Sometime ago finished re-reading a collection of short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto. Apart from some well-known partition stories, there are several other notable ones imbued with the trademark sensibility of Manto. The chaos and confusion (quite often accompanied with utter drunkenness which could be a metaphor for the unhinged time and place), as well as raw emotions surface in many stories where action mostly belonged to the turbulent period 1920-1950. Manto seemed almost like a detached observer of the big social and political transformations and the attendant changes brought on the human beings by poverty, destitution and lawlessness that preceded and accompanied partition. Though his emphathy for the predicament of the lowest among the lowly is unmistakable, nevertheless he characterizes and catalogues layers of depravity and villany to which human beings can descend to (especially under some special conditions like dislocation and uncertainty in the context of the partition) with almost a scientist’s empiricism. He appeared to look at his characters much as a biologist would unemotionally handles his petridishes and the bottles of specimens.
Side by side there are also some amazing stories of immense charm and innocence – especially the stories of apparent sexual awakening in the adolescent and the young adults. His empathy for the down and out, especially women (sex workers or others) in difficult and unenviable conditions (whence conventional morality had come unstuck) is well known, but he does it with a simplicity and sureness of touch that is breathtaking.
His partition stories apart (where much of his fame lay and the cold savage fury that characterizes his writing remains unsurpassed), I found ‘New constitution’, ‘Last salute’, ‘Odour’, ‘The blouse’ and ‘Wild Cactus’ in this collection great reading and were as good as any in the world literature.
No comments:
Post a Comment