Saadat Hasan Manto

Sadat Hasan Manto was a Pakistani Novelist, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and short story writer born on 11 May 1912 at Paproudi village of Samrala, in the Ludhiana district of Punjab, India. His family had settled in the early 19th century in Amritsar. His father's name is Khwaja Ghulam Hasan and Sardar Begum is his mother. Before the partition of India, he was active in British India after that in Pakistan. He thought that being a Kashmiri is the second meaning of being beautiful, as he mentioned in a letter to Pandit Nehru. He wrote many stories,novels. His writings are twenty short stories, a book of fiction, five series of radio plays, two collections of personal sketches, and three collections of essays. He is very famous for his work on the stories about the partition of India.

Manto was tried for obscenity, but he was never convicted. He is one of the greatest Urdu writers of the 20th century and has been the subject of two biographical films. First one was directed by Sarmad Khosat, and the other one by Nandita Das. His schooling was at Muslim High School in Amritsar. He got admission to Hindu Sabha College in 1931. After the meeting with Bari Alig in 1933 his life took a turn in 1933, he started translating Victor Hugo's The Last Day of a Condemned Man into Urdu in 1934. The translated version was published later by Urdu Book Stall, Lahore, as Sarguzasht-e-Aseer is a Prisoner's Story. In 1934 he translated Oscar Wilde’s Vera into Urdu.

Tamasha (Spectacle) was his first original story published under a pseudonym in Abdul Bari Alig’s Urdu newspaper Khalq (Creation). He published Some Russian Stories on Bari's encouragement under the title of Rusi Afsanay in Lahore. The Names of Manto’s two original stories are Tamasha (Spectacle) and Mahigir (Fisherman). Manto was a member of the Indian Progressive Writers' Association. His second story, "Inqilab Pasand", was published in March 1935 in Aligarh magazine. Atish Paray was his first collection of original stories, which was published in 1936. He also got an invitation to edit the Weekly Mussawir in 1936. He married Safia Begum on 26 April 1939. They had three daughters. He died of liver cirrhosis on 18 January 1955 at Lakshmi Mansions, Lahore.