Saadat Hasan Manto was clearly a man who fascinated many. You could love him or disagree with him — going by some of the essays in this collection — but you could not escape his looming shadow.

Academics Vibha S Chauhan and Khalid Alvi’s Manto Saheb: Friends and Enemies of the Great Maverick brings together writings by self-proclaimed “enemies” and friends of the legendary short-story writer. Except for the first two essays — ‘My Twin’, written by Manto himself, and Krishan Chander’s ‘The Diviner of the Human Heart’ — all the others appear to have been written after Manto’s death. Through this collection of reminiscences that Chauhan and Alvi have translated from Hindi and Urdu into English, there emerges a composite picture of not only Manto but also the many people who loved, lived, worked, and drank with him.

The descriptions of Manto in the 15 essays have some commonality: his large eyes, the broad forehead, his tall and lanky frame, his peculiar sitting posture, his regular use of words such as ‘fraud,’ and ‘hiptullah’ (a word he coined which meant eccentric and peculiar), his love for expensive things, his sartorial elegance and his generosity. Foul-mouthed, bitter, egoistic, fierce, honest, gossipy, irresponsible are also recurring descriptions of Manto. The book takes us through the adult life and times of Manto, particularly his working years in India (with the All India Radio, Delhi, and the film industry in Bombay), and follows his relocation to Pakistan in 1948. In it are memories that describe the enormous successes he experienced as well as the hounding he was subjected to. His stories were banned and he had to repeatedly make court appearances in places far away from where he worked. The essays recount the unending trials, the mayhem and trauma of Partition, his desperation to make money as an alcoholic in the later years, being committed to a mental asylum twice, and his death at the age of 43. The tone of each essay is different, reflecting, perhaps, the nature of the writer’s relationship with Manto, and the translations seem to have captured this. Manto Saheb is well-edited and produced, but it could have included some details about the essays, such as when and where they were written and published.

Manto’s ‘My Twin’ is an indulgent description of the man, a tongue-in-cheek celebration of his contrariness and all that he had been criticised for. He is honest but a liar, obscene but obsessively clean, atheist but will not begin writing without inscribing the holy number atop a page. The longest essay is also one of the most riveting chapters.

‘Manto, My Enemy’ by Upendranath Ashk, his colleague both at AIR, Delhi, and later at Filmistan, Bombay, is as much a recollection of Ashk’s difficult relationship with Manto as it is a meditation on his own feelings and actions. Ashk is often as critical of himself as he is of Manto. He writes that he was humiliated by Manto, but admits how he himself would never miss an opportunity to avenge an insult. Fair in his praise and recognition of Manto’s brilliance, his grief at Manto’s passing away is as genuine as his anger at the shoddy memorial that was held for him.

Krishan Chander’s tribute is that of a good friend who was either very forgiving of Manto, or did not see his faults in the way the others did. Chander’s tone may partly have been influenced by the fact that his essay was written in Manto’s lifetime.

Ismat Chughtai, a fellow writer who too fought obscenity charges in court, dwells on her friendship with Manto and his wife, Safia. What began as a warm friendship between equals ended in acrimony because of Manto’s decision to leave India in 1948. She regrets that she never quite made up with him after his departure.

Most of the essays have an easy and anecdotal narrative quality. Ibrahim Jilees’s journalistic eye captures Manto’s quirks dispassionately, without sentimentalism. There is no sentimentalism either in the restrained hurt of his daughter, Nuzhat Arshad. Her memory of him was passed on to her by her mother, who is clearly her hero. There is awill-o-the-wisp quality about Manto, in the sense that one never quite ‘sees’ the complete person. Balwant Gargi’s ‘A Solitary Soul’ captures this. The tributes in Manto Saheb look at the many aspects of the man and the writer.

Did he sell his soul to travel with Mephisto to the underbelly of humanity? Was that why he could write about it so evocatively and heart-breakingly? What had he exchanged his soul in return for? The collection also helps the reader understand the times Manto lived in. What strikes one is that years after an Independence that tore a country apart, book bans continue, communal and caste divides persist, artists, activists, and intellectuals endure attacks, and there are still incidents of unspeakable violence. There seems to be another kind of partition at work that is wreaking a different kind of havoc.

Gita Jayaraj is a PhD scholar at IIT-Madras