Review: The Collected Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Volume 1, Bombay and Poona, translated by Nasreen Rehman

So it’s happening finally. 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 pioneering translation project – a set of 54 stories and two essays pertaining to Manto’s life in Bombay and Poona, a period of roughly a decade between 1937 and 1948. Volumes two and three will cover Manto’s Punjab/Delhi/Kashmir and Pakistan stories respectively. The table of contents of the Bombay-Poona stories 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 excellent introduction is essential to the volume, setting 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 the richness of English’s utlilitarian objectivity mingles piquantly with Manto’s ruthless social critique.

Rehman’s introduction is a complex critical piece that seeks to balance an extensive biography of Manto with her own preoccupations as a historian and political person. Casting Manto’s work as prescient for our times, Rehman connects the rise of Hindutva-driven communal hatred towards Muslims in India as well as the fatalism of Pakistan’s anti-India driven religious and political history with the writer’s tragic life across the Partition years and his writings of that period. And indeed, the fact that Manto considered himself a Kashmiri above all, not an Indian or a Pakistani, becomes a conundrum to work through…yet again, given particular swings Kashmiri history has taken in the recent past. But what makes Rehman’s introduction particularly poignant and thoughtful is the running tremor of the importance of women in all of this – in Manto’s own life as well as Rehman’s, especially her sojourners in her quest for Manto. Women remain the ultimate witnesses/victims of historical violence in Manto’s stories, and women it is now who are the guardians of his work that allows them to speak back to historical violence of our times where women remain the witness/victim of choice…yet again.

Manto’s Bombay-Poona stories, however, belong to a slightly different register of cultural history – that of the city, cinema, the sea and the 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 to rioting in Bombay before the story advances in altogether different directions. Instead, this is the city of Walter Benjamin’s famous flâneur, that hero of recent cultural histories and theories of 20th century modernity and urbanism, the dispassionate but engaged stroller of cities, their documentor and critic, one for whom sampling the city was a greater pleasure than work or family. It is indeed, the idea of the flâneur that dovetails well with Manto’s self-appellation as chalta phirta Bambai, one who is exhaustively intercalated with the ins and outs of the city. Manto’s Bombay is not the White City of south 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 happening in Goregaon and Malad where the two studios with which he had the longest relationship as a writer, Filmistan and Bombay Talkies, were located. We have him travel in local trains, by taxis, by bus and by Victorias. He weaves in and out of chawls, apartments in mansions, modern flats, the labyrinth of the bazaar of Arab Gully and studios…and of course prostitute quarters. Much happens on streets and promenades, ill-lit street corners and other such twilight zones of the city. Stories are peppered with people from all parts of the subcontinent adding yet another layer to Manto’s encyclopedic drive to catch Bombay in all its mad diversity. Janki and Shanti, the leads in eponymous tales, come from Peshawar and Kashmir respectively and end up sleeping with Muslim men.

15 stories and an essay (on Manto’s marriage) deal with Manto fabulating about Bombay cinema while two others deal with the film scene in Poona. The anthology launches itself with eight filmi stories starting with Women, a droll comedy about the circulation of porn films among Bombay’s bourgeoisie, to Uncouth, another comedy about a film director and a feminist Communist getting it on with call girls and spouse respectively in the flat Manto shared with the former. In between, we have tales of a voyeur film studio munshi’s failed career as a seducer of a chawl neighbour, of a Marathi singer in films who is also a procuress of young girls for her clients, of male lust for an actress sublimated in caring for her eye, of a romantically gauche Ashok Kumar shying away from Paro’s sexual overtures and of another 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 lifetime 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 lady 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.

In these stories, the film world shares with the Bombay of the other stories in the collection, the traffic in sex and the parsimony of the rich when it came to paying professionals for the services they rendered. The curtain between prostitutes in Manto’s non-cinema stories and actresses in his films stories is a thin one, with girls being hired for sex as well as hangers-on at studios. Middle class men, like the film hero in My Name is Radha or the munshi in Suited and Booted are weak cowards beating pathetic retreats in the face of the force of women’s sexual desire. Or, they are dark Expressionist mercantile bourgeois characters like Gopinath or the wealthy protagonist of Loser who enter the film industry with a death wish to gamble away all success and wealth as well as the women they pick up on 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 buying up all. Empty Bottles and Empty Boxes stars a good looking film actor whose neurosis connects his celibacy, his love for animals and storing empty containers all of which are cured when his dog Stalin dies and he gets married.

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 film industry seems to bring into sharp focus within a hothouse atmosphere all the characters, classes, costumes, gestures and stories that make up Manto’s historical dialectic of the subcontinent’s relentless drive towards genocide that otherwise remain dispersed in society in general and therefore difficult to sight precisely. Indeed, to riff on Khalid’s Hasan’s English translation of Manto’s sketches of various Bombay film personalities of the 1940s, society is an extended Meena Bazaar, a market for female sex work, rather than being filled with stars from another sky.

The scene darkens as the years and stories progress, from earlier chalta phirta stories keeping riots and massacres in the background to a story such as Ram Khelawan where we encounter Manto on his last day in Bambai/India, having quit Bombay Talkies, waiting to leave for Lahore amidst the post-Partition communal riots in Bombay, being visited by his washer man Ram Khelawan for the purpose of apologising for having almost beaten him up during the riots. With this, Saadat Hasan leaves Bambai and cinema and joins the tracks of the stories for which he will be justly famous as the foremost writer of the Partition… again and again and now…yet again. And then again not quite yet again. 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 us at scales never seen before.

Kaushik Bhaumik is Associate Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University

So it’s happening finally. 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 pioneering translation project – a set of 54 stories and two essays pertaining to Manto’s life in Bombay and Poona, a period of roughly a decade between 1937 and 1948. Volumes two and three will cover Manto’s Punjab/Delhi/Kashmir and Pakistan stories respectively. The table of contents of the Bombay-Poona stories 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 excellent introduction is essential to the volume, setting 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 the richness of English’s utlilitarian objectivity mingles piquantly with Manto’s ruthless social critique.

Rehman’s introduction is a complex critical piece that seeks to balance an extensive biography of Manto with her own preoccupations as a historian and political person. Casting Manto’s work as prescient for our times, Rehman connects the rise of Hindutva-driven communal hatred towards Muslims in India as well as the fatalism of Pakistan’s anti-India driven religious and political history with the writer’s tragic life across the Partition years and his writings of that period. And indeed, the fact that Manto considered himself a Kashmiri above all, not an Indian or a Pakistani, becomes a conundrum to work through…yet again, given particular swings Kashmiri history has taken in the recent past. But what makes Rehman’s introduction particularly poignant and thoughtful is the running tremor of the importance of women in all of this – in Manto’s own life as well as Rehman’s, especially her sojourners in her quest for Manto. Women remain the ultimate witnesses/victims of historical violence in Manto’s stories, and women it is now who are the guardians of his work that allows them to speak back to historical violence of our times where women remain the witness/victim of choice…yet again.

Manto’s Bombay-Poona stories, however, belong to a slightly different register of cultural history – that of the city, cinema, the sea and the 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 to rioting in Bombay before the story advances in altogether different directions. Instead, this is the city of Walter Benjamin’s famous flâneur, that hero of recent cultural histories and theories of 20th century modernity and urbanism, the dispassionate but engaged stroller of cities, their documentor and critic, one for whom sampling the city was a greater pleasure than work or family. It is indeed, the idea of the flâneur that dovetails well with Manto’s self-appellation as chalta phirta Bambai, one who is exhaustively intercalated with the ins and outs of the city. Manto’s Bombay is not the White City of south 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 happening in Goregaon and Malad where the two studios with which he had the longest relationship as a writer, Filmistan and Bombay Talkies, were located. We have him travel in local trains, by taxis, by bus and by Victorias. He weaves in and out of chawls, apartments in mansions, modern flats, the labyrinth of the bazaar of Arab Gully and studios…and of course prostitute quarters. Much happens on streets and promenades, ill-lit street corners and other such twilight zones of the city. Stories are peppered with people from all parts of the subcontinent adding yet another layer to Manto’s encyclopedic drive to catch Bombay in all its mad diversity. Janki and Shanti, the leads in eponymous tales, come from Peshawar and Kashmir respectively and end up sleeping with Muslim men.

15 stories and an essay (on Manto’s marriage) deal with Manto fabulating about Bombay cinema while two others deal with the film scene in Poona. The anthology launches itself with eight filmi stories starting with Women, a droll comedy about the circulation of porn films among Bombay’s bourgeoisie, to Uncouth, another comedy about a film director and a feminist Communist getting it on with call girls and spouse respectively in the flat Manto shared with the former. In between, we have tales of a voyeur film studio munshi’s failed career as a seducer of a chawl neighbour, of a Marathi singer in films who is also a procuress of young girls for her clients, of male lust for an actress sublimated in caring for her eye, of a romantically gauche Ashok Kumar shying away from Paro’s sexual overtures and of another 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 lifetime 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 lady 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.

In these stories, the film world shares with the Bombay of the other stories in the collection, the traffic in sex and the parsimony of the rich when it came to paying professionals for the services they rendered. The curtain between prostitutes in Manto’s non-cinema stories and actresses in his films stories is a thin one, with girls being hired for sex as well as hangers-on at studios. Middle class men, like the film hero in My Name is Radha or the munshi in Suited and Booted are weak cowards beating pathetic retreats in the face of the force of women’s sexual desire. Or, they are dark Expressionist mercantile bourgeois characters like Gopinath or the wealthy protagonist of Loser who enter the film industry with a death wish to gamble away all success and wealth as well as the women they pick up on 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 buying up all. Empty Bottles and Empty Boxes stars a good looking film actor whose neurosis connects his celibacy, his love for animals and storing empty containers all of which are cured when his dog Stalin dies and he gets married.

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 film industry seems to bring into sharp focus within a hothouse atmosphere all the characters, classes, costumes, gestures and stories that make up Manto’s historical dialectic of the subcontinent’s relentless drive towards genocide that otherwise remain dispersed in society in general and therefore difficult to sight precisely. Indeed, to riff on Khalid’s Hasan’s English translation of Manto’s sketches of various Bombay film personalities of the 1940s, society is an extended Meena Bazaar, a market for female sex work, rather than being filled with stars from another sky.

The scene darkens as the years and stories progress, from earlier chalta phirta stories keeping riots and massacres in the background to a story such as Ram Khelawan where we encounter Manto on his last day in Bambai/India, having quit Bombay Talkies, waiting to leave for Lahore amidst the post-Partition communal riots in Bombay, being visited by his washer man Ram Khelawan for the purpose of apologising for having almost beaten him up during the riots. With this, Saadat Hasan leaves Bambai and cinema and joins the tracks of the stories for which he will be justly famous as the foremost writer of the Partition… again and again and now…yet again. And then again not quite yet again. 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 us at scales never seen before.

Kaushik Bhaumik is Associate Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University