Manto: Selected Stories
Saadat Hasan Manto, Translated by Khalid Hasan
India Penguin Modern Classics: 2023
Partition, the defining event of modern South Asian history, has had no greater bard than Saadat Hasan Manto, whose short stories on the subject form a pillar of the Indo-Pakistani literary canon. His forensic, empathetic examinations of the way hatred and mania consumed the division of India and Pakistan in 1947 have built him a towering reputation in the subcontinent and the diaspora, and have gained him increasing prominence in the West. That reputation, however, is incomplete; the singular tragedy of Partition, and the stinging multigenerational awareness of its horror, means that the scale of the event can threaten to engulf everything around it, transforming all those who documented the experience into ‘Partition writers’. Manto is one such: his most relentlessly repeated and anthologised stories, those which have made his modern reputation, all probe that period’s vast range of travesties.
But Manto is so much more than Partition, and his diverse body of work goes far beyond that fatal national and social rupture. Manto: Selected Stories, translated by the late Pakistani writer Khalid Hasan, strikes a balance between Manto’s writing on Partition and his other work.
More from Mekong Review
-
Hafsa Kanjwal contends that Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed’s state-building practices helped strengthen India’s hold over Kashmir while also enabling modernisation, which paradoxically reinforced a sense of alienation rather than reconciliation.
-
Not only did the promise of “Naya Pakistan” never materialise, the country is actually much worse off today.
-
Japanese Management, Indian Resistance is an important work in understanding the larger ecosystem of foreign capital, more specifically that from East Asia, in India’s political-economic-social terrain.