DefinePK

Abstract

he theme of “Toba Tek Singh” is Partition of India. Some have also called it ‘Indian Independence’, which is not correct, because on the one hand, there is a considerable difference in the semantic implications of the Partition of India and the Independence of India, despite the fact that both of these things were possible at the same time: the meaning of one is political and national, while the meaning of the other is dominated by cultural and religious implications. And the national meaning is also not a simple and one-dimensional meaning. Beneath it lie the geographical and religious concepts of nationality that were prevalent during the Indian independence movement.
It is not out of place to raise the question here as to why Manto gave priority to the partition of India over the independence of India in 'Toba Tek Singh'? The simple answer is that the matter of priority is always a matter of values ​​and ideology, but Manto's excellence as a fiction writer is that he adopted an ideological stance in the political and national atmosphere of his era, but did not burden his fiction with this stance. He does not make his fiction an interpreter of ideology or a means of propagating ideology. Here, ideology exists outside the fictional text as a preferential consciousness. And fiction is based on theme