Madness and Partition: The Short Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto / ‫ ‬ﻢﻴﺴﻘﺘﻟﺍﻭ‫ ‬ﻥﻮﻨﺠﻟﺍ‫‬: ‫‬ﺕﺩﺎﻌﺳ‫ ‬ﺺﺼﻗ‫‬

‫‬ﺓﺮﻴﺼﻘﻟﺍ‫ ‬ﻮﺘﻨﻣ‫ ‬ﻦﺴﺣ‫‬

Author(s): Stephen Alter and ‫ﺮﺘﻟﺃ ﻦﭭﻴﺘﺳ‬
Source: Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 14, Madness and Civilization / ‫‬نونجلا‫‬
‫&ةراضحلاو‬lrm;‎ (1994), pp. 91-100
Published by: Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University in
Cairo and American University in Cairo Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/521767
Accessed: 25-03-2020 10:29 UTC

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 Madness and Partition:

The Short Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto

Stephen Alter

No writer has been able to convey the violent ambiguities of

communal conflict with as much force and conviction as Saadat
Hasan Manto. Many of his short stories focus on the sense of despair
and dislocation caused by the partition of Pakistan and India in 1947.
Manto vividly recreates the anger and horrors of this period and the
trauma of refugees uprooted and victimized by the delineation of
arbitrary borders. As the characters in Manto's stories confront the
ruthless inhumanity of Hindu-Muslim violence murder, rape and
mutilation-their only conceivable response is madness.
In one of his stories, "I Swear By God" (Khuda ki qasm), a
Muslim woman searches for her daughter, who was abducted by
Hindu rioters. Refusing to believe that her daughter has been
murdered, the mother wanders from city to city in north India,
mumbling incoherently, half-naked, her hair matted. The narrator of
the story reflects on the woman' s plight:

Her futile search, I realised, was now the only basis of

her life which had kept her going till now. I did not want
to pull it away from under her feet. I did not want to take
her out of a vast asylum where she could make long
excursions in all directions to satisfy the thirst of her
untiring feet and clap her within the narrow walls of an
asylum made of bricks. (Manto 106)

Manto clearly saw the violence which accompanied Partition as

an act of collective madness. He himself was a victim. Born in the
Punjab, of a Kashmiri Muslim family, Manto spent most of his early
life in Aligarh and Bombay, where he worked for a number of years

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as a film writer and editor of literary journals such as Musawwir and
Samaj. While living in Bombay he witnessed communal rioting in the
city, which he condemned in essays and editorials. For a brief period
of his life between 1941 and 1942 he worked in Delhi at All India
Radio, writing a large number of plays and stories. Despite his proliElc
output, Manto became restless and bored with Delhi, which was a
relatively small and provincial city. He missed Bombay and quarreled
with his colleagues, Elnally quitting his job at All India Radio over the
unauthorized editing of one of his plays. Returning to Bombay, he
discovered that Hindu-Muslim tensions had increased. Alienated from
his friends in the Progressive Writers Movement, he became
depressed and disillusioned with the literary and political life of
Bombay. Though he eventually found work at Filmistan studios and
Musawwir, Manto faced financial difElculties and began to drink more
heavily. When Partition occurred in the summer of 1947, Manto's
wife, SaElyah, and her family moved to Pakistan. Manto remained in
Bombay for several months but followed soon afterwards. He settled
in Lahore and faced an uncertain and disorienting future. Though he
continued writing and produced some of his most powerful stories
during this period, his alcoholism had become more severe. Exiled
from Bombay and living in poverty, Manto was unable to reconcile
himself to his new life in Lahore. He died in 1955, of cirrhosis of the
liver at the age of forty-three (Flemming, 1 - 21).
Though he is now acknowledged to be one of the masters of
Urdu fiction, Manto received only moderate recognition during his
lifetime. Manto's writings were always controversial and he was
attacked by his critics for being an alcoholic, a pornographer, and
politically indecisive. In fact, as his stories testify, Manto was a writer
of acute moral vision, who focused on the injustices and
contradictions of his society and the fraudulence of power.
In response to the question posed in the title of his essay, "Is
Manto Necessary Today?", the Urdu critic Salim Akhtarhas stated:

My answer is an unconditional yes, not because Manto

was a very great short story writer or artist, nor because
he wrote very enjoyable stories. These features can be
found in other short story writers. What is, in fact
necessary today is that kind of moral courage, free from
the taint of hypocrisy, that Manto embodied. Manto had
the courage to face bitter truth, to analyze it and to

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 express it openly. He fought all his life for the right to
speak the truth. He endured not only the censure of
religion and the courts but also, eventually, the rejection
of his fellow progressives. Still, he remained on his
path. (Akhtar 1)

Leslie Flemming, Manto's American biographer, refers to him

as a "Kind-Hearted Terrorist." It is an appropriate epithet, for much of
his best writing is subversive. He sought to expose the inherent deceits
in the political system as well as the hypocrisy of religious, social and
sexual norms. When he was alive, Manto was often discredited as an
immoral and degenerate writer, which is ironic, because few writers
have had such an incisive eye for ethical questions. He saw through
the falsity of religious and political rhetoric, particularly in the context
of Partition. What is remarkable about his stories, is that he can
describe acts of communal violence and revenge, without taking sides.
Even though he himself was a Muslim, forced to leave India as an
exile, he does not ascribe blame to one community or the other. His
descriptions of violence may be graphic and disturbing, but Manto
does not perpetmate the cycle of revenge and recrimination through
general accusations. To him, an act of rape or murder is committed by
an individual man, who cannot cloak or disguise his actions behind an
ethnic or religious identity. Probably his most bitter and terrifying
work is called "Black Marginalia" (Siyah Hashiye), a montage of
incidents from Hindu-Muslim riots. Manto begins with a dedication,
"...to the man who, while narrating his blood-curdling exploits, said,
'When I killed an old woman I felt horriEled as if I had committed a
murder"' (Manto 39). The sordid irony of those words underlies much
of Manto's Elction.
The preoccupation with communal violence and rioting in the
stories of Manto and other Muslim writers has been criticized as a
narrow and cynical view of what might have been a positive and
inspiring moment in history. An eminent Urdu scholar, Muhammad
Umar Memon has written that Partition held out the possibility of a
creative renewal for Urdu literature and that the experience of
migration should have produced works of greater vision and
optimism. In the Elction of Intizar Hussein, a contemporae of
Manto's, Memon Elnds the recurring theme of hijrat (migration) which
both the author and critic believe is central to the experience of
Partition and the creation of Pakistan. Intizar Hussein expressed his

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disappointment that other Muslim writers of his generation did not
fully realize the potential of this opportunity to reaffirm their spiritual
and historical roots after 1947 (Memon 377). Part of the blame for this
failure, according to Memon, lies with the Progressive Writer' s
Movement, which did not foster a distinctly Muslim identity because
of their marxistlsocialist world view (Memon 381-390).
Saadat Hasan Manto was only involved in the Progressive
Writer's Movement for a short period of time but he did share many
of their sensibilities. Memon's criticism is partially valid; it is true that
Manto saw Partition as a negative and regressive event. However, to
describe his obsession with the violence and horrors of this period as a
failure of moral and literary vision, is to deny the fundamental truth
and strength of his work. lNhere were certainly other writers who used
rioting and rape to gratuitous effect, but for Manto these images were
essential to his portrayal of Partition as a brutal, inhuman act of
madness.
Partition seems to be one of the most enduring legacies of the
British empire. Former colonies were divided along religious and
ethnic lines, as if the colonial administrators took the wisdom of
Soloman at face value, cutting the disputed infant in half before its
mother had a chance to intervene The problem is that the
cartographer's pencil became a two-edged sword arld there is no line
on a map that can cleanly demarcate a population, particularly when
that population is already riven with hatred and distrust.
As a student in Aligarh, Manto styled himself as a
revolutionary, even though he was never directly involved in the
Indian freedom movement (Flemming 7). In his story, "It Happened in
1919" (l919 ki ek bat), the narrator recounts events leading up to the
Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, a crucial turning point in the
struggle for independence.

...Sir Michael was not a man but a beast. . People say that
whatever had been happening in the sacred city for the
last five years was also the result of the British ruler's
machinations. It may be so, Bhaijaan, for all I know.
Nevertheless, I have a strong inkling that we ourselves
are not above blame for the blood of the innocents that
flowed over the streets at that time. (Manto 94)

Even though the Deputy Commissioner and other Bntish

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officers responsible for the massacre are depicted as cruel and unjust,
Manto is not content to blame the violence on the colonial
administration alone. In another story, "The New Order" (Naya
qanun), one of the characters claims that the Hindu-Muslim riots are
the result of a curse. He tells his friends, "Otherwise why would there
be constant stabbings between Hindus and Muslims? I had heard it
from my family elders that once Akbar Badshah had annoyed a
Muslim dervish and the holy man in his divine wrath cursed the
emperor that henceforth his Hindu and Muslim subjects would always
remain at loggerheads...." The curse also dictated that "...we shall
always be ruled by foreigners" (Manto 109).
Most of Manto's characters are impoverished, dispossessed and
disenfranchised members of society prostitutes, beggars, coolies and
tonga drivers. Though he was associated with the Progressive Writers
Movement, Manto was too independent and temperamental a
personality to remain within the fold of any political or literary clique.
Nevertheless, he shared many of the values and ideals of Marxist
writers such as Ali Sardar Jafri and Rajinder Singh Bedi
(Flemming 11-12). For his time, Manto had a liberal view of
women's roles in society and a number of his stories reveal the
hypocrisy behind men's attitudes to women. Amidst the turmoil and
violence of Partition, he describes the abduction and rape of women.
"Loosen Up" (Khol do) is the story of an old man, Sirajuddin, whose
daughter Sakeena disappears from a train carrying Muslim refugees
from India to Pakistan. A group of young men promise to Elnd the lost
girl and bring her back to her father. After much searching and risking
their lives, the young men Elnd Sakeena, but instead of returning her
safely to Sirajuddin, they rape her repeatedly until she is unconscious.
In this story, Manto shows how men pretend to act out of a sense of
honour and piety but are reduced to bestiality and violence (Manto 89 - 92).
At the beginning of "I Swear By God," (Khuda ki qasam) Manto
writes:

I often wondered why these women were called abducted

women. Under what circumstances were they abducted?
To seduce or abduct a willing woman is a most romantic
feat in which man and woman participate alike...But what
kind of abduction is this where you clap a helpless and
defenseless woman in a dark room? (Manto 103)

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 Even though Saadat Hasan Manto has often been compared to
Guy Maupassant and his stories frequently end with an unexpected
twist, there is seldom any sense of resolution in his narratives.
Manto's stories are never fully brought to closure and this embues his
work with a disturbing sense of uncertainty. He makes us understand
that within the violent and desperate events which he describes, there
could never be a moment of truth or understanding and only death
conveys finality. He writes that these "were the times when
philosophy, argumentation or logic had lost their meaning; they were
nothing but an exercise in futility" (Manto 103).
Manto himself was clearly disturbed by the events leading up to
his arrival in the newly created country of Pakistan. Khalid Hasan
descnbes this period in Manto's life:

His early days in Pakistan were bewildering. Everything

was out of joint. There was a mad stampede for
allotments of evacuee property and a sense of terrible
insecurity. Some people were living as if there was going
to be no tomorrow. Those who had once been rich were
on the streets... The values which had once sustained
society had been destroyed in the conflagration of
independence... The country had gone through such a
temfying baptism of blood and fire that the dividing line
between reality and nightmare was no longer discernible.
(Hasan 89)

In the period following Partition, madness becomes the guiding

metaphor in much of Manto's fiction and nowhere is it more clearly
and effectively used than in his story, ';Toba Tek Singh." Probably
one of his best known stories, it descnbes the exchange of Hindu,
Muslim and Sikh lunatics between asylums in Pakistan and India. The
central character is Bishan Singh, a Sikh, who has been an inmate of
an asylum in Pakistan for the past fifteen years. During this time he
has never slept or lain down and continually mutters variations on the
nonsensical Punjabi refrain, "O pardi girgir axe di bedhiana di
moongdi dal di laltain."
Bishan Singh's home is a village called Toba Tek Singh, which
is located in Pakistan. However, during the period leading up to
Partition, there is confusion amongst the inmates of the asylum, as to
which country they will be assigned. Whenever Bishan Singh inquires

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where Toba Tek Singh is located, he is given ambiguous answers by
the authorities. Sometimes he is told it is in Pakistan and other times
in Hindustan, adding to his confusion. Bishan Singh' s family,
including his beloved daughter Roop Kaur, eventually migrate to
India. A few years later, the governments of Pakistan and India,
decide to transfer their lunatics from one country to the other. Along
with all the other Sikhs and Hindus in the asylum, Bishan Singh
climbs aboard one of the trucks which transport them to the border.
As he is being processed at the Wagah checkpoint, Bishan Singh
discovers at last that his village is in Pakistan. At this point, he runs
back and refuses to leave, planting himself in the no man's land
between the two countries. "'Toba Tek Singh is here! Right here
where I'm standing!' he cried. "O pardi gir gir di axe di bhediani di
moong di dal of Toba Tek Singh and Pakistan" (Manto 58). The
guards try to force him across the border but Bishan Singh will not
move. He stands there all day and night, while the other lunatics are
transferred across the border, but just before dawn he lets out a scream
and falls down dead. Manto ends the story with the typically
enigmatic lines: "On one side behind him stood the lunatics of
Hindustan and on the other side across the road, lunatics of Pakistan.
Between them on the no-man' s land Toba Tek Singh lay
stretched" (Manto 58).
The confusion between the name of the village and the name of
the main character is important to the story. At several points Manto
refers to Bishan Singh as Toba Tek Singh and it becomes the name by
which he is known in the asylum. (Singh is a surname carried by all
Sikhs.) By mixing up the name of the character and place, the
individual and the land, Manto emphasizes the relationship between a
person's home and his identity. He also uses the main character's
madness to exaggerate the sense of separation, the distorted loyalties,
and the dislocated self.
Manto himself was admitted to a mental institution for a brief
period in 1952, as a treatment for his alcoholism (Flemming 18). It is
likely that he drew on this experience when he wrote 'Toba Tek
Singh'. Manto takes an unusually pragmatic view of madness in this
story. For him it is a fact of life, a symptom not only of the individual
character's paranoia but of a kind of mass schizophrenia brought on
by Partition. He does not question the way in which his society treats
the mentally ill and in fact he compares them to criminals who are
also exchanged at the time of Partition. Manto reserves his moral

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indignation for other injustices. There is no attempt in this story to
reveal Bishan Singh' s personal past or explain his madness by
unraveling his subconscious in Freudian terms. Sexuality is central to
many of Manto's stories but again it is not so much an underlying
motive or subliminal cause of madness, but instead an overt and active
element in the narratives. In 'Toba Tek Singh', it is suggested, in the
hesitant remarks of one of visitors to the asylum, that Bishan Singh's
daughter has been raped, but that is part of the horror which is taking
place outside the main character's consciousness and does not enter
into the dilemma of his own identity.
The asylum and the inmates allow Manto an opportunity to
indulge in the kind of black satire that is his trademark. He attacks the
politics and religious dogmatism of the period, through the
eccentricities of the lunatics. One of the inmates proclaims himself to
be Mohamed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Others declare
themselves to be Hindu and Sikh politicians and a tremendous row
ensues. There are several Anglo-Indian inmates, who face an even
greater struggle for identity, being of mixed parentage. One lunatic
believes that he is God and when Bishan Singh inquires of him about
the location of Toba Tek Singh, he replies, "'Its neither in Hindustan
nor Pakistan. In fact it is nowhere because I have not taken any
decision about its location"' (Manto 56). Through their frenzied
shouting of slogans, erratic behaviour and stripping off of clothesS
Manto mirrors the irrationality of society outside the walls of the
asylum.
This inversion of reality, where the characters inside the asylum
take on the roles of those outside, while the people outside behave in
irrational and inhuman ways, underscores the irony which is so much
a part of Manto's fiction. Madness becomes an entirely relative term
which defines the political and social upheaval of Partition, with all its
inherent ambiguities. Walls and borders lose their meaning and a
character like Bishan Singh embodies the contradictions and divided
loyalties experienced by those people who were uprooted on either
side.
As both a victim and analyst of his time, Saadat Hasan Manto
was able to perceive the traumatic dislocation which took place in
South Asian society during 1947. He understood only too well the
anger, bitterness, paranoia and secret fears of each individual caught
up in the turmoil and violence of this period. In many of his stones
madness is conceived as a metaphor, representing not only the

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upheaval surrounding Partition but also the tortured and split identities
which emerged. Reading his work almost fifty years after it was
written, one can see the fractured interface of symbolism and
psychology in a strangely distorted world. As a writer of fiction,
Manto is able to construct a text which is more immediate and incisive
than most journalistic accounts of Partition. He blurs the lines
between reality and imagination so that the reader must confront not
only the factual horrors but also the subconscious violation, the
innermost tragedies of his characters.
A number of South Asian writers have set their stories and
novels during the period of Partition. These include some of Manto's
contemporaries such as Ismat Chughtai, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Intizar
Hussein, Bhisham Sahni, and Kushwant Singh. Each of these author's
draws on the same material that Manto uses in his stories the
violence, the sense of dislocation, loss of identity, and the explosive
hatreds of religious intolerance. Bhisham Sahni, in particular, explores
the theme of madness. The title of his novel, Tamas, implies the dark
forces of human nature, the negative and irrational aspects of mankind
which surface at the time of Partition.
The events of this period have now become an integral part of
South Asian consciousness, not only through literature, but also film
and television. Communal violence did not end with Partition; the
rioting, the killing and rape which are so much a part of today's
headlines in India and Pakistan, could easily have occurred in the
pages of one of Manto' s short stories. Despite the depressing
familiarity of these images of violence, his narratives retain a
disturbing sense of immediacy. It could be the raw, uncut quality of
his prose or the unrestrained tone of outrage in his voice, but more
than anything Saadat Hasan Manto's Elction remains as powerful as
ever, because he was a writer who brought a rational and moral vision
to bear on the madness of his time.

WORKS CITED

Akhtar, Salim. 'Ys Manto Necessary today9" Trans. Leslie Flemming.

Journal of South Asian Literature. XX: 2 (Summer, Fall 1985.) 1-3.
Flemming, Leslie A. Another Lonely Voice: The Urdu Short
Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto. Berkeley: Center For South And
South-East Asia Studies. University of California, 1979.

Alif 14 (1994) 99

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 Hasan, Khalid. "Saadat Hasan Manto: Not of Blessed
Memory." Annual of Urdu Studies 4 ( 1984): 85-95.

Manto, Saadat Hasan. The Best of Manto, Ed. and Trans. Jai
Ratan. Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1990.

Memon, Muhammad Umar. "Partition Literature: A Study of

Intizar Husain." Modern Asian Studies 14:3 (1980): 377-410.

Sahni, Bhisham. Tamas, Trans. Jai Ratan. New Delhi:

Penguin,1988.

Research support for this article was gratefully received from the
Department of Sanskrit and South Asian Studies at Harvard
University and from the American University in Cairo.

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