Mumbai Fables Page 17
Growing up in an elite Parsi family, Karanjia was expected to go on to Cambridge University and pursue a career in the Indian Civil Service after his education in Bombay’s St. Xavier’s High School and Wilson College.8 But an innocent prank changed his life. While waiting to qualify for admission into Cambridge, Karanjia engaged in a back-and-forth exchange of letters under different pseudonyms in the “Letters to the Editor” column of the Times of India. When Ivor Jehu, the deputy editor, discovered his identity, he offered him a job with the newspaper, which Karanjia accepted. Recognizing his potential, the paper sent him to London to apprentice with the Evening Standard. But he was soon bored with the staid Standard, gravitating instead to the excitement of the tabloid the Daily Mirror.
When he returned to India, Karanjia was dismayed to find himself relegated to the background while the management groomed Frank Moraes as the first Indian editor of the Times of India. He left the Times and went on to briefly edit the Sunday Standard and the short-lived Morning Standard. After leaving the Morning Standard, he assembled a group to start a tabloid of his own. The group included Dinkar V. Nadkarni, who had earned a reputation in journalism by penning sensational crime stories in the Bombay Sentinel, edited by the veteran Irish journalist and longtime advocate of Indian nationalism Benjamin Guy Horniman; Zahir Babar Kureishi, who wrote a popular column under the pen name of zabak; and Nadir Boman-Behram, who was to look after the advertising and business side of things. The tabloid, launched from an old Apollo Street building in the Fort, was introduced as “our blitz, India’s blitz against Hitler.”9 Within four months of the inaugural issue, the circulation had reached twenty thousand; twenty-five years later, the “people’s paper” claimed a readership of one million.10
Blitz both inhabited and defined Bombay’s dynamic urban milieu. As a newsweekly, it drew on the Island City’s highly developed bourgeois public sphere. A key element of this sphere was the city’s newspapers, where Bombay’s public life appeared as news and photographs. Like all newspapers, Bombay’s press served a crucial function in making the city legible. Typically, newspaper readers confront their public world in reports on politics and economics, descriptions of social engagements, crime stories, announcements of job vacancies and tender notices, advertisements of products and entertainment, film and theater reviews, and accounts of sporting events. In an important sense, newspapers bring the public sphere to life for their readers and function as agents that act upon it. It has been said that in modern city life, the secular ritual of reading the newspaper replaces the Morning Prayer. It is safe to say that Bombay’s illiterate and poor citizens did not practice this secular ritual. The public life rendered real by the newspapers lay beyond them. What is more, the English language dominated the lettered world brought into view by newspapers. In this English-scripted public world, the Times of India was preeminent. Sober and elitist, it carried a whiff of the formality inherited from its colonial past.
In contrast, Blitz adopted a populist and nationalist mantle. What it lost by publishing in English it tried to gain by deploying a radical ideology. It espoused socialism and planning, and identified the cause of the nation with anti-imperialist internationalism. The tabloid lauded Afro-Asian solidarity against the capitalist West, and loudly and regularly unveiled dark CIA plots against India and Third World leaders. Columnists with Communist sympathies—Ramesh Sanghvi, A. Raghavan, and K. A. Abbas—contributed to the leftist flavor. Karanjia reveled in playing the champion of the Third World cause against American interests. A characteristic example of his posture was the front-page story in the early sixties headlined “Editor Karanjia Crashed US Curtain into Cuba.”11 The report, datelined Havana, triumphantly noted his arrival in Cuba at Fidel Castro’s invitation in spite of the denial of a transit visa by the United States to permit him to fly via New York. When the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser visited the city in 1960, Blitz declared: “President Nasser Captivates the Heart of Bombay!”12 Five years later, Nasser bestowed Karanjia with the Republican Order of Merit, the highest award given to a foreigner. Exultantly, Blitz reported that despite torrential rain, thousands of Bombay’s citizens turned out to felicitate Karanjia.13
Blitz’s political viewpoint closely echoed that of its idol, Nehru, who also viewed a robust national identity and anti-imperialist cosmopolitanism as complementary. Indeed, the endorsement of Afro-Asian solidarity, the admiration for the Soviet Union, the distrust of the United States, and the support for socialism and planning formed parts of an ideology that was widely shared in the decolonized world during the fifties and sixties. In this respect, Blitz was not unusual.
But Karanjia’s journalistic creation was no ordinary left-nationalist fare. True, anti-imperialism and socialism were its watchwords, but it espoused populist rather than class politics. In line with Third World radicalism, Blitz frequently denounced capitalists and championed socialism, but it regarded class as an element, not the whole of the political division. The battle lines were clear. The “people,” a homogeneous category constructed out of a socially heterogeneous population, stood on one side. Socialism and anti-imperialism were seen to serve the “people,” and the cause was entrusted with the leader, Jawaharlal Nehru. On the other side were the corrupt, the profiteers, big business, their right-wing political patrons, and communal politicians who divided the “people” along religious lines. Blitz saw its mission as one of carrying the battle of the people into the English-dominated public sphere. With hard-hitting, two-fisted reports, it saw itself smashing open the arena of public opinion monopolized by the procapitalist and proimperialist elites.
To brashly insert the politics of the collective people, Blitz openly and warmly extolled Nehru and skewered those it saw as undermining his leadership with its signature muckraking, over-the-top stories. Among the unlucky politicians to draw its fire was Morarji Desai, the conservative Congress leader who was elected as the chief minister of Bombay in 1952 and was to become India’s prime minister in 1977. Blitz assailed him as a power-hungry hypocrite who had become the chief minister through a subterfuge.14 It scorned his persona of incorruptibility and moral rectitude and taunted his orders on Prohibition by calling illicit liquor “Morarjin” and Morarjuice.”15 Never missing an opportunity to denounce him as an autocratic enemy of the people, it published stories that claimed to expose his abuse of power, patronage of big business and profiteers, and vindictiveness toward his critics, most notably Karanjia and Blitz. Desai’s greatest defect, in the tabloid’s eyes, was that he feigned loyalty to Nehru while harboring ambitions to succeed, if not replace, him as prime minister.
Blitz thrived on controversy, and Karanjia was frequently embroiled in defamation suits, which the tabloid wore as badges of honor. This is precisely what happened in the so-called Chester Bowles Forgery Case, which once again pitted Karanjia against Desai. The saga began in July 1952 when Karanjia published an interview with Chester Bowles, the U.S. ambassador to India.16 Apparently, this irked D. F. Karaka, the Oxford-educated Parsi editor of the rival Bombay tabloid, Current. On October 1, 1952, Current published purported copies of letters exchanged between Karanjia and Bowles. In one letter that Karanjia allegedly wrote to Bowles, he complains of Blitz’s financial difficulties, asks for help in getting American advertisements, and requests that the ambassador meet some of his Communist friends. In the purported reply, Bowles expresses his readiness to meet Karanjia’s friends. Current charged that the letters exposed Karanjia’s secret desire to be a “Washington patriot.”17 Karanjia thundered in reply: “a monstr ous lie . . . Illustrated with Shameless Forgery.”18 He denied writing such a letter or receiving the one attributed to Bowles. The American ambassador also called the letters forged and denounced Current as irresponsible for publishing a smear.
The Desai government ordered a probe and ended up filing charges against Karanjia. It was alleged that Karanjia had fabricated the forgeries and conspired to get them published in Current in order to embarrass Karaka. Blitz cover
ed the trial with its usual repertoire of bold headlines and blow-by-blow accounts of the proceedings. It expressed outraged innocence and dropped dark hints of a conspiracy hatched by Republicans and McCarthyites against the Democrat Bowles and the progressive Karanjia. After the testimonies and cross-examination of numerous witnesses, the scrutiny of typewriter fonts and letterheads, and legal jousting by the prosecution and the defense, Karanjia was exonerated. The government appealed the decision to the High Court, but its plea was dismissed. The headline in Blitz exclaimed: “karanji a doubly acquitted, innocence doubly proved.”19
Never one to shy away from self-publicity, Karanjia cut a flamboyant figure. His tabloid frequently carried his pictures, now speaking at a meeting, now exchanging pleasantries with political and cultural celebrities. He brashly promoted himself and his paper. During his long editorship of Blitz, he took many controversial and unpredictable positions. He railed against the powerful but was not averse to cozying up to those at the top. Despite his self-professed radicalism, he was an open admirer of Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi. He professed republican sentiments but lauded the shah of Iran as the ruler over the ancient homeland of his Parsi community. An ardent rationalist, he became a devotee of Satya Sai Baba, the god man whom he had previously denounced for retailing mumbo jumbo. Such a figure naturally cut a divisive figure. There were hushed rumors in the city that he was on the take from the KGB, that he was a blackmailer and a hypocrite. The rumors only served to make him more interestingly colorful and controversial, and his tabloid the purveyor of a sensational public culture.
5.1. Karanjia with revolutionaries. Source: Homi D. Mistry, ed., Blitz: Four Fighting Decades (Bombay: Blitz Publications, 1981).
Central to Blitz’s self-representation as a radical paper of the people was its tabloid form. The tabloid is a classic urban form that claims to render legible the anonymous reality of everyday life in the modern metropolis in its bold and sensational headlines. It professes to reveal the mystery of the goings-on in the backrooms of power and money and expose the real motivations and desires of all and sundry. The city becomes real. Adopting this stance, Blitz dispensed with the convention of dispassionate observation and balanced opinion and assumed a charged tone from the very beginning. The tabloid reveled in its self-proclaimed role as a racket buster, exposing truths concealed by the powerful and fearlessly advocating the interests of the people.
In 1945, for example, D. V. Nadkarni, Blitz’s chief racket buster, wrote a series of sensational stories on the textile shortage. These accounts claimed to uncover the hidden hand of the big wholesale dealers who, with the alleged help of government officials, were hoarding textile stocks to drive up the price while representing the shortage as the result of a natural scarcity.20 This was not unusual. Week after week, Blitz exposed truths allegedly buried beneath the surface of random and fragmentary events. The embezzlement of public funds, prostitution rackets, sordid stories of seduction and sex in the name of spiritualism, dark political designs behind high-sounding rhetoric, and the fleecing of the poor by rich industrialists and property developers, all were staples in the weekly. Even its sports column, called “Knock Out,” took on the racket-busting posture. It was written by A.F.S. Talyarkhan, whose bearded, pipe-in-mouth photograph on the page appeared to lend gravity to the charges of malfeasance that he leveled against the sports authorities. The poor performance of Indian athletes in international competitions, he alleged, could be explained by the petty squabbles and power grabbing of officials behind the scenes. Of course, no tabloid can be complete without pinups. Thus, the last page always carried a pinup that greeted the reader with a witty caption, for example, “Nalini makes a winsome bather, But will someone blow off the lather!” Beside the titillating photograph, there was always the “Last Page,” written by K. A. Abbas, a journalist, screenplay writer, and film director. His column offered a man-about-town view of the world, commenting, venting against, and exposing the machinations of the powerful.
In Blitz’s world, there was nothing mysterious about reality. Once it had wiped the mist off the surface-level mystery and decoded the outward face of events, the exposed reality always appeared rational, a product of the relentlessly instrumental and banal pursuits of money and power. The scandal lay in the fact that people wrapped their ruthlessly rational motivations and actions in tissues of lies and deceptions. This required a careful scrutiny of the misleading exteriority of events. The journalist had to act as a detective and plunge into the rough-and-tumble of life. He had to examine seemingly disconnected fragments to decipher hidden connections and detect clues to the underlying reality. In this process, the journalist-as detective functioned as an author who produced written and illustrative political and social texts that claimed to depict modernity’s imperceptible reality.
Bombay acquired a textual and photographic face in Blitz’s news accounts and images that sought to represent reality in its surface-level expressions. No grand philosophy or concept defined this depiction of reality. Rather, the tabloid identified the phenomena in the empirical material itself, in the exemplary spaces and activities of modern life. It traced the contours of Bombay’s daily life on its streets and neighborhoods, restaurants and cinema theaters, textile factories and neighborhoods, docks and shipping offices, and municipal institutions and public parks. Warnings of “Death-Trap for Promenaders at Marine Drive Seafront” and exposures of “Super-Market in Sex: Where Vice Is Sold on Department-Store Basis” or “Bombay Municipality Creates Slums” formed the stuff of Blitz’s Bombay.21
These stories of the city’s dark side did not signify cultural pessimism or despair. If anything, Blitz always expressed supreme confidence in modern life. Showing no nostalgia for the imagined harmony of the countryside, it openly embraced the gritty, conflict-ridden, and urban milieu of Bombay. While it uncovered tales of greed for money and power, it also provided glamorous accounts of film personalities and celebrated popular struggles for justice. On its pages, the city appeared as an immense and exciting mix of multilayered, contradictory, and restless lives. Everything seemed to be in motion. Fortunes were being made and lost, swindles were being plotted and exposed, and big dreams were being dreamed and shattered. People jostled for space and heroically struggled for survival and justice. Against the shadow of its dark side, Bombay’s metropolitan life glittered on the pages of Blitz.
The Nanavati trial was a godsend for Blitz. It provided an opportunity to project the case as a drama of the politics of the “people” on the sensational surface of the tabloid pages. Blitz seized the opening and framed the trial as a titillating urban drama of national significance. Interestingly, although Nanavati belonged to Karanjia’s Parsi community, Blitz never highlighted the ethnic dimension. It did not extol Nanavati’s Parsi origins or comment negatively on Ahuja’s Sindhi identity. Nor did it read any dark conspiracy in Sylvia’s English origins despite the tabloid’s penchant for discovering neocolonial designs on India. The tabloid presented the story as a moral and political scandal, as a case of the nation’s betrayal by the seductive and corrupt influence of the rich.
THE TRIAL
The trial opened on the afternoon of September 23, 1959, in the packed District and Sessions Court of Judge R. B. Mehta, the first legal venue entrusted to try a murder case.22 The nine-member jury consisted of two Parsis, one Anglo-Indian, a Christian, and five Hindus. Representing the government, Chief Public Prosecutor C. M. Trivedi charged Nanavati with intentionally causing Ahuja’s death, an offense under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code. Commander Nanavati, resplendent in his naval uniform, pleaded not guilty. Leading the defense team was Karl J. Khandalawala, a famous criminal lawyer, equally well known as an expert on Indian painting and sculpture.
During the month-long trial, which included a dramatic visit by the judge, the jury, and the counsels to the murder scene, the following facts were established. Nanavati, a highly regarded naval officer, had married Sylvia in England in 1949. Aft
er his return to Bombay, the couple had three children and lived in a Cuffe Parade flat in Colaba. In 1956 another naval officer’s wife introduced Sylvia to Prem Ahuja, a thirty-one-year-old, curly-haired, and handsome businessman. A bachelor, Ahuja lived with his unmarried sister Mamie and three servants in a large apartment on Nepean Sea Road in posh Malabar Hill. Like many Sindhis of the Hindu community, Ahuja’s family had fled Karachi after the Partition in 1947. In Bombay he had built a successful car dealership called Universal Motors, which sold Willys Jeeps. Ahuja’s acquaintance with Sylvia turned into an affair while Nanavati spent long periods at sea, away from home.
On April 18, 1959, when Nanavati returned home, he found his wife inexplicably cold toward him. On April 27 the couple woke up early, took the dog to a veterinary surgeon, bought tickets for an afternoon cinema show, did some shopping at Crawford Market, and returned home. At breakfast, Nanavati asked Sylvia if there was a reason for her cold behavior, but she did not reply. Nanavati asked again after lunch, but she told him to stay away when he approached her. Finally, when he asked if she loved someone else, Sylvia confessed that she loved Ahuja and had been unfaithful. Stunned, Nanavati asked if she was willing to give up her lover. She did not respond. Meanwhile, the children were waiting to go to the cinema. Nanavati drove Sylvia, the children, and a neighbor’s child to the Metro Theatre for the afternoon show of Tom’s Thumb, promising to pick them up after the film at 6 p.m. But things took a different turn.