Bindu.

Yamuna Bindu

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Prof. Kusum Mary George

Toba Tek Singh, Manto and the Collective Consciousness of the Indian Subcontinent

Manto is famous for his charged and jarring narratives on the Partition and the short

story Toba Tek Singh (1955) fits right into his series of disturbing works he put out post 1947

that drives home the horrifying realities of the historic split between India and Pakistan. The

story portrays the conversations and the incidents that take place inside an asylum in Lahore

after the Partition, when the government decides to transfer all the Hindu inmates to India. But

when you consider the inmates whose ideas of nationhood and identity have been blurred to a

point where they do not know who they are or where they come from, the imposed dichotomy

of Muslim-Hindu and India-Pakistan does not work at all. The question of what happens to the

Sikhs, the Anglo-Indians, to those who simply do not remember which community or

geographical area they come from looms over the whole situation. They decide to exchange

the lunatics on a specific day, when the Hindus and the Sikhs would be taken to India. The

discourses that take place between inmates after this has been announced is witty, thought-

provoking and sometimes horrifying.

The titular character of the story, Toba Tek Singh, is actually a Sikh Man called Bishan

Singh, who was admitted to the asylum fifteen years ago. Anytime anybody asks him anything,

he answers with the same reiterative gibberish. He refuses to rest or lie down and his feet are

swollen from constant pressure. He is diligent to any and all conversation regarding the

Partition but continues to answer in nonsense when asked about the subject. He keeps asking

everybody where Toba Tek Singh, his hometown, is now after the Partition, in Pakistan or
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India. Different people give him different answers and we are not given a clear answer as to

where it is, but since after a while the characters in the story start to call Bishan Singh himself

by the name of his hometown, the question of “Where is Toba Tek Singh? In India or

Pakistan?” develops an existential character; it has to do with Singh’s very identity and where

it belongs, not just the question of his hometown.

Carl Jung talks about the idea of collective consciousness in his book, The Archetypes

and the Collective Unconscious – he posits that certain elements in society can manifest among

large groups of people who can then be particularly receptive to certain symbols and ideas

based on the historical situation they are in. (Jung 43) This makes people susceptible to political

rhetoric and manipulation, which is what happened during the Partition, when the

ultranationalist rhetoric propagated by both sides of the new border riled people up, amplifying

their supposed patriotism and ideas of nationalism, driving them to commit heinous crimes like

manslaughter and rape, a lot of which Manto loves to focus on in his narratives.

The lunatics, however, have not been affected by the grasps of collective consciousness

as much as those outside the asylum, who have access to the nationalist (or antinationalist)

propaganda from the newspapers and media – their minds are relatively clean and most of them

are unclear about what the Partition really delineates. The difference between those inmates

who have access to newspapers and rhetoric and those who do not is obvious in the story – a

regular reader of an Urdu daily Zamindar says that Pakistan is “a place in India known for

manufacturing cut throat razors.”

It also really brings about the question of whether those who are already

psychologically imbalanced are more susceptible to being brainwashed and rewired to hate a

particular group of people. A Muslim lunatic yells out “Pakistan Zindabad” so loudly at one

point while he is bathing, slips and gets knocked unconscious. Another man, identifies himself
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with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League and Pakistan, with whom he

shares names while a Sikh announces that he is the leader of all Sikhs, Tara Singh. These kinds

of delusional disorders originate when a person cannot tell what is real from what is imagined,

perhaps in this case, when one’s identity is questioned to such an extent that the very idea of

self, of one’s own persona, dissolves and the patient assumes the identity of someone he or she

must have heard about in the news, a personality that exists in one’s unconscious, brought out

to the surface and manifested as a dual personality.

Bishan Singh also has a deep connection to the idea of his hometown, Toba Tek Singh

– so deeply embedded into his ‘personal consciousness’ as Jung calls it, that it is the only thing

he can focus on after his descent into insanity. It is revealed to him by an officer that his

hometown is in Pakistan and not India, and he tries to run back to his friends on the other side

of the border, only to be dragged back. It is interesting to note that he does not necessarily

wants to return to his hometown – even in his deranged state, he is aware that that is an

impossibility and that his family is in India. But the idea of hometown, the archetypal idea of

belonging to one geographical area that Jung talks about in his book, is what roots him down

to the no man’s land between the borders, strong enough to resist the soldiers and everyone

who tries to move him.

At the end of the story, Bishan Singh collapses in the no man’s land. Manto ends the

story by literally putting Toba Tek Singh, between Pakistan and India. This is strong metaphor

for the conflict of identity faces by a lot of Indians and Pakistanis at that point. For centuries,

the idea of the Indian republic was collectively based on the territories that the colonists

invaded, before that the idea of a community was based of territorial kingdoms and/or religions.

Jung has rightly compared mass nationalist movements to mass psychoses, wherein the INC or

the Muslim League used the power of collective consciousness to persuade the public of the

subcontinent to adhere to the dichotomy of India-Pakistan. This is very easily done, because
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all humans adhere instinctively to a select few images like the Great Mother, the Great Tree

etc. (Jung 15). The Indian Nationalist movement created the image of Mother India based of

such an archetype, making it easy to control the public by propagating this symbol through art,

music and news.

Toba Tek Singh and its plethora of mentally unstable characters show to us the other

side of the story, what would happen if we were not so influenced by the mass hallucinations

that are induced by the powerful rhetoric the government uses to control our collective

consciousness as a society.

References

Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, “The Collected Works of C. G.

Jung: Volume 9 Part 1.” Princeton University Press. New York, 1969.

https://www.jungiananalysts.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/C.-G.-Jung-

Collected-Works-Volume-9i_-The-Archetypes-of-the-Collective-Unconscious.pdf 4

Nov. 2019

Manto, Saadat Hasan. “Toba Tek Singh.” 1955.