Manto and the Mumbhaiya

“If you haven’t been to Bombay, you might not believe that no-one takes an interest in anyone else. But the truth is that if you are busy dying in your room, no one will interfere. Even if one of your neighbours is murdered, you can be assured you won’t hear about it.”

Mammad Bhai may not have agreed with this view of his city. But author and playwright Saadat Hasan Manto, who brought this knife-wielding mafioso to life in an eponymous short story, seemed to differ. This despite the love he had for the lovely but lonely Mumbai.

The last few years have seen a resurgence of Manto’s writings that chronicle human nature, especially against the turbulent backdrop of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. Readers are consuming his written word — both in Urdu and translations — while Indian and Pakistani cinema are depicting different periods of his life in both the countries. Nandita Das’s biopic Manto , which was released in India last month, has further cemented his legacy.

Siddiqui as gangster Ganesh Gaitonde in the Netflix Original series Sacred Games

Better known for his vignettes on Partition and prostitution, Manto wrote about Mammad Bhai in 1954, a year before he died in Lahore. The quintessential ‘Mumbhaiya’, Mammad Bhai came into being long before Amitabh Bachchan’s Vijay in the film Deewaar (1975) , loosely based on the life of the gangster Haji Mastan; and the character reminiscent of another underworld don, Dawood Ibrahim, in Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai (2010). More recently, Ganesh Gaitonde of Sacred Games , a Netflix series based on a Vikram Chandra novel, stirred memories of the sharks that controlled the city’s seamy underbelly. Manto’s Mammad Bhai was also menacing, but behind his hard-as-nails exterior hid a do-gooder.

Matt Reeck’s and Aftab Ahmad’s translation of ‘Mammad Bhai’ showed a man whose word was gospel in the seedy by-lanes of Mumbai’s Arab Gully and Faras Road. A bout of malaria attuned the writer to the apathy of the bustling metropolis — until Mammad Bhai, a self-appointed Robin Hood, walked in with a doctor, who was intimidated into treating Manto for free. The Bhai is still dangerous, but no longer just the brawny goon you may have mentally pictured him to be. Manto wrote that a “Kaiser Wilhelm moustache” helped make up for a scrawny build. Barring the film stars with chiselled physiques who played them, how many real-life Bhais are physically intimidating?

After getting to know each other through interactions at shady Chinese restaurants, Manto was in awe of Mammad Bhai’s knowledge of the local life. Be it someone’s debts to shopkeepers or another’s native town, Mammad Bhai liked to keep a watchful eye on his turf through his web of informers. In the Urdu version, he is coarsely described as a “r***iyon ka pir” due to his benevolence towards prostitutes. He lands in prison when he agrees to a sex worker’s (Shirin Bai) request to kill a man who had raped her daughter.

Manto observed that the English judge presiding over the trial would sympathise with a Mammad Bhai minus the moustache. The man is eventually barred from returning to the city (the common legal and street term “ tadipaar ” is used in the Urdu version to describe this sentence).

The central premise of the story was that colonial law and order, delivered by Judge FH Teague, always superseded street justice. That too, regardless of whether the latter proved to be more effective. After the British overlords departed, indigenous criminals (like the one who had raped Shirin Bai’s daughter) came into their own. The parallel order of the streets flourished with the somewhat munificent Mammad Bhai-esque figures including Haji Mastan and other not-so-benevolent ones. These postcolonial gangsters expanded their reach far beyond the South Bombay by-lanes. Their varied legacies would then become the focus of films and literature.

Manto is often praised for being a writer ahead of his times when depicting the communal fissures of the Partition that keep resurfacing even today. However, his ‘Mammad Bhai’ should be counted among one of the first examples of Mumbai’s noir literature, both fiction and non-fiction. Coincidentally, actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui has not only played Gaitonde, the don that many are in awe of, but also the author who created his predecessor from colonial times.

Daneesh Majid is a freelance writer based in Hyderabad