'Toba Tek Singh' remains a chilling reminder of the tragedy of 1947

Express Tribune

25-02-2025

In 'Toba Tek Singh', Manto exposes the lingering scars of 1947 on collective memory and national identity.
Out beyond the shifting boundaries of sanity, madness and one's search for identity, Saadat Hasan Manto's words truly hold a mirror to the troubled fate of two countries, which have yet to achieve true liberation in thought and conscience.
What remains daunting about Manto's stories is the uncanny resemblance between the past and the present, revealing how little things have actually changed. The craft of revealing the truth—a genre crafted and skillfully mastered by the resilient voice of Manto:
"Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries — slave of prejudice — slave of religious fanaticism — slave of barbarity and inhumanity."
Manto, in his notable short story Toba Tek Singh, delves into the interplay of memory, trauma and displacement across the timeline of 1947 Partition.
The motif of madness plays as a guiding metaphor in Manto's narrative to deconstruct the absurd narrative of Partition, hinting towards the signs of madness projected by the two countries, and in turn, set the tragedy in the lives of the people, residing on both sides of the border.
Amidst years of collective grief and generational trauma, the 1947 Partition becomes, perhaps, an unsettling memory.
Along similar lines, Ritika Singh notes,'Trauma lies not in the shock of the occurrence of the event but in its reception.'
Manto's works explore the nature of trauma within the people of 1947. The unresolved nature of trauma and denied grief persist in the years-long endurance to seek meaning and redemption in their lives.
Caught in a recurring cycle, it is the constant shift between the past and the present that aggravates the tragedy of man in Manto's Toba Tek Singh.
In Toba Tek Singh, Manto pens the dilemma of the protagonist Bishan Singh, an inmate of this asylum, whose internal conflict centers around his search for home following the Partition.
Manto satirically comments on the aftermath of Partition through the narrative of mental asylums, followed by an exchange of psychiatric patients between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims across the two countries, India and Pakistan.
Such was the gravity of the situation that even individuals in mental asylums were being relocated or one could say, partitioned between the two nations, reflecting the absurdity of it all.
Manto, in the satirical piece, constantly touches upon the paradigm of sanity and insanity for today's readers. Manto reimagines the perspective of borders as a weakening factor which divided the people of India and tore the two countries apart.
He redefines 'borders' as not arbitrary lines drawn to solidify the national identity of the countries. If truth be told, these borders unveil the grave intentions behind the British divide-and-rule policy, one of the pivotal instruments of colonial rule, which thrived on partitioning the subcontinent into two separate countries.
Manto goes on to question the 'mad' and the 'partially mad' and signifies the inability of both to comprehend the partitioned identity of Pakistan and India.
He frames the consciousness of the characters in such a poignant manner; their stories mirror the personal dilemma of Manto who could never come to terms with the occurrence of Partition. Manto employs the character of Bishan Singh to voice the stories of those who almost died, without losing their lives during the turmoil.
"As to where Pakistan was located, the inmates knew nothing. That was why both the mad and the partially mad were unable to decide whether they were now in India or in Pakistan. If they were in India, where on earth was Pakistan? And if they were in Pakistan, then how come that until only the other day it was India?"
Manto projects the identity crisis of Bishan Singh's character whose sense of self shatters completely; he loses himself in an unsettling state of chaos and utter confusion when he begins to think of home, where he truly belongs.
The protagonist's home is located in Toba Tek Singh, which now resides in Pakistan. Tracing his character arc, Manto's reader resonates with the underlying feelings of displacement, carefully examining the relationship between an individual's home and his identity.
It is not merely Bishan Singh's home that seems to be displaced, but his identity too, the fragments of which lie in the heart of India and Pakistan.
Bishan Singh's life story, much like those of countless others, stands as a moving testament to collective memory, trauma, and identity crisis buried within the overarching narrative of Partition. Manto builds on the nuanced relationship between a person's home and personal identity, by a conscious attempt to confuse his reader between the identity of Bishan Singh and the identity of the place, Toba Tek Singh.
Throughout the narrative, the writer decides to use the two names interchangeably to draw upon a familial connection between a person's home and their identity.
The internal rhyme embedded within the two names 'Toba Tek Singh' and 'Bishan Singh' mirrors the protagonist's disoriented state of mind which alters his reality. Through the absurd landscape of the asylum, Manto exemplifies his deep resentment towards the incompetency of national politics and the political nature of Partition.
He recounts the madness, the uncertainty, the mass migrations, and his people reluctantly abandoning their homes, their loved ones and hurriedly boarding trains for survival.
Leaving a life, they lived and loved, Manto knows nothing but the tragedy of his people.
Reaching the final lines of Toba Tek Singh, Manto reveals the wretched fate of his loved character, Bishan Singh and his beloved home 'Toba Tek Singh':
"There behind barbed wire, one side lay India and behind more barbed wire lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh."
The recurring motif of the barbed wire symbolically conveys the dilemma of a 'no man's land' grounded in the physical and ideological division between the separated countries. Manto's search for a no man's land manifests the tragedy of Bishan Singh who ultimately takes his last breath on the border, one that unites and divides India and Pakistan.
Carrying the conversation on Partition Literature forward, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Manto employ the poetics of resistance to demonstrate how unresolved grief and intergenerational trauma collectively stem from the absence of closure attached to people of the past; many of whom continue to grapple with sentiments of loss, dislocation and fragmented identity, still strongly felt among us today.
Remembering Faiz, his poetry reverberates with anguish for the unfulfilled promises of freedom that birthed with the 1947 Partition of India. His widely celebrated poem 'Subh-e-Azadi' – Dawn of Independence draws parallels to Manto's Toba Tek Singh, weaving the intricate themes of nostalgia, hopelessness and disillusionment together.
The living memory of Partition seems to be almost rooted in the words of both writers, a tragedy which disintegrated all hope in people for a land that is their own to a no man's land.
Yeh daagh daagh ujaala yeh shab-gazida seher
Woh intezaar tha jiska, yeh woh seher to nahin
Yeh woh seher to nahin, jis ki aarzoo le kar
Chale the yaar ki mil jaayegi kahin na kahin
In the writings of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto, the common man of 1947 seems almost broken, stranded within the confines of a no man's land, searching for the Dawn of Independence once promised.
The tragedy of Partition lies in knowing that the sense of longing is here to stay and this Dawn of Independence was never meant to set, in the eyes of the people who lived and almost survived Partition in its entirety.