Saadat Hasan Manto
Saadat Hasan Manto was an established journalist, short-story author and Indian film screenwriter living in Bombay (Mumbai) at the time of partition. He was born to a Muslim family in the predominatly Sikh city of Ludhiana, Punjab, present-day India. Partition violence later led him to move from Bombay to Pakistan. He is most famous for his collections of short stories which were written in Urdu and covered controversial topics. His stories on partition were seen as controversial because they engaged with the emotional impact of partition at a moment in time when few public figures were willing to talk about this. He was tried several times for obscenity and some of his stories were banned.
Manto’s short story “The Dog of Tetval” is an example of one of his many stories on partition. It is a microcosm for the violence between the two sides, telling the story of a fight on the mountainside between two groups of Pakistani and Indian soldiers and a dog that appears. Both groups befriend the dog, declaring it is Pakistani or Indian, and write this on a collar to be seen by the other side. The two sides fire shots at the dog as it moves between their groups and it is killed.