Manto was born in 1912 at Paproudi near Samrala in Ludhiana district and grew up at Amritsar, where he was a teenager during Jallianwala Bagh and the Rowlatt agitation.
He wrote in Urdu: short stories, radio plays, film scripts. He worked in Bombay cinema through the 1940s and left for Lahore in 1948, which he regretted for the rest of his life.
His Partition stories, Toba Tek Singh, Khol Do, Thanda Gosht, Sharifan, are the central literary record of 1947 in any language. Toba Tek Singh, in which the inmates of a Lahore asylum are to be exchanged by religion and one man refuses to be in either country and dies in the strip between the wires, is the most exact thing anyone has written about the division of Punjab.
He was tried for obscenity six times, three times before 1947 and three times after, and was convicted once.
He drank himself to death at Lahore in 1955 at forty-two. His epitaph, which he wrote himself and which was not used, asks whether he or God is the greater short story writer.
He wrote in Urdu, about Punjab, from Bombay and Lahore, and both countries claim him now.
He was born at Samrala in Ludhiana district, grew up in Amritsar, worked in Bombay in the film industry, and moved to Lahore in 1948, which he regretted.
Toba Tek Singh, Khol Do, Thanda Gosht and Kali Shalwar are the stories, and he was tried for obscenity six times, three before independence and three after.
He wrote in Urdu about Punjabis and he refused every consolation available about 1947. He died at forty-two in 1955.