‘Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.’ – Sigmund Freud It would be appropriate if we replace ‘poet’ in Freud’s statement with ‘artist’. A great artist does not depend on psychology, science and research. His…

I begin with the basic question of how to read Saadat Hasan Manto today, sixty five years after the Partition and at a time when traditional ways of reading litera-ture are being seriously questioned. It is true that more than…

The objective of this paper is quite straightforward and modest: the paper tries to understand ‘politics’, or rather the ‘political role’ of intellectuals, in a postcolonial society. Discussing two short stories written by Manto, ‘Naya Qanoon’ and ‘1919 ki Ek…

I wish to begin with two truisms: one, from the 1930s right up till the mid1950s the Progressives were a force to reckon with; and two, while a ‘progressive’ in every sense of the word for various literary as well…

My initial premise is that the extreme and near-genocidal violence during the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 led to unprecedented psychological trauma, which had a differentiated impact on survivors (as I have argued at greater length elsewhere). In the…

One of the best known things about Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–1955) is the epitaph he composed for himself on 18 August 1954, exactly five months before he died at the age of forty-two on 18 January 1955. It ran (in…

… he saw dimly lit humanity even in the characters that appear to us evil. He perceived glimmers of this humanity both in the oppressed and the oppressor, perceiving a distant flame of human frailties flickering both in the pimp…