The Progressive Writers’ Movement began in 1933 with the publication of the collection of short stories Burning Coals,95 as four young writers critical of the shape Indian literature was taking came together to argue for a new way of writing that was politically minded and sceptical of religion. The movement took its official identity the next year when two writers living in London, Sajjad Zahir and Mulk Raj Anand, founded the Progressive Writers’ Association,96 and when the All India Progressive Writers’ Association was established in 1936.97 Urdu writers joined the revolutionary spirit by initiating their own Urdu Progressive Writers’ Association, along with starting up the journal New Literature98 that would be the effective mouthpiece for their efforts. The UPWA’s first manifesto announced their intention that ‘we want the new literature of India to make its subject the fundamental problems of our life. These are the problems of hunger, poverty, social backwardness and slavery.’ In April 1939 in the first issue of New Literature, they again stated their position: ‘In our opinion, progressive literature is literature that trains its eye upon the realities of life, reflects them, investigates them and leads the way toward a new and better life.’99
Manto is considered a peripheral member of this movement. He did focus on the lower strata of South Asian society, and he was friends with many writers of the movement, most notably Krishan Chander and Ismat Chughtai. Nonetheless, the elite of the movement, both in India and later in Pakistan, often disapproved of Manto’s writing and sought to distance themselves from him. In the All India Urdu Congress in Hyderabad in 1944, Sajjad Zahir criticized Manto’s story ‘Smell’ for being obscene and for not having the reformatory intent that modern fiction should have.100 Literature was meant to be a vehicle for social uplift, and Manto’s stories often fell short of the ideals of the more doctrinaire: he portrayed society’s sordid aspects as they were and remained free from any ideological programme. Manto was too individualistic (and perhaps too egotistical) to belong to any movement that demanded absolute allegiance from its members; he was too interested in his own viewpoint to sacrifice anything for the good of any group. Manto made his own views known on the Progressive Writers’ Movement, and he wrote about them with bitter irony and sarcasm. Two examples include his story ‘Progressives’,101 a trenchant criticism of the movement’s pertinacity, and his satirical essay ‘A Progressive Cemetery’102 that makes fun of the label ‘progressive’ by placing it in the context of the supposed advancements taking place in a Bombay cemetery.
Indeed, perhaps the most consistent reaction to Manto’s writing during his lifetime was censure. Manto stood accused of writing obscenities on five separate occasions. His first four trials took place in Lahore and the last in Karachi, and in each instance he was eventually acquitted. His first trial took place shortly after the story ‘The Black Shalwar’ was published in 1941.103 His second such experience took place after he had resettled in Bombay. A CID agent arrived from Lahore to arrest Manto at ten at night in his apartment on January 8, 1945, again in connection with ‘The Black Shalwar’ but also for his story ‘Smoke’.104 Manto was subsequently released on bail and ordered to stand trial in Lahore.105
Manto stood trial for the third time for his story ‘Smell’ and his essay ‘Modern Literature’.106 In the manner typical of his trials, he was convicted in the lower court but then acquitted in the sessions court.107 On May 3, 1945 Special Sessions’ Judge M.R. Bhatiya wrote in his judgment that in ‘[the story] there was nothing to incite lustful feelings, and moreover in the testimony of the expert literary witnesses the story is progressive … and will have no harmful effect on people’s morals.’108 Manto’s difficulties with censorship continued after Partition as well. After the Lahore literary journal Portraits109 published his canonical story ‘Open Up’, the Pakistani government stepped in to close down the journal’s printing operations for six months.110 Manto’s story ‘Cold Meat’ then became the focus of a series of trials. Manto, along with Nasir Anwar, the owner and editor of Eternity,111 the magazine that printed the story, faced an arduous course that lasted over a year. Manto faced a prison term of three months’ heavy labour and a fine of 300 rupees (along with three weeks’ additional heavy labour if he couldn’t come up with the money to pay the fine),112 but in the end Sessions Court Judge Inayatullah Khan came to the reasonable conclusion that ‘Cold Meat’ was ‘not obscene nor overly objectionable.’113 Manto would stand trial one last time in Karachi for his story ‘Above, Below, and in Between’, with the result this time being a small fine that Nasir Anwar willingly paid.114 Unfortunately, Manto’s troubles with the Pakistani government have continued into the present, and on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, he was still banned on Pakistani television and radio.115
Other than the government censors and Manto’s fellow writers, it’s not clear how many read his work. His stories were published in the leading Urdu literary magazines of his time, but these presumably had small subscriptions as they did not alleviate the poverty that Manto battled for most of his life. Manto began his autobiographical essay ‘My Wedding’ with a self-conscious appeal to readers, ‘For those of you who want to peek into my life, I’m going to tell you about my wedding’,116 and yet the curious question arises as to who exactly he imagined was interested. (Then again, writers do convince themselves that someone is listening.) When Manto left his employment in the Bombay film industry and arrived in Pakistan, he suddenly found himself unable to earn money writing and unwilling to find a new way of generating an income. In his essay ‘Bald Angels’, Manto wrote:
To tell you the truth I was so bitter about things that I wanted to get an allotment.117 Then I could comfortably sit in the corner and let my writing go. Any thoughts I had, I’d let them pass. If I didn’t get an allotment, then I’d go to work in the black market or make bootleg liquor. But I feared that if I ended up doing that, I’d drink all the booze myself — all my efforts would be wasted and I wouldn’t earn anything at all.118
BOMBAY STORIES
Manto’s best known stories are those set in the Partition days — gory, chilling narratives, such as ‘Open Up’ and ‘Cold Meat’ as well as the psychological portrait of madness in ‘Toba Tek Singh.’ Yet his writing had other focal points and bore other geographies in mind, in particular those related to Bombay.
For a restless soul like Manto, home would never be an easy concept, but there is good evidence to suggest that he felt more at home in Bombay’s cosmopolitan, topsyturvy metropolis than anywhere else. After immigrating to Pakistan, he was filled with nostalgia for the life he had known in Bombay. In the postscript to his volume of short stories Yazid (1951),119 he wrote about his feelings for the city, his ‘other home’:
Today I am disconsolate. A strange brooding has come over me. It is the same sadness I experienced four or four and a half years ago when I bid farewell to my other home, Bombay. It was a blow to have to leave Bombay, where I had lived such a busy life. Bombay had taken me in, a wandering outcast thrown out by even his family.120 She had told me, ‘You can live here happily on two paise a day or on ten thousand rupees. Or if you want, you can be the saddest person in the world at either price. Here you can do whatever you want, and no one will think you’re strange. Here no one will tell you what to do. You will have to do every difficult thing on your own, and you will have to make every important decision by yourself. I don’t care if you live on the sidewalk or in a magnificent mansion. I don’t care if you stay or go. I’ll always be here.’