Manto is probably most famous among English readers for his story ‘Toba Tek Singh’, when Partition come for the inmates of a Lahore asylum. It’s a fabulous story and you should definitely read it, but I decided on a different one here, ‘The Assignment’. It’s my most directly personal choice, as my father was one of millions who fled their homes in fear of their lives in August 1947.
Over the years, my dad told many stories about how he, his sisters and parents left India and travelled by train to Lahore in what was about to become Pakistan, where they claimed the empty house of a family fleeing the other way. But I don’t think I ever got the full version, or whether he could have told it. The figures will always be disputed but more than twelve million Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus became refugees and at least a million were murdered in intercommunal violence. Muslims attacked Sikhs and Hindus, Hindus and Sikhs attacked Muslims. Many were attacked as they fled. Trains arrived at their destinations with every passenger murdered. Manto wrote compulsively about the multi-formed violence of Partition and many of his stories, sketches and fragments, some just a few sentences long, are collected in Mottled Dawn. ‘The Assignment’ is set in Amritsar, my dad’s home city:
“Beginning with isolated incidents of stabbing, it had now developed into full-scale communal violence, with no holds barred. Even home-made bombs were being used.
The general view in Amritsar was that the riots could not last long …”
The gap between the first paragraph and the second is what the whole story is about. The cool, documentary narration never breaks down but the general gives way to a particular household, a retired (Muslim) judge, his seventeen-year-old daughter, Sughra, younger son and elderly servant. While their Muslim neighbours decamp to a Muslim neighbourhood (still believing the danger to be temporary), the father insists they stay put, but when Sughra goes up onto the roof, she sees ‘too many fires in too many places’. It soon becomes clear that they are prisoners in their home. Order breaks down, but tradition and the rule of the young by the old do not. The old judge is sure that the customary will be restored. His daughter knows that something irreversible has occurred. Both are right and the consequences are tragic.
First published in Urdu in Yazid, 1951 as ‘Gurmukh Singh Ki Wasiyat’ (The Last Will of Gurmukh Singh). First published in English as ‘The Assignment’ and collected in Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, Penguin Modern Classics, 2011
A Personal Anthology 