MANTO SAYS!
A few excerpts from "Bitter Fruit" the very best of Saadat Hasan Manto... an urdu author beyond compare... reading some of his short stories left me feeling very disturbed... and some gasping for air for their sheer brilliance and emotional impact. Perhaps being an indian i can identify more with the stories... all the same the devastation of the times that he captures is peerless... and offers food for thought for a strife torn world (especially in times like these) we can change the names of the religions/castes/ethnicity and exchange names of nations but the conflicts seem to remain the same... and humans remain the same over the ages with the same fallacies - that seem to disregard and disrespect another human being.
"a tale of 1947"
you would have realised that it wasn't Mumtaz, a Muslim, a friend of yours, but a human being you had killed. I mean, if he was a bastard, by killing him you wouldn't have killed that bastard in him; similarly, assuming he was a muslim, you wouldn't have killed his muslimness, but him. if his dead body had fallen into the hands of muslims, another grave would have sprung up in the graveyard, but the world would have diminished by one human being.
"the last salute"
this was his country before the establishment of pakistan. but now he was fighting against men who were his countrymen until only the other day. men who had grown up in the same village, men whose families had known his for generations. these men had now been turned into citizens of a country to which they were complete strangers. they had been told: we are placing a gun in your hands so that you can go and fight for a country which you have yet to know, where you do not even have a roof over your head, where even the air and water are strange to you. formerly all of them were indian soldiers, but now some were indian and others were pakistani. Rab Nawaz could not unravel this puzzle. and when he thought about kashmir he became even more confused. were the pakistani soldiers fighting for Kashmir or for the muslims of Kashmir? if they were being asked to fight in defence of the muslims of kashmir, why had they not been asked to fight for the muslims of the princely states of Junagarh or Hyderabad? and if this was an Islamic war, then why were other muslim countries of the world not fighting shoulder to shoulder with them?
PS: why can we not learn to live in peace?
"a tale of 1947"
you would have realised that it wasn't Mumtaz, a Muslim, a friend of yours, but a human being you had killed. I mean, if he was a bastard, by killing him you wouldn't have killed that bastard in him; similarly, assuming he was a muslim, you wouldn't have killed his muslimness, but him. if his dead body had fallen into the hands of muslims, another grave would have sprung up in the graveyard, but the world would have diminished by one human being.
"the last salute"
this was his country before the establishment of pakistan. but now he was fighting against men who were his countrymen until only the other day. men who had grown up in the same village, men whose families had known his for generations. these men had now been turned into citizens of a country to which they were complete strangers. they had been told: we are placing a gun in your hands so that you can go and fight for a country which you have yet to know, where you do not even have a roof over your head, where even the air and water are strange to you. formerly all of them were indian soldiers, but now some were indian and others were pakistani. Rab Nawaz could not unravel this puzzle. and when he thought about kashmir he became even more confused. were the pakistani soldiers fighting for Kashmir or for the muslims of Kashmir? if they were being asked to fight in defence of the muslims of kashmir, why had they not been asked to fight for the muslims of the princely states of Junagarh or Hyderabad? and if this was an Islamic war, then why were other muslim countries of the world not fighting shoulder to shoulder with them?
PS: why can we not learn to live in peace?
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