Saadat Hasan Manto was born on May 11, 1912, in Ludhiana. Son of a Kashmiri barrister Ghulam Hasan Manto and Sardar Begum. His mother was a kind hearted, loving and affectionate woman. In contrast, his father was a man of a very severe countenance.
Manto, instead of submitting to his father’s expectations of him, rebelled against him at a very early age and began to pursue his interest in literature. He started writing articles for his school magazine.
By the time he joined Hindu Sabha College in Amritsar he was in the company of friends like Abdul Bari Alig, who made the restless and mischievious Manto take genuine interest in politics and literature. Bari Alig encouraged Manto to study French, Russian and English literature and to do some translations. Manto translated Victor Hugo’s The Last Days of a Condemned Man’ into Urdu (1933). He translated Oscar Wilde’s ‘Vera’ (1934), and later translations of Russian short stories.
‘Tamasha’ was Manto’s first short story. It was based on the 1919 Jilliantwala Bagh massacre.
In July 1934, Manto joined the Aligarh Muslim University, but could not stay there for more than nine months because he contracted tuberculosis.
Manto came back from Aligarh, spent some time at Batote in Kashmir and Amritsar, then moved to Lahore and started working with a newspaper, ‘Paras’. Later in 1936, he joined the weekly ‘Musawwir’, Bombay.
He stayed in Bombay till 1941. He left ‘Musawwir’ to work with ‘Samaj’ and later joined the film industry as a script writer. He also wrote for Radio. On April 26, 1939, he was married to Safia. Impelled by economic difficulties he applied for a job with all India Radio in Dehli. He was taken. He left Bombay in January, 1941. Writing them one by one, Manto managed to produce about fifty stories in Bombay from 1937 to 1941. Short stories which appeared in his first two collections. Some of the essays written in the same period appeared in another collection.
In Dehli, he worked with the Urdu Service of AIR for 19 months. His stay in Dehli was economically stable. Period of his life in Dehli is considered “Golden” both in terms personal relationships and literary achievements.
Manto left All India Radio Dehli and rejoined Musawwir, Bombay in July, 1942. He wrote film stories for Shaukat Husain Rizvi, S. Mukerjee and Ashok Kumar, Shahid Latif and his wife Ismat Chughtai were now among friends. He continued to write short stories, plays and essays and published them one at a time. In 1947, Manto left Bombay and came to Lahore.
Unfortunately, however, milk and honey were not waiting for Manto in Pakistan. In Lahore, he felt completely disoriented. He found himself unsuccessful in Lahore’s film industry. He could not get a job in Radio. Short humorous sketeches for the daily ‘Imroze’ were the only regular source which brought some money to him. Poverty and incessant drinking forced him to write some second rate stories. During his seven years in Lahore, he had no regular source of income. During his last days he had a feeling of rootless ness.
Depressed and jobless, Manto began to hit the bottle hard. Forced at last to admit to his alcoholism, he was obliged to spend several weeks in a mental institution during 1952. Cirrhosis of the liver led to prolonged hospitalization late in 1953.
During his economic difficulties, alcoholism and fits of depression, Manto continued to write and produced some of his most mature stories. His tightly constructed and technically superb “Thanda Gosht” was also written In Lahore during 1949. Similarly the anecdotes “Siyah Hashiye” also appeared during this time.
Financial difficulties, depression and drinking, however, finally took their toll. Manto died on January 18, 1955, in the early hours of the morning on his way to hospital.
His grave is in Lahore, Pakistan carries an epitaph which he wrote himself five months before his death. It reads:
“Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. In his breast are buried all the secrets and nuances of the art of short story writing….”
