Saadat Hassan Manto: “The Assignment”

Author’s notes: 

Content warnings for self-harm, political violence, sexual violence. 

I consistently refer to Manto’s hometown as “Bombay” rather than Mumbai. I do this for two reasons. The lesser reason is that “Bombay” is simply Portuguese for “Beautiful Bay,” whereas Mumbai is short for “Mumbadevi” and the change was made in 1995 at the instigation of Hindu nationalist groups. The greater reason is because my partner continues to use “Bombay” as the name of her hometown and it would be ludicrous of me to diverge from her practice as if I knew better than she. I would stand justly accused, in the words of a particularly picturesque Bombay phrase, of “teaching your father to fuck.”

What’s so Special about “The Assignment” by Saadat Hassan Manto?

“The Assignment” by Saadat Hasan Manto is a story I like to give my writing students when I want to desolate them. Lots of stories make you cry; lots of stories make you think sad, sweet thoughts about mortality or loss. Or about the state of the world and how much of the work of justice yet remains. “The Assignment” hits harder than any of them. It’s such a uniquely troubling story that I’ve never been able to articulate to my personal satisfaction why. 

There are lots of stories that hurt to read. And lots of stories you can use to mess with your students. By which I mean teach them how to write well. By which I kind of mean mess with them. There are stories where the dog dies at the end, which is a cheap trick but boy does it work (full disclosure: yeah I’m guilty of this; in my first-published short story, the dog doesn’t quite die at the end but that last trip to the vet is days or weeks away at most). 

Why does it so often seem like that’s the point of a short story: to ruin your readers’ day? It’s all the more impressive that, against such a tough field, “The Assignment” is uniquely traumatizing to readers.

What’s it About?

I will link the story here, and honestly, it’s better if you read it. Not just because it’s one of the greatest short stories ever written, but because me telling you what happens does as much justice to the original as those movie-captions that say “heroic music playing.” 

The quick-and-dirty is this: The year is about 1948. India has yanked itself free of the UK but now Pakistan and India are going their separate ways, and not amicably. With the riots of Partition happening all around Amritsar, there is a knock at the door of a bedridden Muslim judge. His daughter reluctantly answers to find, not Gurmukh Singh (the old Sikh man who used to visit every Ramadan to deliver a small present to the judge), but rather Gurmukh’s son Santokh, here to carry out his father’s yearly errand.

The son extols the judge’s virtues and waxes poetic as he describes his late father’s gratitude to the judge for long-ago dismissing a frivolous lawsuit. He then bestows the small package and goes on his way. All, it seems, is, if not well, then certainly not as bad as it could be. But once away from the home, Santokh is approached by–

Okay I lied. I’m not going to tell you the story. I tried a couple times but I can’t bring myself to type the words. It’s just too good a story. Go read it. I’ll wait.

Let’s Talk Themes and Ideas

You’re back? Good. Where to begin? Let’s start with those topoi, those commonplaces, that are so useful in a writer’s task of compressing a short story down to the fewest possible words. One character in the story is a stern but fair old judge. One character is a vulnerable young woman. And one is an earnest but dubiously trustworthy young man. The setting is a city that is tearing itself apart with rioting. 

We’ve seen these characters before–in one form or another–in tales and novels aplenty. They might be Karenin, Anna, and Vronsky; or Mr. Bennet, Lydia, and Wickham. Or, with slight alterations, they might be Ram, Sita, and Ravan. As readers, we are primed to sympathize with these characters. And we are primed to predict where they will go and what will happen to them based on our expectations. Manto even throws in, as if for good measure, an old trustworthy servant who proves disloyal (or maybe he simply proves mortal).

With typical characters and a typical-enough setting, we have the ground laid for a typical story. This is a phenomenon that I’ve heard referred to as “tone armor.” One expectation when reading any short story is that things will end badly. You have much greater odds of dying in a short story than of getting laid. But even if things end badly. You can at least hope that it will have been worth it. That you the reader will be able to finish “Daisy Miller” or “Ivan Ilyich” or “Benito Cereno” and say: “Well it’s too bad what happened to them… but what a ride!” 

Suffering but without Hope

A lot of stories in the realist tradition are like this. They give you hope in oblique ways: “Okay the main character died but at least…” That sort of thing. And “The Assignment” looks like it’s going to be that sort of story. All three main characters have the potential to drape themselves with a kind of tragic glory: the elderly Muslim judge in a Sikh neighborhood who will not be intimidated into leaving. His daughter who stays with him out of a sense of filial piety. A young Sikh man who has it in him to make a choice in the direction either of callousness or compassion.

Add to that the depth of suffering depicted in the story: in a few penstrokes, Manto puts us in the world of The Partition of India. A world in which there are no good choices. Surely in such a world, one character making one Good Choice will be like a candle in the darkness. When Santokh Singh starts heroically speechifying about debts of honor, it’s basically a fait accompli that he’s going to do something heroic to save the innocent girl on the cusp of womanhood… or die in the attempt.

But that speech ends the way heroic speeches end in real life: with nobody particularly doing anything and everything running its course as it would have if the heroic speech had not been heroically speechified. I remember reading that speech and its aftermath for the first time and being so crushed. I wanted so desperately for someone to do something. And yet, on subsequent rereadings, I can’t find Santokh Singh uniquely villainous. 

Manto and the Theme of Choices

Nobody in this story makes particularly Good Choices. Or even acts particularly well. There is the judge himself. Is he staying in his home out of courage? No; just denial. There are an 11-year-old kid and a servant, both of whom act basically how you’d expect them to act. The judge doesn’t have any answers, so it would be absurd to expect them to have any, either.

There’s a 17-year-old-girl who acts how you’d expect her to in such an emergency. Without an avenue to express her displeasure to her sick father, and so taking it out on those around her. And there’s a young man who could either act with compassion towards the people his father has told him to honor or could side with the rioters in perpetrating violence against this prominent Muslim. But he is the one we focus on the most because his actions have the greatest consequences. And yet his actions are simple. He obeys his father in delivering the gift. Then he obeys the laws of necessity and survival in leaving the house to its fate.

Why is it that such a simple action should be so upsetting? By doing both the right thing and the wrong thing, he degrades his act of kindness into something cruel and cold. And elevates the violence visited on the judge’s house to levels of horror and tragic irony rarely seen outside of Shakespeare.

Manto’s Story through Successive Rereadings

So much for a summary of some of the characters and themes of the story. But the mark of a good story is that it changes not once upon rereading, but again and again. Or rather, the changes in the reader are reflected in the story upon each rereading. My last time through, I was struck by the character of the girl. On the surface, she is a bully. Her father tells her to stay put and so she stays put. But then, since she cannot stand up to her father, she screams at the servant instead, prompting him to go out in search of medicine, whereupon the servant disappears, either killed or fled.

Upon returning to the story again, though, I was struck with new compassion for her when it occurred to me that she is the one most at risk. All of the characters in the story face death, but she faces the possibility, no, the likelihood, of being raped before she dies. All of this is very much on her mind. She has been looking out over the city like a princess in a fairy-tale wondering when her death, and worse, will come. So it’s not that surprising that her habits in this story are not the best–unable to reason with her father but venting her wrath on the servant. She’s going through a lot.

Keep Calm and Carry On

There is a pattern here: each of the characters does their best to act as if they are in a normal situation. The judge sets the tone with his not-to-worry attitude. The daughter goes to answer the door as if the city were not roiling with violence. The young man delivers his package as if it were a normal Ramadan. Talks to the girl as if it were a normal Ramadan. Then engages in a few words of casual conversation with a handful of men as if they were not holding blades and bombs. The characters in the story have all decided that they don’t have the mental bandwidth, or the language, to think about what was going on, and so have decide to act as if everything were perfectly normal. The results are… chilling.

Manto and his City

There’s another character in this story that I didn’t notice until… Well until just now, really. The city of Amritsar. Manto was a city-boy at heart, and the push and pull of all of the competing and cooperating wills making up a city was his element. A city is, in its way, a beautiful thing: so many people from so many different places all working together to create a home; a habitat.

Before Partition, Manto is reminding us, Amritsar was a city, where, as cheesy as it sounds, rich and poor and Sikh and Muslim looked out for each other at least a little bit. And now that city; that cooperation is on fire. It’s hard not to hear echoes of Manto’s beloved Bombay in this story.

How I Discovered Manto and What his Work Means to Me

A side note: it’s only by chance that I read this story at all. Manto is not well known outside of South Asia and its diaspora. I came to this story late. My partner is a fan of Manto’s work. Like Manto, she is a product of Bombay, India’s cosmopolitan city, and it was there I first read this story. Bombay, when Manto lived there, was an international city, because the various parts of India, though under British control, were still independent nations and princely states. And it was in this soup of languages and cultures that Manto wrote his stories and his radio-plays. 

Manto and Bombay

Manto loved Bombay so much. And, having been there a few times; having ridden its crowded commuter rails and petted its stray dogs and tasted its ostentatiously spicy street food, I can’t claim to understand; but I can claim to have begun to see what he saw. The beauties and textures of Bombay are unique. When he was forced by Partition to flee to Lahore in the newly created Pakistan, Manto drank himself to death within a matter of years.

Manto and Pakistan

It’s a special kind of “fuck you” not only to Pakistan but to the political realities on both sides of that even-now-not-officially-defined border to die of alcohol poisoning in a Muslim country. I suspect that such a thought occurred to him; may even have been foremost among his thoughts as he spiraled. But mostly I think he was just sad and angry, and, above all, trapped. 

He had been brought up on obscenity charges three times while living in Bombay in the years of British control. But he had the friends and the resources to ride those waves. As a refugee to the newly-created Pakistan, he was poorer and lonelier than he had been. And so those waves battered him, and he drowned. More often than not, what seems to be courage is actually a social and financial cushion. And what seems to be cowardice in succumbing to self-destructive impulses is the lack of a social and financial cushion.

Manto and the Rules and the Obscenity Trials

From what I’ve read, it was those obscenity trials that broke Manto. It was people following the rules and demanding he do the same. And “The Assignment” hurts so much to read because the characters in it are following the rules. The judge follows that unwritten rule that says: life will return to normal so let’s not make a fuss and start acting rash. The judge’s daughter follows the rules of filial piety, so she does not contradict her father’s dictum even though she is the one who, from the roof of their substantial house, has been watching Amritsar erupt in flames while he, bedridden, has not.

And Santokh Singh has followed his father’s directive to honor Judge-sahib. He has not only followed his father’s dying wish to the letter; he has thrown in some appropriate words to elevate and beautify the gesture. To make the gesture into an island of sweetness in the midst of such devastation.

Good. So that’s it then. Everyone followed the rules and everything worked out for the best. Right?

Manto and the Current War in Gaza

In fraught circumstances, people cling to the rules that suit their fancy, even as they abandon the ones that inhibit it. In fact, “following the rules” makes it easier, not harder, to act horribly. My social media feed is lighting up with Zionist friends, relatives, and acquaintances proclaiming that Israel is not a colonizer. Whatever else you can say about them, Israel is treating Gaza and the West Bank as colonies. You can’t claim not to be a colonizer and build settlements on land that doesn’t belong to your country or cut off the water supply to a country of two million. (They turned the water back on. After facing international pressure.) 

I took this article into the topical, partly because current events are weighing heavily on my mind these days, but partly because that was Manto’s courage. Manto wrote unflinchingly about a fraught political era. That era was seventy-five years ago, and has begun to fade from living memory, so it takes a special jolt to remind us that he wrote these stories back then. When these events were unfolding. When these events were still controversial.

Now these Stories are History, But…

Those seventy-five years (and half a world’s distance beside, for many of us) serve as psychological insulation. You get a different feeling clicking on an article about a writer who lived and worked during a conflict that now exists only in history books. You prepare yourself differently for that article. That article isn’t going to touch you. Not as deeply. 

I have always appreciated Manto’s ability to write forceful and beautiful stories about ordinary people living in out-of-the-ordinary times. But the more I write, the more I appreciate how difficult it is to write about your own time and place. Manto did not write about safely distant events. He wrote about events that were so present and so real that they killed him. We all need our distractions from the cares of the world. But it is a mistake for literature to provide those distractions too reliably, and with too open a hand. 

Read a Great Story; Let it Change your Life

It’s not enough to read Manto from afar, and tut-tut over the sad things that happened seventy-five years ago. It’s not enough to read about things that happened seventy-five years ago and say: “If only people had acted differently.” These things are happening. Now. You act differently.

So here we are. Israel, a country I grew up loving; a country I have visited twice; a country where I have friends and, until the recent and rather hurried evacuation, family; Israel needed to be pressured as recently as a month ago to provide water to Gaza so two million people would not choke to death on parasites and infections. Call your congressperson. Join a picket line. Go on strike. Do something.