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The Economist September 22nd 2018 75
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1
THIS summer Ganesh Gaitonde’s eyes
burned through the monsoon haze
from billboards across the metropolis. The
fictional gangster, played with seductive
menace byNawazuddin Siddiqui, is one of
the heroes of “Sacred Games”, Netflix’s
flagship Indian drama series. The show is
based on an epic novel by Vikram Chan-
dra, a 900-page testament to the romance
ofMumbai—the biggest, baddest city in In-
dia, 18m people and counting, bursting at
the seamswith schemes, sex andmurder.
Published in 2006, Mr Chandra’s book
formed a de facto trilogy with two other
works that captured Mumbai’s idea of it-
self at the turn of the new millennium:
“Maximum City”, Suketu Mehta’s non-fic-
tion portrait of Bombay (as it was named
until 1995, and is still called by some), and
“Q&A” byVikas Swarup, whichwas adapt-
ed for the cinema as “Slumdog Million-
aire”. In the years since, Mumbai has
emerged as a gritty, glamorous epitome of
modern urban life, a capital of noir for the
wholeworld to admire, or revile.
Yet film, fiction and filth have been
chasing one another up and down the
city’s streets for decades. Its storytellers
have often been enmeshed in the dramas
they describe; their tales of Mumbai have
reflected its lurching growth, the scenes
and themes evolving with its criminal
for the authorities. It can be impossible to
tell which tales were invented and which
reported. In one of the best known, a char-
acter who is also called Manto becomes
entranced by a Bombay gangster with a
heart of gold. The gangster’s rationale for
carrying a dagger instead of a gun might
serve as a credo forManto’s prose style:
With this there’s no bang at all. You can
thrust it into someone’s stomach just like
this. It’s so smooth that the bastard won’t
even knowwhat’s going on.
The Manto of that story loved the hood-
lum, and the real-life Manto loved Bom-
bay. But these loves were complicated;
muck and beauty were inextricably en-
twined, as they are forMumbai’s artists to-
day. As the character asks, “Who in Bom-
bay cares about anyone? No one gives a
damn if you live or die.” After his depar-
ture for Lahore—and before his own early
death—Manto continued to set his stories
in Bombay, thus creating a nostalgic prece-
dent for Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s
Children” and Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine
Balance”, both written after their authors
had left the city of their youth.
Film-makers mapped the underworld.
In1955 “Shree 420” told of a small-time con
artist who comes to Bombay and learns its
soul-destroying lessons too late. Likemany
subsequent movies, “Deewaar”, released
in 1975, was based on a celebrity gangster,
the city’s first—an immigrant from the
south who, at a time when India’s eco-
nomic links to the world were flimsy, be-
came a smuggler and ultimately ruled
whole districts of themetropolis.
Mumbai noir was to become even
darker and more frenetic, mirroring events
on the streets. In 1991 the country’s eco-
demi-monde and quicksilver economy.
India’s business capital, and home to its
most polyglot population, Mumbai has al-
ways been a good place tomake an anony-
mous deal. For most of the 20th century,
the colonial port-city on the Arabian Sea
was both the centre of organised crime on
the subcontinent and the heart of Hindi
cinema. Bollywood made movies that
lionised the localmafia,mobsters financed
productions and the nightlife bound the
two together.
No bang at all
At the dawn of independence, the figures
of writer and low-life flâneur came togeth-
er in Saadat Hasan Manto—whomMr Sid-
diqui plays in a biopic released in India on
September 21st. Written and directed by
Nandita Das, “Manto” weaves together its
subject’s life and his stories, taking in his
struggles with censorship and alcoholism
and the partition of India and Pakistan.
Like Ms Das and Mr Siddiqui them-
selves, Manto migrated to the cosmopoli-
tan city from the inland provinces, work-
ing intermittently as a screenwriter.
Inspired by Victor Hugo and Anton Che-
khov, he wrote from life. He believed in
keeping the worst company, knowing it to
be the best for his art; prostitutes were of-
ten his heroines, a perennial sticking point
Mumbai noir
Maxed-out city
MUMBAI
In India’s commercial capital, art and crime have always been entwined
Books and arts
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