Saadat Hasan Manto’s collection of short stories, Siyah Hashiye (Black Margins), is full of vignettes of memories of the partition of India. He dedicates it to “the man who, when recounting his many bloody deeds, said, ‘But when I killed that old woman I suddenly felt as if I have committed a murder’.” While the history of Partition is marked by an impenetrable silence, Manto writes as a witness, a victim and a non-conformist.
Beparwah Manto, a play directed by Anubha Fatehpuria, recreates Manto’s world of human tragedy and his undying faith in humanity in spite of this. How does one revisit the world that Manto writes about with such empathy and irony? This has always been a difficult proposition. Fatehpuria chooses to mount fragmented stories in an intimate space. In the scope of the performance, this space transforms into a railway station, a publishing house, an unknown alley, the pavement of a city, a kotha of sex workers. This directorial decision brings the characters and their lives closer to the audience while adhering to Manto’s reticence and distance. The audience, like Manto’s readers, witnesses the stories that unfold but is kept at a certain uncanny, yet safe, distance.
The performance script is intelligently ruptured and layered in a way in which characters and stories interact with one another, almost to the extent that they intertwine and begin to exist in each other’s worlds, both theatrically and in the narrative design. Beparwah Manto brings to us characters who are victims as well as perpetrators of violence. They live on the margins, they are exploited, they compromise.
The aesthetic design of the play and the interplay of light and music design are rich and layered. However, the actors’ performances fall slightly short of touching an emotional chord. Yet, the play, because of its theatrical design, leaves the audience with a sense of being split inside as Manto writes “…my mind could not resolve the question: what country did we belong to now, India or Pakistan?”