A Paper by Neeti Singh, Dept of English, Faculty of Arts, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda

sufiandtheswan@ymail.com 98256 07230

‘TOBA TEK SINGH’: THE AESTHETICS OF TRAUMA AND THE SUBLIME

Two or three years after the Partition, it occurred to the governments of Hindustan
and Pakistan that, just as they had exchanged civilian prisoners, they should
exchange the lunatics confined in the asylums as well. In other words, Muslim
lunatics interred in the asylums of Hindustan should be sent to Pakistan and the
Hindu and Sikh lunatics confined in the asylums of Pakistan should be handed
over to Hindustan. (BM, 212)
When news of the exchange reached the mental hospital in Lahore, it evoked some very
interesting and intriguing responses. Inmates of the asylum were thoroughly confused :
If they were in Hindustan then where was Pakistan. And if they were in Pakistan,
then how was it possible since only a short while ago they had been in Hindustan,
and they had not moved from the place at all. One lunatic got so embroiled in this
Hindustan-Pakistan rigmarole that he became all the more insane. One day, while
sweeping the floor, he suddenly climbed up a tree. Perched on a branch he
delivered a two hour long speech… When the guards asked him to come down, he
climbed up even higher. [and]….said, ‘I want to live in neither Hindustan nor
Pakistan…. I’d rather live on this tree.’ (BM, 214)
These are lines from ‘Toba Tek Singh’ a story about the 1947 Partition by Saadat Hasan
Manto. The story was inspired by an actual exchange of lunatics that was carried out over the
India-Pakistan border in 1949 after Partition*. Here the event becomes an apt motif in the
hands of the writer, to interrogate the theme of madness. Which is more dangerous, the
madness of the insane inmates of an asylum in Lahore, or the madness of the murdering
masses and so called leaders of a nation? The story compels us to examine the psyche and
politics of madness - madness as a biological malady or, madness as a temporary suspension
of the human rationale under the influence of trauma?
I
The 1947 Partition of India into Hindustan and Pakistan traumatized an entire subcontinent
and unleashed upon its people, a sea of unimagined horrors. More than a million people were
killed and over 13 million were dislocated on both sides of the border. That was the statistics
of the situation in terms of lives lost and displaced. A countless number of homes and
families were uprooted and sundered, and ran into tragic endings the memory of which still
haunts them and continues to fuel the national narrative of communal hatred and intolerance.
The large scale exodus caused by the Partition not only plunged an entire nation into trauma,
but it also thrust upon its people the enigma of having to choose. It was a ridiculous choice to
make – to choose one limb over the other, the heart over the body or the head. One is
reminded of Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana where in a strange twist of death and divine
intervention, the characters Kapila and Devdatta are brought back from death but find that
their heads have been exchanged. They have regained their lives but at a heavy cost and now,
like the homeless, Partition refugees they too must face the trauma of physical dislocation
and the consequent crisis of identity and relocation. What is it that is most vital to human
survival? Where is home located and what is the dynamic of the term ‘home’? What is more
important, the head or the body, the town/village or the nation state? Where in this gamut of
emotions is trauma located? How does trauma express itself through literature? And how
must trauma, the emotional residual, be negotiated?

Trauma: Physical and Psychic

Trauma as a term of medical science refers to bodily wounds and injury. Trauma therapy
which initially concerned itself with healing physical injury, has branched out to address
issues of deep psychic and emotional hurt with the help of medical and non medical aids.
Physical wounds are more obvious and simpler in comparison to psychic wounds which are
buried in the unconscious mind and so are far more complex, lasting and difficult to resolve.
The trauma of the Holocaust victims, the 1947 Partition refugees or the horrific 9/11 World
Trade Centre attacks are examples of sites that generate collective trauma. Located in the
psyche, Trauma by its very nature is uncertain and inaccessible. It is also a matter of shame.
Trauma surfaces after a considerable time lag as it is located in the unconscious – a region
which the conscious mind tries to suppress by resorting to strategies of denial. Trauma in
short is complex, it festers in the unconscious dark regions of the mind and tends to manifest
in insidious ways. Depending on the nature of its root cause, trauma has the potential to drag
its victims to extremes of insanity, horror, violence, death. (Cathy Caruth, Trauma:
Exploratons in Memory,1991)

The Negative / Nuclear Sublime

The terrain of ‘trauma’ connects with the terrain of the ‘sublime’ in the sense that both are
energies of excess, - energies that are naked, raw, and tend to disrupt the dynamics of the
familiar and orderly. Sublime works of art and literature are characterised by an aesthetic
capacity to traumatise and tease the reader into regions of the no mind, no order and no
comfort; and thereby to bring him/her to experiences that disturb as they threaten to diminish
and deconstruct, and leapfrog into to an aesthetic arrival to new paradigms of growth and
comprehension. I resonate here, not with Kant’s phenomenological idea of the ‘sublime’ but
with Edmund Burke’s concept of the negative sublime (1759) – the sublime as a source of
trauma that flings the subject into an abyss of fear. Burke’s idea of the sublime is closer to
post war definitions of the sublime – the ‘nuclear sublime’ according to Francis Fergusson,
[‘The Nuclear Sublime’ Diacritics No 4. 1984] is perceived as a mass of fear, a luminous
threat that stalks the humankind in the form of a death-knell, invoking hellish horrors in a
people deprived of the comfort of god/nation/faith. It’s a Hobbesian jungle, where according
to Edmund Burke ‘the passions belonging to self-preservation are the strongest of all
passions. They make the matter of the sublime.’ [Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the
Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 51]

Trauma Theory and the Aesthetics of Trauma

While the Sublime is seen as an experience of the conscious mind that is located both outside
and within the psyche, the location of trauma is in the individual/collective unconscious and
in memory, Trauma therefore is an interpretation - a deep response, to a wounding of sublime
proportions. According to trauma theory, the root cause of trauma needs to be addressed, and
the wound needs to be acknowledged and purged so that a catharsis is arrived at and healing
accomplished. The events of the 1947 Partition for example, traumatized both India [north
India primarily] and Pakistan – both are traumatized nations. ‘In order to resolve the narrative
of trauma, they need to stop demonizing each other. They need to acknowledge with
compassion their common suffering and to re-examine the ravages of Partition violence from
a humanist perspective. Unfortunately even literature – a majority of partition literature
generates ‘the prose of otherness’ and thereby fuels the narrative of communal bias, violence
and trauma. [Prof Birendra Pandey]

Literary narrative that employs nationalistic/communal tropes of martyrdom, is perceived as

a half hearted attempt at addressing trauma, it is categorised as ‘fetishist trauma narrative.’
According to Prof Gyanendra Pandey, historian and founding member of the Subaltern
Studies project, the ‘fetishist trauma narrative’ is an exercise in ‘the cannibalising of
literature.’ Very few according to him, are able to respond to trauma from an objective
humanitarian stance, without succumbing to the psychology of victimhood and covert
nationalist manoeuvring. In the litmus test of a humanitarian handling of trauma, Sa’adat
Hasan Manto’s work, along with the writings of a few others like Amrita Pritam, Qurratulain
Hyder, qualifies with distinction to the title of being an aesthetic [narrative] of trauma.

‘Toba Tek Singh’

Having mapped the terms, trauma, sublime, partition and the aesthetics of trauma, I shall
proceed to examine from within this framework, the motif of insanity in the work and life of
Sa’adat Hasan Manto (1912-1955). I propose to do this by placing at the centre of the
conceptual framework, ‘Toba Tek Singh’ a story by Manto, Gulzar’s response to Manto, a
poem from across the border by the same title, and the image of the insane, bearded Sikh
from the mental asylum of Lahore, Toba Tek Singh as his mad friends call him, standing on
the no-man’s-land strip at the Wagah border, refusing to budge, babbling an incoherent
mumbo-jumbo - beyond the reach of reason and all/any authority.

Originally a well to do landlord from a place called Toba Tek Singh, Bishen Singh has been
standing ever since he arrived 15 years ago at the mental hospital in Lahore. His feet from so
much standing are now swollen but he refuses to sit or lie down and, though once in a while
he does lean against the wall, as the guards report, he has not slept a wink in the last 15 years.

‘Toba Tek Singh’ is a powerful short story, narrated with cinematic precision, in a matter of
fact tone. Through the bewilderment and anguish of its insane characters, it exposes the utter
absurdity and mindlessness of the 1947 Partition. The story begins with a joint declaration
passed by the governments of Hindustan and Pakistan that the insane inmates residing in
mental hospitals on both sides of the border must be exchanged and relocated in accordance
with whichever side of the border their families are settled in. As news of the government
decision trickles in, much mayhem and emotional chaos is let loose. The idea of parting from
each other and relocating with strangers is daunting to these lunatics who have lived as one
family in the Lahore asylum for so long. It triggers a series of reactions that at the same time
are tragic, hilarious and melodramatic in tenor.

Historical facts
It is a fact that the government’s decision (1949) to exchange their mad-men across the
border, amounted to yet another spin off of traumatic upheavals made all the more poignant
by the utter helplessness of the madmen who defy all rule of logic and are unable to even
think. According to a report which appeared in the Indian Express on 19, November 2012, Dr
Alok Sarin, a senior consultant psychiatrist at Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and
Research shares his findings:

“when I was researching in the Teen Murti library as a Fellow I discovered that
there was actually a problem about mental patients after Partition, when it was
decided to send Hindus and Sikhs across from the asylum in Lahore to India. As
Agra and Ranchi were seen as too far, the Amritsar facility was set up in 1949 to
deal with the incoming inmates from West Punjab." [The same newspaper article
also reports that,] "There were 30 mental hospitals in the country at the time of
Partition," "Twenty-seven of these were in what came to be post-Partition
India and three in Pakistan, in Lahore, Hyderabad (Sindh) and Peshawar."
"….after protracted correspondence and several postponements, 450 non-
Muslim patients were transferred from the three hospitals (in Pakistan) to
India in December 1950. Simultaneously, 233 Muslim patients drawn from
various mental hospitals were transferred to Lahore." [Indian Express]

Toba Tek Singh: An Analysis:

With madness as a backdrop Manto taps into the liberty that madness provides. He chronicles
the bewildered reaction of twelve mad inmates hailing from Hindu/Sikh and Muslim faiths, to
review the Partition of the homeland through the perspective of the insane. Cultural
stereotypes are pitched against each other to mock in one breath both with hilarity and
sobriety. There were Anglo-Indian lunatics in the European Ward, even they are not spared,
Manto writes with obvious relish,
‘They would now spend hours in secret confabulation about their changed status
in the asylum. Would the European Ward be there or done away with ? Would
they be served breakfast anymore? And, instead of Western style bread, would
they be forced to swallow the ‘the bloody Indian chapatti?’ (BM, 215)

Through the free play of madness, the narrative throws up many disturbing and heart
wrenching images. For instance the lunatic who gets so confused that he climbs up a tree and
refuses to come down either into Hindustan or into Pakistan. or, the haunting figure of Toba
Tek Singh – standing for 15 long years on swollen feet, and finally as he falls with his head
down, sprawled on the no-man’s-land strip between the barbed wire borders of both the
countries. From an asylum to the no-man’s-land strip – Toba Tek Singh is a figure that defies
all categorization, even language falls through as Toba with his creative static separates
meaning from the act of speech. In a last attempt at expression he chooses to be in Pakistan:
‘Oppad di gurgur di annexe di bay dhiana di mung di daal of Toba Tek Singh and Pakistan. ’
Choice however is denied to the mad. He symbolises the figure of the underdog and the
quintessential exile who has in him the tragic courage and tragic enterprise, to plunge into a
fight and resist to the limits of death the exercise of categorization and stereotype.

Saadat Hasan Manto:

The same is true of Manto who spent a major part of his writerly life in Colonial Bombay,
writing scripts for the Bombay Cinema, editing and writing for the print media and churning
in Urdu brilliant short stories. As his biography reveals, Manto from his early youth was
befriended and inspired by those that lived in the margins and back alleys of Amritsar, the city
he grew up in. After flunking twice in high school he took to the company of gamblers and
alcoholics. Agha Hashr the brilliant playwright and theatre personality who impressed the
young Manto deeply was a compulsive alcoholic and a womaniser who in his old age was
madly in love with Mukhtar, a leading courtesan of Amritsar. Later in Bombay his work with
early bollywood cinema would provide him greater exposure and insight into human nature
from all walks and stratas of life. This freedom and pride of place as artist and creative writer
which Manto had earned on the Indian soil was denied him in Pakistan. The last 7 years of his
short life in Lahore were the darkest years which saw Manto turn into an ‘inveterate
alcoholic.’ His work was seen as pornographic, charges of obscenity levelled against him for
stories like ‘Cold Meat’ and ‘Black Margins’ left him demoralized and intellectually
confused.***

To Conclude
Towards the end of his life Manto had plunged into abyss-mal despair. He used to write a
story a day and go and sell it so he could pay for his daily liquor. In an attempt to save him
from ruin, Manto was admitted twice, in a mental hospital in Lahore. ‘Toba Tek Singh’ the
masterpiece of a story which finds its place of pride in his last anthology Phunde (gallows),
could have been inspired by what Manto saw and experienced during his visits to the mental
asylum.** On the one hand was the biologically generated dementia of the insane inmates of
the mental hospital and on the other hand we have in the figure of the wasting Manto - a
traumatised soldier, a Toba Tek Singh sundered and besides himself in the no-man’s-land,
straining to resist, to write stories of sublime value till his last breath of mindfullness. Thus in
giving us the figure of Toba Tek Singh – that undying Lear-ian image of dementia, Saadat
Hasan Manto has given us a powerful metaphor that reconciles in its person a network of
concerns – those that are existential and therefore universal in nature, as well as concerns that
are specific to the history of the South Asian region. He has merged with the Partition
narrative, a discourse on the dynamics of madness and performed through the story an
exploration of the aesthetic potential of the sublime and the traumatic.

Toba Tek Singh is South Asia’s answer to the madman of the west, Shakespeare’s King Lear.

I shall end with a reference to Gulzar’s emotional response to Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’. It is
a poem titled by the same name and was written by Gulzar the bollywood lyricist, many years
later from across the border, from the same city which once upon a time was also the city of
Manto. Gulzar takes a dig at the metaphor of madness as he ends with the following verse:

It’s been told that all the mad ones haven’t yet reached there
Destinations –
There are many on that side
And many on this.
Toba Tek Singh’s Bishan beckons me often to say:
“Opad di gud gud di moongdi dal dilaltain di Hindustan te Pakistan di dur fitey
munh.”
(Translated into English by Anisur Rahman)
*

References :
Cathy Caruth, Cathy, 2010, ‘Introduction: The Wound and the Voice,’ Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. John Hopkins University Press. USA.

Farooqi, Mehr Afsan, (Ed) ‘Saadat Hasan Manto: Two Encounters with Agha Hashr
Kashmiri’, The Oxford India Anthology of Modern Urdu Literature: Poetry and Prose
Miscellany, OUP: New Delhi, 2008.

Manto, Saadat Hasan, Saadat Hasan Manto: Bombay Stories, Tr. Matt Reek & Aftab Ahmad.
Random House India: UK, 2012.
Memon, Muhammad Umar, (Ed), Black Margins: Saadat Hasan Manto Stories. ‘Katha’
OUP, 2001, New Delhi.

Pandey, Birendra, (Lecture), ‘Trauma theory and the history of Partition’, Refresher in
English: Ideology and Literature, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, 15 October 2014.

Ravikanth & Tarun Saint, (Eds) Translating Partition, Katha, New Delhi, 2001.

Singh, Neeti, 1994, The ‘Sublime’ in Longinus, Burke & Kant, M. Phil Thesis, Dept of
English, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Guided by Prof P C Kar.

Newpaper Articles:
1) The Express Tribune, ‘Toba Tek Singh: A peek into pre-partition history,’ by Taha Kehar,
March 12, 2011.
2) The Indian Express ‘Exploring the ‘madness of Partition’ through Toba Tek Singh,’ Seema
Chisti, New Delhi, November, 2012.

NOTES:
*** As Manto himself writes in an introduction to his volume of short stories Cold Meat
(1950), “For three months I was confused. I couldn’t figure out where I was. ……It seemed as
if three movies were playing simultaneously on one screen. Sometimes I saw Bombay’s
shopping districts and alleyways, sometimes I saw the small trams of Karachi rushing past
donkey-drawn carriages, and sometimes I saw Lahore’s noisy restaurants. I couldn’t figure
out where I was. I would sit lost in thought all day. (Bombay Stories, xviii)”

**One of his best and among the last of Manto’s stories, ‘Toba Tek Singh’ was published in
Phunde in 1955, the year in which Manto died. ‘It is, in a sense, a ‘goodbye tale’ that stresses
on the tyrannical nature of dividing people. The tone of the narrative is fresh and the concept,
surreal. It made us question the dogma of national interest that we were raised to cherish.’
From the Express Tribune : ‘Toba Tek Singh: A peek into pre-partition history,’ by Taha
Kehar, March 12, 2011.

* According to a report in the Indian Express on a seminar on Exploring the ‘madness of

Partition’ through Toba Tek Singh - Seema Chisti, New Delhi, November, 2012.

"There were 30 mental hospitals in the country at the time of Partition," Dr. Kala says.
"Twenty-seven of these were in what came to be post-Partition India and three in Pakistan, in
Lahore, Hyderabad (Sindh) and Peshawar." The paper is set to discuss how, "after protracted
correspondence and several postponements, 450 non-Muslim patients were transferred from
the three hospitals (in Pakistan) to India in December 1950. Simultaneously, 233 Muslim
patients drawn from various mental hospitals were transferred to Lahore."
At the time, according to Dr Kala's paper, the Indian government was said to have
complained about the ill-treatment meted out to Hindu and Sikh inmates.
Speaking about how the idea of the seminar took root, Dr Alok Sarin, senior consultant
psychiatrist at Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research who is one of the driving
forces behind the meet, explained: "It all started when I was researching in the Teen Murti
library as a Fellow and discovered that there was actually a problem about mental patients
after Partition, when it was decided to send Hindus and Sikhs across from the asylum in
Lahore to India. As Agra and Ranchi were seen as too far, the Amritsar facility was set up in
1949 to deal with the incoming inmates from West Punjab."
Sarin said the intention was both to look at this traffic in asylum inmates, and "to see what it
can tell us as about the nature of a society's understanding of mental illness, and its attitudes
towards the mentally ill". He added that it was also important to look at what happens when a
society is fractured and how long it took for any society to heal after such ruptures, if it heals
at all. Leading sociologist Dr Ashis Nandy and eminent historian Prof Shahid Amin are
among the participants. Atamjit Singh, a Punjabi playwright; JNU professor Moushmi Basu
(set to speak on how breaking up of nations impacts mental well being); Dr Sanjiv Jain, head
of Psychiatry, NIMHANS, Bengaluru; and Alok Bajpai, a Kanpur-based psychiatrist who has
worked on cinema, literature and Partition and who is one of the co-organisers of the seminar,
will speak on issues around mental well-being, history, literature, the law and its
interconnections with identity.
**
Published in Anekaaant, 2015.
Neeti Singh, 901 Vraj Apartment, Race Course Circle, Vadodara – 390007.
sufiandtheswan@ymail.com 9825607230