Toba Tek Singh

"It’s interesting that while people stress what Pakistan and Pakistani culture lost by partition from India, Manto demonstrates that India also lost something. Manto was writing scripts for the Indian film industry before partition. Oddly enough, Muslims, perhaps because of the strong tradition of culture and music in the Muslim court in South Asia, have always played a disproportionally large role in Indian cinema. If Manto had stayed in India he would have ended up a very prominent figure in the Indian film world and Indian culture. He was one of these people in 1947 who opted for Pakistan but whose whole life in many ways was damaged as a result, and he became a very tragic figure. Because like so many of them, he never really settled down in Pakistan, though that’s not to say that as a very proud Muslim he would have been happy in India either. But there was this movement of Indian Muslim intellectuals to Pakistan after 1947 and it seems almost incredible now that there was this belief, even among young progressive highly educated Muslims, that Pakistan could somehow be turned into not only an ideal Islamic state but an ideal socialist state – that egalitarian, almost socialist, traditions and the very strong traditions of social justice in Islamic thought could somehow be made to flourish in an independent Pakistani state. And, of course, what they found was – as Pakistan’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah miserably described it – a moth-eaten Pakistan. All but one of the great centres of Muslim culture in South Asia were left behind in India. The Muslims lost Delhi, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Bhopal. Lahore became the beacon within Pakistan, of culture and belief of continuity of Muslim urban culture. What these highly educated, progressive, urban Muslims found themselves in was a pretty rough, heavily tribal, feudal dominated and pretty backward chunk of the former Indian empire in which they never really settled down. And then, of course, these were people who had also had very close and culturally productive relations under the British Indian empire with Hindu and Sikh intellectuals. This was especially so in the Punjab. Right up to a year before partition, the ruling party in Punjab was the Unionist Party, which united the landowning elites of the three religious communities. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The tragedy was that these Muslim intellectual migrants from India ended up in a country which in every way fell short of the vision that they had. And then there was the terrible tragedy of the personal break with Hindu and Sikh friends and with Muslim friends and relatives who opted to stay in India. And, of course, the physical tragedy which accompanied partition itself in Punjab with hundreds of thousands of people massacred on all sides. All of these tragedies come out in Manto’s writing. He is one of the very finest writers that South Asia has produced and his short stories are incredibly moving. The signature story is a masterpiece of allegory with touches of surrealism. It’s also a very powerful human story. Toba Tek Singh is the story of a lunatic asylum from British days in India, which after partition ends up on the Pakistani side of the border. In this lunatic asylum there is this Sikh called Bishan Singh from the village of Toba Tek Singh. His family flee to India and he’s left behind in Pakistan. A few years after partition – this is where you can see Manto’s deep regret about partition and where his anger and despair comes in – the decision is made that the Hindu and Sikh lunatics and the Muslims lunatics also have to be partitioned and that the Hindu and Sikh lunatics have to be sent to India. He refuses to go because he realises that he is going to be separated forever from his beloved Toba Tek Singh. When they try to drag him he throws himself on to the ground and the authorities leave him there for the night. In the morning, the implication is that he’s dead, with his body straddling the border between India and Pakistan."