Pick Up Manto: Selected Stories Illustrated By Saadat Hasan Manto Distributed In Digital Version

a writer! The introduction by Aatish Taseer serves to enhance the effect of these short stories, so many of which knock the wind out of you much as a blow to the solar plexus would.


With a great focus on brevity and economy of words, Manto manages to paint vivid pictures and give you a bit of a shock as each story ends.
There's an atmosphere of hope, despair, sadness, and even horror not of the supernatural variety, but daily, everyday horror, There's wit, there's humour often dark and a dull cynicism in the entire setup that Manto manages to create,

Aatish Taseer does a great job of translating from Urdu, though I dare say that the original stories in Urdu must be even more powerful.
I so wish I'd learnt that language!

It would be totally worth hearing a comparison of the Urdu originals with Mr, Taseer's translation, just to see how much more powerful the originals are, I have no complaints at all about the ten stories, except that at some places it seems that the translator has tried a little too hard to preserve the original turns of phrases, leading to a bit of awkward sentence construction.
I could be wrong about this though,

The other minor complaint is that what I know as Manto's most famous story Toba Tek Singh, doesn't feature in this book,

However, if you're even remotely interested in the short story genre, don't give this a miss, This is a collection of ten of Manto's most well known stories, translated by Aatish Taseer, The translation is occasionally a bit off and the meaning not always clear, giving the general impression of reading better in the original language, Urdu.
The introduction is a good addition to the book, I felt, expressing a general love for Urdu, I am tempted to learn Urdu now,
Manto is a delightful writer, the stories are intense and crisp, They are mostly straight forward and easy to read but contain great nuance, Manto deals expertly with sexual themes there is no excessive euphemism or unnecessarily florid language, something a lot of very accomplished authors falter at,
This is a very elementary collection,in number and ofpages in total, Most of the stories set in preindependence Bombay, a couple set during or after the partition, My favourite was Ram Khilawan, because it holds a lot of relevance today, more than the others,
Manto is a mustread, if only at least his most famous stories as in this collection, The stories are: Ten Rupees, Blouse, Khol Do, Khaled Mian, My Name is Radha, Ram Khilavan, Licence, The Mice of Shah Daulah, For Freedom, Smell.
I really appreciate the fact that Manto was The Edgy Dude at a time when Edginess wasn't accepted, and that he wrote about very important themes of violence, sexuality, and masculinity.
But God help me I cannot handle his personality that SO SURELY creeps out of his writing, I'd thought my only issue would be the clunky English translation, but guess that's not the only issue here, At one level, there is a method to Manto's writing which recalls the timetested recipe to construct goodold, rounded short stories:

Out of the many characters in the story, keep the narrative focus on a single one, could be a postman or a dwarf.
R. K. Narayan understood this too well,
Introduce an action/conflict in which everyone is involved and which leads somewhere, Your characters need not leave the room if you so wish,
Throw in the details of the contemporary milieu,
Provide character or historic anecdotes to set a context,
All the characters should be fleshed out, and not present simply to justify a scenario or an action, or to act as a punching bag for the main character.
It's just that the focus is on A right now and B is given less space in the narrative, Should we change the focus a little bit, B could have his own story with A in the background, Every person is an island,
If you show a gun on the wall, it must be fired before the story ends, Chekhov's timeless advice. It is still the easiest way to create a sense of continuity in the reader's mind, Of course, you don't always need a gun!

It's not just an oldstyle, motheaten recipe, A similar way of constructing can be observed in Daniyal Mueenuddin's recent writing as well, It works if done well is what I mean, And shines when done too well, like in this collection,

Manto sometimes seems unplanned and rambling very strongly in "My name is Radha", but there is a pattern that emerge in each narrative that leaves you in shock.
His stare is direct, he is never sentimental, even when describing the partition he writes with great understanding but does not shy away to find comedy at unlikely places.
In a story titled "For Freedom", one of the protesters in a rally against the British got so excited that he removed his shirt and threw it in the bonfire that was lit to boycott foreign clothing, but later regretted because with the shirt he also threw away two gold ornaments that were in his pocket.


Every story in this collection throbs with life, There is a sense of foreboding in the narrative, even when Manto is describing something as pleasant as a newborn crawling on a wellcleaned floor.
I don't think that comes out of technique, It is much more mysterious, something that crawls out of his person and makes way into the prose through his emaciated fingers, I've always been interested in reading books and stories of post and pre independence times, and
Manto is the best one among them,
This is such a book by which you will never be bored and disappointed at all, All the stories in the books have a clear plot about how people have suffered in the pre and post independence phases, bookreview Manto: Selected Stories.

Last Monday, India celebrated itsth Independence Day, The independence that came with a cost, The partition culminates in separating the Indian Subcontinent into two selfgoverning independent dominions India and Pakistan, It is a period of horror that has been forgotten by many, We have just not forgotten how many people died or how many families have suffered owing to some mindless hate and violence, We have also forgotten writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, One of the rarest gems India British India has ever produced,

His writings have a fluidity that genuinely resonates with the essence of Indian culture and its people in the mids, If you have not witnesseds Bombay through the lens of Mantos Bombay through the lens of Manto, then you're missing out on something impeccable.


"Bombay and Manto" is an emotion,

In his short life ofyears, he has written several short stories, some essays, and radio dramas, His writing comprised sex and desire, adolescence, alcoholics, and prostitutes, He was a distressingly prophetic and daring writer, and a lot of controversies were created in and around his writings, He was charged with obscenity six times, But his stories of partition have made him famous the greatest chronicler of one of the darkest episodes of Indian history, I think only he can write something like 'Khol do' open it,

"Whether he was writing about prostitutes, pimps, or criminals, Manto wanted to impress upon his readers that these disreputable people were also human, much more than those who cloaked their failings in a thick veil of hypocrisy.
" "The Pity of Partition," Ayesha Jalal,

Manto's stories were radical in their own time and are still revolutionary, He doesn't shy away from the idea that women have sexual needs and their own sexual vision that has nothing to do with being in love with someone else.
While reading Manto, you will realise that literature didn't always have to conform, It doesn't always have to tell polite stories,

I'm heartbroken seeing that we have erased such a great icon from the literary canon, This is the first time I have read Manto, but it won't be my last,



"If you cannot bear these stories then the society is unbearable, Who am I to remove the clothes of this society, which itself is naked, I don't even try to cover it, because it is not my job, that's the job of dressmakers, "
Saadat Hasan Manto. You would understand "Smells beautiful" right It doesn't make sense but you do understand, That is Saadat Hasan Manto, Reading these stories let you have a rich experience of the world drawnup and there's a recurring thought on how beautiful it would be to read his work in Urdu or even Hindi.

I think writing shortstories is a lot difficult than writing a novel, After going through a couple of them we'd be able to pick a pattern, especially the endings, Manto succeeds in making us not think about the ending but leave the reader wanting more,
This book is an easy and short read, Has an intro on what, why and how of bringing this to market, The beauty of the original does not fully translate into English, despite the sincerity of the translator, Manto's grandson, Taseer,
The writing and ideas are exceptionally educational and modern, even though the stories are set in pre Indian independence times, His writings are very much relevant in today's public moral policing Indian society, It is direct and is rarely sentimental,

I'll look for a Hindi translation of another collection of Manto's works, 'Manto's stories may have been written half a centuries ago, but they strike the heart as cleany as ever, . . Unforgettable'.

This description of Saadat Hasan Manto by Ismat Chughtai through the essay 'My Friend, My Enemy', tries to decipher what Manto was and she says:

That he

could be a rascal and at the same time an extremely honest and honourable man, how could that be I didn't even try to understand.
This was Manto's territory. From the jilted squalor and refuse of life, he picks out pearls, He enjoys digging in the refuse because he doesn't trust the luminaries of the world he doesn't trust their brilliance or their judgement, He catches the thieves that lie in the hearts of their pure and respectable wives, And he compares them to the purity in the heart of a whore in a brothel,

He describes India and Pakistan so humbly that he says, Try as I did, I wasn't able to seperate Pakistan from India and India from Pakistan.
This statement requires deep thought, As much as one would like to seperate Manto the writer from Manto the man, it is not always easy to do so,

Aatish Taseer's sensitive translation captures the lyricism and power of Manto's voice,


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