Question

insanity is the metaphor for sanity justify the statement in the light of toba Tek Singh?​

Answer 1

1. i don't know what is answer of this question question

Answer 2

INSANITY IS THE METAPHOR FOR SANITY

“If they were in India, then where was Pakistan? If they were in Pakistan, how come that only a short while ago they were in India? How could they be in India a short while ago and now suddenly in Pakistan?”

• These lines from Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story, “Toba Tek Singh” appear in a discussion among the lunatics of asylum in Lahore. Anyone who has experienced or even knows about the atrocities caused on either side of the Punjab border during the partition of India in 1947 would understand the rationality in the aforementioned lines. When India was celebrating its Independence in 1947, there were more than a million people who weren’t aware of their nationality or the country they belonged to.
• Overnight some of them became Pakistanis and some Hindustanis. This essay will attempt to show the absurdity of the logic given for India’s partition by deploying the perspective of madmen in Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”. While doing so, the paper will also inverse the binary of constructed categories of madness and sanity.

Saadat Hasan Manto is known for his witty and sharp take on events related to the partition (Singh). In “Toba Tek Singh”, we see lunatics in an asylum discussing where and what Pakistan is. In the short story “The Last Lesson” by Alphonse Daudet, an order was sent from Berlin that made German and not French the official language of Alsace and Lorraine, after the Franco-Prussian war. Nobody could do anything but follow the instruction; irrespective of how silly it was to even try to curb a language that is the “key to their prison” (Daudet).

• When the protagonist of the story Franz asks, “Will they make them speak in German, even the pigeons?” it reveals the absurdity of such unthoughtful, stringent actions. Similarly, in “Toba Tek Singh”, set in an asylum near the newly-announced Indo-Pakistan border, an order is passed which says that the Muslim lunatics are to be sent over to Pakistan and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics were to be handed over to India. In a similar manner, even the criminals were divided in the story. Women too had to go through a similar division (Mangat).
• The conversations that the lunatics have among themselves give a ‘sane’ perspective to the whole situation just like Franz’s statement about pigeons; birds won’t be asked to choose a nation as they can fly across borders. Both the stories criticize ideas of war, nationalism, and nationality. While Daudet uses an illiterate child’s perspective, Manto deploys that of the lunatics, both of who are considered to be lacking reason and rationality as per socially constructed binaries of adult/child and sane/insane respectively.