Mottled Dawn: Fifty Stories on Partition by Manto

I just finished reading " Mottled Dawn", translation of fifty sketches and short stories of Saadat HasanManto by Khalid Hasan, written in 1996 and with a forward by Daniyal Mueenuddin in 2011.



The title is the translation of Faiz's verse Dhaag Dhaag Ujala about the Independence of Pakistan.

While questions of Independence abound and what exactly it mean for Pakistan to be independent is hotly debated, (an ideological religious state vs secular state etc), the trauma of Partition has largely been shelved. People do not talk much about it, partly due to shared guilt or due to apparent disconnect with the present day situation.

For those who are interested in Partition, and there is an increasing demand in certain circles to explore and research it more, not much is out there in objective way. Most of the accounts are jingoistic and clearly partisan, blaming the others for the starting of atrocities or otherwise minimizing and looking the other way. Other accounts are devoid of human stories, being just statistics and bland numbers.  People present at that time who are still alive and can provide oral histories are rapidly vanishing.

In this dearth of real information, strangely, Manto's stories come to the rescue, almost as a collection of people's history. Here you see an honest and impartial depiction of what happened. Manto is able to take the essence of the time, and tell us what was going on in peoples heart and minds. How a relatively normal person gets drawn into the rage of revenge and hatred and commits atrocious crimes. At the same time how brief moments of humanism show up amidst that time of violence and make the person human again.

It starts with 'Toba Tek Singh', his seminal story; how a lunatic refuses to be transferred to India from Pakistan in exchange of residents of lunatic asylums as he wanted to be nowhere else but in his Toba Tek Singh.

In 'Return' (Shalwar), the father is mad with joy to find out his daughter is alive, ignorant or oblivious of the fact that she had been repeated raped and mutilated. In 'Colder than Ice' (thanda gosht), for which he was tried in the courts, he tells how a person felt impotent after realizing he had raped someone who was dead all along. Many more including the 'Assignment', 'Dutiful Daughter', 'Mozail' ( the Jewish girl in Bombay who helps rescue a Sikh girl for his ex boyfriend) 'Dog of Ttitwal' and 'The Last Salute' are a treat to read.

In the 'Last Salute', Indian and Pakistan soldiers who were members of the same regiment before the partition face each other in war in Kashmir, and the dying Ram Singh cannot help but salute the Pakistani Captain as he was his previous officer .

In the 'Tale of 1947', the main character is based on Manto himself. Mumtaz leaves Bombay for Pakistan after he realizes that his own best friend had admitted that he could have killed him in revenge of his uncle's murder in Lahore at the hands of a Muslim.

The sketches are from his book 'Siyah Hashie', composed of short stories, some are only a line or two long. They all tell the story of Partition tersely.

The best way to describe Manto is in the words of Khalid Hasan in his introduction and I reproduce below:

"--- to Manto, what mattered was not what religion people were, what ritual they followed or which gods they worshipped, but where they stood as human beings. If a man killed, it did not matter whether he killed in the name of his gods or for the glory of his country or his way of life. To Manto, he was a killer, In Manto's book, nothing could justify inhumanity, cruelty or the taking of life. In the holocaust of 1947 he finds no heroes except those whose humanity occasionally and at the most unexpected times caught up with them as they pillaged, raped and killed those who had done them no personal harm and whom they did not even known. Manto saw the vast tragedy of 1947 with detachment, but not indifference because he cared deeply." 

Khalid Hasan has done a great job in translation and having read some of the stories in Urdu before, it was a pleasure to read them in English. It opens up a larger readership to Manto which he has deserved for a long time.

Sunlight on a Broken Column by Attia Hosain

 I finished reading the book the second time, read it first thirty years back.

Written by Attia Hosain, a member of a Taluqdari family of Oudh, who decided to move to Britain and not to Pakistan after the Partition, the title is drawn from a line of T S Elliot, 'There the Eyes are Sunlight on a Broken Column".

Set in Lucknow of 1930's it tells the story of people of privilege: a group of cousins and their friends. Told in first person by a character who shares much of her background with the author, it takes you back to the lives of a decaying class, the feudals of North India. Known as Taluqdars they had hereditary lands from Mughals and later from British Empire. Loyal to Crown, they had an almost total control on the lives of their land tenets and serfs.
By the turn of 20th century, many had personally moved to bigger cities and controlled the rural fiefdoms remotely, each generation bringing a different set of values and vision, although still subscribing to the same sense of privilege and authority.

Connection to the rural estate was for getting grains and rents, burying the dead, and later to get votes for elections.

The estate of Hasanpur is not that far away from the city and the description of the journey from the city to the estate looked like any other road trip to any of Punjab villages.
Syed Mohammed Hasan, Baba Jan, the old feudal lord is slowly dying in his Luckhnow mansion, Ashiana. There is a joint family system where his two daughters live with him, one widowed and one unmarried. The protagonist is the orphaned granddaughter whose parents had died. Her father's sister is raising her in a modern way as it was the desire of the dead father. Extended family members stay for long times.

Baba Jan's friends and acquaintances are from his class and share a common interest in things archaic and mundane. His only living son lives elsewhere and moves in after the patriarch dies.

He dies in the chaotic times of Muharram when the city is full of riots. The rituals of death take place in the city and the village. They are beautifully portrayed: the lamenting, the sharing of food , the three days mourning and how the life goes back on track.

Hamid, the son, now moves back to take the charge. He is an anglophile and his wife does not observe Purdah. He does not like joint family system and the sisters are dispatched to village or married off. Laila continues to live in the city and continue her education in the institutions run by the British. Later Hamid's two sons come back from Briton after finishing education and staying there for ten years.

The life of aristocracy, having different faiths and political inclinations but sharing a common social and economical interest, is ceremonial, monotonous and intriguing at the same time. The interplay of older generation and the younger one shows the tension of disagreements between them and how different generations handle them. It is as true as it is today as it was then.

It is perhaps the first, if not the only, English language piece of fiction by a native Urdu speaking person of that era. The language is flawless and one can imagine as if one is reading it in Urdu. The idioms and ways of expression as translated effortlessly as English sentences are uttered by characters who would never speak that language. It does not seem odd at all.

The cousins in this story are or the same age as my parents. This is a good peek into that time, a kind of 'people's history' of what went on in the hearts and minds of the young generation of that time. Similar to the Udaas Naslain, translated by the author himself in English as Weary Generations, it tells you their lives. They had all the range of ideas and thought and their conversations captured in these books tell you of the scope of possibilities and confidence they had. Women , educated in colleges, able to talk and express opinion on all the taboo subjects and accepted in their group of friends could be unimaginable a few decades later in Pakistan.

Seems things have moved backwards as much as on the surface we see the effects of material modernism.

Although the story is narrated by a member of the aristocratic family, the lives and thoughts of the 'other' class is told through the stories of the servants and less privileged relatives. The author does justice to those characters. Perhaps she and the character based on her has the capacity to go beyond their areas of comfort and look at the word through the eyes of the other class without patronizing or being judgmental.

Although it is a story of cousins and their personal affiliations and aspirations and basically it is a love story, the subtext of Independence and the Partition is played in the background without being onerous. Different members of the same family and circle of friends align themselves and route for Muslims League, Congress or for just the Feudal system. Landed aristocracy see its gradual downfall, politically and socially, and the eventual disappearance of its existence as a class. We see how the new rich gain ground and influence and the mercantile class become land owner transforming it to urban boom. 

And then, true to the title, the ultimate effect of Partition on the larger family, how it gets dispersed over countries and continents and unable to communicate with one another. Lines drawn on sand become permanent barriers and hearts, properties and lives are divided.

And how a young girl, born in a family of privilege, is able to keep her head balanced, able to see the world as it should be, and defies the authority of others in choosing her own destiny.

I am not sure why the novel did not get noticed in Pakistan as much as it should have been. I for one, did not hear about it until I moved to USA in 1988, It was first published in 1961 and is surely one of the best portrayal of pre partition twentieth century in North India.