Hansa wadkar biography of rory

What made you choose the text Mandi… the short story?

There was a very well-known short story writer from the pre independent times- Ghulam Abbas. After partition , he moved to Karachi and he had written a short story called Anandi. It is a very interesting story because it deals with how this so called moral brigade tends to deal with women. In this case there is this bordello in the heart of town, as you always have in the tradtional Indian towns, like Sonagachi, you have  different places like Daal ki Mandi in Benaras and so on. So he had taken a situation where you have the city elders, (which means the municipality) who decide to get rid of their brothels and exile these people because they are bad for social morality. So they get rid of them, and the women are left in the wilderness but soon their business picks up and a whole city develops around them; this is the story in very simple terms.

Now there is an interesting back story to this, I don’t know how far it is true, but it was said that Ghulam Abbas had taken the idea of the story from Allahabad, which was his native town; and he wrote this because in 1928, Jawaharlal Nehru became the Mayor of Allahabad and his municipality councillors came upto to him and said “Sir, the house in which you were born is

•