Mirror of a fractured world

“…and it is also possible, that Saadat Hasan dies, but Manto remains alive.” — Saadat Hasan Manto

SAADAT Hasan Manto was not just a writer; he was a storm that uprooted the comfortable lies of society. In a world eager to dress up truth in polite fictions, Manto tore the fabric off society and pointed, unapologetically, at its nakedness. He was not a man shaped by his time, but one who scorched through it — too sharp, too honest and too rebellious to be forgotten.

Born on May 11, 1912, in Paproudi village near Samrala, Ludhiana, Manto grew up in a strict household under the shadow of his father’s rigid authority. This early repression sowed the seeds of defiance that would define both his life and his writing.

He failed in school, even in Urdu, the language that would later carry the weight of his most brutal stories. Manto’s first story, Tamasha, was more than fiction — it was a scream. Set against the bloodied soil of Jallianwala Bagh, it didn’t whisper the truth, it punched you with it. That became Manto’s style — fierce, urgent and unrelenting.

Bombay became Manto’s playground in the 1930s. He dabbled in films, wrote scripts and carved stories from the city’s underbelly. Manto’s characters were not heroes. They were pimps, prostitutes, madmen and beggars — people society silenced. Manto often said he didn’t invent stories — he found them on the streets. In a time where silence was the decorum, he chose the loudest kind of honesty.

Then came 1947 and he moved to Pakistan.

The Partition tore not just nations, but people apart. Manto, a writer at the peak of his powers, became a witness to madness. He had no interest in borders, only in the bleeding hearts on either side. He didn’t write about freedom or patriotism. He wrote about the mother who killed her own child to save it from the mob. He wrote about the man who laughed his way into madness because no country would claim him. He wrote about a dog that was shot because it wore the “wrong” collar. His stories — including Khol Do, Thanda Gosht and Toba Tek Singh — from this period are raw, haunting and unflinchingly honest.

His writing was met with fierce resistance. He was tried six times for obscenity. Each time, he defended his work with the same clarity that defined his prose. “Who am I,” he asked, “to remove the clothes of this society, which itself is naked?”

In two decades, he produced 22 collections of short stories, a novel, dozens of radio plays, essays and sketches. He died on a winter morning in 1955, just 42 years old, in Lahore.

But Manto is not dead.

He lives in the voice that refuses to be silenced, in the writer who dares to write what must be written. Manto never wrote to change the world. He wrote because he couldn’t help it. And in doing so, he changed everything.