Mumbai Fables Read online

  The densely packed chawls were distorted reflections of the apartment buildings. If the working-class tenements were a form of industrial housing, a way of massing one living space atop another, so were the apartments. The difference was that the apartments on Queen’s Road and Marine Drive were significantly more spacious and comfortable, dressed up to add a fashionable, aesthetic gloss to industrial modernity. But the secret of this polished surface of the metropolis could be found in the dimly lit and densely packed chawls. Capitalism had forced architecture and town planning to design beautiful buildings and objects for the elite to cover over the ugly reality of workers “warehoused” in oppressive tenements.

  Likewise, the swinging and shining milieu of music and entertainment had another side. In the brothels of Kamathipura, the flesh trade was brisk and sordid. Beginning first as a neighborhood where European prostitutes were concentrated, by the end of the nineteenth century it had become the city’s red-light district. According to the census,68 the number of prostitutes in 1931 was 1,136, which appears to be a gross underestimate. Official figures counted only the prostitutes in registered brothels, excluding those who operated outside the law. Being a port city and an industrial center with a skewed sex ratio among its immigrants—eighty-one males per one hundred females in 193169—Bombay probably had a much larger number of prostitutes. Certainly, anecdotal evidence portrays Kamathipura as a thriving and populous red-light district. In addition to prostitutes, brothel keepers and pimps crowded the area. Many of the brothels had barred doors on the ground floor, making the prostitutes appear as caged women.

  Kamathipura was a far cry from the Taj bar where Bromfield found bartenders mixing gimlets and gin slings and serving chotapegs “in quantities vast enough to float a ship,” and where “‘advanced’ Indian girls and Russian and German tarts danced odd versions of what they believed to be the latest American dances.”70 No, the American novelist would not have found the fake baroness Stefani there, speaking English in an East European accent while prospecting for women suitable for her rich clients in Paris. But Kamathipura was also fashioned by industrial modernity. Though it lacked the sophistication of the Taj, Marine Drive, and Malabar Hill, the red-light district also gained sustenance from Bombay’s industry and trade, catering to mill workers and other underclasses. Like the rest of the city, the brothels were also cosmopolitan, made up of the flotsam and jetsam that washed ashore the Island City. Greeks, East Europeans, Levantines, women of assorted European descent, and Arab women described as belonging to the “Jewesses” caste found their way to the brothels in the city.71 They probably ended up in the establishments on Safed Gulli (White Lane) in Kamathipura, which served European sailors and soldiers. Indian prostitutes, who were initially scattered over the mill districts, occupied other streets in the area. They were drawn from all over—Punjab, Sind, Kashmir, Goa, Karnataka, and many other places.72

  The bleak chawls and the sordid Kamathipura do not usually enter the picture of the city on the sea composed by the sweeping promenade of Marine Drive, the aesthetics of Art Deco, and the hot sounds of jazz. Claude Batley, the well-known Bombay architect and urbanist, spoke feelingly about the abysmal living conditions of the poor in the government-constructed chawls. But he too was inspired by the possibilities opened by the Backbay reclamation. Speaking in 1934, he criticized the government plan and proposed that “the front of the Marine Parade from Colaba to Chowpatty should be a great, wide sea-front with recessed lawns on its East side, with rides, drives and a promenade so that all may realize again that Bombay is by the sea.”73 It is another matter that the government did not follow his advice, but the point is that Batley was not immune to the charm of the image of the city on the sea. Nor did he see it vitally connected to the reality of the chawls, which he condemned.

  Even Nariman, who earned his spurs exposing the Backbay scandal, did not view the two as structurally related. His target was colonial despotism. Focused on unearthing the murky secret of the Raj, he could not fathom the force of what was unfolding before him. It was not just colonial power, but industrial modernity, now clad in aesthetic modernism. The appeal extended even to the working classes, which responded enthusiastically to the thrill of Fearless Nadia.

  The package of Art Deco architecture and objects, fashion, entertainment, and cinema was seductive. It offered a dreamworld of human and technological mastery of nature. Caught up in its allure, the city columnist for the Illustrated Weekly of India published an article tellingly entitled “A Jungle Mind Looks at Bombay.”74 It recounted the visit of Bhendu, a member of the Bhil “jungle tribe,” to Bombay. The crowd did not faze Bhendu, but he “stood on the pavement grinning with amazement and threw sly glances at the tops of several of the city’s landmarks.” Most of all, cinema startled him. As soon as he entered the theater, Bhendu rushed to the door to escape, asking: “Why the darkness?” He refused to believe that tamasha (traditional Indian theater) could be performed in the dark. Coaxed to return, Bhendu sat high up on the tilted edge of his seat. “I explained how the seat sprung back and Bhendu stood up several times to study the wonders of that tip-up chair.” To “Bhendu’s credit,” he sat “like a gentleman” through the whole performance, clicking his tongue “during a particularly exciting part of the film.” After the show, Bhendu noted that he would have difficulty explaining “the wonderful piece of magic” he had witnessed to his fellow villagers. Finally, the author, suitably satisfied with his experiment of showing the magic of the city and cinema to Bhendu, asked him if he would like to work and live in Bombay. “Bhendu did a surprising thing. He put his finger to his nose and shook his head emphatically.”

  Bhendu was able to resist the seduction of the modern city and technology despite the shock experience. Not so the author of the article; he was more bewitched by the charms of industrial modernity than the “jungle tribe” visitor to Bombay. Indeed, so powerful was the enchantment that even Nariman’s exposés were ignored. Years later, an area on the Backbay was named after him. Later still, adding insult to injury, yet another scandal-riddled reclamation was also christened after him. But meanwhile, industrial modernity forged ahead, and the City on the Sea went on to stage its magical visual drama.

  4

  THE COSMOPOLIS AND THE NATION

  On October 9, 1947, a young Muslim woman committed suicide in Bombay. She was married to a police constable who was adamant that they move to newly created Pakistan. The husband was persistent, but so was the wife in refusing to snap the deep ties to the land of her childhood and ancestors. Finally, tired of his stubborn insistence, she hung herself by a rope fastened to the ceiling of their home.1

  Tragic though it was, the Muslim woman’s death pales in comparison with the scale of the displacements and killings that marked the unruly end of the Raj. Between half a million to a million people lost their lives in the butchery that greeted the British decision to partition the colonial territory into the independent states of India and Pakistan. Over twelve million Hindus and Muslims were uprooted from their homes, forced to relocate to a state where their coreligionists were in the majority. Punjab and Bengal bore the brunt of the Partition carnage. In Bombay, where the 1941 Hindu and Muslim populations were 68 and 17 percent, respectively, the riots never reached the scale of other areas. Still, the politics of Partition and Independence cast a pall on Bombay’s multicultural world.

  Like Istanbul under the Ottomans and Vienna under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bombay owed its cosmopolitan nature to imperialism. What brought together its inhabitants was not their common humanity but their subjection to the British Raj. The imperial cosmopolis was deeply hierarchical; it was underwritten by concepts of racial and cultural superiority and required subordination to imposed authority. But it did not demand a common, homogeneous identity among its subjects. On the contrary, it thrived on differentiating and dividing the subject population. Not so nationalism. In challenging imperialism, it pressed the nation’s claim as the most fundamental of all
identities. Jawaharlal Nehru famously viewed India as unity in diversity, but diversity was subordinate to unity. A person was an Indian first, and only then a Hindu, Muslim, or Christian. Religion, region, and language added color and texture but did not fundamentally contribute to national identity, which was unmarked and undivided. So it was with the idea of Pakistan. The central assumption was that a Muslim was a Pakistani first, and only then anything else. This demand for loyalty to the modern nation-state over everything else left little room for those who took their other affiliations as seriously as they did the nation.

  The Muslim policeman’s wife in Bombay committed suicide when faced with this meaning of identity imposed by the change from empire to nation. Fortunately, not many others took this fatal step. Nevertheless, the politics of nationalism challenged the cosmopolitanism of the colonial metropolis. Bombay’s multiethnic and polyglot world of radical politics, literature, film, and art felt the pressure to choose between a religious and a national identity. Saadat Hasan Manto, the brilliant Urdu writer, whose searing Partition short stories have no equal, was unable to cope. In 1948 he bade farewell to the city he loved and migrated to Pakistan. He died there in 1955, at the age of forty-three, consumed by alcohol, loneliness, penury, and a lack of critical recognition. Others, such as Ismat Chugtai and Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, refused to choose between their faith and the nation. They elected to remain in Bombay. Writers and intellectuals like them, many of whom were Muslim, rejected the entanglement of national freedom with communal violence and rebuffed an exclusivist definition of the nation. This is a story of the city that they made, the cosmopolitan world they inhabited and sought to project in the changed context of national citizenship.

  THE WRITERLY CITY

  By the 1930s, Bombay was the place to be if you were a writer, an artist, or a radical political activist. Already a preeminent center of commerce and industry, the Backbay reclamation and the Improvement Trust’s housing and transportation projects had imparted it the urban form of a metropolis by the early thirties. The colonial invocation of medieval authority by Gothic Revival buildings now faced the internationalist aspirations of Art Deco’s industrial modernity. The resumption of international travel and migration after World War I reenergized the city’s links to the world. The elites heard swing and jazz sounds in clubs and restaurants and watched Hollywood films in the new Art Deco theaters. The world of workers in chawls and slums lay far away from the cosmopolitan glitter of the elites, but there too the winds of change were blowing. While the Congress activists mobilized working-class neighborhoods for nationalist agitations, the Communists organized the mill hands for militant industrial actions. Politically energized by anticolonialism and Marxism, many middle-class intellectuals found stimulation in the modern metropolitan milieu of Bombay. Writers and artists from North India flocked to the city, seeking opportunities to practice their craft in newspapers, literary journals, and the growing film industry.

  Saadat Hasan Manto came to Bombay in 1936. Of Kashmiri descent, he was born in 1912 in Punjab and grew up in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar, where his father, a judge in colonial service, was posted.2 His father married twice and had twelve children, Manto being the youngest child of his father’s second wife. Living in constant dread of his short-tempered father and feeling neglected and ignored by the rest of the family except his mother, he struck out in a free-spirited direction. Manto loved to read but failed his high school matriculation examination twice—including Urdu, of all subjects. Although he barely passed in his third attempt, he showed no interest in further studies, failing his intermediate examinations twice. He drifted for a while, loafing on the streets, gambling, drinking, consuming marijuana, visiting graveyards to commune with the spirits of Sufi saints, and hanging out with friends, listening to classical Hindustani music. While living this bohemian life, Manto found a mentor in Bari Alig, the editor of an Urdu journal, who kindled his interest in modern European literature. He read Victor Hugo, Gogol, Gorky, Chekhov, Pushkin, Oscar Wilde, Maupassant, and Somerset Maugham. While plying himself with liquor, he also published Urdu translations of Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man and Oscar Wilde’s Vera. Manto even tried to revive his failed academic career by enrolling in Aligarh Muslim University in 1934. But a false diagnosis of tuberculosis limited his university education to a mere nine months. More important, it was writing, and not a formal education, that consumed his attention. Before he was twenty-four years old, he had published Urdu translations of European authors, penned a short story and film reviews, and become acquainted with Marxist ideas through his mentor, Bari Alig.

  Fittingly, a footloose and rebellious man who had found his direction in modern literary pursuits gravitated to Bombay in 1936. With the death of his father a few years earlier and a dependent mother, money was tight. When Manto received an offer from Bombay to edit the Urdu film journal Mussawar, he promptly accepted. For the next twelve years, he lived almost continuously in Bombay, except for an eighteen-month period in 1941–42 when he worked for All India Radio in Delhi. Over a hundred radio plays written by him were broadcast. It was in Delhi that he came to know other Urdu writers, such as Krishan Chander and Upendra Nath Ashk. Although it was a productive time, Manto found the imperial capital too slow and dull. He returned to Bombay and worked for several film companies over the next five years, writing stories for the screen. He also continued publishing short-story collections that he had begun with Aatishpare in 1936, followed by Manto Ke Afsane (1940) and Dhuan (1941). While writing for films, he published Afsane Aur Dramme (1943) and Chughd (1948), the last appearing shortly after he left for Pakistan. Between 1934 and 1947, he published nearly seventy stories.

  Manto is justly celebrated for his Partition short stories. Although the stories sketch unsparing portraits of ordinary people as willing executioners, they also draw attention to the little acts of humanity practiced by flawed individuals. This concern with the ordinary, the flawed, the minor, the social outcast, was enduring in Manto. He was a classic flaneur, writing about the everyday experiences of the people who lived in his neighborhood. Above all, he was drawn to the urban reality. Breaking from the sentimentalism and romanticism of traditional Urdu literature, he sketched modern urban life in sparkling prose. The pointed and pithy short story was his chosen form to chronicle the city, to depict the drama of modernity in the small details of life on the street.

  “Mammad Bhai” is one such delightful tale about the street.3 It is set in the time when Manto first moved to Bombay and lived in a rented room in Arab Gulli, located in the heart of the city’s red-light district. The tone is nonjudgmental and affectionate. He starts with a montage of the street. In short but vivid strokes, he brings to life a picture of the hustle and bustle of the neighborhood—the cinema employees soliciting viewers with bells, people getting oil massages, and, of course, prostitutes of every possible nationality and price. The story centers on Mammad Bhai, a neighborhood Dada (gangster) with a heart of gold. Manto does not pull punches on the nature of his profession and the fear he arouses among the people. But it turns out that the fierce Mammad Bhai, always armed with a menacing knife, is also a kind neighborhood patron. When Manto, who places himself in the story as the narrator, is struck with malaria, shivering with fever in his room for days with no one to take care of him, the dreaded Dada pays him a visit. Manto has never met him before. Nonetheless, Mammad Bhai arrives with his posse to check on his health. Twirling his alarming “Kaiser Wilhelm” handlebar mustache and stroking his razor-sharp knife, the gangster reprimands Manto for not contacting him. A doctor is summoned. He is ordered to treat Manto free of charge and threatened with dire consequences if his patient does not survive.

  Fortunately for the doctor, Manto does recover. But the exercise of raw street power, albeit for benign purposes, soon hits its limits when Mammad Bhai is charged with the murder of a man who had raped a prostitute’s daughter. An uneducated tough who strikes fear in the red-light district, he is filled with an
xiety about his court appearance. The confidence gained from the street deserts the gangster and his posse when faced with the weighty authority of the court. At the suggestion of many, including Manto, he shaves his menacing mustache to look respectable in the court. His anxiety is unfounded, as no witness is willing to testify against him. When the judge acquits Mammad Bhai but exiles him from the city, it is not the banishment that the Dada mourns. Rather, he is stricken with remorse on losing his mustache. The story poignantly marks the limits of Mammad Bhai’s very being, his street-born confidence and power, in the loss of his mustache.

  “Naya Qanoon” (New Constitution) also deals with the restricted power of the street, though in the context of modern politics.4 The setting is Lahore, and the protagonist is Mangu, the coachman. Though uneducated, Mangu picks up stray bits of information from his passengers and is considered a knowledgeable man in his subaltern circle. One day he hears from his passengers that a new constitution will come into effect on April 1, which will end the power of the Goras (Whites). Mangu does not know or understand that the new constitution refers to the Government of India Act of 1935, passed by the colonial government in response to the nationalist movement that was meant to devolve power. Instead, he conflates conversations about the new constitution and the Soviet Union to infer a connection between the two and concludes that the “Russian king” has ordered the inauguration of a new regime. The new constitution will terminate the rule of the whites, whom he hates because of their racial arrogance, and will inaugurate wholesale social changes. April 1 arrives. Mangu spots an Englishman, recognizing him as the same drunken Gora who had once beaten him. The coachman is brimming with self-assurance. But when he behaves haughtily, the Englishman strikes him with his cane. Mangu responds by delivering a solid thrashing to the Gora. The police appear and promptly drag Mangu away, ignoring his screams of “New Constitution, New Constitution!”