Bombay’s working world was a male one. In 1864 there were about 600 women for 1,000 men, and by 1930 the proportion of women had declined even further.75 If women worked, it was because their family was so poor that they needed the income, however slight. In 1931, only thirteen percent of women claimed employment, even though around two-thirds were of working age.76 Prostitution developed out of these conditions and did so on a scale unlike anywhere else in India, as the migration of unaccompanied males to the city met with destitute women forced to earn money by any means possible. In 1921 there were an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 prostitutes in the city.77 (Contemporary figures estimate there are now about 450,000 prostitutes, and yet these numbers are approximate and conceivably on the low side.78) Manto saw how the unique social conditions of the city bred prostitution, and the figure of the prostitute became of considerable interest to him. In Bombay Stories, prostitutes of one type or another are featured in just about every story.
Another striking feature of Bombay was its ethnic diversity. One gauge of this would be Manto’s enumerations of the ethnicities represented by prostitutes: in ‘Mammad Bhai’ he claims that there were prostitutes ‘of every sort — Jewish, Punjabi, Marathi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Anglo-Indian, French, Chinese, Japanese.’ In the same story Manto mentions Arab pearl merchants and Chinese restaurateurs.79 Otherwise, in several stories there are Punjabis and Kashmiris; in ‘Khushiya’ the prostitute Kanta Kumari is from Mangalore, Karnataka. ‘Smell’ and ‘Mummy’ feature Anglo-Indians; ‘The Insult’ and ‘Rude’ mention people from south India. ‘Ten Rupees’ and ‘Mummy’ involve characters from Andhra Pradesh; Pathans from the Hindu Kush Mountains are mentioned in ‘Janaki.’ Mammad Bhai is from Rampur, Uttar Pradesh; and Sen, the murdered musician in ‘Mummy’, is Bengali.
Not only did people come from everywhere to live in Bombay, but people of all religions lived there together in relative harmony — from the Parsi descendants of Zoroastrian immigrants from Iran to Jews, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Muslims; and this history of tolerance has a surprisingly long history. Christian history in Bombay began almost 500 years ago. The Portuguese were the first to come, and they worked up and down the western coast, with the Jesuits and the Franciscans competing for souls to convert. While the Jesuits were said to have won out in Dadar and Parel, the Franciscans fared better among the native fisher-folk in Mahim and Bombay.80 The architectural patrimony of Christianity in Bombay is old as well, as St Michael’s in Mahim, the oldest surviving church in the city, was built in 1534, the year the Portuguese acquired land from the Sultan of Gujarat.81 By the time the British took over, there were already Christians in the native population, and in 1674 the East India Company asked the British government to send over some good unmarried Anglican girls since the Company’s workers were breaking religious etiquette by marrying native Indian Catholics.82
The history of the Parsi community is deep as well83 for they came as soon as the British, and their contributions — first as cloth merchants, then as shipwrights,84 and yet later as industrial barons and intellectuals — greatly aided the city on its rise to prominence. A Jewish community also existed in the city:85 the 1941 census showed more than 10,000 Jews living there, and the vast majority of these were the Bene Israel.86 Mozelle from the eponymous story in Bombay Stories is Jewish. Manto provides us with certain Indian Jewish stereotypes — namely, Mozelle’s traditional dress and wooden Sandals — but her licentiousness is clearly a fictional detail. Among the other communities, the Muslims ruled the area before the Western colonial intrusions, and Hindus of diverse types have lived in the area since perhaps time immemorial.
In only the last twenty years, Mumbai has increasingly become associated with communal violence, chiefly after the 1993 bombings and riots that seared the city and left 1,400 dead in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.87 The first notable example of such violence came during an eight-day stretch in 1893 when riots broke out in reaction to Hindu — Muslim communal fighting in Saurashtra, Gujarat. Eighty people died (thirty-three Hindus, forty-six Muslims, and one Jew), and 700 people were wounded.88
Riots erupted again in 1929, and yet these riots were not set off by religious acrimony; they began as a clash between striking workers of General Motors and a group of Pathan musclemen. 89 Pathans were an intimidating physical lot — tall, broad-shouldered men wearing turbans and flowing gowns, their kurtas so long they nearly touched the ground. From the wild mountainous regions of the borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan, they had well, deserved reputations for violence. In addition to working as henchmen for corporate powers, they also worked as small-time moneylenders. They arrived on payday at the factory gates to demand repayment on loans and were said to go so far as to demand sex from women who could not pay up.90 (Pathans figure in Bombay Stories several times. In ‘Mummy’, there is mention of a ‘bloodthirsty Pathan’ pressuring Chaddah to pay back a loan, and in ‘Why I Don’t Go to the Movies’, Manto mentions the ‘intimidating Pathan guard.’) A group of forty such Pathans were called in to break the workers’ strike. They descended upon the offices of the Girni Kamgar Union, the leading Communist labour union, but the violence soon got out of hand and turned along communal lines. In the clashes, 106 people died and over 600 were wounded,91 and in time these riots became known as the Pathan Riots.
Manto claims that he was twice witness to Hindu — Muslim violence during his first stint in Bombay (1936–41),92 and there is no reason to doubt him, as the years before independence saw increased violence of all sorts, including labour strikes in connection with the Quit India Movement. And yet it wasn’t until the communal violence of 1946–47 that Muslims thought to live separately for their safety.93 Manto left the city due in part to the growing tension that divided the city on religious lines, and yet even then the growing unease he felt was more a premonition for what the future would hold than it was a part of the city he knew and loved.
LITERARY CONTEXT
Salman Rushdie has described Manto as a writer of ‘low-life’ fictions,94 and this phrase helps explain why Manto had problems with government censorship and, to an extent, with many of his fellow writers. Rushdie’s comment points not only to the low social status of many — in fact the overwhelming majority — of Manto’s characters, but it also suggests the uncertain morals that many of these characters display. It was due to this second point that Manto found himself in conflict with the leading literary movement of India and Pakistan of the twentieth century, the Progressive Writers’ Movement.