“Aao Radio Sunein”: Manto’s Radio Plays
Aakriti Mandhwani _______________________________ [i] Saadat Hasan Manto is arguably best known for his oft-acerbic, yet true-to-life depiction of the tragedies that befell India during the partition. “Khol Do” is one such popular narrative; Manto pens the short story of a young girl who is separated from her father during the Partition and, upon her rescue raped so persistently by her “rescuers” that she, even after having been returned to her father, mechanically opens her shalwar when the hospital doctor has merely asked someone to open the windows in the room. Manto’s skilful climax brings to the fore the painful understanding of how, following the carnage of the Partition, language itself loses its complexity and results in the fixing of one particular meaning; indeed, “Khol Do”, for the girl, has come to mean only one thing. Of “Toba Tek Singh”, another of his pungent stories on the Partition, prescribed in numerous university syllabi, which, in many senses, can be deemed partly responsible for Manto’s name in contemporary popular circulation, M. Asaduddin paradoxically says, “The name ‘Toba Tek Singh’ creates all this resonance… It is only some moments later that one thinks of Manto, the writer who created the character. It is the classic case of a fictional character overshadowing its creator”. However, even as the power of Manto as short story writer is noted and feted, he did not only pen short stories. He is equally well-known for his biting account of the film industry of pre-Partition Bombay and its stars, in a post-Partition series of essays titled “Ganjey Farishtey”. Before the Partition, along with his other illustrious contemporaries like Krishen Chander and Rajinder Singh Bedi, Manto was also a writer of film stories. His other professions included being a translator, critic and editor. However, another fact—noted by every biographer, yet always in passing and, therefore, not chronicled well enough—is that Manto worked at All India Radio (AIR) in Delhi for 18 months from the beginning of 1940 to August 1942, writing more than 110 radio plays during his time there. I would like to uncover Manto’s relationship with this forgotten archive, that is, the radio plays he wrote for AIR. Manto self-confessedly turned to radio as a means of sustenance, at a time when he could not get any other work that paid him nearly as much[ii]. Through a close examination of some of the plays written by Manto for AIR, the essay shall seek to understand how Manto, as an artist, dealt with the material that was meant to be broadcast over radio, to examine the contradictions between writing for what seems to be commercial gain. Manto’s treatment of this difference between writing for AIR as against writing short stories for publication shall be uncovered through his own views on it, and the contradictions that lie within the artist that provide the logic for such demarcations shall be probed. Even as the Manto oeuvre ranges well over 110 radio-plays, because of language limitations and difficulty in accessing the archives at AIR[iii], I shall only examine the plays included in Dastaawez Part 3[iv] . Manto the “Artist” vs. Manto the “Commercial” Writer An artist, writing and making a living in the modern marketplace, is understood to make a distinction between the art he makes for personal satisfaction and the art he seeks to sell. More often than not, both these kinds of writings are simultaneously available in the public domain, since the writer seeks appreciation for the art that gives him personal satisfaction. Pierre Bourdieu, in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field says of writing: “It is instituted through two principal mediations: on the one hand, the market, whose sanctions and constraints are exercised on literary enterprises either directly, by means of sales figures, numbers of tickets sold and so forth, or indirectly, through new positions offered in journalism, publishing, illustration and all forms of industrialized literature; and on the other hand, durable links, based on affinities of lifestyle and value systems, and operating especially through the intermediary of the salons, which unite at least a portion of the writers to certain sections of high society, and help to determine the direction of the generosities of state patronage.” It can, therefore, be understood that a writer, at any time, has to deal with both these questions simultaneously. In Manto’s context, the second option—that which seeks to “unite at least a portion of the writers to certain sections of high society”—was not feasible in the sense that Bourdieu thinks of it, namely, that of “state patronage”. However, for Manto, it indeed was “based on affinities of lifestyle and value systems, and operating especially through the intermediary of the salons, which unite at least a portion of the writers”, and that was a movement called the Progressive Writer’s Association (PWA). Instituted in 1936, the PWA united and perhaps even encouraged the form of the Urdu short story, a fairly recent phenomenon in the history of Urdu literature, to grow. The similarities between the intent and value judgements of Manto’s short stories—even as he, throughout his life, completely sought to disengage from movements of any kind—and the work of other pioneers of the progressive Urdu short story form, do stand in agreement with the general collective judgments that are so essentially a part of the PWA. Asaduddin mentions that, at the time of Manto’s joining, other personalities like Ahmad Shah Bukhari, N.M. Rashid, Chiragh Hasan Hasrat, Miraji and Upendranath Ashk were also associated with AIR. Though a perfect delineation is difficult to make—especially in the case of an artist such as Manto who actively avoided being grouped in any institutional way—at this point, the essay tentatively proposes to set up a dichotomy between Manto’s art and Manto’s commercial work, with Manto’s art leaning towards the expectations that the PWA, during its formative years, had from its literature. This dichotomy is proposed not only because of Manto’s personal interactions and timorous debates with other members of the PWA,