The News Minute | January 18, 2015 | 6.33 pm IST
To an extent, India and Pakistan derive their identities from each other.
And in the last few months, as India and Pakistan exchanged fire at the borders in Jammu and Kashmir, this question of identity was once again quite evident. A favourite of politicians on both sides is to give a “fitting reply” each other. Almost as if it was an exchange of letters.
Back when the two countries were created out of the British Empire, one writer perhaps articulated this question of identity better than any other. One of the things Sadat Hasan Manto is remembered for best, are his stories of Partition.
Today, perhaps, as India and Pakistan are once again at each other’s throats at the border, it would do us some good to take a step back, and perhaps read a story that he wrote about the absurdity of an unnatural border dividing cultures that grew out of each other.
One of the forms that Manto used to tell his stories was the sketch, which is basically a very short story. Originally called Sorry in Urdu, its English translation goes by the name of Mishtake:
Sorry
Churi
paet chak karti hui
naaf ke neeche tak chali gai izarband kat gaya.
Churi maarnevale ke
munh se
dafatan
kalma-i-taassuf nikla
"Chi, Chi, Chi...mishtake ho gaya."
An English transation:
Mishtake
Ripping the belly cleanly, the knife moved in a straight line down the midriff, in the process slashing the cord which held the mans pyjamas in place.
The man with the knife took one look and exclaimed regretfully, ‘Oh! no … Mishtake.’
Equally powerful is another of his stories Toba Tek Singh. It begins like this: “Two or three years after the 1947 Partition, it occurred to the governments of India and Pakistan to exchange their lunatics in the same manner as they had exchanged their criminals. The Muslim lunatics in India were to be sent over to Pakistan and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani asylums were to be handed over to India.”
The story is about a man named Bishan Singh, but whom everybody called Toba Tek Singh, because that was where he was from. He wanted to go back to his village, but nobody knew where it was as his relatives had stopped coming to visit him after riots broke out. When he died, he died on a bit of land that had no name.
Although Partition was one of his literary and political preoccupations, Manto’s writing spans a diverse body of work including the profiles of film actors, film scripts, editing magazines.
Although he lived in Bombay, and worked there, he became convinced that he would not be safe in India. Reluctantly he moved to Lahore.
As we observe Manto's 60th death anniversary on January 18, 2015, one cannot but wonder what Manto would have written about relations between India and Pakistan today.