Manto – the burning furnace

It is not entirely the doing of the external forces whenever there is an untimely death. There is always a fire that burns inside which doesn’t let one go slow. Therein we have the mavericks producing the never-seen-before works - be it in politics, arts or literature.

No comparisons. But whether the Romantics - Keats, Shelley and Byron or our very own Manto who left us 59 years ago today - they all had a fire that consumed them from inside faster than was the norm. In the process, the world did shine brighter. A burning furnace was Manto. Fire emanating from within and poured from the outside consumed his constitution much before it was due. Here, I reflect on one typical aspect of our society: critiquing without reading. This is particularly true about Manto’s writings. He remained unread as much as he was misunderstood.

I doubt if the judges who conducted the ‘obscenity trial’ of the acclaimed writer had ever read his stories they were adjudicating him against. I was introduced, some 12 years back, to Manto through people who had never read a word by him. It was just the stories about his stories that were sourcing their commentary. But the commentary came as if they had laboured from cover to cover. He talked about the bad, the ugly and the filthy, I was told. Instead, he should have talked about the shinier aspects of our society. For when guests come to a house you don’t straight away take them to a toilet or show them the broken sewage line. You take them to the best part of the house.

That is what a writer is supposed to do as he is an introducer of a society he lives in. I was expected to nod in agreement as everyone else in the gathering did. Then I was told to look at the revealing enough titles of stories like Kali Shalwar, Thanda Gosht and Khol Do. Curiosity took me to a library counter at the Rawalpindi Gordon College where I was a student then. When I asked for the book on Manto that had these stories, a meaningful smile played on the faces present on both sides of that wooden plank. But when one reads through, an entirely other kind of smile plays on your lips. It’s about time we stop being critics without reading first.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 19^th, 2014.