Memorializing Manto in Mumbai

The entrance to Victoria Garden, Byculla. (Photo: Albumen print from wet collodion glass negative by Fracis Frith, predating Manto's arrival in the city)

In late February 2023, Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde announced the decision to rename Mumbai's Churchgate Station after India's first Reserve Bank of India governor C.D. Deshmukh.

As naming of streets, stations and other landmarks after public figures goes, writers - of stories and films - are usually pretty low down the pecking order.

To be sure, streets named after writers do exist - there are Mirza Ghalib Road in Mumbai, Tolstoy Marg in Delhi and Shakespeare Sarani in Kolkata, among others. But their density is much lower than other public figures, especially freedom fighters, social reformers, key economists and even businessmen.

Now, every city has its share of iconic writers who come to be associated with the fabric of its inner life. In the case of Mumbai, aided by large scale and multiple translations in English, Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto has over the last two decades emerged as one of the most admired and perceptive observers of the city’s underbelly. Manto’s short stories, essays, and sketches are a masterclass in how to chronicle the quotidian.

Manto (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

The first wave of Manto’s popularity emanated from his Partition stories. He himself left Bombay (now Mumbai) for Lahore reluctantly in 1947, having lived in the city he loved the most for over a decade working as a journalist, short story writer and scriptwriter. And it was sitting in actor Ashok Kumar’s car, going through a crowded Muslim locality, that the anxiety and fear that came with Partition hit him hard as he was worried about their safety.

Manto’s haunting stories about Partition offer a direction to break away from the kind of history that academic Prof Faisal Devji says are “written as a police report or judicial decision to make someone ‘responsible’ for it.” Manto, and his contemporaries, who wrote about the human cost of the Partition in stark details in their stories, brought much more nuance than statistics and official figures could ever do.

But Manto was more than the Partition and the ‘obscene’ stories that gained him notoriety and court cases. As author and literary critic Rakshanda Jalil observed in a piece, “There is more to Manto than ‘Thanda Gosht’, ‘Khol Do’ or ‘Kaali Shalwar’ – stories that offended many on grounds of perversion and obscenity.”

Manto and Bombay

Manto came to Bombay in 1936 to edit the weekly film newspaper Musawwir, working from its offices at Clare Road in Byculla. At the Nagpada-end of the road was his favourite restaurant Sarvi which is still going strong and is the end point for walking tours especially those who seek to trace Manto’s presence on Mumbai’s streets. Those were the days of film studios, and he got his break in the film world at Imperial Film Company. In 1937, Village Girl was released for which he wrote the script and dialogue.

Manto also briefly worked for Baburao Patel’s film magazine, before he went to Delhi in 1941 to work at All India Radio. He made more connections there, but Bombay was where his heart was and he came back to the city in 1942. In his second innings, he followed the same path of editing a magazine and writing for film studios. The death of his infant son in Delhi had broken him.

Among the numerous stories that Manto wrote, I find "Mammad Bhai" to be really poignant. The story is about a street ruffian who shaved his moustache to escape punishment for a murder. This is not a story that can be written unless you have lived and spent time around such people, which is what Manto did.

And then the title of the story. Mammad is the Bambaiya-inflected-heavily-drawn-on-Gujarati version of Mohammad. Usually, it would be difficult for an Urdu writer who was not born or grew up in Bombay to resist changing Mammad to Mohammad. But just like his Partition stories where victims and perpetrators were not typecast, Manto’s chronicles of Bombay stayed true to what he saw and observed. There was no artificiality.

Journalist and Manto translator Aakar Patel met the writer’s daughter who told him that till the 1980s, she had no idea what a big writer her father was. In Pakistan where he died in 1955 at the age of 43, the establishment did not relish his writing which was deemed lewd and in some cases disrespectful to the newly-carved nation state. There’s much written about how he remained at the periphery of the Progressive Writers’ Association, whose members, hypocritically, characterised some of his stories as obscene. But it’s not that Manto craved the Progressive tag either.

All this took a heavy toll on him, and financial insecurity remained a constant feature. Much of the tension and dilemma that Manto faced has been examined by historian Ayesha Jalal who is his grandniece. She notes that Pakistani officialdom continues to represent Manto as a “pornographer and a socially subversive writer.”

“The chasm between the lack of state sponsorship, if not outright disapproval of his writings, and the growing ranks of Manto enthusiasts made for a creative tension that has served the cause of Urdu literature better than any formal official endorsement would have allowed.”

Manto scholars and readers will obviously differ on the choice of their favourite stories, but there is no difference on the point that Bombay was Manto’s favourite city. He lived in Amritsar, Lahore, Delhi and Aligarh, but nothing came close to Bombay. Patel believes that Manto’s portrayal of Bombay is one of its kind and that no writer understood Bombay as well as he, not even Behram Contractor. Salman Rushdie has called him the undisputed master of the modern Indian short story.

Sadly, for a writer who is enjoying a resurgence due to multiple translations, timelessness of his work and exciting re-assessments of his writings, there is (no physical commemoration) not a road or chowk named after him. Interestingly, Clare Road which was his haunt has been renamed Mirza Ghalib Marg, a poet he admired a lot. A journalist – Hafiz Ali Bahadur Khan – whom Manto blamed for being a rabble-rouser during communal disturbances too has a road named after him just a short distance away from Clare Road.

Urdu scholar, translator and linguist Dr Abdus Sattar Dalvi told Moneycontrol that usually writers and philosophers are way down the pecking order to have roads or streets named after them. “I count myself lucky as I live off Krishan Chander Marg in Bandra and I occupied the inaugural Krishan Chander chair in Urdu at the University of Bombay.”

Krishen Chander, a prominent writer, was a contemporary of Manto and they both worked at All India Radio in Delhi. Lyricist Kaifi Azmi, journalist and writer Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, and Abdul Hamid Ansari, founder of Urdu newspaper Inquilab are other contemporaries of Manto who have had roads/chowks named after them.

Three weeks ago, a chowk in Mumbai's Bhendi Bazaar was named after Khilafat Movement leader Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar. Perhaps it's time Mumbai had a Manto Marg?