The Partition, as Manto saw it

From the battleground that was the Partition, emerged some of the finest literature of the subcontinent. Manto's was the best

Prasenjit Chowdhury Kolkata

Muslims living in Hindu localities began to leave for safer places; Hindus in Muslim majority areas followed suit. Full-scale communal violence erupted in Amritsar. However, retired judge Mian Abdul had a bull-headed conviction that the storm would blow over. Therefore, he chose not to move his family. His two children, a boy of eleven and a girl of seventeen, and his old servant who was pushing seventy, were the three who kept him company. His daughter Sughra was not so convinced because "there were too many fires in too many places" and the "sky was always lit by conflagrations like giants spitting out flames."

Things indeed belied Mian sahib's predictions as they went from bad to worse. Mian sahib had a stroke and was laid up. All the dispensaries were closed. And Mian sahib's condition worsened by the day. Desperately, Sughra scolded their servant who mostly kept near Mian sahib's bed as he coughed and fought for breath: "What good are you? …There was a time when servants used to sacrifice their lives for their masters." Akbar, the servant, left for good. The festival of Eid was only a night away. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. No, it was not Akbar. It was perhaps Gurmukh Singh whom Mian sahib once did a great favour by getting him acquitted in a false legal suit. It wasn't Gurmukh Singh but his son Santokh Singh, assigned to do an errand by his departed father — to fulfil his father's farewell wish — all the way from his village to deliver a bagful of siwwaiyaan to Mian sahib on the occasion of Eid, as his father always did to register his lifelong gratitude.

The paternal assignment over, Santokh left. But outside the door were four veiled men, wanting to know if he had done the job his father had entrusted him, that is, delivered the token gift from his father to Mian sahib. Then they set about doing their job. They had burning oil torches with them and cans of kerosene oil and explosives.

The above account, which could well be of modern-day Naroda Patiya in Gujarat or even Mumbai, is of The Assignment, a famous story by Saadat Hasan Manto, south Asia's foremost and possibly most controversial Urdu short story writer. Endowed with a literary genius capable of exploring topics as diverse as the socio-economic injustice prevailing in the subcontinent, love, sex, incest, prostitution, and the typical hypocrisy of traditional sub-continental men, Manto is chiefly remembered as the literary exponent of the Partition and its accompanying horrors.