[11] Saadat Hassan Manto was born in Paproudi village of Samrala, in the Ludhiana district of the Punjab in a Muslim family of barristers on 11 May 1912.

[12] He belonged to a Kashmiri trading family that had settled in Amritsar in the early nineteenth century and taken up the legal profession.

[17] The big turning point in his life came in 1933, at age 21, when he met Abdul Bari Alig, a scholar and polemic writer who encouraged him to find his true talents and read Russian and French authors.

[26] After a brief stay in Amritsar, Manto moved to Lahore in search of employment and joined the newspaper Paras (Philosopher's Stone).

[31] In August 1940 he was dismissed from the editorship of Musawwir and started working for another magazine called Karwan (Caravan) at a lower salary.

Subsequently he moved to Delhi in January 1941 and accepted the job of writing for Urdu Service of All India Radio.

[32] Manto joined All India Radio in early 1941 and became acquainted with many writers working there such as Chiragh Hasan Hasrat, Akhtar Hussain Raipuri, Ansar Nasiri, Mahmud Nizami, Meeraji and Upendranath Ashk.

[33] Meanwhile, due to growing differences with his colleagues at All India Radio, he left his job and returned to Bombay in July 1942 and again started working with the film industry.

Some of his short stories also came from this phase including Kaali Shalwar (1941), Dhuan (1941) and Bu (1945), which was published in Qaumi Jang (Bombay) in February 1945.

According to one commentator: "There was absolutely no external influence and people would share their opinions on any subject without fear even during the military dictators' regimes.

This was Manto's extended family as well including his relatives Film Director Masud Pervaiz and Cricket Commentator Hamid Jalal.

The three storied building was built by Lala Lajpat Rai's Lakshmi insurance company in 1938, inaugurated by Sarojini Naidu, and was at one time the residence of K.Santhanam, an eminent lawyer.

Manto had suffered public trials for writing obscene literature in the newly created and increasingly Islamized Pakistan.

Sessions Judge Munir presided over Manto's last trial in Lahore and he is the infamous judge who later became Justice Munir, Chief Justice of Pakistan Supreme Court and who invented the Doctrine of Necessity alias Nazria e Zaroorat in later years to buttress martial law in Pakistan.

Manto's trial ended with a warning from Sessions Judge Munir that he was being let off easy with just a fine but would be sent to jail for many years if he did not stop writing his provocative short stories.

[7][54] He started his literary career translating the works of Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde and Russian writers such as Chekhov and Gorky.

To add to it, his numerous court cases and societal rebukes deepened his cynical view of society, from which he felt isolated.

[57] No part of human existence remained untouched or taboo for him, he sincerely brought out stories of prostitutes and pimps alike, just as he highlighted the subversive sexual slavery of the women of his times.

[58] To many contemporary women writers, his language portrayed reality and provided them with the dignity they long deserved.

[59] He is still known for his scathing insight into human behaviour as well as revelation of the macabre animalistic nature of the enraged people, that stands out amidst the brevity of his prose.

[60] -- MantoAt least one commentator compares Saadat Hasan Manto to D. H. Lawrence, partly because he wrote about taboos of Indo-Pakistani Society.

[61] His concerns on the socio-political issues, from local to global are revealed in his series, Letters to Uncle Sam, and those to Pandit Nehru.

[64] While the conservative or right-wing section of the society criticised him on moral grounds, the progressives or Marxists and leftists criticised him for ideological reasons, namely for his migration to Pakistan and embrace of Pakistani nationalism, Manto then being championed by traditional minded literary critics such as Hasan Askari and Mumtaz Shirin.

[67] During the last two decades, many stage productions were done to present his character in conflict with the harsh socio-economic realities of the post-partition era.

Danish Iqbal's stage Play Ek Kutte Ki Kahani presented Manto in a new perspective on occasion of his birth centenary.