Bombay Stories

by Saadat Hasan Manto

  Manto’s first job in the film industry came at the Imperial Film Company, and his first film credits appeared in the 1937 film Village Girl whose script and dialogue he wrote.42 As this was India’s first colour feature-length film, the Imperial Film Company had spent a considerable sum of money buying the required colour-processing equipment. When the film failed to make an impact at the box office, the company’s future fell into doubt. Nazir Ludhianvi intervened once again on Manto’s behalf and got him a job at Film City, where his pay jumped from forty to one hundred rupees a month.43 Yet when Seth Ardeshir Irani, the owner of the Imperial Film Company, learned that Manto had joined another studio, a tug of war developed. He wanted Manto back, and at twice his original salary Manto rejoined the Imperial Film Company.44 This reunion didn’t last long, though, because almost as soon as Manto returned, the company became insolvent. Manto’s work there ended with his having collected only eight months’ worth of his year’s pay.45 Manto then joined Saroj Movietone in June 1938, and yet this company’s finances were so thin that it also immediately threatened to go out of business. Seth Nanu Bhai Desai, the owner of the studio, secured new financial backing, and the studio was relaunched as Hindustan Movietone. Despite disputes with Seth Nanu Bhai over unpaid back wages, Manto would stay there until his abrupt departure for Delhi three years later.46 During his tenure there, Manto wrote the story for his second film Mud, a film that was later wisely renamed My Hometown.

  Manto left Bombay for Delhi in 1941, and we might ascribe his departure to general malaise. His firing from The Painter, his dissatisfaction with his job at Caravan, the memory of the sudden death in June 1940 of his mother,47 his uncertain health, and the stresses of living in a big city without ever earning a stable income all combined to make the job at All India Radio sound appealing.

  While in Delhi, Manto’s life as a writer improved. All India Radio was emerging as an outstanding literary venue, and Manto came into contact with many leading Urdu writers of the time. His job at the station was to produce radio plays, and he did this with great diligence, churning out plays in impressive numbers, and in his short time in Delhi he saw several collections of his radio plays published.48 Other aspects of his writing life flourished as well. Along with a volume of essays, he published a short story collection called Smoke.49 Unfortunately, Manto’s expectation that his health would improve in Delhi was not borne out, and his contentious and often oversensitive reactions to his colleagues eventually tired everyone involved.50 A series of events unfolded in his second summer in Delhi that would lead him back to Bombay: Nazir Ludhianvi once again offered Manto a position at The Painter, and Manto’s good friend Krishan Chander, who had originally offered him the job at All India Radio, left the station. When Upendranath Ashk—another noted Urdu writer with whom Manto shared an especially acrimonious relationship—took over Chander’s job, Manto couldn’t reconcile himself to the fact that Ashk would be editing his work. While the station readied to broadcast a version of Manto’s play ‘The Wanderer’ that was edited by Ashk, Manto unceremoniously quit.51

  Manto returned to Bombay. He resumed editing The Painter; and upon the intercession of Shahid Latif, an old friend from Aligarh and husband of the influential Urdu short story and film writer Ismat Chughtai, he began to work for Filmistan, a film company where over the next six years he would meet many of the most famous actors, actresses, directors, and personalities of the film world. The next significant event in his life—and in the lives of all those in the subcontinent—came at the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, when India and Pakistan came into being. Safiya and the couple’s eldest daughter, Nighat, left for Lahore, but Manto stayed, joining Shahid Latif and the famous film actor Ashok Kumar in their attempt to revive one of the first great Indian film companies, Bombay Talkies.52 But trouble turned up there as well, when Kumar passed over Manto’s work, deciding instead to adapt an Ismat Chughtai short story into a film.53 Manto had a hard time accepting this decision. The perceived affront, coupled with increasing Hindu–Muslim communal tensions, made it difficult for Manto to see a future for himself in the changing political climate of Bombay, so he set out for Pakistan. He travelled by boat to Karachi and arrived in Lahore on January 8, 1948.

  Thus began the last and the hardest era of Manto’s short life. The seven years he lived in Pakistan were characterized by indigence, severe alcoholism, and nostalgic reminiscences about the life he had known in Bombay. He never adjusted to his new environment. He wrote in the introduction to his volume of short stories Cold Meat (1950) about his sense of dislocation upon arriving at his new home:

  For three months I was confused. I couldn’t figure out where I was. Was I in Bombay, at my friend Hasan Abbas’s place in Karachi, or in Lahore, where the Qaid-e-Azam Fund was being built up through proceeds from dance and music concerts being put on in a handful of restaurants?

  For three months I couldn’t make up my mind about anything. It seemed as if three movies were playing simultaneously on one screen. Sometimes I saw Bombay’s shopping districts and alleyways, sometimes I saw the small trams of Karachi rushing past donkey-drawn carriages, and sometimes I saw Lahore’s noisy restaurants. I couldn’t figure out where I was. I would sit lost in thought all day.54

  In Pakistan he drifted through his days without steady employment, trying to maintain his dedication to being a serious writer but encumbered by poverty and a debilitating drinking habit. He adopted the habit of writing a story a day and going immediately to a magazine’s office to demand payment, only to spend this money on alcohol.55 He entered a mental institution in April 1952 in a belated attempt to cure his alcoholism, but this had no lasting results.56 Wracked by his disease, depressed about the uncertain status of his reputation, and distressed by his failure to provide for his family, he died on January 18, 1955.

  MANTO’S BOMBAY

  Bombay was where the motion picture made its first appearance on the subcontinent when the French Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe was shown on July 7, 1896 at the upscale Watson’s Hotel.57 The honour of having made the first Indian film goes to Hari Bhatvadekar whose two short films—one of a choreographed wrestling bout and another of a man training a monkey—were shown in late 1899.58 Bombayites would have to wait more than thirteen years for the first feature-length Indian motion picture to be released, when D.G. Phalke unveiled the mythological film Raja Harishchandra in May 1913.59 In order to complete his film, Phalke mortgaged his life insurance policy to afford travelling to London to buy equipment,60 converted his kitchen into a makeshift laboratory,61 and, according to Manto, even sold off his wife’s jewellery.62 He also faced the difficulty of finding a woman to play the role of King Harishchandra’s wife, as all the women he asked refused due to the impropriety they felt that acting involved, and Phalke was forced to give the role to a man.63 Phalke would go on to make twenty mythological films and ninety short films,64 becoming the undisputed champion of the silent era and the consensus ‘father’ of Indian cinema.

  The next landmark in the history of the Indian film industry came in 1931 when Light of the World became the country’s first feature-length sound film.65 The Imperial Film Studio—the first studio at which Manto worked after coming to Bombay—claimed credit for this film, and their 1937 film Village Girl was the first feature-length colour film in the subcontinent.66 The 1930s saw the first studio competition arise. Not only did the Imperial Film Company figure prominently on the scene, but the Prabhat Film Company and Bombay Talkies also made names for themselves.67 Prabhat was established in 1929 in Kolhapur though the studio was moved four years later to nearby Pune. Set up by V. Shantaram, K.R. Dhaiber, S.B. Kulkarni, and S. Fatehlal, the studio had several hits in the thirties, including The Churning of the Oceans (1934) and The Immortal Flame (1936).68 In addition to the progressive social content of their films, the studio was known for the technical qualities of its products. The four founding members, as Manto notes, ‘all had the same desire, and that was to outstrip everyone
else in matters of art and technique.’69 Bombay Talkies came into being five years after Prabhat and featured the husband–wife pair of Himanshu Rai and the beautiful Devika Rani, the former working as producer/director and the latter starring in films,70 including the popular Untouchable Girl.71 Furthermore, their studio is noteworthy from a historical perspective, as it employed three men who would later come to rank among the forefront of actors in the entire history of Indian cinema: Ashok Kumar (then a laboratory assistant), Dilip Kumar (then and afterwards an actor), and Raj Kapoor (then a clapper).72

  The burgeoning film industry aside, Manto’s Bombay was a city of economic opportunity, attracting people from all over India and indeed from around the world. The census of 1921 revealed that an amazing eighty-four per cent of its work force came from outside the city.73 These workers were men from villages and towns, thinking they would come to the city for a while to earn money to send back home. Often, they decided to stay for good, sending for their families and other relatives to join them. These immigrants developed their own lifestyle, which has now long since become a part of the Bombay myth. The tightly confined chawls constructed by the textile mills to house their employees were their environs, and it was here that two of the typical characters of Bombay, the gangster and the prostitute, came about.

  A chawl can best be described as tenement housing. The rooms were tiny and without running water. Common lavatories and washrooms were located at the end of corridors, or as in ‘Ten Rupees’, the buildings were entirely without such facilities. Access to the water taps was a serious issue, especially in the summer when the water supply often failed. Getting water was the cause of much worrying and worse, and the communal water taps brought people together who would have been better kept apart. Sarita, a teenage prostitute, is the main character in ‘Ten Rupees’. Manto writes about the tense encounters that could take place around the taps: ‘But when Tukaram harassed Sarita by the water spigot one early morning, Sarita’s mother started screeching at Tukaram’s wife, “Why can’t you keep track of that dirty rat? I pray to God he goes blind for eyeing my little girl like that.” ’

  People jammed into the chawls’ rooms. The 1930s saw the textile mills begin multiple shifts, and workers often rotated in and out of the chawls’ rooms just as they replaced each other at the factory. The men returned to the chawls to collapse upon their mats, their peers sleeping right next to them; when these men returned to the factory, others came to sleep in the spaces just vacated. In 1931 a full three quarters of Bombayites lived in such one-room accommodations. 74 But sharing such tight quarters didn’t bring about a sense of solidarity within the ranks of the workers. Instead, indifference manifested itself, as Manto writes in ‘Ten Rupees’:

  Sarita’s mother was always telling this story [of the death of her husband], but no one knew whether it was true. No one in the building felt any sympathy for her, perhaps because their lives were so difficult that they had no time to think about others. No one had any friends. Most of the men slept during the day and worked nights in the nearby factory. Everyone lived right on top of one another, and yet no one took any interest in anyone else.

  The chawls’ overcrowding made maintaining order difficult. The police by themselves could not—or chose not to—serve as the main law enforcers, and so a new figure emerged, the ‘dada’, the Bombay hoodlum cum agent of the peace. A dada was at once a benevolent figure and one to be feared. Manto gives us two portraits of dadas, the extended one of Mammad Bhai in ‘Mammad Bhai’ and a briefer look at Dada Karim in ‘Hamid’s Baby’. The dada would help those living in the area where he ruled, even if it meant committing a crime to exact revenge and re-establish order. He had a reputation for violence, and his persona was built up through anecdotes, real and mythic, which exemplified his physical prowess, cunning, and keen eye for justice. He knew everything about his people, and he was expected to protect them. Mammad Bhai is feared for his ability in martial arts and his habit of wearing a razor-sharp knife beneath his waistband. But he is also a benefactor, making sure the sick get cured and the poor don’t get cheated, and protecting the women of the neighbourhood.

  Bombay’s working world was a male one. In 1864 there were about 600 women for 1,000 men, and by 1930 the proportion of women had declined even further.75 If women worked, it was because their family was so poor that they needed the income, however slight. In 1931, only thirteen percent of women claimed employment, even though around two-thirds were of working age.76 Prostitution developed out of these conditions and did so on a scale unlike anywhere else in India, as the migration of unaccompanied males to the city met with destitute women forced to earn money by any means possible. In 1921 there were an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 prostitutes in the city.77 (Contemporary figures estimate there are now about 450,000 prostitutes, and yet these numbers are approximate and conceivably on the low side.78) Manto saw how the unique social conditions of the city bred prostitution, and the figure of the prostitute became of considerable interest to him. In Bombay Stories, prostitutes of one type or another are featured in just about every story.

  Another striking feature of Bombay was its ethnic diversity. One gauge of this would be Manto’s enumerations of the ethnicities represented by prostitutes: in ‘Mammad Bhai’ he claims that there were prostitutes ‘of every sort—Jewish, Punjabi, Marathi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Anglo-Indian, French, Chinese, Japanese.’ In the same story Manto mentions Arab pearl merchants and Chinese restaurateurs.79 Otherwise, in several stories there are Punjabis and Kashmiris; in ‘Khushiya’ the prostitute Kanta Kumari is from Mangalore, Karnataka. ‘Smell’ and ‘Mummy’ feature Anglo-Indians; ‘The Insult’ and ‘Rude’ mention people from south India. ‘Ten Rupees’ and ‘Mummy’ involve characters from Andhra Pradesh; Pathans from the Hindu Kush Mountains are mentioned in ‘Janaki.’ Mammad Bhai is from Rampur, Uttar Pradesh; and Sen, the murdered musician in ‘Mummy’, is Bengali.

  Not only did people come from everywhere to live in Bombay, but people of all religions lived there together in relative harmony—from the Parsi descendants of Zoroastrian immigrants from Iran to Jews, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Muslims; and this history of tolerance has a surprisingly long history. Christian history in Bombay began almost 500 years ago. The Portuguese were the first to come, and they worked up and down the western coast, with the Jesuits and the Franciscans competing for souls to convert. While the Jesuits were said to have won out in Dadar and Parel, the Franciscans fared better among the native fisher-folk in Mahim and Bombay.80 The architectural patrimony of Christianity in Bombay is old as well, as St Michael’s in Mahim, the oldest surviving church in the city, was built in 1534, the year the Portuguese acquired land from the Sultan of Gujarat.81 By the time the British took over, there were already Christians in the native population, and in 1674 the East India Company asked the British government to send over some good unmarried Anglican girls since the Company’s workers were breaking religious etiquette by marrying native Indian Catholics.82

  The history of the Parsi community is deep as well83 for they came as soon as the British, and their contributions—first as cloth merchants, then as shipwrights,84 and yet later as industrial barons and intellectuals—greatly aided the city on its rise to prominence. A Jewish community also existed in the city:85 the 1941 census showed more than 10,000 Jews living there, and the vast majority of these were the Bene Israel.86 Mozelle from the eponymous story in Bombay Stories is Jewish. Manto provides us with certain Indian Jewish stereotypes—namely, Mozelle’s traditional dress and wooden Sandals—but her licentiousness is clearly a fictional detail. Among the other communities, the Muslims ruled the area before the Western colonial intrusions, and Hindus of diverse types have lived in the area since perhaps time immemorial.

  In only the last twenty years, Mumbai has increasingly become associated with communal violence, chiefly after the 1993 bombings and riots that seared the city and left 1,400 dead in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Mosque
in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.87 The first notable example of such violence came during an eight-day stretch in 1893 when riots broke out in reaction to Hindu–Muslim communal fighting in Saurashtra, Gujarat. Eighty people died (thirty-three Hindus, forty-six Muslims, and one Jew), and 700 people were wounded.88

  Riots erupted again in 1929, and yet these riots were not set off by religious acrimony; they began as a clash between striking workers of General Motors and a group of Pathan musclemen. 89 Pathans were an intimidating physical lot—tall, broad-shouldered men wearing turbans and flowing gowns, their kurtas so long they nearly touched the ground. From the wild mountainous regions of the borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan, they had well, deserved reputations for violence. In addition to working as henchmen for corporate powers, they also worked as small-time moneylenders. They arrived on payday at the factory gates to demand repayment on loans and were said to go so far as to demand sex from women who could not pay up.90 (Pathans figure in Bombay Stories several times. In ‘Mummy’, there is mention of a ‘bloodthirsty Pathan’ pressuring Chaddah to pay back a loan, and in ‘Why I Don’t Go to the Movies’, Manto mentions the ‘intimidating Pathan guard.’) A group of forty such Pathans were called in to break the workers’ strike. They descended upon the offices of the Girni Kamgar Union, the leading Communist labour union, but the violence soon got out of hand and turned along communal lines. In the clashes, 106 people died and over 600 were wounded,91 and in time these riots became known as the Pathan Riots.

  Manto claims that he was twice witness to Hindu–Muslim violence during his first stint in Bombay (1936–41),92 and there is no reason to doubt him, as the years before independence saw increased violence of all sorts, including labour strikes in connection with the Quit India Movement. And yet it wasn’t until the communal violence of 1946–47 that Muslims thought to live separately for their safety.93 Manto left the city due in part to the growing tension that divided the city on religious lines, and yet even then the growing unease he felt was more a premonition for what the future would hold than it was a part of the city he knew and loved.