22 In Urdu, ‘Khalq’.
23 ‘Bari Sahib’, 73.
24 ‘Red Revolution’. (‘Surkh inqalab‘.) Manto’s Essays. (Manto ke mazameen.) Lahore: Maktaba-e-Urdu, 1942. Re-published in Mantonuma, 685–94.
25 Bari Sahib published Manto’s short story ‘A Show’ (‘Tamasha’) in the inaugural edition of Creation.
26 ‘Several Encounters with Akhtar Sheerani’ (‘Akhtar sheerani se chand mulaqaten’). Bald Angels. Lahore: Gosha-e-Adab, 1955. Re-published in Mantonuma, 46. See also ‘Bari Sahib’, 85.
27 Flemming, 6.
28 Ibid., 7.
29 Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 234.
30 Batot is in Jammu near the Kashmiri border. See Manto’s ‘My Wedding’ (‘Meri shadi’) for a brief accounting of this stretch of Manto’s poor health. [Above, Below, and in Between. (Upar niche aur darmiyan.) Lahore: Gosha-e-Adab, 1954. Re-published in Mantorama. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 2004, 276–92.]
31 In Urdu, ‘Musawwir’.
32 Wadhawan, 46.
33 ‘My Wedding’, 279.
34 Ibid., 281.
35 Ibid., 285.
36 Flemming, 14. Manto and Safiya had three more children, daughters Nighat, Nuzhat, and Nusrat. Manto would go on to write the short story ‘Khalid Dear’ (‘Khalid mian‘) in honour of his dead son. [Empty Bottles, Empty Cartons. (Khali botalen khali dibbe.) Lahore: Maktaba-e-Jadeed, 1950. Re-published in Mantorama, 72–81.]
37 ‘My Wedding’, 277 and 285.
38 The room represented a considerable upgrade as it cost thirty-five rupees per month as opposed to the previous room’s nine rupees (Ibid., 278 and 287).
39 ‘Babu Rao Patel’. Bald Angels. Re-published in Mantonuma. 215.
40 Ibid., 216.
41 Sparks. (Atish pare.) Lahore: Urdu Book Stall, 1936. Re-published in Mantorama. And Manto’s Short Stories. (Manto ke afsane.) Lahore: Maktaba-e-Urdu, 1940. Republished in Mantorama.
42 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish and Paul Willemen, ed. Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 272.
43 ‘My Wedding’, 278.
44 Ibid., 278.
45 ‘Babu Rao Patel’, 214.
46 Ibid., 215. See also ‘My Wedding’, 288.
47 Flemming, 11.
48 The first four volumes of his radio plays were the following: Come On. (Ao.) Lahore: Naya Idarah, 1940; Three Women. (Tin auraten.) Lahore: Maktaba-e-Urdu, 1942; Funerals. (Janaze.) Lahore: Zafar Brothers, 1942; and Short Stories and Plays. (Afsane aur drame.) Hyderabad: Sayyid Abdul Razzaq Tajir Kutab, 1943. Flemming provides these dates in Another Lonely Voice. The first two dates are corroborated by short forewords Manto wrote and dated, both of which are included in Manto’s Plays. (Manto drame.) Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 2003. 265 and 481. In private correspondence, Sang-e-Meel lists the publication date of Funerals to be 1955, evidently a later edition of the original work.
49 Smoke. (Dhuan.) Delhi: Saaqi Book Depot, 1941. Re-published in Manto Kahaniyan. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 2004.
50 Flemming, 14.
51 Ibid., 14.
52 Ibid., 16.
53 Ibid., 16.
54 ‘The Trouble of the Shining Sun’ (‘Zahamat-e-mihr-e-darakhshan’). Cold Meat. (Thanda gosht.) Lahore: Maktaba-e-Jadeed, 1950. Re-published in Mantonamah. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 351.
55 Wadhawan, 143.
56 Flemming, 18.
57 Rangoonwalla, Firoze. A Pictorial History of Indian Cinema.
London: Hamlyn, 1979, 10.
58 Ibid., 11.
59 Ibid., 12.
60 Joshi, Lalit Mohan, ed. Popular Indian Cinema: Bollywood. London: Dakini, 2002. 15.
61 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. ‘Indian Cinema: Origins to Independence’. The Oxford History of World Cinema. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 402.
62 Manto, Saadat Hasan. ‘A Glance at the Indian Film Industry’. Manto’s Essays. In Mantonuma, 592.
63 Popular Indian Cinema: Bollywood, 16.
64 Ibid., 16.
65 Rajadhyaksha, 403.
66 Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 109.
67 Other prominent companies included New Theatres in Kolkata (founded 1931), Minerva Movietone (founded 1936), the Ranjit Film Company (founded 1929), Wadia Movietone (founded 1933), and Sagar Film Company (founded 1930). (For more see Popular Indian Cinema: Bollywood, Chapter One, and references in Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema.)
68 In Hindi, ‘Amritmanthan’ and ‘Amar jyoti‘, respectively.
69 ‘Babu Rao Patel’, 210.
70 Popular Indian Cinema: Bollywood, 21.
71 In Hindi, ‘Acchut kanya’.
72 Ibid., 22.
73 Adarkar, Neera and Meena Menon. One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon: An Oral History. Intro. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar. Calcutta: Seagull, 14.
74 Ibid., 21–22.
75 Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business strategies and the working classes in Bombay, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 34.
76 Ibid., 94. Chandavarkar cites that two-thirds of women living in Bombay in the inter-war years were of working age—defined as being between the ages of fifteen and fifty-eight.
77 Ibid., 97.
78 David, M.D. Bombay: The City of Dreams. Mumbai: Himalaya, 1995, 243.
79 You might not think of the Chinese in India, but some Chinese have lived in the country for hundreds of years. Kolkata has historically had the largest Chinese community, and the history of Chinese there goes back to 1778. The city became home to 10,000 Chinese during the inter-war years and later boasted of around 30,000 people of Chinese origin. (Biswas, Ranjita. ‘Little China Stays Alive in Eastern India’. Inter Press Service News Agency, August 3, 2006.)
80 David, 18.
81 Ibid., 19.
82 Ibid., 39. Percival Spear notes that the British were marrying both natives and Portuguese Roman Catholics (The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India. London: Oxford University Press, 1963, 13).
83 The Parsi community erected the Tower of Silence on Malabar Hill in 1674 (David, 219).
84 Ibid., 2. Also, Spear writes, ‘The Parsi shipbuilder rather than the English merchant was the true maker of Bombay’ (Nabobs, 71).
85 India has been home to three distinct Jewish communities: the Cochin Jews of Kerala, the Bene Israel Jews of the Konkan coast south of Bombay, and the Baghdadi Jews, who fled persecution in Iraq during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to settle as immigrant communities in Mumbai and Kolkata. The Bene Israel Jews got their name from the Muslims of the Konkan coast who identified them with the Banu Israel named in the Koran. (Isenberg, Shirley Berry. India’s Bene Israel: A Comprehensive Inquiry and Sourcebook. Berkeley, CA: Judah L. Magnes Museum, 1988, viii, 25 and 375.)
86 Ibid., 297.
87 Thomas Blom Hansen notes that the official death count was 800 (official death counts in India tend to be low), but also that 150,000 Muslims fled the city as well as another 100,000 who sought shelter in predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods (The Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, 122).
88 Adarkar and Menon, 114.
89 Ibid., 169.
90 Ibid., 110.
91 Time Magazine, February 18, 1929.
92 ‘Matters’. (‘Baten’.) Manto’s Essays. In Mantonuma, 695.
93 Adarkar and Menon, 20.
94 Rushdie, Salman. ‘Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for you!’ The New Yorker, June 23–30, 1997: 51.
95 Flemming, 24. In Urdu, ‘Angare’.
96 Ibid., 25.
97 Ibid., 25.
98 In Urdu, ‘Naya adab’.
99 Azmi, Khalil ur-Rahman. Urdu men taraqqi pasand adabi tahrik. Aligarh: Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind), 1972, 46, 67.
> 100 Ibid., 26.
101 Manto Kahaniyan, 267–77.
102 Mantonuma, 723–31.
103 In Urdu, ‘Kali shalwar’.
104 In Urdu, ‘Dhuan’.
105 Wadhawan, 90.
106 In Urdu, ‘bu’ and ‘adab-e-jadid’, respectively.
107 Wadhawan, 100.
108 ‘The Trouble of the Shining Sun’. Mantonamah, 372.
109 In Urdu, ‘Naqush’.
110 ‘The Trouble of the Shining Sun’, 354–56.
111 In Urdu, ‘Javed’.
112 ‘The Trouble of the Shining Sun’, 382.
113 Ibid., 402.
114 Wadhawan, 116.
115 ‘Manto’s Fiftieth Death Anniversary Observed: Ban on Manto’s Writings on TV and Radio Condemned’. The Daily Times (Islamabad) January 19, 2005.
116 ‘My Wedding’, 276.
117 The Pakistani government was awarding land and businesses to immigrants from India so that they could begin to build up their new lives.
118 ‘Bald Angels’, 224.
119 Yazid was the Umayyad Caliph responsible for the killing of Husain ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at the Battle of Karbala on October 10, 680 (Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Volume 1, The Classical Age of Islam. 1958. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977, 219).
120 Manto’s family never threw him out (though his brother-in-law did forbid him to visit his sister’s house in Mahim), and so Manto must have been referring only to his father’s stern and sometimes disapproving figure.
121 This is another example of Manto’s tendency to exaggerate autobiographical details.
122 An interesting contrast to this passage from Yazid would be to look at this comment in relation to the Manto character’s comment in ‘Mammad Bhai’. There the fictional Manto finds fault with Bombay for these very traits: ‘Like I said, who in Bombay cares about anyone? No one gives a damn if you live or die’ (Mantonamah, 591).
GLOSSARY
Here, the in-text transliteration precedes a more rigorous rendering of the Urdu vowels and nasalization: hamzah is indicated with a single closed quotation mark (’) and ain, with a single open quotation mark (’).
Adana raag name
babu respectful title for a man older than the speaker and of higher socio-economic status
bahar vala literally ‘outside person’ but in Bombay slang, ‘tea boy’
beora local Indian alcohol
bhangan a woman of the sweeper caste
bhapa dad
bismillah phrase that means ‘in the name of God’ that is used before you begin anything new and colloquially can be used to express surprise
changli ‘good’ in Marathi
chane ‘fish scales’ in Punjabi
chikku the sapodilla fruit
chuna lime, or the white acidic paste from the berries of the evergreen tree Citrus aurantifolia used in preparing paan
dalal pimp
dhani Indian dance step
dhrupad genre of north Indian music thought to be the oldest extant classical music tradition in India
ghatin a woman of a low caste in Bombay who does menial labour
kaserail ki peti type of peti
kashta sari that at nine yards is longer than average and that is wrapped in a special way—passed from the front between a woman’s legs and tucked into the waist from behind—and associated with the underclasses and with coarse eroticism
lahaul wala quwat the phrase ‘there is no sway or strength but that of God’ can be said to repel Satan or when you want to express something along the lines of ‘shit’ or ‘to hell with it’
Malkos raag name
Mian ki todi raag name
paan/pan digestive concoction that usually includes grated betel nut and tobacco
Patdeep raag name
peti small instrument used to accompany singing
sang-e-aswad the Black Stone in the Ka’aba in Mecca
sayyan/sa’ĩ wandering Muslim holy man, fakir
seth a banking caste, or colloquially, a rich man
shalwar kameez/qamiz pants and blouse set
shervani long coat for men that extends several inches below the knees
Tandau Shiva’s angry dance
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We’d like to thank the editors of the following magazines for publishing some of these stories, essays, and condensed versions of my introduction: Harold Jaffe, Fiction International, for publishing ‘The Insult’; Donald Breckenridge and Jen Zoble, In Translation, for publishing ‘Hamid’s Baby’, ‘Mozelle’, and ‘Ten Rupees’ and for including ‘Hamid’s Baby’ in The Brooklyn Rail’s best fiction anthology; Giriraj Kiradoo, Pratilipi, for publishing ‘Janaki’, ‘Peerun’, ‘Why I Don’t Go to the Movies’, and ‘Women and the Film World’; Brigid Hughes, A Public Space, for publishing ‘Barren’, ‘Khushiya’, ‘Rude’, and ‘Siraj’; and Olivia Sears, Natasha Wimmer, and Jeffrey Yang, Two Lines, for publishing ‘Smell’.
Bombay Stories Page 24