In January 1948, four months after the traumatic partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto boarded a ship to Karachi from Bombay. He was moving to Lahore, where his wife, Safia, and daughter, Nighat, had travelled the previous year to attend a wedding, but after yet another British colony was split up along sectarian lines in August, and refugees began to trickle into both sides of the border with tales of arson, murder, and rape, Safia had decided not to return. At twenty-two, Manto had briefly worked for a newspaper in colonial Lahore, and later, after his literary career took off, he often came back to defend his stories against multiple charges of obscenity filed in the city’s courts. But now Lahore was in Pakistan, a new nation that had been carved out overnight as a homeland for the region’s ethnically diverse Muslims, a country to which Manto had abruptly decided to migrate one morning in Bombay in the wake of endless riots and killings everywhere. And yet, as he wrote later, “I found it impossible to decide which of the two countries was now my homeland — India or Pakistan.” He could not return to his ancestral home in Amritsar, to the house where he grew up and learned to write, since back in March, before a decision had been made on whether Amritsar would belong to India or Pakistan, rioting mobs had torched down and destroyed every last brick in the neighborhood. (A visiting friend would later write that Manto’s old neighborhood “looked like a replica of Berlin after the Second World War.”) He could have stayed put in Bombay, except that his wife was now pregnant with their second daughter in another country. In Bombay, he had earned his living for years from film studios, writing screenplays, dialogues, and songs for early Bollywood musicals. On August 15, the day of India’s independence, he started a new screenwriting gig at Bombay Talkies, having been persuaded to join by Ashok Kumar, then the country’s biggest movie star. One evening, Kumar was dropping off Manto after work when his car was stopped by a wedding party in a Muslim neighborhood. Manto was horrified. “We were in an area that no Hindu would dare enter,” he wrote. “And the whole world knew Ashok was a Hindu, a very prominent Hindu at that, whose murder would create shockwaves.” But nothing happened. The wedding party was just starstruck by Kumar and kept chanting his name. Two men helpfully gave him directions. “Ashok bhai,” they said, adding an honorific word to his name, “this street will lead you nowhere. It is best to turn into this side lane.” Later, after Manto had decided to move, he recalled these lines: “I said to myself, ‘Manto bhai, this street will lead you nowhere. It is best to turn into this side lane.’ And so I took the side lane that brought me to Pakistan.” In Pakistan, however, Manto didn’t survive for long. His stories were again tried for obscenity; he was convicted twice, though he managed to avoid jail time on both occasions by paying a fine. His books ended up being pirated in both countries even as he struggled to make ends meet. He produced two films in Lahore — Pakistan’s film industry was still nascent — but they flopped at the box office. Fellow left-leaning Urdu writers and editors effectively blacklisted him for trying to start a new magazine with a conservative literary critic. He could no longer publish his work in prominent journals and newspapers, which meant that his freelancing income also dried up. The very stories that had been lauded earlier by his peers as iconoclastic masterpieces were now deemed “reactionary” and not “progressive” enough. Faiz Ahmad Faiz, perhaps Pakistan’s most famous poet, was once summoned as a witness when Manto was on trial for a story called “Colder Than Ice.” Faiz testified in court that the story was not obscene. “However,” he added, “the story does not measure up to a high standard of literature either, for it does not satisfactorily analyze the basic problems of life.” With peers like these, Manto didn’t need enemies. In desperation, he wrote to his old friends in Bombay, wondering if a studio there would hire him back. “Do something,” he implored the novelist Ismat Chughtai, “and call me back to Hindustan.” He had always liked drinking whisky in the evenings: as a teenager in Amritsar, he used to hide his stash in a shelf above his father’s portrait. But now he woke up every morning and finished bottles of deadlier bootlegged stuff. The one rehab clinic in Lahore was located in those days inside the Punjab Mental Hospital’s “anti-alcoholic” ward. Manto checked himself into the hospital twice for treatment. These stints prompted a popular myth, which endures even today, that in his last years he became mentally ill and was institutionalized twice. Condemned by courts, by his contemporaries, and by his family for his drinking, and disparaged by progressives, right-wing zealots, and even himself as a “fraud,” Manto died at the age of forty-two, seven years after leaving Bombay. 
It would not be inaccurate to say that Manto was “cancelled” shortly after moving to Lahore. But he also wrote prolifically throughout that dark period, churning out stories, sketches, editorials, personal essays about his time in Bollywood — anything that would pay for his next drink. Between 1948 and 1951, he published seven collections of short stories. He was among South Asia’s pre-eminent modernists, casually inventive about literary forms: a writer named Manto was popping up in his Bombay stories, for instance, decades before the French writer Serge Doubrovsky came up with the word “autofiction.” Just before his death, Manto wrote a series of impishly mordant letters addressed to “Uncle Sam,” where he turned out to be prophetic about the disastrous consequences of a military alliance between the United States and Pakistan. Seventy-five years after India’s and Pakistan’s independence, his
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