Hasan Manzar is probably not very well-known, as his conspicuous absence from the literary Urdu critical scene would suggest. Being a psychiatrist, and one untiringly devoted to his patients (even in retirement and ill health he takes weekly trips to Hyderabad for two or three days to inquire after and see his old patients), he has preferred to spend the little time he could scrounge from his overly busy professional schedule on his writing, rather than in coffee-houses, tea-shops, in socialising or participating in the so-called global this and global that conferences — a must if you want to be on the centre stage of the literary scene. But he is content in his kulba-e nisyaan, his cubical of solitude, which is perhaps not surprising. It is the criminal neglect of his writing and its critical assessment that should rankle any unbiased reader.

In an interview aired by the Voice of America in 1995, Hasan Manzar remarked:

“My stories are inspired by … ordinary men and women affected by some sorrow, happiness, or longing. … [They] are not imagined beings. I mean, I’m as far away as anyone can get from any kind of romanticism. Subjects, unless they are firmly grounded in objective reality, leave me cold, and I almost never feel motivated to probe them in my fiction. It is the real, flesh-and-blood people, victims of oppression and violence, scarred by pain and injustice that touch me. And it does not matter where they come from.”

Clearly, Hasan Manzar’s mimetic strategy is pointed away from abstraction, allegorical meaning, or any kind of creative equivocation; instead, it is grounded in stark realism. Even deep and knotty psychological problems have to be made evident on the surface, not to be guessed at in the subtle modulations of the psyche well below the surface. Meaning must emerge wearing its own palpable form — gritty, textured, and alive to the touch, exposed to the eye. Like Munshi Premchand (1880–1936), whom he resembles closely in his creative vision, if not always in his creative execution, he prefers to cast his stories in the realistic mode, almost never deviating from the traditional geometry of plot and structure. One may find his view of reality a bit too restrictive, for characters in fiction are, to state the obvious, fictional. Where they seem real, their reality itself is composite, reconstituted into fictional identity from fragments of real personalities as seen through the mediating eye of the narrator. Nonetheless, it is a view to which Hasan Manzar has remained loyal throughout. The dozen or so short stories included in his A Requiem for the Earth (Oxford University Press, 1998) — as well as those in his several collections — never waver in their author’s commitment to the individual, privileging his external reality over probes initiated into the subterranean and obscure realms of his consciousness. This individual is so real he could be one’s next-door neighbour, savvy or naïve, rural or urban, educated or illiterate. He comes from all walks of contemporary Pakistani life, from every social stratum and, as often, from across the seas: India, Africa, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Iran, the Gulf states, everywhere and anywhere.

The searing conflicts generated by regional and religious chauvinism in a highly exploitative society, or even by one’s own unarticulated dark impulses, are the sources from which Hasan Manzar draws the raw material for his stories. Among contemporary Pakistani writers, he stands out for his experimentation with the widest possible range of subjects and for diversity of locale. Pakistan is a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic society. In no other Urdu writer of this country do these realities find their most informed and variegated expression as they do in Hasan Manzar. He touches on most aspects of its corporate existence, from religious bigotry to corruption at all levels of society, from regionalism to nationalism. While the issues are not exclusive to Pakistan, they do have their distinct Pakistani texture; Hasan Manzar captures it well.

Pakistan was founded on the basis of religious identity and religion has been present as a major force throughout its 66 years of existence, as the principal term of all private and public discourse. Stories such as ‘Emancipation,’ ‘The Beggar Boy,’ and ‘Kanha Devi and her Family’ offer shades of spirituality and its misapprehension, which often leads to bigotry and denominational xenophobia — to an exclusivism that feeds on difference and drives a wedge between human beings. But, again, the stories deal with these issues at the level of the individual. Nowhere does the author single out entire communities for indictment.

In ‘Emancipation,’ a young married Hindu woman, bearing the stigma of barrenness, is assaulted by a Muslim ticket checker in a deserted railroad car one dreary evening during a trip to the Holy Ganges. She manages to walk away from the terrifying ordeal unhurt, thanks to her quick thinking and wit. However, for her husband and her in-laws, she is henceforward a condemned woman, a veritable canker growing on their purest religious honour, a walking reminder of their largely imagined humiliation, an affront to their piety. On the other hand, her assailant’s family stands solidly behind him and exerts every effort to secure his acquittal, even soliciting help from a “Muslim holy man.” Worse yet, the assailant’s wife, rather than being cross with her husband, raises the accusing finger at his victim.

Hasan Manzar is careful not to exploit the story’s negative potential, to project yet again the generalised views and attitudes about whole groups, or to judge the quiet spirituality inherent in religions by the violent, often explosive, conduct of their adherents. His emphasis remains throughout on how individuals understand and interpret religion, and how they often use it for entirely non-religious ends. The tragic event, and its even greater tragic consequences, turn the victim’s thoughts inward, give her the opportunity to reflect on her own attitudes towards the religious other, to distinguish between essential spirituality, with its concomitant potential for inner transformation, and the seductive lure of a religion’s exoterica.

This reflection, in turn, becomes a liberating and empowering experience. In the concluding brief segment of the story, set apart from the larger first portion, we meet her not in her native India, but somewhere overseas, with a West Indian friend, as the two playfully hurl coins at empty beer cans floating in the river.

“‘Another round — shall we?’ my West Indian friend asked. “‘No, that’ll do for today,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to cook supper for the children as soon as I get back home. My husband is on call tonight. And since today is my lucky day, I hope the phone won’t ring every five minutes for him to rush to the hospital to take care of some drunkard’.” (Requiem 1998) These sentences project a woman confident in herself. Full of verve and brio, she is looking to the future with strength and optimism, in sharp contrast to the meek and trodden housewife of a few years ago who bent over backwards to ingratiate herself with her in-laws, wallowing in maudlin self-pity, denying her potential. She is now happily remarried, has children and — something she didn’t have before — an understanding and loving mate, whom she looks forward to meeting with eager anticipation at the end of the day. The narrative is purposely silent about the developments in her life since her assailant’s acquittal. But none of this would have been possible without a sense of liberation and empowerment blossoming deep within the protagonist’s psyche.

Exaggerated confidence in the redeeming and salvific power of religious exoterica for adherents of one religion or another charged with missionary zeal underlies ‘The Beggar Boy.’ The contradiction between the true spirituality that occupies the core of religion, and slavish and hypocritical adherence to its rituals, is subtly presented in this story.

Station master Baray Babu’s entire family is hell-bent on making a Muslim out of Ramsarna, a homeless Hindu boy who comes begging for scraps of food at their door every so often during the week. With great deftness, Hasan Manzar here probes the motives and the conduct of several members of this family to show how their actions are at odds with their avowed scramble for beatitude, whether for themselves or for those outside their fold. These motives are anything but selfless. The oldest boy of the family has no qualms about forcing himself upon a village girl for sex — stuffing a shiny four-anna coin in her hands for services unwillingly performed — while Baray Babu, the essence of righteousness and virtue, manages to fit into his out-of-town day-trip a quick visit to a prostitute’s kotha.

The suggestion to convert initially terrifies the beggar boy. But his fear stems more from a feeling of uncertainty and a visceral dread of the unknown than from a deep conviction about his own faith which, like most individuals, he has merely inherited and grown used to without the need to search within himself for its essence or meaning. In fact, it is just this suggestion that forces upon him the need to articulate his religious identity for the first time. He stays away from Baray Babu’s household, but only for a day. The pangs of hunger bring him back, and the next day finds him grovelling at Baray Babu’s doorway again, seduced into the benefits of conversion — “Two meals a day — the same food as we eat, not some rotten bread thrown at beggars,” nice clothes to wear, freedom from untouchability, even education. The boy succumbs, as temptation’s tidal wave washes away the mud embankments of his hesitation.

Reciting the kalima proves easy enough, but the boy panics when the family tries to snip off the small tuft of hair traditional Hindus wear on a shaven head as a mark of devoutness. Conversion is one thing, losing the hair quite another. He hadn’t bargained for it, so he flees. He comes upon a Hindu priest lolling on a raised platform outside a temple in the darkening shadows of the evening. The priest quizzes the boy and learns about his narrow escape from conversion to Islam. He praises his valiant effort to remain steadfast in his own religion. And just as he has seduced him with a promise of a better life (“I’m sure some noble soul or the other will take you in,”) he attempts a sexual assault on him. Ramsarna runs again — twice humiliated, twice betrayed.

In both ‘Emancipation’ and ‘The Beggar Boy’ religion is used as an obfuscating cover for one’s less than honourable motives. The incidents themselves are not unique in any way, but in revisiting them in their crass, unredeemed ordinariness, Hasan Manzar seems to be underscoring their great potential for divisiveness and disruption, while subtly alluding to the fact that such conduct is not consistent with true, transformative spirituality, which, ultimately, all religions strive for.

The theme of religious difference and its effect on the mindset of minorities is probed with sensitivity and wit in the short story ‘Kanha Devi and her Family.’ The ideological imperatives of the 1947 partition aside, few can deny that its execution, on the human level at least, left quite a lot to be desired. Rarely has history witnessed such a sloppy and messy job of uprooting and relocating entire populations. Where Muslims are concerned, scarcely a family was left undivided, some of its members migrating to Pakistan, others opting to live on in India. This was less so for the Hindu and Sikh residents of what eventually became West Pakistan. Demographically small, most had managed to emigrate to India. The few who did stay on probably suffered comparatively less at the hands of the majority. The main religious conflict in Pakistan appears to have been generally inter-denominational, rather than inter-faith. But size and demographic density aside, minority status in itself is hardly a fate to be envied.

Few Urdu writers have focused on the experience of minorities within Pakistan. One looks in vain for a significant story about, for instance, a member of the Parsi community, other than the English novel The Crow Eaters by Bapsi Sidhwa, herself a Parsi, or about the Ahmadis, except Ikramullah’s Urdu novella, Aankh Ojhal. How does a minority feel in the midst of a Muslim majority? Such exclusion is not only unwarranted, it is also fundamentally at odds with a fictional logic which assumes, as Hasan Manzar’s does, the individual to be the principal value and measure of all creative endeavour. One’s religious or ethnic identity is only secondary to one’s status as a human being. Whatever importance religious and ethnic questions may assume, they do so obliquely through the lives of individuals. Kanha Devi and her family are Sindhi Hindus who have stayed on in Pakistan following Partition. This family and a few others live in an enclave surrounded by Muslims. The interaction between the two communities is one of mutual respect and harmony — perhaps a bit too idealistic from today’s perspective. The Muslim method of greeting as well as certain deferential customs of the local Hindus are unhesitatingly observed by both communities. All the same, this mutual regard does not prevent some of the Hindu dwellers of the enclave, and especially Kanha Devi’s husband Chandarmal and her daughter-in-law Damayanti, from feeling claustrophobic, jittery, and nervous. Their anxiety grows in proportion to the news of atrocities committed against Muslims in India, each fresh assault invoking renewed fear of reprisals from the very people among whom they have so far lived in relative peace. Damayanti, an Indian national who married into the family and has never reconciled to her life in Pakistan, loses sleep, desperately longs to return to her native India, and dangles precariously on the verge of paranoid collapse.

But if Kanha Devi’s husband and daughter-in-law live out their days in cloistered marginality, Kanha Devi herself goes about the business of life supremely unaffected by the supposedly hostile presence of the ‘other’ around her. She is at peace with her environment, fully integrated with it. And so is her son Kishan Chand, who tells his nagging wife in no uncertain terms: “You know what I think? If you had been born here, then you too would be like mother: you’d obey your religion and not hate others for obeying theirs. Anyway, why would I want to abandon this country?” And elsewhere:

“Let’s just say that I’m in no mood to emigrate to Bharat. I’m happy here. I’ve grown up among these people and consider them my own. Your misfortune is that you grew up in an environment full of instigators, people who keep themselves in business by stirring up members of one faith against members of another, and send one caste against the throat of another.”

Damayanti’s unhappiness comes to a head following the latest news of anti-Muslim riots in India and their potentially damaging effects for the Pakistani Hindus. […] She shifts restlessly in bed, unable to sleep. Kishan sits up and says, “Look at it this way: […] why can’t the same piece of land be held dear by some, because it was gotten in the name of religion, and be respected as a motherland by others? Or must we have two Damayantis? […] Only then would it make sense to think of one as mother and the other as wife.”

But it is Persumal, Kanha Devi’s brother-in-law, who more nearly approximates her refreshingly liberal and delightfully ecumenical spirit. He is afflicted with some mental disorder, which comes and goes. A deeply religious man, much given to recitation of the Hindu holy texts, he is nonetheless unsparing in his brutally candid criticism of the hypocrisy in the family. But his tongue-lashing is reserved for those times when he is seized by fits of insanity, when he rants and raves, shouts and screams. Thus “in madness he manages to say what is truly blameworthy in man.”

In their own ways, both Kanha Devi and Persumal represent the finest spirit of religion and exude the reassuring power of religious belief. Genuine religious feeling makes for acceptance, not for hostility, distance and rejection.

In a country where a poor taxi-driver is worried more about the faith of his fare than about arbitrary blackouts and the disruption of basic utilities (not to speak of the poor condition of the roads and the rocketing price of gas, which directly affects the means of his livelihood), the reiteration of some age-old lessons would appear hardly out of place. ‘Emancipation,’ ‘The Beggar Boy’ and ‘Kanha Devi and her Family’ do just that: dispel some of the obscuring mists from religious exoterica and reestablish the transformative principle inherent in true spirituality, with its emphasis on understanding, open-mindedness and tolerance.