Beyond nationalism: The border, trauma and Partition fiction

Abstract

This article aims to rethink the trauma of the 1947 Partition of British India through the figure of the border. It is at the border that we can see how the present is as much constituted by the concentration of new realities that call for shifting frameworks of understanding as it is by past events that continue to haunt memory. It undertakes this task through a close reading of the trope of borders in Saadat Hasan Manto’s 1953 short story, ‘Toba Tek Singh’. Partition fiction serves as a fruitful ground for developing new approaches to that history because, in part, literature is uniquely situated between representation and theory, between what a text represents and how it represents. 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. I suggest that the division of British India signaled a unique rupture within the subcontinent in which the creation of borders became the defining traumatic event of that history. 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.

Nationalism and Madness in Three Translated Stories Of Manto: Toba Tek Singh; The Dog of Tetwal; See, Kabira Cried

“…Keeping in mind the level of syntax and discourse, Yusin (2011) talked about the plight and misery of the lunatics in the story Toba Tek Singh (published in 1955) by focusing on the ambiguity of the language. The phrases used by the lunatics like so boley so nihal, Fitey moon, upper dey gur gur are not only difficult to translate she says, but the ambiguity hovers in the characters, in their names, in the theme, and in the meaning of the story, it seems that as for Manto the meaning of partition was the absurdity and essential loss.…”