Artist of the Great Divide

Manto’s genius as a writer of short stories about Partition,some staggering in their effect at just a few lines long,lay in his success in showing how it had “destroyed the psychic equilibrium of people”. Jalal,in fact,contends — and this is the central argument in the book — that “creative writers have captured the human dimensions of partition far more effectively than have historians”.

Jalal’s is an intimately personal inquiry in two specific ways. She is Manto’s great-niece,and her task as biographer is made easier by access to a rich archive of letters and family stories. It also makes it somewhat tricky,on account of navigating the inevitable overhang of family lore. And two,she makes it a point to trace the arc of her career as a historian to “the literary presence of the conspicuously absent” Manto while growing up amidst his immediate family in Lahore’s Lakshmi Mansions. (Manto had passed away in 1955 at the age of 42.) Together,these give her material and confidence to read his mind and intent at various points in the narrative in ways not available to others who have made similar claims about his unique place in the literature of Partition. 

Predictably,this renders the intellectual inquiry remarkably uncritical of Manto and even defensive,whether it be the question of his agency in hastening his death by addiction to alcohol or his place amongst his peers. This is Manto as Jalal sees him and would present to a wider readership keen on understanding his times and,in an indeterminate way,our own.

This occasionally uncritical defence of Manto,it must be clarified,does not exactly detract from the book — in fact,not at all. It anchors him in a specific context in a manner that prevents him from becoming all things to all people,and,therefore,eventually just a string of platitudes,as happens all too frequently when talking of his short stories about the “little tragedies” of Partition. As Jalal says it herself: “The Manto archive gave me the source materials to connect the micro history of an individual and a family with the macro history of communities and states during India’s partition… This book reflects my efforts to interweave Manto’s personal life and work with the momentous events through which he lived and that he recorded in his writings. What follows is a canvas on which the pathos of Manto’s life merges imperceptibly with the pity of partition.”

To this end,Jalal embeds Manto’s fiction and profiles (especially of the Bombay film world of the 1940s) in a linear biography — from his formative growing-up years in Amritsar,to his stint in Delhi writing plays for All India Radio,through his years in Bombay,his happiest,and finally his relocation in 1948 to Lahore,where he would be finally beaten by economic hardship and alcohol but where too he would produce his most stellar work till his eventual death. Manto was an extraordinarily prolific and famously quick writer,often finishing a story in

one sitting — and the overlay of his lived life and

his published work conveys how this feat would be impossible to pull off without an essential standard of humanism and cosmopolitanism.