Writer and researcher Ahmad Salim considers Saadat Hasan Manto the foremost progressive writer in the subcontinent, saying that he had started writing his revolutionary works in the early 1930s -- years before the Indian Progressive Writers Association was founded (the PWA came into being in 1936). Manto’s essays on Karl Marx and the Russian Revolution had started being published in 1930-31.

Manto called his drawing room “Darul Ahmer” (Red House), Mr Salim continued, however, he was unfortunate to be the target of both the progressives and their opponents. “Manto is somewhere lost between Sajjad Zaheer and Hasan Askari,” he said and added that the progressives drove him out whereas their opponents saw only sexual themes in his writings.

Ahmad Salim was speaking at the conference, 100 Years of Soviet Revolution; A South Asian Perspective, which concluded at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) on Saturday.

Dwelling further on the classic Urdu fiction writer, he said everybody interpreted Manto in his or her own way. “Sajjad Zaheer has his version of Manto, Hasan Askari has his own and the comrades have their own.”

Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi wrote “Manto Kay Naam Khula Khat” in 1939, telling him about his proscription from the Progressive Writers Association and that he won’t be published in their journals, Mr Salim said, and added that Manto wrote an essay on Marx in which he eulogises Marx more than any Marxist.

“History of the Russian Revolution has been written by the leftists, historians as well the creative writers and last one is as important as the other two groups,” he said.

Progressive Writers Association Pakistan Secretary-General Dr Jaffer Ahmed spoke on how critics and academics put literature in two pigeonholes, i.e. national bourgeois or people’s revolution and the writers were not being read as autonomous. “Even the writers like Sibte Hassan and Ali Abbas Jalalpuri should not be put in these pigeonholes. Most of the books the former wrote after leaving the Communist Party. These writers should not be forcibly tagged with Communism.”

Talking about the stratification of classes, Dr Ahmed said there were other classes besides the classic definition of the three classes. “It’s hard to explain the situation in Pakistani context which has more classes like military bureaucracy besides the dominant class. It’s due to military bureaucracy that there was more struggle in Pakistan for democracy and women rights,” he said.

He said the writers in Pakistan suffered most as right after the independence, the suppression of writers and action against the literary journals started.

Talking about society, he pointed out that some clichés had been coined like ‘Pakistani society is stagnant and static’. Rejecting such clichés, he said society was changing drastically, especially in Punjab’s rural areas, which had become a sort of laboratory of social change which needed to be explained by social scientists. He bemoaned that society could not produce social scientists and historians.

Humeria Ishfaq of the International Islamic University pointed out a lack of progressive elements in the Urdu literature which dealt more with the imaginative world instead of the real life day-to-day matters. “Urdu literature does not make the living people its subject,” she said.

Explaining her point further, she said ‘Angaary’, the collection of stories that had got an iconic status in the progressive literature, had no prominent element of the progressive literature. Giving examples of the short stories of Ahmad Ali and Rashid Jahan, she said they were based on only human observations which was not a big deal from the point of view of progressive literature.

Kamran Asdar Ali, a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, referred to the first manifesto of the All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association (APPWA) that was presented in its conference in Lahore in 1949 and how it targeted the writers like Manto while borrowing diction and expressions from the Soviet Union after the World War II, which was influence by Andrei Zdhanov, a secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His policy became the Zhdanov Doctrine and it hounded the writers and poets like Anna Akhmatova.

He said due to the same influences, the APPWA might have attacked the writers like Manto, Noon Meem Rashed and Miraji.

Reacting to Mr Kamran’s point of view, Ahmad Salim said the situation should not be seen out of context and one should see things as a whole. Admitting that there was extremism in the APPWA’s views, he said it had a background of suppression. “The APPWA conference of 1949 where Manto was banned is referred to but the conference of 1952 of Karachi is not talked about wherein the ban on Manto was lifted and he was later published in the progressive journals.”

Publisher Abdul Rauf Malik said he was a witness to the APPWA conference in 1949 and the attitude of the progressives towards Manto was reactionary as that of the government and the ‘non-progressives’.

“Manto used to visit me often and he was a progressive. I never found any reactionary element in his personality, attitude or writing,” he recalled.

Published in Dawn, November 5th, 2017