It was in Lahore that Saadat Hasan Manto, charged with ‘obscenity’ for his short stories was reeling under court trials before and after partition years. Had the ‘oft-misinterpreted’ Manto been alive today and discerned the shift of his literary works from awaiting a legal judgment to being read and understood in the open air of a literary stage, the man would have been happier. When we asked Pakistani-American historian (also the grand niece of Manto) Professor Ayesha Jalal to elaborate on the aspects of Manto’s writings she would be discussing at the festival, she said, “I hope to discuss Manto’s life, times and work across the temporal and spatial divide of 1947. His letters, essays and stories reveal the cosmopolitanism of everyday life and enduring friendships that proved resilient despite the cataclysmic violence of partition. Manto is also an excellent source for historical insights into the post-colonial moment in Pakistan”. And on what was it like being a family to the master storyteller of all times, Prof. Jalal said, “Manto passed away a year before I was born. But I grew up in Lahore’s Lakshmi Mansions with his conspicuously absent presence in our joint family. I knew several of his short stories even before I could read. Later, his partition stories informed my years as a graduate student of history”.
