Speakers at Manto Seminar paid rich tributes to eminent scholar and writer Saadat Hassan Manto on his 100th birth anniversary. The seminar was presided over by Dr Anwaar Ahmad, PAL Chairman, Dr Najeeb Jamal, Head of Urdu Department of International Islamic University, Islamabad (IIUI), and Rector NUML Maj Gen (R) Masood Hasan also addressed the audience at the National University of Modern Languages (NUML), Islamabad.
Dr Anwaar Ahmad said short story writers like Manto were the conscious and mirror of the society. “Pakistan happened to be a very fertile land that it has writers like Gull Khan Naseer, Sheikh Ayaz, Saadat Hassan Manto, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and many others. They were the conscious of Pakistan and they held the mirror against the society,” he added. He told the gathering of students and faculty members that a short story `Mutri’ was a master piece of Manto since it exposes unheard voices of weak, downtrodden, lower strata and economically challenged people. “He exercised all those topics which no body dared to speak, write and hear before and it is that hidden reality that would keep Manto alive forever. Therefore, we need the writers who are trusted for telling bitter truth to awake the conscious of the society,” he added. Moreover, with reference to seminar, Professor Ahmed Javed in his article highlighted the political insight and conscious of his charters and then sufferings of a lay man in pre and post-partition era.
Dr Rawash Nadeem from IUII discussed Manto’s style of narrating the plight of a woman specially a strata that represents sex-worker, prostitute, and said that process of bringing out some very high trait of morality and humanity from such woman spell bound readers. Dr Fouzia Aslam from NUML in her article narrated the psychological and technical influence of western norms on Manto. She said that he had a deep influence of western and especially Russian and French writers and even Saadat Hasan Manto is often compared with Guy de Maupassant, and like Maupassant he also wrote about the topics considered social taboos in Indo-Pakistani Society. Besides, Iftikhar Arif, Dr Najeeb Jamal and Head of Urdu Department Dr Roubina Shaheen also spoke at the occasion and they highlighted aspects of his short stories saying his topics range from the socio-economic injustice prevailing in pre and post-colonial era, to the more controversial topics of love, sex, incest, prostitution and the typical hypocrisy of a traditional 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 chronicling the lives and tribulations of the people living in lower depths of the human existence, no writer of 20th century came close to Manto. In the end Rector NUML Maj Gen (R) said that very few people have ability to think and write beyond time.
