I feel like Manto

By Manuwant Choudhary

This Sunday evening I watched Nandita Das's film Manto.

I had been looking forward to the film ever since the trailers were out.

Because Sadat Hassan Manto's short story Toba Tek Singh featured in our ICSE school text book and it left its mark.

The mad sardarji who kept uttering gibberish ..oh pad dee gir gir dee...moong did daal deee..but one thing he was clear on was he came from a village called Toba Tek Singh, except he did not know where it was - in India or Pakistan !

I grew up wondering who the writer was?

To be frank I do not know Nandita Das except having met her once at a wedding in Bombay.

But I could relate to her Manto completely.

Especially the Manto in Bombay - a city that asks no questions, as he put it.

Manto loved Bombay and his own life as a writer in a city where he could write freely and get paid for what was his...and drink...



The film is a bit slow but life in those days must have been just that way - a walk on the beach was all that mattered and an evening party with the top film stars.

I had grown up wondering how and why a writer like Manto would choose to leave Bombay and India for Pakistan.

Nandita Das's film explores just that and very sensitively.

Its painful seeing Manto leave Bombay.

You must watch the film.

Unfortunately, the hall was mostly empty, a few rows were booked thats all.

It seems our audiences have somehow become identical to the Muslims who wanted Pakistan.

So in the film when two Muslims in Lahore announce the killing of Gandhiji with a glee, an old man scolds them, but I found two men sitting beside me laugh.

70 years later we have become them.

Manto was lonely in Pakistan, and a wreck. He had no freedom to write what he wanted...the remunerations were even lower...and then a jail term...for his short story 'Thanda Gosht' (Cold Meat)

The last scene is from the story Toba Tek Singh.  Two months after the partition...both the Indian and Pakistani governments realise they are yet to divide the mental ayslums - Hindus and Sikhs to be sent to India and Muslims to Pakistan.

I thought the mad house was exactly how I visualised it as a child reading that story...even the characters - the sardarji - just amazing.

If he was alive today, I wonder what Sadaat Hassan Manto would have written on the lynchings in Modi's India ?