(Dis)Entangling Manto and Chughtai: Review of Manto and Chughtai: The Essential Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto, tr. Muhammad Umar Memon, and Ismat Chughtai, tr. M. Asaduddin. Penguin Random House India, 2019

Manto and Chughtai: The Essential Stories, a new translation of the stories of Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai by Muhammad Umar Memon and M. Asaduddin, respectively, entwines the already allied lives of the two most dauntless Urdu writers of the twentieth century. Both Manto and Chughtai wrote around the same time; they were associated with the Progressive Writers’ Movement¹; they rejected extravagance in favor of a spareness in style; their stories “Bu” and “Lihaaf” were simultaneously, and unsuccessfully, tried for obscenity; indeed, they were friends. The above Penguin edition would appear to honor this literary comradeship, publishing a few key stories of the two writers in a single volume.

Devangasha Dash’s attractive book cover features paintings of Manto and Chughtai each on one side, as though flipping one would lead you to the other. Manto as Chughtai’s inverse, and vice versa. Such a presumption would not be entirely wrong, for, affable as they were, their friendship was punctuated by impassioned debates, conflicting ideas, and fundamental disagreements. Included in this book is Chughtai’s obituary on Manto, revealingly titled “My Friend, My Enemy!” which documents the complexity of their relationship. This collection celebrates their kindredness but brings out the divergences in their writing, enriching the experience of reading each writer. True, they have a similarly sharp and observational quality in their writing, but their focal points differ as do the outlooks that compose their material.

Take their stories categorized under “Sex and Sexuality,” for instance. Translated as “Smell,” Manto’s “Bu” is the free indirect discourse of Randhir’s mind recollecting the sexual encounter he had on “a day just like today” with a “young woman from the hills. Embarking on the fling “to get even with” the Christian neighbor who spurned him, Randhir presumes in this girl from far away an authenticity, an “earthly” meaning. His desire is layered with Pygmalionesque regard for the woman’s body: “he felt as though, with the dexterity of the master potter, his own hands had shaped a lump of soft, moist clay into a pair of exquisite cups on the girl’s chest.” Not only her possessor, then, but her maker. And his sexual memory is sustained by a sense: her “primal and timeless” odor. Such a phantasmic narrative, Manto suggests, has material implications: namely, that Randhir cannot feel “that call,” the “something else altogether” – note the evasiveness of the highlighted words – in his wife’s arms. The masculine idealization of a sexual experience serves as both an emotional and sexual closure to new attachments. Randhir strains to find traces of the woman in his wife, and in their absence places the burden of his frustration upon her: “the new bride … failed to rouse her husband’s passion.” A marriage fails.

Manto returns to the same question in “Sharda,” where the protagonist Nazir’s affair with Sharda thrills him as long as it is at the brothel. At his own house, “her body [is] as physically hospitable as before, but the vibes [are] no longer the same.” Sex there was fulfilling for more than the physical act, for the whole economic atmosphere, for its distant location. His fixation to a scene rather than a person is contrary to Sharda’s own demonstrative obsession with him. She pens lengthy letters and makes a stopover at his house, but the man dismisses her with bizarre justifications in his mind. Whereas the ending can leave us feeling sympathetic for Sharda, it seems that Manto’s aim, in anchoring the narrative in Nazir’s life, is to probe a markedly masculine formation of desire men like Nazir and Randhir exemplify: the hankering for a vague, “original” sexual experience that breeds disappointment and nostalgia, always at the expense of the other.

In Chughtai’s stories, the focus is less on the “truth” of the erotic – in which Manto’s men invest – but on its stealthiness, on its possibilities for pleasure and anxiety, and its power to make and break intimacy. The sensual, for Attan and Safiya of “The Net,” is a bath, where the “air [beats] against their bodies.” The touch of an element frees. Stimulation abounds in the paragraph describing the bath, but Chughtai remembers to map its borders: only the bathroom is their “swaraj” – one’s own domain – and the bath thus a “reverie.” Outside they have to wear “grotesque vests” that are like “roadrollers on their bodies”; outside life “spread itself like a net”; outside swaraj can be contemplated only as death, as do the girls: “The heroines of those [sentimental] stories were lucky that they died. If only these two could die like them!” Later, sensuality too takes the form of a net, trapping them, and breaking the singularity of their friendship. The story wades through the whole sweep of breakup emotions: animus at the betrayal, a push of desire to reconnect, a pull of the will to self-containment. All this, for Chughtai, in the stumbling of two female children into the erotic.

Incidentally, it is the stumbling of another child into a sexual scene that forms the story “Lihaaf,” translated as “The Quilt”: the story that got Chughtai into court. True, Begum Jaan and her masseuse Rabbu are at the center of attention – the swaying elephants under the quilt, indulging in the unspeakable thing. But the erotic power of the story comes from the “innocent” narrator, so sly and deft in her reportage that she is able to veil not only the sexual act from explicit presence but also herself as ignorant of sexual knowledge. And yet we feel the sensuality of it all; and yet we know she knows. A professor of naivete and unease, she is otherwise happy to play the voyeur, rubbing Begum’s body and recording her “sensuous breaths”; and stealing glances at Begum’s skin, “stitched tightly over her body,” Begum’s “ample flesh,” and Rabbu’s “roving hands” as they moved over Begum’s waist and thighs. The narrator does not name the act, but rather “moan[s]”: “Allah, Ah!” For the women, and for the narrator, desire is forbidden but known, pleasurable but hidden, and Chughtai weaves these conditions into a heady lihaaf.

If obscenity is what made Manto controversial, it is his stories around the event of the Partition – three of which are included in this collection – that have made him prominent. Manto’s prose is sparer in these, and his best story “Open It!” is barely two pages, and no less disquieting for its brevity. In the refugee camp at Mughalpura is Sirajuddin, frantically searching for his daughter Sakina, whose dupatta – a mark of propriety – he has preserved. Volunteers who promise to help him locate her – one of whom, upon finding her, even provides her with his jacket as she attempts to cover her “modesty” – do not take her to Sirajuddin and instead feign ignorance. She is later found almost dead, presumably raped. The cruelties of Partition do not come only from the other side; trust is meaningless when nobody is accountable; violence is the norm. These are not all Manto’s arrangement suggests. The breath-stopping horror of the story hinges on the two words that make its title, “Open It!”: the doctor looking at Sakina’s unmoving body directs Sirajuddin to open the window. But all Sakina can hear in those words, and the male voice, is imminent sexual assault: “with lifeless hands she undid the knot of her waistband and lowered her shalwar.” That it is this traumatized response which ascertains the fact of her being alive is the disturbing end of the story.

“Toba Tek Singh,” the most famous Manto story, is a literary uncanny of Partition. For Manto sets a Partition-like situation in a post-Partition mental asylum, framing questions of belonging, religious riots, political recklessness, and loss of land and love in a context of “insanity”: it is the familiar, but altered, with changes, decontextualized. In the wake of the recognition and shock that follow, justifications for the event of violence and displacement – of inevitability, of rightness – are rendered open to question. To question is not to be hopeful though, for Manto. The solution to the scars of history we did not elect is bleak: it is no-man’s land, where we can but die, for the location precludes the possibility of living.

Chughtai does not write of the Partition, but her stories with themes of communal difference and relation, categorized under “Communal Colour,” come with optimism. Playing with stock dialogs of communal hatred and religious exclusion to one-up each other in their banter, the two child-protagonists in “Kafir,” one from a Muslim family and another from a Hindu family, mock the seriousness of their differences. In fact, they use identities as character roles to adorn and discard depending on the festival of the time. Identities depend on festivals, not the other way round. This carefree attitude extends until they contemplate their marriage, or as the girl foresees it, “a shoe beating by Abba!” At this impasse, where conversion would be an adherence to the dictates of religion, they decide to abandon their identities altogether and become kafirs in the true sense, in the sense “of the poets,” and walk “down the big, straight road” toward some hopeful future.

But what about after that? This is the question Chughtai takes up in “Sacred Duty.” She is not a utopian and knows the imposture of concepts like goodwill and tolerance all too well to pronounce “all will be well.” This story has a “progressive” Sunni father who wants to “go to Allahabad and shoot” his daughter and Hindu son-in-law upon learning about their cross-religion marriage. When his Shia friend helps him hatch a less violent plot, and the Shia–Sunni differences do not matter, Chughtai offers us irony: “Often a man’s faith comes in the way of his friendship, but it is mostly love and friendship that triumph.” In the end, the parents’ plot fails, of course, and Chughtai makes love triumph, leaving us with lines from the Quran grafted onto lines from the Gita, transgressing both their “original” meanings. The sacred duty is to love, and communal color is a mixture.

For veteran readers of Manto and Chughtai, this collection can function as a comparative text. Where Manto is interested in the depravity of a gendered subject and the bleakness of a historical moment, Chughtai is attentive to the desires of the other gendered subject and to parallel spaces of attachment and solidarity within that bleakness. For new readers, on the other hand, this new translation offers an enabling introduction to an assorted selection of the writers’ oeuvre. If this selection can be termed “essential,” as the collection does, it is only because of the political resonance they have in our times, for, reading these stories, especially those under “Partition” and “Communal Colour,” is an experience of another kind of uncanny. The state of the land is as though Manto and Chughtai have never been read and understood. There is public rhetoric and state legislations that police interfaith love and marriage.² An elected Member of Parliament objects to the Urdu naming of Diwali and garners widespread support.³ The government wishes to observe August 14th as “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day,” “in memory of the struggles and sacrifices of our people”: Indians only.⁴ These unfortunate historical moments make the publication of this book timely; for, otherwise, these stories are timeless.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Formed in 1935–36, the Progressive Writers’ Movement, or Progressive Writers’ Association, was a group of South Asian intelligentsia that was, in the words of Maia Ramnath, “the cultural wing of the South Asian left and the South Asian manifestation of an international anti-imperialist movement that in both periods viewed art, literature, and ideology as crucial components of building socialism and decolonization.” See Ramnath, Maia, “The Progressive Writers Association.”

² See Soutik Biswas, “Love jihad: The Indian Law Threatening Interfaith Love.”

³ See India Today Web Desk. “Deepavali is not Jashn-e-Riwaaz: Tejasvi Surya slams Fabindia ad.”

⁴ See Special Correspondent of The Hindu. “Narendra Modi picks August 14 to Recall Partition trauma.”