MEMORY, MODERNITY, AND MADNESS

          Memory, Modernity, and Madness:

                           Reading  Manto

                                                - Afeef Ahmed

 Sadat Hasan Manto was one of the most prolific 

writers of a particular period of transition in the history of the Indian subcontinent. He not only 

witnessed the horrors of partition, the most riotous post-colonial moment in the political history of 

the Indian subcontinent but produced piercing, brutal accounts of it through his short stories. Manto 

didn’t ‘belong’ to any state in the post-colonial sense of ‘belonging’, which is easily translated into 

the idea of ‘citizen’. Most of the profiles of him we see online and offline describes him as a 

‘colonial Indian- Pakistani writer’.There is no single identity- of an Indian or a Pakistani- ascribed 

to him. This non-association is what makes Manto one of the most important literary embodiments 

of the event of partition.

The partition of Colonial India into two, as India and Pakistan, was a crucial moment in the political

history of the subcontinent. The ghost of partition and post-partition violence still informs and 

influences various political propaganda and debates in both states where a ‘national’ issue can be 

easily triggered by imagining the people/community from the ‘rival’ state as the ‘antagonistic 

other’. It is not this essay's intention to get into the micro-details of partition and the politicalhistorical

triggers behind it. Rather, this is an attempt to read/remember Manto’s literary accounts, 

‘Toba Tek Singh’ in particular, in the background of the division and formations of nation-states and

the violent, epidemical madness that followed it.

Gyanendra Pandey, in his ‘Community and Violence: Recalling Partition’ remarks that ‘critical 

events like partition often lead to the radical reconstitution of the community’. He makes this 

remark while critically examining the uncontrolled violence, which often acts as a hurdle in-front of

an ethical-political-sociological understanding of the event. Pandey observes that in most of the 

memories, accounts of the victims, violence was always ‘out there’ and never ‘in us’. This 

imagination that violence is always what is done by the other, Pandey argues, leads to the 

demarcation of the borders of the radically reconstituted community. When partition happened, this 

violence ‘out there’ reached a level of ‘unbearableness’, creating mental desperation, among the 

helpless masses. This desperation, along with the sudden exposure to the liminal condition of 

territorial non-belongingness, was manifested through various shades of madness. Michel Foucault, 

in his book Madness and Civilization (1971), notes that ‘madness creates its meaning in an attempt 

to find truth; Most of the characters from the fictional, part-fictional partition narratives, especially 

in Manto’s works, go through this state of mental condition which often crosses the limits of sanity 

and rationality to find order and normality amidst the chaotic every day. Here at this particular 

historical context, we find it very hard to define madness as a pathological stage, avoiding the 

sociological condition informing it.

Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’, set on the premise of a mental asylum in the newly born state of 

Pakistan, discusses these very aforementioned conflicts. It opens with an exchange of inmates of a 

lunatic asylum, ‘In other words, Muslim lunatics in Indian madhouses would be sent to Pakistan, 

while Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani madhouses would be handed over to India’.

 This 

exchange happens just after the exchange of the prisoners, as Manto notes. Interestingly, both prison

and mental asylum come under the category of ‘disciplinary institutions’ in a Foucauldian

understanding. Foucault associates disciplinary institutions along with the modern nation-state, as a 

distinctive feature of the modern manifestation of power. It is the aim of these institutions to 

‘control’, ‘reform’ the ‘abnormal’, ‘deviant’ behaviors, and tendencies of the modern society. Here 

in Toba Tek Singh, It is the lunatics, those who are viewed as ‘irrational’ and ‘abnormal’, and whose

mutterings are ignored, who can perceive the absurdness of the very event of partition and to raise 

most rational questions against the structures of power, who drew the line of partition, who set the 

ground for a violent, unbearable and confusing mass exodus by completely ignoring the vernacularterritorial

affects and affinities of the common people.

There’s an instance in the story where a Sikh lunatic asks another Sikh: “Sardar Ji, why are they 

sending us to India? We don't even speak their language." This question exposes the shades of 

structural violence behind the formation of the modern nation-state. Benedict Anderson views this 

formation of the nation-state as “an imagined community encompassing so many people that most 

of them never actually will meet face to face, and who share nothing apart from an abstract sense of 

belonging to this expanded community (as opposed to the concrete sense of belonging to a

Smaller community); in other words, a community that one can only imagine, and which constantly 

demands or requires to be re-imagined”. Anderson views simultaneity, an embodied temporality, the

Benjaminian notion of “homogeneous, empty time”, as the strong, cohesive force behind this 

image. The sudden creation/construction of an ‘imaginary’ boundary followed the immediate 

cultivation of an abstract sense of ‘belonging’ as a concrete idea created contradictions among the 

masses across both borders. The lunatics in ‘Toba Tek Singh’, felt a similar contradiction: ‘If they 

were in India, then where was Pakistan? If they were in Pakistan, then how was it that the place 

where they lived had until recently been known as India?’. Thus, Manto exercises a powerful 

criticism of the possible risks of a nation-state, an inevitable product of modernity.

Manto explores this world of mental instabilities and psychological terrors in his various other short

stories, namely in ‘Thanda Gosh’. Manto, with his powerful political-moral critique combined with 

his historical-social honesty, produced short stories with unparalleled perfection. Ayesha Jalal, in 

‘The Pity of Partition’, remarks that “Manto, the individual, and writer, is ideal fare for a historian 

of partition. An astute witness to his times, Manto crafted stories that give a more immediate and 

penetrating account of those troubled and troubling times than do most journalistic accounts of 

partition”. Remembering Manto at a historical juncture like this is a very crucial political act.

 He 

was a person who defied and more importantly ridiculed the absurdness and fixed interests behind 

the institutions of power. At the same time, he warned us of masculine chivalries and aggressive 

performances of nationalism and superpatriotism at the sight of an ‘imagined other’. It is important 

to ‘remember’, for memory becomes an important political act in an age in which memories, 

memoirs, and monuments are not only forgotten but forcefully erased. But at the same time, it is 

also very crucial to think about the various articulations/formations of resistance informed through 

claiming ‘memory’. Unfortunately, in most of these claims, memory works as a stagnantaestheticized

object detached from the historical discourse. Though contestations can be made on 

the trustworthiness of the historical discourse, it is very important to resist the ‘sloppy 

‘hypostatizing of “Memory” that glorifies it and makes it a therapeutic alternative to historical 

discourse’, as Lila Abu Lughod observes. She warns us not ‘to romanticize memory as “the repository of alternative histories and subaltern truths” but instead to attend to the processes of 

remembering, the fashioning of personal memories, the strategic silences, and those experiences, 

like sensory recollections or itemized lists, that cannot be put into narrative form”. Therefore, 

Remembering Manto automatically becomes a remembrance of partition and the riotous, seminal 

political history attached with it.

Courtesy : Madhyamam