An inheritance called Kashmir: The valley that lived as memory inside Manto

Kashmiri diaspora spread across the plains of Punjab carried the memory of the Valley from one generation to the next. Though Saadat Hasan Manto never set foot in Kashmir, that inheritance shaped his identity, his imagination and some of his finest writing.

“Here lies buried Saadat Hasan Manto in whose bosom are enshrined all the secrets and art of short story writing. Buried under mounds of earth, even now he is contemplating whether he is a greater short story writer or God,” reads Manto’s self-written epitaph.

There is a small comedy buried in Manto’s childhood that he only got around to writing down near the end of his life, when he was drinking himself to death in Lahore and had begun sorting through what remained.

Whenever Kashmiri labourers, hato, as Punjabis would call them disparagingly, passed through his house, Manto’s father would call them in and sit them down.

He would talk to them at length about their homeland and then announce, with evident satisfaction, “I am a Koshur too.”

Manto as a boy thought this was ridiculous. The dying man wrote an essay about it.

Saadat Hasan Manto was born on 11 May 1912 in Paproudi, a village near Samrala in the Ludhiana district of Punjab.

He died in Lahore on 18 January 1955, forty-two years old and largely broken by drink, poverty and litigation.

Between those two dates of life and death, he had never once set foot in Kashmir.

This is worth stating at the outset, because Kashmir is one of the few subjects on which Manto, a writer who was congenitally allergic to piety (especially to the piety of belonging to a certain homeland), allowed himself something close to sentiment.

The Mantos were Kashmiri Muslims of the Punjab diaspora, one of the many families of converted Pandit origins who had migrated down from the Valley into the plains during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

They were mainly driven by the general misery of Afghan and Sikh rule in Kashmir.

In Kashmir, they had lived as shawlbafs (shawl weavers) and were forced to leave because of heavy taxation and the decline of the Kashmiri shawl market in Europe.

The enormity of migration was such that in 1891 C.E, the Punjab Census Report re-enumerated about 1,11,775 Muslim born in Kashmir as having settled in the Punjab. This was equivalent to the entire population of Srinagar.

According to the 1911 Census, there were 1,77,549 Kashmiri Muslims in the Punjab. With the inclusion of Kashmiri settlements in NWFP, this figure rose to 2,06,180.

Kashmiri Muslims migrated to several Punjabi cities such as Sialkot, Lahore, Amritsar and Ludhiana.

In an anthology of 70 research documents on the history and culture of undivided Punjab called ‘Punjab revisited’, a reference is made to the famines.

“Owing to a large influx of Kashmiris into Amritsar during the great famine which occurred in Kashmir in the year 1833 A.D., the number of shops increased in Amritsar to 2,000 and the yearly out-turn of pashmina work to four lacs of rupees.”

Thus emigration had reduced the population to one-fourth by 1836.

Ghulam Ahmad Mehjoor would later sum up the nature of these exoduses by versifying:

“Had there been opportunities of my survival within home;
the poor would not have been roaming during the dread nights of winter.”

Saadat was, in this, part of a recognisable class.

The Nehrus (Kaul), Iqbal’s family (Saprus, by his own account), and the Mantos all belonged to the same slow leakage of Kashmiri families into the Punjab and the United Provinces.

It was a diaspora that kept its origin as a marker of refinement and took pride in it long after it had lost the Valley itself.

Manto took the marker and, characteristically, made a joke of it and a weapon of it at the same time. However, also remained proud of it in either case.

In a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, Manto wrote: “To be Kashmiri is to be beautiful.”

Manto’s writings reflected a unique blend of his Kashmiri heritage, his Punjabi upbringing, his experiences in the markets of Delhi, the streets of Bombay, and his life as a Mohajir in Lahore.

However, the most direct piece of Kashmir writing that Manto produced was not a story at all.

In 1952 he wrote a preface, titled ‘Teen Hato’, for an Urdu translation of the Kashmiri poet Ghulam Ahmad Mehjoor by the Lahore writer Naseer Anwar; the piece later appeared in the Kashmir number of the Urdu magazine Nusrat.

It is a strange, affectionate and ironic essay which in strange ways served as a moving tribute to Kashmir.

The land he had known only through his father’s stories but which nonetheless flowed in his veins.

In it Manto makes a political point of great simplicity and no small nerve: Nehru in Delhi, Khwaja Nazimuddin in Karachi, both Kashmiri by blood. You couldn’t get turnips and rice off either man’s table, Manto observes, so why can’t you get them to a table together?

Bring Mehjoor back, he says, and you could send Dr Graham, the UN’s shuttling mediator, home. It is not a serious proposal. It is more serious than most of what was being proposed.

Manto often recalled the stories his father narrated about Kashmir’s landscape, people, and society.

They, in turn, turned into anecdotes about the great poet Ghani Kashmiri, some of which Manto later mentioned in his letter to Nehru.

He recounts one famous story in which a renowned Persian poet sought Ghani’s help to complete an unfinished couplet.

Manto deeply admired Mehjoor, an admiration rooted in the Rooh-e-Kashmir (the spirit of Kashmir) that he believed they both shared. As he once lamented: “I have not seen Kashmir, but Kashmiris I have seen. But alas! I have not seen Mehjoor…”

Haunted by the memories of Partition, Manto paid tribute to Mehjoor’s steadfastness: “Mehjoor sustained all the oppression. He suffered the biggest oppression, the mental torture, but he didn’t waver and remained steadfast. The idea of migration didn’t cross his mind. He stayed where he was.”

At his mother’s insistence, Manto married into a Kashmiri family that had long been settled in Africa.

His wife, Begum Safia, was the daughter of a former police inspector who had served there. Manto himself acknowledged their Kashmiri heritage in a letter to Ahmad Nadeem Qasimi, writing: “My wife comes from a Kashmiri family based in Lahore.”

The fourth volume of Poora Manto includes two short stories that allude to the politics of Kashmir: Aakhri Salute (The Last Salute) and Tetwal Ka Kutta (The Dog from Tetval).

Both stories were written in October 1951, seemingly as a distinctly Mantoesque reflection on the first Indo-Pakistani war over Kashmir that began in October 1947, shortly after the creation of India and Pakistan.

Tetwal ka Kutta is set on the line where Indian and Pakistani pickets face each other across a valley, close enough to shout.

A stray dog wanders between them; each side decides it belongs to the enemy, labels it, torments it, and finally shoots it as it runs frantically from one slope to the other.

It dies, as one of the soldiers observes, a dog’s death — the phrase that turns the whole parable inward on the men who use it.

Aakhri Salute does the same work with human material: two soldiers, Rab Nawaz and Ram Singh, comrades in the same colonial regiment, now shooting at each other in the Kashmir hills for reasons neither of the two can quite articulate.

The shared past intrudes fatally into the present. There is no Valley in these stories, no chinar, no lake and no tulips. There is only rock, cold, boredom and killing: Kashmir as it was actually being experienced in 1948.

Manto’s Kashmir is therefore not the Kashmir of either state’s liturgy; it is neither a jugular vein nor an integral limb.

For Manto it is either a family birthmark and a running joke; or an idiom of beauty inherited from a father he half-mocked; and finally, in the last years, a rebuke and a wound— the shared origin that ought to have made the war impossible and did not.

He never saw the place. That may be exactly why he could see it so clearly.