Manto (Hindi, 2018)
Man is full of contradictions. He has laid rules that he proclaims to be of the divine decree, but nobody follows. They say one thing and do something else, knowing very well that their action is directly antagonistic to what they preach. But rules are for others.
They say all men are equal, but everybody knows that that only applies to a select group of people with political domination. Others do not really matter. Every community has its codes of decency, social mores and laws to put things straight but vice and crimes never cease. We know what is right and what is not, but we still turn a blind eye to atrocities that happen under our very noses.
What is really the duty of writers? Do they have any responsibility at all? Are they there just to preach a utopia that we can all transcend to? Is their job to highlight things as they are on the ground to create a certain awareness to change the status quo? To get people out of their comfort zones or indeed to create a platform for victims to be heard, writers may have a unique role.
This biopic is the reply to Pakistan's 2015 multiple award-winning film of the same name. If the Pakistani version was longer and more in-depth, the Indian compensated through brilliant acting by the cast. It tells of the life and times of a Bombay author, Saadat Hassan Manto. A prolific writer before the Partition, he, due to the fear of religious double-crossing by his friends, he uprooted himself to Lahore. His intimate and graphic descriptions of true-to-life stories of the ordinary people, especially of women, did not go well with the conservative government of the day who considered his work as immoral. He spent most his short life fighting for his survival in the courts and being slaved to the bottle. Understandably, this film is banned in Pakistan. It portrays the Pakistani courts as a sham and the guardians of the legal profession as paternalistic dancing to the tune of the leaders. A good movie.
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| The versatile Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the lead. |
They say all men are equal, but everybody knows that that only applies to a select group of people with political domination. Others do not really matter. Every community has its codes of decency, social mores and laws to put things straight but vice and crimes never cease. We know what is right and what is not, but we still turn a blind eye to atrocities that happen under our very noses.
What is really the duty of writers? Do they have any responsibility at all? Are they there just to preach a utopia that we can all transcend to? Is their job to highlight things as they are on the ground to create a certain awareness to change the status quo? To get people out of their comfort zones or indeed to create a platform for victims to be heard, writers may have a unique role.
This biopic is the reply to Pakistan's 2015 multiple award-winning film of the same name. If the Pakistani version was longer and more in-depth, the Indian compensated through brilliant acting by the cast. It tells of the life and times of a Bombay author, Saadat Hassan Manto. A prolific writer before the Partition, he, due to the fear of religious double-crossing by his friends, he uprooted himself to Lahore. His intimate and graphic descriptions of true-to-life stories of the ordinary people, especially of women, did not go well with the conservative government of the day who considered his work as immoral. He spent most his short life fighting for his survival in the courts and being slaved to the bottle. Understandably, this film is banned in Pakistan. It portrays the Pakistani courts as a sham and the guardians of the legal profession as paternalistic dancing to the tune of the leaders. A good movie.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
