Long before ‘Shree 420’ and ‘Awaara’, KA Abbas’s humanity was visible in a travelogue from China

Since his death at the age of 72 in 1987, polymath Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, better known as KA Abbas, is remembered mainly for his screenplays and being one of the pioneers of Indian neo-realistic cinema. Few recall that before he attained celebrity as the screenwriter of iconic Hindi films such as Shree 420 and Awaara, Abbas worked as a cub reporter for The Bombay Chronicle.

Early in this stint, in July 1938, Abbas got an opportunity to travel from Bombay to Shanghai. He was just 24 then. And Shanghai had undergone an extraordinary transformation, becoming, as Abbas wrote in an article for his newspaper, the “world’s most amazing city”.

Once a nondescript fishing village, Shanghai turned into a melting pot of Chinese and European cultures after the British made it a treaty port following the end of the First Opium War in 1842. Over the next few decades, several fortune-seeking foreign businessmen made their way to the city, altering its cultural landscape and helping it earn the moniker Paris of the East.

The first Indian to document the city in a travelogue was Karpurthala’s ruler Jagatjit Singh, who visited the city in 1903-’04. Singh wrote in glowing terms about the Shanghai International Settlement and the French Concession, but was visibly disturbed by the poor living conditions in the Chinese areas. By the time of Abbas’s visit, the city had undergone profound change and also considerable tumult. In August 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army staged a brutal invasion of the city. Stiff resistance was offered by the Chinese, but in the end the Japanese were victorious, capturing the Chinese parts of the city.

After the Japanese invasion, the International Settlement was run through a unique system of governance, with the British, Americans, Chinese and Japanese jointly administering it. The area was guarded by Scottish and Sikh soldiers, and the police force mainly comprised Sikhs and Chinese. Interestingly enough, the French maintained total control over the French Concession.

Abbas’s article dated July 12, 1938 started off on a sombre note: “It is the morning of Sunday the 10th. Our ship is puffing its way up the delta of the Yangtze and Whangpo rivers and as the stream is pretty fast, we can only move at snail’s speed. All the Chinese passengers, most of whom belong to Shanghai and are returning after months of homelessness in Canton and Hong Kong, have been up from an early hour. Today, they are unusually quiet as they look out in the direction of Shanghai.”

The lull on the ship was understandable. Abbas’s co-passengers were refugees who had fled when the Japanese invaded and were finally returning home. Signs of the Japanese assault were visible to Abbas as his ship reached Shanghai. He wrote, “We go along a bend in the river, and then the doomed city of Woosung bursts on to our view. It was once a flourishing suburb of Shanghai – once! Now it is all in ruins, victims of Japanese bombs and shells.”

Abbas sympathised with the plight of his Chinese co-passengers, writing, “Our Chinese friends look on with moist eyes, though they would not give expression to their feelings. Many of them had their homes here. They will, like a million more like them, take refuge in the International Settlement.”

The passengers were herded onto a smaller boat and taken to the Custom House jetty, which was a scene of chaos. The Indian journalist described in The Bombay Chronicle his unusual welcome: “I am greeted with a smile by a young Chinese girl who hands me a flower and says some charming things to me…only I cannot understand them for she speaks Chinese. Then I am embarrassed to find her pinning a bouquet to the lapel of my coat and I have to put an improvised pantomime show to ask her what it is all about.” A student with a bundle of English books, who was passing by, explained that she was collecting money for a refugee camp, to which Abbas gladly contributed.

Urban squalor

Among the overflowing crowds at the jetty, Abbas could not get a taxi to the International Settlement and had to witness the suffering of the ordinary Chinese in Shanghai. He found that the only way to get to the Foreign YMCA in the posher part of the city was by a hand-pulled rickshaw.

Abbas hated riding the vehicle, which he called a relic “from the days when slaves carried rich men in sedan chairs and pulled their carriages like horses”. He described the locals’ amusement when they saw “a most self-conscious young Indian riding in a rickshaw simultaneously trying to keep his balance on the unsteady perch and hide his embarrassed countenance under the brim of his hat.”

As the rickshaw went past trams, buses and bicycles, Abbas said he feared for his life and swore never to ride one again. He was appalled at how poorly the rickshaw-pullers were paid and how many of them died of tuberculosis at a young age. “For 10 cents (roughly one anna), you can get them to pull a bloated plutocrat for a mile,” he wrote. “Perhaps only the peasant in some parts of India can equal this record of sweated labour.”

In the Shanghai summer heat, the young journalist was relieved at seeing the better parts of the city. “Shanghai is full of far more exciting and pleasanter things than starving rickshawwallas; and the fast tempo of this, the world’s most amazing city; its reckless pursuit of pleasure and the sense of insecurity and uncertainty of the future which is in the air as a legacy of the recent troubles and which further sharpens the edge of desire for momentary enjoyment and escape from reality – these are guaranteed to set right the most uneasy social conscience.”

Sin City

Despite the physical scars left by the Japanese invasion, the vibrant social and business life in the foreign-occupied parts went on as usual. When Abbas visited what he called the “strangest city in the whole world”, there was no dearth of customers in glitzy restaurants, skating rinks, dance halls, cabarets, opium dens or for that matter brothels.

The city even had a cosmopolitan character. “There are large numbers of Germans, Portuguese, Russians (mostly refugees who found the country too hot after the revolution) and even some Indians,” Abbas wrote. “As invariably happens in all cities with such a mixed population, mostly composed for fortune-seekers, adventurers and profiteers – the city acquired the vices and doubtful virtues of all, while maintaining the moral and cultural values of none.”

Many had got rich quickly in Shanghai by selling opium to the Chinese or selling weapons to bandits and warlords. To them, spending their ill-gotten wealth on entertainment was only natural. “And thus Shanghai came to be classed among the world’s ‘Cities of Sin,’” Abbas wrote. “I doubt, however, whether it deserves such eminence. The conception of what is ‘Sin’ has itself changed and now we seek reasons for the moral degeneration in political and economic phenomena.”

The International Settlement also had a significant number of affluent Chinese. “The people here, including the Chinese, indulge in the pursuit of pleasure with almost philosophic earnestness,” Abbas wrote. “Not only for the rich, but for the middle classes, there are innumerable places of entertainment, where, it may be conceded, escape from reality is offered at moderate rates, in clean surroundings and without any hypocritical pretensions.”

During his stay in Shanghai, the Indian journalist went to, among other places, a Chinese theatre, tea houses and a Muslim restaurant. “Some Chinese friends, on learning with regret that I ate neither pork nor frogs, took me to a Muslim restaurant where I struggled with a dish of chicken and a pair of chopsticks,” Abbas wrote. “Though the Muslims in China do not eat any prohibited meat, they take indigenous wine regularly after meals and my friends were surprised when I declined the liquor when it was brought.”

Abbas was surprised to see that Chinese Muslims neither dressed differently from other communities in the country, nor observed purdah. “I further learnt that there has never been communal friction in China and I wished I could tell them the same about India,” he wrote. His friends told him that Chinese people, though mostly Buddhist, never took religion seriously and “would worship any god who came their way”. Inter-religious marriage, he was told, was common: “In fact, with all the Chinese people with whom I discussed this topic seemed to attach no denominational labels at all.” It was later he found that it was considered bad manners in Chinese society to be curious about people’s religion.

The young reporter seemed to be in a perpetual state of wonder as he went around Shanghai. He was clear, though, that the life he witnessed in the city was not the life led in other parts of China.

The Japanese invasion of Shanghai is essentially seen as the beginning of the Second World War in Asia. By September 1939, Europe was at war and, with Imperial Japan becoming part of the Axis with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, foreigners fled Shanghai. By 1943, the foreign areas of the city came under total Japanese control. It would take several decades for Shanghai to once again become a global economic and cultural hub. This time around, the city is seen as far more equal than the era when it was dominated by foreign expansionist powers.

Abbas went on to attain a great degree of fame as a screenwriter and filmmaker. His column titled ‘Last Page’ began with The Bombay Chronicle in 1941 and, after the newspaper’s closure in 1959, moved to Blitz. He continued to write the column until his death in 1987. But it was his travel article about Shanghai that gave readers one of the earliest glimpses into the mind of a person for whom social justice was of highest importance.

Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His Twitter handle is @ajaykamalakaran.