Saadat Hasan Manto
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Saadat Hasan Manto was a Pakistani writer, playwright and author born in Ludhiana, who was active in British India and later, after the 1947 partition of India, in Pakistan.
Saadat Hasan Manto
Manto's grave at Miani Saheb graveyard in Lahore.
Opposition to the Partition of India
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Opposition to the Partition of India was widespread in British India in the 20th century and it continues to remain a talking point in South Asian politics. Those who opposed it often adhered to the doctrine of composite nationalism in the Indian subcontinent. The Hindu, Christian, Anglo-Indian, Parsi and Sikh communities were largely opposed to the Partition of India, as were many Muslims.
Khudai Khidmatgar leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Mahatma Gandhi, both belonging to the Indian National Congress, strongly opposed the partition of India, citing the fact that both Muslims and Hindus lived together peacefully for centuries and shared a common history in the country.
First Session of All-India Jamhur Muslim League, which was established by Maghfoor Ahmad Ajazi to support a united India (1940).
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a key player in the Indian independence movement, stated in India Wins Freedom that "as a Muslim, I for one am not prepared for a moment to give up my right to treat the whole of India as my domain and share in the shaping of its political and economic life. To me it seems a sure sign of cowardice to give up what is my patrimony and content myself with a mere fragment of it." He argued that if India were divided into two states, "there would remain three and half crores of Muslims scattered in small minorities all over the land. With 17 per cent in UP, 12 per cent in Bihar and 9 per cent in Madras, they will be weaker than they are today in the Hindu majority provinces. They have had their homelands in these regions for almost a thousand years and built up well known centres of Muslim culture and civilisation there."
"To welcome Partition is to imply that people with different backgrounds and different blood-lines cannot live together in one nation, a regressive suggestion." —Rajmohan Gandhi, Professor at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign