Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”: To Consider as You Read

I. Like the inmates of the insane asylum in “Toba Tek

Singh,” Saadat Hasan Manto was confused by his own
migration after the Partition of 1947. India’s colonizing
power, Britain, partitioned the single nation into Islamic
Pakistan and Hindu India before the dissolution of British rule.
“Toba Tek Singh” was written after the chaotic and violent
Partition. Manto also migrated from Bombay leaving his job at
the studio Bombay Talkies for a life of persecution and poverty
in Lahore, Pakistan. Many scholars question his decision to
leave Bombay, which was a melting pot city that welcomed
religions and cultural groups. Some attribute his choice to
missing his family, who had already migrated, to receiving a job
offer at another studio, or to a hurt ego over having a script
passed over at Bombay Talkies. In a sketch of actor Shyam,
called “Murli Ki Dhun,” Manto writes about his decision: “I was
really insane perhaps… From time to time some Hindu-Muslim
riots would take place in that area but I understood it. But what
this new name had made of that piece of land was beyond my
comprehension. What is self-rule? I had no concept of it… I
couldn’t understand which was my country, Hindustan or
Pakistan, and whose blood was spilling callously every day.”

II. “Toba Tek Singh” is a series of vignettes about both

people (like Bishan Singh) and places (like Toba Tek
Singh). A vignette is a short, evocative description of a person
or place. Saadat Hasan Manto wrote dark, humorous vignettes
about the senselessness of Partition under the title Siyah
Hashiye, which translates as “Black Borders” or “Black
Margins.” The story might be considered a collection of vignette
all se tin the same time and place. The journalistic report of
each “insane” person just discovering news of the Partition is
communicated through a third-person narrator, who is not
omniscient. The voice is one of observation and reportage, as if
her were watching each of the inmates respond. Only once does
the narrator seem to respond rather than report—when he
reaches the vignette about Bishan Singh. Through most of the
story, the character is referred to as Bishan Singh, at least until
he runs to Pakistan. A change occurs in the final scene as the

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 narrator conflates the character and town, thus reinforcing the
theme of dependence on geography for identity.

III. Bishan Singh sees his nationality as the only determining

factor of his identity. From the moment readers meet him, he
is obsessed over the location of Toba Tek Singh. After fifteen
years of standing, he collapses in no-man’s-land, and though we
do not know if he has died, passed out, or fallen asleep, we can
recognize his position as an act of defeat. He is without an
identity and unable to acquire a new identity either as a person
or as an allegorical location. Some critics believe that he “sees
through” the senselessness of Partition, but Bishan might also
or alternatively recognize the tie between nation and identity.
Although he would have family visitors and even “developed a
sixth sense about the day of the visit, “Bishan saw his daughter
as “just another face” (1490). The sixth sense, then, might just
be about the presence of one from Toba Tek Singh, someone
who still has an identity.

IV. Though he was rejected by the Progressive Writers’

Movement for his “antihumanism,” Manto argued that his
stories were realistic sketches of India. Like his
predecessor, Munshi Premchand, Manto was a member of the
PVM. Writers in this movement for social change broke with
classical Persian literary traditions, subjects, and languages and
instead featured average citizens depicted in colloquial terms
and the vernacular. Other members criticized Manto for the
sexuality and grotesqueness (in literary terms, this means
characters often elicit both pity and disgust) in his work, since
prostitutes, criminals, beggars, poor people, and residents of
insane asylums populated his stories. He called them hypocrites
who were not actually engaged in their nation’s reality. The
insane asylum in Lahore, then, becomes not only a grotesque
portrait of madmen or a satire of society for its acceptance of
partitioning but also a realistic, multi-ethnic, and religious
microcosm of Indian society.

V. Manto believed in religious equality and though his hero

figure is Sikh in “Toba Tek Singh,” he defended no one
religion during the turmoil of the Partition era. Many

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 readers note that Bishan Singh is not Muslim or Hindu but is
Sikh, from the city of Toba Tek Singh, itself named after Tek
Singh who was a Sikh saint; he would provide food and water
for all travelers regardless of their nationality or religion. The
founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak, believed foremost in the
equality of people. As a Hindu child, he refused to wear the
thread that distinguishes one caste from the other because he
believed that people should be distinguished by their individual
qualities, not their caste, gender, or even religion. Manto
believed in the same equality, though he didn’t merely support
Sikhism. Each of his works features characters of different
religions in the full range of morality: Muslims, Hindus, and
Sikhs were all his heroes and villains.

VI. The story is quite Kafkaesque. We could easily compare the

futility Bishan feels to what Gregor experiences, no?

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