Imagine that you visit asylum and happened to see Bishan Singh.Write down your reflections on him...
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Answer:
........I will be the luckiest in the world
As a remark on the relative saneness of national-communal separation, Manto centered his story ‘Toba Tek Singh’, in a Lahore mad asylum and here the repulsion of partition is expressed in a bleak comical bafflement which takes hold of the patients, as they are not able to place themselves in the transformed set of a newly independent nation. (Pakistan)
EXPLANATION:
The story is set 2-3 years post the 1947 independence when the Govts. of India and Pakistan agreed to interchange some Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim lunatics, and involved Bishan Singh, a Sikh patient of the asylum in Lahore, who was from the Toba Tek Singh. Bishan Singh is sent along with police escort to India, as part of the exchange; however, on being conveyed that his home Toba Tek Singh was in Pakistan, he declines to go.
The partition of India and Pakistan left a space between the barbed wires on the borders of both the nations, which had no name. Bishan Singh made a silent claim for a personal space between the borders that had no name. In protest, Bishan Singh never sat down or slept in the asylum, and the awful manifestation of his final posture, as he plants himself in the space between the borders on his swollen legs was like a giant changing into a metaphoric symbol of rooted and stasis immovability.
Bishan Singh's stand of remonstration signifies a conflicting impulse, an effort to anchor the self and to re-assert the spatial connotation of a home on a specific piece of land. Without doubt, Bishan Singh's endeavor to reconcile location and subjectivity is nothing more than a frantic gesture: a single heart-breaking attitude in a gamut of evasive or ironic responses that punctuate Manto's imaginary engagement with the ordeal of partition. Bishan Singh's escape into the border-area should be construed as a direct challenge to these broader, official treatises of the nation.