I was disconsolate after leaving Bombay. My good friends were there. I had gotten married there. My first child was born there, as was my second. There I had gone from earning a couple rupees a day to thousands — hundreds of thousands121—and there I had spent it all. I loved it, and I still do!
Bombay meant something to Manto beyond being merely a place he knew, a city in which he had lived. In this wistful invocation, he states his outright love for the city. He mentions two chief things. For one, years of personal history important to him took place there. Compared to his new life in Lahore, his time in Bombay had been full of crucial, exciting work to do, money to be earned, and people to meet. He valued how the city had made him who he was, how it had given him the opportunity to be a writer and to mix with the creative elite of his country. In hindsight, he must have felt as if he had been part of an enormous, vital enterprise.
But he also praises the city in another way. He appreciated how it had accepted him although he had failed by the middle-class standards of Indian society. Interestingly, the city’s acceptance was not obvious approbation but benign indifference.122 But with indifference came anonymity and in turn the freedom to become who he wished to be. Self-reliance and personal fortitude were traits that Manto valued, and when he saw that the city espoused the same qualities, he must have felt within his rightful domain. Bombay, more than Delhi, and certainly more than provincial Lahore, was the city of license and liberty that Manto craved, the place where he might become his own man.
Bombay Stories is a collection of Manto’s fiction set in part or entirely in that city, and a unique sense of place emerges through the narratives. In fact, a merging of place and character seems to occur for Manto, as for many after him — to write about Bombay means to write about a certain group of characters of a particular milieu. Bombay Stories represents the first and best literary evidence of Bombay’s emergence as the modern city we now recognize it to be, and Manto’s way of characterizing the city — populating it with a motley crew of prostitutes, pimps, writers, film stars, musicians, the debauched, and the rich — has become typical of a sub-genre of Indian fiction that I will loosely call ‘Bombay fiction.’ Whether through historical coincidence or literary prescience or both, Manto stands at the very beginning of this important Indian literary tradition.
Manto never compiled all his stories set in Bombay in one volume, so this collection of translations is both a sample of his work and represents a specific aspect of it. I have organized the stories chronologically. In fact he wrote the bulk of them after immigrating to Pakistan (eleven of the total fifteen), and this retrospective attention appears prominently in several stories. For instance, in ‘Mammad Bhai’ he writes, ‘It was almost twenty years ago that I used to frequent those restaurants’; and in describing the title character, ‘I don’t remember what exactly he looked like, but after so many years I can still recall anticipating that he must be enormous, the kind of man Hercules bicycles would use as a model in their advertising.’ Most of these stories were apparently written, at least in part, to assuage the pangs of nostalgia.
Lastly, if Manto is indeed the first representative of the contemporary Indian genre, then we might also consider how his prose includes literary devices that we now characterize as post-modern. Many of these stories feature narrative irruptions and self-reflexive commentary; he also obfuscates the clean genre limits of biography and fiction. While most writers of fiction covertly include details from their lives, Manto goes further, and in many stories he incorporates an eponymous Manto character — a character that roughly corresponds to the actual man. There are seven such stories in Bombay Stories, and practically every story in which his character appears does, in fact, give us some detail that is true to his life. In ‘Babu Gopi Nath’, we find the character, Manto, working at a weekly newspaper in Bombay, just as the actual Manto did. In ‘Janaki’ we find him writing film scripts. In ‘Mammad Bhai’ he falls ill with malaria while living in a tiny room. ‘Rude’ tells us how he spent time working in Delhi, as well as revealing his fascination with the Communist Party. In ‘Barren’ he talks about how he would earn seven to ten rupees for each story he wrote, and in ‘Mummy’ he mentions the death of his son. While each story provides us with some accurate biographical information, other details are blatantly inaccurate. ‘Rude’ provides us with the best examples. In this story Manto is re-acquainted with a character named Nasir, an old friend from Aligarh Muslim University. Manto did reunite with an old friend after returning from his hiatus in Delhi, but this was Shahid Latif. Also we notice that Nasir is a foreman in a factory and husband to the famous Communist leader Izzat Jahan, and Shahid Latif was married to the writer Ismat Chughtai and worked in the film industry.
Authorial intrusions also complicate stories — especially those with an eponymous Manto character — as they highlight the stories’ constructed and textual nature, often in a disingenuous or misleading way. In ‘Siraj’ and ‘Barren’, two stories that use an autobiographical conceit, Manto refers without prompting or an obvious narrative reason to the fact of his writing. Relevant passages in ‘Siraj’ are the following:
But this is the impression of a short story writer who in describing a tiny facial mole can make it seem as large as the sang-e-aswad in Mecca.
These details are enough. I don’t want to tell you what I thought because it’s not relevant to the story.
The city had built tin shacks there for the poor, and I won’t mention the nearby high-rises because they have nothing to do with this story, only that in this world there will always be the rich and the poor.
I don’t want to get into the details, but Siraj was with me at a hotel.
And from ‘Barren’:
Anyway, enough of this. If I go on in such detail, I’ll fill page after page and the story will get boring.
But now I’ve started talking about my stories!
By bringing attention to his authorial consciousness, Manto focuses our attention briefly on exactly what he pretends to dismiss or belittle: ‘Siraj’ is about storytelling (both Manto’s and Dhundhu’s), and it is about the rich and the poor, just as ‘Barren’ is about the exchange of stories and lies between Manto and Naim. Perhaps in ‘Barren’ we have an analogy that explains Manto’s fact-befuddling style: Naim writes to Manto at the story’s end to confess that he made everything up, and yet he also avers that while objectively false, his stories felt true, and that through his lies he expressed a real part of himself. As self-conscious reflections on storytelling interrupt the authorial transparency of documentary realism, we see a style emerge that makes Manto progressive in a sense separate from what the term meant during his lifetime: he had outstripped the literary conventions of his time.
Matt Reeck
1 Wadhawan, Jagdish Chander. Manto Naama: The Life of Saadat Hasan Manto. Trans. Jai Ratan. New Delhi: Roli, 1998, 14.