Every student of Urdu must come across Manto’s works in his/her intermediate or advanced Urdu classes, usually Khol Do (کھول دو) and Toba Tek Singh (ٹوبہ ٹیک سنگھ), sometimes Thanda Gosht (ٹھنڈا گوشت). From a literary perspective, Manto’s works helped mature Urdu short stories as a distinct genre in Urdu literary history, which had been predominated by poetry, like ghazal, masnavi, etc. From a historical perspective, Manto’s works chronicled the brutality, horror, and social reality before, during, and after the Partition, the most significant event in contemporary South Asian history. Having said this, I have also met some notable scholars in the field of South Asian Studies who think that Manto has been overrated or his works are not as profound as they are allegedly to be. Therefore, the importance of Manto in Urdu literature in particular, and in South Asian literature in general, is always a personal question. It has to be personal; once the writing touches the core of your life, the personal starts to be generative and relational to others.
As a social scientist with an unquenchable humanist aspiration (if it is not considered a sin, since much of social science is becoming data science, regardless the data is small or big), I was immediately captivated by Manto’s extraordinarily sharp sense of life and observation of society. He got a tremendous acumen in choosing simple topics and words to suggest something socially significant, humanly profound, as well as literarily beautiful. I have always dreamt of doing this myself but found myself snared in academic formalism and disciplinary departmentalism. Being capable of striking a balance between these three components requires a radicalized way of living, conceptualizing, and writing the world. As my beloved teacher, Michael D. Jackson, the renowned humanist anthropologist at HDS, elucidates this way of living and knowing, “Rather than perpetuate antinomies between self and other, observer and observed, body and mind, writing and world, reality and the imagination, or reason and emotion, we needed to explore the dialectic in human consciousness between the kinds of experiences such terms roughly designated…we had to resist the allure of language, particularly our tendency to assume that the forms of our thought mirrored the constitution of the world.”
Therefore, having known the fact that Manto’s works have already been translated many times, I still think it is worth and necessary to translate them again myself. I could not resist being allured to Manto’s language, since his language does not reflect the world, however hellish it was, around him, his language is the world.
For more information about Manto's life and works, here is a wonderful piece by Ali Sethi from The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-seer-of-pakistan
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