The lights come on, one by one, as the credits start rolling up the screen. There is a stunned silence in the cinema, followed by a smattering of applause. Slowly, people rise from their seats. The hall empties out quietly. It takes the crowd a few minutes to file out through the exit hallway. Not one person speaks the whole way. The atmosphere is one of shock and introspection. The question hanging in the air is: How did we allow that to happen to one of our biggest writers?
Manto, the biographical film on one of Urdu’s best known and most controversial literary figures, was released in Pakistan recently amidst much anticipation. For a film that would normally not be considered classic crowd-pleasing fare, it was surprising for it to elicit so much public interest.
Cinemas are still going fully booked weeks in advance, and social media is flooded with positive reviews. Something extraordinary is happening here: somewhere along the decades of censorship and the resulting struggle to bring his work to the fore, Saadat Hasan Manto became sexy for the average, upper-middle-class Joe; and it’s possible that no one realised just how much, until the release of this film.
Manto once reportedly told his wife, Safia, “Saadat Hasan will die; Manto will live!” Today, with a movie on him pulling in crores at the box office just days after its release, one can finally say – not without some cynicism – that Manto is very much alive.
Manto the offender
But which Manto? Because by all accounts (and there have been many), Saadat Hasan Manto was a complicated man – difficult and spiteful on the one hand, witty and flamboyant on the other. There were distinct phases in his life where different sides to him emerged; for instance, his high-flying time in Bombay versus his final years in Lahore, before Partition and after, in financially better times versus when the purse strings had to be pulled tighter.
Contrary to the image of him that has become popular after his death, he was a career writer more than a social campaigner, churning out pieces on demand, depending on what served him best at any time. The one thing that remained constant, though, was that he was a man always at odds with the prevailing sociocultural milieu of his time. There were several people writing in Urdu about the plight of society’s downtrodden; Manto thrived on doing this in a way that consistently offended people’s sensibilities, and while that brought him both notoriety and admiration, it also cost him dearly.
It is this Manto that we see in director Sarmad Khoosat’s film: the disappointed, bitter man, deeply affected by the wanton violence of Partition, at the latter end of a series of obscenity trials, struggling to make ends meet in the face of health issues and a runaway drinking problem. Khoosat himself plays the title role of the film – no small feat, considering especially the demanding nature of historical drama with an ensemble cast, and the ethically ambiguous and multilayered nature of his protagonist – and he does it admirably.
Upon leaving the movie theatre, it is impossible to pinpoint which role he has played better – actor or director. And for all of Saadat Hasan’s faults, one cannot help but be drawn to Sarmad Khoosat’s Manto. His portrayal of the writer ironically mirrors Manto’s portrayal of his own characters – dramatic, and honest to the point of being painful, at times almost repulsive.
Both have the same effect on their audiences: they leave them uncomfortably aware that a great injustice was done, and that somehow, at a societal level, the audience is implicated. As Khoosat himself said in a recent appearance at The Second Floor (T2F) in Karachi, “The film disturbs you, but then so did Manto Sahib. You have to look for material from within that.”
But what’s new?
We must ask ourselves at this point, though, whether this is enough – or whether it’s even anything new. The literary and academic conversation around Manto has tended to remain fixated on one or two aspects of his life and writing, mainly the way he wrote about Partition, women and sexuality, and the obscenity trials. Noted voices in the literary industry have pointed this out, from Urdu translator and academic Mohammed Umar Memon, to Salman Rushdie.
From that angle, at least, this film does not seem to reinvent the wheel. “The 1947 to 1955 period is popular with people who write about Manto because you can show Manto incapacitated and spitting blood,” says theatre director and Manto enthusiast Zohair Raza. “This is the only kind of Manto we can stomach. We cannot imagine the Manto who had a thin, high-pitched voice and pleasant personality. The Manto who used to say that the curse of his drinking was his to bear alone.”
Khoosat also acknowledges this bias, albeit less bluntly, pointing out that select portions of Manto’s work have been sensationalised over the years. “We’ve always pigeonholed him in one genre,” he says, referring generally to the biographical work and commentary on the author over the last few decades. “We only picked him because there was an edge to doing something with and on Manto.”
During the course of his extensive research on Manto, Khoosat found “another flavour to his writing” that is rarely spoken of: his dark humour, his political comment (some of it quite prophetic), even some dabbling in Darwin’s theory of evolution in one essay.
It would seem, then, that Manto’s relationship with society continues to be an awkward one till today. This raises some interesting questions. Would the audience’s response have been different if Manto’s suffering were not quite as highlighted in this film? Do we need to see him suffering in order to forgive him his sins? And if that is true, does Manto (the film) actually do justice to Manto (the man) or does it pander to an innate sense of judgement in its viewing public?
Zohair Raza thinks this is the case. “The audience laughed and cried as at one time people would do while reading Manto’s stories,” he says, in a thinly veiled critique of viewers’ literary credentials. “But the fact is Manto has been propped up in front of the very society that could never understand him – not back when it used to curse him, and not now when it is applauding him.”
The man in Manto
Is it possible that the beauty and value of Sarmad Khoosat’s film lies elsewhere, then? What if we were to shift our perspective and view this as a character sketch rather than a biopic? It is only from this perspective that one’s attention is sufficiently directed towards Khoosat’s artistic achievements in this project.
We begin to see the film as a study of the man – as a trip down the rabbit hole of his brilliant, tortured (and often quite selfish and mundane) mind. It is the humanising of a person who has only ever been seen half-illuminated at the fringes of the stark light thrown on a portion of his work. As actor and theatre director Osman Khalid Butt puts it, “Manto is not merely a film – it is an education. Sarmad brilliantly taps into Manto's psyche; the method behind the madness (read: genius), merging a stark realism with visual theatricality.”
There are other significant aspects of the writer’s personality (and reality as he perceives it) that the film helps to flesh out. Actor Nimra Bucha, who plays the fascinating role of Manto’s humzaad (alter ego) in the film, talks about how the film made Manto’s complicated domestic situation accessible to this generation of Pakistani viewers for the first time.
“It’s not easy living with a writer – I think that’s shown [in the movie]. They [Safia and Saadat Hasan] have separate bedrooms; she’s constantly responsible for the girls,” Bucha said during the cast’s appearance at T2F. “And this whole writing business is such a lonely, painful process. What are you writing for? Just a few rupees here and there. What will happen to your kids after you’re gone? These are truths even in today’s world. What guarantees have artists and writers got? I think we all felt that and empathised with it.”
The real connection?
However, ultimately there may be another reason entirely why this film is connecting so well with its audiences. As former teacher Waqeea Aqeel puts it so well, “The parallel was just too blinding. To this day we are being nudged this way and that; killed, maimed, tortured, gagged all in the name of morality, honour, nationalism, religion. To this day we fight for our right to speak our mind, or at least to think our thoughts.”
Although this is only partly correct (the very fact that the film has made it through the Censor Board surprisingly intact bears witness to this), Aqeel’s passionate and instinctive response can be well understood. The generation that is going to watch this movie today in the cineplexes is largely an English-medium, upper-middle-class generation that lived through the Zia years, saw the tumultuous years of democracy after, witnessed the birth and subsequent explosion of the Internet, watched the proliferation of private media channels, cheered on the second wave of Pakistani writing in English, blinked but eventually moved on when the Veena Malik FHM cover happened, then saw her get a 26-year jail sentence for a “blasphemous” sequence on a television morning show, and now finds itself in the middle of an ongoing tussle between conservative and liberal ideologies and narratives in the urban centres of the country – a tussle that has seen the permanent silencing of many liberal voices.
This is the generation that has mostly read Manto in translation, or as part of O Level course books. And while it may be accurately argued that it is nothing like the generation that was reading while Manto was alive and writing, perhaps these viewers are capable of connecting with his struggle at a different level.
Perhaps that is what this film will ultimately mean to its viewers: a call to their conscience, and a call to action. Dare one hope?
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Manto, the biographical film on one of Urdu’s best known and most controversial literary figures, was released in Pakistan recently amidst much anticipation. For a film that would normally not be considered classic crowd-pleasing fare, it was surprising for it to elicit so much public interest.
Cinemas are still going fully booked weeks in advance, and social media is flooded with positive reviews. Something extraordinary is happening here: somewhere along the decades of censorship and the resulting struggle to bring his work to the fore, Saadat Hasan Manto became sexy for the average, upper-middle-class Joe; and it’s possible that no one realised just how much, until the release of this film.
Manto once reportedly told his wife, Safia, “Saadat Hasan will die; Manto will live!” Today, with a movie on him pulling in crores at the box office just days after its release, one can finally say – not without some cynicism – that Manto is very much alive.
Manto the offender
But which Manto? Because by all accounts (and there have been many), Saadat Hasan Manto was a complicated man – difficult and spiteful on the one hand, witty and flamboyant on the other. There were distinct phases in his life where different sides to him emerged; for instance, his high-flying time in Bombay versus his final years in Lahore, before Partition and after, in financially better times versus when the purse strings had to be pulled tighter.
Contrary to the image of him that has become popular after his death, he was a career writer more than a social campaigner, churning out pieces on demand, depending on what served him best at any time. The one thing that remained constant, though, was that he was a man always at odds with the prevailing sociocultural milieu of his time. There were several people writing in Urdu about the plight of society’s downtrodden; Manto thrived on doing this in a way that consistently offended people’s sensibilities, and while that brought him both notoriety and admiration, it also cost him dearly.
It is this Manto that we see in director Sarmad Khoosat’s film: the disappointed, bitter man, deeply affected by the wanton violence of Partition, at the latter end of a series of obscenity trials, struggling to make ends meet in the face of health issues and a runaway drinking problem. Khoosat himself plays the title role of the film – no small feat, considering especially the demanding nature of historical drama with an ensemble cast, and the ethically ambiguous and multilayered nature of his protagonist – and he does it admirably.
Upon leaving the movie theatre, it is impossible to pinpoint which role he has played better – actor or director. And for all of Saadat Hasan’s faults, one cannot help but be drawn to Sarmad Khoosat’s Manto. His portrayal of the writer ironically mirrors Manto’s portrayal of his own characters – dramatic, and honest to the point of being painful, at times almost repulsive.
Both have the same effect on their audiences: they leave them uncomfortably aware that a great injustice was done, and that somehow, at a societal level, the audience is implicated. As Khoosat himself said in a recent appearance at The Second Floor (T2F) in Karachi, “The film disturbs you, but then so did Manto Sahib. You have to look for material from within that.”
But what’s new?
We must ask ourselves at this point, though, whether this is enough – or whether it’s even anything new. The literary and academic conversation around Manto has tended to remain fixated on one or two aspects of his life and writing, mainly the way he wrote about Partition, women and sexuality, and the obscenity trials. Noted voices in the literary industry have pointed this out, from Urdu translator and academic Mohammed Umar Memon, to Salman Rushdie.
From that angle, at least, this film does not seem to reinvent the wheel. “The 1947 to 1955 period is popular with people who write about Manto because you can show Manto incapacitated and spitting blood,” says theatre director and Manto enthusiast Zohair Raza. “This is the only kind of Manto we can stomach. We cannot imagine the Manto who had a thin, high-pitched voice and pleasant personality. The Manto who used to say that the curse of his drinking was his to bear alone.”
Khoosat also acknowledges this bias, albeit less bluntly, pointing out that select portions of Manto’s work have been sensationalised over the years. “We’ve always pigeonholed him in one genre,” he says, referring generally to the biographical work and commentary on the author over the last few decades. “We only picked him because there was an edge to doing something with and on Manto.”
During the course of his extensive research on Manto, Khoosat found “another flavour to his writing” that is rarely spoken of: his dark humour, his political comment (some of it quite prophetic), even some dabbling in Darwin’s theory of evolution in one essay.
It would seem, then, that Manto’s relationship with society continues to be an awkward one till today. This raises some interesting questions. Would the audience’s response have been different if Manto’s suffering were not quite as highlighted in this film? Do we need to see him suffering in order to forgive him his sins? And if that is true, does Manto (the film) actually do justice to Manto (the man) or does it pander to an innate sense of judgement in its viewing public?
Zohair Raza thinks this is the case. “The audience laughed and cried as at one time people would do while reading Manto’s stories,” he says, in a thinly veiled critique of viewers’ literary credentials. “But the fact is Manto has been propped up in front of the very society that could never understand him – not back when it used to curse him, and not now when it is applauding him.”
The man in Manto
Is it possible that the beauty and value of Sarmad Khoosat’s film lies elsewhere, then? What if we were to shift our perspective and view this as a character sketch rather than a biopic? It is only from this perspective that one’s attention is sufficiently directed towards Khoosat’s artistic achievements in this project.
We begin to see the film as a study of the man – as a trip down the rabbit hole of his brilliant, tortured (and often quite selfish and mundane) mind. It is the humanising of a person who has only ever been seen half-illuminated at the fringes of the stark light thrown on a portion of his work. As actor and theatre director Osman Khalid Butt puts it, “Manto is not merely a film – it is an education. Sarmad brilliantly taps into Manto's psyche; the method behind the madness (read: genius), merging a stark realism with visual theatricality.”
There are other significant aspects of the writer’s personality (and reality as he perceives it) that the film helps to flesh out. Actor Nimra Bucha, who plays the fascinating role of Manto’s humzaad (alter ego) in the film, talks about how the film made Manto’s complicated domestic situation accessible to this generation of Pakistani viewers for the first time.
“It’s not easy living with a writer – I think that’s shown [in the movie]. They [Safia and Saadat Hasan] have separate bedrooms; she’s constantly responsible for the girls,” Bucha said during the cast’s appearance at T2F. “And this whole writing business is such a lonely, painful process. What are you writing for? Just a few rupees here and there. What will happen to your kids after you’re gone? These are truths even in today’s world. What guarantees have artists and writers got? I think we all felt that and empathised with it.”
The real connection?
However, ultimately there may be another reason entirely why this film is connecting so well with its audiences. As former teacher Waqeea Aqeel puts it so well, “The parallel was just too blinding. To this day we are being nudged this way and that; killed, maimed, tortured, gagged all in the name of morality, honour, nationalism, religion. To this day we fight for our right to speak our mind, or at least to think our thoughts.”
Although this is only partly correct (the very fact that the film has made it through the Censor Board surprisingly intact bears witness to this), Aqeel’s passionate and instinctive response can be well understood. The generation that is going to watch this movie today in the cineplexes is largely an English-medium, upper-middle-class generation that lived through the Zia years, saw the tumultuous years of democracy after, witnessed the birth and subsequent explosion of the Internet, watched the proliferation of private media channels, cheered on the second wave of Pakistani writing in English, blinked but eventually moved on when the Veena Malik FHM cover happened, then saw her get a 26-year jail sentence for a “blasphemous” sequence on a television morning show, and now finds itself in the middle of an ongoing tussle between conservative and liberal ideologies and narratives in the urban centres of the country – a tussle that has seen the permanent silencing of many liberal voices.
This is the generation that has mostly read Manto in translation, or as part of O Level course books. And while it may be accurately argued that it is nothing like the generation that was reading while Manto was alive and writing, perhaps these viewers are capable of connecting with his struggle at a different level.
Perhaps that is what this film will ultimately mean to its viewers: a call to their conscience, and a call to action. Dare one hope?