Toba Tek Singhٹوبہ ٹیک سنگھ

"Toba Tek Singh" is a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, published in Urdu in 1955, the year of his death. Set in a Lahore asylum two or three years after the 1947 Partition, it follows Bishan Singh, a Sikh inmate who refuses to accept that his home town now lies in Pakistan. It has become the most famous story of Partition in any language: in 2018 the BBC named it among the 100 stories that shaped the world.

About the story

Manto wrote the story at the end of his life, in the Lahore he had moved to after Partition, and it appeared in 1955. A scholarly article in the Annals of King Edward Medical University calls it, by some accounts, the best short story ever written on the subject of Partition, and notes its central irony: faced with the chaos and bloodshed of those years, the response of a man committed to a mental institution appears more sane and more appropriate than the behaviour of the people around him. An essay hosted by Columbia University, quoted in the reference literature, calls the story a powerful satire and a bitter indictment of the political processes and behaviour patterns that produced Partition.

What is Toba Tek Singh about?

"Toba Tek Singh" is about the exchange of lunatics after Partition. Two or three years after 1947, the governments of India and Pakistan decide that asylum inmates, like criminal offenders, should be sorted by religion and exchanged: the Muslim inmates of Indian asylums to Pakistan, the Hindu and Sikh inmates of Pakistani asylums to India. In the Lahore asylum the news lands among men who do not know what Pakistan is. One inmate explains that Pakistan is the place in India where razors are made. Another climbs a tree, delivers an unbroken two hour speech on the subtle problem of Pakistan and Hindustan, and refuses to come down: he does not want to live in either country, he says, he will live right here in this tree.

The comedy keeps curdling. A Muslim inmate from Chiniot, once a member of the Muslim League, announces that he is Quaid-e-Azam and promptly declares war on a Sikh inmate who believes he is Master Tara Singh. A quiet radio engineer decides the situation calls for freedom from clothes and wanders the garden naked. Manto gives each madness a short paragraph, and the reader slowly sees the story's engine: the logic of the asylum, sorting human beings by the label on their file, is exactly the logic being applied outside its walls.

Bishan Singh, called Toba Tek Singh

Everyone in the asylum calls Bishan Singh by the name of his home town: Toba Tek Singh. He has been confined for fifteen years, and in all that time, the story says, he has never once sat down or lain down. He stands, day and night, and asks the one question that matters to him: where is Toba Tek Singh now, in India or in Pakistan? His relatives visit once a month. His daughter has grown older coming to see him, and still cries every time at the sight of her father. Whenever he is agitated he bursts into his famous refrain, a mash of Punjabi, Urdu and English that sounds like nonsense and lands like a verdict on both new countries: "Upar di gur gur di annexe di bedhiyana di moong di daal of di Pakistan and Hindustan of di durr phitey mun."

When the exchange comes, Bishan Singh is taken under police escort to the border, and there he is told that Toba Tek Singh, his town, has stayed in Pakistan. He refuses to cross. Through the night he stands in the no man's land between the two barbed wire fences, and before dawn he is found lying face down where he stood. Manto closes the story with the lines every reader remembers: "There, behind barbed wire, was Hindustan. Here, behind the same kind of barbed wire, was Pakistan. In between, on that piece of ground that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh."

Themes: who is mad here?

The story's argument is made by reversal. The men certified mad ask the plain questions, where is my town, which country is the place where razors are made, why must I move at all, that the sane world of officials, forms and escorts cannot answer. Bishan Singh's refusal is the only honest geography in the story: a man who belongs to a place, told that the place has been assigned to the other side, chooses instead the strip of earth that belongs to neither. The refrain that sounds like madness is, on inspection, the story's clearest sentence, a curse aimed with perfect accuracy at the inattention of both states.

The author

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912 to 1955) was born in Samrala, in Ludhiana district, and wrote in Urdu: twenty two collections of short stories, a novel, five series of radio plays, three collections of essays and two collections of sketches. Partition, which he opposed, became his great subject, and his unsparing stories of its violence, above all of what was done to women, made him famous and prosecuted: he was tried six times for obscenity and never convicted. "Toba Tek Singh", published in Lahore in the year he died there, is the story his whole career points towards. His life is told in his people entry in this Kosh.

Reception and legacy

No Partition story has been adapted more often. A film was made from a play adaptation in 2005 by Afia Nathaniel; Sarmad Sehbai's version aired on Pakistan Television in 2006; Ajoka Theatre performed its stage adaptation in India for the sixtieth anniversary of Partition; Ketan Mehta's short film followed in 2018, the year Nandita Das's film Manto wove the story into Manto's biography. In 2018 the BBC placed "Toba Tek Singh" among the 100 stories that shaped the world, in the company of Homer and Virginia Woolf. In 2020 the British Pakistani rapper Riz Ahmed took its name for a song on his album A Long Goodbye. Bishan Singh's unnamed strip of ground has become the standing image, in both Punjabs and far beyond them, for everyone Partition left belonging nowhere.