas,” a 1973 Hindi novel set in that period, brings such a camp to life. The exhausted refugees are greeted by a functionary of the Relief Committee with the unpropitious nickname Statistics Babu. “I want figures, only figures, nothing but figures,” he instructs. The refugees mill around him, unhearing. They weep, stare blankly. They repeat, in exasperating detail, every step of their journeys. “Why don’t you understand?” Statistics Babu pleads. “I am not here to listen to the whole ‘Ramayana.’ Give me figures—how many dead, how many wounded, how much loss of property and goods. That is all.”

Is that where the story lies? What do “figures, only figures” convey of the full horror and absurdity of 1947? Of a border that cut through forests, families, and shrines, that saw wild animals apportioned between the two countries and historical artifacts snapped in half? In “Tamas,” the testimonies of the survivors reveal all that records omit and conceal. A refugee is desperate to recover his wife’s gold bangles: won’t Statistics Babu help him? Those bangles still circle his wife’s wrists, however, and she lies at the bottom of a well. It is a detail perhaps lifted from the case of the real-life village of Thoa Khalsa, now in Pakistan, where almost a hundred Sikh women drowned themselves and their children. We don’t have the figures for women killed by their own families or forced to kill themselves in the name of protecting their honor. There are no records of those who died of heartbreak. My family migrated from an area not far from Thoa Khalsa. Only my great-uncle remained; he lay beheaded in the courtyard of his home. Three months later, his wife died—of grief, some say. Their children were scattered. There are no firm figures available for orphaned children, or for children abandoned along the journey because they were too small to walk quickly enough.

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This past year has marked seventy-five years of Partition, a process of fracturing that continues in the imagination and in memory. Each generation has posed new questions, searching for places where the stories can be found—in statistics, in stubborn reticence, in a pair of gold bangles. A sturdy consensus long held that the fullest account of 1947 could be found not in facts and figures—not in nonfiction at all—but in texts like “Tamas,” in literature. We were steered strenuously away from the scholarship and toward fiction and poetry—often by the scholars themselves. “Creative writers have captured the human dimensions of Partition far more effectively than have historians,” the scholar Ayesha Jalal has written. Novels were said to surpass even survivor testimonies for vividness and accuracy. Two decades ago, Akash Kapur, writing in the Times about a landmark work of Partition oral history, directed the reader back to “the excellent fiction” of Partition, such as Khushwant Singh’s “Train to Pakistan” (1956), which “does a far better job of evoking the terror, the bewilderment and the remorse that still shadow so many lives on the subcontinent.”

Partition literature fills a long shelf. There is early fiction by survivors and spectators: realist narratives (Singh’s “Train to Pakistan”), feminist epics (Yashpal’s “This Is Not That Dawn”), stripped-down, nightmarish short stories (Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Black Margins”). In the nineteen-eighties came a new flourishing, with now canonical novels by Salman Rushdie (“Midnight’s Children”), Amitav Ghosh (“Shadow Lines”), and Bapsi Sidhwa (“Ice Candy Man”). Certain tropes and tendencies repeat. There is a reliance on coming-of-age stories, in which the loss of the nation’s innocence maps neatly onto a character’s; twins illustrate a conjoined fate; a dead woman personifies the fractured motherland. (These tropes are so alluring that a recent American young-adult novel about Partition, Veera Hiranandani’s “The Night Diary,” combined all of them, in a coming-of-age story about a twin born to a mother who dies in childbirth.)

But the unity, and moral power, of the genre derives from its sustained confrontations with the violence of Partition. The official narrative of independence was one of celebration. “Before the birth of freedom we have endured all the pains of labor and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow,” Jawaharlal Nehru announced on August 14, 1947, as independence and Partition were imminent. “Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us.” The killings were portrayed as a spasm of collective madness, a regrettable development on the path to progress. In fact, it was the efficiency and organization of the attacks that came to distinguish the episode, and its stamp was the targeting and torture of women.

What we call Partition fiction might be more pointedly described as one of the most extensive bodies of literature committed to cataloguing rape and sexual terrorism—the frenzy that left corpses riddled with bite marks, pregnant women slit open, and religious slogans branded upon faces and genitals. What Nehru dismissed as labor pains, what films dealt with obliquely, and some families not at all, is bluntly documented in the novels—the grisly discovery in “Ice Candy Man,” for example, of a bag stuffed with severed breasts. Novels filled in the extensive gaps in the archives. “There were no trials for perpetrators of violence, the authorities took no statements, and very little data was gathered,” the historian Manan Ahmed has written. “Even the trains, which ran covered in blood across the Punjab border, were scrubbed clean. . . . In fact, the only physical traces left are the people themselves. And they too shucked their old identities for fear of more violence.”

If it seems crude to treat literature as testimony, we cannot ignore the fact that some writers conceived of themselves as eyewitnesses. They shared a commitment to preserve not only what went unsaid but what felt unsayable—that the violence of Partition was not necessarily an aberration in the lives of women, for one. The upheaval could be liberation—the domestic spaces to which women were confined could protect but also imprison, as Daisy Rockwell notes in the afterword to her translation of Khadija Mastur’s 1962 novel, “The Woman’s Courtyard.” As early as 1950, Amrita Pritam’s novel “Pinjar” examined the refusal of families to take back women and girls who had been abducted and “contaminated.” The sexual violation of men during that period remains a taboo subject; I find mention of castrations in “Train to Pakistan” and almost nowhere else.

This is the work of the novel: to notice, knit, remember, record. The novel confers wholeness and unity to a story of division. The novel—it cannot help itself—reconciles. But it was only by taking a truncheon to the form that some of the greatest Partition fiction was created. Out of the rubble of the cities and the scorched fields emerged Saadat Hasan Manto’s glittering, razored shards. A recent collection, “The Dog of Tithwal,” gathers classics by the Urdu master of the short story. Born in 1912 to a Kashmiri family in the northern state of Punjab, Manto fell under the spell of Gorky and Poe, not to mention the rotgut that would kill him at the age of forty-two. Fluent in almost every genre, he wrote while sitting on the family sofa, his daughters climbing over him as he churned out polemics, screenplays, and twenty-two volumes of short stories marked by a warm, coarse, and occasionally menacing sexuality that so agitated the censors. He was tried for (and acquitted of) obscenity six times; his story “Khol Do” was condemned as an incitement to rape. Partition tore him from Mumbai, his home and muse. Marooned in Lahore, he began writing furiously about what he had seen. The most famous of these stories, “Toba Tek Singh,” tells the tale—based in fact—of India and Pakistan dividing up patients of mental institutions according to their religion. One Sikh inmate cannot figure out which country his village belongs to; he roots himself between the barbed-wire fences of each border, and dies on a patch of unclaimed earth.

Manto established his distinctive form in the book “Black Margins” (1948): thirty-two sketches of compressed power, some no more than a few sentences long, which brought to life the obscene logic of the new world. In “The Advantage of Ignorance,” a sniper takes aim at a child. His companion objects, but not for the expected reason. “You are out of bullets,” he exclaims. In “Double Cross,” a character complains about being sold bad petrol—it won’t set fire to any shops. The stories are not just expressions of shock; they are modes of refusal—a response to facts that will not, ought not, be easily assimilated into a narrative. The ink feels fresh, wet. Manto remains our eternal contemporary, his capacity to unnerve undiminished.

Even his admirers can be caught trying to tame him—pushing him into earnest ethical stances. In the introduction to the recent collection, the poet Vijay Seshadri describes Manto’s Urdu as firm, spare, and “easily accessible to translation.” In truth, Manto frightens his translators. The rehabilitation mission starts with them. Khalid Hasan begins his translation by defanging the title of “Khol Do,” which Manto is said to have considered his best work. Hasan names it “The Return,” instead of the literal translation, “Open It”—the command issued in the story’s chilling climax. As it begins, a Muslim girl has clearly been abducted by a Hindu mob. Men from her community go in search of her. When her father spots them accompanying a body, the reader understands that the girl, Sakina, has been attacked again, by the very men who promised to rescue her. She is brought to a hospital, seemingly lifeless. A doctor enters the small, stifling room, and gestures to a window: “Open it.” There is a jerk of movement; Sakina’s hands move to untie the drawstring of her pants and lower them down her thighs. Her father exults—“She is alive”—and the doctor breaks into a cold sweat.

There’s a crucial line in the story. In Urdu, it reads, “ Sakina ke murda jism mein jumbish hui. ” Hasan has variously translated it as “The young woman on the stretcher moved slightly” and “Sakina’s body stirred.” A more faithful translation would be something like “There was a movement in Sakina’s corpse.” It was Hasan who respectfully refers to Sakina as “the young woman,” Hasan who wants her still to be Sakina. Manto refers to her corpse. He is interested in the threshold that she has crossed, what the doctor notices and the father cannot—the threshold we keep encountering in his stories about Partition.

Manto’s fiction routinely blurs the line between life and death, sanity and madness. Characters merge with their weapons. (In “The Last Salute,” a platoon leader “felt as though he had turned into a rifle, but one whose trigger was jammed.”) Weapons act as agents in their own right. (From “Mishtake”: “Ripping the belly cleanly, the knife moved in a straight line down the midriff, in the process slashing the cord which held the man’s pajamas in place.”) These transformations occur beyond the characters’ awareness. You will cross the threshold without knowing , Manto seems to say. You will not be able to see what you have become . There is no self-knowledge or remorse, no greater sense of justice than there was in 1947. Nor does the author permit himself the reprieve of moralizing. There are only loops of retribution. “Bitter Harvest” begins with a Muslim father screaming the name of his young daughter, who has been raped and murdered: “Sharifan! Sharifan!” The story ends with him seizing, raping, and strangling a Hindu girl, leaving her father to find the body and scream her name: “Bimla, my daughter, Bimla.”

In the past generation, though, Partition “shimmered away as a suitable subject” for fiction, in the words of the literary critic Nilanjana Roy. The mantle was taken up by oral historians. Recurrent eruptions of violence reawakened memories of the killings of 1947—its unfinished business, the rot in the wound. The 2002 Gujarat riots, in particular, shared the grammar of Partition violence: the frenzy masking careful coördination, the targeting of women, the impunity. The feminist writer and publisher Urvashi Butalia’s “The Other Side of Silence” (1998) had been sparked by the Sikh massacres of 1984, which led her to think more deeply about her family’s history. Through interviews with survivors, Butalia traced a story of Partition as its meaning was shaped (and evaded) in private life, in families. This was Partition seen from the perspective of women, children, Dalits, all those left out of the grand political narratives, and told with the kind of feeling and detail that, as the scholar Deepti Misri writes, could never have made it into Statistics Babu’s ledger. The testimonies compiled by Butalia—as well as by Ashis Nandy, Veena Das, Ritu Menon, and Kamla Bhasin—rippled with complexities and contradiction. Memories of loss exist, sometimes queasily, alongside memories of gain—the birth of nations, the pride of survival, the unexpected opportunities created in the upheaval. I was weaned on stories of my family’s Partition: my beheaded kinsman; my grandmother wheedling extra rations for her children in the camps; the two young girls, sisters, who went missing. Beneath these stories pulsed the uncomfortable knowledge that the very tumult of Partition allowed some families like mine, living under the boot of brutal feudal hierarchy, their first opportunity to prise themselves free.

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In the past few decades, popular chroniclers influenced both by fiction and by oral history have taken up polyphonic approaches. Yasmin Khan’s “The Great Partition” and Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar’s “The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia,” both published in 2007, at the sixtieth anniversary of the event, synthesized Statistics Babu’s facts and figures with the testimonies of survivors. More expansive histories of Partition began to be told, attending to the links between 1947 and the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971, the migration of Dalits, and the effects of Partition on tribal communities, on Kashmir, on the diaspora.

At its seventy-fifth anniversary, Partition has found still more eclectic forms. The new generation coming to the story—midnight’s grandchildren—are not scholars, for the most part. They typically have no specialized credentials. Theirs is a different qualification: this is their inheritance. They include the New York rapper Heems, who describes himself as a “product of Partition”; the installation artist Pritika Chowdhry, who constructs “anti-memorials”; Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, an Oscar-winning filmmaker and the founder of the Citizen Archive of Pakistan ( CAP ); and Guneeta Singh Bhalla, a physicist who has established a crowdsourced library of testimonies. It’s no longer enough for fiction to fill the silences. These self-taught archivists search for whatever evidence they can find; they build on the work of oral historians like Butalia, finding the archives in the last remaining survivors.

Their ranks are thinning. That young woman, so startled by the rumors, who fled with her children—my grandmother—died in 2006. Her eldest child, the child who could walk—my aunt—died last year. Organizations like Obaid-Chinoy’s CAP and Bhalla’s 1947 Partition Archive gather testimonies with fresh urgency. Online communities invite survivors to upload their stories or find childhood friends. Project Dastaan, an organization formed by students at Oxford, not only collects testimonies but also offers refugees a chance to “visit” their homeland using virtual-reality headsets.

This cohort of oral historians has confronted a reticence born not only of suffering but also of shame, arising from complicity, intimate betrayals—Manto’s thresholds. “The true horror is not what your neighbors did to you,” the historian Faisal Devji notes, “but what your own family members might have done out of force of necessity: Leave somebody behind who was handicapped, who was unable to walk or flee.”

In “Remnants of Partition” (2019), Aanchal Malhotra, a Delhi-based artist turned oral historian, devised a method to sidestep the silences. Her grandparents, Punjabi migrants from Pakistan, were skillful at thwarting her questions about their journey, but conversations suddenly bloomed when she asked what they carried with them. Her great-uncle produced a ghara , a metallic vessel for churning yogurt, and a gaz , a yardstick from the family tailoring business. He absently handled the objects as he spoke; they stimulated memories of a rich, associative, unexpected kind, full of longing. Malhotra took the same question to her grandmother, and to other survivors. Her book is a history of Partition told in twenty-one possessions: a string of pearls, a sword. These objects are not relics; many are pointedly, movingly, still in use. Her grandmother travelled across the border with a small folding knife given to her by her family, who told her to use it against attackers or on herself. The same blade, “swallowed by rust,” now accompanies Malhotra’s grandmother on her morning walks, as she slices leaves from an aloe plant—the weapon transformed into an agent of healing.

The music video opens in a train station—the archetypal setting of Partition horror. The windows are shattered; debris lies scattered on the floor. The waiting area fills with passengers, looking at one another warily. A man sitting alone on a bench begins to sing a ghazal by the Pakistani poet (and Partition migrant) Saifuddin Saif: “This moonlit night has been a long time coming / The words I want to say have been a long time coming.” The mood warms. A traveller darns another’s torn clothing; a woman admires another’s baby.

“Chandni Raat,” an Urdu single from the Pakistani American singer Ali Sethi, was released in 2019, just days before fighting broke out between India and Pakistan. Once again, war seemed imminent. The YouTube comment section of the accompanying music video became a gathering place much like the train station’s waiting area. Strangers congregated, invoking the song’s message of unity. “It became kind of an anthem,” Sethi says. “It felt genuinely miraculous.”

The son of prominent journalists, Sethi grew up in Lahore—“a haunted city,” he calls it. The old part of the city was full of signs of the people who fled, some sixty per cent of the population; home alcoves once reserved for shrines now held a refrigerator or an electric fan. “For me, turning to Hindustani music was the only way I could unpartition myself—go back to a place that was not only pre-Partition but pre-colonial,” he says. Hindustani music, as he describes it, is sacred and secular, a mongrel of Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim traditions. He was taught by two renowned singers, both Partition migrants, and during the COVID lockdown he used social media to bring together musicians from across the border to collaborate. He cites a teacher of his who taught him that metaphors “help us to dialogue across distances.” Song, he says, is a space we can live inside. Just as the little knife of Malhotra’s grandmother was repurposed, the train station in the “Chandni Raat” video has been, too—a place of death reconceived as a place of reconciliation.

Violence has long felt emblematic of the story of Partition—it was what lurked in Manto’s “black margins”—and that history of violence is now deployed as a political weapon, stoking suspicion, retribution. Anam Zakaria, who works on cross-cultural exchange between India and Pakistan, describes younger generations—who have grown up in the shadow of war—as even more hostile toward one another than the generation who survived Partition. India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, recently declared August 14th to be Partition Horrors Remembrance Day. By choosing the date of Pakistan’s independence day (India celebrates August 15th as its day of independence), and by carefully referring to those denied “cremation,” Modi framed it as an occasion to mourn only Hindu and Sikh victims, and to single out Muslims as aggressors. A younger generation struggles not just to devise new modes of accessing and telling the story of Partition but also to prevent it from being used to justify further bloodletting. They want to return the event to survivors and their families—and to highlight memories and emotions that have been occluded by the fixation on carnage. Malhotra asks, “Why do we immediately think of the trains? Why don’t we think of the friendship left behind or the love affairs that may have gotten cut?” Kavita Puri, a BBC journalist, similarly wants to see beyond the brutalities: “Partition, though filled with horror in so many ways, is also a story about love.” Can the story of Partition be told in a different genre? Will love stories keep the blood at bay?

In “Tomb of Sand,” the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, Geetanjali Shree pays homage to Partition fiction, imagining the great novelists gathering near the border. “The group of Partition writers has come to sit in a row, and every person has a name card at their place like at a formal banquet. Bhisham Sahni. Balwant Singh. Joginder Pal. Manto. Rahi Masoom Raza. Shaani. Intizar Hussain. Krishna Sobti. Khushwant Singh. Ramanand Sagar. Manzoor Ehtesham. Rajinder Singh Bedi.” Yet Shree also explores the possibility of writing one’s own story of Partition. Ma, the central figure in the novel, an eighty-year-old widow, spends more than a hundred pages of the book lying in bed, her back to the reader, before finally, heroically, reclaiming her life, by going back across the border to Pakistan and falling in love.

“A border,” she proposes,

does not enclose, it opens out. It creates a shape—it adorns an edge. This side of the edging blossoms, as does that. Embroider the border with a shimmering vine. Stud it with precious stones. What is a border? It enhances a personality. It gives strength. It doesn’t tear apart. A border increases recognition. Where two sides meet and both flourish. A border ornaments their meeting.

Partition stories offer few consolations; one wants to hold this one tightly in hand, like Grandmother’s little knife. But what is that folded blade but sheathed violence? Has it completed its work? How does one begin to tell a tale so turbulently in progress? “It will jump, it will cross over, the story will not end,” Shree writes. Manto’s shards, unblunted by any urge toward narrative neatness, find their mark for a reason.

There’s a quiet detail in “The Dog of Tithwal,” one planted delicately, as if designed to be lost amid the gaudy violence. The Pakistani Army and the Indian Army gather on two hills, facing each other. Between bursts of gunfire, the soldiers sing. Only the reader can know that they are both singing a folk song of romance and longing. The reader experiences, at first, a frisson of recognition— ah, to be so alike, on either side of a divide . But how little it matters, once the action of the story is under way. Both sides send a dog back and forth, frightening and torturing it to death. The dog cannot hear the singing; he cannot name the song. Sing whatever you like while you can, the writer seems to say. The black margins are closing in. ♦

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Manto kay Afsaney

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aaj ik aur baras biit gayā us ke baġhair

jis ke hote hue hote the zamāne mere

Saadat Hasan Manto

1912 - 1955 | Lahore , Pakistan

World-renowned Urdu fiction writers. Known for masterpieces like Thanda Gosht, Khol Do, Toba Tek Singh etc.

• Index of Books 186332

• Agriculture 67 Article Collection 169 Astrology 24 Autobiography 414 Banned Books 15 Bibliography 56 Biography 2576 Calligraphy 14 Catalogue / Index 460 Children's Literature 1816 Catalogue / Index 6 Dastaan 7 Drama 33 Entertainment 13 Geet 8 General Knowledge 17 Geography 1 History 11 Islamiyaat 38 Learning Resources 49 Magazines 57 Mathematics 32 Medicine 7 Moral and Ethical 41 Nazm 159 Novel 50 Personality 105 Pratham Books 56 Psychological 1 Quatrain 1 Research And Criticism 24 Science 34 Story 593 Text Books 102 Translation 57 Upbringing And Nourishment 33 Comments 13 Communal Harmony 25 Constitution 32 Dastarkhwan 21 Diary 67 Dictionary 548 Directory 11 Drama 911 Drama History & Criticism 31 Historical 37 Romantic 27 Social 39 Economics 127 Education 282 Encyclopedia 64 Entertainment 11 Environment 21 Essays & Profiles 1076 Essays 835 Profiles 175 Feminism 76 Fiction 1344 Dastaan 378 Moral and Ethical 26 Novel 35 Short Stories 225 Film Songs 783 Folk Song 15 Folk tales 21 Freedom Movement 145 Geography 70 Health 38 General Health 21 Infant health / Gynaecology 7 Hikayaat 86 Hinduism 4 History 2612 Cultural History 242 History Of Literature 119 Indian History 782 Islamic History 561 World History 281 Humorous 576 Humorous History & Criticism 30 Poetry 71 Prose 294 Hunting's 21 Idioms 46 Interviews 51 Islamiyat 599 Journalism 181 Column 7 kavita 27 Language & Literature 1598 Aestheticism 9 Criticism 104 History 303 IntiKhab 137 Language 523 Tazkira 50 Lateefe 45 Law 173 Lectures 518 Letters 630 History & Criticism 61 Life Style 19 General Information 12 Linguistics 155 Logic 50 Manuscript 269 Mathematics 76 Medicine 631 Ayurveda 28 Homeopathy 15 Surgery 11 Tibb-e-Unani 245 Memoir 66 Monograph 184 Moral and Ethical 314 Movements 262 Literary movements 66 political movements 157 Religious Movements 42 Music 65 Myths 4 Novel 3810 Biographical 43 Detective 160 Historical 228 History & Criticism 7 Humorous 21 Moral and Ethical 168 Psychological 6 Romantic 509 Social 552 Novella 60 Others 512 Parody 7 Philosophy 187 Physics 3 Political 225 India 45 world 39 Prosody 135 Prostitute 17 Psychology 27 Publications Of Munshi Naval Kishore 1446 Religions 2416 Buddhism 23 Christianity 32 Comparative Study 8 Hindu-mat 59 Islamiyat 2213 Sikhism 59 Remnants 12 Reportage 92 Research & Criticism 5272 Aestheticism 18 Articles / Papers 1075 Autobiography 11 Biography 110 Children's Literature 20 Comparative Study 1 Compiled 169 Criticism 1377 Dastaan 21 Dictionary 7 Drama 34 Essays 54 Fiction 200 Ghazal 48 History 18 Idioms 5 Iqbaliyat 133 Lectures 7 Letters 14 Magazines 3 Marsiya 54 Masnavi 31 Naat 22 Nazm 24 Novel 94 Poetry 914 Prose 40 Qasida 13 Quatrain 10 Rekhti 1 Reportage 7 Research 689 Research Methodology 11 Short-story 88 Tazkira 13 Translation 9 Travelogue 13 Reviews 79 satire 9 Science 170 Sexology 28 Short-story 2460 Horror fiction 10 Symbolic / Artistic Stories 82 Sketch Writing 4 Sketches 247 Sketches: History & Criticism 60 Social issues 74 Custums 5 Sociology 14 Story 54 Story Collection 32 Sufism / Mystic 1664 Chishtiya 240 Discourses 211 History of Sufism 56 Naqshbandiya 108 Philosophy of Sufism 61 Poetry 164 Qadiriyya 115 Research / Criticism 118 Sama And Others Terminology's 102 Suhrawardiyya 45 Tazkira 234 Syllabus 89 Talks 27 Tazkira 885 Text Books 443 Criticism 78 Fiction 54 History Of Literature 13 Non Fiction 50 Poetry 32 Translation 3940 Autobiography 54 Biography 150 Catalogue / Index 4 Chemistry 2 Children's Literature 73 Constitution 11 Critique / Research 27 Dastaan 53 Diary 3 Doha 2 Drama 128 Economics 36 Epics 56 Essays 31 Geography 19 Hikayaat 22 History 398 Humorous 5 Huntings 1 Islamiyat 208 Law 15 Lecture 42 Letter 54 Medicine 65 Notebook / Dairy 3 Novel 581 Philosophy 84 Poetry 300 Political 12 Psychology 15 Science 35 Short Story 193 Social issues 10 Sufism / Mystic 150 Translation: History & Criticism 8 Travelogue 36 Travelogue 486 Wars 33 Women's writings 6895 Autobiography 41 Biography 114 Children's literature 26 Compilation 235 Criticism 304 Drama 34 Feminism 13 Novel 617 Poetry 328 Prose 38 Stories 379 Travelogue 18 Women's Translations 119
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Short story 233

Afsancha 29, tanz-o-mazah 1.

Translation 2

Novelette 1

Thanda Gosht

Toba tek singh, kaali shalwaar, hindustan ko leadron se bachaao, hindi aur urdu, afsana nigaar aur jinsi masaael, ismat faroshi.

Leader Jab Aansoo Bahaa Kar Logon Se Kahte Hain Ki Mazhab Khatre Mein Hai To Ismein Koi Haqeeqat Nahi Hoti. Mazhab Aisi Cheez Hi Nahi Ki Khatre Mein Pad Sake, Agar Kisi Baat Ka Khatra Hai To Woh Leaderon Ka Hai Jo Apna Ulloo Seedha Karne Ke Liye Mazhab Ko Khatre Mein Daalte Hain.

Main Baghaawat Chahta Hun Har Us Fard Ke Khilaaf Baghaawat Chahta Hun Jo Humse Mehnat Karaata Hai Magar Uske Daam Adaa Nahi Karta.

Aap Shahar Mein Khubsurat Aur Nafees Gadiyaan Dekhte Hain... Ye Khubsurat Aur Nafees Gadiyaan Kooda-karkat Uthane Ke Kaam Nahi Aa Saktin. Gandagi Aur Ghalaazat Utha Kar Bahar Phenkne Ke Liye Aur Gadiyaan Maujood Hain Jinhein Aap Kam Dekhte Hain Aur Agar Dekhte Hain To Fauran Apni Naak Par Rumaal Rakh Lete Hain... In Gadiyon Ka Wujood Zaroori Hai Aur Un Aurton Ka Wujood Bhi Zaroori Hai Jo Ghalaazat Uthaati Hain. Agar Ye Aurtein Na Hotin To Hamaare Sab Gali-kooche Mardon Ki Ghaleez Harakaat Se Bhare Hote.

Pahle Mazhab Seenon Mein Hota Tha, Aaj-kal Topiyon Mein Hota Hai. Siyaasat Bhi Ab Topiyon Mein Chali Aayi Hai. Zindaabaad Topiyaan.

Duniya Mein Jitni Laantein Hain, Bhook Unki Maan Hai.

Aaram Ki Zarurat

Ghaate ka sauda, aankhon par charbi, mirza nausha aur chaudhvin, noor jahan suroor jahan, ismat chughtaai, akhtar shirani se chand mulaqatain, ashok kumar, aao akhbar padhen, mohabbat ki paidaish.

Aap Ka Saadat Hasan Manto

Manto Ke Khutoot

Aatish Pare Aur Siyah Hashiye

Afsane Aur Drame

Kulliyat-e-Manto Afsane Jild 1

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