Aakar Patel discusses Saadat Hasan Manto and his writings with Loveleen Kacker in this 8th episode of My Book Podcast Show, produced by Cine Ink.

'Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto', edited and translated by Aakar Patel has been republished in March 2023. The 2023 edition has two new essays, on hijab and on graffiti, bringing the total number of essays to 27 in the book.

“What would Manto have made of India after 2014? Certainly, he would have found it familiar and understood it in profound ways. He knew and had seen things through his lived experience that we in our generation are discovering decades later.”

“Manto would not at all have been surprised, let alone shocked, at the fact that independent India in 2022 had no chief minister, minister in the union cabinet or legislator in parliament from the ruling party belonging to the Muslim community,” says Patel.

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955), one of the greatest short-story writers in South Asia, published about 20 collections of short stories in Urdu. Being a multi-faceted author, he went on to write five collections of radio plays, three of essays, two of sketches, one novel, and a number of stories and screenplays for Bombay’s Hindi film industry in the 1940s.

Aakar Patel is a syndicated columnist who has edited English and Gujarati newspapers. His books include 'Our Hindu Rashtra: What It Is. How We Got Here', a study of majoritarianism in India and Pakistan (Westland, 2020), 'Price of the Modi Years', a history of India after 2014 (Penguin Random House, 2021) and 'The Anarchist Cookbook', a guide on why and how to protest (HarperCollins, 2022). He is Chair of Amnesty International India.

Author and Podcaster, Loveleen Kacker is a former Indian administrator now based in London.

Produced by Cine Ink in London by Achala Sharma and Pervaiz Alam, My Book is a podcast show in English.