Mumbai Fables Read online

  4.2. The vagabond Raj Kapoor in Awara. Source: R.K. Films.

  The professed theme of the film is heredity versus environment, but at the center of it is the vagrant’s reform from a figure on the social margins to an upstanding citizen of the nation. Although it is society that produces the vagrant, it is not radical social change but a return to the affective fold of the family that enacts his transformation. The film highlights the role of social inequality in producing the outlaw but suggests that his redemption lies in the rule of law softened with a heart. Now that colonial rule has ended, the agenda of transforming society is left to its conscience. Abbas shifts the radical agenda of the Progressives into the register of affect and morality. Gone is the language of revolution, and in comes the vocabulary of individual choice and responsibility to rescue Raj from his vagrancy.

  The commercial success of Awara was followed by an even bigger box-office hit, Shree 420. The opening song of the film, which became an overnight chart buster, offers a cosmopolitan anthem of the nation:

  Mera joota hai Japaani

  Yeh patloon Englishtaani

  Sir pe lal topi russi

  Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani.

  My shoes are Japanese

  These trousers are English

  The red hat on my head is Russian

  But my heart remains Indian.

  A Chaplinesque Raj, an unemployed graduate from a small town, comes to Bombay, joyously declaring himself a member of the cosmopolitan world of nations. The sight of the big city—its traffic snarls and the hurrying crowd—bewilders the immigrant. He asks for directions, but no one answers him. Frustrated, he asks a beggar, “Is everyone deaf in Bombay?” The beggar replies: “Deaf and blind. They hear nothing but the jingling of money. This is Bombay, my brother, Bombay! Here the buildings are made of cement and the hearts of stone. Stone! Only one god is worshipped here and that is money!” This sets up the tale of the innocent, common citizen, done in by the heartless city of money. Playing on the classic nationalist exaltation of the village and the representation of the city as alien and corrupting, Raj becomes a cardsharp. He conquers the city with the tricks that it teaches him and enters a world of wealth and glamour.

  4.3. A beggar explains Bombay to Raj Kapoor in Shree 420. Source: R.K. Films.

  The film’s title plays on section 420 of the Indian Penal Code, which deals with fraud, to highlight what the capitalist city forces the common person to become. Bombay brings Raj close to two women. One is Maya, or Illusion, a Westernized vamp, who draws him toward money and desire. The other is the woman he loves. She is Vidya, or Knowledge, modestly dressed, an identifiably Hindu woman, and a schoolteacher. Vidya is shocked when she learns about the source of Raj’s wealth. She accuses him of selling his soul for the false world of glitter. He is unmoved by her critique of commodification. But when an unscrupulous businessman tries to defraud the homeless by promising them housing, Raj’s conscience is awakened. He outwits the crooked capitalist and becomes a hero to the masses.

  The film mobilizes the progressive themes of capitalist exploitation and injustice to set up the resolution in the victory of human values. The savior of the masses is the educated citizen Raj, who speaks and acts on their behalf. The exaltation of the hero coincided with Raj Kapoor’s elevation as one of the biggest stars in Hindi cinema. The commercial imperatives of the film industry worked in tandem with the nonrevolutionary ideology of Nehru’s India. Shree 420 provides a progressive critique of social inequality and capitalist power while presenting humanist reform as the path forward using a deeply moral tone. Instead of radical change, the film offers individual responsibility and the law, softened by a heart, as the means to combat the temptations and illicit desires of modernity. Significantly, the film ends with Raj pointing in the direction of planned housing. The radical urban imagination has made peace with the nation-state.

  But this is not the whole story. The writers and the artists who had breathed Bombay’s exhilarating air were no narrow-minded nationalists. They played with the nationalist contrast between the simple village and the corrupt city, between Vidya and Maya, adopting a moral tone strikingly different from the heady and hedonistic mood of Fearless Nadia’s stunt films. But they based their moral-humanist drama on Bombay’s multifaceted life. The city was the symbol of both the challenges and the promises of modern life. Accordingly, the trials and tribulations of the modern national subject were to be played out in the city. It was also here that the citizen, who was neither Hindu nor Muslim but a subject of the modern nation, could seek freedom and justice. This national subject was cosmopolitan. He wore Japanese shoes, English trousers, and a Russian hat while remaining Indian at heart. The song privileges the nation as the “heart” of identity but positions this Indianness in the wider world.

  It was in Bombay that the modern and cosmopolitan social world of the Indian could be best represented. Thus, the crime melodramas of the 1950s, starring Dev Anand, are frequently located in the city. Stylishly dressed and personifying urban cool, Anand always appeared as an utterly modern character. The films, shot in the noir style of shadows and highlights, showcase the modernity of the city—its spatial organization in buildings, open streets and dark lanes, brightly lit clubs, and shadowy dens of gangsters. Modern urban types—the taxi driver, the pickpocket, the trickster, the club dancer, the street urchin, the shopkeeper, the stylish city slicker, the villain in trench coat and hat, and the smart police detective—appear in film after film.

  Taxi Driver (1954), for example, parades Bombay’s irreducibly diverse social milieu. A pivotal location in the film is a club for workingmen—Doston ka Adda (Friends’ Hangout)—shown serving only nonalcoholic drinks such as Coca-Cola in Prohibition-era Bombay. Dev Anand, playing a Hindu taxi driver named Mangal —called Hero by his friends — frequents the club after work. His best friend, Mastana, played by Johnny Walker, is a Muslim (going by his own name in the film), who also treats it as a meeting place. D’Mello, a Christian, owns the club. His employees include the Anglo-Indian Mrs. Thomas, who plays the piano, and her beautiful daughter Sylvie, a singer and dancer. Breaking from the standard depictions of Christians and Westernized Indians as alien and portending trouble, the film treats them as ordinary city dwellers. Sylvie fleeces rich men who entertain her at the fancy Taj Hotel, but she is no prostitute; she is simply another urban trickster who loves to have a good time. In the club, she maintains an easy and harmlessly flirtatious relationship with men. D’Mello is in love with her, but she fancies Hero. Though the rakishly charming taxi driver does not love Sylvie, he treats her respectfully and as a friend.

  The affectionate interactions between Sylvie and Hero in an atmosphere of easy communication across gender and religious identities infuse the club with emotional and social significance. This is captured in a sequence in which Sylvie tries to charm a hard-to-get Hero with seductive dancing and singing. The scene breaks from the Hindi film convention that presents women as objects of male seduction, unless they are vamps who flaunt their wanton sexuality to ensnare men. Sylvie is no vamp, but a modern woman confidently pursuing the man of her dreams. Undeterred by the failure to enchant Hero, she continues with her performance of enticement (fig. 4.4). The band—which includes Sylvie’s Anglo-Indian mother on the piano, her young brothers playing a clarinet and maracas, and a Goan Christian-looking man on the guitar—plays on, backing her bold spirit. The men in the audience, including Hero, look on indulgently at her playful flirtation. The mood is easy and tolerant. A picture of urban conviviality and openness, Doston ka Adda appears as a microcosm of Bombay’s culturally hybrid and modern world.

  4.4. Bombay’s cosmopolitan world in Taxi Driver. Source: Navketan Films.

  If Bombay’s Indian world is cosmopolitan, it is also full of vicious predators. Gangsters and gamblers prey on innocent city dwellers. Unscrupulous men lie in wait to entice and coerce poor women into the flesh trade. Street toughs extort the vulnerable, and slumlords terrorize their poor
tenants. While highlighting Bombay’s perils, these crime melodramas also accept them as given. Baazi (1951), for example, opens with Dev Anand in a gambling den. He is a smalltime gambler with uncanny skills. His urgent need for money drives him to participate in a big-time gambling racket that already exists. CID (1956) opens with a petty pickpocket, played by Johnny Walker, who ends up witnessing a murder while slinking into a newspaper office to steal typewriters. In the film, the CID detective (Anand) is up against an established crime mafia run by a respectable businessman who doubles as a criminal mastermind, with a beautiful moll and murderous henchmen at his command. Of course, the criminals are always caught in the end. If the hero takes to crime, it is only because he is poor and unemployed, and, in any case, eventually he finds his way to the right path because of love. Like the tramp films, law, leavened by morality and affection, wins in the end.

  4.5. Love and freedom in Bombay—Dev Anand and Kalpana Kartik in Taxi Driver. Source: Navketan Films.

  The thematic victory of law and morality must be placed against the celebration of the city. Bombay may be perilous, but it is also the place where the heroine played by Kalpana Kartik in Taxi Driver seeks refuge from an arranged marriage in the village. She finds love—Dev Anand—and a career as a singer in the film industry. The dark city is also the shining city, a place of glamour and fortune, of opportunity and freedom, of cosmopolitan culture and bourgeois self-fashioning. If the artists have made peace with the nation-state, they have also accepted the capitalist city as their mise-en-scène, their here and now.

  5

  THE TABLOID AND THE CITY

  It was April 27, 1959. As the day wore on, the oppressive humidity hung like a pall over the city. Deputy Commissioner John Lobo of the Bombay City Police was in his office, planning to escape the sweltering heat with a family holiday in the cool Nilgiri Hills.1 But police work intervened. Lobo recalls that he had spent a typical busy day at his Crime Branch, CID (Criminal Investigation Department), office in the hulking police commissioner’s building. The daily routine of discussing business with the commissioner over a cup of tea had ended at around 5:00 p.m., when the phone rang. Commander Samuel of the Indian Navy was on the line.

  “Commander Nanavati is coming to see you. He was down at my residence.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “He has had a quarrel with a person and has shot at him.”

  A short time later, he received another call, this one from Deputy Inspector Gautam of Gamdevi Police Station.

  “There has been a shooting incident. A Mr. Ahuja has been fatally injured. We are proceeding to the spot and will get back to you.”

  A little later, he heard a voice outside his office, asking “Lobo sahib ka kamra kahan hai?” (Where is Mr. Lobo’s office?). A tall, handsome gentleman dressed in white shirt and slacks walked in and introduced himself as Commander Nanavati. He appeared to Lobo like a man in a hurry to unburden himself of something weighing on him.

  “I have shot a man.”

  “He is dead. I have just received a message from Gamdevi Police Station.”

  Commander Nanavati turned pale on hearing this. There was a pause. It was Lobo who broke the silence.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Just a glass of water.”

  Lobo then gathered from Commander Nanavati that the shooting had occurred over an affair between the commander’s wife, Sylvia, and the man who now lay dead. As Lobo puts it, it was a case of “the eternal triangle that sometimes upsets a marriage.” Based on Nanavati’s statements, the police retrieved a revolver and some unspent ammunition from his car. Lobo then placed the commander under arrest.

  “Ordinarily, undertrials in police custody are lodged in police lock-ups. We felt Nanavati could be shown some consideration and accommodated him in one of our office-rooms.”

  Later, Lobo describes the “feverish activity” at the Jeevan Jyot apartment building of the victim as the Gamdevi police officers investigated the scene of the crime. They noted the shattered glass in the nine-by-six bathroom, the bloodstains on the wall and door handle, and, lying on the floor, “the empty brown envelope bearing the name ‘Lt.-Commander K. M. Nanavati.’” Recalling the murder scene years later, Lobo could not resist a philosophical observation: “The evil that men do lives after them—it leaves ‘footprints on the sands of time.’”

  Thus began the sensational Nanavati case that consumed the city. It had all the ingredients of a thrilling drama—extramarital sex, jealousy, and murder. It also had compelling and cosmopolitan dramatis personae—Kawas Maneckshaw Nanavati, an upright Parsi naval officer; Sylvia, his beautiful English wife; and a rich, swinging Sindhi bachelor, Prem Bhagwandas Ahuja. The locus of the drama was decidedly upscale. The Nanavatis lived in elegant Cuffe Parade, and Ahuja’s posh apartment building on Nepean Sea Road (ironically named Jeevan Jyot, or Flame of Life) was in the exclusive Malabar Hill neighborhood. This upper-class geography cast the case as a story about the cosmopolitan elite in the city. The murder case was fought all the way from the trial in the Bombay Sessions Court to the final appeal in the Supreme Court in Delhi, with renowned lawyers battling on opposite sides. It was also destined to make legal history as the last jury trial in India.2

  The case received relentless press attention throughout the nearly three years of legal wrangling in the courts. The story even made the pages of Time and the New Yorker.3 Facts and opinions surrounding it entered everyday conversation and popular culture in India. So great and lasting was the public impact of the case that even when it disappeared from the front pages of newspapers, the interest in the event never waned. In 1963 a Hindi film loosely based on the incident, Yeh Raaste Hain Pyaar Ke (These Are the Pathways to Love), opened in theaters. Ten years later, Achanak (Suddenly), another Hindi film based on the Nanavati story, was released. It appears as a vignette in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and forms the central arc of Indra Sinha’s sprawling novel The Death of Mr. Love.4 In 2002 the Hindustan Times Tabloid ran a special on the case, reminding its readers of the compelling cast of characters, the captivating legal drama, and its sensational impact on popular culture. It revisited all the lurid details and gossip surrounding the case. Retailed once again was Ahuja’s image as a Don Juan, cooing seductively into the ears of one of the several women he wooed: “The meaning of my name is Love—Prem.”5

  Half a century after Nanavati pumped three bullets into the body of his wife’s lover, the event continues to retain its sensational appeal. I return to the case to examine the postcolonial city that the legal and mass cultural spectacle brought into sharp focus. At the center of this new culture of sensation produced by the outsize media attention was the portrait of a cosmopolitan society. The case’s multiethnic and sophisticated cast of characters evoked Bombay’s mythic image. The fact that an Englishwoman was involved never raised an eyebrow. There was no insinuation (one very likely today) that she lacked the cultural values of India and exhibited the lax morals of Western women. At that time, the fact that Sylvia lived in Bombay and was married to a Parsi seemed totally natural. It was as if nothing had changed in the city, as if the Partition violence had done nothing to tarnish its myth of openness. In fact, a lot had changed. British rule had ended a little over a decade ago, and Bombay was no longer a colonial metropolis. Now, writers, artists, and filmmakers had to imagine the promise of the city in the context of the nation. The picture of the cosmopolitan milieu broadcast by the trial also had to contend with the legal system, ideology, and politics of a free India. In revisiting the case, my goal is to examine this changing city and to draw out the murder trial’s effects on the politics of the city; specifically, I am interested in its contribution to the development of populist politics, that is, the politics of the “people.”

  MEET THE PRESS

  Almost single-handedly responsible for turning Ahuja’s murder into a gripping and enduring event in popular culture was the spunky Bombay tabloid Blitz. For nearly two and
a half years after the trial opened on September 23, 1959, Blitz covered the case with outsize and relentless attention. With bold front-page headlines, photographs, scoops, special features, boxed reports, and gossip, Blitz dramatized the case as a soap opera of morality and patriotism and played it on the stage of mass culture. The three chief protagonists were—a dashingly handsome naval officer devoted to the nation; his beautiful but impressionable wife; and an ultramodern, wealthy, and wily Lothario, who had wronged not just Nanavati but India itself by seducing a married woman while her husband sailed the seas in defense of the nation. There was also a fourth protagonist—Blitz and its dapper and dynamic Clark Gable look-alike, the Parsi editor Russi K. Karanjia, a well-known figure in the city. Under his direction, Blitz audaciously framed and broadcast the case of a murder in the city as an event of nationwide importance. Splicing lurid details and courtroom drama into a moral and patriotic story line, it staged the Nanavati case as a riveting media event, the first of its kind in India.

  When Ahuja’s murder occurred, Blitz was already established as a widely read Bombay tabloid. From its inception in 1941, it quickly became known for sensational stories under its colorful and larger-than-life founder-editor, Karanjia. With an irrepressible drive to unearth and spice up stories, Karanjia fashioned Blitz into a popular tabloid known for its irreverence and outsize confidence. A sign hanging outside his office read: “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.”6

  Born in 1912, Karanjia belonged to an upper-class family.7 His father was an ophthalmic surgeon who had trained in Edinburgh. His mother came from a wealthy family from Quetta and had been educated by an English governess. The family lived opposite the famous Orient Club on Chowpatty Beach in Quetta Terrace, a wedding gift to the couple by Karanjia’s maternal grandfather. As was typical with upper-class Parsis, his upbringing was Western. The hand-wound gramophone played records of Enrico Caruso, Fernando Gusso, and Lawrence Tibbett. A grand piano, the surgeon’s wedding gift to his wife, occupied nearly one-third of the living room in the sprawling apartment. At the frequent parties hosted by his mother, tea would be offered in the finest china and served to the upper-crust guests by a liveried butler. The evening would invariably include his mother playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and his younger brother singing “The Lost Chord,” Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” or Schubert’s “Serenade.”