Manto was prophet of hope, Ayesha Jalal says in Toronto

By Latafat Ali Siddiqui
TORONTO – There is a perception that most books on India’s partition were not written in a correct perspective of historical facts. In many cases, authors on both sides of Indo-Pakistan border presented the facts according to the needs of their own country.
 Some European writers also presented one-sided or biased views on British Raj and the independence of India and Pakistan.
 Several writers distorted the facts and brough their personal opinions. For example, no Pakistani author ever made mention of Father of the Nation Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s historic address to the Constituent Assembly on August 11,1947.

In his speech, Jinnah clearly declared that in Pakistan the state will have nothing to do with matters of the faith and Pakistan was supposed to become a democratic Muslim-majority nation state.
He went on to add: “… you will find that in course of time (in Pakistan) Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims; not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”



So soon after Jinnah’s address, an attempt was made by some Pakistani leaders to censor the draft of the speech that was to be published in the newspapers. However, it was only when the then editor of daily Dawn newspaper, Altaf Hussain, threatened to take the issue directly to Jinnah that the League leaders relented and the full text of the speech was published in his paper.
Now the situation has changed both in India and Pakistan and the truth is slowly coming out. Luckily present day writers are consciously trying to present the facts about Partition and the subsequent events in correct perspective. Jaswant Singh of India and Ayesha Jalal of Pakistan can be listed among such brilliant writers. They both have produced marvellous books on Partition. Incidentally their books are related to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a visionary leader.
The title of Jaswant’s book is: Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence. Ayesha Jalal’s book - The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, is also on the same subject. Th US-based Ayesha has written another good book – The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide. As its title suggests, Ayesha got the inspiration and guidance from the writing work of Saadat Hasan Manto for her latest book. “The Manto archive gave me the source material to connect the micro history of an individual and a family with the macro history of communities and states during India’s Partition,” she wrote in the very first chapter of her new book. She is the grandniece of Manto, a renowned Urdu fiction writer.
Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistani-American historian, is the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University and a 1998 MacArthur Fellow. The bulk of her work deals with the creation of Muslim identities in modern South Asia. Ayesha said she was great admirer of Manto.
“I have called him Manto abajan (father) since my childhood, though he had passed away a year before I was born. He was my father’s maternal uncle and married to my mother’s elder sister, Safia, to whom I was especially close. This book is dedicated to her memory,” Ayesha said.
“I grew up with Manto’s conspicuously absent presence in our joint family and was intrigued by his short stories, several of which I knew before I had learned to read. A personal favorite was his Partition classic - Toba Tek Sing,” whose main character’s prattle fascinated me as a child. The story’s dramatic ending made me want to know more about Partition.” She wrote that through his (Manto’s) close-range and personal picture of characters like Jugal, Sahai, Ram Khalawan, and unnamed murderers, Manto turns short story writing into a testament of his belief that human depravity, though real and pervasive, can never succeed in killing all sense of humanity. His faith lay in that kind of humanity. Perhaps that was the reason that Ayesha started her book with her favorite subject – Manto and Partition.
Like Manto, Ayesha expressed sorrow over the senseless killing of innocent people in the name of religion during the Partition in 1947.
During her thought-provoking lecture on her book and the horrific events that took place during Partition days, she vehemently denounced the massacres of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs in 1947. Her lecture was jointly arranged in Mississauga recently by the Committee of Progressive Pakistani-Canadians; Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq (Toronto); Progressive Writers Association (Canada) and South Asian People’s Forum.
“The end of modern colonial empires in the twentieth century, more often then not, has been accompanied by cataclysmic events of partition, civil war, or balkanization. The general tendency can be gleaned from the social and political process set off by British decolonization in not just India but also Ireland and Palestine,” she told a select gathering of highly educated people, including poets, writers and authors.
She further said: “These decisions to divide and quit were taken in the absence of any agreement of power-sharing arrangements among different claimants to the imperial mantle, resulting in unprecedented and tragic violence at the time of independence, as well as a long aftermath of war and conflict.”
Ayesha said she holds a firm belief that religions cannot be eliminated by killing people. In this context she wrote a story in her new book and described it as “Nothing but the Truth.” She wrote:
Bombay was rife with fear and foreboding. The British had wielded the partitioner’s ax. Reports of Horrific bloodletting in northern India, particularly Punjab, had turned the cosmopolitan city into a battleground of real and imagined hostilities along purportedly religious lines.
Four good Punjabi friends, three Hindus and one Muslims, were parting company. Mumtaz was going to Pakistan, a country he neither knew nor felt anything for. His decision to leave was sudden but unsurprising. Relatives of his Hindu friends in western Punjab had suffered loss of life and property. Overcome with grief upon hearing of his uncle’s murder in Lahore, Jugal had told Mumtaz that he would kill him if violence broke out in their neighborhood. After eight days of stoic silence, Mumtaz announced that he was setting sail for Karachi within a few hours. Jugal fell into a deep silence. Mumtaz became excessively talkative; he started drinking incessantly and packing as if departing for a picnic. When the time came for him to leave, they all took a taxi to the port, which was bustling with mostly destitute refugees heading for Pakistan. As they stood on the deck of the ship sipping brandy, Jugal begged Mumtaz to forgive him. When Mumtaz asked whether he really meant that he would kill him Jugal replied in the affirmative and apologized. You would have been sorrier if you would have killed me,” Mumtaz asserted philosophically, though only if you had realized that it was not Mumtaz, a Muslim and a friend of yours, whom you had killed but a human being. Muslims in Lahore killed your uncle and you killed me in Bombay. What medal do you or I deserve. What medal is your uncle’s killer worthy of.
Becoming more emotional, Mumtaz explained that by religion he meant the faith that distinguishes human beings from beasts of prey. Don’t say that hundred thousand Hindus and hundred thousand Muslims have been massacred, he tol his friend. Say that two hundred thousand people have been killed. What is tragic is that the loss of life has been futile. Muslims who killed a hundred thousand Hindus might think that they had eradicated Hinduism, but it is alive and will remain alive.
Similarly, the Hindus who murdered one hundred thousand Muslims may rejoice at the death of Islam when actually Islam has not been affected in the least bit. Those who think religion can be hunted down with guns are stupid. Religion, faith, belief, devotion are matters of the spirit, not of the body. Knives, daggers, and bullets cannot destroy religion.
Later, during question answer session, someone from the audience asked Ayesha whether Manto was the prophet of doom. Nope was her answer. “On the contrary he was the prophet of hope,” Ayesha said.
Before her lecture, Abbas Syed, one of the main organizers, welcomed the guests and the co-hosts of the event. Later, Munir Sami of Writers Forum introduced Ayesha Jalal and said that Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories and Ayesha’s all books are worth reading.