Saadat Hasan Manto
Short-story writer born near Ludhiana whose stories of Partition, such as Toba Tek Singh, are the sharpest record of its madness.
Saadat Hasan Manto was born in 1912 at Samrala near Ludhiana into a Kashmiri Muslim family. He wrote short stories, radio plays and film scripts in Bombay before moving to Lahore in 1948.
His stories of Partition are the sharpest record of its madness. In Toba Tek Singh, an inmate of a Lahore asylum, told that he is to be exchanged to India, refuses to leave his home town and dies in no-man's-land. Thanda Gosht, Khol Do and other stories describe violence and rape so plainly that he was tried for obscenity six times.
He drank heavily and died in Lahore in 1955 at forty-two. He wrote his own epitaph, asking whether he or God was the greater storyteller.