“I have seen him
on the cleanest roads, in a dust-covered amazement;
in the gathering storm of blind, overturned cups;
Tossing the empty bottle he shouts,
‘Oh world! Your beauty is your ugliness.’
Booms becoming the noise of chains
The world stares back at him
Their bloodshot eyes rattle with the question
‘Who nabs the pillar of time
By the noose of his drunken breath?
Who dares to break into dim corridors
of twisted conscience?
Who intrudes upon poisonous dens
of demonised souls?
Through icy glasses his rude glance
chases us like a footfall
Foul monster!
Bang! Bang!”
(Manto, Majeed Amjad)
The man who saw beauty in the world’s ugliness, and for whom this poem was written shortly before his untimely death, was none other than Saadat Hasan Manto, the rebel, and one of Pakistan’s greatest writers and social critics. Manto died 60 years ago today. Manto’s own life mirrored the characters he portrayed in his famous short stories, sketches and his powerful non-fiction. He was a writer with a deeply political vision and this vision was reflected uncompromisingly in his work. It also reflected the contradictions of Pakistani society because he himself hated hypocrisy and refused to partake of it. For example, he foresaw presciently many of the patterns our state and society forged with religion.
He looked at India and the US as early as the 1950s with devastating wit and satire. Take, for example, Manto’s Letters to Uncle Sam. They were written in the early 1950s when the contours of Pakistan’s foreign policy were just beginning to be shaped by an unconstitutional government. Though written in a bitingly satirical vein, they contain a remarkable overview of the history, politics, culture and international relations of the period as it affected not only Pakistan and India but the wider world as well. And as could be witnessed from the Prime Minister’s (PM’s) tour of Washington two years ago, where an overgenerous aid package of $ 1.6 billion was rolled out while the PM’s plane was still in mid-flight, what Manto cautioned against was not just dependence on US kiss-proof lipstick (Manto found this appellation disappointingly inaccurate), but also economic dependence (and its less savoury aspects like US-armed jihadis in Manto’s time, and Saudi and Canadian ones in our own). In his fourth letter ‘posted’ in 1954, he wrote, “India may grovel before you a million times but you will definitely make a military aid pact with Pakistan because you are really worried about the integrity of this largest Islamic sultanate of the world and why not, as our mullahs are the best antidote to Russia’s communism. If the military aid starts flowing, you should begin by arming the mullahs and dispatch vintage American (dry cleaning) stones, vintage American rosaries and vintage American prayer mats, with special attention to razors and scissors, and if you bless them with the miraculous prescription of vintage American hair dye as well then do understand that the cat is in the bag. The purpose of military aid as far as I understand it is to arm these mullahs. I’m your Pakistani nephew but I am aware of all your machinations but this heightened intelligence is all thanks to your politics (God save it from the evil eye). If this sect of mullahs is armed American-style, then the Soviet Union will have to pick up its spittoon from here, even whose gargles are mixed up in communism and socialism.”
Satire apart, Manto was probably the first observer who foresaw early the US’s disastrous foreign policy in various parts of the Muslim world in the 1950s and 1960s, leading right up to the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, of assisting Islamic fundamentalist parties against the threat of rising communist and secular-nationalist forces, a process that has now come full circle with the unannounced execution of one of their own armed mullahs, Osama bin Laden, in Abbottabad. He thus accurately foretold the contradiction in the poisonous US-Pakistan relationship. One only need look at the headlines screaming at us from the newspapers today.
In Save India From Its Leaders, there is an evocative passage that serves to highlight his foresight in predicting the rise of such opportunists and time-servers as newly-elected Narendra Modi and re-elected Nawaz Sharif, Anna Hazare, Asif Zardari, Tahirul Qadri and even the mercurial Imran Khan: “These people, who are commonly known as leaders, view politics and religion as that crippled, lame and injured man, displaying whom our beggars normally beg for money. These so-called leaders go about carrying the carcasses of politics and religion on their shoulders and, to simple-minded people who are in the habit of accepting every word uttered to them in high-sounding vocabulary, they bandy about that they will breathe new life into this carcass. Religion is the same as it has always been and will always remain so. The religious spirit is a concrete reality, which can never change. Religion is a rock, which cannot be affected by even powerful waves of the sea. When these leaders cry their hearts out telling people that religion is in danger there’s no reality to it. Religion is not something, which can be endangered. If there is a danger, it is to these leaders who endanger religion to achieve their own ends.”
Significantly, Manto wrote this powerful indictment in 1942, in pre-partition India.
(To be continued)
The writer is a freelance contributor