Bombay Stories

by Saadat Hasan Manto, Matt Reeck (Translator), Aftab Ahmad (Translator)

Bombay Stories is a collection of short stories, originally written in Urdu by Saadat Hasan Manto. This translated version, by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad, makes these stories accessible to a much wider audience.

Bombay Stories is set in the 1930s and 1940s, when the author had just arrived in the city. The stories speak about actors, prostitutes, intellectuals, conmen and more. For example, in "Ten Rupees," a 15-year old prostitute is taken out by three older men on a drive to the beach. As readers expect this young Sarita to become a victim, the tables turn on the men! Another tale in Bombay Stories focuses on how a man is outraged and feels insulted at the sight of a woman who has not covered up in front of him. Manto then introduces a visitor to Bombay, who is amazed to see the city filled with both shrines, as well as houses of pleasure. He asks a rich sap named Babu Gopi Nath why this is so. Babu's reply will make readers smile. Many stories in Bombay Stories are set in the Hindi film industry.

Bombay Stories shows what it means to be human. Anyone who is interested in the history and culture of Bombay or is a fan of translated Urdu literature, can enjoy reading this book. Bombay Stories, published by Random House India in 2014, is available in paperback.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, India, Classics, Indian Literature, Literature, Pakistan

276 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Saadat Hasan Manto (Urdu: سعادت حسن منٹو, Hindi: सआदत हसन मंटो), the most widely read and the most controversial short-story writer in Urdu, was born on 11 May 1912 at Sambrala in Punjab's Ludhiana District. In a writing career spanning over two decades he produced twenty-two collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three collections of essays, two collections of reminiscences and many scripts for films. He was tried for obscenity half a dozen times, thrice before and thrice after independence. Not always was he acquitted. Some of Manto's greatest work was produced in the last seven years of his life, a time of great financial and emotional hardship for him. He died a few months short of his forty-third birthday, in January 1955, in Lahore.

Reviews

[Aamil Syed · Rating 5 out of 5]

When 'Bombay' was changed to 'Mumbai' many years back (it's actually a decade or more, but seems like yesterday), I was a kid. It didn't really affect me so much, but I used go around correcting people every time they called 'Mumbai', 'Bombay'. I don't know why I did that, maybe I asserted my sense of belonging to the city by claiming to know the correct name and declaring it to those who didn't love it enough to care. Or maybe, it was just a sense of smug satisfaction of having just corrected someone. Whatever it was, I stuck to the name and have used only Mumbai ever since.

Some of these people, I used to think, were actually pretentious snobs who did not want to associate themselves with the linguistic cultural movement of Mumbai. I was also far more nationalistic back then, and saw 'Bombay' to be a vestige of the colonial past of India and wanted to shake it off. Anyway, what happened is that I consciously avoided 'Bombay' and soon, it was out of my lexicon.

I still meet people who use 'Bombay' and I have asked them many times why they do that when it is clearly no longer 'Bombay'. They tell me that they don't know, they just like the sound of 'Bombay'. I gained a little understanding of why they do that, when at the beginning of the year, I read Jerry Pinto's 'Em and the Big Hoom'.

Bombay is not just a name, it stands for the cosmopolitan air of a young city that throbs with life. A city of great inequality, yet full of opportunity. An unforgiving city; an all embracing city. A city that never sleeps; a city where one can sleep anywhere and at any time. Bombay is the city that people love and adore; a city for which they have a special corner in their heart. While Bombay is the warmth and camaraderie of people staying wall to wall in chawls and sharing their city with quaint little bungalows housing unassuming rich people; Mumbai is about cut-throat competition and high rises that stand isolated from the crowded slums.

But above all, Bombay, is Manto's Bombay. It is the city of playful prostitutes and the insouciant destitute. Where Khushiya the pimp, blushes when his girl opens the door to him naked. Where for ten rupees, a young girl gets to take a horny grown up duo, on the ride of their lives through the city! Where the smell of a girl lingers on longer than her memory. It is the city of good times where time stands still. Goodwill and love are what drive Manto's Bombay and the foundation of the city is laid on liberty and the pursuit of carefree happiness.

Where Mammad Bhai is not at all, the terrifying goon that he is made out to be and Mozelle isn't such a selfish bitch after all. And where Janaki finally finds love in a vial of penicillin. Manto's Bombay is a city of love and a sort of deliberate careless humanness.

Manto wrote in Urdu (or perhaps Hindustani) about Bombay, but Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmed have done a wonderful translation. I don't know how much better the original version will be, but I can say for sure that this version does carry the essence of the stories. For those of us who aren't well-versed with Urdu, this book offers a beautiful chance to experience the literature. Don't miss it.

Now that I've read Manto's stories about Bombay and know what it's all about, I will try to find my way back to it. I just hope that I don't run into Peerun on the way, or my luck is up.

(A big thank you to Utkarsha for lending me this book and encouraging me to read it. I have also collected excerpts from the book)

Thirty-seventh book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge | Read on my blog

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Manto is able to conjure beauty from the drudgery of Bombay;  the dirt-filled puddles reflect the diaphanous sun-light of a gleaming Bombay morning, as the cast of outcasts who populate these short stories;  pimps and prostitutes, artists and assassins as the lugubrious and the lonesome lurch from jubilation to mourning. In his unflinching portrayal of the seedy under-belly of Indian life,  a break from all of the cliches and caricatures which can beset stories about India and Indian society, Manto represents a truly original voice in Indian literature, at times unrefined and coarse, but with the eye of a true storyteller.

'Mozelle' stands as a particular highlight; a story where the heartless floozy sacrifices herself for a insecure Sikh man (who she may or may not love) and his fiancee. The lead character, whose casual indifference to any form of rules or decorum captivates the reader as much as it does Trilochan; indeed Manto's ability to circumvent norms is his key skill s a novelist. Mozelle, like so many other Manto characters, defies any kind of convention, indeed most of the female characters in his collection of short stories demonstrate this spirit of independence, this disdain for classification. Manto can turn the most hardened murderers-such as Mammad Bhai-into honourable men, the most pathetic lovers-such as Chaddah and Mommy-into sympathetic characters, as Bombay is transformed via the alchemy of Manto's prose into a city of million and one untold stories; of jilted actresses, of prostitutes desperate for love, lonely directors and naive revolutionaries. 

Few writers are able to turn the waves of a woman's hair into billowing of smoke on the skyline, or a woman's breasts into finely crafted pots; yet this is the magic of Manto who was able to paint Bombay in limitless number of harlequin colours. 

[Kiran Bhat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think a lot of South Asian writing is criminally neglected on a global level. That’s not because I’m trying to be ethnocentric, or I want people necessarily to think more about writing from my place of origin. It’s more that I really do think there’s a lot of good writers who are just not being read enough as they should, and I felt like doing whatever I can, in a space as simple as this one, to get them a few more readers.

And, if we have to talk about someone who is truly and indisputably great, I can’t think of any other person to first and foremost focus on, than the master of the short story that is Hasan Saadat Manto. For me he has just as much range as Chekhov, just as much swagger as Lord Byron, and just as much ambition as Joyce. And, yet, outside of India and Pakistan, I don’t think many people read of him, or know of him. Considering how deeply his characters laugh, or how much they emote, aspire, and live, I consider this a real shame.

Manto is a hard writer to classify, partly because of the time period he wrote in. He was born in Punjab, made his name in Bombay, but then Partition happened, and since he was a Muslim, he was sent to live in newly formed Pakistan. He is supposedly a household name on the other side of the border, but he also has a lot of fans in Bombay, because most of his best stories were written there. He is considered the most quintessential Partition voice, mostly because of his own life story, but also because of his story ‘Tek Toba Singh,’ which tells the story of a crazy man in a prison who can’t recall his hometown (the trick of the story is that this is because his home is actually literally on the border between Pakistan and India, highlighting the idiocy of such a divide in the first place). It’s probably the most anthologised story of a South Asian writer, and for good reason. It is built off of the twists and tricks of an O.Henry story, as well as the surreal premise of something Kafka would write, but there’s an emotional poignancy to this man’s predicament and fate that put Manto in a class of his own.

But, mostly, it is his Bombay stories that are really awesome. Manto just really gets Bombay. He lived in the border of Mazgoan (Mumbai’s old immigrant hub, where the Chinese, Jews, and Farsis lived) and Kamathipura (the red light district), and so he saw a very unique Mumbai, as equally vibrant and cosmopolitan as it was seedy and corrupt.

And, Manto’s stories not only live in that Bombay, they defecate, orgasm, and respire in them. In ‘Ten Rupees,’ a girl who’s barely of age lives as a prostitute. She sees men who are thrice as old as her, maybe even more, and does whatever they want, all for the sake of ten rupees. And, yet, she also laughs, she also dreams. At the end of the story, after seeing a client, she throws away her ten rupees from her bosom and runs off, seeing that the time that she had with this guy and her experience was more important than anything money can buy.

In ‘Mozelle,’ though the perspective is written from a male perspective, it is a Jewish Indian girl who centres all of the drama. Much like how Nick Carraway observes Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s eternal classic The Great Gatsby, Trilochan is thinking about the girl he loved, Mozelle, wild, full of excitement and ambition, and yet the girl he ultimately married, a wallflower who exists to please his parents. He regrets his decision, but doesn’t fully feel it until Partition occurs. Trilochan goes to visit Mozelle, despite knowing that Sikhs like him are being hunted. Just as predicted, a mob comes, and is ready to lynch Trilochan on the spot, that is until Mozelle strips herself of all of her clothes, and literally throws herself down the stairs, breaking some bones in the process, confusing everyone who had to witness the scene. In a less talented writer’s hands, the story could have come off as incredibly sexist, or gratuituous, or in bad taste.

Because Manto wrote it, the story is the right mix of funny, ridiculous, and somehow truthful. Mozelle doesn’t just feel like a male’s creation. She seems cantankerous, zesty, and unabashed to be the crazy she is. She seems really alive.

Manto’s characters, whether they are male or female, young or old, Sikh or Muslim, are all completely their own. They are imbibed with something much greater than the sum of their parts. They are just as much their own beings as they are embodiments of Manto’s ever-living energy, and soul. As I said earlier, I can only think of Chekhov matching Manto in relation to both profundity, prolificness, and profusion. However, Manto’s stories are much more gaudy, much more flamboyant, and even much more uncouth. I’d recommend his work for anyone who loves the short story form, and who wants to see characters who are not just a fantasy, but a true representative of how fully life should and must be lived.

[Doc. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a little over five years old when Bombay became Mumbai, in a post-colonial rush to erase all evidence of the oppressor. But in Manto's pre-Partition stories, the city is still Bombay, and though much has changed, much remains the same. White Alley may have taken on a new name, but it continues to house the prostitutes, pimps, gangsters, struggling actors and others, who make up the iconic Bambaiyya characters of Bollywood. The squalor has only increased since Manto lived in these lanes, but perhaps now they are better obscured from vision by urbanisation and gentrification. These stories use the forgotten names of the city's roads and monuments, named after the original benefactors, transporting you to a different time. History still surrounds us, only with an updated cover in a new edition.

As one of the few people amongst my friends and family to have lived away from home for a good part of my life, Bombay's flaws make themselves more readily apparent to me. And yet, it's hard to resist its charm. Even in a diverse country, it stands out for its diversity. They say you'll meet every kind of person in Bombay—people from all over India, sometimes the world—and I can attest to this. Manto implied that people who come here for a better life rarely go back. Again, true. We are a city of immigrants. But once in a blue moon, sectarian violence rears its head, whether it's native vs. immigrant or Hindu vs. Muslim; even a busy and bustling Bombay is not immune to hatred, in this melting pot of which the privileged are so proud. And so, Manto, who emigrated to Pakistan owing to this hatred, suffers from a common malady: nostalgia for a Bombay long-gone. I know this feeling, as someone who's always nostalgic for the Bombay of my youth, even as I live right here. His love for the city and mine are founded on past identities that are being reinvented constantly.

I would've preferred these stories with the original spirit of Bombay intact, but so much of that is related to language. We speak a dialect of Hindi here that is uniquely associated with the city's history and culture, that has grown and evolved with it. So it took a while to get into this translation. Once I did, I could appreciate Manto's love for the downtrodden, his knack for writing them as complex people rather than plot points or spigots on which to hang his values or views. It's a part of India that most would rather we ignore, but Manto put all these unsavory elements front and centre, forcing us to confront poverty and despair and the humanity that exists between both. Then there are the parts of the city that are dying but still alive and thriving in Manto's stories, like the dwindling Jewish population and their philanthropic gifts to the city, whose numbers have reduced since the Zionist creation of Israel. Indeed, the face of the city transforms imperceptibly, until before you know it, it's no longer recognisable. Read this, if you share my fascination for this beautifully contradictory city.

[Siddharth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5 stars

A collection of 15 short stories set in pre-independence Bombay, featuring prostitutes, pimps, writers, thugs, and the like. Written in simple prose (at least if you go by the translation), the stories are by turns delightful, moving, and occasionally, a little mediocre. They also manage to be both frank and subtle, which is an excellent achievement.

The appendix of the book has three non-fiction pieces by Manto, which help us understand more about him.

On society and prostitutes, in Women and the Film World:
Society produces prostitutes, and its wide-reaching laws foster their existence. So why are they stigmatized, why is their collective death wished, when they too are part of society? If we want to transform them into something good, then we will have to work to improve society as a whole. As long as we don’t think with new vigor about how our society operates, then in this so-called era of culture and civilization there will continue to be prostitutes everywhere and this “impurity” will never disappear.

On gender bias in the way society views men and women, also in the same piece:
Our so-called honorable citizens hold fundamentally flawed opinions about prostitutes in that their posturing is essentially no more than a way for them to insist upon their respectability and dignity. Men control society and take advantage of the power this bestows on them. Society says that men always remain men, regardless of whether they commit sins at each and every step of their way, but a woman no longer remains a woman if she succumbs even once to a youthful desire or some other impulse, or if she loses her way for a moment due to a man’s forceful demands. She’s viewed with contempt and hatred, and doors close for her that would remain open for men.

On what he writes about, in a lecture at Jogeshwari College:
So long as there is human weakness ( and especially so long as it exists in me), I will search it out and expose it in others...when I'm sitting in a train and take out my new expensive pen just so everyone will look over in awe, I get interested in my crassness. When my next-door neighbour beats his wife but she still cleans his shoes, I hardly feel any sympathy for her. But when she gets beaten up, threatens suicide, leaves the house to watch a movie so her husband must suffer through the next two hours of uncertainty, then I feel a strange sort of sympathy for both...My heroine is the cheapest of whores who works at night and sleeps fitfully during the day, persecuted by nightmares that she's getting old, and whose heavy eyelids are weighed down by years of missed sleep. That's what I write about. Her desperation, her illnesses, her anxieties, her insults - that's what I like, that's what I write about, not the housewife's pleasant banter, good health, and high-mindedness.

[dhanak · Rating 4 out of 5]

yearning for a land i’ve never been; a land that doesn’t quite exist—— not as it had once been, at least.

[Akshay Dasgupta · Rating 1 out of 5]

Firstly, my sincere apologies to all Manto fans for the following review.

This book was bad - just plain bad. I have never struggled so much to finish any book before this one. I really don't know where to even big. I have no idea why is this book called 'Bombay Stories'. There was nothing "Bombay" about any of the stories. Most of the them were so similar and repetative in theme, all about pimps, prostitutes, struggling actors and directors, pathetic parties and aimless drinking. Agreed that these elements are a part of any metropolitan city but there was nothing really 'bombay' about it. This book has miserably failed to bring out even the slightest essence of the city.

the writing (or the translation, most probably) was so bland and basic, it seems someone just jotted down the stories for the sake of finishing a book. I really hate giving one star to any book and I try my best to give it the most stars but this one was just bad. I would not recommend this book to anyone, especially those wanting to get a real essence of the city of Bombay.

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I plan to write more about Saadat Hasan Manto and his stories after reading Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto, his anthology including sketches on the partition. All i want to say now, some of these stories are as good as any best short stories I've ever read including Chekhov and Joyce. For example, "The Insult" or "Mozelle". It is a pity that he is not better known now in the West.

[Aloke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind blowing. Suketu Mehta writes that he might be the greatest South Asian writer of the 20th century. And yet I’d not really heard of him until recently. Why? Mostly my fault but maybe partly because he writes about a “foreign” India closer to my favorite Simenon than Forster, with his empathetic descriptions of prostitutes and others on the margins of urban life (plus a healthy dose of sleazy rich people and their hangers on). Also like Simenon, Manto is economical with his prose managing to fully realize a world in a few pages. Includes a very informative afterword (thankfully not an introduction!).

This was a good review although I think he plagiarizes the afterword a bit and is too harsh on the other book reviewed:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014...

Suketu Mehta: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/bo...

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Hamid dropped Lata off at her house at nine that night, he felt hollow. The touch of her soft body was sheared from him like bark from a tree, and he spent the entire night tossing and turning.

In the course of finding a prostitute for a client, Hamid becomes infatuated with the fresh Lata and spends thousands of rupees on her, taken from his bank account without the knowledge of his wife. Moral disintegration follows. Early in the story Manto contrasts meticulous Hamid with the well-to-do client Babu Har Gopal, who seems indifferent to filth in others or himself.

He ate off dirty plates and was unfazed. His pillowcase was soiled and stank, but he never thought of changing it. Hamid thought long and hard, but he couldn’t understand him. He often asked, ‘Babuji, why aren’t you revolted by dirtiness?’

Babu Har Gopal would smile. ‘I am revolted. But when you’re obsessed by it, you see it everywhere. How can you cure yourself of that?’

Hamid had no answer but his disgust didn’t abate.

Manto was obsessed by the colorful life of Bombay immigrants scrabbling to live on the edge. He sees it everywhere. He writes about prostitutes, gangsters, and every kind of hanger-on in the film industry. The stories are matter-of-fact; characters generally operate as best they can within the rules of the powers that be around them, be they pimps or courts. Almost everyone suffers from intermittant illness, and many drink heavily; a few are drug addicts. And yet the stories aren’t depressing; they say, this is what life is. People still love, party, dance, laugh. Many of the stories here, drawn from a variety of collections published in his lifetime, show Bombay citizens of all religions living side by side, but a couple are from the time of partition and portray the terror and bloodshed (Mano was Muslim and eventually took his family to Lahore).

Saadat Hasan Manto was a short story writer, journalist and scriptwriter for films and radio in India and later Pakistan. He was born in 1912 in a small town in Punjab and died in Pakistan 1955, an alcoholic. The years that constituted his active writing career, however, were lived in Bombay and Delhi. Manto was the son of a strict lawyer, but he was an indifferent student and not cut out for the law. He did finally finish university, and became a journalist, with the other writing roles developing later. An irascible employee and editor, Manto frequently moved from newspaper to newspaper or studio to studio as a consequence of quarrels. He also used frank language in his stories, and fought censorship actions throughout his life. According to the translators’ afterword, his work is still banned in Pakistan.

Manto was politically aware, but also skeptical. One of the stories ridicules Communists in name only:

I wanted to talk about the development of Communist philosophy from Hegel to Karl Marx and the disuss the viewpoints of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. I wanted to tell her my opinion of India’s Communist Movement and to hear hers too. I wanted to tell her stories of young men carrying Karl Marx’s books tucked beneath their arms with only one idea in mind--to impress others...Then I would tell her about the young men and women who become Communist as a way to meet the opposite sex. I would tell her how half the boys who join the Movement are, simple put, horny, and how they stare at the girl initiates with eyes filled with centuries of unrequited desire. I would tell her how most of hte girls are rebellious daughter of fat-cat industrialists who read introductory books then become activemembers just in order to stave off boredom...

Of course some stories are more successful than others, but I enjoyed the collection very much. It felt very authentic, without striving to be so. Manto himself is a character in several of them, and he sometimes refers to this overlap directly. The translators emphasize his role as the first modern Bombay author, portraying the city as a place of anonymity that is both liberating--one can be oneself--and lonely--no one notices whether you live or die.

The truth is that I’ve lived with dervishes and gypsies since I was a child. I love them and can’t live without them. I’ve decided that I’m going to stay at a saint’s shrine as soon as my money runs out. Whorehouses and shrines--I feel at peace nowhere else. I’ll quit going to whorehouses soon enough because my money’s about to run out. But India has thousands of saints. I”ll go find one when my time comes.’

‘Why do you like whorehouses and shrines?’ I asked.

He thought for a moment and then answered, ‘Because there, from top to bottom, it’s all about deception. What better place could there be for a person who wants to deceive himself?’

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saadat Hasan Manto is one of those writers whose reputation precedes him, often carried like a warning label. His name evokes the Partition stories, the raw accounts of madness and brutality that stripped away all illusions of civilisation. Yet long before he became the reluctant chronicler of 1947’s apocalypse, he had another city and another obsession: Bombay. He arrived there as a young man in the late 1930s, and between 1936 and 1942 he immersed himself in its streets, its chawls, its Irani cafés, and its emerging film world.

Out of this immersion came a set of stories that would later be collected and translated under the title Bombay Stories. The collection, though less famous than Toba Tek Singh or Khol Do, reveals the crucible in which Manto’s vision was forged. It is here that his voice—acerbic, compassionate, unsentimental, and always fascinated by the margins—first hardened into the instrument we now recognise as his own.

To read Bombay Stories is to enter not a romanticised city of dreams but a fractured, breathing organism whose very pulse is hunger, desire, and exhaustion.

Manto’s Bombay is both seductive and suffocating, never static. The chawls drip with sweat and gossip, the brothels hum with weary routine, and the film studios tempt with glamour and then betray with indifference. Unlike Dickens’s London, which carried within it a moral order waiting to be restored, or Balzac’s Paris, which promised a panoramic sweep of society, Manto’s Bombay has no center, no lesson, no reconciliation. It is pure flux, a trap and a lure in equal measure.

One of Manto’s greatest achievements in these stories lies in his cast of characters. The people who populate Bombay Stories are prostitutes, pimps, junior actors, gangsters, struggling writers, and clerks forever waiting for a break. They are not glamorous in the way cinema might have wished to portray them, nor are they tragic symbols. They are alive—messy, contradictory, resilient, sometimes cruel, sometimes tender. Manto had an uncanny ability to elevate the supposedly marginal figure into a mirror of universal human experience.

A prostitute in his stories is not reduced to her occupation; she is also a woman with jokes, with moods, and with flashes of insight and cruelty. A small-time gangster is not just a menace; he is charisma, theatricality, insecurity, and eventual vulnerability. This commitment to complexity distinguishes Manto from many of his contemporaries and explains why his stories, though rooted in a specific time and place, still feel startlingly fresh.

Consider “Mammad Bhai”, one of the standout stories in the collection. At first glance, it reads like a gangster sketch: the rise and sudden fall of a chawl overlord whose reputation is his currency. But what lingers is not the violence or the swagger but the fragility of power itself, how charisma is sustained by performance and how quickly it evaporates. When Mammad Bhai’s aura collapses, it does so not with a melodramatic climax but with the quiet indifference of a city that moves on. This insight—that even the most powerful are only temporarily significant in the churn of urban life—is one Manto would return to again and again.

Another story, “Janaki”, focuses on a small-time actress whose brief flirtation with fame crashes against the reality of exploitation and the grinding mechanisms of the film industry. Here Manto is both insider and sceptic: having worked as a screenwriter himself, he knew the illusions of Bombay cinema from the inside. What the story strips bare is the hollowness behind the glamour, the way promises of stardom dissolve into drudgery, rejection, or worse. To read it now, in an era when Bollywood still produces dreams while chewing up aspirants, is to recognise the enduring truth of Manto’s portrayal.

Many of the stories feel fragmentary, deliberately so. Manto often refused the neat closure of traditional fiction, preferring abrupt endings that leave the reader suspended in unease. This is not clumsiness but fidelity to life as he saw it. In Bombay, stories do not end neatly; they trail off, they are interrupted, and they collapse into silence. The lack of closure mirrors the precarious lives of his characters, for whom nothing is secure, not even narrative resolution. This stylistic choice also links Manto to the modernist impulse of his global contemporaries: Joyce’s stream of consciousness, Dos Passos’s fragmented montages, or Hemingway’s minimalist silences.

Stylistically, Manto’s realism is sharp-edged, almost journalistic. His sentences are clipped, his descriptions terse. Yet within this economy lies a devastating irony. He never moralises, never preaches. Instead, he allows the reader to judge—or to squirm when judgement rebounds on them. The dialogues, in particular, shimmer with authenticity.

The cadences of Bombay’s street speech—Urdu mingled with Hindi, laced with slang and rhythm—come alive. The translation by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad cannot fully replicate the music of Manto’s Urdu, but it preserves enough of the rhythm to let us sense the rough vitality of the original. Still, any reader who knows Urdu will feel the loss: Manto’s wit and bite often travel poorly across languages, and the sharpness of a well-placed colloquial word is dulled in English.

If the stories have limitations, they lie in their sketch-like quality. At times they read less like fully fleshed fiction than like notebook jottings from a reporter haunting the city’s underbelly. Certain figures recur—the prostitute with ironic resilience, the gangster with a hidden weakness, the failed artist clinging to a dream—so often that one feels a pattern, perhaps even predictability. Yet this repetition, rather than laziness, reflects the social world Manto inhabited. The circles he moved in were populated by such figures, and to represent them repeatedly was to insist on their centrality, to refuse their erasure by more respectable narratives.

What Bombay Stories reveals most clearly is Manto’s movement away from romanticism and toward the hard-edged realism that would later define his Partition stories. In his earliest work he still toyed with florid styles, but Bombay stripped him of illusions. Here he encountered poverty not as an abstraction but as a daily reality, exploitation not as a moral theme but as a lived fact. This encounter hardened his prose, sharpened his eye, and armed him for the literary battles to come. His later depictions of Partition’s madness would not have been possible without this apprenticeship in Bombay’s chawls and brothels.

Placing Manto’s Bombay alongside other urban literatures is revealing. Dickens’s London often oscillated between horror and moral restoration; Balzac’s Paris offered sprawling maps of ambition and corruption. Manto’s Bombay, by contrast, is anarchic and fragmented, refusing synthesis. In this sense he is closer to modernists than to realists. At the same time, his choice of subject matter—prostitutes, failed actors, and gangsters—distinguishes him from his Indian contemporaries. Premchand focused on rural poverty, Tagore on the spiritual and emotional landscapes of Bengal. Manto, along with Ismat Chughtai and Krishan Chander, turned his gaze to the profane, the everyday, and the unrespectable. In doing so he not only broadened Urdu literature’s thematic range but also challenged the hypocrisy of middle-class morality.

Indeed, one of Manto’s key achievements is the subversion of respectability. He insists that so-called immoral lives are lived with as much dignity, humour, and contradiction as respectable ones. The violence in these stories is rarely spectacular; it is structural, embedded in poverty, in exploitation, and in the commodification of bodies. The horror is not in bloodshed but in the grinding machinery of a city that consumes its migrants and leaves them disillusioned.

Manto’s Bombay is also haunted by displacement. Written before Partition, these stories already anticipate the themes that would later dominate his career: rootlessness, unmooring, and alienation. The migrants who pour into Bombay are already estranged from tradition, already searching for precarious footholds. In this sense, Bombay Stories is less a prelude than an early articulation of Manto’s lifelong obsession with the fragility of belonging.

Reading these stories today, in the translation of Reeck and Ahmad, is to confront both the gift and the loss of translation. The English makes them accessible to global audiences and rescues them from obscurity. Yet one feels constantly the ghost of the original Urdu—the sharper bite, the earthier slang, the crueller humour—that cannot fully cross over. The translators preserve the cadences, but not the sting. For those who can, returning to the Urdu remains essential; for those who cannot, the translations remain invaluable, if inevitably partial, windows.

Ultimately, Bombay Stories endures because it is more than literature. It is an archive of urban history, a sociological document that captures a city in flux during the 1930s and 40s. No government report, no official history, could have preserved these voices with such intimacy. Today, when Bombay has become Mumbai, transformed and globalised, the stories still resonate. Beneath the gleaming skyline of modern Mumbai lies the same machinery of exploitation and resilience, the same factories of dream and disillusionment.

To read Manto is to be forced into confrontation. He offers no easy escape, no consoling narrative. His characters do not uplift; they unsettle. His city does not inspire; it corrodes and fascinates. Yet in his refusal to romanticise, Manto offers something more enduring: truth, unflinching and unsentimental. The reader may long for a reprieve, but none is given. That, perhaps, is the mark of his genius.

In the end, Bombay Stories is not simply a collection of tales from a young writer finding his voice. It is a record of how a great city forms and deforms those who come to it. It is a love letter written with acid ink, a chronicle of both intimacy and betrayal. For readers approaching Manto through this collection, the reward is not comfort but recognition—the recognition that beneath every city’s glamour lies a darker, fragile, more human reality. Manto forces us to see it, without apology and without embellishment. And once seen, it cannot be unseen.

[Sandeep · Rating 4 out of 5]

How I love Manto, and how obscure I have been about his writing all these days! Pity me, but not anymore.

I have read multiple books on Indian History, Indian freedom struggle, set during 1930's. This particular book too is set round about the same time and it covers quite a lot of ground as it chugs along covering topics other than the freedom struggle.

How the author has portrayed his stay in Mumbai during the pre-independence era, what occupation the people were into, a glimpse into the film industry during the 1930's, it has left me with no other option that to order few more books of Manto as well as Bombay and start reading them too.

So many people get introduced in this book and each one has a different tale to tell. Its a great work, the translation might have taken off some luster but overall its a gem worth taking some time out and reading. That's my perspective though, I hope you agree!

I could literally visualize an era, where the population was less, technology was not that advanced, life was laid back, where a journey from Lahore to Bombay could be taken by a train, plus an age where letters, telegrams and occasional roaring of an engine, still held a charm.

How I wish I could have heard such stories from my grand parents. Never mind, but with Manto's stories for company, I am sure, I can fill that void and instead come closer to understanding the day to day life of a (Indian) common man during the 1930's and 1940's.

Yet, for me, the shortcomings include
- Most stories revolved around prostitutes/pimps other occupations could have been written about.
- Alcohol, few stories carried instances of this,

so though I like the way its written, things could have been a bit more broader, but never mind, I still love them.

Cheerio,

[Jigar Brahmbhatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Further amused by Manto's artistry. Brewed in the cheap alleys of pre-independent Bombay, amidst the low lives and the pleasure-seekers and the wanna-bes, these stories pick up the commonplace, the everyday, and make it shine like embers. His effortlessness is envious.

[Maryam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I honestly think this book just suffered a lot from its translation. As I was reading it I could literally feel how much context I was missing out on because it wasn't translated well. A lot of meaning and symbolism is lost once a work has been translated and I'm quite a big fan of the way penguin pocket classics format their translated fiction, so for example in those editions if a phrase, name, or a word is mentioned that needs further explanation for the reader to truly understand its importance they add an asterisk and give the background information necessary in the footnote on the page. It's simple to follow and helps a lot with understanding the book. I think if Vintage had a similar format to that of Penguin's this would have been far more enjoyable. There was a point in the book that just annoyed me so there's a line that says "I don't know what his real name was but everyone called him Dhundhu, which was fitting because his job was to find girls that satisfied his customers' varied tastes." But the thing is I don't know why that's fitting because I don't know what that word means to begin with. That's why I feel like I wasn't getting as much as I could have from this collection unfortunately.

The writing was really bland nothing was driving the stories, if this were to have been one story rather than a collection of short stories I'm not sure I would have even gotten through it at all. I failed to see a point or meaning to any of them but I think the stories were more of a character/city analysis rather than one with meaning in them so that was fine. Manto often puts himself in the stories which I didn't enjoy at all it made the stories feel like a poorly written recount because it was all just:

I went to the coffee shop to meet my friend. My friend was struggling. We talked some more then we separated. Then I met another friend.

Again, I feel like this was less Manto's fault and more the translators'.

Regardless, there's no argument that Manto was an incredibly influential writer and I'm glad to have read some of his work. His life was the biggest tragedy and yet his legacy carried on in formation of India's film industry, it's literally the biggest shame that he didn't live to see it. I also enjoyed the essay, "Why I Don't Go to the Movies" in the appendix.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I generally love most things written about India, particularly from this time period. But there is not a lot of redeeming value in this collection of stories written mostly in the 1940s, which have been recently translated, collected into one volume, and then published in 2014. The characters, heavily centered on pimps and prostitutes, are mostly unappealing. The stories themselves are not highly entertaining. However, I can appreciate that these stories were groundbreaking in its day and have heavily influenced several succeeding generations of writers. There are small glimpses into the Bombay of the 1930s and 1940s, which are fascinating and further put the city way ahead of its time. But the price of extracting these glimpses is too high for my taste.

[Saumya · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a marvellous short stories collection!

[Riya Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some stories were a pleasure to read, others were a bit confusing and ambiguous. 3.5 stars!

[Kaivalya Karkare · Rating 4 out of 5]

My 2nd Manto collection of short stories after "Toba Tek Singh and Short Stories". As before, love the brutal rawness of his 'low-life fiction'; brings to mind Bukowski. I especially liked the 'Rude' short story. Manto's works continue to remind how so many facets of life in India yet remained unchanged 7-8 decades later.

[Peeyush Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

All short stories are autobiographical, these stories kind of a reminds me of short stories written by Charles Bukowski which are written from the point of view of Henri Chinaski, Bukowski’s alter-ego. The writing in this book has an astonishing spontaneous feel to it, anything can and will happen in the raw inventive hands of Manto. Bombay Stories is a collection of Manto’s fiction where short stories are set in part or entirely in the Mumbai city, and every story has a unique sense of place emerges through the narratives by bringing attention to his authorial consciousness where Manto attracts our attention briefly on exactly what he feels and focuses on what he pretends to dismiss or belittle. In one of the stories Manto confesses that he made everything up in his story and in the same story there is a character Naim who writes to Manto at the story’s end to confess that he made everything up, and yet his stories felt true and that through his lies he expressed a real part of himself. I didn't know If Manto has lived those moments and meet those interesting characters which are described in the book but he has made me feel like that he was the very part of it. His self-conscious reflections on storytelling break the conventions of storytelling and it interrupts the transparency visible in documentary realism. It is one of the foremost works where representation of Bombay’s emergence as the modern city we now recognize it to be, and Manto’s way of characterizing the city—populating it with a motley crew of prostitutes, pimps, writers, film, gangsters and riches has become a very part of the Mumbai tradition.

[Lily · Rating 1 out of 5]

According to Salman Rushdie's blurb on the back of this book, Saadat Hasan Manto is the "undisputed master of the modern Indian shot story." Not to disagree with Salman Rushdie, but I really did not enjoy this. He writes about prostitutes, pimps, madams, and the men who enlist their services in Bombay. It was like reading a narrative version of the scene where Joan prostitutes herself to Herb so Sterling Cooper can get the Jaguar account. Over and over and over again. I think there's something to be said for shedding light on the sex industry, but it was just a rough read. And anyway it was written by a man, a man who put himself into the stories as a kindly john who just wants these girls to get out of the game. Wasn't for me.

[Ahsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing style is unsophisticated and lazy; every female character in the book is a prostitute whose only function is to tell the story of a man; Manto unsubtly and randomly inserts himself into most of the stories in a self-praising way which comes across as arrogant; I can’t think of anything good about the book 😓

[Somya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Strange. Stories about the underbelly of pre-independence Bombay. Something was definitely lost in translation here. Perhaps Manto in Hindi would be better.

[Nitya Kuchimanchi · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I picked up this book, I definitely was not expecting feel-good, slice of life stories based in Bombay. Manto after all, is renowned for his unabashed communist stance and his penchant for writing about who were thought to be "scandalous women" ; women in my opinion with silenced voices, characters who are often shunned by other authors of equal fame. What appeals to me most about the way he writes about his characters, (more often prostitutes than not) is how he refuses to victimize them , shining light upon aspects of their thought that have virtually nothing to do with their work.

From Saugandhi who pines after man after man she runs into with nothing but her insecurities to wake upto the mornings after, eventually finding strength within herself to Mozelle a self aware character whose complexity words fail to describe, the women of Manto's stories despite being threaded together by their common profession, have unforgettable individualism. My personal favorite was "Ten Rupees", the story of a girl whose innocence is unparalleled to the extent that it spills over and unto the people who wish her harm. The translation, in retrospect could have used some work in a couple of places but nevertheless does the job. Never for a second throughout the book did the ache to know Urdu leave me, for I could only imagine how much more impact the book would have had on me. I'd recommend this book to everyone who has even a remotely nurtured interest in post-Independent Bombay and feminism at the time.

India at the time wasn't too kind to authors who wrote about complex and multilayered women, much less women who dared to be open about sexuality. Manto's books have crossed many a social prejudices but aptly so, a task that must have demanded much bravery from an author of that time. The line between vulgarity and prose is a thin one and one that Manto has skirted playfully yet beautifully.

[Anna A-P · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Pakistani friends recommended Manto to me. My favorite stories from this collection were "Ten Rupees, "The Insult," and "Smell." His stories explore society's more sordid facets, featuring prostitutes and the people they encounter of questionable moral character, yet I found myself sympathetic to many of them (particularly the women, often prostitutes, who were usually the ones with true hearts). Manto writes beautifully and vividly--in "The Insult," I felt that I was right in the prostitute's filthy room where the story takes place (he described her dog as having "fur...so patchy that if someone saw him from a distance, they would mistake him for the folded piece of sacking used to wipe the floor"). A beautiful scene description in "Smell": "When he looked through the window, he saw the leaves of the peepal tree trembling in the rain, rustling and fluttering in the breeze. It was dark and yet the night gave off a faint glow, as though the raindrops had stolen some of the stars' radiance." Some stories are autobiographical, with writer characters who have some variation of the name "Manto." By the end, I felt like I'd outstayed my welcome at a raunchy party filled with drunken, absurd, and sometimes dangerous guests, but a memorable party I nevertheless did not regret attending. Grateful for this glimpse into Manto's world!

[Suzanne F. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bombay Stories ( some of which are located in Pune) is a hilarious, and quite fascinating read. The short stories describe a Bombay in the 1930s; at the cusp of Independence from the British Raj but judging by the still somewhat prejudiced multiculturalism of the city - complete with Jews, Parsis, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians and Anglo-Saxons - has not yet reached the peak of sectarian/ethnic violence (at home and abroad) that would enable Independence and later, Partition to occur. Manto writes about his own life living - and drinking vast quantitities of Bombay's alcohol - with/among the medley of actors, gangsters, street people and prostitutes of the city. Each character is humanized by Manto with witty prose and humurous but often compassionate writing style. Although the rising tensions in India are mentioned its clear from the casual nonchalance that Manto writes with that he believes that Bombay will remain apart from such ridiculousness. How very wrong he was.

Nevertheless, Manto, I am happy to report, is truly a master of the short story form. Definitely Bombay Stories read if you can - my personal favourite of the stories was Mozelle and Peerun.

[Mahima Kohli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Manto, always have. His keen observations on people around him, the faithful reproduction of the sacred and profane of society and human behaviour, and the subtle humour - it is all there in this collection of short stories with the common thread of being based in or around Bombay. But there's another thing that's common to almost all these stories - prostitutes. Nearly every story revolves around prostitutes, and the occasional young girl or woman who isn't a prostitute but her morals are still on the table for discussion and comment. And do not think this is a critique - it's just something I realised once I was through with the book.
It's an interesting book with some tongue-in-cheek humour and a good look at the underbelly of Bombay city. I did however feel that I wasn't reading the real Manto but just a translation. There are some words, some phrases that only have an impact if said in Hindustani. That absence of linguistic impact is unmistakeable in these stories. I'd suggest reading the original stories written in Hindustani if you can.

[Gary Singh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Manto is one of the most celebrated literary troublemakers of 20th century India. His most famous stuff is the body of stories he wrote about Partition, accurately depicting with brutal clarity the violence, trauma, fear, paranoia and sheer madness of the resulting two countries. But this collection is about Bombay. Before he relocated to Lahore after Partition, his milieu was the gritty underside of Bombay in the 1940s, in the same way that the gritty underside of Los Angeles was home to Bukowski or Raymond Chandler. These stories are about pimps, prostitutes, drunks, crooks, and washed-up outcasts of all sorts. Manto wrote what he knew and what he saw; he wasn't burdened with Western creative writing teacher nonsense, meaning, you won't find any dramatic transformation of the protagonist, an obstacle overcome, or a satisfying resolution in most of these stories. They're more like sketches or vignettes, albeit with a creative twist at the end, sometimes. I consider Manto my creative ancestor, I suppose. I love this stuff.

[Arin Goswami · Rating 3 out of 5]

Manto is described as India's answer to F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I find to be a demeaning proposition. Yes, Fitzgerald is far better known and accepted within the literary canon, but to even come close to describing the inherent nihilism in the left-leaning experience in late colonial India as somewhat similar to that, is doing Manto and his contemporaries a disservice. Whatever freedom India experiences today is because of people like Manto, and it would be insulting of us to forget that.

[Sheetal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many babies are born prematurely and so are weak, and love, too, remains weak if rushed. Sometimes childbirth is very painful, and sometimes falling in love causes great pain. Just as a woman may miscarry, love can die before it has had a chance to grown. Sometimes women are infertile, and from time to time you'll also find men incapable of loving. That isn't to say they don't want to love, but they don't know how to. Some women can't have babies and some men cant inspire love because they lack something emotional. - Barren

As soon as her bad luck wore out, I got bored of her. My game evaporated! Now, who's going to screw things up for me? - Peerun

I am born and brought up in Bombay and would always be in this childish love with it. Bombay meant something similar to Manto though he was not born there. I liked his perspective and the way he felt and woven the essence of Bombay, the people, into his stories. All characters, locations came to life.

[Kanchan Mandanekar · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are stories and interesting details about the ingenious Manto who is a well deserved cult than just a writer.

Yes, I did feel during the middle of the book that why is there an over emphasis on prostitution. Bombay was not just about that! It took me time to understand that he lived in very very different economic and cultural times and that this was his reality. His Bombay Stories. Besides, it is the fag end of the book that makes us realise why it was and is important to talk about it.

This is not a must read book, definitely. Nor does it evoke strong nostalgia about Bombay for someone who's lived there in the recent times. But this book is about how one man who was simply awake (or "progressive") saw what he saw and fearlessly wrote what he wrote. Most importantly, he did not fail to make the reader think about how more the things change the more they remain the same. Or, do they?