Saadat Hasan Manto: 'He anticipated where Pakistan would go'

Celebrated for his stories of Indian partition, Saadat Hasan Manto was a distressingly prophetic and daring writer. But would his work have found a publisher today?

It was the greatest mass movement of humanity in history. In the days and months leading up to the partitioning of India in August 1947, 14 million people moved and two million died as the new nation of Pakistan was created. The borderline was arbitrary and artificial – established in haste by a British barrister called Sir Cyril Radcliffe – and in trying to slice India along religious lines, it turned former Muslim, Hindu and Sikh friends and neighbours against each other.

The partition was brutal and bloody, and to Saadat Hasan Manto, a Muslim journalist, short-story author and Indian film screenwriter living in Bombay, it appeared maddeningly senseless. Manto was already an established writer before August 1947, but the stories he would go on to write about partition would come to cement his reputation. Though his working life was cut short by an addiction to alcohol, leading to his death at 43, Manto produced 20 collections of short stories, five collections of radio dramas, three of essays, two of sketches, one novel and a clutch of film scripts. He wrote about sex and desire, alcoholics and prostitutes, and he was charged with obscenity six times. In his journalism, he predicted the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan. But it is for his stories of partition that he is best remembered: as the greatest chronicler of this most savage episode in the region’s history.

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