Bombay Stories

by Saadat Hasan Manto

  LITERARY CONTEXT

  Salman Rushdie has described Manto as a writer of ‘low-life’ fictions,94 and this phrase helps explain why Manto had problems with government censorship and, to an extent, with many of his fellow writers. Rushdie’s comment points not only to the low social status of many—in fact the overwhelming majority—of Manto’s characters, but it also suggests the uncertain morals that many of these characters display. It was due to this second point that Manto found himself in conflict with the leading literary movement of India and Pakistan of the twentieth century, the Progressive Writers’ Movement.

  The Progressive Writers’ Movement began in 1933 with the publication of the collection of short stories Burning Coals,95 as four young writers critical of the shape Indian literature was taking came together to argue for a new way of writing that was politically minded and sceptical of religion. The movement took its official identity the next year when two writers living in London, Sajjad Zahir and Mulk Raj Anand, founded the Progressive Writers’ Association,96 and when the All India Progressive Writers’ Association was established in 1936.97 Urdu writers joined the revolutionary spirit by initiating their own Urdu Progressive Writers’ Association, along with starting up the journal New Literature98 that would be the effective mouthpiece for their efforts. The UPWA’s first manifesto announced their intention that ‘we want the new literature of India to make its subject the fundamental problems of our life. These are the problems of hunger, poverty, social backwardness and slavery.’ In April 1939 in the first issue of New Literature, they again stated their position: ‘In our opinion, progressive literature is literature that trains its eye upon the realities of life, reflects them, investigates them and leads the way toward a new and better life.’99

  Manto is considered a peripheral member of this movement. He did focus on the lower strata of South Asian society, and he was friends with many writers of the movement, most notably Krishan Chander and Ismat Chughtai. Nonetheless, the elite of the movement, both in India and later in Pakistan, often disapproved of Manto’s writing and sought to distance themselves from him. In the All India Urdu Congress in Hyderabad in 1944, Sajjad Zahir criticized Manto’s story ‘Smell’ for being obscene and for not having the reformatory intent that modern fiction should have.100 Literature was meant to be a vehicle for social uplift, and Manto’s stories often fell short of the ideals of the more doctrinaire: he portrayed society’s sordid aspects as they were and remained free from any ideological programme. Manto was too individualistic (and perhaps too egotistical) to belong to any movement that demanded absolute allegiance from its members; he was too interested in his own viewpoint to sacrifice anything for the good of any group. Manto made his own views known on the Progressive Writers’ Movement, and he wrote about them with bitter irony and sarcasm. Two examples include his story ‘Progressives’,101 a trenchant criticism of the movement’s pertinacity, and his satirical essay ‘A Progressive Cemetery’102 that makes fun of the label ‘progressive’ by placing it in the context of the supposed advancements taking place in a Bombay cemetery.

  Indeed, perhaps the most consistent reaction to Manto’s writing during his lifetime was censure. Manto stood accused of writing obscenities on five separate occasions. His first four trials took place in Lahore and the last in Karachi, and in each instance he was eventually acquitted. His first trial took place shortly after the story ‘The Black Shalwar’ was published in 1941.103 His second such experience took place after he had resettled in Bombay. A CID agent arrived from Lahore to arrest Manto at ten at night in his apartment on January 8, 1945, again in connection with ‘The Black Shalwar’ but also for his story ‘Smoke’.104 Manto was subsequently released on bail and ordered to stand trial in Lahore.105

  Manto stood trial for the third time for his story ‘Smell’ and his essay ‘Modern Literature’.106 In the manner typical of his trials, he was convicted in the lower court but then acquitted in the sessions court.107 On May 3, 1945 Special Sessions’ Judge M.R. Bhatiya wrote in his judgment that in ‘[the story] there was nothing to incite lustful feelings, and moreover in the testimony of the expert literary witnesses the story is progressive … and will have no harmful effect on people’s morals.’108 Manto’s difficulties with censorship continued after Partition as well. After the Lahore literary journal Portraits109 published his canonical story ‘Open Up’, the Pakistani government stepped in to close down the journal’s printing operations for six months.110 Manto’s story ‘Cold Meat’ then became the focus of a series of trials. Manto, along with Nasir Anwar, the owner and editor of Eternity,111 the magazine that printed the story, faced an arduous course that lasted over a year. Manto faced a prison term of three months’ heavy labour and a fine of 300 rupees (along with three weeks’ additional heavy labour if he couldn’t come up with the money to pay the fine),112 but in the end Sessions Court Judge Inayatullah Khan came to the reasonable conclusion that ‘Cold Meat’ was ‘not obscene nor overly objectionable.’113 Manto would stand trial one last time in Karachi for his story ‘Above, Below, and in Between’, with the result this time being a small fine that Nasir Anwar willingly paid.114 Unfortunately, Manto’s troubles with the Pakistani government have continued into the present, and on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, he was still banned on Pakistani television and radio.115

  Other than the government censors and Manto’s fellow writers, it’s not clear how many read his work. His stories were published in the leading Urdu literary magazines of his time, but these presumably had small subscriptions as they did not alleviate the poverty that Manto battled for most of his life. Manto began his autobiographical essay ‘My Wedding’ with a self-conscious appeal to readers, ‘For those of you who want to peek into my life, I’m going to tell you about my wedding’,116 and yet the curious question arises as to who exactly he imagined was interested. (Then again, writers do convince themselves that someone is listening.) When Manto left his employment in the Bombay film industry and arrived in Pakistan, he suddenly found himself unable to earn money writing and unwilling to find a new way of generating an income. In his essay ‘Bald Angels’, Manto wrote:

  To tell you the truth I was so bitter about things that I wanted to get an allotment.117 Then I could comfortably sit in the corner and let my writing go. Any thoughts I had, I’d let them pass. If I didn’t get an allotment, then I’d go to work in the black market or make bootleg liquor. But I feared that if I ended up doing that, I’d drink all the booze myself—all my efforts would be wasted and I wouldn’t earn anything at all.118

  BOMBAY STORIES

  Manto’s best known stories are those set in the Partition days—gory, chilling narratives, such as ‘Open Up’ and ‘Cold Meat’ as well as the psychological portrait of madness in ‘Toba Tek Singh.’ Yet his writing had other focal points and bore other geographies in mind, in particular those related to Bombay.

  For a restless soul like Manto, home would never be an easy concept, but there is good evidence to suggest that he felt more at home in Bombay’s cosmopolitan, topsyturvy metropolis than anywhere else. After immigrating to Pakistan, he was filled with nostalgia for the life he had known in Bombay. In the postscript to his volume of short stories Yazid (1951),119 he wrote about his feelings for the city, his ‘other home’:

  Today I am disconsolate. A strange brooding has come over me. It is the same sadness I experienced four or four and a half years ago when I bid farewell to my other home, Bombay. It was a blow to have to leave Bombay, where I had lived such a busy life. Bombay had taken me in, a wandering outcast thrown out by even his family.120 She had told me, ‘You can live here happily on two paise a day or on ten thousand rupees. Or if you want, you can be the saddest person in the world at either price. Here you can do whatever you want, and no one will think you’re strange. Here no one will tell you what to do. You will have to do every difficult thing on your own, and you will have to make every important decision by yourself. I don’t care if you live on the sidewalk or
in a magnificent mansion. I don’t care if you stay or go. I’ll always be here.’

  I was disconsolate after leaving Bombay. My good friends were there. I had gotten married there. My first child was born there, as was my second. There I had gone from earning a couple rupees a day to thousands—hundreds of thousands121—and there I had spent it all. I loved it, and I still do!

  Bombay meant something to Manto beyond being merely a place he knew, a city in which he had lived. In this wistful invocation, he states his outright love for the city. He mentions two chief things. For one, years of personal history important to him took place there. Compared to his new life in Lahore, his time in Bombay had been full of crucial, exciting work to do, money to be earned, and people to meet. He valued how the city had made him who he was, how it had given him the opportunity to be a writer and to mix with the creative elite of his country. In hindsight, he must have felt as if he had been part of an enormous, vital enterprise.

  But he also praises the city in another way. He appreciated how it had accepted him although he had failed by the middle-class standards of Indian society. Interestingly, the city’s acceptance was not obvious approbation but benign indifference.122 But with indifference came anonymity and in turn the freedom to become who he wished to be. Self-reliance and personal fortitude were traits that Manto valued, and when he saw that the city espoused the same qualities, he must have felt within his rightful domain. Bombay, more than Delhi, and certainly more than provincial Lahore, was the city of license and liberty that Manto craved, the place where he might become his own man.

  Bombay Stories is a collection of Manto’s fiction set in part or entirely in that city, and a unique sense of place emerges through the narratives. In fact, a merging of place and character seems to occur for Manto, as for many after him—to write about Bombay means to write about a certain group of characters of a particular milieu. Bombay Stories represents the first and best literary evidence of Bombay’s emergence as the modern city we now recognize it to be, and Manto’s way of characterizing the city—populating it with a motley crew of prostitutes, pimps, writers, film stars, musicians, the debauched, and the rich—has become typical of a sub-genre of Indian fiction that I will loosely call ‘Bombay fiction.’ Whether through historical coincidence or literary prescience or both, Manto stands at the very beginning of this important Indian literary tradition.

  Manto never compiled all his stories set in Bombay in one volume, so this collection of translations is both a sample of his work and represents a specific aspect of it. I have organized the stories chronologically. In fact he wrote the bulk of them after immigrating to Pakistan (eleven of the total fifteen), and this retrospective attention appears prominently in several stories. For instance, in ‘Mammad Bhai’ he writes, ‘It was almost twenty years ago that I used to frequent those restaurants’; and in describing the title character, ‘I don’t remember what exactly he looked like, but after so many years I can still recall anticipating that he must be enormous, the kind of man Hercules bicycles would use as a model in their advertising.’ Most of these stories were apparently written, at least in part, to assuage the pangs of nostalgia.

  Lastly, if Manto is indeed the first representative of the contemporary Indian genre, then we might also consider how his prose includes literary devices that we now characterize as post-modern. Many of these stories feature narrative irruptions and self-reflexive commentary; he also obfuscates the clean genre limits of biography and fiction. While most writers of fiction covertly include details from their lives, Manto goes further, and in many stories he incorporates an eponymous Manto character—a character that roughly corresponds to the actual man. There are seven such stories in Bombay Stories, and practically every story in which his character appears does, in fact, give us some detail that is true to his life. In ‘Babu Gopi Nath’, we find the character, Manto, working at a weekly newspaper in Bombay, just as the actual Manto did. In ‘Janaki’ we find him writing film scripts. In ‘Mammad Bhai’ he falls ill with malaria while living in a tiny room. ‘Rude’ tells us how he spent time working in Delhi, as well as revealing his fascination with the Communist Party. In ‘Barren’ he talks about how he would earn seven to ten rupees for each story he wrote, and in ‘Mummy’ he mentions the death of his son. While each story provides us with some accurate biographical information, other details are blatantly inaccurate. ‘Rude’ provides us with the best examples. In this story Manto is re-acquainted with a character named Nasir, an old friend from Aligarh Muslim University. Manto did reunite with an old friend after returning from his hiatus in Delhi, but this was Shahid Latif. Also we notice that Nasir is a foreman in a factory and husband to the famous Communist leader Izzat Jahan, and Shahid Latif was married to the writer Ismat Chughtai and worked in the film industry.

  Authorial intrusions also complicate stories—especially those with an eponymous Manto character—as they highlight the stories’ constructed and textual nature, often in a disingenuous or misleading way. In ‘Siraj’ and ‘Barren’, two stories that use an autobiographical conceit, Manto refers without prompting or an obvious narrative reason to the fact of his writing. Relevant passages in ‘Siraj’ are the following:

  But this is the impression of a short story writer who in describing a tiny facial mole can make it seem as large as the sang-e-aswad in Mecca.

  These details are enough. I don’t want to tell you what I thought because it’s not relevant to the story.

  The city had built tin shacks there for the poor, and I won’t mention the nearby high-rises because they have nothing to do with this story, only that in this world there will always be the rich and the poor.

  I don’t want to get into the details, but Siraj was with me at a hotel.

  And from ‘Barren’:

  Anyway, enough of this. If I go on in such detail, I’ll fill page after page and the story will get boring.

  But now I’ve started talking about my stories!

  By bringing attention to his authorial consciousness, Manto focuses our attention briefly on exactly what he pretends to dismiss or belittle: ‘Siraj’ is about storytelling (both Manto’s and Dhundhu’s), and it is about the rich and the poor, just as ‘Barren’ is about the exchange of stories and lies between Manto and Naim. Perhaps in ‘Barren’ we have an analogy that explains Manto’s fact-befuddling style: Naim writes to Manto at the story’s end to confess that he made everything up, and yet he also avers that while objectively false, his stories felt true, and that through his lies he expressed a real part of himself. As self-conscious reflections on storytelling interrupt the authorial transparency of documentary realism, we see a style emerge that makes Manto progressive in a sense separate from what the term meant during his lifetime: he had outstripped the literary conventions of his time.

  Matt Reeck

  * * *

  1 Wadhawan, Jagdish Chander. Manto Naama: The Life of Saadat Hasan Manto. Trans. Jai Ratan. New Delhi: Roli, 1998, 14.

  2 His family migrated into the Indian plains at some point near the beginning of the nineteenth century (Wadhawan, 13).

  3 Flemming, Leslie A. Another Lonely Voice. Berkeley, CA: Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, UC Berkeley, 1979, 4. Or Hasan, Khalid. ‘Saadat Hasan Manto: Not of Blessed Memory.’ Annual of Urdu Studies 4, (1984): 85.

  4 Hasan, 85–95.

  5 Manto, Saadat Hasan. ‘Pundit Manto’s First Letter to Pundit Nehru (That Has Become the Foreword to a Novel)’ [‘Pandit nehru ke nam pandit manto ka pahla khat (jo is kitab ka dibachah ban gaya)’]. Untitled. (Baghair unwan ke.) Lahore: Zafar Brothers, 1956. Republished in Manto Baqiyat. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 2004. 411.

  6 Flemming, 2.

  7 Ibid., 2.

  8 Ibid., 14.

  9 Ibid., 3.

  10 Manto, Saadat Hasan. ‘Two Encounters with Agha Hashr’. (‘Agha hashr se do mulaqaten’.) Bald Angels. (Ganje farishte.) Lahore: Gosha-e-Abad, 1955. Re-published in Mantonuma. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 2003, 31.


  11 Flemming, 2.

  12 Ibid., 4.

  13 Ibid., 4.

  14 Ibid., 4.

  15 Ibid., 3.

  16 In Urdu, ‘Musawat’.

  17 Hugo’s Le dernier jour d’un condamné was first published in 1829. The fourth edition, published in 1832, was prefaced by a short drama, which served as Hugo’s literary response to the criticism and controversy the novella had elicited. Manto translated both the dramatic foreword and the novella.

  18 Wadhawan writes that Manto finished translating Hugo’s novella in a mere fifteen days. Were this true, Manto’s effort here would be characteristic of the fast work rate he demonstrated later. But Wadhawan does not cite any sources for us to verify whether this detail is factual or rather, stands as another example of how literary scholars have mythologized Manto as a sort of enfant terrible and Romantic genius. For an interesting look at how Manto has been used by literary scholars both in America and in South Asia, read Richard Delacy’s ‘Sa’adat Hasan Manto: The Making of an Urdu Literary Icon’. MA Thesis. Monash University (Clayton, Australia), 1998.

  19 See ‘Bari Sahib’. Bald Angels. Re-published in Mantonuma, 71.

  20 Vera, or the Nihilists, Wilde’s first play, was first produced in New York in 1882.

  21 Wadhawan suggests that Manto knew Russian, French, and English but does not provide evidence to corroborate this (Manto Naama, 178). Alain Désoulières writes that Manto translated the Russian and French texts through English translations (‘Vie et œuvre de Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–55).’ Toba Tek Singh et autres nouvelles, Saadat Hasan Manto. Trans. Alain Désoulières. Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 2008, 11–12.) Lastly, in his essay ‘Babu Rao Patel’, Manto confesses that his English was mediocre: while it was good enough for basic comprehension, he found translating the English of Babu Rao Patel, the editor of a Bombay magazine Film India, very difficult (‘Bari Sahib’, 213).