THE PARTITION NARRATIVES: UNDERSTANDING DIFFERENT

ASPECTS OF PARTITION THROUGH SOME SELECT SHORT

A Dissertation submitted by
Aiman khan
M.A. Semester IV, Department of English
S.S KHANNA GIRLS’ DEGREE COLLEGE, PRAYAGRAJ

University of Allahabad, Prayagraj

2020

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1
 Tittle Page
Abstract 3
CHAPTER-1: Introduction 4-8
1.1: The pangs of partition 4
1.2: Saadat Hasan Manto: the writer who marked the 5-8
trauma of partition.

CHAPTER-2: Disorder, chaos and mental illness in 9-11

CHAPTER-3: Undocumented voices of violence in 12-16

CHAPTER-4: Borders and boundaries in Manto’s 17-19

CHAPTER-5: Conclusion 20-22

References 23

ABSTRACT

Considered to be one of the most traumatic chapters in India’s history, the 1947 partition

witnessed a saga of bloodbath and communal riots. Nearly fourteen million people who were

forced to embrace the political solution thrust upon them, underwent this wrenching

experience. The partition was brutal and bloody, and to, Saadat Hasan Manto, a Muslim

journalist, short story author and Indian film screenwriter living in Bombay, it appeared

maddeningly senseless. He clearly saw the violence which accompanied the partition as an

act of collective madness and the only known way for him to respond to this chaos around

2
him was thorough his writings. Through his stories Manto vividly recreates the anger and

horror of this period and the trauma of the uprooted and victimized refugees.

The dissertation attempts to shed light on the trauma incurred from the 1947 partition of

India, through a detailed analysis of three short stories of Sadat Hasan Manto, “Toba Tek

Singh”,

“Bitter Harvest” and “The Dog of Tetwal”. All three stories revealing a different aspect of

Partition. The decision to partition had caused irreparable traumatic disorder. These stories

take us to a world of chaos when the territorial division along the Radcliffe line made people

awfully confused. The confusion led to the uncertainty about the fate of thousands of villages

across the border. Thousands of civilians became panicked due to the trauma of losing their

own land overnight.

1.INTRODUCTION

1.1 THE PANGS OF PARTITION

In August 1947, a great struggle spanning over a century achieved its major goal as the

British left India after almost two centuries of atrocities and subjugation of the Indian

populace. The Independence of India, however, had dual implications as it not only meant

the exit of the British but also the partition of the country into a Hindu dominated India

and a Muslim dominated Pakistan. Partition is considered to be the culmination of a long

process carried out by the British, focused on dividing the people of India. They created

3
disharmony among the people by defining communities based on religious identities and

providing political representation to them. This led to a gradual decline of the long-

standing intermixed and syncretic culture of India. Partition is one of the greatest

migrations in human history, as Muslims trekked towards the newly formulated Pakistan,

while Hindus and Sikhs moved in the opposite direction towards India. According to

estimates, more than 15 million people were uprooted and close to 2 million were

massacred as a result of massive communal violence. Partition was not just a division of

political territory but a division of the people as they were separated from their homes,

livelihood, family and friends.

The immediate literary response to the partition which had displaced the intelligentsia

(especially the Urdu writers) was through the narrative literature. Most of the partition

stories tried to explore how the myriad communities coexisting side by side and sharing

the same ethos for so long suddenly turned against each other and actively participated in

the ethnic cleansing in the name of religion. But the manner of perception, representation

and re-construction of this catastrophic event by the writers in their respective creative

spaces differed from one giving each attempt a unique identity of its own and providing

multiple dimensions to the event itself. Most of the writers, such as; Krishan chander,

kartar Singh Duggal, Khushwant Singh or Ibrahim Jalees attempted a more blatant

description of the violence that accompanied partition, Manto’s take is more

psychological. Through his partition stories Manto tries to understand what is it that turns

ordinary man into monsters? how can a man descend so low? And how does the same

man ascend from the depths of sin and discover that he still has some human feelings left

in him?

4
 1.2 SAADAT HASAN MANTO: THE WRITER WHO MARKED THE

MADNESS OF PARTITION

Saadat Hasan Manto was born into a middle-class Muslim family in the predominantly Sikh

city of Ludhiana in 1912. Though we cannot say very confidently about the time and period

from when and where he started writing, but many of the critics consider his translation work

of Victor Hugo’s novel “Last Day of a Condemned” with the title “Ek Aseer ki Sargasht”, as

the first piece of writing by him. In his early 20s he translated Russian, French, and English

short stories into Urdu and through studying the works of western writers he learned the art of

short story writing. He wrote around 250 short stories which are spread in India and Pakistan.

He was well aware with national and international issues and politics as he writes many of his

short stories and essays on it. Along with it, his sharp consciousness was aware about the

inter and intra conflicts, problems and issues of the society he belonged to. He was a writer

who wrote on humanity all together including social, political, cultural, psychological and

behavioural patterns.

Saadat Hasan Manto spent most of his early life in Aligarh and Bombay, where he worked for

a number of years 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 prolific output,

Manto became restless and bored with Delhi, which was a relatively small and provincial city.

He missed Bombay and quarrelled with his colleagues, finally 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

5
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 difficulties’ and began to drink more heavily.

After Partition, Manto felt deeply disturbed by the intolerance and distrust that he found in

the city, even in the areligious world of, “he could not accept the fact that suddenly some

people saw him not as Saadat Hasan Manto but as a Muslim.”

In the summer of 1947, Manto's wife, Saliyah, 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. Manto was never comfortable with his

migration to Lahore and always suffered due to this sense of “dual belonging”. But he

continued writing and produced some of his most powerful stories during this period. During

these seven years, he wrote 127 stories and had to face five court cases due to some of them.

He won almost all these cases and continued to write in the same bold vein. his alcoholism

had become more severe, and his health deteriorated because of excessive drinking. However,

he continued drinking alcohol against the advice of his doctors. 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.

On partition narratives, “Siyah Hashiye” influenced by partition riots was his first anthology,

which was published in 1948. Manto describes his collection as “an attempt to retrieve pearls

of a rare hue from a man-made sea of blood” and dedicated the book to “the man who, when

recounting his many bloody deeds, said, ‘But when I killed that old man I suddenly felt as I

had committed a murder’.” (Manto 1991: 34). As Jalal wrote:

“He had faith on humanity, which motivated him to write fascinating short stories

about the trauma of 1947, and it is acknowledged internationally that his writings

6
 representing the pain of migration and savagery of humanity without any objectivity”.

(Jalal 2013: 56)

Much of his material is on the partition, which includes sketches and short stories, but short

stories are more in number. All his material depicts how a single moment in a person or

family’s life changed their lives. In “Mazdoori”, he mentioned a Kashmiri labour boy,

carrying a rice sack, who was then chased by the police who shot him in his leg. He pleaded

“Exalted sir, you can keep the rice, I am a poor boy please give me my wages, just four

annas” (Manto 1948: 17). In “Ta’awun”, his style was different; a group of mob attacked and

looted a house. Meanwhile, a mysterious man came and joined them in looting (Manto 1948:

21). The writer shocked the readers when he revealed that the mysterious man was the owner

of the house. In

“Taqseem”, the story started with two men fighting each other; they found a box and both

claiming ownership. Finally, their fight ended on the decision that whatever is there in the

box, they divided among them equally. However, suddenly, a man with a sword came out

from the box and killed both claimants; here Manto used the analogy that Hindus and

Muslims in trying to get the ownership of the land of the sub-continent were losing their lives

(Manto 1948: 29).

When there is demoralization of dignity, ethics, culture, civilization and religious values, then

it leads to a traumatized society, and it manifested in the personalities of a person. Manto had

the great courage to directly point out the evils of the society in his writings. In his essay, he

mentioned this as:

“If you don’t know the circumstances of your age then read my short stories. If you

do not tolerate these, it means this era is not able to be tolerated. If you find anything

7
 indecent, these are the indecencies of your times. There is no error in my writing, and

the error, which are attributed to my name, is the error of this system. I do not like

chaos; I don’t want to emotionalize the people and their thoughts. How I uncover the

civilization and society which is already naked, and I don’t want to cover it.” (Manto

1982: 23)

Manto focused on cryptography, storytelling, and content, and applied the art of short story

writing to all aspects, whether the start of the story, climax or end, he knew all the art of short

story writing in Urdu. His stories are about common persons like workers, owners,

prostitutes, pimps and clerks, and their problems. There is no match to Manto in developing

abnormal and feminine characters. If he writes a sentence, it becomes a masterpiece; his

ability to write is such that even if he was given matchsticks or stones to write on, he can

create a legendary outcome. He was a great artist and died because of the excess use of

alcohol. He contributed many outstanding masterpieces to Urdu literature. In addition, in his

own words inscribed on his gravestone:

“Here Saadat Hasan Manto lies buried, there are a lot of secrets in his chest. He is

still thinking even buried whether he is a great short story writer or God.” (Manto

1997: 65)

Chapter: 2. DISORDER, CHAOS AND MENTAL ILNESS IN MANTO’S

TOBA TEK SINGH

8
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 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 saner than the government figures making decisions about their exchange. Astute

comments by the asylum inmates demonstrate the absurdity of partition:

All those lunatics in the asylum who had at least some sense left were uncertain

whether they were in Pakistan or India. If they were in India, then where was

Pakistan? If they were in Pakistan, how could it be possible when only a short while

ago they had been in India, without having moved at all? (Manto 1955, 9)

Published in 1955, the story takes place inside the Lahore insane asylum (today called the

Punjab Institute of Mental Health), two or three years after partition. At a high-level

conference, a decision has been made for the exchange of lunatics in insane asylums. When

news of this decision spreads, it causes consternation among the inmates of the asylum. Their

fear is made worse by their ignorance of 'Hindustan' and Pakistan‟. According to one of the

inmates, Pakistan is the place in Hindustan where razors are made. Another volunteers that

the people in Hindustan go strutting around like devils. One of the in mates climbs a tree,

seats himself on a branch and gives an unbroken two-hour speech about the subtle problem of

Pakistan and Hindustan. When the guards ask him to come down, he climbs even higher.

When he is warned and threatened, he says, “I don’t want to live in either Hindustan or

Pakistan. I'll live right here in this tree.” A quiet radio-engineer, for some obscure reason

9
decides that the situation warrants freedom from clothes and starts to wander around the

garden completely naked. Manto gives us brief, pithy descriptions of some of the lunatics e.g.

A Muslim lunatic from Chiniot, a past member of the All-India Muslim League, announces

that he is Quaid-eAzam and then promptly declares war on a Sikh, who, in his madness

considered himself Master Tara Singh. Midway through the story, Manto introduces the

titular character, known to everyone as ‘Toba Tek Singh‟. His real name is Bishan Singh and

he has been confined to the asylum for fifteen years, during which time, he has not, even

once, sat or lain down. The only words he has spoken during the fifteen years are the

nonsensical, “Upar di gur gur di annex di be dhyana di mung di dal of the lantern.” Once a

month when his relatives came to meet him, he agrees to take a bath and clean-up. He has a

daughter who has grown older visiting him, and still cries every time she sees her father. In

the aftermath of partition his relatives have stopped visiting him. His one desire is that they

visit him again. The reason he asks repeatedly about “Toba Tek Singh‟ is that his lands were

in Toba Tek Singh and he thinks the relatives are in Toba Tek Singh too. A Muslim friend

from Toba Tek Singh, Fazal Din, arrives to inform him of his family’s safe arrival in

Hindustan. Just as Toba Tek Singh begins to remember and ask after his daughter, Fazal Din

mumbles, stammers and tells him she is fine. But we realize what has happened to her. The

same fate that befell tens of thousands of women during the madness of partition has claimed

the innocence and perhaps the life of Toba Tek Singh's daughter, Roop Kaur as well. „Toba

Tek Singh‟ also learns from Fazal Din that the tehsil of Toba Tek Singh is now situated inside

Pakistan. He is unwilling to leave the place of his ancestors. When he is taken to the border

he refuses to cross-over into Hindustan. Instead he runs off into the no-man’s land in between

the two countries where, in the pre-dawn peace and quiet, from Bishan Singh’s throat came a

shriek that pierced the sky…. From here and there a number of officers came running, and

they saw that the man who for fifteen years, day and night, had constantly stayed on his feet,

10
lay prostrate. There, behind the barbed wire, was Hindustan. Here, behind the same kind of

wire, was Pakistan. In between, on that piece of ground that had no name, lay Toba Tek

Singh.

Thus, ends Manto's most poignant short story. The partition of India and Pakistan literally

ripping into two the soul of Toba Tek Singh and claiming his life. Manto's Toba Tek Singh is

a triumph of ambivalence as it proclaims the in-betweenness of the protagonist. The

madman's death takes place in no man's land where the right of neither nation prevails. The

story shows the partition as an outbreak of collective madness which is turned upside down.

For Manto, the partition was primarily a lived reality which became a metaphor for human

depravity. The partition became a metaphor for the post-independence communal divide. The

story is short but it tells a lot about partition violence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Manto

suggests us to fight for humanity and morality forgetting national boundary, culture and

religion. Mohammad Menon, in his introduction to Black Margins: Saadat Hasan Manto

stories, very insightfully observes:

Above all “Toba Tek Singh” is about lunacy, madness. It is the madness of the

sane which is a million times more destructive than the madness of the insane.

A lunatic cause harm only to himself, but when a group of normal people

choose to get themselves into a rage or frenzy, they leave behind a bloody trail

which takes generations to erase. Who knows this better than the people of the

Indian subcontinent? Bishen Singh straddles two worlds – at one extreme we

have the madhouse, at the other the no-man’s land – both of them are spaces

where the restrictions of the “normal” world are suspended and individuals are

set free from their stranglehold” (Menon 34- 35).

CHAPTER 3: UNDOCUMENTED VOICES OF VIOLENCE IN MANTO’S

11
 BITTER HARVEST

The present story is entitled “Bitter Harvest” that rightly epitomizes the ethnic belligerence

and communal vengeance in the widespread madness of Partition violence. It’s a very

disturbing story in that sense it rightly captures the criminal psychology of perpetrators in the

wake of Partition. Human history has witnessed atrocities many times. But the uniqueness of

this violence lies in that communal frenzy had surmounted to the level of ethnic cleansing,

the ideological credence of wiping out entire religion by annihilating members of the rival

community. The collective madness giving birth to such mass killing had blurred all traces of

communal harmony which had been the essential feature of India from ancient times.

Sectarian politics and jingoism led the masses to identify themselves solely in terms of

communal identity. All the other identities got blurred in this madness. An individual or a

group of people could identify themselves either as Hindu or Muslim or Sikh and adopt their

role as the protector of their own religion, community, ethnicity etc. And in so doing, women

became the easiest target of the rival communities. Thousands of women were abducted,

raped, paraded naked on the streets by the rival community as has been recorded by Urvashi

Bhutalia, Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin. A total number of 75,000 women were profoundly

affected in this division by the rival communities. As Debali Mookerjee-Leonard has

observed that as a result of the Partition-induced collective violence, “women’s bodies”

became “a site for the performance of communal identity” (Mookerjee-Leonard). Exactly this

is what we can find in the case of Manto’s “Bitter Harvest” where Qasim, the father of

Sharifan gradually descended to the level of hysterical madness as he determined to avenge

the murder of his wife and his daughter just at the beginning of the story. As Qasim returned

home after his day-long labour and was frantically searching for his only daughter Sharifan in

12
the room, he was shocked to discover the dead body of his daughter lying “naked absolutely

naked” beside his wife’s dead body. He, at once, got stunned and traumatized and Manto

describes his condition in these words:

“Qasim felt shaken to the very core of his being. A scream, one that could rent the

skies, emerged deep from within his innards but he had pursed his lips so tightly that

it could not escape. His eyes had shut of their own volition. Still, he covered his face

with both his hands. A muffled sound emerged from his lips, ‘Sharifan…’ With his

eyes still tightly shut, he groped around and picked up some clothes, flung them over

Sharifan’s body and left the veranda without stopping to see that the clothes had fallen

some distance away from her.” (42-43).

Qasim’s disorder after witnessing this event can be termed as absolute neurosis from a

psychoanalytical point of view. The communal/bigot self of Qasim made him convince that

this act of violence was done by any of the rival communities other than Muslim. Qasim

became resolute that the only way to get satisfaction was to avenge this murder with a similar

kind of violence on the rival community. Qasim, at once, took his axe which he generally

used for chopping firewood and immediately reached a nearby chowk where he encountered

a tall Sikh man. Qasim struck the man on his head (giving him a fatal injury), without any

apparent reason as the Sikh man never did any harm to him. But Qasim’s aggressive, and

hence, ‘mad self’ thought of nothing except committing an act of ethnic violence. He was

brimming with rage as if the “blood coursing through Qasim’s veins grew hot and began to

splutter as boiling oil does when the smallest drop of water falls on it” (43).

After killing the Sikh man, he came across another group of three men in his direction who

were casually marching on the street chanting “Har Har Mahadev!” at the top of their voice.

13
The mad self of Qasim presumed that they were jeering at him and instead of “responding

slogan of his own, he spat out the worse mother-sister oaths he knew and pushed his way into

them” (43). All of a sudden, the “three fresh corpses lay quivering on the road” (43). The

other people loitering nearby had run away immediately. A sort of madness had possessed

him and he sat against one of the dead bodies and felt as if “someone had pushed him and

began to scream obscenities and shout, ‘Kill them! Kill them!’”. In this fit of madness, the

memory of deceased Sharifan constantly haunted him: For a minute he felt disappointed, for

perhaps he wanted to die. But, all of a sudden, the image of Sharifan – naked Sharifan –

appeared before his eyes and turned his whole being into a pile of burning gun-powder. He

got to his feet, picked up the axe and once again began to sweep through the streets like a

stream of molten lava. As a brutal bloody machine, he began to rush on the streets “like a

stream of molten lava”. The image of the dead and naked Sharifan still troubled him and he

suddenly realised that his babbling with “mother- sister curse” had suddenly transformed to

“daughter curse” (44). “Irritable and dissatisfied” Qasim rushed towards a nearby house

whose front parlour was inscribed with a Hindi signpost, indicating that it was a Hindu house.

Just like a “madman”

(44) he hustled towards its closed door and began to strike axe on it until a girl of the age of

Sharifan appeared at the door. On Qasim’s enquiry the girl with her “dry lips” answered that

she was ‘A Hindu’ (44). That was all for Qasim. He did not require anything else. Suddenly

he

pounced upon the girl like a wild beast. As we read in the story:

Qasim stood ramrod erect. He looked at the girl with fire-shot eyes. She was barely

fourteen or fifteen years old. He dropped the axe from his hand. Like a falcon he

pounced upon the girl and shoved her into the veranda. And, then, began to tear her

clothes with both his hands like a man possessed. Scraps and shreds of fabric began to

14
 fly in all directions as though someone was carding cotton. Qasim remained busy

taking his vengeance for about half an hour. The girl offered no resistance because she

had become unconscious as soon as she had fallen on the floor (44-45).

When Qasim opened his eyes, he found he had both his hands wrapped tightly around

the girl’s throat. With a jerk, he removed them and jumped to his feet. Drenched in

sweat, he looked once in her direction so that he could fully satisfy himself (45).

Qasim not only raped the girl but killed her exactly the same way that he imagined Sharifaan

had been killed. In this devilish way, Qasim satisfied his ego and avenged the murder of

Sharifaan. This scene seems very much like a repetition of the opening episode. Indeed, there

are potent similarities between the opening and the ending. The girl naked and dead lay on

the floor much like the same way as Sharifan did. Qasim’s condition then was deteriorating

gradually. Manto narrates:

He covered his face with both his hands. The hot sweat that drenched his body turned

into a sheet of ice and the lava coursing through his veins hardened into a rock (45).

All of a sudden, a man with a sword in his hand entered the room and saw “a man [Qasim]

with eyes tightly shut trying to throw a blanket with trembling hands over something lying on

the floor” (45). He was undergoing a sort of schizophrenic aberration, an important

pathological case in crime/criminal psychology. The man asked him who he was and got to

know that he was Qasim. He immediately asked Qasim what he was actually doing there. The

answer lies in the concluding paragraph:

“With quivering hands, Qasim pointed at the blanket lying on the floor and in hollow

voice uttered only one word, ‘Sharifan…’

15
 The man stepped forward urgently and pushed the blanked aside. The first sight of

the naked corpse made him tremble; abruptly he shut his eyes tightly. The sword fell

from his hand. With his hand over his eyes, he left the house on wobbly legs,

muttering ‘Bimla… Bimla…” (45).

The story follows a cyclic pattern with Qasim repeating the act of covering the raped

girl Bimla with a blanket (like he did with his daughter Sharifan) but this time his

position shifts from being the victim to becoming the perpetrator. The story ends with

Qasim in a dazed condition, unable to distinguish between Sharifan and Bimla

anymore.

The discourse of the narrative ultimately leads to an extreme destabilisation of the

protagonist. Qasim loses all his balance, his sense of ethics after encountering a certain death.

There are moments when some certain death triggers a sense of compassion even among the

most hardened miscreants. Similarly, there are instances where people who have nothing to

do with crime commit heinous crimes to satiate their inner demons. And it is through his

sensitive portrayal of the plight of these affected lives, that Manto reanimates the human

bestiality amidst this massive social dislocation. For Qasim’s traumatized mind, the probable

Hindu or Sikh who have raped Sharifan assumes the form of all Hindus or Sikhs within his

ambit of compensatory justice., and Bimla’s body transforms into the specific site for the

manifestation of his desire for vengeance. As both these girls are of the same age, therefore,

through some macabre logic, Bimla becomes the ideal person to pay the price for the brutality

imparted on his wife and daughter.

Through this story Manto explores a different social and psychological space born out of the

abyss of partition. In this new-born space, Madness, violence and carnage are ‘normal’ and

the humanity is at stake. And by “accepting the gruesome reality of partition at face value, he

16
(Manto) sought to find rare pearls of humanity in the man-made sea of blood, a hint of

remorse felt deeply or a reflection of tears shed by murderers.” (Jalal 43-44)

CHAPTER 4: BORDERS AND BOUNDRIES IN MANTO’S ‘THE DOG OF

TETWAL’

'The Dog of Tetwal' originally written in Urdu by Manto is translated into English by

Ravikant and Tarun K Saint. The pain which Manto had experienced during Partition - the

pain of displacement and mental harassment, finds expression in most of his short stories.

"Through the reflection of his own experience as well as the general experience of humanity,

Manto achieves a searing critique of the oppressive structures that came into being with the

division of the subcontinent.”

'The Dog of Tetwal' is a masterpiece of Manto. The story is about a stray dog who becomes a

helpless victim in the conflict between Indian and Pakistani army. However, at the symbolic

level the dog's death signifies the ignorance of the values of life.

In the story the soldiers of the armies of both India and Pakistan are shown to be the products

of the same place, speaking the same language and sharing the same culture. In spite of all

these similarities they have become indifferent towards each other as a result of the division

of the country. This acute sense of differentiation has pulled them farther and farther away.

The Partition of the subcontinent has imprinted on their minds that Hindus, Muslims and

Sikhs are essentially different communities and to place them in a unified whole is

impossible. The song sung by one of the soldiers fills the atmosphere with a sense of

loneliness. Banta Singh's tender feelings for his beloved come to the fore with the recitation

of this song, describing the longing of a lover. While singing the passages from 'Heer' he

appears to be a sensitive person who can do anything for the sake of his love. However, the

same feelings undergo a drastic change when he comes across a stray dog and takes pleasure

17
in shooting it. Inflicting misery on the dog and driving pleasure out of it reflect the

heightened state of frustration of the soldiers. It is their indirect way of releasing suppressed

feelings of depression. A man whose voice bears so much intensity of pain, turning the entire

atmosphere melancholic, can never be heartless. Hence one may conclude that the portrayal

of the soldiers is Manto's critique of what communalism has done. Their reaction shows the

damage which has been done to the Hindu-Muslim relations as a result of Partition.

In Manto's story the dog is an allegorical figure. His condition is more or less like that of the

refugees. During Partition millions of people were uprooted from their homeland and thrown

into an alien place, without any resources. Most of the refugees had to die a dog's death and

no mercy was granted to them. The historical accounts and literature produced on Partition

portray the grim realities but no effort can justly depict the agony of those men and women

who lost their lives.

The tag affixed to the neck of the dog further enhances the irony. Just as the citizen of a

country has to show his passport as a proof of his identity, the dog too, is provided with a

hanging tag that confirms its citizenship. Once the people of both the countries of India and

Pakistan belonged to one nation but with the division of the country, they have become

strangers and their strangeness has gradually taken the form of hatred. "Since Nation - states

cannot do without fixing identities, the ultimate extension of this logic can be war. Emotions

like anger and an unthinking aggression can be thus directed, so as to sustain the tired rhetoric

of nationalism." The Indian soldiers are found questioning the identity of the dog in a

humorous vein. Jamadar Hamam Singh speaks aloud: "Like the Pakistanis, Pakistani dogs too

will be shot." On the surface it seems to be ridiculous but in reality, it is not. It carries with it

the powerful sting of hatred. The attitude of the soldiers is that they hate Pakistan and

everything associated with it. And this sort of hatred knows no bounds.

18
"Now, even dogs will have to be either Hindustani or Pakistani!"
This phrase expresses the black humour and the gravity of the scene. By questioning the

identity of the dog, soldiers reinforce the irony of the situation. This shows that human beings

are not satisfied simply by dividing their own lot and now their intention is to destroy the

harmony of animal world. The tragedy of Partition represented by Manto leaves its mark,

especially through the depiction of absurd situations. For instance, the dog becomes an issue

of war for both the sides. Both the parties claim it but the moment they suspect the loyalty of

the dog, it becomes an object of hatred for them. Subedar Himmat Khan's sending of message

on the wireless set and having a word with the Platoon Commander in connection with the

identity of the dog sounds grotesque. However, if things are viewed closely, one realizes that

it is Manto's style of representing black humour. Mutual antagonism is reflected through such

portrayal.

Religious fanaticism arouses blind fury which impels people to indulge in beastly activities.

And no justification can be offered for such inhuman acts. Religious bigotry played a vital

role in the victimization of the weakest and the most vulnerable sections of the society. The

frightened dog reflects the trauma of the scared humanity at the time of Partition. Arjun

Mahey remarks:

“The irony is that, the only time when the enemies agree about something, is that

when they want to kill a creature which has been an unselfish friend to both; the

indictment of treachery is one that can only recoil back onto them. The tones of

pathos and savage frivolity are balanced and captured by the simple tactic of

overlapping images of the dog's wounded bewilderment with the soldiers' indifferent

brutality, counterbalancing simultaneously the ideas of death and a diversion.”

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 CONCLUSION:

Each story in this dissertation has attempted to explore different sides of partition. Through

the clever and double-edged use of metaphor of madness, Manto offers a sharp critique on

partition in Toba tek Singh, Manto uses the madness of the asylum as a metonym for the

madness that wreaks havoc in the nation at the time of partition. In an ironic manner, the mad

are seen as saner than the sane whose reason led them to brutally divide a nation in two. The

widespread irrationality of Partition in the society ruled by the so-called “normal” people is

“million times more destructive than the madness of the insane”. Bitter Harvest, captures the

criminal psychology of perpetrators in the wake of Partition. Human history has witnessed

atrocities many times. But the uniqueness of this violence lies in that communal frenzy had

surmounted to the level of ethnic cleansing, the ideological credence of wiping out entire

religion by annihilating members of the rival community. It is a never-ending vicious cycle in

the wake of Partition which makes each and every one mad, frantic and revengeful. The

associated madness actually had paralyzed thousands like Qasim. Even if, Qasim got a

chance to escape, he could not because he had killed his inner self of humanity. He was not a

hard-boiled rapist or murderer. But it is the madness centred on Partition violence that

sponsored millions of

Qasim’s to be trapped under communal frenzy and turned them into aggressive beasts. And

lastly, The Dog of Tetwal, we see how the people who are the products of the place, speaking

the same language and sharing the same culture become indifferent towards each other as a

result of the division of the country. The Partition of the subcontinent has imprinted on their

minds that Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs are essentially different communities and to place

them in a unified whole is impossible. All three stories reveal a different aspect of the

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partition. In his stories Manto has adopted a humanistic and secular approach, taking side

neither with

Muslims nor Hindus but focuses his attention on reality in a detached manner. According to

his viewpoint, all these anti-Hindu and anti-Muslim activities are part of general human

tragedy, the result of which is a horrifying disaster.

Manto was one of the best short-story writers of the twentieth century as well as one of the

most controversial writers. No other writer touches the oeuvre of Saadat Hasan Manto as far

as partition literature is concerned. His earlier works are marked by social leanings,

influenced by the progressive writers of that time. His later works portray the darkness of

human psyche and declined the hypocrisy of the partition period, and his final works reflect

the post-partition society and his own miseries and financial struggles. He left no human part

of existence untouched. Unlike his contemporary writers or predecessors, he never wrote on

didacticism or romanticized his characters. He simply presented his characters in their true

light and left the readers to judge them on their own reading eyes. This allows his readers to

interpret his works in different ways depending on the viewpoint of the readers. So, much of

writings remained banned for many years which prevented him from many opportunities to

earn a healthy living and he suffered a lot during the last years of his life. While writing about

India and its people he very artistically portrayed the psychological, social and political

scenario of the period he belonged to. He used the diction in his stories which made his

readers think deeply and respond wisely. Not all writers have got this talent which Saadat

Hasan Manto possessed in abundance.

About things, Manto wrote seventy years ago, have come true in today’s life. Religious

insanity, communal discrimination, attacks on religious places, cultural nationalism,

kidnapping, abduction, rapes, murder, increasing distances etc. are common happenings of

the present world. So, if we consider the short-stories of Saadat Hasan Manto written in pre-

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and post-partition period, he wrote on the same themes and happenings of that time. We see

the theme of oppression in his short-stories, whether being done by political, social or

religious followers or due to circumstances. He got hurt by the brutalities of the partition that

is why most of his well-known short-stories are based on partition related issues and

consequences.

The undesirable happenings on the name of religion during partition hurt his humanity and

disturbed his intellect. He never supported the inhuman riots neither in India nor in Pakistan,

he was always against such barbaric and mischievous acts, and he always wept for the loss of

humanity. In one of his short-stories he wrote:

Ye mat kaho ke ek lakh musalman aur ek lakh Hindu mare. Ye kaho ke ek lakh insaan

mare. (Don’t say that one lakh Muslims or one lakh Hindus were killed. Say that one

lakh of human beings were killed).31

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References :

1. Manṭo, Saadat Hasan, Toba Tek Singh. New Delhi: Penguin Random House India,

2011. Print.

2. Manṭo, Saadat Hasan, Mottled Dawn. New Delhi: Penguin Random House India,

2011. Print

3. Manṭo, Saadat Hasan, The Dog of Tetwal. New Delhi: Penguin Random House India,

2011. Print.

4. Jalal, Ayesha. ‘He was more than just a short story writer’, The Hindu: Sunday

Magazine, Features, Aug.8, 2013.

5. Memon, Muhammad Umar. An Epic Unwritten. New Delhi: Penguin Books India,

1998. Print.

6. Manṭo, Saadat Hasan, Selected Stories. New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1997. Print.

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