Perhaps no other Urdu fiction writer has been translated as frequently into English as Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) has been. This great degree of interest in Manto is by no means purely literary — in recent decades, we have seen discussion and debate on him steered more and more by historians and social scientists. Interest in Manto has thus become firmly tied up with interest in the history of Partition, and in the accompanying experience of communal violence.

With the hats of political commentator, social critic, and historical documenter all forcefully jammed onto Manto’s head, could it be that somewhere along the line, sight is being lost of Manto the ‘writer’ — the crafter of stories? This is certainly the assertion that translator Muhammad Umar Memon makes in his fresh — and refreshing — selection of the writer’s work.

One of Pakistan’s most prominent and prolific translators of Urdu fiction into English, Memon’s efforts over the years have contributed to making international audiences more familiar with the work of eminent figures in the Urdu world, such as Intizar Hussain and Naiyer Masud. Now, he applies his formidable skill to offer us translations of some of Manto’s cleverest fiction, in a volume called My Name is Radha: The Essential Manto.

Several English-translated collections of Manto already exist; Memon’s efforts, however, are not restricted to simply adding one more translated volume of Manto’s work to this list. The book also happens to be a very deliberate enterprise on the translator’s part to steer readers’ understanding away from the prevalent idea that decrying the violence of Partition, and the harsh realities of the lives of prostitutes, are the chief preoccupations of Manto’s fiction. The one is a political event, Memon argues, and the other a social phenomenon; instead of dividing his stories into such broad binaries and non-literary categories, critics ought to focus on Manto’s stories as creative explorations of the complex psyche of distinct kinds of individuals, rather than as generalised commentaries or ideal proclamations about society and politics. That many of Manto’s major stories are titled after their focal characters — Bb Gopnth, Mer Nm Rdh Hai, Moail, Sirj, Shrd, Rm Khilwan, Gilgit Khn — only serves to demonstrate this.

Muhammad Umar Memon’s selections and commentary on Manto are a critical intervention in liberating Manto from commonly held myths — a call to focus on the art of the writer

The stories in Memon’s volume have been ordered to reflect this principle, and have been curated into seven distinct groupings which focus on different categories relating to particular kinds of characters, thematic concerns, or narrative perspectives and techniques. The effect of this is that as the reader progresses through the book, her mind is trained to hone in on distinct facets of Manto’s craft and literary preoccupations.

For instance, we know that Manto (as a writer) had an almost pathological preoccupation with female characters from a particular segment of society, whose ways and manners he had had the opportunity to study at close quarters. The experience of reading so many stories which delve deeply into the lives of prostitutes packed together in a section which highlights his major female character studies allows us to measure the truth of Memon’s assertion that far from assuming an attitude of righteous indignation over society’s exploitation of such women (as Manto the ‘reformer’ is popularly (mis)perceived as and much celebrated for), Manto the ‘short story writer par excellence’ was rather more preoccupied with exploring each character’s peculiar reaction to the unique circumstances in which she finds herself.

A character like Saugandhi in ‘Scorned’, for example, does not appear to feel the affront or humiliation at being forced to trade in what she does each night quite as deeply as she feels the insult of being rejected outright one night by a rich and fastidious customer who takes one look at her and dismisses her as being beneath his notice. These are some of the seeming paradoxes of the human psyche that Manto liked to explore, and which make his stories so powerful and appealing for the reader. Far from grave outrage, we can even sense his obvious enjoyment in detailing the subtle and unique quirks of each individual character’s personality. In the story ‘My Name Is Radha’, for instance, the bit actress from Banaras who plays the vamp in a film that Manto (in the form of first-person narrator) is writing dialogues for insists on calling him “Sadiq” instead of “Saadat” because — she declares with a faint smile on her thin, dark lips — “Once I’ve made a mistake, I stick it.”

The first two sections of the volume showcase some of Manto’s most powerful sketches of female and male protagonists. Most of these are set against the backdrop of the bordello, with characters ranging from patrons, to procurers, to prostitutes — the milieu from which Manto seems to have drawn his most inspired character portraits. In further sections, this setting takes up a much less concentrated form, as we read stories of people from many different walks of life set in both pre- and post-Partition times — a waiter struggling to live with his off-putting looks; a Progressive writer out to impress a fellow Progressive writer; soldiers who had once fought side by side now finding themselves fighting on opposite sides of a battlefield; a female seductress/serial killer; a khadi-wearing freedom fighter; a charlatan holy man; an expectant unmarried mother working up the cowardice-laced courage to abandon her baby; a Kathiawari banya quite deliberately constructing unsound dwellings for refugee families; husbands navigating the complaints of their hen-pecking wives; a film actor with a fetish for collecting bottles and cans.

“Doubtless, I’m a frail and chronically ill man. One of my lungs can hardly pump enough oxygen into my body. But as God is my witness, I have never put my weakness on display, although I know that one can exploit one’s frailty as much as one’s strength. But I believe one should not do that. To me, true beauty is the kind that you quietly admire in your heart, not broadcast with your tongue. I consider such beauty an affliction that hits you with the impact of a rock. All the beauties that a young man should have, Raj Kishore had them.” — Excerpt from the book

The subtitle, The Essential Manto, seems apt indeed for the volume, since it is a weighty one and endeavours to convey a comprehensive picture of Manto’s oeuvre in forty carefully selected full-length short stories, and one play. These include some of Manto’s most famous stories as well as some of his lesser-known ones, and the play — In this Maelstrom (A Melodrama) — displays a side of Manto seldom seen, for it deals with the romantic yearnings and heart-searchings of members of the kind of well-heeled, conventionally respectable family that writers other than Manto are typically better known for writing about. The volume is thus a treat for any reader seeking to get an overview of Manto’s best writing. Yet, there’s more.

At the end of the book, Memon makes the valuable inclusion of some brief samples of critical literature, penned both by himself and the legendary Urdu critic Muhammad Hasan Askari, as well as some of Manto’s own key reflections on various aspects of his fiction — a worthwhile read for those seeking to understand Manto’s attitudes towards his own writing. Through these, Memon makes a critical intervention in the popular understanding of two vital issues in relation to Manto — the matter of Manto as a writer of the obscene, and that of him as a writer of Partition.

Although Manto has come to be known (perhaps unfortunately for him) as the quintessential ‘Partition writer’ of South Asian fiction, Askari’s pieces raise interesting questions about whether political subjects such as war or communal strife can really be considered viable literary subjects, or whether they can only be “written about” from a purely non-literary point of view. He questions whether Manto, however great the moral effect of his words on us, ever really chose to write about Partition or the communal riots at all as his primary goal, or whether reflecting on the curious and contradictory impulses of the human psyche is what truly concerned him, and what makes his fiction that much more powerful than that of writers who actively strove to write about such events.

After all, if Manto is interested in communal riots as a topic, what is his position on them? Is he interested in apportioning blame in his stories? Or even in maintaining complete religious neutrality? In taking some kind of clear position for or against the so-called ‘vivisection’ of India? Askari’s criticism cautions us to be wary of making assumptions and trying to derive clear political messages from Manto’s stories by projecting our own political views onto them. The only thing that we can be positively clear about in Manto’s fiction, Askari argues, is this: “[Manto] only points out that man is a strange creature, a compound of discordant elements, and then he keeps quiet… What gives us hope is that one can’t be sure about man — he can be good, but then again he can be bad.”

While the addition of such thought-provoking critical material adds worth to an already valuable collection, the single most important factor which makes Memon’s volume tower head and shoulders over past efforts is the quality of the translation itself. It is rare these days to see so profound and faultless an understanding of Urdu matched with a formidably supple command over English expression. This translation is thoroughly pleasurable not just in the sense that it is highly idiomatic, but also in that it manages to capture and retain much of the terse, energetic verve we associate with Manto’s pen.

Other translators have sometimes made Manto seem excessively sober, even stodgy. Memon’s triumph is that he manages to communicate much of the informal, conversational vivacity, and deft force, of Manto’s original words. He follows Manto closely, and then bravely abandons him to come up with a superb sentence that captures the essence of Manto’s writing in a radically different yet entirely apt manner; a manner which gels infinitely well with the habits and temperament of conversational English.

When Manto talks about the uniquely pleasant quality of the Rawalpindi dialect of Punjabi, he describes it as possessing a strange kind of “mardnah nis’yat”. Now this could technically have been translated as “masculine femininity”, but Memon does something much better and more effective — he translates the phrase as “rugged femininity”. In other words, he adroitly captures the essence of Manto’s expressions, rather than conforming to the literal meaning of Manto’s words.

While some of Manto’s (even most well-appraised) translators have in the past taken bold liberties with his stories, often distorting or skipping entire sentences and passages which were carelessly deemed uninteresting or untranslatable, there is no sign here of such problems. Each sentence has been translated meticulously and faithfully, with nothing added or deleted. The story titles are also recognisable and largely free of unnecessary changes.

Manto’s plots are often so dramatic and striking that a translation need not be excellent in order to retain the reader’s interest. He is, however, essentially a master of description. It is fitting, thus, that it should be in the descriptive passages that the beauty of Memon’s translations is most apparent. The pleasure created by a smell “not at all eager to be smelled” is contrasted with the more assertive smell of henna, which is an “exhausted smell in the throes of death, somewhat tangy, oddly tangy, like the sour belches of indigestion”. Although the thoughts and imagery always remain Manto’s, it is in these moments, when Memon’s translation flows so smoothly and gracefully, that one is reminded of the fact that the translator himself is a short story writer.

It is a rare moment when a writer and translator, deserving of each other, are brought together. In reading Memon’s translation of Manto, a reader may enjoy the rare confidence that she is reading Manto — no more and no less. It is one of those special translations that brings pleasure even to those who are already in the habit of reading Manto in Urdu.

Memon has succeeded in producing an accessible translation without including a glossary. Words like baithak, kothi, namaz, phulka, takht, seth, and curiously even garbar (confusion) are left unexplained and untranslated without detracting from the smooth flow of the reading experience, perhaps adding to it, in fact, since the publisher is Indian and the primary target audience can be presumed to have some knowledge of South Asian life and lingo. Footnotes are provided for presumably less accessible words such as ashnan and Hadith, which is beneficial in preventing explanations or contextual information from creeping in to disrupt the flow of Manto’s work. Yet the logic of such footnoting is not always obvious to follow, for while the meaning of La Illaha Ilallah Muhammadur Rasulullah is footnoted for the story ‘Recite the Kalima!’, there is no comparable footnote in ‘Yazeed’ to explain the identity of this historical personage.

Memon’s attitude towards dialect is also interesting. In ‘Ram Khilawan’, the uneducated Bombay dhobi’s original words (“Begam sb dhob ko len y … moar men … Bhagwn begam sb ko khus rakkhe … Bolo Rm Khilwan bolt hai, ham ko bh kgaj likkho”) are translated as “Begam sab came visit dhobi in car … Bhagwan keep begum sab happy … Say Ram Khilawan want you write him letter”. Making the dhobi speak this sort of broken English is admirably effective in faithfully communicating the spirit of the various differences between the master and dim, so clear in the original story. However (and this is really just a quibble), we may discern the very slightest of inconsistencies here when Memon does not appear to employ a similar technique in translating the Jewish character’s assumed Bombay-style Urdu at the relevant point in ‘Mozel’ — her line “Ham is se shd banne ko mngt hai” has been translated quite straightforwardly as “I’m going to marry this man”.

My Name Is Radha: The Essential Manto holds interest as a glimpse into cosmopolitan culture at a particular historical juncture in this part of the world. At a point when Partition had not yet taken place, or when the process of Partition was yet to be fully completed, the book depicts life in society’s seedy underbelly, and the terms of easy (or tense) discourse between members of different religious groups — groups that had not yet been transformed into majorities and minorities by the post-colonial nation-state, and its artificial (yet influential) discourse of love and condescension. We see a fictional world where it is fascinatingly difficult to characterise the writer’s sensibility as ‘liberal’ or ‘illiberal’, partly because the terms of a South Asian liberal humanism had yet to be defined. These are characters (whether a prostitute like Sultana who seeks a black shalwar to wear in Muharram, or Trilochan who agonises over removing his Sikh turban and beard to please his Jewish fiancée) who either defy religious/social norms, or seek to adhere to them — though not necessarily out of espousal of, or opposition to, a clearly defined modern, liberal sensibility.

Rather than being motivated by a desire to paint Manto as a conscience-stricken chronicler of his times (standing above the base and all-too-human impulses of his contemporaries), or a presager of times to come, or just to have a good cry about Partition, Memon’s book is a call to focus on the art of Manto, who is above all a writer and not a philosopher or historian. It is also a call to think long and hard about what Manto appeared to be saying, or leaving unsaid, in his fictional and non-fictional work — rather than posthumously straightjacketing him into the reductive image of a poster child for some ready-made political cause or ideology which his thoroughly independent-minded temperament would quite likely have rebelled against.

“It is about time that we discarded the myth about Manto tacitly following some Progressive-socialist-reformist agenda in his fiction; if anything, he was following his own agenda as a writer true to his calling,” Memon writes. It is brave of Memon to come out and state this boldly, unlike so many commentators these days who try to fudge the issue and keep their fingers in both the Progressive pie and in Manto — an astonishing feat considering how much fun Manto poked at men who display a marked degree of blindness towards their own basic instincts and predilections, who espouse grand ideals in general, and about the Progressives in particular. And this is aside from what he stated (in no uncertain terms) in some of his non-fictional writing, which is also included in this volume: “Alas, my Progressive friends are averse to thinking! They consider it a negative act.”

Manto appears to be in vogue these days, with new cinematic and television depictions of his life on the horizon. This renewed burst of attention is positive in the sense that it will hopefully provide viewers with more incentive to read his actual work and make up their own minds regarding his art and persona. Memon’s fresh selection and translation of Manto’s work provides an opportunity to fall in love with Manto in a new way, and to view him from fresh and unfettered perspectives — and it could not have come at a better time.

The reviewer is a researcher and literary translator.

My Name is Radha: The Essential Manto
(SHORT STORIES)
By Saadat Hasan Manto; translated by Muhammad Umar Memon
Penguin Books, India
ISBN 978-0670086900
340pp.