Mumbai reminds me of the Hindi novel Kuru-Kuru Swaha (1980), written by Manohar Shyam Joshi, an iconic litterateur and scriptwriter. It’s said to be the first post-modern novel in Hindi. Undoubtedly, it’s very different from its Hindi contemporaries, with a non-linear narrative that avoids the dominant trope of mainstream Hindi literature—marginalised society.
Set in 1962-63, the novel doesn’t talk about ‘one’ but ‘many’. Even its narrator has many identities. It is a kind of biographical novel, with three narrators—Manohar Shyam Joshi himself, the writer Joshiji who dreams of writing a magnum opus equal to War and Peace or The Wasteland, and Manohar, an emotional fool. While living in Mumbai, Joshiji has developed a second dream—of making a film called Sweet Decadence.
These three overlapping narrators encapsulate the dilemma of India’s emerging middle-class. Their composite represents a generation that had begun to lose faith in the grand Idea of India, with the mohbhang (disillusionment) over the Nehruvian model setting in after India’s humiliating military defeat in the hands of China. The mohbhang is described satirically. At one point, the second narrator Joshiji tells Mohan Rakesh, another real life litterateur and playwright, that, “There’s nothing we can hope or worry about—even a second attack by China!”
As a metaphor for Bombay, the novel offers the reader everything that the Bombay of 1962 did. Bombay meant cinema, Bombay meant dreams, business, power, a vibrant fine arts and theatre scene. Most of all, it represents Bombay’s cosmopolitan core—representing India in a microcosm.
These days, Mumbai has become a centre of power and power brokers. But that too reminds one of Kuru-Kuru Swaha. Perhaps, it’s the only Hindi novel that foregrounds Mumbai’s ubiquitous dalal (pimp)—a guy named Babu, whose business it is to stand at Chowpatty beach and sell Bombay’s beauty to unsuspecting victims.
The next character the novel introduces is the woman Pahuncheli. Together, they stand as metaphors for the future Mumbai. There are people like Babu selling its beauty, and there are others—migrants hoping to fulfil their dreams, like the narrator(s) fruitlessly trying to acquire Pahuncheli—a mysterious woman everybody claims to know, but none actually does. That’s Mumbai right there.
Kuru-Kuru Swaha is reminiscent of the days when Bombay was also a centre for intellectual activities, such as publishing, art exhibitions, terrace theatre, film societies and progressive movements, glimpses of which run through the novel. The novel reflects upon the meaninglessness of Bombay’s leftist intellectuals, who, after promising to work for the movement, abandon it to run after the glamour of Bollywood. There is a leftist Urdu poet Khaliq, who renders hifalutin speeches, only to become a film scriptwriter, start making money and forget all about his revolutionary idealism. In this, it dovetails into the author’s later novel Kyāpa, a Sahitya Academy winner, that also critiques leftist writers in the movement.
By blurring the boundary between the literary and the populist, the novel also breaks new ground. It tackles all the intellectual debates of its time, but satirically, confounding contemporary critics. In a long interview of Joshi by poet Ajit Kumar, published in the January 1981 issue of the literary magazine Sarika, the interviewer draws similarity between Kuru-Kuru Swaha and Shekhar: Ek Jeevani (Agyeya, 1940), and castigates Joshi of narcissism. Personally, I find Kuru-Kuru Swaha closer to Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari (1968) in its humorous narrative style, even though thematically, Raag Darbari is about political disillusionment and cynicism, while Kuru-Kuru Swaha targets intellectual decadence.
Among other things, the novel also focuses on how the Idea of India is dying in its commercial capital, as everything, including arts and culture gets commercialised. There are throwaway debates on the clash of tradition and modernity, the Anglicised middle-class, their decadent parties, and their detachment from the realities of India’s majority. As a major (pejorative) trope, bazaarvaad gains centrality in Hindi literature much later, around the 1990s. Kuru-Kuru Swaha, though, anticipates that through tropes of loss of ideals and innocence.
Among memorable characters in the novel, special mention must be made of Rathijit Bhattacharya—a “genius” filmmaker—and the story-writing sessions with him. The debates there are reminiscent of the vibe around the ‘parallel cinema’ movement of the 1960s.
But most of all, what sets the novel apart is its use of Bambaiya, the city’s colourful, constantly evolving pidgin, and its many registers—in Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi. Perhaps, no Hindi novelist since Phanishwarnath ‘Renu’ has played with Hindi’s multifarious oral traditions as well as Kuru-Kuru Swaha.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Many Bombays Now")
(Views expressed are personal)
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A Whimsical Philippic
That memorable evening!
After picking my brains over the script of an in-house documentary on the Western Railways, I came out of their office exhausted. I thought, “Let me have a tea at the stall outside Churchgate railway station before heading to the guest house.”
As I started on my cup of tea and a plate of pakoras, a voice from behind said: “I can be convinced to have tea with you, and if you insist a lot, I might even consider the pakoras.”
I turned to find Khaliq, dressed whimsically. Dirty, torn pyjamas and an inverted khaki vest. A week-old stubble. Barefoot. Teeth that had not been brushed for some time.
I answered Khaliq’s questions and then tried to get rid of him.
“So, you have developed such airs that you can’t bear my company?” he responded, irritably, “Does your bourgeois nose find me smelly? Go on, tell me?”
Why would I confess to that. Even though the body of the genius was emitting a rank sweaty smell.
Khaliq grabbed me by the collar and pushed my nose down his hairy armpit: “So, can you smell the working class Indian now?”
When I pushed him away, he started fighting me. I could have easily beaten him up, but according to Joshiji, even that would be his victory. Irrespective of the righteousness of his ‘rebellion’—he would always come out victorious against my “compromise.” I had “compromised” as soon as I had got a job.
In any case, I resorted to the same “compromise” now and said: “Khaliq, I’m also a worker like you. I survive by my pen. Even on a holiday today, I’ve toiled the whole day writing for a documentary. So far, I’ve not even become a small-time sahib, earning a meagre Rs 1,000 a month.
Khaliq softened a little and wished me luck: “Go on, bastard! You’ll become a small-time sahib after all, as you’re not fit to become anything more than that anyway.”
Thereafter, Khaliq began ranting on the “system”, cursing the revolutionary souls of our acquaintances who had “made it.”
Once this ‘blessing ritual’ was over, he was happy. But this happiness cost me dearly. Now he insisted I accompany him to Andheri East’s slums, where he was camping. He said now that I’d become a little fresh after smelling his armpit, I had to get rid of my bourgeois staleness by smelling the place. He claimed that the recent success Shailendra had achieved with some of his songs was a result of the inspiration found while spending four hours in Khaliq’s shanty.
(Translated by Iqbal Abhimanyu)
Prabhat Ranjan is a Hindi novelist, translator and professor at Zakir Husain College, DU
