Comrade Manto: Revisiting Saadat Hasan Manto’s Progressive Writings
Raza Naeem*
Saadat Hasan Manto, one of the greatest Urdu writers of the 20th century, started his initial writing career in 1930s pre-partition India shaped by his admiration for the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia on one hand, and the struggle waged by Bhagat Singh and his comrades for Indian freedom locally. These feelings are clearly brought out in Manto’s earliest collection of short-stories Aatish Paray (Nuggets of Fire) 1936 and his 1940s essays Manto kay Mazameen (Essays of Manto), which were hailed by the Indian Progressive Writers Movement. Yet Manto also disagreed with the latter about the ideological/communist straitjacketing of writing and its true calling. Manto also crossed another red line in 1930s Indian communal politics by choosing to migrate to Pakistan despite his own visceral opposition to partition and being shattered emotionally, psychologically and financially by it. In Pakistan, he duelled with the Progressive Writers Movement while continuing his anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics as can be witnessed in his witty Letters to Uncle Sam (1950s).

The paper is based on my own original translations of Manto to evaluate his immersion and impact on public debate on the role of religion, nation and Western imperialism (read the United States) in South Asia. I argue that Manto’s socialist, secular, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist views in pre-partition India and post-partition Pakistan make him an unlikely and neglected role model for the communist Left and an icon for construction of a united South Asia in the 21st century, away from the politics of the ‘official’ communist Left which shunned him in the 1950s and in fact supported the partition of India in 1947. The paper will furthermore evaluate Manto’s contribution as a harbinger of leftist, secular and progressive thought amid the poisonous cauldron of South Asian nationalistic politics (India, Pakistan, East Pakistan and Kashmir) in the 1950s and his continuing relevance for a united South Asia on non-communal, non-sectarian lines
* Mr. Raza Naeem is a social scientist and translator engaged as a Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute of Development Studies, Lahore School of Economics in Pakistan. He is presently working on a translation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s essays. He is the 2013-2014 Charles Wallace Trust Fellow at the University of Bradford, UK.