The Dead Authors Society: Pritam, Manto, and the Betrayal of Posthumous Publishing
Photo: Karan Madhok
Amrita Pritam, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Kamala Das were all writers who, even in life, lived on the edge of taboo, scandal, and self-revelation. In death, stripped of agency, their voices have been reframed by the very people who claim to honour them.
The great Pakistani writer Saadat Hasan Manto died a drunk, defiant, and in debt, a man who hurled his truth at the world like broken glass. He wrote of pimps, madmen, riot victims, child molesters. When he passed away in 1955 at just 42, he had already been tried six times for obscenity. His stories, especially those about the Partition, were too brutal for a world trying to repaint itself in noble colours.
History, with its cruel irony, forgave his rebellions. In posthumous accounts, Manto the author, became Manto the visionary. It is tempting to think of posthumous publishing as redemption. In Manto’s case, though, it often feels like resurrection for the sake of spectacle. Letters written in the haze of hospitalization, fragments penned in the corridors of mental asylums, incoherent notes from his final days, and more, are now canonized. Collections like Letters to Uncle Sam (Alhamra, 2001) are read for their candour, yes, but also consumed voyeuristically. Manto, however, never had the chance to revise these writings. Authorship is a mask of one’s thoughts, and control is usually an illusion.
The myth of Manto now grows without his consent, a prophet disrobed by the crowd. After his death, Manto’s reputation has swelled in ways that often leave the man behind. The six obscenity trials that once humiliated him are now polished into badges of defiance. His bruises have been turned into the marks of a martyr. In Pakistan, state institutions that once branded him indecent now celebrate him as Partition’s conscience. In the process, they flatten his anarchic range into the singular role of prophet. Bollywood and translation houses repackage him as a tragic liberal hero, while social media carves his sharpest lines into memes, stripped of irony and context. Each such act of homage is also an act of erasure: the crowd garlands him, but in doing so disrobes him, taking from Manto not the man he was but the figure they require him to be.
Would he have approved? Or laughed, bitterly, as he often did, at the hypocrisy of a world that only listens to its prophets when they are dead?
There is a terrible intimacy to posthumous publishing. To read the words of a writer, who no longer lives to defend themselves, is to enter a space half-sanctified, half-stolen. The dead cannot curate their own memory. They cannot withhold or redact. They cannot protest when their unfinished drafts, raw confessions, and unsent letters are dredged from the private and set ablaze in public light.
Yet time and again, we go digging: lovers, publishers, scholars, descendants into drawers and diaries. We publish what was withheld, and in doing so, we quite possibly fracture the delicate architecture of what a writer intended to leave behind.
Authors like Manto, Amrita Pritam, Kamala Das, and more were all writers who, even in life, lived on the edge of taboo, scandal, and self-revelation. In death, stripped of agency, their voices have been reframed by the very people who claim to honour them.
Pritam’s name floats like a sigh across modern Punjabi literature. She wrote of longing like it was a religion. Born of Partition and poetry, hers was a voice that crossed borders of language, gender, and propriety. Her famous lines “Aj Aakhaan Waris Shah nu” were not merely lamentation but invocation, a plea to resurrect the soul of Punjab. In life, Pritam chose her disclosures. She alluded to her passionate, unfulfilled love for Sahir Ludhianvi with the sly grace of myth. After her death, private letters, diary entries, and half-formed poems were compiled and published, often by those closest to her. Among them was Amrita–Imroz: A Love Story (Penguin, 2006), written by Uma Trilok, which became one of the most widely read accounts of her private life.
Trilok’s book is an intimate portrait: it reconstructs the four-decade companionship between Pritam and painter Inderjeet Imroz, pieced together from Imroz’s recollections, their correspondence, and Amrita’s own fragments. The narrative lingers on their daily rituals transforming private gestures into public testimony.
For Imroz, the book was a tribute. Perhaps it is. But one wonders: what does it mean to unveil what a woman chose not to name? There is always a difference between what is intentionally published, refined into art, and what is laid bare without that authorial control. Instead of Pritam commanding the narrative, as she had in her poetry, readers were now privy to her neuroses and dependencies in raw, unfiltered form. In mining her emotional interiority, the publication reduced her to a woman in love, a reductive epitaph for a woman who was also a revolutionary writer, editor, and public intellectual.
Few writers split the Indian literary world than Kamala Das. Erotic, elegiac, and elliptical, her writing bled with such fearless intimacy that it rattled the patriarchal furniture of both English and Malayalam letters. When the autobiographical My Story appeared in 1976, readers were scandalized: here was a woman speaking of lust, loneliness, motherhood, masturbation, and the failings of marriage, and doing so with lyrical audacity.
Das converted to Islam late in life, reborn as Kamala Surayya. She disavowed some of her past writings and retreated into mysticism. When she died in 2009, the public remembered her either as a literary siren or a lost matriarch. Few recalled the shrewd architect of her own myth.
The dead cannot curate their own memory. They cannot withhold or redact. They cannot protest when their unfinished drafts, raw confessions, and unsent letters are dredged from the private and set ablaze in public light.
After Das’s death, a variety of unpublished texts emerged: letters to her sons, religious musings, half-finished essays, diary pages hinting at childhood trauma and marital discontent. Academics hailed the texts as revelatory. Publishers lauded their candour. Readers were left unsettled. Her ghost now haunts the literary canon. The woman who once said, “Only the soul knows how to sing,” is now forced to speak in every tense: past, present, posthumous.
Readers and critics remain divided over My Story, debating whether it is autobiography, autofiction, or exaggeration; her late-life conversion to Islam continues to polarize assessments of her writing; and the posthumous publication of her letters, diaries, and unfinished essays provoked discomfort, with some hailing them as revelations and others dismissing them as invasions of privacy.
Even in academic circles, critics confess difficulty in pinning her down. Was she a feminist, a confessional poet, a mystic, or a provocateur? This inability to domesticate her is precisely what gives her ghostly presence in the canon its power.
The posthumous voice of Marathi writer and Dalit activist Shantabai Kamble—long suppressed by caste and gender—resurfaced as a disruption in the smooth fabric of Marathi literary history. Her memoir Majhya Jalmachi Chittarkatha (The Kaleidoscopic Story of My Life), was published decades after it was first written. In it, Kamble traces the fragile, often brutal thread of a Dalit woman’s life: her hunger, her humiliation, her fierce hunger for education. The fact that her words were published only after her death asks us to consider not just what is lost when a voice is silenced in life, but what happens when the story is finally told in the author’s absence. In the case of Kamble, the act of publishing feels both redemptive and painful, as if history, so long reluctant, has finally made space, but only after its subject could no longer see it.
There are innumerable such examples of literary giants from around the world. Kafka asked for his work to be burned. Emily Dickinson never prepared her poems for publication. Sylvia Plath’s journals were redacted by her husband, Ted Hughes. In each case, someone else played god with their afterlives. And we, as readers, became willing conspirators, trading ethics for access.
In India, these dilemmas are further complicated by caste, gender, religion, and nationalism. Dalit writers’ unpublished writings may be appropriated without context. Female writers may be posthumously reduced to lovers. Muslim writers may be politically sanitized.
The stakes are not only literary, they are ideological. There is no neat resolution to this dilemma. Publishing a writer’s private fragments after death risks violating the very control they exercised so fiercely in life; it strips away the veils of themselves they chose to wear. Despite all this, the world does gain something from these transgressions. The raw windows offer texture: they enlarge the field of literature, giving scholars new material to study, readers new intimacies to hold, and societies new mirrors in which to see themselves.
Humanity thrives on such contradictions—it is the human condition. Great art is nourished not only by what writers offer willingly, but also by what is wrested from them. To acknowledge this is to sit with discomfort: we gain richness, but at the cost of voyeurism.
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Treya Sinha hopes to be a journalist someday. At the moment, she reads, writes and she loves taking long walks. You can find her on Instagram: @treyasinha.
