Sunil Khilnani explores the life and work of India's master of the short story Saadat Hasan Manto. Manto didn't fuss much over his sentences. He wrote in a rush, at hack speed, for money – and often legless drunk. His raw, visceral, personal response to his experiences – including the massacre at Amritsar, cosmopolitan Bombay and the horror of Partition – matched a historical moment that needed a raw, human response. In a divided country that Manto thought possessed "too few leaders, and two many stuntmen", his sentences asserted, plainly, the human facts – not the moral or political motives that produced them. As Professor Khilnani says, "for all the velocity that his economy of language creates, the pressure of a story builds slowly. You're never quite prepared for the moment that blasts off the emotional roof. His sentences etch a groove in the mind not because he saturates his truths about atrocity in lurid color, but because he delivers them off-hand, even elliptically."

Readings by Sagar Arya.

Producer: Martin Williams