Saadat Hasan Manto: A condemned legend, a reality merchant

Saadat Hasan Manto’s death anniversary went unnoticed yesterday. Does he deserve this treatment? Yes, he does. Because, he gave voice to the disgruntled, downtrodden and miserable elements of a so-called ‘civilised’ society.

He committed no other crime but loved those whom society hated, noticed those whom society ignored, immortalised those whom society buried alive.

The king of Urdu short story writing of the Sub-continent lived controversial and died controversial. He offended the ‘good doers’, desecrated the social norms and earned immense criticism just for sake of speaking the truth which we are averse to even listen.

Throughout his literary career, the enlighten writer wrote on prostitutes, beggars, drug adductors, pimps and dancing girls—-all these elements are considered to be the worst creatures of the universe. But they are not in fact. Before going to lampoon
them, no one bothers to peep into the factors that force them to join these unworthy professions.

What Manto did was a thorough journey into the sub-conscious of all these elements. He realized their feelings and thoughts by himself and conveyed them to the society via his short stories. He tried to tell the righteous ones of the society that prostitutes
and dancing girls too possess feelings, they too dream of a clean life and they too want to be good but the oppressive social set up ad tough circumstances do not let them be so.

Manto tried to reveal that all those, who are tagged ‘bad’ by the society, are not bad actually. Rather, they do more good deeds than what the manifested goo doers do.

Apart from the above-mentioned elements, the rock-star writer also read out the feelings of young boys and girls of the society and enclosed them in his short stories. He notified a clash between demands of the youth and the resistance of the society.

For doing all these things, he was termed as ‘Sex Merchant’, tried in the court of law and sent behind the bars for many times. The religious ‘scholars’ issued fiery Fatwas against him. To the extreme of injustice, a big part of his masterpiece work was
destroyed after his death, especially in Pakistan.

But despite all this opposition and criticism, Manto is alive in the hearts and minds of his lovers. We, the ‘good’ ones, cannot remember him as he darling showed us our real faces and reality is always sour.

God bless you legend!

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=9800

Posted by Sharjeel Ahmad on Jan 19 2012. Filed under Opinion, Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry