Mumbai Fables Page 13

  In the story, the street appears as a space of self-fashioning. Thus, picking up and mixing together bits of information from his passengers, the coachman fancies himself a knowledgeable person, about to achieve full freedom of expression. But the confrontation with authority brutally clarifies the political and social limits of his self-fashioned world. Manto excels at showcasing both the soaring possibilities and crushing limits of modern urban life. He treats urban society as an exciting constellation of multiplicity, mixture, and unpredictability, bringing to the surface its ironies and contradictions. But even as he chronicles these possibilities and paradoxes, Manto cannot remain immune from them; they enter and disturb the flaneur’s observing self. We can witness the shadow cast by the romance of modern urban life on Manto the narrator in “Babu Gopinath.”5

  Babu Gopinath, a rich Hindu merchant from Lahore, comes to Bombay in 1940. His entourage includes a few hangers-on, who regularly fleece him, and two courtesans, one of whom is Zeenat, a young Kashmiri woman. The rich merchant has two passions: the company of courtesans and Sufi shrines. He is perfectly aware that “in kothas [courtesans’ establishments], parents prostitute their daughters, and in shrines, men prostitute God.”6 Yet, Babu Gopinath says to Manto, he is willing to spend time in both because both are places of illusion, fit for a man seeking to deceive himself. The only thing he is sure about is that his money is going to run out soon. Before that happens, he is determined to find a suitable husband for Zeenat, the woman he loves. When a rich Sindhi landlord falls in love with Zeenat, he arranges the marriage. Manto is invited to the wedding, where he sees Zeenat dressed in a fine bridal dress. At the sight of a flower-bedecked bridal bed prepared for the courtesan, Manto bursts out laughing. In spite of his modern, broad-minded outlook, he cannot resist judging the courtesan. The sight of the virginal bed stumps the flaneur’s celebration of the impure, the lowly, and the ironic. His laugh, the cruel laughter of tradition, which shows he is unable to accept the irony of the courtesan’s desire for matrimonial respectability, makes Zeenat burst into tears. Babu Gopinath comforts her, casts a disappointed look at the chastened chronicler of modern society, and leaves the room with tears glistening in his eyes.

  To Manto’s credit, the story ennobles Babu Gopinath and Zeenat and casts a critical eye on his own narrow-mindedness. In story after story, Manto engages with the humanity of courtesans, prostitutes, and their paramours. The street is his hunting ground, and the people on the fringe of society his dramatis personae. With sensitivity, he explores the world of street toughs, pimps, and hustlers. Unsparing in unmasking the respectable, Manto treats the disreputable with sympathy. He does not judge their profession; nor is his prose wrapped in the language of reform. He writes with a humanist impulse, one that illuminates the self that emerges in the struggle to negotiate with the demands of modern life. Stable families and kinship ties play no role in his portrait of the city. His urban society is formed in daily exchanges and chance interactions between strangers. No single identity of religion, class, gender, or language acts as the sole determinant of the self in the city. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Jews interact without any prior philosophy of cosmopolitanism guiding their exchanges. Rather, it is the vortex of money, occupation, friendship, and desire that brings them together without diluting their religious identities. In Manto’s stories, there is a celebration of the diversity and vitality, the randomness and motion, of everyday modern city life.

  Manto lived his urban imagination. Interactions and friendships across religious boundaries marked his life in Bombay. This remained true even after he achieved fame and riches and moved from his Arab Gulli room to a flat in Byculla, where he lived with his wife after their marriage in 1940. Prostitutes, courtesans, and pimps continued to inhabit his stories. When he achieved literary recognition and started writing for films, his circle of friends came to include writers and artists who had also gravitated to Bombay and to cinema. Among them was Ismat Chugtai (1915–91), later lauded as a feminist writer.

  Like Manto, Chugtai was also fiercely independent and unconventional. She grew up in a large family (the ninth of ten children), first in Agra, and subsequently in Aligarh. The family was well off, and Chugtai grew up surrounded by servants. Her father, a judicial magistrate in colonial service, was a progressive man, and the family had easy relations with their Hindu neighbors. But there were limits. Despite neighborly exchanges, the Hindus considered Muslims ritually polluting, and for all its progressivism, Chugtai’s own family saw nothing wrong with the lot of their servants. Most of all, what irked her was the differential treatment of girls. Fortunately, growing up in the company of her brothers, Chugtai seized the freedom that the boys enjoyed. One of her elder brothers took her under his wing and introduced his sister to history, geography, and literature. She started translating English novels into Urdu and also wrote (by her own admission) “filthy” short stories.7 When they were discovered, Chugtai disowned her creations, claiming they were translations. This setback did not dim her rebelliousness. Her heroine was Rashid Jahan (1905–52), whose story had appeared in the Urdu collection Angaarey (Embers). Published in 1932, this collection caused a stir. Muslim clerics and conservatives denounced it as blasphemous and obscene. Under their pressure, the British government banned the anthology. Such strident admonitions and the ban only enhanced Angaarey’s radical status and turned Jahan into a feminist literary icon.8 Drawing strength from this example of a deep churning in the Muslim middle class, Chugtai rebelled against the gendered double standard of her milieu. She rejected an arranged marriage, earned a BA degree, trained as a teacher at Aligarh Muslim University, and became the headmistress of a girls’ school. She moved to Bombay after marrying Shaheed Lateef, a filmmaker. After initially working in the colonial education service, she resigned her position to become a full-time writer, publishing in Urdu journals and writing scripts for films.

  In Bombay, Chugtai became part of the literary circle that had turned the city into an intellectual hub. It is no surprise that she and Manto got on like a house on fire from the very first time they met. It was a friendship of the intellect. Both were iconoclasts, opinionated, and argumentative, their exchanges full of high-voltage disagreements over ideas high and low; but they also had genuine affection for each other. Chugtai became very close to Manto and his wife, Safia.

  The bond between the two writers became even stronger when both were charged with obscenity in their writings. In 1942 Chugtai had published “Lihaaf” (Quilt).9 The story is about the neglected wife of an aristocrat who prefers to spend his time in the company of handsome young men. The unhappy wife finds comfort under the quilt in the company of her maid. The scene of her physical and emotional fulfillment is reported through the eyes of the wife’s young niece. The girl wakes up at night and notices that the quilt covering her aunt and the maid is moving. She does not understand her aunt’s lesbian relationship, but the reader does. This was cause enough for her majesty’s government, apparently egged on by the conservative Muslims of Lahore, to charge her with obscenity. Chugtai was no defender of homosexual relationships and was not proud of having written a story that had won her such notoriety. Consequently, she was not exactly thrilled that the obscenity charge brought attention to “Lihaaf.”10

  Manto, on the other hand, wore the obscenity charge as a badge of honor. Two of his stories, “Boo” (Odor) and “Kaali Shalwaar” (Black Trousers), were on trial.11 The two stories are very different. The first concerned male sexuality, which expressed masculine desire in the fetish for the odor of an earthy, unrefined woman. The second was a story about a prostitute in Delhi, whose desire for a pair of black trousers is used by Manto to reflect on urban society and sexual politics. Not only was Manto unrepentant about these stories, he tried to convince Chugtai that “Lihaaf” was her best work.12 Both traveled to Lahore for the trial. The Muslim conservative elite of Lahore tried to pressure Chugtai to confess to the crime of obscenity, but she resisted. Manto was his ir
repressible self. When a witness testified that he found the word “bosom” obscene, Manto shot up from his chair and asked sarcastically if he should call a woman’s breasts “peanuts.” The court tittered. The charges were thrown out, and the duo returned triumphantly to Bombay.13

  The friendship between Manto and Chugtai, cemented by their obscenity trials, was expressive of the space Bombay afforded for relationships based on literature and art. In their different ways, both writers explored the functioning of modern social relationships, of desire and sexuality. The city and its film industry offered them opportunities for their literary pursuits. To read the accounts of their arguments over philosophy and literature, their friendly quarrels over small matters, their everyday comings and goings, is to appreciate the social exchanges and ties that Bombay provided to the life of literature, art, and commerce.14

  THE PROGRESSIVES

  Manto and Chugtai were not the only ones inhabiting and exploring Bombay’s modern life. Several other Urdu writers, including Krishan Chander (1914–77), made the city their home. Like Manto and Chugtai, Chander also wrote scripts for films. Whereas Hindi writers looked down on cinema in their quest for pure forms, Urdu writers, both Hindu and Muslim, found a receptive audience and a new medium for their work in films. The desire to address a mass audience in a popular, accessible language fell in line with their literary quest to explore new forms to represent modern experiences and question customary norms. The film industry also offered lucrative and steady employment. In the 1940s, the industry was organized in a studio system. Each studio had a stable of writers, who were paid a regular monthly salary to write stories and scenes. Of course, not every writer or intellectual drifted into the film world. There was, for example, Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004), who returned from London in 1946 to live in Bombay, with his literary fame already established by his social realist novels in English—Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936).

  Intellectuals and artists were drawn to Bombay’s pulsating modernity, but they also viewed it as deeply contradictory. If the city’s promise of progress and freedom attracted them, they were repelled by its depredations and injustices. Theirs was not a belief in idyllic progress. Even as they represented and criticized caste, gender, and class inequalities with new eyes and excoriated religion and religious divisions as backward, the writers and artists also strove to uncover the oppressions of colonialism and capitalism. As much as they broke from inherited norms and dogmas, these intellectuals also brought to light the dark and dense reality hidden by the glitter of modernity. Intellectuals influenced by this progressivism congregated in Bombay, turning it into a hothouse of radical art and ideas. Giving this milieu a political direction and organization were the Communist-led Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) and Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA).

  The PWA’s origins went back to Angaarey’s publication in 1932. This anthology included short stories by Rashid Jahan, Sajjad Zaheer (1905–73), Ahmed Ali (1910–94), and Mahmuduzzafar (1908–56). Remembering the Angaarey group of writers, Ali writes that they “shared a love of sombreros, bright shirts, and contrasting ties, collecting candlesticks and gargoyles, Bach and Beethoven, and an admiration for James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence and the New Writing poets, as well as Chekhov and Gorky.”15 The group combined a youthful, cosmopolitan outlook combined with a predilection for realism and a desire to expose social injustices and “outmoded” beliefs and customs.

  To this broadly progressive outlook, Zaheer gave a political and organizational shape. Zaheer, the son of a High Court judge, was initially educated in Lucknow and earned a bachelor’s degree at Oxford in 1932. While in England, he turned to Marxism. Like many intellectuals of his generation, Zaheer was alarmed by the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Europe’s drift toward militarism.16 Politically energized by anti-Fascist struggles in Europe, Zaheer and several like-minded aspiring writers decided to form a literary association. The kindly owner of a Chinese restaurant in London offered them the use of a small, unventilated room at the back of his establishment for a meeting. A group of thirty-five (mostly students from Oxford, Cambridge, and London) met at the Nanking Restaurant on Denmark Street in November 1934 to discuss a manifesto. Drafted by Mulk Raj Anand, it called for rescuing literature and other arts from “the priestly, academic and decadent classes in whose hands they have degenerated so long” and “to bring the arts into the closest touch with the people.”17 The aspiring writers met periodically in London to discuss literary works, but it was clear to Zaheer that he had to make connections with progressive writers in India. Thus, after completing his law degree, he set sail for India.

  The All India Progressive Writers’ Association held its first meeting in Lucknow in April 1936.18 The choice of Lucknow was not accidental. The Congress was also meeting in the city, and Jawaharlal Nehru was to preside over its session. As a left-wing nationalist, Nehru qualified as an ally according to the Comintern’s united front strategy. Nehru warmly greeted the PWA’s formation. Messages of support also came from the Bengali writer and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The only disquieting note was struck by the near absence of Hindi writers. With the Hindi-versus-Urdu controversy raging in North India, they were wary of the prominence of Urdu writers in the PWA. The Hindi writers’ absence was made up for by the presence of Premchand (1880–1936). The noted Hindi-Urdu writer, who was then at the peak of his literary fame, was elected as the president, and Zaheer as the secretary-general of the association.

  Though Zaheer was a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI), the PWA was not just a front organization. Many writers who were influenced by progressive and socialist ideas were neither CPI members nor followers. Indeed, a tension between didactic and creative tendencies was present from the PWA’s inception. But all these writers expressed a genuine social and intellectual ferment. Modernity had brought with it a critique of customary authority and religion and sparked a reevaluation of traditional aesthetic forms. The encounter with European literature and philosophy shaped their critical outlook and literary practice, providing them with a sense of belonging to a cosmopolitan political and literary world. The PWA seized on the changing literary and intellectual milieu to move the writers in the direction of socialist realism. Under its influence, the Urdu writers, for example, shifted the focus of their aesthetic attention. “The rose still bloomed in the spring, the cup of wine still passed around, the bulbul still sang songs of love,” but the suffering of the romantic lover was transformed into the plight of humanity.19 They penned poems of incitement and anger, in a language that had become far more direct. Of course, not everyone followed the credo of socialist realism, but the commitment to engage with the “real” was widely shared. This “real” in India was colonial. The progressive writers did not approach this reality as simpleminded nationalists; they saw the nation as a horizon of social equality and communal harmony. This was in line with the broad goals of the Communists, whose stewardship of the PWA provided the literary milieu with an organized coherence.

  The PWA enjoyed a significant presence in Bombay. Chugtai, Krishan Chander, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Ali Sardar Jafri, Sahir Ludhianvi, Kaifi Azmi, Josh Malihabadi, all were actively involved. They were some of the most talented Urdu writers and poets, who went on to achieve great fame as film lyricists and scriptwriters. Their circle extended to gifted writers spread all across North India. Manto was friendly with several PWA writers but remained deeply skeptical of the political orientation of Progressives. His short story “Taraqqipasand” (The Progressive) pokes fun at them as superficial intellectuals captive to the sound of the English word progressive. He was to write later that the Progressives were apparatchiks, bent on turning “a poem into a machine and a machine into a poem.”20 Notwithstanding his hostility to socialist realism, Manto’s writings engaged with the social inequities of the world around him. Progressivism was in the air, and Manto breathed it, even if he turned up his nose at its political prescriptions. Many of his fellow writers in
the city did not share his suspicion. Marxism appealed to intellectuals who wished for national freedom to mean something more than the mere end of British rule.

  The presence of the CPI headquarters in Bombay and the influence of its powerful trade unions added to the sway of progressivism among intellectuals. The party headquarters on Sandhurst Road was run like a commune under P. C. Joshi, the CPI’s charismatic secretary. Joshi had a particular talent in interacting with artists and intellectuals. It was largely under his direction that the IPTA, founded in 1942, went on to quickly become a powerful cultural movement. The Communist attempt to organize artists was part of the Comintern’s response to political developments in Europe. The Reichstag fire, the Nazi rise to power, and the persecution of Communists had convinced it of the need for the widest possible mobilization against fascism. The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 demonstrated the virtue of the united-front strategy all the more urgently.