{"id":172587,"date":"2013-07-26T19:36:58","date_gmt":"2013-07-26T14:06:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=172587"},"modified":"2013-07-26T19:36:58","modified_gmt":"2013-07-26T14:06:58","slug":"manto-found-goodness-even-in-the-most-bestial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/manto-found-goodness-even-in-the-most-bestial\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Manto found goodness even in the most bestial\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ayesha
Ayesha Jalal<\/strong> Historian.
Photo: Ankit Agrawal<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nEdited Excerpts from an Interview<\/strong>
\nWhat do you make of the resurgence of Manto\u2019s popularity over the last year?<\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t know whether \u2018resurgence\u2019 is the word for those of us who have seen a steady interest in Manto. Of course, the last year was important because it was the centenary and that may have brought in a new set of youngsters previously unexposed to him, but I do think he has caught the imagination of the youth over the years. What\u2019s beautiful about Manto is that he hasn\u2019t received state sponsorship in either India or Pakistan, but youngsters have independently found in him the attraction of him as a rebel writer, a contrarian. The more we are surrounded by hypocrisy, the more Manto becomes relevant. The hypocrisy of society really used to get to him.
\n
\"The
The Pity of Partition<\/strong>
Ayesha Jalal
HarperCollins
265 pp; Rs 599<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nThe great thing about Manto was that he could tell you so many stories about Partition from so many perspectives, but what did he personally think of what was happening around him?<\/strong>
\nHe expressed bewilderment at the Partition. He looked in the newspapers, and all he could see was that the Muslim League was a mosque and the Congress was a temple. He really didn\u2019t buy either; he was just trying to understand what the hell was going on. After the violence broke out he was despondent and he addressed his despair by writing these stories about the horror, making people realise it could happen to them. He was not trying to cast a moral judgment, but wanted to show how individuals are affected by the chaotic times. He wasn\u2019t na\u00efve; he brings out the bestiality of human beings, but says there is still some goodness, something that can be redeemed, even if you\u2019re Ishwar Singh of \u2018Thanda Gosht\u2019. Manto claimed that he never wrote a story on the basis of a purely imaginary character; he was journalistic in that sense. He drew people out to find their stories.
\nWas the shunning of Manto part of the act of our two countries shelving away the memory of the violence of our creation?<\/strong>
\nThere is much more to Manto than Partition stories, but it is also extraordinary that Pakistan doesn\u2019t want to face up to the reality of that bloodshed. Many Pakistanis will take issue even with the name of my book, The Pity of Partition<\/em>, because it makes it sound like Partition was a bad idea. The \u2018pity\u2019 is that despite independence they are still slaves of bigotry. Even though we are free, the question is who will we subjugate now. That is the story Manto tells and that was awkward for many people.
\najachi@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Manto lived and Saadat Hasan died, the great writer once said, he would be happy. If Saadat Hassan lived and Manto died, it would be a shame. His grandniece, historian Ayesha Jalal, uses both the man and his writings to tell the history of the Partition, an event that both horrified and defined him. She tells Ajachi Chakrabarti how Manto\u2019s observations, however awkward they were for the two nations founded on the violence he documented, resulted in an almost journalistic account of those turbulent days. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":172599,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8040,8372,8373,8374,8371],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172587"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}