TUTORIAL

Name Olivia Chatterjee

Semester 6th

Subject ENGA

Paper CC-13

C.U. Registration number 0521211137321

C.U. Roll number 212052110166

College Roll number 20212964

TOPIC

Discuss 'Toba Tek Singh' as an instance of partition literature.

OLIVIA CHATTERJEE
0521211137321
ENGA CC13

UPER THE GUR GUR THE ANNEXE THE BAY

DHAYANA THE MUNG THE DAL OF THE
LALTAIN
In 1947, at the stroke of the midnight hour, on 15th of August, India gained independence from
British rule. According to the then, interim Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, India redeemed its
trust with destiny.

However, when the British left, they gave away one last gift to the subcontinent, India was
divided into two — India and Pakistan. Following this decision, millions of people were forced to
leave their homes and move to state on the basis of their religion, laboring through
corpse-littered landscapes and not knowing what their future would be like. This would turn out
to be one of the worst man-made calamities of the 20th century.

Partition literature is the depiction of the tragedy of this time, an era where “philosophy,
argumentation or logic had lost their meaning; they were nothing but an exercise in futility,” as
Stephen Alter says in his article Madness and Partition.

Saadat Hassan Manto, being a writer of that decade, not only witnessed the horridness of
partition but also realized how that separation traumatised people by making them homeless
and identity less. Manto once said “When I sat down to write, I found my mind in a confused
state. However much I tried, I could not separate India from Pakistan or Pakistan from India. My
mind was invaded by the same puzzling question again and again; will the literature of Pakistan
be different? If so how? Who has the claim to what was written in undivided India? Will that be
divided as well?” It is this exact state of confusion that Manto has depicted in one of his finest
short stories “Toba Tek Singh.”

Mahnaz Ispahani defines Manto as a “remorseless student of partition’s wreckage, of its broken
soul.”

Manto’s epoch-making short story portrays the everhaunting catastrophe of partition through
lunatics of an asylum. It depicts the protagonist Bishan Singh as a poor prey to the demonic
blow of the 1947 partition.

The story begins on a ridiculous note, the narrator himself is not sure if the governments of the
two countries were being reasonable or not, there is a subtextual mocking of the countries and
their officials. This ridicule becomes clearer when an inmate named Muhammad Ali, fancies
himself to be Jinnah, and argues with a Sikh who thinks himself to be Tara Singh, while other
inmates “…were unable to decide whether they were now in India or 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?”
OLIVIA CHATTERJEE
0521211137321
ENGA CC13

The story discusses a few lunatics and their different reaction towards being moved from the
Lahore Lunatic Asylum, from the man who climbed a tree and refused to let go of, declaring, “I
wish to live neither in India nor in Pakistan. I wish to live in this tree.” Another shed off his
clothes and stood stark naked, while two Anglo-Indians wondered if breakfast would continue to
be served.

The narrative finally focuses on Bishan Singh, a Sikh lunatic who is called ‘Toba Tek Singh’
because he was a rich landowner of that village. He didn't speak about anything except
gibberish. The guards stated that Bishan Singh had not slept a single wink in 15 years and
neither had he sat down. His feet were swollen but he remained steadfast on them. However, as
the story progresses we witness the gradual mental decline as Bishan Singh tries to find out
where Toba Tek Singh is — in India, or in Pakistan.

He cannot understand why he is being uprooted from his home. That was the question over two
million people asked their governments during Partition. At the border, Bishan Singh learns from
a liaison officer that Toba Tek Singh is in Pakistan, and he refuses to cross. When all persuasion
fails, he is left standing by himself between the two border stations. Finally, just before sunrise,
Bishan Singh, the man who had stood on his legs for fifteen years, screamed and as officials
from the two sides rushed towards him, he collapsed to the ground.

“There behind barbed wire, on one side, lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the other
side, lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.” These
are the last lines from the short story and they struck a poignant chord in everyone's heart.

To quote Gilmartin, “The desperate attempt to maintain the linking of place, ancestry, sanctity,
and moral order was cast against the backdrop of a fixed Partition of territory that symbolically
tore these linkages asunder. No work of literature encapsulates this more dramatically than
Saadat Hasan Manto’s Urdu short story, ‘Toba Tek Singh’.”

Manto, thus, deliberately chose to show the devastating psychological effects the partition had
on people through lunatics from an asylum, criticizing the barrier between India and Pakistan
that separates man from man, body from body and soul from soul.

As if he wants to propagate the message of peace and prosperity to the people of both
countries by showing them the way that leads them to a land, where there is no division in the
name of religion, where liberty, equality and fraternity predominates and where wind blows only
to disperse the fragrance of Shantih, Shantih and Shantih.