Mumbai Fables Page 14

  The favorable response to a workers’ theater group in Bangalore inspired some intellectuals in Bombay to gather in the Taj Mahal Hotel to form a similar cultural group. But “the proletarian theatre was apparently stifled in the air-conditioned atmosphere of the far-from-proletarian Taj!”21 In February 1942 another attempt was made, which met with more success. A committee—“ranging from the deepest Red to the bluest Blue blood”—was formed. Among others, it included Lt. Col. S. S. Sokhey, the director of Haffkine Institute, “who divides his study tours between snakes, dance, and Marxism”; Mrs. Wadia, a wealthy socialite; and Anil de Silva, the socialist daughter of a Sri Lankan government minister.22 The new organization was inspired by the Little Theatre movement in England, the WPA Federal Theater Project in the United States, and the Chinese theatrical productions against Japanese occupation. IPTA aimed to deploy the popular theatrical and musical traditions as “the expression and the organizer of our people’s struggles for freedom, economic justice and a democratic culture.”23 The physicist Homi J. Bhabha, later regarded as the founder of the nuclear establishment in India, was a member of IPTA and is the one who named the organization.

  Bombay became an important hub of IPTA, attracting radical writers, poets, musicians, journalists, and film artists, as well as a number of cultural activists from the working-class districts. Its inaugural performance on May Day in 1943 was a play written by a working-class activist. IPTA also staged Yeh Kiska Khoon Hai? (Whose Blood Is This?), a play watched by over four thousand workers, written by the Urdu writer Ali Sardar Jafri. The performance ended with all the actors coming on the stage, singing:

  Woh duniya, duniya kya hogi, jis duniya mein Swaraj na ho?

  Woh azaadi, azaadi kya, jis mein mazdoor ka raj na ho?

  What will be that world, a world that is not free?

  What is that freedom, where workers don’t rule?24

  IPTA held film screenings, one of which showed a Soviet woman making a parachute jump. The audience responded with cries of “Stalin Zindabad” (Long Live Stalin). Paul Robeson’s portrayal of an African American miner apparently elicited interest among workers about the life of miners in the West. Working-class activists such as D. N. Gavankar and Anna Bhau Sathe drew on folk theater to write Marathi plays that were staged in working-class districts. Khwaja Ahmed Abbas wrote a Hindustani anti-Fascist fantasy titled Yeh Amrit Hai (This Is Nectar), which was also staged in working-class districts.25

  Abbas (1914–87) belonged to a Muslim middle-class family from Panipat, a town near Delhi. He received his college education at Aligarh Muslim University, the educational Mecca of modern Muslims. At Aligarh, he started writing for newspapers and became enchanted with Nehru and his socialist ideas. In 1934 he made his first journey to Bombay, a city he had read about in novels and short stories. He records the excitement of the immigrant’s arrival in the city: “As the train thundered past the local station platforms, there were dark clouds in the horizon. It was raining somewhere. Excitement piled upon excitement as we recognized, from hearsay, some of the suburban stations—Andheri, Bandra, Dadar. . . . Bombay, it has been said, is not a city, it is a state of mind. It is the state of a young man’s mind, exciting and excitable, exuberant and effervescent, dynamic and dramatic.”26 After working as an intern for a few months in the nationalist newspaper Bombay Chronicle, he returned to Aligarh to complete his law degree. But the Bombay bug had bitten him for good. He returned a year later to work for the Bombay Chronicle and made the city his home.

  Living in the city, the news of the formation of the PWA gladdened Abbas’s heart. Although he was a journalist who wrote in English, he also had an abiding interest in Urdu literature and later wrote literary works in Hindustani. He became one of the founding members of IPTA and was commissioned to write a Hindustani play for North Indian mill workers. He wrote Zubeida, which was directed by Balraj Sahni (1913–73), who was to become a celebrated film actor.

  Sahni grew up in a Punjabi family in Rawalpindi, then a British military cantonment town. His father ran a successful clothing business, but Sahni’s interest ran in a different direction. Like many other young people in Rawalpindi, he was besotted by cinema.27 This love persisted while he studied at Lahore. He saw both Hollywood and Hindi films and acted in plays while earning a master’s degree in English literature in 1934. At loose ends after his university education but determined not to be in the family business, he wrote Hindi short stories, became a teacher in Tagore’s Shantiniketan, and then jumped to Sevagram, Gandhi’s ashram in 1939. Both Shantiniketan and Sevagram were centers of experimentation in search of new forms of art, culture, and education. Drawn by this heady atmosphere, Sahni and his wife, Damyanti, spent nearly three years working on the experiments to formulate a new language of Indian art and education. But they were not done yet with searching for a purpose in life.

  A job offer from the BBC took the couple to London, where they worked in its Hindi service. London overawed Sahni, who spent a good part of his salary visiting strip clubs and watching films. It was only the outbreak of the war that awoke him to politics. He saw Soviet films, read Marxism, and met writers and intellectuals such as T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, Harold Laski, Lionel Fielden, and Gilbert Harding.28 After soaking in the intellectual life of London, the Sahnis returned to India in 1944, making Bombay their home.

  Sahni ran into Chetan Anand, an acquaintance from Lahore, who was now in Bombay, working on a film. The chance meeting introduced him to the film industry. Sahni describes how the studios were working overtime to produce films, and educated young men and women were joining the industry. Famous writers and poets such as Krishan Chander, Manto, Upendra Nath Ashk, Josh Malihabadi, and Bhagwati Charan Varma were writing screenplays and songs and earning fabulous sums. Chetan Anand offered acting roles to both Sahni and his wife. The couple, along with their young daughter, moved in with Anand in his rented bungalow in Pali Hill, Bandra, a big rambling house surrounded by mango groves. Anand lived there with his wife and his two brothers—Vijay Anand, who was later to make his name as a successful director, and Dev Anand, who went on to become a huge star. Like Sahni, Chetan Anand was also a Punjabi. After completing his BA in Lahore, he went to London to study for the competitive Indian Civil Service examinations. Instead, he took part in BBC programs, attended seminars, and reveled in the intellectual atmosphere of the city. On his return, he taught briefly at Doon School, but his love of theater and film drew him to Bombay in 1943.29

  Chetan Anand’s Pali Hill bungalow was a salon for artists. His wife, Uma Anand, ran an open house, frequented by aspiring writers, poets, actors, filmmakers, and artists. “Life at 41 Pali Hill resounded with ideas; scripts being discussed; Kamleshwar painting, Zohra dancing, everybody arguing, reading and discussing.”30 Chetan Anand and Sahni also went downtown every day to breathe in the heady atmosphere of the India Coffee House at Flora Fountain, where they would run into writers, journalists, painters, and dancers. “The occupants of the next table might be spiritedly defending the Congress policies, while the one in front of you was likely to be a communist or a socialist stronghold! Naturally, all these budding geniuses were accompanied by their girlfriends, who hung on every word they uttered! The whole atmosphere in that cafe used to be charged with emotion and you felt a mood of expectancy in the air.”31

  A chance glance at a newspaper advertisement announcing that People’s Theatre was to stage a play took Sahni and Chetan Anand to an IPTA meeting.32 Abbas conducted the meeting, attended by twenty-thirty young men and women. Without getting Sahni’s prior consent, Abbas announced that “Comrade Balraj Sahni” was going to direct his play Zubeida. Sahni was taken aback by this sudden anointment, but since nothing was happening to his film career, he decided to take up the challenge. He recruited Chetan and his brother Dev Anand as actors, but on the day of the performance, Chetan suddenly took ill, forcing Sahni to play the lead role. The play was about a young Muslim girl who casts aside her veil to take up relief work for chol
era victims. The high point of the performance was the appearance of her bridegroom, who rode a horse down the aisle of the auditorium. The play was a great success and was performed several times.

  IPTA became a fixture in the city. It staged plays and performances in the working-class districts as well as before middle-class audiences. Its reputation grew, and noted theater and film actors, such as Prithviraj Kapoor, maintained a sympathetic and supportive relationship to its activities. Leading actors, writers, musicians, and dancers who went on to great fame and fortune were involved in its performances. Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar (Lowly City), for example, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946. Written by Abbas, with music composed by Ravi Shankar, the film tells the story of the nonviolent struggle of the underclasses against the rich. Neecha Nagar combines a social realist story with a cinematic style of set design and lighting that was clearly influenced by German Expressionism. Abbas also wrote Dr. Kotnis ki Amar Kahani (The Immortal Journey of Dr. Kotnis). It was directed by and starred V. Shantaram, a legendary name in Marathi and Hindi films. The film told the story of a young Indian doctor who goes to China to help Chinese troops fighting the Japanese invasion. IPTA itself also produced a film, Dharti ke Lal (Children of the Earth), in 1946. Directed and cowritten by Abbas, it was based on Krishan Chander’s novella Anndaata. Also a social realist film, Dharti ke Lal was the story of a poor family’s struggle to survive during the devastating Bengal famine of 1943. It starred Zohra Sehgal and Sahni, but the film flopped at the box office.

  Notwithstanding the Dharti ke Lal setback, IPTA and the PWA remained an influential presence in the city. In spite of the frequent contortions in its strategy, the CPI, under P. C. Joshi’s stewardship, was remarkably successful in nursing the youthful enthusiasm for radical change. Margaret C. Godley, a British social worker visiting Bombay at that time, described the party headquarters as “a large, shabby set of offices in a shabby street” but “the abode of the young & eager, all working hard in a veritable hive of activity.” The activists were occupied in preparing the Communist newspaper and propaganda material in English and Indian languages. Amid all this feverish activity, Godley spotted Joshi’s wife looking after her baby, “which lay chuckling in bed, surrounded by Communist slogans.”33 The party office functioned as a commune, a place of politics and sociability, where the young activists talked, argued, wrote, and organized for the revolution while living a communal life along with their families.

  The CPI attracted intellectuals ranging from working-class artists to upper-class journalists and writers who had been educated and traveled abroad. Among them was the couple Romesh and Raj Thapar. Both were privileged Punjabis from Lahore, who were married in Bombay in 1945 when Romesh returned from England. They resided in Breach Candy, in the elite Mafatlal Park block of flats by the seashore, boasting a lawn and a swimming pool. Their three-bedroom flat, which came with a garage and servants’ quarters, became a hub of activity. “People flowed in and out all hours of the day and night, staying to eat and drink even when we were not there. The cook had a standing order of dinner for five.”34 After dinner, the Thapars and their guests would sit outside on the grass until the early hours of the morning, talking and discussing ideas.

  Marxism was often quoted in conversations, with no one in the midst of frenzied arguments ever being conscious of “the obvious incongruity of holding a juicy job in a foreign firm on the one hand and entertaining ideas of communism on the other.” Accusations of being a Menshevik and a reactionary flew fast and easy. The couple’s social list included Frank Moraes, the editor of the Times of India, where Romesh Thapar worked. The Goan editor, with “slurringly British” speech,” took Romesh regularly to his weekly dinners at Raj Bhavan, the Communist Party headquarters on Sandhurst Road. The celebrated social realist author Mulk Raj Anand once came to stay in their flat for a month. But Raj Thapar’s excitement turned to disappointment because the novelist was then preoccupied with “a grand passion with the rather remarkable and attractive Anil De Silva,”35 while his English wife remained in London. The couple’s Communist friends included Mohan Kumarmangalam and his sister Parvati Krishnan, who belonged to a distinguished Tamil political family and had been to school and university abroad. “Parvati could move in and out of any drawing room, clad in white cotton, holding her own,” and Mohan’s “eyes were forever twinkling, never dimmed by communist ideology or by living in the urine-smelling commune at Raj Bhavan.”36

  Raj Thapar’s no-holds-barred memoir is peppered with catty remarks about people and deeply affected by her elite status—the “urine-smelling” party headquarters frequently throws her upper-class nose out of joint. Nevertheless, she paints a vivid picture of the intellectual and political ferment in the city. Bombay seemed to hold the promise of a new India, and to the educated elite of Thapar’s generation, Nehru was the symbol of a modern India. But even more inspiring was Marxism, which enchanted both Raj and Romesh. She found herself “moving naturally and effortlessly, almost sleepwalking, towards the communists, who were as much part of the social elite of Bombay at the time as anyone else.”37 When Rajni Palme Dutt, the legendary leader of the British Communist Party, visited India in 1946, he obviously could not stay at the “urine-smelling” Raj Bhavan. So the party arranged for the Thapars to host him. J.R.D. Tata sent a message through a mutual friend that he wanted to meet Dutt, or RPD, as he was known. “So I asked Jeh [JRD] and his wife Thelma, for dinner one night.” It was an uncomfortable evening, with RPD and JRD repeatedly thrusting swords at each other.

  4.1. Happy times: Chugtai (2nd from the left) with other Progressives. Source: Eve’s Weekly, August 6–12, 1983

  Sucked into the exciting whirlpool of Communist political and intellectual vision, Raj and Romesh became active in party activities. Raj even started working in the reviled party headquarters, where, to her great relief, she found that she was not discriminated against for her Westernized background. She came to admire Joshi for his knack at picking talented artists. Romesh became active in IPTA, which was running into financial difficulties. To raise money, Mulk Raj Anand adapted Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty for the Indian scene. Godley, the British social worker, described the performance as good—“more for the sincerity & impassioned enthusiasm of the actors than for the quality of acting.”38 Romesh took to playing the role of the eternal worker with such gusto that he changed Odets’s words after every evening performance. The audience was far from working class, but so were the actors. One female actor, when asked what socialism meant, said “going to parties.”39

  “Going to parties” expresses the range of socialism’s promise. To politically conscious writers and activists, Marxism provided a general horizon for progressive art and politics. But even some of the elite were caught up in its charm. And at the center of this Communist promise of a new dawn, of modern society, art, cinema, and literature was Bombay. Writers, film and theater actors and directors, and musicians saw India’s future in progressivism and gave a progressive cast to the city, until communal riots shattered the dream.

  COSMOPOLIS LOST

  In March 1946 the British government sent a cabinet mission to India with a plan to transfer power. It held talks with the Congress and the Muslim League and proposed independence under dominion status to a united India, composed of a three-tier federation. The central government was to be a limited one, with power restricted to foreign relations, communications, defense, and unionwide finances. India was to consist of three major groups of provinces: Group A, comprising the Hindu-majority provinces of the Bombay Presidency, Madras, the United Provinces, Bihar, Orissa, and the Central Provinces; Group B, to include the Muslim-majority provinces of the Punjab, Sind, the North-West Frontier, and Baluchistan; and Group C, containing the Muslim-majority Bengal and the Hindu-majority Assam. Barring powers conceded to the central government, the three groups were proposed as virtually autonomous. Both the Congress and the Muslim League accepted the plan. However, Nehru
announced that the Congress had agreed to participate only in the Constituent Assembly, and that it would be free to amend these arrangements as it saw fit. Jinnah, the Muslim League leader, saw this as a betrayal and believed that Nehru’s position meant that minority interests would be placed at the hands of the majority. Faced with this crisis, the cabinet mission proposed the subcontinent’s division into India and Pakistan. Nehru and Gandhi rejected the division. After a Muslim League meeting in Bombay, Jinnah announced on July 27 that he accepted the partition plan and called for Muslims to observe August 16 as “Direct Action” Day. The country plunged into bloody Hindu-Muslim riots, with the “Calcutta killings” consuming nearly six thousand lives.

  In Bombay the Muslim League observed Direct Action Day on August 16 by closing all Muslim schools and colleges and shuttering their neighborhoods. Muslim workers also stayed away from mills. However, the day passed off peacefully, with no retaliatory violence in response to the “Calcutta killings.”40 But the idyll did not last. Serious communal disturbances broke out on the afternoon of September 1, when Muslims began to hoist black flags. At some places, sandals, brooms, Gandhi caps, and felt hats were also hung. In response, the Hindus hoisted Congress flags. The commissioner of police issued a curfew order and prohibited meetings, assemblies, and processions. Despite the presence of troops, who were called out, and in spite of the twenty-four-hour curfew, organized violence and stabbings occurred over two days. The city was quiet for a while, but communal clashes resumed ten days later.

  Hindu-Muslim riots were not new to Bombay. In the bloody riots of 1893, Hindu and Muslim street gangs fought pitched battles.41 In 1929 there was another serious outbreak of communal violence, following unfounded rumors that Pathans (Pashtuns from Afghanistan who lived in the city as moneylenders, traders, and security guards) were snatching children and spiriting them away in a red car. As school after school reported falling attendance due to the fear of kidnapping, the Pathans were attacked. As moneylenders and as muscle for mill owners, they were easy targets. Despite the government’s efforts to squelch the rumor, the Pathans faced the murderous wrath of Hindu mill workers fearful of the danger to their children. Retaliatory violence followed, making the mill districts a scene of assaults and counterassaults.42 Three years later, Hindus and Muslims were at each other’s throats again in and around the mill districts. The Muslim isolation from the Congress-led nationalist agitation created communal tension in the city. Stray incidents of stone throwing lit the fuse, leading to full-scale riots that consumed 133 Hindu and 83 Muslim lives between May and July 1932.43 Four years later, communal violence returned, sparked by a dispute over the construction of a raised platform for worship by Hindus next to a mosque. In a cruel validation of Gandhi’s repudiation of the biblical retributive justice of an eye for an eye, the killing of forty-seven Hindus was matched by the murder of forty-seven Muslims.44