‘Bombay Stories,’ by Saadat Hasan Manto
Suketu Mehta
Saadat Hasan Manto has a good claim to be considered the greatest South Asian writer of the 20th century. In his work, written in Urdu, he incarnated the exuberance, the madness, the alcoholic delirium of his time, when the country he loved cleaved into two and set upon each other, brothers of all religions murdering their infant nephews and raping their sisters-in-law.
Manto is best known for his stories about the partition of the subcontinent immediately following independence in 1947. Although he wrote essays, screenplays and one novel, Manto’s métier was the short story; he published more than 20 collections. He was an Indian F. Scott Fitzgerald, moving from north India to Bombay to sell his talents to the movie industry, and dying at 42, after a long struggle with alcoholism.
Manto wrote most of the stories that are collected here after moving to Pakistan in 1948, out of an aching longing for the city he had just left. Bombay in the 1930s and ’40s was a city of migrants working in textile mills, men without women. So the women in “Bombay Stories” are almost all prostitutes, those human weather vanes of loneliness. But what prostitutes! The 15-year-old Sarita in “Ten Rupees” is taken out by three men for a drive to the beach. Manto plays with our expectations of the standard fate of the young girl preyed on by older men, building up a scene out of a Joyce Carol Oates story or a David Lynch film. But it ends with the girl turning the tables on the men in a most unexpected way. No mere victim, this Sarita.
Manto sketches out the essential paradox of the relationship between prostitute and john in “Hamid’s Baby,” where a customer is choosing a 17-year-old girl: “Youth itself was sitting before him in its purest form — fresh, stainless youth wrapped in silk — and he could have her, not just for one night but for many, as once he paid for her, she would be his. And yet this thought saddened him. He didn’t know why such things happened — this girl should never be sold like merchandise. But then he realized if that were true then he could never have her.”
Anyone looking for further insight into the spate of news stories about Indian men brutalizing women could profit from reading this book. As one of the characters ponders, after being angered by the sight of a woman who wouldn’t cover up in front of him: “Now he was sure he’d been insulted. He realized that he implicitly expected women, whores included, to take him for a man and so to dress modestly in his presence, as had been the tradition for so long.”
A visitor to the city today is struck by the vast number of houses of pleasure and houses of worship, and their proximity. Manto provides the explanation in the rich sap Babu Gopi Nath’s response, when asked why he likes whorehouses and shrines: “Because there, from top to bottom, it’s all about deception. What better place could there be for a person who wants to deceive himself?”
Many of the stories are set in the Hindi film industry, which has its origins in the brothels; the grandmothers of some of today’s most successful actors started off as dancing girls. Respectable families would not allow their daughters to sing and dance for the entertainment of the general public, and so actresses in those years came from the demimonde. A wonderful companion volume to this book is “Stars From Another Sky,” Manto’s Bollywood Confidential, a mixture of drunken memoir and scabrous gossip.
One of the “Bombay Stories” brings us the 10 commandments of a fixer in the film industry: “If an actress addresses you as ‘bhayya’ or ‘bhai sahib’ (brother), immediately ask her in a whisper, ‘What’s your bra size?’ ” Another two refer to the political situation: “Remember, if you want to have a child with an actress, hold off until after independence!” “Never get addicted to liquor and actresses. It’s quite likely that Congress will suddenly outlaw them both.”
The ninth commandment speaks to what’s most admirable about Bollywood: It has all the secularism of a brothel. “A shopkeeper can be a Hindu shopkeeper or a Muslim one, but an actor can never be a Hindu actor or a Muslim one.”
The translators of “Bombay Stories” are a poet and an Urdu lecturer at Columbia University. I am grateful to them for bringing out these stories in English, but they err toward an excess of American colloquialisms. I have difficulty imagining someone in 1940s Bombay saying things like “I’m out of here” or “You’ll be in a world of hurt.” Take the translation, “buddy.” Wouldn’t the original word “yaar,” in context, be equally comprehensible to a foreign audience, especially since it can be explained in the glossary attached to the book? And why attach a glossary if the explanation for the word “chawl” is inserted in parentheses in the main text, irritatingly interrupting the story? Wouldn’t “tenement” have served better? But I can empathize with the translators; these sorts of choices are a constant kind of trench warfare for any author attempting, line by line, to convey an Indian reality in English.
The most interesting character in this book is Manto himself, the complicit writer, who appears under his own name in several stories. He arranges assignations for his actor friends, tries to tend to the women they injure, reflects with bitter humor about what men and women do to each other.
In 1951, Manto started writing a series of “Letters to Uncle Sam,” a masterpiece of tongue-in-cheek special pleading for writers and prescient observations about the American-Pakistani relationship. In one, he writes about his sentence of three months in prison for obscenity. “My judge thought that truth and literature should be kept far apart.”
Manto was tried several times for obscenity, and from a story of sexual obsession like “Smell,” one can see why. His travails, in India and Pakistan, foreshadowed the current dire state of freedom of speech in both countries — but more surprisingly, in the world’s largest democracy. In February, Penguin India agreed not just to withdraw but to “pulp,” in an act of gross literary violence, all copies of Wendy Doniger’s magisterial “The Hindus,” in fear of the right-wing mobs who seem poised to take power in Delhi. In India these days, truth and literature are to be kept far apart at all costs.
But the truth will prevail, because it is disobedient to any kind of authority. Manto once wrote a kind of writer’s prayer, which could serve as jacket copy for this book:
“Dear God, Compassionate and Merciful, Master of the Universe, we who are steeped in sin, kneel in supplication before Your throne and beseech You to recall from this world Saadat Hasan Manto, son of Ghulam Hasan Manto, who was a man of great piety. Take him away, O Lord, for he runs off from fragrance, chasing filth. He hates the bright sun, preferring dark labyrinths. He has nothing but contempt for modesty but is fascinated by the naked and the shameless. He hates what is sweet, but will give his life to sample what is bitter. He does not so much as look at housewives but is entranced by the company of whores. He will not go near running waters, but loves to wade through slush. Where others weep, he laughs; where they laugh, he weeps. Evil-blackened faces he loves to wash with tender care to highlight their features. He never thinks about You, preferring to follow Satan everywhere, the same fallen angel who once disobeyed You.”
Bombay Stories
Author: Saadat Hasan Manto
Translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad
Publisher: Vintage International
Pages: 288; Price: $16
Suketu Mehta is the author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.” He teaches at the Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.