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.