“No Man’s Land” as the “Mulk”: Revisiting Disability and Statelessness in “Toba Tek Singh”

This paper examines the metaphor of disability and statelessness resulted by the India-Pakistan partition in Saadat Hasan Manto's “Toba Tek Singh.” The state of statelessness goes beyond the geographical understanding of a ‘state.’ This paper attempts a close reading on the relationship between statelessness and its effects on the inmates of a lunatic asylum where their mental situation is portrayed through a metaphorical manifestation. Manto, here, deals with people who do not have any idea of the borders of India and Pakistan, but their minds inherit the intuition of borderlessness. “Where is Toba Tek Singh?” is one of the main concerns of this paper. This question leads to the paradox of staying in a state and feeling stateless at the same time. As a result of the partition, Toba Tek Singh falls into Pakistan, but Bishan Singh, the Sikh lunatic protagonist, must move on to India as per the decision of the government of India and Pakistan. This paper shows a detailed analysis of the cultural differences created by the futile making of boundaries in a Postcolonial world. It is not a mere boundary that divides India, Pakistan and later on, Bangladesh. Rather the boundary puts the lunatics in a dilemma of where India or Pakistan actually exists. This dilemma arising out of the theme of statelessness, questions the concept of Nationalism. This paper hopes to transcend the geographical boundary and Nationalism to reach a mental landscape where Toba Tek Singh is located. The lunatics could not understand why they were being forcibly removed, thrown into buses and driven to this ‘strange land.’ The dilemma of “Where is Toba Tek Singh?” is resolved, as the paper argues, Bishan Singh, the man who has stood on his legs for fifteen years, collapses to the ground of ‘No Man's Land,’ his own ‘Mulk.’