SAADAT HASAN MANTO

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Saadat Hasan Manto (11 May 1912 – 18 January 1955) was a Pakistani writer, playwright and author considered among the greatest writers of short stories in South Asian history. He produced 22 collections of short stories, 1 novel, 5 series of radio plays, 3 collections of essays, 2 collections of personal sketches and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Manto was tried for obscenity six times; thrice before 1947 in British India, and thrice after independence in 1947 in Pakistan, but never convicted.

TOBA TEK SINGH "Toba Tek Singh" is a short story written by Saadat Hasan Manto and published in 1955. It follows inmates in a Lahore asylum, some of whom are to be transferred to India following the independence of Pakistan in 1947. The story is a "powerful satire" on the relationship between India and Pakistan.

THEME AND SIGNIFICANCE The story describes the chaos created by the decision of the governments of India and Pakistan to exchange the lunatics lodged in their lunatic asylums. The madmen lodged in Lahore mental asylum do not understand why they are being uprooted without any fault of theirs. It creates communal tension among the inmates. The protagonist of the story is a Sikh inmate named Bishan Singh who, fifteen years earlier, had gone mad and was committed by his family. Everyone in the asylum calls him Toba Tek Singh, the name of his village. Almost bald, his legs swollen because he seemed to be standing all the time, he also has the habit of speaking this nonsensical phrase,“Upri gur gur di annexe di be-dhiyana o di mung di daal of di lalteen.”

Every reader at once realizes that it's a powerful satire, and also a bitter indictment of the political processes and behavior patterns that produced Partition. But the author's brilliant craftsmanship lies partly in the fact that there's not a single word in the story that tells us so. The story presents itself as a deadpan, factual, non-judgmental chronicle of the behavior of certain lunatics in an insane asylum in Lahore.

Whatever the reason, the narrator's carefulness in this respect enables him to set up a wonderfully elegant, haunting, ambiguous conclusion. After Bishan Singh gives a single loud shriek and collapses, the narrator locates him in a no-man's-land between the two new nations' barbed-wire borders. My translation is entirely literal: "In between, on that piece of ground that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh." We know of course that the person Bishan Singh lay there. But since the narrator never calls this person by that name, he's able to force us to the additional reading that the real location of the village Toba Tek Singh is between the two new states' sharply demarcated borders. But if the village is there, then in what sense exactly, and in whose eyes? Is Bishan Singh sane or mad, conscious or delirious, alive or dead? With wonderful subtlety and literary restraint, the author allows us-- and thus also forces us-- to invent our own ending.