Saadat Hasan Manto (May 11, 1912–January 18, 1955) was a Pakistani Urdu short story writer of Kashmiri ancestry who was born in Samrala in the Ludhiana district of the Indian state of Punjab.
He was one of the best short story tellers of the 20th century, and one of the most controversial as well. He is often compared with D. H. Lawrence, and like Lawrence he also wrote about the topics considered social taboos in Indo-Pakistani Society. His topics range from the socio-economic injustice prevailing in pre-and post-colonial subcontinent, to the more controversial topics of love, sex, incest, prostitution and the typical hypocrisy of a traditional subcontinental male.
In dealing with these topics, he doesn’t take any pains to conceal the true state of the affair—although his short stories are often intricately structured, with vivid satire and a good sense of humour. In his own words, “If you find my stories dirty, the society you are living in is dirty. With my stories, I only expose the truth”.
He was tried for obscenity in Pakistani Courts, but never convicted. Some of his works have been translated in other languages.
Saadat Hasan Manto arrived in Lahore sometime in early 1948. In Bombay his friends had tried to stop him from migrating to Pakistan because he was quite popular as a film writer and was making reasonably good money. Among his friends there were top actors and directors of that age—many of them Hindus—who were trying to prevail upon him to forget about migrating. They thought that he would be unhappy in Pakistan because the film industry of Lahore stood badly disrupted with the departure of Hindu film-makers and studio owners. But the law and order situation in post-partition India was such that many Muslims felt insecure there. That was the reason that Manto had already sent his family to Lahore and was keen to join them. Manto and his family were among the millions of Muslims who left present-day India for the newly created Muslim-majority nation of Pakistan.
It was period of 1950 when his controversial stories like Khol Do and Thanda Gosht created a furor. Those days Manto was writing indiscriminately in order to provide for his family and be able to drink every evening. For everything he wrote, he would demand cash in advance. In later days, he started writing for magazines like Director. He would go to its office, ask for pen and paper, write his article, collect the remuneration and go away. This Manto was different from the one who arrived in Lahore in 1948.
Manto lived in Lahore for seven years. For him those years were full of a continuous struggle for his survival. In return, he gave some of his best writings to the literary world. It was in Lahore that he wrote his masterpieces like Thanda Gosht, Khol Do, Toba Tek Singh, Iss Manjdhar Mein, Mozalle, Babu Gopi Nath etc. Simultaneously he had embarked on a journey of self-destruction. The substandard liquor that he consumed destroyed his liver and in the winter of 1955 he fell victim to the deadly disease of liver cirrhosis. During all these years in Lahore he waited for the good old days to return, never to find them again. He was 44 years old at the time of his death.
