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Manto in the Ruins of Being Human
- Amna Asim
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
"Zamaane ke jis daur se hum guzar rahe hain, agar aap isse naawaaqif hain to mere afsaane padhiye. Agar aap in afsaanon ko bardaasht nahi kar sakte to iska matlab hai ki ye zamaana naaqaabil-e-bardaasht hai."
(If you are unacquainted with the era we are passing through, read my stories. If you cannot bear these stories, it means that the era is unbearable.)
Saadat Hasan Manto, who failed his matriculation examination twice due to weak Urdu, went on to become one of its finest writers, writing about humans, emotions, and the realities of society. Born on 11 May 1912 into a Kashmiri family in British India, Manto grew up with little inclination towards academics. It was at Aligarh Muslim University that he developed an interest in world literature and began to understand the craft of writing. In 1934, he wrote his first story, Tamasha, based on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. He did not look back thereafter and chose to build his career in writing. Manto’s time at Aligarh Muslim University was brief due to his diagnosis of tuberculosis. In 1936, he moved to Mumbai, where he lived until Partition, before eventually moving to Pakistan.
Manto was a hyper-realist writer who drew from the places he lived, the people he encountered, and the realities the world faced. The figures in his stories are not merely fictional constructs; they are human beings shaped by emotion and experience. Viewing the world through a humanist lens, Manto gave all his characters depth and feeling. Even in his portrayal of prostitutes, whom society often regards as fallen, he presented them as human, as women, and as emotional beings living ordinary, complex lives. He chose characters and narratives that were strikingly hyper-realistic, often unsettling his readers. After all, truth has a way of making people uncomfortable. His stories engaged with themes such as Partition, sexuality, prostitution, social discrimination, and the everyday lives of people across different strata of society, bringing into focus realities that were often ignored or deliberately suppressed.
Notably, he faced six major obscenity trials over the course of his career, three in British India and three in Pakistan after Partition. Before 1947, he was prosecuted for stories such as Dhuan, Boo, and Kali Shalwar. After Partition, charges were brought against works like Khol Do, Thanda Gosht, and Upar Neeche Darmiyan. He was never ultimately convicted; instead, he embraced the label of obscenity with defiance and even a sense of pride, remaining steadfast in his literary vision. While the titles of these stories may appear explicit, they in fact lay bare the stark realities of society. His Partition narratives, in particular, confront themes of violence, sexual brutality, communal tension, and the immense suffering endured by women.
Saadat Hasan Manto was never in favour of Partition. He did not wish to move to Pakistan. In his Partition writings, he places women at the centre of the narrative. Thanda Gosht confronts the horror of necrophilia during Partition, revealing a moment when lust and hatred had become so pervasive that even the dead were not spared. Khol Do presents a deeply unsettling account of betrayal enacted in the name of care, tracing a father’s desperate search for his daughter alongside a young girl’s trauma of rape and violence, where her body becomes the site upon which this brutality is inscribed. Through Toba Tek Singh, he critiques the decision-makers by exposing the absurdities of borders, belonging, and identity. As Ayesha Jalal argues, Manto’s stories bear witness to the moral disintegration unleashed by Partition.
The writings of Manto are deeply confrontational. They do not evoke pity so much as compel a recognition of the structural and moral failures within society. Rather than offering solutions, they lay bare the persistence of these flaws. Stories such as Rishwat and Chori explore the inherent tendencies of human nature, revealing the lengths to which individuals may go in pursuit of greed. Rishwat illustrates the uneasy intertwining of faith and self-interest, where devotion often intensifies in moments of need. Chori, on the other hand, reflects on how certain regrets linger deeply, and how some actions arise from sudden impulse, once again pointing to the complexities of human nature.
In stories such as Kali Shalwar and Shikari Auratein, Manto turns his attention to those pushed to the margins of society. Kali Shalwar centres on a prostitute’s simple yet deeply human desire to wear a new black shalwar for a festival, capturing raw emotion, longing, and dignity in the midst of deprivation. Shikari Auratein, on the other hand, operates as a sharp satire, exposing social hypocrisies through its portrayal of relationships and gender dynamics. In both stories, Manto does not frame his characters within rigid moral categories; instead, he presents them as shaped by the socio-economic conditions they inhabit. His narratives thus foreground the economic and social inequalities that compel individuals to live and act in the ways they do, making their choices less about morality and more about survival within unequal structures.
Religion, in the works of Manto, appears less as a source of faith and more as a marker of identity shaped by circumstance and coercion. In Padhiye Kalma, the act of reciting the kalma is stripped of its spiritual meaning and reduced to a test of survival, exposing how belief is transformed into performance under threat. Manto repeatedly reveals how religion, rather than offering solace, becomes entangled with violence, fear, and power. By doing so, he underscores the tragic irony of a world where faith is no longer lived, but demanded, measured, and weaponised.
The declaration, “Main baghawat chahta hoon. Har us fard ke khilaf baghawat chahta hoon jo humse mehnat karwata hai magar uske daam ada nahin karta,” underscores a deep sense of class consciousness in Manto’s writing. It reflects his acute awareness of the exploitation faced by the working class and his alignment with their struggles. Through such assertions, he does not merely depict social inequality but also calls for resistance against those who profit from labour without just compensation, urging the oppressed to recognise and assert their rights.
In Jhoothi Kahani, Manto turns to the very act of storytelling to question what is accepted as truth. By presenting a narrative that appears fabricated, he unsettles the reader’s faith in neat distinctions between truth and falsehood, suggesting instead that what is dismissed as “false” may in fact reveal deeper social realities. This self-reflexive move allows Manto to expose the hypocrisies and silences that shape public memory, especially in the aftermath of violence and upheaval. In doing so, he brings his literary project full circle, reminding us that his stories do not claim to offer absolute truths, but compel us to confront those we would rather deny.
In the end, Saadat Hasan Manto did not merely write stories; he exposed society in its most unguarded and unsettling form. Whether through the brutal realities of Partition, the silences around sexuality, or the lives of those pushed to the margins, he gave voice to what others feared to articulate. His narratives do not comfort; they confront, forcing readers to reckon with truths buried beneath respectability and denial. In the debris of violence, hypocrisy, and fractured identities, Manto searches for and ultimately finds the human. It is this relentless honesty, this refusal to look away, that defines his legacy, where literature becomes not an escape, but a mirror held up to the deepest and most uncomfortable truths of human existence.
Bibliography:
Nadeem Naadim, comp. Jhoothi Kahani aur Anya Kahaniyan. Ibarat Publication, 2025. (translated)
Jalal Ayesha. The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013
Prakash Gyan. Mumbai Fables. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Rekhta Foundation. “Toba Tek Singh.” Rekhta.
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