Ayesha Jalal's first book changed the way historians understood “high politics” surrounding India's partition. Saadat Hasan Manto, the subject of this book, is arguably one of the best chroniclers of the human drama of partition. In The Pity of Partition, Jalal seeks to meld her earlier interests and those of her subject, to “connect the micro history of an individual and a family with the macro history of communities and states” (p. xii). Manto is also special for the author because he was a close family member. Although he died a year before Jalal was born, she grew up “with Manto's conspicuously absent presence in our joint family” (p. xi). That relationship also makes this book a family history of sorts. Subjects as controversial as Manto or partition, particularly when they reflect on one's own family, are not easy to write about. It is a testament to Jalal's skill that she manages to do so and produce this thoughtful, yet eminently readable study.
The book is divided into three thematic sections, each roughly corresponding with phases of Manto's own life. In the first section, Jalal uses Manto's stories as a narrative thread to link his early life to its historical context. We see someone who combined irreverent iconoclasm, fierce independence, with hypersensitivity to perceived slights—qualities that were evident throughout Manto's life, and which undoubtedly contributed to his financial insecurities. But they helped shape the cosmopolitan humanism evident in Manto's work. He was, as Jalal points out, interested in people rather than reified labels of political identity. His stories undermined the religious and nationalist identities being created by colonial and nationalist politics of his time. Despite his aversion to such politics, it was ironic that Manto's “life and work … were to become imperceptibly interwoven in the broader canvas of politics he neither quite understood nor took much interest in” (p. 72).
The identity politics Manto resisted crystalized into harder boundaries in the 1940s, leading to the horrors that followed. The second part of Pity takes us through Manto's life in Bombay, his work for the film industry, his abrupt decision to move to New Delhi in late 1940, and in 1942, a move back to Bombay. By the end of 1947, Manto left Bombay to move to Pakistan. Through Manto we get a glimpse of the literary and creative milieux of Bombay and Delhi—the generosity and creative bonhomie, as well as the unfortunate pettiness of literary politics. While Manto was clearly unhappy with the growing Hindu-Muslim divide, there is no evident watershed event that precipitated Manto's sudden decision to move from Bombay to Pakistan. Perhaps, like many of his earlier relocations, this decision too came from feeling that his genius was not being sufficiently appreciated by his employers (p. 130). Perhaps, like others who left their homeland in 1947, Manto did not quite comprehend the reality of the borders created.
The third section of the book focuses on Manto's life in Pakistan. The borders between the two states were only too real. Perhaps it was the recognition of this new reality that drove Manto to write his most searing indictments of partition in his early days in Pakistan. Life was hardly easy, and Manto's irreverence and iconoclasm were not appreciated by either the religious orthodoxy or the jingoistic partisans of his new state. Money was tight. Worse, there was a rift even with his friends among the Progressive Writers Association. Though labeled a reactionary by the left, and uninterested in politics by his own admission, Jalal argues, using Manto's “Letters to Uncle Sam,” that he was prescient in his understanding of the emerging geopolitical realities. The same “Letters” also reveal Manto's increasing sense of despair, which led to alcoholism and his untimely death in 1955.
At times, Jalal's close relationship limits analysis of her subject. From his youthful indiscretions to his falling out with the Progressive Writers Association in post-independence Pakistan, Jalal offers readers mostly a defense or justification of Manto's positions. But she provides us with enough evidence to draw different conclusions too. Criticizing an internationally renowned literary icon is difficult enough, and unimaginably so if the subject is someone you grow up calling “Manto Abajan” (literally, father) as Jalal did (p. x). Less explicable is the total absence of gender as an analytic lens for understanding either Manto or partition. Manto has been valorized as a feminist and pilloried for perceived misogyny. With the documents and family-as-archive Jalal had at her disposal, she may have missed an opportunity for moving that debate in new directions.
Some readers might be disappointed at not learning more about Manto the brother, the son, the husband, or the father. Others might ask for more about Manto's reasons for moving to Pakistan, and his ambiguous relationship with India and the Pakistani state after the move, or indeed about Manto's difficult relationship with his faith. The truth is no one will ever be entirely happy with any narrative about partition. Too much happened for stories not to be left untold. There was too much that was simply ineffable about the times, at least to relate in traditional prose. Perhaps Manto knew that before most scholars. Could that be the reason behind the incomprehensible hybrid of words spoken by Bishan Singh in Manto's best-known partition story? Jalal says she loved that prattle even as a child.
