“Ismat’s pen and tongue both run fast. When she starts writing, her ideas race ahead and the words cannot catch up with them. When she speaks, her words seem to tumble over one another. If she enters the kitchen to show her culinary skill, everything will be in a mess. Being hasty by nature, she would conjure up the cooked roti in

her mind even before she had finished kneading the dough. The potatoes would not yet be peeled although she would have already finished making the curry in her imagination. I feel sometimes she may just go into the kitchen and come out again after being satiated by her imagination.”
—Saadat Hasan Manto

“In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful here lies Saadat Hasan Manto, and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing....Under tonnes of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or he.”
—Ismat Chughtai

MANY OF us have held Ismat Apa’s fingers and strolled on the revolutionary roads of the literary world. Encountering Manto on midway is both predictable and unavoidable. Ismat Chughtai and Sadaat Hasan Manto, the legends of Urdu literature, have not just remained on the shelves, but have trespassed the hearts of their readers. While leading the progressive movement, they both criticised and laughed at the duplicity of authorities and establishments. Their short stories, essays and screenplays unmasked the “comfortably-hidden” issues of their time.
Apart from being the leaders of the progressive movement of Indian literature, both Ismat Chughtai and Sadaat Hasan Manto are also reminders of still unexplored dramatic possibilities of Urdu fictions. Their content captures all elements required for artistic, yet meaningful theatre. Countless productions based on their stories have created a new genre of storytelling on stage. The layers of drama, hidden in the subtext of their literature and their characters, have appealed to various generations of directors, artistes and audiences.
The extraordinary world of these Independence-era writers must be explored to savour the sensibilities hidden in their work. In one such attempt, a two-day festival, “Ismat and Manto: Life and Legacy”, has been organised at the India Habitat Centre on Friday and Saturday. The organiser of the festival, writer Namita Gokhale, underlines the vision of the festival as “generating joy while recalling these extraordinary personalities and looking at our times critically”.
While sharing the story behind the idea of the event, Gokhale says, “I have always admired Manto and have read little bit of Ismat. At a recent seminar in Jamia, I heard few scholars discussing Ismat and Manto with fierce passion. It struck me how these two writers hold the key to so much. They raised the taboo issues of sexuality and gender; they shared the pain of partition and the trauma of communal violence. I wanted to study their time, casting an immediate shadow on the present. I wanted to bring two contemporary personalities in the passage of time in which they emerged as classic writers. I wanted to bring out the process of their being.”
The event will be inaugurated with an appreciation of their works by poets Gulzar and Padma Sachdev, and scholar Rakshanda Jalil. Sachdev, a long-time friend of Chughtai, will also share her moments with the fiery feminist.
The event also includes an exhibition of the portraits of these writers by artistes Rohit and Siddharth Sharma. Works of M.F. Hussain, F.N. Souza and Kishen Khanna have also been displayed.
Both the writers chose partition, communal tension and sexuality as their prime subjects, but their style and language had diverse routes; Manto expressed raw truth in his upfront Punjabi Urdu and Chughtai stung through subtle storytelling in her delicate Lucknowi Urdu. Day Two of the function will focus on their style and other contemporaries of that time. The screening of Ismat and Annie by Juhi Sinha will open the session. Under the title “Pom Pom Darling and Lady Chengis Khan,” the literary feud between Urdu writer Qurratulain Haider and Chughtai will be discussed by lyricist Javed Akhtar, poet Sukrita Paul Kumar and scholar Baran Farooqi. The word war shot up with Chughtai calling Haider “Pom Pom Darling” and the later referring her as “Lady Chengis Khan”. The session will be followed by discussion in different sections; Syaah Hashiye: Narrating partition, Afsana: Reading from Ismat and Manto and Censorship and sexuality in 1940s. Ghazala Amin’s dramatic reading of the Lahore trial of Manto and Chughtai will bring the curtain down on the show.
In Kaghazi Hai Pairahan, Chughtai’s autobiography, she mentions Lahore trial and Manto’s phone call informing that he too had been charged with obscenity and his case was also scheduled for the same day in the same court. On the day of trial, Manto looked happy, as if he had been awarded Victoria Cross. Chughtai was apprehensive, but Manto’s exuberance banished all her fears.
For capturing the essence of their writing on stage, one must explore their real world, the world full of drama and events.