Precarious Homes in Saadat Hassan Manto's "Toba Tek Singh:" Insanity, Illness and Displacement

The short stories of Sadat Hassan Manto, who is acknowledged to be one of the pioneers of the Urdu short story, have been read variously as resorting to obscenity to demonstrate the obscenity of partition and attendant nationalism. The paper examines the short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ arguably Manto’s most well-known and translated story, to understand the interrogation of ‘home’ in the post-colonial future which is perpetuated through the fiction re-interpreted across time, space, and different frameworks. By focusing acutely on traumatized and split subjectivities, Manto demonstrates the performative potential of cultural memory to serve as a testimony of the enduring power of memory. Moreover, it depicts the determination and disruption of current imaginings of a ‘self’ shaped by a perpetual dialectic of exclusion and inclusion, lately accelerated by the rise of muscular nationalism. Manto’s short stories protest the perpetual denial and postponement of the question of ‘home’, and hence provide a valuable insight into the postcolonial dilemma of imagining the nation as a coherent and linear space. This paper approaches this aesthetic of denial by examining the wide semiotic range of possibilities offered by an examination of the vocabulary of Manto, and thereby illuminate the contours of Manto as a practitioner of writerly writing.