Why I Write: Essays

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Saadat Hasan Manto was an Indian trapped in Pakistan. This was his misfortune, and it was ours too. His identity didn’t come from religion and it came only partially from geography. It came mainly from his belonging to our culture, about which he wrote with great skill.

He reluctantly fled his beloved Bombay at Partition, complaining all the time against M A Jinnah’s stupidity, but worried for the safety of his three little girls. His observations of Mahim and Bhendi Bazaar, while the city was at its most violent, have been reproduced in these pieces. We can no more blame him for going than we can our grandfathers for staying.

Manto was not particularly educated, and had dropped out of Aligarh Muslim University after being an indifferent student. From a migrant Kashmiri family, he lived in Amritsar in those days, and came to Bombay after his father’s death to make a career as a journalist. Sleeping in the office of the paper he worked for, he got occasional work writing scripts for Bollywood (which wasn’t known by that name then).

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