The madness in Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”.

In the period following Partition, madness becomes the guiding metaphor in much of
Manto‟s fiction and nowhere is it more clearly and effectively used than in his story, “Toba Tek
Singh.” Probably one of his best known stories, it describes the exchange of Hindu, Muslim and
Sikh lunatics between asylums in Pakistan and India. Before partition, people lived with
harmony and love with one another irrespective of religion and culture. This is exemplified in the
story when Bishen Singh‟s old Muslim friend, Fazal Din comes to see him from Toba Tek Singh
and tells him that soon he would be sent to India and he should remember him to “bhai Balbir
Singh, bhai Vadhawa Singh and bahain Amrit Kaur. Tell Bhai Balbir Singh that Fazal Din is
well by the grace of God. The two brown buffaloes he left behind are well too”. He also brings
him a gift “a nice treat from home”. Thus, Manto reflects how the love and respect people from
different community used to share with one another before the boundaries were drawn in the
name of religion by the decision makers. But once the boundaries were drawn, all these things
came to an end, thereby promoting the religious hatred among the common people. These higher
officials filled their minds with religious hatred and elements of communalism. People began to
hate each other on the basis of religion:

“A muslim lunatic from Chaniot, who used to be one of the most devoted workers of the
All India Muslim League…announced his name was Muhammad Ali—that he was Quaid-e-
Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. This had led a Sikh inmate to declare himself Master Tara Singh,
the leader of the Sikhs. Apprehending serious communal trouble, the authorities declared them
dangerous, and shut them up in separate cells.” (Manto 2)

Bishan Singh, a Sikh, who has been an inmate of an asylum in Pakistan for the past
fifteen years. During this time he has never slept or lain down and continually mutters variations
on the nonsensical Punjabi refrain, “O pardi girgir axe di bedhiana di moongdi dal di laltain.”
Bishan Singh's home is a village called Toba Tek Singh, which is located in Pakistan. However,
during the period leading up to Partition, there is confusion amongst the inmates of the asylum,
as to which country they will be assigned. Whenever Bishan Singh inquires where Toba Tek
Singh is located, he is given ambiguous answers by the authorities. Sometimes he is told it is in
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Pakistan and other times in Hindustan, adding to his confusion. Bishan Singh‟s family, including
his beloved daughter Roop Kaur, eventually migrate to India. A few years later, the governments
of Pakistan and India, decide to transfer their lunatics from one country to the other. Along with
all the other Sikhs and Hindus in the asylum, Bishan Singh climbs aboard one of the trucks
which transport them to the border. As he is being processed at the Wagha checkpoint, Bishan
Singh discovers at last that his village is in Pakistan. At this point, he runs back and refuses to
leave, planting himself in the no man's land between the two countries. “Toba Tek Singh is here!
Right here where I‟m standing! he cried. “O pardi gir gir di axe di bhediani di moong di dal of
Toba Tek Singh and Pakistan” (Manto 7). The guards try to force him across the border but
Bishan Singh will not move. He stands there all day and night, while the other lunatics are
transferred across the border, but just before dawn he lets out a scream and falls down dead.

Manto ends the story with the typically enigmatic lines: “Before the sun rose, a piercing
cry arose from Bishan Singh who had been quite and unmoving all this time. Several officers,
and the guards ran towards him; they saw that the man who, for fifteen years, had stood on his
legs day and night; now lay on the ground, prostrate. Beyond a wired fence on one side of him
was Hindustan and beyond a wired fence on the other side was Pakistan. In the middle, on a
stretch of land which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.” (Manto 7). The confusion between the
name of the village and the name of the main character is important to the story. At several
points Manto refers to Bishan Singh as Toba Tek Singh and it becomes the name by which he is
known in the asylum. By mixing up the name of the character and place, the individual and the
land, Manto emphasizes the relationship between a person's home and his identity. He also uses
the main character's madness to exaggerate the sense of separation, the distorted loyalties, and
the dislocated self. The phrase, “lay Toba Tek Singh”, refers both to the man stretched out on the
ground and to the piece of ground itself, which has become for him “the homeland” Toba Tek
Singh. Where he most wants to be. Toba Tek Singh is Manto‟s symbolic rejection of the division
of the country and his considered comment on the mindlessness of it. 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 torn these
linkages asunder. No work of literature encapsulates this more dramatically than Sadat Hasan
Manto‟s Urdu short story, “Toba Tek Singh”…”
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It also tells the story of those who have lost their loved ones, their families, friends and
their identities as a result of the geographical division of the country and forcible displacement of
the people. The story very realistically portrays the emotional trauma of the partition. A Hindu
lawyer from Lahore who is in love with a girl from Amritsar turns mad and experiences a sense
of grief when Amritsar becomes a part of India:

“There was a young Hindu lawyer from Lahore who had gone off his head after an
unhappy love affair. When told that Amritsar was to become a part of India, he went into
depression because his beloved lived in Amritsar, something he had not forgotten even in his
madness. That day he abused every major and minor Hindu and Muslim leader who had cut
India into two, turning his beloved into an Indian and him into a Pakistani.” (Manto 3). And
when he comes to know that he is now being sent to India, the country where his beloved lives,
he doesn‟t feel happy and is not willing to leave his ancestral home, Lahore, “because his
practice would not flourish in Amritsar”

The asylum and the inmates allow Manto an opportunity to indulge in the kind of black
satire that is his trademark. He attacks the politics and religious dogmatism of the period,
through the eccentricities of the lunatics. One of the inmates proclaims himself to be Mohamed
Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Others declare themselves to be Hindu and Sikh politicians
and a tremendous row ensues. There are several Anglo-Indian inmates, who face an even greater
struggle for identity, being of mixed parentage. One lunatic believes that he is God and when
Bishan Singh inquires of him about the location of Toba Tek Singh, he replies, “It‟s neither in
Hindustan nor in Pakistan. In fact it is nowhere because I have not taken any decision about its
location.” He got angry and told him, “You don‟t answer my prayers because you are a Muslim
god. Had you been a Sikh god, you would have been more of a sport.” Through their frenzied
shouting of slogans, erratic behaviour and stripping off of clothes Manto mirrors the irrationality
of society outside the walls of the asylum. This inversion of reality, where the characters inside
the asylum take on the roles of those outside, while the people outside behave in irrational and
inhuman ways, underscores the irony which is so much a part of Manto‟s fiction. Madness
becomes an entirely relative term which defines the political and social upheaval of Partition,
with all its inherent ambiguities. Walls and borders lose their meaning and a character like
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Bishan Singh embodies the contradictions and divided loyalties experienced by those people who
were uprooted on either side.

To conclude, Manto made the insane people his mouthpiece to show his resistance to
partition. The lunatics resist partition in many ways. They act or show what they feel which
probably a sane human would have failed to. They try to somehow make space for themselves by
refusing to „fit in‟ in this newly created cartographical land. Thus, infusing madness with identity
crisis gave Manto a perfect blend of resistance which was what he probably wanted to express
through his work.

Works Cited

Alter, Stephen. “Madness and Partition: The Short Stories of Sadat Hasan Manto.” Alif: Journal
of Comparative Poetics 14 (1994): 91-100. JSTOR. Web. 09 April 2019.

Hashmi, Ali Madeeh. “Manto: A Psychological Portrait.” Social Scientist 40.11/12 (2012): 5-15.
JSTOR. Web. 09 April 2019.

Manto, Saadat Hasan. “Toba Tek Singh.” Trans. Tahira Naqvi. n.p., n.d. 1-7. Print.

Poudyal, Biranchi. “Realistic Representation of Partition Violence in Manto‟s Toba Tek Singh.”
Art. (2015): N. pag. Web 09 April 2019.

Thoker, Shamsul Haq. “Manto‟s Toba Tek Singh as A Political Satire: A Critical Study” Journal
of English Language and Literature 4.4 (2017): 194-97. Web 09 April 2019.

Tiwari, Sudha. “Memories of Partition: Revisiting Saadat Hasan Manto.” Economic and Political
Weekly 48.25 (2013): 50-58. JSTOR. 10 April 2019.