Every culture and society which breaths, lives and walks on the planet makes its existence known through its stories, tales, and knowledge. This includes the foresight of its thinkers, its intellectual heritage, philosophical endeavors and literary tradition. Though, an even deeper mark is left by those with a scrutinized gaze of the world, who had helped us see what our ordinary eyes could not catch, who had dared to challenge and question our view of reality, who had left us wondering and thinking, who had astonished, surprised and even awed us. One such example in our long history of Urdu literary tradition is that of Manto, whose written progeny dented our minds and shook our worldview. Yes, the same Manto, the ‘infamous’ writer, the ‘controversial’, the ‘crazy one’, the one with all sorts of labels, and probably the most misunderstood one.
If we ever bother to listen carefully to our literary exemplars and connect with our history, we will realize that among many, Manto is also speaking to us. He is speaking to Pakistan. He has a lot to say about our condition today. If we pause and ask ourselves ‘Where do we stand as a society today?’, we will inevitably gravitate towards the brutally honest, bold and powerful writings which we have inherited through Manto.
He had warned us. He had warned us against the growing religious intolerance and dogma in every corner of our society. He had warned us against the injustices and the oppression about which no one talks. He had warned us against the narrow identities and the boundaries we have drawn among our own selves which only exist in the imagination. He had warned us about our hypocritical norms and double-standard of our conventions. Why had we ignored his warnings? Why had we closed our ears?
Today, we are surrounded by incidents of religious fanaticism and extremism. We constantly breathe in the air of hatred and ignorance. We have been stringed within the threads of social taboos, excessive censorship, and lip-sealing. When the pillars of our society slowly rot away in the filth, we ourselves dumped and which no one wants to highlight. Because those who try to point at it, are labeled ‘controversial’, ‘crazy’ and ‘dirty-minded’. In Manto’s own words “How can I strip a society naked, which is already shameless“.
Manto was aware that people hated his writing because he knew it had struck them. It had struck them so bad that they were in denial and fear. It’s a fairly uncomfortable position to be in. In his famous words “If you find my stories dirty and intolerable, the society in which you live is dirty and intolerable. I only expose the truth“. It comes back at us to shake the foundations of our neat, cohesive view of our own selves and of the world. Nobody wants to hear about the stigma attached to being a prostitute, about the imaginary lines we have used to divide ourselves, about the pile of corpses and blood upon which we have built the empire of our nation. It is daunting and scary. Yet, it dawned us with the realization of how naïve and deluded we are, always quick to hide the ugliness of our social functioning, always trying to reinforce how virtuous and righteous we are and always justifying the status quo.
It is time for us to take a step back and reflect upon our own standing. What kind of society do we want to live in? The one where people hate and even kill each other based on superficial identities, where they trivialize suffering, walk blind over injustice and oppression against fellow humans, where they stigmatize and shame women and demean their sexuality. Or, where we put aside our comfort bubbles and critically re-look at our surroundings, where we realize that our delusions and silence is doing more harm, and where we understand that to construct a firm social building, we need empathy, freedom, and humanistic values rather than playing cards of our moral superiority, prejudice and labels. Manto could not be more relevant than he is today. We should start to explore and connect with our literary past, and we will probably find many others, whose nit-pick observations and profound insights can provide us a useful tool to ponder, reflect and retrospect. Finally ending this with another of his quote:
“Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries — slave of prejudice… slave of religious fanaticism… slave of barbarity and inhumanity.”
