Nawazuddin Siddiqui & Nandita Das on Becoming Manto | Live at Jashn-e-Rekhta

Saadat Hasan Manto was not a writer who allowed anyone to stay comfortable. In this powerful conversation from Jashn-e-Rekhta, filmmaker Nandita Das and actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui join RJ Sayema to speak about bringing Manto’s life, mind and contradictions to the screen.Nawazuddin reflects on playing Manto and the strange after-effect of carrying his honesty into real life. Nandita Das explains why the film stays rooted in the years around Partition, from 1946 to 1950, and how Manto’s questions around identity, religion, nationalism, women and censorship continue to feel unsettlingly current.The conversation also goes behind the scenes of recreating 1940s Lahore, holding a creative line, and understanding Manto’s writing as something plain, sharp and impossible to ignore. For anyone interested in Urdu literature, cinema, Partition stories, or the life of Saadat Hasan Manto, this is a rare and deeply revealing listen.