Mumbai Fables Page 15

  What distinguished the bloodshed of 1946 and 1947 was that it was sparked by events and purported developments elsewhere in British India, and not local incidents.45 The circulation of the false rumors—that the Muslim League planned to forcibly convert Hindus or that Nehru had been shot and injured—raised the communal temperature. Exaggerated accounts of the massacre of Hindus in East Bengal and stories of atrocities on Muslims in North India provoked clashes. Attacks on Muslim mill workers were followed by retaliatory violence on the Hindus. There were rival black-flag demonstrations, strikes, stabbings, and violent disturbances that lasted up to three days at a time.46 The violence and tension prevailed for the rest of the year and well into 1947 as reports and rumors of violence and mass displacements continued to circulate.

  A. C. Clow, the governor of Bombay Presidency, noted with satisfaction that nothing like the “Bombay riots” had occurred,47 but the communal frenzy could not but cast a pall on Bombay. “The city was divided between ‘Hindu Bombay’ and ‘Muslim Bombay.’” No Muslim ventured into a Hindu area, and no Hindu would stray into a Muslim area. Writing about the climate of fear, Abbas recounts seeing a killing that was to haunt him for years. A hoodlum in a Hindu neighborhood spied a man dressed in kurta pajama and concluded by this clothing that he was a Muslim. He pounced on him from the back and stabbed him. As he wiped his bloody knife clean on the clothes of the man he had slain, a doubt appeared to cross his mind. He tugged open the pajama cord and saw that the man was uncircumcised. The killer clasped his knife and uttered “Mishtake ho gaya!” (Oh, a mistake!)48

  Manto found the communal tension in the city unbearable. August 14, 1947, the day of Partition and the day before Independence, was celebrated with great fanfare in the city, with cries of “Long Live India” and “Long Live Pakistan” reverberating in the streets. Manto was unable to decide which was his country even as he agonized about people dying. “Where were they going to inter the bones which had been stripped of the flesh of religion by vultures and birds of prey? . . . When we were colonial subjects, we could dream of freedom, but now that we were free, what would our dreams be?”49 Bombay Talkies, the studio where he was employed, had begun receiving hate mail threatening arson and murder because it employed Muslims. The studio owners were unconcerned, but the communal enmity worried Manto. One day in January 1948, he packed his bags and left for Pakistan. The only person who knew that he was leaving was his close friend Shyam. When they had a parting drink of brandy, Shyam threw his arms around him and said affectionately, “Swine.” Tearfully, Manto replied, “Pakistani swine.” Shyam accompanied him to the port, and Manto sailed for Karachi.50

  Chugtai was deeply disappointed. She writes that Manto had once suggested that she also move to Pakistan. According to her, he said: “There’s a bright future for us in Pakistan. People there will get bungalows of those who have fled, and we’ll be in a better position there to get things done, we’ll make rapid progress.”51 Chugtai thought that Manto was a coward for preparing to take advantage of those who had been forced to flee.

  Chugtai judges him too harshly. It was a difficult time, and people made decisions to stay or move under trying conditions. It is perhaps more fruitful to view the move to Pakistan in light of Aamir Mufti’s reading of Manto’s ambivalent relationship to national culture. He suggests that the prominence of the prostitute and the brothel in his stories is a sign of a larger theme in Manto—the subordinate relationship of the minority to the majority, the subaltern to the dominant. “The insistent irony of Manto’s stories, his characteristic irreverence for all cultural and political pieties and solemnities, and his elevation of doubt and ‘betrayal’ to something like the imperatives of an ethical life” meant that he could not be accommodated within a nationalist aesthetics.52 His short stories were destined to remain a minor figure to the epic form of the nation. As a writer, he did not have an easy time in the new nation of Pakistan.

  However, Manto went on to pen some of the most powerful short stories ever written on the Partition violence. Among them is the poignant “Toba Tek Singh.”53 It concerns a lunatic who refuses to choose either India or Pakistan as his country. The story uses lunacy as an allegory for the madness of the subcontinent’s division and the maniacal desire for modern nation-states. So illogical are the new nations that even a lunatic finds them unacceptable. Manto was interested not in the politics of the nation-state as such but in its effects on the textures and feelings of everyday life.

  In his delightful sketch of his friend Shyam, Manto writes about the effect of the politics of the state on friendship. It is abundantly clear that the two enjoyed a warm friendship. Shyam, a handsome film star with a love for drink, women, and books, was just the kind of person Manto adored. They drank together and helped each other out with money, and Manto was privy to the ups and downs in Shyam’s numerous affairs. One time during the Partition violence, Manto and Shyam were listening to the plight of Sikh refugees forced to flee the killings in Punjab. Manto could see that his friend was deeply moved, and so he asked Shyam: “I am a Muslim, don’t you feel like murdering me?” “Not now,” Shyam answered gravely, “but when I was listening to the atrocities the Muslims had committed . . . I could have murdered you.” Manto was shocked and thought that he could have murdered Shyam at that moment. “But later when I thought about it—and between then and now there is a world of difference—I suddenly understood the basis of these riots in which thousands of innocent Hindus and Muslims were killed every day.”54

  Yet another account of “then and now” is his story “Mozail,” set in a Bombay torn apart by the Partition.55 The story showcases the city as a space of diversity, of chance encounters and affinities between strangers, of beastly violence and little acts of redemption. It opens with the protagonist, Tarlochan, a Sikh, worrying about the safety of his fiancée, Kirpal, whose family lives in a Muslim neighborhood. In his mind, he is cursing Kirpal’s brother, whom he has implored several times to move the family to safety. But the brother scoffed at the idea: “This is not Amritsar or Lahore. . . . It is Bombay.” Tarlochan’s thoughts move from Kirpal to Mozail, a Jewish woman who had lived in his building and whom he had loved. He remembers Mozail making fun of his religion when he asked her if she loved him. When he implored her to marry him, she laughed and responded that she would if he cut his hair and shaved his beard. He complied. But on the day they were to marry, she ran off with another man. Tarlochan suffered greatly but recovered. He started growing his hair and beard again and fell in love with Kirpal. Now, he worries that he will lose her too. Suddenly, he recognizes the sound of the wooden sandals that Mozail used to wear. She is back. They talk, and Tarlochan tells her that he is concerned about Kirpal. Ignoring his protests, Mozail drags him to Kirpal’s house. A bloody attack is in progress. Mozail rescues Kirpal by handing her the gown she is wearing, which identifies her as a Jew. Kirpal escapes with her life, but Mozail dies, naked.

  In a few pages, Manto lays out the diverse social geography of the city, its multiple religions, and its chance interactions, setting up the bonds of religion against the ties of humanity. Mozail, a member of the classic minority and otherwise unreliable, stands for values that neither religion nor the state embodies. Manto resists sentimentalism and lofty humanism by portraying Mozail as flawed. She has no feminine modesty—she never wears underwear—she ridicules Tarlochan’s religion, strings him along, and double-times him. Yet, such are the attachments formed by urban life that she sacrifices her life for Tarlochan’s beloved. Manto left Bombay, unable to cope with its communal tension, and yet he remained wedded to his imagination of the city as society. Later, he wrote this ode to the city:

  My heart is steeped in sorrow today. A strange melancholy has descended on me. Four and a half years ago, when I said goodbye to my second home Bombay, I had felt the same way. I was sad at leaving a place where I had spent so many days of hardworking life. That piece of land had offered shelter to a family reject and it had said to me, “You
can be happy here on two pennies a day or on ten thousand rupees a day, if you wish. You can do what you want. No one will find fault with you. Nor will anyone subject you to moralizing. You alone will have to accomplish the most difficult tasks and you alone will have to make every important decision of your life. You may live on the footpath or in a magnificent palace; it will not matter in the least to me. You may leave or you may stay, it will make no difference to me. I am where I am and this is where I will remain.”

  After living there for twelve years I find myself in Pakistan. I am here because of what I learnt there. If I leave and go elsewhere, I will remain the way I am. I am a walking, talking Bombay. . . . I loved that city then and I love it today.

  COSMOPOLIS IN THE NATION-STATE

  The intellectuals and artists of the city who had dreamed of a cosmopolitan nation of justice and freedom were left reeling by the blood-soaked birth of India and Pakistan. In his regular “Last Page” column in the Bombay Chronicle, Abbas wrote about the loss of his sense of humor. Where was it? “Perhaps, it was drowned in the rivers of blood, Hindu blood and Muslim blood, your blood and mine, that have been flowing in the streets of Calcutta, in Noakhali, in Bihar, in the U.P., the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, not to mention the occasional bloody spurts in the streets of our own Bombay.”56 Chugtai wrote: “Communal violence and freedom became so muddled that it was difficult to distinguish between the two. . . . The hearts that had been singing were hushed, the dancing feet were stilled.”57 The poet Josh Malihabadi asked:

  This measuring, this cutting, this wanton devastation

  The drowning of swimmers, the helplessness of the fighters,

  What shall we call autumn if this is spring?

  A distraught Jan Nisar Akhtar discovered:

  The flower lost its colour the moment it was touched

  The garland had yet to be braided when it came undone

  The goblet hadn’t touched the lips when it was shattered

  It’s not my dreams that have been looted and pillaged, it is me.58

  The Progressives responded to the communal bloodbath by organizing writers and artists to spread the message of harmony. The PWA and IPTA mobilized several theater groups and cultural associations in a unity procession that marched through the city. Prithviraj Kapoor, accompanied by his sons, Raj and Shammi Kapoor, who were to become film stars in the following decade, were in the rally, beating a drum. Balraj Sahni, Chetan Anand, Dev Anand, and Prem Dhawan spread the message of communal harmony from an IPTA truck. The Urdu writers Sajjad Zaheer, Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Sahir Ludhianvi, and Majrooh Sultanpuri joined the procession for peace.59 Abbas wrote a play, Main Kaun Hoon? (Who Am I?), drawing on his experience of a “mistaken” killing. The play was staged multiple times to promote the message of communal harmony. Krishan Chander was like a man possessed, writing story after story, and a novel, Hum Vehshi Hain (We Are Savages), on communal violence.

  It was difficult to pick up the pieces after the trauma of 1946–47. The about-turns in the CPI’s strategy did not help. Its support of the demand for Pakistan on the grounds of self-determination, followed by an overnight conversion to the cause of India’s unity, were confusing. The loyal party members went along with the twists and turns, but others were not so compliant. Abbas wrote: “My Communist friends, who have always ridiculed me for my sentimental petite bourgeoisie faith in the unity of India and hostility to the idea of Pakistan, who were ready to divide India into two or twenty pieces in pursuance of their theory of self-determination, have suddenly become fanatical believers in the unity of India.”60 Asking himself who killed India, he answered that Hindu and Muslim fanatics did, the Communist Party did.

  The PWA continued to function, but its fire had been doused. The new nation-state responded with repression to yet another of the CPI’s strategic about-turns, calling Indian independence a hoax and launching an armed peasant insurrection in Telangana. As the state consolidated itself under Nehru, fiercely putting down challenges to its authority, including those from the Communists, the Progressive writers fell into disarray. Instead of their grand vision of politically committed writers engaged with worker and peasant struggles, writing stories and poems that outlined a diverse nation of justice and freedom, they had to content themselves with films. The Progressives, who were already firmly entrenched in Bombay’s film world, became the leading scriptwriters and lyricists.

  It was because of the Progressive writers’ well-established position that a socially conscious cinema developed in the 1950s. This period is considered the golden age of Hindi films, a time when cinema spoke to the common concerns of the people. Progressive poets such as Sahir Ludhianvi wrote angry and searing critiques of society. In the 1957 film Pyaasa (The Thirsty One), Ludhianvi asks the national leadership:

  Ye kooche, ye neelam-ghar dilkashi ke

  Ye lut-te hue karvaan zindagi ke

  Kahaan hai, kahaan hai, muhaafiz khudi ke?

  Jinhen naaz hai Hind par voh kahaan hai?

  These streets, these auction houses of pleasure

  These looted caravans of life

  Where are they, the guardians of selfhood?

  Those who are proud of India, where are they?61

  Sahir, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Shailendra, Pradeep, Prem Dhawan, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Abbas, and many others wrote songs and stories that shaped the cinema of the 1950s. But film was a medium of mass entertainment. It was a business. This was all the more the case after the war boom, which brought an influx of producers involved with films in Hindi, which had emerged as something approximating a “national” language. Hindi cinema, eclipsing films in other languages, held the promise of providing the largest return on investment. As new producers seized on this chance, stars’ salaries soared. Formula became king. Eric Barnow and S. Krishnaswamy, in their authoritative history of Hindi cinema, state: “A formula, as dictated by the exhibitor and distributor, called for one or two major stars, at least half a dozen songs, and a few dances.”62 The story became less important and was deployed primarily as a vehicle to exploit the stars’ appeal.

  An equally relevant factor was the existence of the new nation-state and nationalist sentiments. The Partition had been a traumatic experience, but Nehru’s government had moved on to nation building, with the state seen as a vital instrument in modernizing India. What would our dreams be, Manto had asked, now that colonial rule was over? The Progressives in the film industry had to answer this question against the background of cinema’s role as mass entertainment and the ideological shadow of the new nation-state.

  They answered Manto’s question by writing socially conscious lyrics and stories, but the postnational conjuncture also witnessed a coming to terms with the new nation-state. This is evident in the two “tramp” films of the 1950s written by Abbas and starring Raj Kapoor: Awara (1951), or The Vagrant, and Shree 420 (1955), or Mr. 420. Both were great commercial successes, and Kapoor became one of the most popular stars of the 1950s. In these films, Abbas attempts to articulate progressive themes within the commercial imperatives of Hindi cinema. Working with stars and containing songs that have endured, Abbas’s films portray the subjecthood of the citizen in the nation-state.63

  Awara is an Oedipal drama between Raj, played by Kapoor, and his father, Judge Raghunath, played by his real-life father, Prithviraj Kapoor. The judge is a reformist who has defied feudal norms by marrying a widow. He believes, however, that heredity has a determining influence; the son of a criminal can be only a criminal, and one born to a gentleman will also be a gentleman. In accordance with his belief, he convicts the son of a criminal who is trying to reform himself and has been falsely accused of rape. The son takes revenge by kidnapping the judge’s wife, but he frees her when he learns that she is pregnant. But Judge Raghunath suspects that she has been defiled and throws his pregnant wife out of the house. Poor but honest, she struggles hard to raise her son on the mean streets of Bombay, hoping that he will one day become a lawyer like his
father. However, Raj is thrown out of school when his mother is unable to pay his tuition fees. He is seduced into a life of crime and makes his living from “import-export.”

  Raj is a delightful, Chaplinesque “awara” (vagabond), happy with his life on the streets, singing “Awara hoon” (I Am a Vagabond) in lyrics penned by the Progressive poet Shailendra. After a chance encounter with a childhood sweetheart, Rita, played by the star Nargis, he tries to mend his ways. Rita happens to be an orphan who is Judge Raghunath’s ward and a lawyer. Raj is charged for the murder of the gangster who had kidnapped his mother and had induced him to follow a life of crime. This is not all. He is also booked for the attempted murder of Judge Raghunath. Rita acts as Raj’s defense attorney in her guardian’s court and makes a stirring defense, arguing that Raj is not a born criminal but a victim of his social circumstances. All ends well when his real identity as the judge’s son is revealed.