Desire and Freedom in the Selected Works of Saadat Hasan Manto’s Short Stories

Pages:41-43
Saloni Rathee (Department of English, M.D University, Rohtak, Haryana)

Saadat Hasan Manto was born at Papraudi near Samrala, in Ludhiana district of Punjab on May 11, 1912, to a barrister practicing in Amritsar and his second wife. He received his early education at Muslim High School in Amritsar, but remained a misfit throughout his school years. After failing twice in matriculation, he cleared it on the third attempt with poor grades. One of the subjects he flunked twice was Urdu, which is not surprising because niceties of the language were not for him. His interest was in common people and colloquial language. In 1931, he finally passed out of school and joined Hindu Sabha College in Amritsar. But his attempt to study there failed as did his subsequent effort to study at the Aligarh Muslim University. Back in Amritsar, he came in contact with Abdul Bari Alig, who introduced him to European literature and coaxed him to translate Hugo, followed by the likes of Chekhov, Gorky and Oscar Wilde. The massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar inspired him to write his first short story “Tamasha”. In 1936 an assignment to edit a weekly Urdu film magazine Mussavar took him to Bombay, a city he loved immensely. He earned name and fame there but after the partition, the condition in the film industry took a serious turn. People began to look at each other with suspicion. It was a period of great turmoil. Fearing that he would be attacked any day, he yielded to the prodding of his wife and migrated from India to Pakistan almost in desperation, on January 08, 1948. As film industry was almost non-existent in Pakistan after the initial years of the partition, so he had to entirely depend upon creative writing for a living. It proved to be the most creative period of his life and he wrote more than one hundred fifty stories only in seven years there. Some of these stories like “Toba Tek Singh” and “Mozel” are considered the best of his literary creations. But he was sore over the fact that he was not accorded his rightful place in Pakistan as a writer. In a postscript to one of his collections he wrote: