Fictions of Intellectual Politics: Manto

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 Baat’, the paper revisits a particular historical moment (late 1940s and early 1950s) to understand various shades, forms, continuities and discontinuities of intellectual engagements with the idea of politics in North India (or the Northern part of South Asia!). In this sense, the paper makes an attempt to explore an extremely influential tradition of writing which not merely produced a critique of modern political ideas, institutions and processes, but also made a serious endeavour to search for possible forms of critical engagements with the world of politics. Manto’s stories, the paper suggests, offer us an important reference point in this regard.