Ayesha Jalal uses Manto's life and work to probe the creative tension between literature and history Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) was an established Urdu short story writer and a rising screenwriter in Bombay at the time of India's partition in 1947, and he is perhaps best known for the short stories he wrote following his migration to Lahore in newly formed Pakistan. Today, Manto is an acknowledged master of twentieth-century Urdu literature, and his fiction serves as a lens through which the