The city, cinema and the sea
Nasreen Rehman’s translation of Manto’s stories based on his life in Bombay and Poona between 1937 and 1948 stands out for its precise capturing of the author’s modernist Urdu phraseology
So it’s finally happening. We are in the process of being presented with English translations of all of Saadat Hasan Manto’s 255 known stories. Published by Aleph, the stories are spread across three volumes, all translated by historian, writer and activist Nasreen Rehman. Of the three, we have in hand the first volume of this mammoth project, a set of 54 stories and two essays pertaining to Manto’s life in Bombay and Poona. Volumes two and three will cover Manto’s Punjab / Delhi / Kashmir and Pakistan stories respectively.
The table of contents in Volume 1 reveals many tales that are appearing for the first time in English, further enriched by a long informative, analytical and personal introduction by the translator. Rehman’s introduction sets the tone as well as the context for the stories that follow. And when the stories come we are mesmerised by the felicity of Rehman’s translation of Manto’s precise, modernist Urdu phraseology, where words stand out as discrete perfect objects, perhaps a symptom of the uncompromising materialism of a socially committed writer’s impeccable realist eye. Here, English’s utlilitarian objectivity mingles piquantly with Manto’s ruthless social critique.
Rehman’s introduction seeks to balance an extensive biography of Manto with her own preoccupations as a historian and political person. Casting Manto’s work as prescient of
our times, Rehman connects the rise of Hindutva-driven communal violence towards Muslims in India and the fatalism of Pakistan’s anti-india political history with the writer’s tragic life across the Partition years and his writings of that period.
Manto’s Bombay-poona stories, however, belong to a slightly different register of cultural history — that of the city, cinema, the sea and urban denizen. In these stories, communal riots seldom form the bedrock of narratives (except say in stories such as Sahai, Ram Khelawan and Mozelle), and quite often we are witness to throwaway remarks about rioting in Bombay before the story advances in altogether different directions. Instead, this is the city of Walter Benjamin’s famous flâneur, one for whom sampling the city was a greater pleasure than work or family.
Manto’s is not the white city of south Bombay but the streets and lanes of Byculla, the Grant Road bazaar zone and Mahim as well as the arc along the sea from Worli to Juhu via Bandra. Interestingly, it is also a suburban Bombay with Manto’s film work set in Goregaon and Malad, where the two studios with which he had the longest relationship as a writer, Filmistan and Bombay Talkies, were located.
He weaves in and out of chawls, apartments in mansions, modern flats, the labyrinth of the bazaar of Arab Gully, studios and prostitute quarters.
The anthology launches itself with Women, a droll comedy about the circulation of pornographic films among Bombay’s bourgeoisie. We also have tales of Ashok Kumar shying away from Paro’s sexual overtures and of a studio munshi who gets involved in a surreal farrago involving a studio extra, a Marwari seth and a courtesan of sorts. And of course there is one of the great stories of this collection, My Name is Radha. This story, along
with Babu Gopinath, about a rich man who spends his life between call girls, actresses and various religious sites trying to fix up one of his lovers in marriage with a rich client, and Mummy, set in Poona, about a Eurasian woman who provides food and care to a posse of young men working in the Poona film studios while also being a procuress for them, are the pièces-de-résistance of Manto’s cinema tales.
The curtain between the prostitutes in Manto’s non-cinema stories and the actresses in his films stories is a thin one. Middle-class men like the film hero in My Name is Radha and the munsh i in Suited and Booted are weak cowards beating pathetic retreats in the face of female sexual desire. Or they are dark Expressionist mercantile bourgeois characters such as Gopinath and the wealthy protagonist of Loser, men who enter the film industry with a death wish to gamble away all success and wealth as well as the women they pick up along the way.
In short, bourgeois and middle-class men are incapable of enjoying sexual romance with courtesan actresses due to moral inhibitions while the seths are seen as rapacious. Here, Manto’s Freudo-marxism of sorts sets up a murky “romantic” triangle — sex workers caught between the timidity of impotent middle-class men and the ruthless rapaciousness of capitalists — as the main dialectic of communal and political violence in the subcontinent.
The scene darkens as the years and stories progress, from earlier chalta-phirta tales to a story such as Ram Khelawan, where we encounter Manto on his last day in Bambai / India, waiting to leave for Lahore amid the post-partition riots. He is visited by his washerman Ram Khelawan. who appears to apologise for having almost beaten him up during the riots. With this, Saadat Hasan leaves Bambai and cinema and heads towards the stories for which he will be justly famous as the foremost writer of the Partition era. The sharpness of Manto’s prose gets more incisive with Rehman’s razor-sharp translation just as the knives of patriarchal violence in various guises begin to be brandished all around at scales never seen before.