A Rare Specimen

What makes a novelist? This is a very difficult question to answer since different attributes get together for the final emergence of an ideal novelist. Again, there also exists a lot of differences between the novelists especially on the basis of temperaments and life styles. While some of them happen to be bohemians, some are quite reserved since they have taken up writing of novels as a profession and in no way have been influenced by any such stray incident. However, it is also true even among the so-called bohemian novelists hardly anyone matches with Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-55), who by virtue of his temperament was not only a distinct class on his own but was also the doyen of the modern Indian tradition of short story writing. If we continue to denote him as a leading and marvelous Urdu short-story writer of the twentieth century, it will in no way be his complete identification. . He was a journalist, critic and film writer. He worked for All India Radio during World War II and was a successful screen-writer in Bombay before moving to Pakistan during Partition of India. But above all of them he repeatedly tried to transgress the orthodox social culture or the conventions and to bring the society before the basic, crude reality. This has been the driving force of his life and all his works have been the greatest specimen of his core belief.

Throughout his life Manto had always seen the ugliest parts of life and that inspired him to write and drink, both excessively. Throughout the span of his career for two decades marred by controversies he published twenty-two collections of stories, seven collections of radio plays, three collections of essays, and a novel. Besides, in spite of all hardships, due to their excellences a good number of his 250 short stories have been enacted in plays and films. He was firm of his conviction that led him to comment once, “Saadat Hasan will die one day, But ‘Manto’ will never die”. The acute financial crisis that affected him in the life were also prominent in his last days, but that even failed to dispirit him. He is certainly one of the greatest short story tellers of the 20th century who has dealt with almost all topics that a human life pervades and the perfect epitome of the world of arts and humanities.