Dissimilar writers and their desire for change by Aishwarya
Manto and Chughtai: Progressive writers of the Pre-colonial India
Mirza Ghalib rightly said, “Lest we forget: It is easy to be human, very hard to be humane.” Pre-colonial India in the early twentieth century was a center of mayhem and madness. While the cries of freedom filled the air around, the society was torn apart by social inequality and justice. Progressive writer’s movement in the mid-30s upholding qualities of being anti-imperialists and left-orientalists and thus assayed to inspire people through their writings, preaching equality and lashing out at social inequality and backwardness.
The Progressive Writers' Movement, besides bringing these writers to prominent light, had also exceedingly broadened the horizon of Urdu poetry. The movement also had emancipated Urdu from the classical cliché and added dollops of fresh vigor and imagery and structure to the poem; it had instilled the rhyming scheme with scintillating zing and introduced and developed new forms like free verse, dramatic and allegorical poems; it lent an ideological substance and utilized the very movement as a tool to the freedom struggle of India.
Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. With him lie buried all the arts and mysteries of short story writing . . . Under tons of earth he lies, wondering who of the two is the greater short-story writer: God or he, reads the self-written epitaph at his resting place at Lahore.
His melancholy was deceptive and words dazzling. From love for pens, shoes, and alcohol he became the voice of Partition. A connoisseur of human reality, his courted controversial career is a testimony for his determination to present truth in its absolute form. He wrote about prostitution, adolescent anxiety, sex, and communal conflicts.
Saadat Hasan Manto was indeed an Indian trapped in
Pakistan. His life torn between his love for Bombay and an identity crisis at
Lahore mimicked the pre and post-Colonial India that lived a different life.
His journey reflects the times of struggle and displaced of ethnicity,
religion, and humanity- wounds of which are still remembered today in silence.
His forced migration to Pakistan in the wake of communal riots. As he leaves
for Lahore in the wake of the Partition violence, he tells a friend, 1940s
Mumbai cinema star Shyam Chadda, that he will not repay the sum so that
he never forgets his debt to his beloved Mumbai, where his
mother, father, and first-born are buried.
“In my stories, I've put down everything with
objectivity. Now, if some people find them obscene, let them go to hell. I
believe that experiences can never be obscene if they are based on authentic
realities of life,” this was the reply given by famous Urdu writer, Ismat Chughtai, when societies labeled her stories obscene.
Ismat Chughtai stands out from the crowd. In her work, women are portrayed as strong and independent protagonists who express their
emotions freely rather than weak and repressed. She understood the complexities
of a woman's mind, their inhibitions, and also their secret desires, and all of
her writings reflected these complexities in length. She made a different
place for her female characters through her stories.
Her characters varied from the Begum in Lihaaf who
finds love in an emotional and sensual relationship with her masseuse to a
village woman Rani in Til who does not
shy away from expressing sexual desires. Ismat’s style was the most suitable
for the novel and short story and it had such beauty and attraction that no
other short-story writer could compete with it. Her short stories added
numerous new words, new metaphors, and new similes and symbols to the dictionary
of the Urdu short-story which merely belonged to the social life of women.
Any celebration of
friendship would become bootless without the mention of the unrivaled
friendship between Saadat Hassan Manto and Ismat
Chughtai. Ismat was
always encouraging of Manto’s work and Manto often teasingly took a jibe at
Ismat as any friend would. Their friendship demonstrates a unique
diversion from the strong competition that is usually present between two
contemporary writers. They strived together through the grave and unfortunate
criticism attracted by their realistic short stories.
Ismat and Manto were both progressive Urdu writers
of those times. It was a time when society was unable to deal with or was
rather uncomfortable with the issues of gender and sexuality. They shared a
deep understanding of human emotions and captured every emotion effectively in
their stories.
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Bio: Aishwarya in an architect by morning and a bookworm by night, she is an avid reader wandering across the board and leads a dual life juggling between studying and writing.References
1. The Print Magazine2. The Hindu
3. Free Express Journal
Further reading
Great writing 🙂
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