Author Nasreen Rehman Speaks On Manto, South Asian Literature And Its Translations

The choicest of words fail to encapsulate the feelings Saadat Hasan Manto's work stirs deep within a person's being. Manto, unlike many writers of the 40s, humanised women in his stories who had a range of qualities; they were animated. One such woman from the world of his stories who stands out is Mozail from his short Mozail. 

"While thinking of Kirpal Kaur, he began to think about Mozail, the Jewish girl who lived in Advani Chambers and with whom he had fallen in love 'right up to the knees'. His first impression of her was that she was really quite mad. Her brown hair was cut short and looked dishevelled. She wore thick, unevenly laid lipstick that sat on her lips like congealed blood. She wore a loose white dress, cut so low at the neck that you could see three-quarters of her big breasts with their faint blue veins. Her thin arms were covered with a fine down."

Manto introduces her through the perspective of Trilochan.

Author Nasreen Rehman, who translated Manto's works into English, in a conversation with SheThePeople revealed that she first learnt about him as a teenager from her beloved friend and mentor poet Zehra Nigah.

Rehman recalls a conversation they were having about lingerie and to elucidate her point, Zehra Bi, as the author fondly addresses her, spoke about Mozail. "She told me the story of Mozail, a young woman in a Manto short story of the same name.  I had heard of Manto but never read him," she admits and says that until then her encounter with Urdu fiction was confined to the romantic novel of AR Khatun and Razia Butt or hearing "reformist novels of Deputy Nazir Ahmed, and the magical dastans of Amir Hamza, and the riveting  Fasana-e-Azad".

Nasreen recalls prior to that evening, she hadn't heard or read any story like Manto's Mozail which eventually hooked her to the author but his books were not easily accessible she recalls.

Manto, His Influence On The Author

Speaking about what about his writing stood out to her, she says, "The quality of Manto’s writing that stands out for me is its readability – it’s the conversational style of his prose and the economy with which, phataak – he takes you to the time and place of the action.  We encounter his characters just as he encounters them, and his prose gets under your skin."

Nasreen was born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan and has been an economist before she turned to humanities and arts. The author, who currently is a Director with National Commission on Forced Marriage,(NCFM) in the UK, says that she falls in love with books and returns to them "much as I like to visit old friends – not in Hungama mode but in quieter and more intimate encounters".

"But like Manto, I loathe communalism and violence. And yes, hypocrisy and the pervasive South Asian inability to discuss sexuality as any other aspect of the human condition. We tend to either make a mountain out of a molehill or sweep these matters out of sight," she adds saying that the quality of the Urdu literary giant's works influences her.

Manto predominantly wrote in Urdu, multiple authors have translated his work into English and his works have become more accessible. Retaining the essence of the author's choice of words during translation is a difficult task and Rehman manages to do it quite well. However, Manto's voice does not feel lost in her translation of his work.

As a woman of South Asian descent, a feminist and a Marxist from an Urdu and English-speaking family, Nasreen says, she attempted to find Manto's voice and capture its "raw immediacy".

"A translator brings to the task their own experience of life and the two languages one is working with," she says. The author further adds, "In translating Manto, perhaps, I was helped by the fact that both my parents spoke excellent but very different Urdu.  My paternal family are from Nabha and speak very urban Urdu from Punjab – very close to Manto’s language.  On the other hand, my mother’s family speak very UP Urdu, which can shift from a chaste urban to a mixture of interesting inflexions from the local qasbahs and Awadhi."

In her brief introduction, the author mentioned that she, even before the thought of translating his works had occurred to her, had written about the author but after a series of mishaps, she had given up on it.

"In the 1970s I started a novel in which Manto was a character. Alas, someone thought it worthy of a bonfire and destroyed it.  Yet again, in 1988-89, I started writing a play called Manto House: the protagonist was called Dushka, after a very dear fiery and feisty school friend.  In another astounding turn of events, my play and at least thirty of my translations of Mira Ji’s poems and a long essay on the poet disappeared from my flat.  I was shattered and sort of gave up," the author reminisces.

Rehman, until 2021, was also teaching while she worked full-time with NCFM, as she juggled her time between UK and Pakistan. Certainly, her day is busy. The author confesses that she usually spends 18 hours working and is sleep-deprived. The author hopes she can resume teaching once she submits volume 2 of Manto's translations.

Acknowledging Translations From The Subcontinent

Rehman since she first read Manto's works has been transfixed by the author. She writes in her college dissertation A History of the Cinema in Lahore c.1919-1947 she relied upon his essays, and stories that documented film personalities. Rehman says that Manto gave her a "frontline view" of the Indian film studio. She noted that his stories compelled her to confront, "hideously and horribly", the communalism in South Asia.

"Since I was writing mainly on popular cinema, love and gendered relations were an important part of what I was analysing.  And Manto’s writings take us right into the hearts of what Ajaz Ahmed has referred to as ‘cultures of cruelty’ that shape the systemic communal and gendered violence in our everyday lives, at home and in the world of work, commerce, and politics," the author adds.

She also reveals that she translated his work for her thesis and it was her thesis supervisor, late professor CA Bayly who advised her to publish them. Thus, she got a chance to translate all of Manto's works which will be published as a three-book series. The First Volume of the book, which has been published, focuses on stories from the erstwhile Bombay and Poona cities.

Amidst all of this, the author reflects on her decades-long career when she is posed with a question about whether she'd been discriminated against and the changes she's seen over the years. She affirms that she has faced both gendered and racial discrimination. "The whole world is somewhat pearshaped on this front," she observes adding that the battles women once thought they'd won have resurfaced. "Women are facing huge challenges but we are fighting back on all fronts – and I have not lost hope," the author remains optimistic.

When asked about her opinion on how things will look up for the literature in translation after author Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand was awarded the Booker Prize this year, she notes, "I’m not sure where we’d be without literature in translation.  In the English-speaking world, there was deep-seated prejudice against literature in South Asian languages, fuelled by Macaulay’s ghastly Minute on Education. It is good that the West is waking up to the joys of works of literature from South Asia," she remarked before signing off.  

Suggested Reading: Aanchal Malhotra On Unlearning With Her New Book ‘In The Language Of Remembering’