Saadat Hasan Manto

He was born on 11 May 1912 at Paprodi village of Samrala in the Ludhiana district of British Punjab, into a Punjabi Muslim family with Kashmiri ancestry ¹². His trading family had settled in Amritsar and taken up the legal profession; his father, Khwaja Ghulam Hasan, was a sessions judge ¹. He was educated at a Muslim high school in Amritsar, where he twice failed his matriculation examination, then briefly at Hindu Sabha College ¹. The turning point came in 1933, when the scholar Abdul Bari Alig encouraged him to read Russian and French authors and to translate them; his rendering of Victor Hugo's The Last Day of a Condemned Man appeared as Sarguzasht-e-Aseer, and his first original story, "Tamasha", on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, followed ¹. He joined Aligarh Muslim University in July 1934 and fell in with the circle that became the Indian Progressive Writers' Association, but tuberculosis cut his studies short after nine months ¹.

He worked in Bombay as a journalist and film screenwriter ¹. He strongly opposed the Partition of India, which he saw as an overwhelming tragedy, and intended to stay in India; in 1948, as news of the partition riots reached him and communal riots flared in Bombay itself, he left by ship for Pakistan and settled with his family at Lahore, among the millions of Muslims who made that migration ¹. His stories of Partition — among them "Toba Tek Singh", "Khol Do" and "Thanda Gosht" — cemented his reputation ¹.

He was tried six times for alleged obscenity in his writings, three times in British India and three times in Pakistan, and never convicted ¹. In Lahore he sank into depression and alcoholism; treatment at the Lahore asylum did not hold, and he died of cirrhosis of the liver on 18 January 1955 at Lakshmi Mansions, Lahore ¹². He is buried in the Miani Sahib graveyard in Lahore ¹.

On 26 April 1939 he had married Safia Begum; they had three daughters ¹. Pakistan awarded him the Nishan-e-Imtiaz posthumously in 2012, and two biographical films, in 2015 and 2018, have told his life ¹.

The English article attests him personally as a Muslim: it quotes The Guardian's description of him as "a Muslim journalist, short-story author and Indian film screenwriter", and counts him among the Muslims who migrated in 1948 ¹. Wikidata records his religion as Islam only ³. His obscenity trials, his drinking and his irreverence are recounted in the sources as biography; they are not attestations of any affiliation or unbelief, and no source names a school for him. The museum's data record therefore leaves his school unknown and sets out the evidence exactly.

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