IN her book Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 which reflected on the “social convulsions of 1947” and in particular the partitioning of the Punjab, Ayesha Jalal took a moment to relate the events of ‘Parhiya Kalima’ by Saadat Hasan Manto, not a historical account, but a work of literature. One of the many unsettling short fictions her prolific granduncle penned in the aftermath of the subcontinent’s painful separation, ‘Parhiya Kalima’ — or, in its English translation, ‘Nothing but the Truth’ — tells the story of a Muslim man’s killing, in that fractious period, of his Hindu lover, a murder which in fact has nothing to do with the creation of Pakistan or communal antipathies. Having provided her précis of this specific tale, Jalal proceeded to assert: “It is to the credit of … storytellers like Manto that individual pain at the moment of Partition was not lost sight of in the recounting of a human tragedy attributed solely to religion. Escaping the exclusionary trapdoor of collective memories, [his] characters resoundingly defy the straightjacketing of religious categories ... these were men and women for whom the politics of religious identity were not necessarily more important than personal relationships cutting across religious denominations. Celebrated in literary circles, Manto’s social intuition has yet to inform historians searching for ‘communal’ trails to unknown ghosts in the killing plains of the Punjab.”

Published 13 years later, and many decades in the making, The Pity of Partition is Jalal’s determined endeavour to demonstrate how the astute Ludhiana-born writer’s brief life and work may provide the basis for “an imaginative retelling of the history of South Asia” in the early to mid-20th century.

Jalal’s methodological intention is to point to the validity, as a practice, of mining realist fiction for historical insights which may destabilise dominant nationalist and communal narratives around the bloody birth of the postcolonial states of Pakistan and India. In pursuit of this end she seeks to explore and showcase the breadth and significance of the socially critical and satirical creative outputs of the relative she called Manto Abajan within the context of his times (although he had died a year before she was born, Jalal describes Manto “an absent presence” for whom she says — in somewhat portentous terms — that she had a “bond ... which transcended” relationships of family).

Importantly, she interweaves not just the Urdu writer’s best-known Partition stories but also his other short fiction, personality sketches, essays on the postcolonial transition and private letters with the events of his life as she explores what light they might shed on the meaning of historical matters from the 1919 Amritsar massacre to the newly independent Pakistan’s alliance with the United States in the early 1950s — for, temporally as well as geographically, Manto’s life straddled the divide. And, doing so, Jalal attempts to demonstrate how a recognition of the “cosmopolitan humanism” exuded by the man himself and instilled in the “information”-based works contained in his archive may “become a catalyst for reassessing” “statist” and “communal” narratives of the “dislocations of partition” and later “episodes of violence.”

The different parts of this study are grouped according to genre. The first titled ‘Stories’ introduces fact-based fictional narratives of Hindu-Muslim friendships placed under strain (but by no means necessarily broken) in pre-Partition Bombay. It provides impressions of Manto’s boyhood immersion in revolutionary literature and thought under the polemical Marxist Abdul Bari Alig’s mentorship, leading to autobiographically-informed accounts of anti-colonial struggles. Memorably, this section also covers Manto’s 1936 arrival in Bombay, where he strove to write film scripts in addition to Urdu short stories, which remained true to his “opinion” that the “life” — whether of a pious house-wife or an illiterate tonga driver anticipating the introduction of a ‘Naya Qanun’ — “ought to be presented as it is.”

The Pity of Partition’s ensuing parts cover ‘Memories’ which, Jalal contends, point to “the other [cosmopolitan] side” of everyday life at the time of Partition, countering “narratives of social conflict” which have naturalised ‘tragic incidents’ of violence, and obscured more humane ones. The ‘Memories’ part also includes a consideration of Manto’s candid Bald Angels sketches of writers, film-makers, artists and editors — an array of celebrity friends and acquaintances whose religious affiliations were no impediment either to his amicability or his wit. This second part’s final section, ‘Living and Walking in Bombay’ draws on correspondence and works such as the Manto Nama to retell extraordinary moments when the author’s life seemed to mimic fiction (instead of vice-versa), for example when his friend, the matinee idol Ashok Kumar, was hailed by a Muslim ‘mob’ as “Ashok Bhai” and given safe passage via a side-lane through their “sectarian” neighbourhood.

The final part, on ‘Histories’ of Partition, “the Postcolonial Moment” in which Manto arrived in Lahore, and ‘Pakistan and Uncle Sam’s Cold War’ draw in particular on his essays on subjects ranging from the predicaments of abducted women to accounts of his trials for obscenity in a fledgling nation whose artists and writers remained hamstrung by colonial censorship laws. Jalal’s discussion of the supportive correspondence he received when booked on obscenity charges in respect of the short story ‘Thanda Gosht’ is particularly interesting when we consider how narratives of Partition’s traumatic events may be perceived: as indicative of an endemic “lewdness” and depravity, or as examples of exceptional incidences in which “flashes of light” may be gleaned “in the depths of darkness.”

Lastly, part three includes a consideration of his ‘open’ correspondence with his American uncle, brilliantly poised so as to ridicule the US’s ruthless pursuit of its foreign policy interests in the region, its growing cultural influence, and the wisdom of Muslim Pakistan’s associations with this rich and unscrupulous relative. Jalal’s Epilogue briefly probes Manto’s memorialisation and legacy, and points to the still ambiguous status of his life and work in a “postcolonial state anxious to protect its Islamic credentials,” where “conservative circles” who would censure it remain “eager to make social capital out of their contrived piety,” even as “growing ranks of Manto enthusiasts” continue to read, discuss and disseminate his work nationally and globally.

Switching between the genres of history, literature and biography, Jalal makes a strong case for the inclusion of a consideration of Manto’s writings in any study of 20th-century South Asian history, and in particular of what she terms “the pity of Partition, and the pity that Partition continues to be.” Jalal’s lengthy retellings of Manto’s complex, realist and — in her own terms — “impartial” fictions almost as fact in The Pity of Partition blur the boundaries between the two, encouraging the reader not only to acknowledge their proximity (and hence therefore the expediency of their incorporation, along with other forms of “evidence” into any nuanced historical account). They also encourage us to reach again, both for the more familiar ‘Partition’ stories, and for the less-read letters, sketches, and biographies, as we search not only to reacquaint ourselves with the full versions of the originals, but also to verify and more subtly to understand the basis for Jalal’s assertions about the “percipience” of this “all to honest” subcontinental writer in her highly personal homage to his greatness.

The reviewer’s doctoral thesis at the University of East London explores contemporary South Asian fiction

The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide

(HISTORY)

By Ayesha Jalal

Oxford University Press, Karachi

ISBN 978-0-961-15362-9

265pp.