Prologue

Manto This is the last sentence of Sa’adat Hasan Manto's “Toba Tek Singh,” a story that has had an abiding impact on me. Originally written in Urdu, it was published in 1953 in the Lahore-based magazine Savera. Manto's rather matter-of-fact, Kafkaesque commentary on the violence of the Partition has since stayed with me as a searing critique of the violence of the nation-state and its boundaries, as well as a compassionate voice for the marginalized. Toba Tek Singh happens to be the name of a town in Pakistan's Punjab province, but due to its word structure, can also be the name of a man. Manto uses this collapsibility between the land and the human to narrate the Indo– Pak Partition—an event that threw into question the associations people had with the land they had long inhabited and called home.

In the story, the insane yet intrepid protagonist, Toba Tek Singh, is an inmate in a lunatic asylum in Pakistan, who, being Sikh, is to be exchanged for Muslim lunatics from India. His name is actually Bishan Singh, but he is called Toba Tek Singh in the asylum because he says he belonged to a village of the same name and keeps repeating that name, wanting to return to it urgently.