In his poignant, much-acclaimed short story “Toba Tek Singh,” Pakistani playwright Saadat Hasan Manto describes the plight of Bishan Singh, an inmate of the asylum in Lahore. In the story, set in a post-Partition era, the governments of India and Pakistan decide to exchange inmates: the Muslims among them are to stay in Pakistan, while Hindus and Sikhs are to go to India.
Singh, whose native town Toba Tek Singh now lies in Pakistan, is asked to go to India, as he is a Sikh. Unable to comprehend the new realities of home and belonging, Singh struggles with a crisis of identity. In the end, the “madman” dies at the no man’s land on the newly carved India-Pakistan border.
