Bombay Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto (2014)

"Whorehouses and shrines, I feel at peace  no 

where else."- Saadat Hasan Manto

 

Saadat Hasan Manto was born 1912 in Ludbiana in the Punjab region of India and died 1955 in Lahore, Pakistan.  Bombay Stories, edited and translated from Urdu by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad, is a really valuable anthology of fifteen short stories written by Manto from 1945 to 1955.  Literary works about the dark side of the great India mega cities are very popular now and are among the best so far of 21st century literature.  The editors of the anthology in their very informative remarks say that Manto was the first to write about the gangsters, pimps, film industry people, whores and their customers who made  much of the population of Bombay, now sadly called 'Mumbai'.  In every one of these stories prostitutes, Manto uses the term, "whore" a lot, play a part.  In about half of the stories prostitutes are the central focus of the stories.  Gangsters feature in several of them.  Manto made, or tried to make, a living as a Bollywood screenwriter and through his short stories, and elements of this appear frequently.  Manto did not spare himself.  If I were able to time travel and do a tour of the brothels of Paris in 1855, I would love to have had Flaubert or Guy de Maupassant as my guide.  If made a similar tour in Bombay in 1950, Manto would be the perfect  host.  His life was as tortured as any Irish poet. 

These stories are very gripping.  You feel you are in back alleys of Bombay. In teeming apartments, in whorehouses, talking to gangsters and getting drunk or high with your last rupee.  I found it fascinating to learn one of his first published works was a translation of Oscar Wilde's play about Russian revolutionaries, Vera into Urdu  He also translated short stories  of Gorky and Chekhov as well as some of Victor Hugo's works into Urdu.

These stories should be on the reading list of any lover of the short story and Indian Literature.  Some may find his treatment of women debasing.  He did marry and tried to be a good husband but it was not meant to be. Some of the stories are very funny,in parts.  Some, maybe most, are at their core tragic.  There is an excellent translator's afterword.  The only fault I have with the anthology is we are not told when and in what magazines the individual stories first were published.  This is important information. 

I was provided a free copy of this book.

Mel u

"The Insult" by Saadat Hasan Manto (1948, translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmed)

Novels about the dark side of the great Indian Mega Cities are common place now.  Some of them are among the best of 21th century literature, as I know it.  Saadat Hasan Manto (1912 to 1955, born Samrala, India) was among the very first writers to focus on the lives of the millions of people living on or beyond the edges of polite society in Bombay. "The Insult" takes us into the life of a Bombay prostitute in 1947 or so.  We see her various clients and we ponder what drives them to visit her.  It is rarely just sex as most have wives.  Manto's evocation of her sensuous nature and voluptuous body did make me wish for a moment I was back in old Bombay, before they changed the name, with ten rupees to spare.  We get a bit of an understanding as to why she became a whore (not a lot of euphemisms in Manto- the much more gentle R. K. Narayan uses the term "public woman").  Lots of her clients temporarily fall in love with her and make all sorts of promises to save her from her life.  In fact she sort of likes it.  She gets ten ruppes  from her clients (Manto says prostitutes normally get from ten to a hundred rupees so she
is at the bottom of the hooker hierarchy.  Her pimp, who has 120 girls under him, gets a cut of 2.5 rupees per customer.  You can see the starkness of Manto in the opening lines of "The Insult".  She loves the compliments her customers pay to her body and thrives from the temporary euphoria.

You can see the harsh world Manto depicts and the deep rooted corruption of Bombay in these opening lines of "The Insult".

I have posted on several of Manto 's wonderful stories and you can find background information on him in those posts.  I was given a free copy of the collection in which I read "The Insult ".  It is a first rate anthology.

The New Yorker recently had a very good article on Manto

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/the-seer-of-pakistan.htm

Please share your experience with Manto with us.

 

"Khushiya" by Saadat Hasan Mamto (1949, 15 pages)

In his very interesting afterward to a forthcoming collection of short stories by Saadat  Hasan Manto (1912 to 1955) Matt Reeck credits Manto as the first author to focus on the dark side of Bombay (now known as Mumbai) in his stories about thugs, prostitutes, slum dwellers, Bollywood writers, and the rural immigrants who made up eighty percent of the populace of Bombay in 1948.  He also wrote extensively on the catastrophic results of the partition of the Indian subcontinent into two countries.  Novels about the reality behind the glitter of modern India mega-cities have won or been short listed for the Booker Prize.  His work reminds me of the great Yiddish language writer Lamed Shapiro who wrote stories of the pogroms against Eastern European Jews.  It is almost as if Manto broke the ice and a great out flow of pain resulted in literature of great depth.  On a side note, in my post on Manto's short story "Mozelle" I was in a quandary as to why Manto choice to make the central figure in the story a Jewish woman.  From Reeck I learned that there were extensive Jewish communities in the Bombay area since 1600.

One side effect of the migration of poverty stricken people to Bombay, the majority of immigrants were men, was a great expansion in the number of prostitutes.  Whole areas of the city were given over to prostitutes and many women did it as a side line.  For various complicated reasons, prostitutes were often from the Dalit (Untouchable) castes and their pimps and gangster overlords were from higher castes.  There is no sense of condemnation in Manto's story.  He is just portraying life.  

Khushiya is a pimp.  However, he personally at age twenty eight had had it seems no sexual contact with women.  Religious and caste taboos kept him from touching the prostitutes.  In fact before the day of the story, he last saw a naked woman when he accidentally got a glimpse of a woman in the shower at age ten. Today he decides to go check on one of his charges.  He does not think she is home so he walks into her apartment.  To his shock, she is all but naked.  He is grossly insulted when she makes no effort to cover herself, as if her were a cat, not a man.  He takes an extreme step to prove his manhood, nothing violent but actually I liked how it ended a lot and thought Khushiya had for sure resurrected his manhood.

For sure Manto's stories are very powerful, the best can stand with the greatest of short stories.

There are fifteen stories collected in Bombay Stories (I was given this book by Viking International and offer my thanks.)  For sure I will read them all.  

Please share your experience with Manto with us. (There is background information on him in my prior posts on his stories)

Mel u