It took just a moment to cleave India in two. At midnight between 14 and 15 August 1947, the country of Pakistan was born and India was liberated from British rule. In the months leading to the end of the British Raj, one of the world’s largest migrations occurred. Fourteen million people were displaced, leading to acts of mass violence, turning Hindu, Muslim and Sikh against one another. On the morning of the 15th, Saadat Hasan Manto looked on with horror as communal violence erupted on the streets of his adopted home city, then known as Bombay. A journalist and short story author, he had just been fired from his job as a screenwriter at the Bombay Talkies film studio for being a Muslim. Fearing for his family’s safety, he had little choice but to flee the city, finding refuge in Lahore, Pakistan. By 1955 he was dead, aged 42, due to alcoholism. He had never returned to the city he loved.
Born in Punjab in 1912, Manto was one of most controversial writers of the age, eloquently crafting empathetic and shocking short stories about those living on the edges of society. Many of his best tales were inspired by his time in what is now Mumbai between 1936 and 1948. He would recall these years as the happiest of his short life, with stories that portrayed a very different side to India, embracing both beauty and ugliness.
While best known for his tales of partition such as Toba Tek Singh, he also masterfully captured the underbelly of the city, telling stories of pimps, gangsters, salon madams and prostitutes living in cramped chawls. His stories were frank, forthright and imbued with a sense of moral outrage that aimed to give a voice to the voiceless. Notoriety inevitably followed him, and Manto faced trial six times on charges of obscenity for his short stories.
The author’s life and work are now the subject of Firaaq director Nandita Das’s second feature film, Manto. Starring Sacred Games star Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Manto, the biopic charts the writer’s last years in Bombay before moving to Pakistan.
“He’s so relevant to today, and it is my way of responding to what is happening now,” explains Das, speaking from Mumbai. “His empathy was very deep for those that exist on the margins of society – especially for women and sex workers – and no one in India was writing about that at the time.”
Throughout the film, Das weaves in tableaux of five of the author’s better-known works, blurring the line between fact and fiction – as was the case with Manto’s own work. His stories spring to life as he strolls crowded streets, talking with intellectuals in Irani cafes, drinking Deer brand whiskey with actors and singers, and making ends meet by working as a screenwriter – often haggling for more money from penny-pinching producers.
Salman Rushdie, the author of Midnight’s Children and one of Manto’s biggest advocates, describes him as “unparalleled in his generation”. “There are few writers,” says Rushdie, “who straddle both India and Pakistan as he does, and who engage with the deepest problems of both countries.” According to Rushdie, Bombay was always Manto’s “greatest inspiration”. It is an affection that shines throughout Das’s film.
‘Unparalleled in his generation’ … Saadat Hasan Manto. Photograph: Wikipedia
Manto was the voice of the city in the 1940s. As a writer he peeled back the tourist-guide sentimentality of the city, portraying a warts-and-all place where you could “live on the footpath or in a magnificent palace” and be happy “on two pennies a day or on 10,000 rupees”.
Like Manto, Das doesn’t wince at showing the city’s complexity pre- and post-partition in the 40s. The director says: “I didn’t want to do a series of cliched shots of places like the Gateway of India, or the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus. It’s the Bombay that common people see at eye level that I wanted to show.”
Das was fascinated by the fact that Manto wrestled with the theme of identity all his life. It was this that inspired her to make the film. He was a Muslim living in a cosmopolitan city also populated by Sikhs, Christians and Jews. It was a place where textile workers huddled in cramped tenements while film producers puffed on fat cigars in luxurious surroundings. Manto lived and breathed a city of contrast and contradiction, much of which is still reflected in its modern incarnation, Mumbai.
Back then it was an environment that provided enough anonymity to allow him to sculpt his own identity and escape moralising busybodies. That is, until world events intervened, forcing him to be defined by his religious identity – the shock must have been immense.
“We are still grappling with issues of identity, nationalism and religion. Not just in India, but around the world,” says Das. “His words lend themselves to the times, then and now, in their identity politics.”
Manto’s work was born from his experience. In his stories we see an author who never shrank from telling the truth about what he saw, even if it was ugly. “His sense of morality, his sense of humanity and truth is just as important in today’s world where we are discussing concepts like ‘post-truth’ and fake news. The space for expressing truth is shrinking,” says Das.
Das wanted to do more than simply tell Manto’s story. Just as Manto saw the world in Bombay – a place of boundless (and for a time borderless) opportunities where issues of race, religion and nationality blurred – she also wanted to explore the theme. “It’s not about showcasing an Indian writer; it is about looking at the idea of boundaries,” she says. “It’s about how we have created these boundaries of ‘us and them’, whether its person to person, or country to country, because we are losing our grip on the importance of truth. Have we stopped valuing honesty?”
In Manto, Das sees a kindred spirit. Above all she sees a maverick, a free thinker, who sought to open up India in all its wild and contradictory glory. So does she think, as many believe, that Manto was a prophet of things to come for both Pakistan and India?
“No one film can say, ‘This is India’,” says Das. “It is part of that jigsaw puzzle, and it is for you to put those pieces together and create your view of India, because it’s many things to many people.” She concludes: “This period of Indian history is very significant. It defined India and Pakistan as it is today. Manto was the conscience of society. And if he were writing what he wrote back then, it would probably be banned.”
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