November 3, 2002

Qurratulain Haider on the death of Manto

I HAVE been asked to write something about Manto. The problem is what could I add that would be new to so much already being written about the departed soul. Before January 19, while he was alive, he was abused. The progressives would call him an obscurantist, while the obscurantists considered him to be the biggest irreligious revolutionary, and a progressive to boot. Being thus pulled and shoved, the poor man gave up and departed to the next world. Now all you can do is go play your fiddle.

Festivals are organized and dedicated to his memory. Condolence resolutions are passed. Many are the sorrow-filled statements published in the press by his contemporaries. Books are being written on him with great enthusiasm in Urdu and English, which will indeed be beautifully printed. These will be reviewed. The nation, which did not honour its artists while they were alive, will mourn them.

Both the parties say that Manto was an extremely talented artist. Pakistan’s Baudelier. The State should grant a stipend for his widow and children, as if Manto kept his wife in great luxury all his life. The effect that his death has had on their comfortable and luxurious life should be exacerbated by the government. It is the duty of the government to respect artists.

This con game in the name of ‘artists’ has become a very interesting thing these days. The artist has such a strange means of income that is almost an illusion. He lives on air and love. It is his duty to entertain you in life as well as by his death....and the artist whose death has come about in such a tragic and dramatic manner becomes as though the embodiment of the creed and tradition of a true ‘artist’. It is better that he dies young. This has an excellent effect on his readers. The tradition established by Keats, Shelley and Dylan Thomas thus remains alive. Then he becomes Baudelier...

Manto even in living demonstrated the magic of art. He would drink excessively. He was prosecuted. He landed up in a lunatic asylum. What a great painter he was of the literary underworld of the subcontinent... it is surprising why he has not yet been compared to Toulouse-Lautrec...! Sadly enough I never met him or I too would have narrated some event of the meeting that, “in such and such year, in Bombay, or Lahore, when I met him he was sitting on his haunches on the sofa.” Now myths about Manto will be purveyed.

It was a while back that Bulbul Choudhry died. The poor man was pushed from here to there. His theory was that there was a Pakistani dance form and it should be disseminated. After passing a few years in this confusion he too died in his youth. No sooner had he closed his eyes that the setting up of the Bulbul Academy was announced. Appeals were made to the state on behalf of his wife and children. A black cloud of grief and unhappiness descended on the nation.

Why go far. A few evenings back Bukhari sahib’s commentary was heard on the radio. (Bukhari sahib was as an excellent commentator.) No sooner had the sound of the evening azaan come from the mosque that Ustad Bundu Khan committed his life to eternity. Bukhari sahib gave the nation the news of this tragedy in a very effective and beautiful way. But the nation was not concerned with who Bundu Khan was. What was his status? Only that there was an ustad who played the sarangi. No one knew of the condition in which he spent the last six years of his life in a Muhajir settlement in Lalukhet nor did anyone care.

The question is that why should one care? So you used to play the sarangi. You loved the Pakistani dance. Fine. You have the writing sickness, so go ahead and write. How am I responsible for you? After all what is this pressure that you put on me?

Manto was a fascinating story teller. What craftsmanship. What narrative style. He was good. So what is to be done now? It was known that he often went to bed hungry.

So he should have taken up a job somewhere. Why did he flit around from here to there.

He would say, “Look Kabeera weeps.”

Well mister, so why did he weep? And all that nonsense that he wrote, caricatures of his friends and relatives, the life stories of actresses, the autobiographies of pimps, if he had not written all this then him and me both would have lived in great comfort. There were so many Barristers and judges of high courts in his family. There were also high government officials. They would have ‘fixed’ him up somewhere or the other. He should have got a job. We would then have continued to read the writings of Rashid Akhtar Nadvi and M. Saleem with great satisfaction.

At this time a great deal of emphasis is being placed on the fact that he died in a state of great penury. As if this was a very rare thing to have happened in this country. All the remaining writers, who are not in high government positions and have not gone to Geneva or to New York to attend official conferences, are all spending their lives in such luxury. Look there are exclusive Drama Academies for them, for the writers and poets there is a separate Council. They have their own Trusts.

When their books are published then like Somerset Maugham they are able to collect thousands and millions of rupees and save them in banks. Actually poor Manto was a bohemian and he used to derive such a spiritual happiness from a life of poverty that he chose to remain quite immersed in it. This is why the masses have been suddenly startled. And they lament, Oh! What a tragedy. An artist of this welfare state died in such a way.

Anyway, I cannot figure out what I should write. And this is certainly no statement for the ‘Manto Number’ issue of Afkar. Brothers, the thing is that one Manto has not died. Manto will die again and again. Sometimes he breathes his last while dancing, sometimes while playing the sarangi. This will go on as long as we don’t open our eyes!

[Note: the above essay was published in the March/April 1955 Issue of the monthly Afkar in its “Manto Number”.]

Translated by Aquila Ismail

 

Daastaan-i-Ahd-i-Gul

By Qurratulain Haider

Maktaba-e-Danyal, Victoria Chambers, Abdullah Haroon Road, Karachi. Tel: 021-5681457

ISBN 969-419-004-5

345pp. Rs350

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