Manto set for rebirth

Manto set for rebirth on screen


Chandraprakash Dwivedi, who made his big-screen directorial debut in 2003 with the award-winning adaptation of Amrita Pritam’s celebrated Partition epic, Pinjar, is now working on a script woven around the life and work of Urdu short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto Manto chronicled the anguish and madness of the post-Independence communal riots better and more starkly than anybody other writer.

According to producer Anish Ranjan of Talking Pictures, the proposed film will weave together elements from Manto’s life with four of his best-known stories, including the one that brought him much posthumous fame, Toba Tek Singh. “The film begins at the point where an ailing Manto is in an asylum and then it fans out in different directions,” he explains. Manto was as much a chronicler as a victim of the Partition. The division of the subcontinent caused him great emotional agony and he poured his feeling on to the pages of his books.

Manto, who began his career in All India Radio in Delhi before shifting to Mumbai to make a career as a film scriptwriter, died in Lahore exactly 50 year ago a few months shy of the age of 43. He left behind a sizeable body of work that said a lot about him personally and about the times he lived in. Says Anish: “I had initially envisaged a film based on three Manto stories to be directed by three different directors. When I contacted Dr Dwivedi, he was already working on a script inspired by Manto’s life. So we decided to get together.” The script is almost ready and work on the yet to be titled film is due to begin later this year. In an interview before the release of Pinjar, Dwivedi had mentioned Manto as one of the writers he had read while researching for a Partition-era subject. “He has written some of the most meaningful stories about the pathos of Partition,” the physician-turned-filmmaker had said.

Pinjar was a commercial failure, so Dwivedi’s fame still rests primarily on the successful television serial Chanakya, which he scripted and directed. His interest in serious literature and history is well known and explains his attempts to mine serious writing for the purpose of understanding the politics and social realities of our times. Manto lived a short but extremely eventful life. In an amazingly fecund writing career spanning a little over two decades, he produced 22 collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three books of essays, two anthologies of personal sketches and numerous film scripts, including Mirza Ghalib, which was made after Manto moved to Lahore in 1948. Although Manto spent many years working with film studios in Mumbai, not too many screen adaptations have been made of his stories. Veteran Bengali filmmaker Mrinal Sen based his mid-1990s film Antareen on a Manto story, while more recently debutante filmmaker Fareeda Mehta crafted Kali Salwar out of multiple tales authored by the Urdu writer.

http://www.indiadaily.com/breaking_news/28512.asp

little bit more about Manto :
http://www.alhamra.com/Excerpts/mantoaikmutalla.htm

read his famous story "Toba Tek Singh" :
english :http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=Toba
Urdu: http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/pdf/TOBA.pdf

Some more of his stories @ urdustan : http://www.urdustan.com/mazameen/mazduri.html

and some of his books tranlsated in English and available on Amazon.com