Resistance In Partition Literature: Two Manto Novels
The most recent critical study of Saadat Hasan Manto's life and his works is The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide (pub. 2013) by Ayesha Jalal. She is a noted historian from Pakistan and the director of the Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University, Massachusetts. In this book she explores Manto's life and times, especially around Partition and for it she has taken the microcosm of Manto’s life and his works and connected them to the microcosm of Partition. Her area of interest is partition and this book is her return to Partition in a different theme. In this, she used Manto’s life and his witnessing of Partition, as well as his broader engagement with the history of the time through his writings, to understand Partition. Her study of Manto’s life is based on the information available in family archives and her research into the rich body of literary work that the writer left behind. But it is leavened by her intimate understanding of Manto, possible perhaps because she is his close relative.
Manto was the maternal uncle of her father and also married to the elder sister of her mother. This gives her a ringside view of his life as seen by many of his relatives including Safia, his wife. Not surprisingly, some of the finest pictures of Manto, his wife and of his friends embellish this book. This book is partly about Manto, the human being, and Manto, the individual, as related to the society he grew up in and then subsequently engaged with in different cities. It is about his life and times and his work. Jalal claims that his portrayal of the times of which he was a witness, his fictional narratives helps the historian in a way an official archive cannot. He was a key witness to the post-colonial movement and he throws light in ways that journalistic and official accounts would not. Though it is an excellent study but more than a work of literary criticism, it’s a work of history that shows how a new kind of historical narrative can be crafted that utilizes the life and works of a literary figure that throws light on a major historical disjunction.
C. Manikandan, and V. Umadevi, has presented the view that how Saadat Hasan Manto showed the reality or current fire theme of his society in his short stories. Most of the critical studies available are based on his stories considered whether the theme of partition or prostitution but as the focus of this research is not partition so deliberate attempt has been made to discuss only the aspects of massacre of partition.
In the research by Nafisa Zagar she analyses ‘Resistance” in Manto writings’ by discussing in detail his two short stories “Toba Tek Singh” and “The Dog of Tiwal”. She claims that Manto stories deal with the forms of resistance used by the protagonists of both the stories are different as one selects to erase the borders and question its significance, while the other tries to resist the authority of the border. However, both the protagonists suffer as the subaltern under the power of the dominant class. Their resistance is after all, micro-resistance at last.
Pushpinder Walia, (2015) discussed in his research article about the short story of Manto with the madness of bloody event of Indo-Pak partition and the element of nationalism involved . In Toba Tek Singh symbolizes an eccentric madness among characters. The way Manto adopted to generate madness is beyond description.
According to the literary encyclopedia (2018), Saadat Hassan Manto is a reknown short-story writer of South Asian history. Though many research articles on her writings are available but the number and range of these articles is very limited in comparison to the wide range of her work. ARIF NISAR, (2014) analyzed that his short stories not only carry an objective note of grim realities of partition but an element of satirical and ironical sensibility of the partition.
Nafisa Zargar (2014) says that Saadat Hasan Manto in his short story “Toba Tek Singh” states that the Partition of India transformed for millions the very thought of home. People who had certainly not been out of their cut off villages for generations were all of a sudden strained to choose a country and this in addition changed for them the idea of nation and the most devastating fact was that they lost their identity.
Devi Prasad Sharma Gautam, (2014) comparative analysis the fictional works of Saadat Hasan Manto, Khushwant Singh, Chaman Nahal, Bhisham Sahni, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Amitav Ghosh in order to examine the treatment of violence, attitude toward history, use of literary form, and the ways characters react to violence.
A comprehensive analysis of the short story “Toba Tek Singh” from a modern philosophical perspective in an attempt to look at its politics. The analysis is based on Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘the politics of literature. Navdeep Kaur (2015) study argues that the story implicitly as well as explicitly exemplifies the politics carried out by a work of literature.
Jennifer Yusin, (2016) states that In Manto’s story; the border is embodied in its central protagonist, Bishan Singh, who experiences an ontological struggle between being and belonging that exceeds the particular historical, geographical, and national context of the Partition. This article thus moves away from the familiar nationalist rhetoric that has otherwise dominated conversations about the 1947 Partition of British India. It focuses instead on the geographical border as a conceptual figure that is at once spatially and corporeally oriented to a collective identity that exceeds nationalist frameworks of reference.
In “Moral Condemnation of Partition Violence in Manto's Toba Tek Singh” Dadhi Ram Panthi (2015) attempts to explore the quest for universal moral values. Ironically, the story shows us that when faced with the chaos and bloodshed of partition, the response of a person committed to a mental institution appears more 'sane' and appropriate than those around him. Singh’ is a tale about the partition of the Indo-Pak sub-continent. It is, by some accounts, the best short story.
Manto is recognized as an influential voice in the development of modern Urdu fiction and, through his short stories, as the source of a considerable legacy to the succeeding generation of short-story writers. This article by Muhammad Usman Khan (2014) focused on different four translations of Manto´s short-story “Toba Tek Singh” and analyzed comparatively the selected words in accordance with the criterion set by Larson´s meaning based translation theory. It was found that no any translator did a thorough job and every translation had some pros and cons. Some real words of the source language were omitted and on the contrary, some new words were added into the translation. Finally, among the four writers, the ´Anonymous translator´ was regarded as the best translator.
The Partition of the Indian sub-continent was the single most traumatic event experienced in recent years. The violence that it unleashed was unprecedented, unexpected and barbaric. Provoked by the hooligan actions of a few, the vengeance that ordinary Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs wrecked on each other coarsened our social sense, distorted our political judgments and deranged our understanding of what is meant by moral rightness. Parui, Avishek (2015) analyze the entanglements of memory and the crisis of location in the context of the India-Pakistan Partition in 1947, as depicted in Saadat Hasan Manto’s short fiction. As it investigate how Manto’s fiction is reflective of the trauma of geographical and existential dislocation with the birth of two nations following a program of political and epistemic violence and remapping. The study place special focus on the entanglement of memory and madness alongside the broader issues of nation-formation, alienation and loss in story “Toba Tek Singh”. It examines the trauma of 1947 Partition as a psychological as well as existential crisis that often manifested itself in madness, aphasia and amnesia.
The trauma left by Partition remains a major concern of Indian literature after independence. While independence was greeted by several poets with celebratory odes, quite a few considered it a false dawn: either because they felt, like Nazrul Islam of Bengal, that the Swaraj did not bring anything for the hungry child or because it was a divided India. Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati poets all expressed the same feelings. . Memories of the communal holocausts were still fresh in people’s minds. The deepest anguish was expressed by the poets of the Punjab and Bengal directly affected by the Partition. The trauma of Partition also was a major theme in fiction as in the stories of Krishna Chander, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Amrita Pritam, Saadat Hasan Manto. K. S. Dugga. The present study by Sayantan Thakur (2015) intends to bring forth that the Partition was the major event that gave new shape to the history of the subcontinent. Manto, being an eyewitness of the cataclysmic event, has depicted the impact of it with utmost intensity. The trauma, from which Bishen Singh was suffering from, was in fact a contagious disease that dispersed after partition.
This study endeavors to capture in Manto’s story “Toba Tek Singh” the heteroclite and cohabitation of society comprising of Sikhs, Muslims and Hindu contemporary for centuries till the partition of British India in 1947 and birth of India and Pakistan. Dr. Mehak Jonjua, (2017) deliberately avoids the conventional analysis of Partition narrowly conflating it with newly assumed religious identities of the refugees. Through this partition reading, an attempt is made to show the fissures that accompany the progressions and developments of an identity formed on the basis of religion in a postcolonial encounter, the trauma of which does not actually translate into a purely communal consciousness. By exposing religion as a force that restrained victims in the name of - honor and spirituality, writings show that identity shaped in the case of refugees is highly intricate and psychologically nuanced.
History has always offered a context for fiction, which if appropriately used, can provide a useful perspective. However, over dependence on history can cramp the writes vision and this can be an even greater risk if that historical circumstance is a part of the writers life. But a good author uses historical material only to the extent it is essential to his fiction. He takes from history broad ideas and patterns and blends them into his narrative in such a way that they become a part of his fictional world. To quote Manto, Partition literature “In trying to grapple with the enormity of misery, writers dealing with this period, obsessively deployed imageries of rape, violence and destruction.”
