Mental illness is an important and enduring, perhaps even defining, theme in “Toba Tek Singh.

” Indeed the
choice to write about partition through the lens of a mental asylum is itself highly significant. Manto’s use of
the patients to reflect the “madness” of what was happening outside was poignant. The asylum in a sense
represents the whole subcontinent (Ispahani 1988); the madness of its inhabitants symbolising the madness of
the partition violence. Bishan Singh’s nonsense phrases, as Tarun K. Saint has explained, reflect the
arbitrariness and opacity of the governmental machinery (2012). Increasingly, it becomes clear that the
“lunatics” in the asylum are more sane than the government figures making decisions about their exchange.
Astute comments by the asylum inmates demonstrate the absurdity of partition:

“Toba Tek Singh” was written after Manto’s time in hospital and was clearly influenced by his experience;
perhaps even the choice to write about a mental asylum was a consequence of his hospitalisation. In a context
where mental illness was commonly regarded as abhorrent and shameful, Manto’s explicit engagement with the
theme would have been unusual but powerful, emphatically drawing attention to the madness of partition.

The character of Bishan Singh represents a symbolic commentary on the trauma of displacement. His intense
suffering reflects that of partition refugees. The constant questioning and demands to know about his homeland
are evocative of fractured identities and loss of sense of belonging. Perhaps his character is also a reflection of
Manto’s own suffering and confusion about identity in the wake of his move to Lahore. Manto wrote: ‘I found
my thoughts scattered. Though I tried hard, I could not separate India from Pakistan and Pakistan from India’
(Hasan 1984, 89). Elsewhere he added: ‘I found it impossible to decide which of the two countries was now my
homeland’ (Ispahani 1988,192). In this way, Bishan Singh’s character can be read both as a mirror to the
general displacement suffered by so many as well as a more specific portrayal of Manto’s own personal
experience. From both perspectives, the pain and emotional trauma of displacement is significant, often
contributing to psychopathology whether implicitly or explicitly.
It is crucial to take into account the specific historical and geographical context in which Manto wrote, within
which the underlying influences and subsequent implications of his work should be situated. The exchange of
psychiatric inpatients between India and Pakistan actually happened, as described by Sanjeev Jain and Alok
Sarin. After 1947, the partition of the Punjab Mental Hospital in Lahore dragged out over several years as there
was nowhere to transfer patients. In 1949, the Amritsar asylum was hastily constructed, which although
inadequate, was able to receive four hundred fifty non-Muslim patients in 1950. Of those, two hundred eighty-
two were kept there with the remainder being sent on to Ranchi. Two hundred thirty-three Muslim patients,
meanwhile, were sent to Lahore from various Indian hospitals. Patients were largely classified based on who
would pay the bills (Jain and Sarin 2012). This almost complete disregard for identity and individuality, where
the mentally ill were treated as merely an administrative burden, was typical of the time.
Manto’s work was never moralising; he left it up to his readers to form judgements, preferring instead to record
events bluntly without comment (Jalal 2013). However, an engagement with, and indeed challenge towards,
popular attitudes is implicit in “Toba Tek Singh.” Manto’s blunt and matter-of-fact descriptive style presents
mental illness as a fact of life; it is neither dramatised nor evaded, nor is it trivialised as cheap comedy. It is just
there. This was a normalising approach. Significantly there is a conspicuous absence of psychiatrists in “Toba
Tek Singh”; the target of Manto’s criticism, as Saint has argued, was not mental health professionals or the
practice of psychiatry but rather the bureaucratic procedures and those according to whose whims they were
implemented (2012). The publication of the story may itself have had some impact on the exclusionist popular
attitudes towards the mentally ill that were so prevalent at the time. Jain and Sarin have described how the
Amritsar asylum psychiatrist, Dr. Vidysagar, by accommodating patients and their families together in tents due
to the inadequacy of facilities, pioneered a model for greater family engagement in the care of the mentally ill
(2012). It is conceivable that Manto’s normalising writings may have contributed, if only in a limited way, to
the beginnings of a shift in popular opinion.

The implications of Manto’s work have been touched on above but were more concrete with respect to his
literary influence. “Toba Tek Singh” was not the only one of his stories to deal with mental illness. Indeed, as
Stephen Alter has argued, ‘in the period following Partition, madness became the guiding metaphor in much of
Manto’s fiction’ (Alter 1994, 96). For example, in “Khol Do,” Manto’s use of the character Sakinah’s
dissociative state following the trauma of rape is shocking and powerful. Mental illness as a literary theme has
been used by a number of writers working on partition long after Manto’s death; in this sense his work on
mental illness cast a ‘long shadow’ (Saint 2012, 59). Indeed, as Alter has described, madness became the ‘only
conceivable response’ to the ‘ruthless inhumanity of Hindu-Muslim violence’ (1994, 91). As Saint has
explained, partition violence meant huge psychological trauma, that often manifested in belated after-effects.
Whole communities were affected by symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The literature on partition and
mental illness, then, may have helped to enable the beginnings of a process of working through these traumatic
memories (2012). This was, and continues to be, a long and difficult process, but one of the most important
implications of Manto’s work was to help set this in motion.
Manto’s writing in general, and “Toba Tek Singh” in particular, was coloured by his own mental health
problems, namely alcohol addiction and possibly depression. Even the choice to use a mental asylum to reflect
the “madness” of partition was intimately related to his experience. However, more than just this, “Toba Tek
Singh” and the character of Bishan Singh is a symbolic commentary on the psychological trauma of the human
displacement brought about by partition; perhaps also the author’s own displacement and uncertainty about
identity. The specific subcontinental context was important in terms of attitudes towards, and treatment of, the
mentally ill around the time of partition. Importantly, Manto’s work started a trend of writing about mental
illness and partition; later authors followed suit. This may have helped audiences to go some way towards
processing their psychological trauma. Although this analysis has focused specifically on “Toba Tek Singh,”
references to mental illness and psychological distress are prevalent in many of Manto’s other stories, “Khol
Do” being just one example. The broad range of Manto’s corpus of work now needs to be examined from this
angle in order to shed further light on the relationship between his literature and mental illness in the Indian
subcontinent.

One of Partition's most evocative stories, Toba Tek Singh will on Monday be the take-off point for a seminar
entitled 'The Partition of Madness and the Madness of Partition' being held here.

The 1955 short story by Saadat Hasan Manto was based on inmates of lunatic asylums being split in the wake of
Partition — with Hindu and Sikh inmates being transferred to India and Muslim inmates going to Pakistan. In
the book, several inmates of a Lahore facility are anxious about a "transfer" in the wake of Partition. One of
them, a Sikh inmate called Bishan Singh, is traumatised at being told he is being sent off to India while his
village Toba Tek Singh is in Pakistan. He doesn't want to go, and is finally found dead in the no-man's land
between India and Pakistan. His non-sensical mutterings in the book are an indictment of the separation of the
two countries.

Anyone who has experienced or even knows about the atrocities caused on either side of the Punjab border
during the partition of India in 1947 would understand the rationality in the aforementioned lines. When India
was celebrating its Independence in 1947, there were more than a million people who weren’t aware of their
nationality or the country they belonged to. Overnight some of them became Pakistanis and some Hindustanis.
This essay will attempt to show the absurdity of the logic given for India’s partition by deploying the
perspective of mad men in Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”. While doing so, the paper will also inverse the binary of
constructed categories of madness and sanity.
Saadat Hasan Manto is known for his witty and sharp take on events related to the partition (Singh). In “Toba
Tek Singh”, we see lunatics in an asylum discussing where and what Pakistan is. in “Toba Tek Singh”, set in an
asylum near the newly-announced Indo-Pakistan border, an order is passed which says that the Muslim lunatics
are to be sent over to Pakistan and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics were to be handed over to India. In a similar
manner, even the criminals were divided in the story. Women too had to go through a similar division (Mangat).
The conversations that the lunatics have among themselves give a ‘sane’ perspective to the whole situation just
like Franz’s statement about pigeons; birds won’t be asked to choose a nation as they can fly across borders.
Both the stories criticize ideas of war, nationalism, and nationality. While Daudet uses an illiterate child’s
perspective, Manto deploys that of the lunatics, both of who are considered to be lacking reason and rationality
as per socially constructed binaries of adult/child and sane/insane respectively.
In “Toba Tek Singh”, one of the lunatics is so bewildered by the idea of the partition that he climbs a tree and
claims that his home is on the tree itself, neither in India nor Pakistan. Indeed, a decision that even the ‘sane’
people couldn’t make for themselves! The politicians who made the decision to divide India and create Pakistan
weren’t the ones who had to walk across the borders and experience the atrocities of rapes, loots, and killings
(AP). They took a decision sitting in the comfort of their offices, not realizing the catastrophic impact it would
yield on the lives of millions, and suddenly half the population became refugees with not even a tree to call their
own. A Hindu lawyer from Lahore who had gone mad because of unrequited love is asked to go to India since
the girl he loved had shifted to India. But the girl he loved so much isn’t reason enough for him to shift to India
because he values his legal practice in Lahore. For him, his homeland mattered more to him. The lawyer, being
a ‘lunatic’ as per the standards of ‘sane’, understands the importance of his hometown and the problems that
will arise in migrating to an alien land.
Jinnah’s ‘Two-Nation Theory’, believed in having a country for the followers of Islam, based on the ideology
that the primary identity and unifying denominator of Muslims in the South Asian subcontinent is their religion,
rather than their language or ethnicity, and therefore Indian Hindus and Muslims are two distinct nations,
regardless other commonalities (General Knowledge Today ). Jinnah’s belief in a nation based on religion,
rather than any human ground seems incongruous. And then we have these men in the asylum, who are
ostracized for being lunatics, but are evidently more concerned about their homeland and can see the absurdity
of the logic of partitioning a country based on religion, where people had shared memories, histories, and ties.
Jinnah and all the politicians who actively promoted the partition, which in turn created trauma and fragmented
identities due to all the madness and sadness associated with it, are irrational in their approach of keeping
religion above humanity. Also during partition, ‘logical’ people who are considered to be reasonable, in the
name of the same religion, killed each other for a mere piece of land. But aren’t rationality and logicality gifts
that only the sane are supposed to have? Manto’s characters are unknowingly critiquing the creators of a new
nation through their innocence and insanity!
Among the inmates, there is one person named Bishan Singh who belongs to a place called Toba Tek Singh. In
the fifteen years that he had been in the asylum, he hadn’t slept at all and never lay down to rest. When news of
the partition reaches the asylum, he begins asking everyone where was Toba Tek Singh, in India or Pakistan. “It
was all so confusing!” (Manto). If someone asked him his view on the partition, he would say “Uper the gur
gur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the Government of Pakistan.” Something nobody could
understand. Once a friend who visited him told him that Toba Tek Singh will be in Pakistan, Bishan replies
“Uper the gur gur the annexe the bay dhyana the mung the dal of the Pakistan and India dur fittey
moun.” (Manto). ‘Fittey Moun’, is a Punjabi expression similar to ‘Face-palm’. His confusion and the
seemingly absurd line that he speaks repeatedly (perhaps symbolic of the absurdity of partition) makes obvious
that Bishan Singh found this idea of the sudden change of homeland and country very absurd. Finally, the day
arrives when inmates are divided and sent to their respective countries. When Bishan Singh’s turn comes, he
refuses to move and the guards try to push him across the border to India. He announces that the land he was
standing on was Toba Tek Singh. After which, “The man who had stood erect on his legs for fifteen years, now
pitched face-forward onto the ground” (Manto). Between the barbed wires, in a no man’s land, which had no
name, Bishan Singh, also known as Toba Tek Singh, falls down. His madness was liberating.
The innocent reason/method to his madness made him immune to the communal frenzy of partition. If he
decided that the particular land that he inhabited was Toba Tek Singh, and based on this we call him ‘insane’,
then the politicians who redrew borders thoughtlessly and gave new names to the provinces are equally or rather
more insane. If their decision to split the country and change the nationality of a part of its population can be
seen as a logical decision, so can Bishan’s decision to call the unnamed land his village. Thus the story inverses
the binary of sanity and madness created by social norms.
Very often a mad person is described as someone who lives in dissociative realities and lacks logic and reason
(Oz). This is how social norms have constructed the difference between sanity and madness. But in the case of
partition, the lunatics and their thoughts on partition seem more logical than the decision taken by the
government officials. Even the lunatics could understand that being uprooted from one’s homeland is traumatic.
Initially, the inmates are seen living together happily without any communal hatred. But only during and after
partition, when the country was torn with communal hatred, the asylum also sees instances of religious
difference, for instance when one of the mad men calls himself Jinnah and another calls himself Tara Singh, the
leader of the Sikhs, and violence is prevented by shifting them to different cells (Manto).
In “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, Pecola believed at the end that she had blue eyes (Morrison), and
nobody could falsify her belief. In her madness, she finally found what she was looking for just like Bishan
Singh who found his Toba Tek Singh in an unnamed piece of land. And no sane person can take that absolute
freedom away from the mad through logic and reason. What they feel about their body or, in Toba Tek Singh’s
case, the nation, can’t be altered by the opinion of the ‘sane’, for in madness there is  freedom; freedom from
the tyranny of social, cultural and national norms and structures. In the movie Mammo (Jalal), it was evident
how Mammo defied the rule of the state because it was meaningless to stay away from her family and homeland
just because the government decided that she would have to be restricted to the nation they’ve ‘made for her’.
She was categorized ‘sane’ unlike Bishan, but both did the same thing, defied the orders of the state. Thus,
“Toba Tek Singh”, a story of mad people, is more about sanity and logic inherent in the madness of the inmates.
Throughout “Madness and Civilization”, Foucault insists that madness is not a natural, unchanging thing, but
rather depends on the society in which it exists (Foucault). Indeed, the society valued the men, who took
irrational decisions in their ‘sane’ state, and banished men who thought rationally in their ‘insane’ state.   The
ones who create definitions of madness and thus keep mad people away from society aren’t acknowledging the
fact that these people might think differently but being different doesn’t always mean being inferior or unfit.
Madness might even be a gift!