Partition, commonly understood as the violent territorial and political separation

of groups also conjures up images of forced evictions and migrations of

populations at immense communal and personal cost. The Partition of India was,
in the words of Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal, “the central historical event in the
twentieth century South Asia”. It was a defining moment that has shaped, and
continues to shape, the lives of the people living in this part of the world. The
Partition was the most cataclysmic event of the 20th century as it caused the
greatest transfer of population in human history and heaped unimaginable misery
on people. There are no definitive estimates but it is generally accepted that no
less than fifteen million people were uprooted from their homes, between one
and two million people including men, women and children were massacred, and
hundreds of thousands were physically and emotionally maimed for life. It not
only divided the subcontinent but also the hearts of its people, tearing apart the
social and cultural fabric that had taken many centuries to acquire its assimilative
character. Studies of partition began with a profound reexamination of why it
happened; they gathered momentum as scholars looked at the provincial and
local roots of the drive to divide India; and the subject took a big step forward
when oral histories revealed how women and men experienced the traumas of its
bloody upheavals.

By dividing the Indian empire when quitting it in 1947, Britain pioneered a model
of decolonization which seemed to present solutions to many intractable
difficulties. On the face of it, partition appeared to have much to commend it. It
enabled Britain to get out of India swiftly, leaving its successors to cope with
problems of law and order in an increasingly violent society. Since the Indian
National Congress was ready to accept the excision of Muslim majority districts as
the necessary price for a strong centre, partition enabled Britain to establish
cordial relations with the government of independent India and bind it to the
Commonwealth, both priorities of its policy. Thereafter, partition came to be
deployed in other parts of the colonial world as a solution to vexed political
conflicts, but recent studies of India’s partition raise the question of whether
partition in fact ‘solved’ anything.
On 3rd June 1947, the British Government announced its decision to partition its
Indian Empire. As argued by many historians – whether orthodox or revisionist-
the rivalry amongst the Indian elites over the problem posed by the minority
Muslim population in the country
was undoubtedly a significant factor behind this decision. The protagonists in this
rivalry were, on the one hand, the Congress, and on the other, the Muslim
League. The orthodox authors have always laid the blame for the Partition on
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the President of the Muslim League and the sole
representative of Muslim interests at the centre. The authors from this school of
thought such as R.J Moore, Stanley Wolpert and Akbar Ahmed emphasize Jinnah’s
demand for a separate, sovereign nation for Muslims in the Muslim League’s
Lahore Resolution of 1940 and in relentlessly forcing this demand until its
achievement in 1947 with the creation of Pakistan. On the other hand, the
authors of the Revisionist view such as Ayesha Jalal and Asim Roy argue that
Jinnah never intended a Partition. On the contrary, it was the Congress that was
to be blamed for running the knife across India. Another significant reason that
should be kept in mind is that the British were no longer willing to play the ruling
game as imposing the imperial rule was becoming increasingly difficult to carry on
in India and thus they were desperate to withdraw their rule and leave. This
hurried and chaotic withdrawal of the British left many issues and interests
unresolved at the Colonial end and caused a hasty, premature partition without
defining the borders of the new nations. So for a brief time, the two newly
separated countries were independent without knowing what part of their nation
belonged to them. The boundary was hurriedly drawn up by a British lawyer, Cyril
Radcliffe, who had little knowledge of Indian conditions and with the use of out-
of-date maps and census materials. Communities, families and farms were cut in
two, but by delaying the announcement the British managed to avoid
responsibility for the worst fighting and the mass migration that had followed.
The politics of the elitists was not confined to the tiny world of the elites but it
was politics that actually ended up affecting and shaping the lives of millions of
common masses and still continues to do so. Partition cannot be termed as a
singular event that just happened in 1947 as it can be seen even today as it casts
its shadow on the politics of the subcontinent.
Let’s turn our focus on the representation of these events through a piece of
literature I’ve chosen. My focus will be on a short story called ‘Toba Tek Singh’ by
Saadat Hasan Manto which was published in 1995.

‘Toba Tek Singh’ first published in 1953 in an Urdu magazine Savera, was written
at a time ‘when Manto’s energies were at their lowest ebb’. He had migrated to
Pakistan in 1948 and since then had been leading an agonized existence. Manto
locates his story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ in a lunatic asylum and thus takes the theme of
Partition to the world of the insane, highlighting the political absurdity of the
Partition itself and at the same time lodges a note of protest against the powers
who take such momentous decisions as splitting a country into two, without ever
thinking of the consequences. For writers who wrote around that time, it became
almost an inward compulsion to write about the Partition of the country. Fictional
historical narratives about the Partition developed basically on two lines. There
were those who re-evoked the senseless carnage, the horrifying brutalities and
the numbing meaningless violence that the different communities perpetrated on
each other. Then there were those narratives that focused on the fear, the agony,
and the insanity which resulted from the sudden dislocation of people, uprooting
them cruelly from places which had been home to them for generations, only to
be thrown into a strange alien land and told that henceforth this was their home.
Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’ also falls into the second category of stories that deal
with the theme of Partition concentrating on the tragedy of dislocation and exile.

The story is told by a reliable but not omniscient narrator who speaks as a
Pakistani, and seems to be a Lahori. The style is that of newspaper reportage but
the tone is mock-serious and dispassionate. Thus in two short paragraphs, Manto
sets the tone of the story and displays the scene of action with a strong
suggestion that the madhouse we are about to enter is in fact going to be a mirror
of the world outside. The cut was made through the heart of both the countries.
A couple of years after the partition, the respective governments decide to
exchange the inmates of lunatic asylums in both the countries. The situation was
such that nobody, not even the guards could tell exactly where both countries are
situated. With his simple but powerful language, Manto portrays explicitly, the
dilemma of thousands who were once caught in a no man’s land.
In ‘Toba Tek Singh’ the lunatic asylum becomes a microcosm of the  world outside
and Manto focuses on the anguish of one man to bring out the trauma and
tragedy of dislocation and exile faced by those innumerable others who were
forced out of their homes. Even in the world of these madmen, the realization of
a division of their country has gradually percolated through.

Two things are happening here simultaneously. On the one hand there is a note
of protest in this madman’s declaration that he would rather live on a tree than
be forced to make a choice between two parts of the same country. This protest
simmered in the breasts of most common people who were driven out from their
homes when sudden political decisions were thrust on them. A political decision
has been made without consulting the people concerned and it has been thrust
upon them leaving them with no choice but to comply. The second noteworthy
fact which emerges from the protest of the madman, who prefers to live on the
tree, is located in the manner in which he embraces his Hindu and Sikh friends
and begins to cry. For him they are still his friends and it does not matter that they
are not Muslims. We might as well ask ourselves who in fact is mad here- the
madmen in the asylum or the sane men outside the madhouse? It is the
apparently sane people who have gone berserk and are killing their friends and
neighbors. It is they who are saying that the place that has been your home since
birth is no longer your home. Confusion about their status is now rampant in the
madhouse.

Manto is highlighting here a very important aspect about the gap between
decision makers and the affected people. For the political leaders it was easy to
run a dividing line through the country and have clear cut physical boundaries
drawn between Hindustan and Pakistan. But for the common people, home was
where they had been born, lived and would have died had history not played such
a cruel trick. For them it did not matter whether that home was in Pakistan or
Hindustan but if in the name of division of the country they were driven out of
that home then they would rather they did not belong to any of those countries
as long as they were allowed to live there. This hopelessness and this despair is
evoked in the mild protest of the madman who would prefer to live in the tree
rather than in Hindustan or Pakistan and be separated from family and friends in
the process.

Having set the scene of his story, the narrator then shifts his focus to the central
character Bishan Singh, a wealthy landlord in Toba Tek Singh, a small town in
Pakistan, who has been in the asylum for fifteen years. In those fifteen years he
has never laid down to rest and had never slept a wink. He stood on his feet all
the time because of which his calves were distended and his feet swollen. The
first noticeable thing about him, however, is the gibberish he speaks all the time
through which Manto seems to be commenting on the breakdown of all
communication in these times of sheer devastation. Language which should
enable people to connect, often betrayed. His basic desire was to know where
Toba Tek Singh was, in Pakistan or India. Bishan Singh’s friend Fazaldin refers to
Bishan Singh’s brothers and wife, calling them ‘brothers’ and ‘sister’ respectively,
points to a crucial fact of shared community life and kinship amongst people of
various communities.

Even though Bishan Singh has been locked up in the asylum for the past fifteen
years, yet it is crucial for him to know where Toba Tek Singh lies now and he asks
the same question to the concerned official when the Hindu and Sikh madmen
are taken to Wagah, the border between the two countries for an exchange with
those Muslim madmen who wait on the other side to be transferred to Pakistan.
This time, however, Bishan Singh gets a definite answer and the official laughs and
says that Toba Tek Singh is in Pakistan. The description that follows is almost
heart rending even though the narrative tone remains dispassionate and
detached. Like a trapped animal Bishan Singh refuses to go to the other side and
runs back to where his friends were. Bishan Singh refuses to be coaxed into
believing that Toba Tek Singh will be moved where he wants it to be moved. He
runs and stands firmly at a spot in the middle of the two countries refusing to be
stirred. It is just before dawn that everyone hears a piercing cry coming out of
Bishan Singh. The man, who had stood on his legs day and night for all of fifteen
years spent in the asylum, now lies face down on the ground. On one side of him
lay Hindustan and on the other lay Pakistan. ‘In the middle on a strip of no man’s
land lay Toba Tek Singh.’ In a very skillful and inobtrusive manner, Manto has
succeeded in investing the identity of a person with the identity of a place. Bishan
Singh and Toba Tek Singh have almost become synonymous and interchangeable
by the time we come to the last two paragraphs of the story.  In his death too he
is able to determine where Toba Tek Singh lay for him. The person and the place
merge into one.