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Saadat Hasan Manto Analysis
Saadat Hasan Manto Analysis
Urdu writers of the twentieth century. Although he was a prolific writer of essays, plays, film
scripts, and a novel, he was best known for his short stories. Born in Punjab, his writing career
really took off in Bombay; he then moved to Lahore in Pakistan in January 1948, some months
after partition (Hasan 1984). His subsequent stories largely focused on the theme of partition,
exploring its human consequences from a range of different angles.
Manto’s stories are known for his tradition of realism, verbal economy, reliance on internal
elements, and especially his sudden, sometimes disturbingly uncertain endings
“Toba Tek Singh,” written in 1954, is perhaps Manto’s most famous short story . Describing the
exchange of inmates of a Lahore mental asylum after partition, “Toba Tek Singh” uses the
madness of the inmates as a mirror for the madness of the outside world. As the story progresses,
the reader comes to realise that the asylum inmates are in fact much more sane than the
politicians controlling their destiny. The main character, Bishan Singh, in his painful struggle for
identity, is symbolic of the displacement suffered by millions of partition refugees. Although the
story is fictional, an actual exchange of psychiatric patients between mental hospitals in Lahore
and Amritsar took place in 1950. Despite extensive studies of Manto’s life and work, as well as
selected articles on his psychology and mental health, few attempts have been made to integrate
both aspects. “Toba Tek Singh” provides a useful lens through which to look at Manto more
broadly and explore the role of mental illness not only in his life and work but also in the Indian
subcontinent more generally around the time of partition.
By discussing Manto’s personal experience of mental illness, themes in “Toba Tek Singh” and
their implications in specific historical context, this essay aims to shine an integrative light on
aspects of Manto’s work and mental illness.
Regardless, Manto’s difficult childhood left him with memories of neglect and rejection, and he
became prone to excessive displays of emotion. Restlessness and agitation troubled Manto
throughout his life. Referring to the years following his father’s death, he wrote: ‘In those days
of vagrancy. A strange restlessness gripped my heart and mind...that disquietude would not go
away’. Ali Madeeh Hashmi has argued that this was in part due to Manto’s Existentialist
philosophy. Restlessness and agitation necessarily followed his awareness that the ultimate
culmination of life is death, and all human relationships and affections are therefore temporary.
This might be overstating the case, however, as Manto’s thought was also influenced by his
Islamic faith, even if he was not especially devout in his adherence to Islamic norms. It has also
been suggested by Hashmi and Aftab that Manto might have suffered from a depressive disorder.
Multiple studies have identified a higher prevalence of mood disorders in creative writers
compared to the general population. This is certainly plausible, and there are records of Manto
describing his depressed mental state, even referring to suicide on occasion. Jalal has described
how, in reference to his sister’s miscarriage, ‘recalling his emotional and mental torment at the
time, Manto confessed that if he had been stronger willed, he would almost certainly have
committed suicide’. Whether this amounted to a clinically definable suicidal ideation is unclear;
nonetheless it adds weight to the hypothesis of depressive illness plaguing Manto throughout his
life.
Alcohol addiction stands out as perhaps the most significant of Manto’s mental health
difficulties. Although he always drank heavily, Manto’s drinking escalated after his move to
Lahore. His family became so concerned that they twice admitted him to the antialcoholic ward
of the Punjab Mental Hospital for treatment between 1951 and 1952 (Jalal 2013). This was not
successful; Manto progressed to binge drinking and started to experience hallucinations (Jalal
2013), a symptom of alcohol-induced psychosis (Hashmi and Aftab 2013). Noting the high rates
of comorbidity of alcohol addiction and mood disorders, Hashmi and Aftab have suggested that
Manto used alcohol for self-medication, arguing that he ‘sought refuge in substance abuse to
ease his psychological pain’ (2013, 1096). This was a time when Manto was at his lowest,
struggling financially and finding it difficult to situate his sense of identity in Pakistan.
Therefore, it does not seem unreasonable to associate his alcohol use with a potential depressive
disorder. Ultimately, it was liver cirrhosis due to alcoholism that killed Manto at the premature
age of forty-four.
Hashmi has argued that Manto’s burst of creative output was a sign that he was preparing for
impending death (2012). Jalal, on the contrary, has noted that almost all of his stories were
written when he was sober and therefore credits this prolific output with the period of sobriety
that lasted for some months after his first hospital admission (2013). Regardless, it is clear that
Manto knew his drinking was killing him. He wrote in 1954 that ‘anyone drinking this dreadful
stuff ends up in the netherworld in less than a year’ (Jalal 2013, 191). According to his nephew
Hamid Jalal, Manto might have been ‘toying with the idea of suicide, either because it was the
easiest way out or because he wanted to fill the family with remorse for having given him up as
hopeless case’ (192). Whether or not his drinking amounted to a form of “extended suicide” it is
clear that Manto’s battle with addiction would have influenced his work.
Bishan Singh’s nonsense phrases, as Tarun K. Saint has explained, reflect the
arbitrariness and opacity of the governmental machinery. Increasingly, it becomes clear that the
“lunatics” in the asylum are more sane than the government figures making decisions about their
exchange. Astute comments by the asylum inmates demonstrate the absurdity of partition:
All those lunatics in the asylum who had at least some sense left were uncertain whether
they were in Pakistan or India. If they were in India, then where was Pakistan? If they
were in Pakistan, how could it be possible when only a short while ago they had been in
India, without having moved at all?
“Toba Tek Singh” was written after Manto’s time in hospital and was clearly influenced by his
experience; perhaps even the choice to write about a mental asylum was a consequence of his
hospitalisation. In a context where mental illness was commonly regarded as abhorrent and
shameful, Manto’s explicit engagement with the theme would have been unusual but powerful,
emphatically drawing attention to the madness of partition.
The character of Bishan Singh represents a symbolic commentary on the trauma of displacement.
His intense suffering reflects that of partition refugees. The constant questioning and demands to
know about his homeland are evocative of fractured identities and loss of sense of belonging.
Perhaps his character is also a reflection of Manto’s own suffering and confusion about identity
in the wake of his move to Lahore. Manto wrote: ‘I found my thoughts scattered. Though I tried
hard, I could not separate India from Pakistan and Pakistan from India’ (Hasan 1984, 89).
Elsewhere he added: ‘I found it impossible to decide which of the two countries was now my
homeland’ (Ispahani 1988,192). In this way, Bishan Singh’s character can be read both as a
mirror to the general displacement suffered by so many as well as a more specific portrayal of
Manto’s own personal experience. From both perspectives, the pain and emotional trauma of
displacement is significant, often contributing to psychopathology whether implicitly or
explicitly.
Manto’s work was never moralising; he left it up to his readers to form judgements, preferring
instead to record events bluntly without comment (Jalal 2013). However, an engagement with,
and indeed challenge towards, popular attitudes is implicit in “Toba Tek Singh.” Manto’s blunt
and matter-of-fact descriptive style presents mental illness as a fact of life; it is neither
dramatised nor evaded, nor is it trivialised as cheap comedy. It is just there. This was a
normalising approach. Significantly there is a conspicuous absence of psychiatrists in “Toba Tek
Singh”; the target of Manto’s criticism, as Saint has argued, was not mental health professionals
or the practice of psychiatry but rather the bureaucratic procedures and those according to whose
whims they were implemented (2012). The publication of the story may itself have had some
impact on the exclusionist popular attitudes towards the mentally ill that were so prevalent at the
time. Jain and Sarin have described how the Amritsar asylum psychiatrist, Dr. Vidysagar, by
accommodating patients and their families together in tents due to the inadequacy of facilities,
pioneered a model for greater family engagement in the care of the mentally ill (2012). It is
conceivable that Manto’s normalising writings may have contributed, if only in a limited way, to
the beginnings of a shift in popular opinion.
The implications of Manto’s work have been touched on above but were more concrete with
respect to his literary influence. “Toba Tek Singh” was not the only one of his stories to deal
with mental illness. Indeed, as Stephen Alter has argued, ‘in the period following Partition,
madness became the guiding metaphor in much of Manto’s fiction’ (Alter 1994, 96). For
example, in “Khol Do,” Manto’s use of the character Sakinah’s dissociative state following the
trauma of rape is shocking and powerful. Mental illness as a literary theme has been used by a
number of writers working on partition long after Manto’s death; in this sense his work on
mental illness cast a ‘long shadow’ (Saint 2012, 59). Indeed, as Alter has described, madness
became the ‘only conceivable response’ to the ‘ruthless inhumanity of Hindu-Muslim violence’
(1994, 91). As Saint has explained, partition violence meant huge psychological trauma, that
often manifested in belated after-effects. Whole communities were affected by symptoms of
post-traumatic stress disorder. The literature on partition and mental illness, then, may have
helped to enable the beginnings of a process of working through these traumatic memories
(2012). This was, and continues to be, a long and difficult process, but one of the most important
implications of Manto’s work was to help set this in motion.
Conclusion
Manto’s writing in general, and “Toba Tek Singh” in particular, was coloured by his own mental
health problems, namely alcohol addiction and possibly depression. Even the choice to use a
mental asylum to reflect the “madness” of partition was intimately related to his experience.
However, more than just this, “Toba Tek Singh” and the character of Bishan Singh is a symbolic
commentary on the psychological trauma of the human displacement brought about by partition;
perhaps also the author’s own displacement and uncertainty about identity. The specific
subcontinental context was important in terms of attitudes towards, and treatment of, the
mentally ill around the time of partition. Importantly, Manto’s work started a trend of writing
about mental illness and partition; later authors followed suit. This may have helped audiences to
go some way towards processing their psychological trauma. Although this analysis has focused
specifically on “Toba Tek Singh,” references to mental illness and psychological distress are
prevalent in many of Manto’s other stories, “Khol Do” being just one example. The broad range
of Manto’s corpus of work now needs to be examined from this angle in order to shed further
light on the relationship between his literature and mental illness in the Indian subcontinent.