Selected Stories By Saadat Hasan Manto, Random House India, Rs 295

After Khalid Hasan’s unduly adventurous translation of Manto published last year, Aatish Taseer presents a sober, graceful and faithful rendition of ten little gems by the master of the Urdu short story. In contrast with Hasan’s tolerably lucid, though somewhat choppy, English, Taseer’s command over the language lends a certain charm to this version. Taseer has another advantage over Hasan, in his unwavering fidelity to the original. Whereas Hasan takes needless liberties with the content — editing out lines or silently weaving his own annotations into the text — Taseer is closely attentive to the subtle inflections of Manto’s florid, yet modernist, style. Taseer has the gift that is essential for any successful translator: self-effacement.

One wishes that his introduction, too, were a little more self- effacing. For the greater part of its thirty-odd pages, the introduction focuses, a little too self-indulgently, on Taseer himself. Born to a Pakistani father but brought up largely in India, Taseer traces his lineage from his grandfather, M.D. Taseer, a pre-eminent Urdu poet. At 21, when Taseer went to Lahore to meet his Pakistani father for the first time in his adult life, he was gifted a copy of his illustrious grandfather’s poems. In the opening few pages, Taseer lavishes attention on this glorious patrimony and the cruel irony of his inability to read Urdu. So he goes to Zafar Moradabadi, an impoverished Urdu teacher, who opens up the lyrical magic of Mir, Ghalib, Momin and Dagh, and reveals, in the process, the decline of this beautiful language, ever since it was “stolen” from India by Pakistan.

Moradabadi feels that Urdu is “not the language of any part of what would become the territory of Pakistan” after Partition. This is only an affective claim, historically tenuous, and prone to scrutiny. As Taseer astutely observes, despite India’s Sanskritizing of Hindi in response to Pakistan’s Islamizing of Urdu, Urdu is still alive in colloquial Indian idiom, thanks to the influence of Bollywood (“a traveller is a musafir, not a yatri, and a conspiracy, a saazish, not a shadyantra”). Admittedly, this linguistic plurality does attest to India’s secular credentials in contrast with increasing Pakistani fundamentalism, although it may be imprudent to labour this point too much. In spite of his avowed admiration of Manto, Taseer is a little too anxious to put India’s Islamic neighbour in its place through a thinly-veiled cultural competitiveness. A man of refined literary sensibility, who knows that an “understanding of economy” is critical to enjoying a Manto story, Taseer provides a strange justification for his project: “India had too few writers of [Manto’s] calibre... to allow any to leave for Pakistan.”

Enthusiasm can tip over into over-zealousness. Once Taseer’s agenda of repatriating Manto becomes clear, one is not taken unawares by declarations like this: “the ugly truth about Manto [is] that for all his love of Indian multiplicity, he went to Pakistan”. This is not just an unfairly reductive assessment of a complex genius, but also a shallow understanding of something as complicated as the Partition. In his time, Manto was rebuked by friends like Ismat Chughtai for his ‘escape’ to Pakistan. Looking back, Manto’s flight may appear cowardly, even unethical, an act of betrayal to the country that had given him literary recognition. But he never claimed to be a saint; in fact, he wrote about the baser human instincts, plumbed the dark abysses of the mind and picked out pearls “from the jilted squalor and refuse of life”, as Chughtai had famously said.

Manto’s wife, Safia, lamented that he was driven away from India after his contract with Filmistan (the colonial predecessor of Bollywood) was unceremoniously terminated months before the Partition. Driven to drink and despair, Manto produced some of the best writing in the final years of his life before he died in 1955. It is difficult to agree with Taseer that of all his writings, the Partition stories “feel dated” today; this is why Taseer chooses so few stories from this period. (He includes the famous, “Khol Do”, retaining the title in the original to suggest the bilinguality of globalized English.) The other notable inclusions are “Blouse”, “Smell”, “Ten Rupees” and the hauntingly tragic “Khaled Mian”. Since Taseer, unlike Hasan, translates Manto’s well-known titles literally, one can easily associate Taseer’s English titles with the original stories.

Taseer’s Manto is a labour of love, but one that is spiked with jealous proprietorship. In Pakistan, “Manto’s world”, Taseer declares, “would feel very foreign... His eye could only have been an Indian eye”. Manto’s greatest muse was perhaps the city where he spent most of his life, Bombay. Even so, Taseer’s investment in what he takes to be Manto’s essential Indianness underestimates the universality of Manto’s achievement.