The following is an excerpt from link above of a scene from Saadat Hassan “Manto’s “Dekh Kabira Roya” (“Kabir Saw and Wept”), a story he wrote soon after Pakistan’s creation. It shows the medieval Indian poet Kabir, a sayer of contrary things, freakishly transplanted in the streets of a “newly independent state.” ” ++ Kabir moves between these scenes, crying all the while.
A religious leader says to him, ‘Why do you weep, my good man?’ Kabir—his medieval contrariness has been transformed in these circumstances into a kind of innocence—wants to know how the prostitutes will ever find husbands. And the religious leader, who is a creature of the state and has a working knowledge of its laws, laughs because “it was the funniest thing he had ever heard.” http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/the-seer-of-pakistan.html?mbid=social_mobile_email ++ vjp
