Shock and Awe

Shock and Awe – the military doctrine was propounded at the National Defence University of the US. It means using overwhelming power to paralyse the adversary, crush its will to put up any fight.
In Urdu fiction, the man who employed the doctrine of Shock and Awe was Saadat Hasan Manto. The difference being that he shocks, jolts and stuns the enemy that rests within a person. His intention is not to decimate but to liberate the person who reads him or listens to him. He uncovers the hidden corners of our personal and social psyche.
However, at the same time, he reminds us in most artistic and subtle manner that in the final analysis humanity prevails. And if it doesn’t in certain situations, it should. This he does without being overtly political and ideologically motivated. He changes people’s perception about life and the society in which they live.
Manto turns hundred today. He was the son of his age. His universality is rooted in his time and space, his locale and contemporariness. His protagonists belong to all faiths and communities, genders and occupations. No one is a hero and no one is a villain.
It is the oppression of history and tyranny of circumstances that brings the worst or the best out of a human being. In his brief lifespan of a little over 42 years, while he was busy enriching the corpus of our literature, the custodians of morality continuously tormented him with hate speech and court cases.
Manto has an incomparable understanding of human situation, the choices made by an individual, overt or latent sexual impetus and collective behaviour in adverse or favourable circumstances. This made him chronicle the human suffering attached to the most significant event he witnessed in his life. He has stripped naked the rotten underbelly of the partition of British India.
His short stories, Toba Tek Singh, Khol Do and Thanda Gosht, and vignettes published under the name of Siyah Hashiyay (Black Margins), bring sleepless nights. Manto wrote prolifically and his repertoire includes short fiction, pen portraits, screenplays and essays. He displays a unique sympathy for his characters in the stories and affection for his friends who he remembers through his sketches.
Between 1951 and 1954, Manto wrote nine letters to Uncle Sam. It seems they are written today.
Here is an excerpt from the third letter, “As for your military pact with us, it is remarkable and should be maintained. You should sign something similar with India. Sell all your old condemned arms to the two of us, the ones you used in the last war. This junk will thus be off your hands and your armament factories will no longer remain idle... As soon as you get this letter, send me a shipload of American matchsticks. The matchsticks manufactured here have to be lit with the help of Iranian-made matchsticks. And after you have used half the box, the rest are unusable unless you take help from matches made in Russia which behave more like firecrackers than matches. The American topcoats are also excellent and without them our Landa Bazar would be quite barren. But why don’t you send us trousers as well? Don’t you ever take off your trousers? If you do, you probably ship them to India. There has to be a strategy to it because you send us jackets but no trousers which you send to India. When there is a war, it will be your jackets and your trousers. These two will fight each other using arms supplied by you.”
The writer is an Islamabad-based poet and author. Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com