The Long Shadow of Manto’s Partition Narratives:

‘Fictive’ Testimony to Historical Trauma

Tarun K. Saint

My initial premise is that the extreme and near-genocidal violence during

the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 led to unprecedented psychologi-
cal trauma, which had a differentiated impact on survivors (as I have argued
at greater length elsewhere).1 In the wake of the event, during which collect-
ive violence and an extensive breakdown of social and cultural norms took
place, this historical trauma left its indelible imprint,2 especially evident in
our society in the falling off from the high civilisational ideals embodied in
the notion of a syncretic Indo-Islamic culture, the Ganga–Jamni tehzeeb.
The belated psychological after-effects of the rupture of the Partition, after an
initial phase of dormancy, continue to bedevil descendants of refugees as
well as minority groups across South Asia to this day, despite State and com-
munity-sponsored efforts at rehabilitation and resettlement. Our collective
inability to come to terms with the past and the recurrence of communal/
sectarian violence may be symptoms of this malaise. Writers across the sub-
continent have responded to the prevalence of this unresolved historical
trauma over at least three generations. While doing so, they have often enough
reckoned with the long shadow cast by the remarkable corpus of short stories
about the Partition by Saadat Hasan Manto.3 His imaginative foray into the
abyss was a courageous attempt to bear witness to the extent of damage done,
as well as the survival of the impulse to resistance, even if in fragmentary
form. This essay, I must say, in which I discuss a selection of Manto’s Parti-
tion narratives, stems from experiences as a teacher and researcher of Parti-
tion literature, rather than specialised knowledge of Manto’s oeuvre in Urdu.
Manto is arguably not only the most important of the witnesses to Par-
tition violence; in a paradoxical way his writing has prefigured and borne
anticipatory witness to subsequent outbreaks of communal/sectarian con-
flict, as well as the breakdown of communication that often accompanies
such conflict. During the 1990s, I recall being gifted a copy of Manto’s short
stories in translation by my father, who had personally undergone the trauma
of Partition as a refugee and for whom reading those stories in Urdu in 1947–
48 had been a route to achieving (via Manto’s creative re-enactments) at
least a partial catharsis. Manto’s work refuses to become dated, especially on
account of his ability to reinvent the afsana or short story as a self-reflexive
mode of ‘fictive’ testimony, which captures both the direct impact of fiendish
forms of collective violence as well as the persistent after-effects of historical
trauma. The recent exchange in the ‘letters’ columns of the Economic and 53
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Political Weekly (EPW) in which Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’ was invoked as a
metaphor for subcontinental geopolitics in the context of the Siachen stale-
mate, as well as with reference to the actual predicament of mental patients
housed in asylums at the time of the Partition (which I refer to in detail
later), is an illustration of the abiding interest in his work.4
Let us turn to a story from Siyah Hashye, or Black Margins, Manto’s
collection of ironic vignettes, written shortly after the event. The short story
‘Taqseem’ (Fifty-Fifty)5 can be read as Manto’s symbolic rendition of the risk
of infinite repetition of the moment of Partition and the fissioning of self
without cease. In this story, we find that a rioter benefits from the help of
another, stronger participant in widespread looting while taking away a large
box he has come upon. The duo reaches a quiet place; they eventually decide
to split the contents. When they open the box a man emerges from within,
carrying a sword, with which he cuts the two claimants into four. The bizarre
logic of the numbers game at work during this historical moment is
unravelled here with mordant irony. The inversion of any notion of the
social contract in this moment of ethical dysfunctionality becomes appar-
ent, while nemesis arrives in the shape of that which lurks within the box. The
hidden contents of the box in the form of a killer with a sword may be a
symbol of repressed desire and avariciousness, or simply the unknown, one’s
worst nightmare. Bifurcation without end is the likely outcome. This is
symbolised by the dismemberment of the looters; the story thus bears testi-
mony to the evisceration of the ethical compact in society. As Keki Daruwalla
has pointed out, this is worthy of a story by Borges or Cortazar. The unpre-
dictable irruption of the fantastical into the everyday can indeed be dis-
cerned here, as in the case of Julio Cortazar’s short story ‘Bestiary’. In Cortazar’s
story, the presence of a tiger free to move about without a leash through the
rooms of a farm house is accepted by its inhabitants, until the tiger’s proxi-
mity unleashes their own bestial proclivities, especially that of Isabel, the
visitor from the city. The question of whether it is the tiger that embodies
bestiality, or Isabel and the family members themselves, becomes moot in
Cortazar’s ironic tale.
Another major Partition story by Manto, ‘Saha’e’, depicts the fall-out of
the breakdown of trust and friendship, in this case a friendship across the line
of religious difference. In this story, narrated by a Hindu with family in West
Punjab, his friend Mumtaz’s decision to leave for Pakistan is a result of the
unthinking desire for revenge expressed by their mutual friend Jugal, after
hearing about his uncle’s murder in Lahore. An abyss of mutual hatred
and inter-communal animosity is revealed, even if for a brief moment. The
notion of space presented here extends beyond Bombay, since vicarious
revenge on behalf of those killed even at a remote distance is beginning to be
deemed acceptable. This is a byproduct of the emergence of a mediatised
world where print culture allows for the rapid dissemination of such stories
54 about violence in often sensationalist ways. While Mumtaz seeks to find a
 The Long Shadow of Manto’s Partition Narratives

Tarun K. Saint
refuge and sanctuary in the newly formed nation-state, Pakistan, he cannot
but help reflecting on what constitutes humanity, beyond the trappings of
religion. Mumtaz refuses to be anointed a martyr, even if he were to be killed
in a riot. Before departing by ship for Karachi, he shares with his Hindu
friends the memory of the sacrifice made by one of his acquaintances, a pimp
named Saha’e. Saha’e’s urgent need to convey the prostitute Sultana’s sav-
ings of twelve hundred rupees to her is borne witness to by Mumtaz, who
narrates the story of the fidelity of a pimp to one of the prostitutes in his
stable. Saha’e’s empathy for Sultana’s plight and the risk that he takes be-
comes a counter-memory in the absence of the ability to rise above religious
identification and the drive to reprisal killings even amongst the middle
classes. Through the narration of Saha’e’s story (as testimony to the capacity
for true feeling and generosity of heart in the midst of carnage and arson on
the streets of Bombay) there is an exorcism to an extent of the ghosts of
bitterness and antipathy. Even though Mumtaz does not change his mind
about leaving, his forced exile is tempered by the recollection of the tran-
scendence of communal antagonism by Saha’e.
I once heard actor Dilip Kumar give a talk on secularism in Trivandrum;
after his presentation I asked him if he could shed light on Manto’s decision
to leave Bombay. In response, Dilip Kumar recalled Manto’s closeness to his
own elder brother with warmth and affection. He explained Manto’s diffi-
cult choice, firstly on the grounds that communal threats were being made
with respect to Muslim employees in the film industry in Bombay; Manto
thus felt a strong sense of apprehension about future prospects. Secondly,
according to him, Manto feared for his daughters at this time when women
were being extensively targeted by rioters, not least in Bombay. The story
‘Saha’e’ articulates such anxieties felt by Muslim professionals and others,
especially after the bloodbath in Punjab. The memory of Saha’e’s quixotic
gesture proves crucial for the departing exile Mumtaz, perhaps by extension
Manto as well, allowing for a salvaging of an alternative conception of the
ethical in this moment haunted by proliferating stories about violence (in-
cluding sexual violence) and counter-violence which saturated the senses.
While not an exemplar of anti-communal virtue, Saha’e stands apart in
his rectitude and perseverance in his self-assigned task. Such anti-heroes
may paradoxically represent the hope for containment of the cycle of retri-
bution, despite their location outside the framework of good society, in the
profane world, Manto seems to suggest, while sensitively depicting the initial
breakdown of communication between Mumtaz and Jugal and their later
parting after his sharing of Saha’e’s story. Such modes of transmission of
otherwise untold stories as testimony to both the horrors of collective viol-
ence, as well as the possibility of resistance to the submergence of the self
into the morass of affects such as vindictive rage and humiliated fury, remain
crucial in attempts to further reconciliation. Saha’e, technically the exploiter
of Sultana, also understands her vulnerability and pain as he rises in the 55
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moment of crisis above the impulse to self-protection. Mumtaz realises this,

in turn, prior to the moment of Saha’e’s death, at a time when his own sur-
vival is imperilled. This insight into the nature of sacrifice is then borne
witness to by the narrator at the time of Mumtaz’s departure for Pakistan.
Artistic mediation of the crucial idea that narcissistic dwelling on the wounds
of one’s community is a self-defeating exercise thus takes place through the
relaying of a story within the story, a form of secondary witnessing. This is
rendered even more poignant as a result of our awareness that the episode in
which Jugal admits that he was ready to kill Mumtaz after hearing of his
uncle’s death was at least partly based on an actual exchange between Manto
and his close friend, actor Shyam. This rift between friends is symbolically
transfigured in this self-reflexive story, in which the perspective of the Hindu
narrator adds a further level of intricacy to the blurring of the line between
fact and fiction.
I now turn to ‘Toba Tek Singh’, Manto’s most remarkable artistic
engagement with the traumatic events of 1947. There is no question that
Manto’s invocation of Toba Tek Singh’s mental illness as a mode of figura-
tion of the disorientation and bewilderment of the common man become
refugee remains the most brilliant treatment of the subject so far. Further-
more, as psychiatrist Alok Sarin has recently discovered, there is a factual
basis for the idea of an exchange of inhabitants of the asylums on the basis of
their communal or regional identity. In his remarks on the report of the
Punjab mental hospital at Amritsar for the year 1950 by the Director of
Health Services, Punjab, the following appears.
The outstanding feature of the work of the hospital during the year was a
repatriation of the non-Muslim mental patients from Western Pakistan. Since
this was scheduled to coincide with the transfer of the Muslim patients from
many other states besides Punjab in India, and since this exchange was canalised
through Amritsar, it involved considerable preliminary organisational work.
Four hundred and fifty non-Muslim mental patients were received from
Lahore out of which 282 Punjabi patients were accommodated in the Amritsar
mental hospital, the remaining having been sent on to the Inter-Provincial
Mental Hospital, Ranchi. As against this 233 Muslim patients drawn from
different mental hospitals in India were evacuated in the opposite direction to
Lahore. That against an estimated non-Muslim population of six to seven
hundred of the Mental Hospital, Lahore at the time of the partition only 317
patients were actually exchanged at the time of the transfer, is a tragic fact
which sadly betrays the treatment meted out to those unfortunate victims
who could not be retrieved earlier from the Lahore hospital. (Annual Report
of the Punjab Mental Hospital, Lahore, 1950)

Manto’s rendition of the plight of such victims subjected to governmen-

tal procedures related to partitioning, in most cases against their will, would
56 have retained its validity even if there was no such documentary and statisti-
 The Long Shadow of Manto’s Partition Narratives

Tarun K. Saint
cal evidence available. Nonetheless, the establishment of the fact that such an
exercise in tracking down the patients in the various mental hospitals suffer-
ing from a variety of mental illnesses in order to demarcate them in terms of
religious and regional identity actually took place imparts to this story a
further degree of resonance. For there were many confused and disorien-
tated patients like Manto’s protagonist suffering from different forms of
mental illness who were being similarly processed and sent across the bor-
der, at times not quite as planned. As Jain and Sarin observe, hundreds of
real-life ‘Toba Tek Singhs’ lost their identities and were classified as Hindu
and Muslim, Punjabi and non-Punjabi, or in other categories, in their view
probably on the basis of who would foot the bill for their expenses rather than
any humanitarian, medical or clinical concerns. In this context, the absence
of any psychiatrists or counsellors overseeing the transfer in Manto’s story
takes on additional significance; it is the incremental bureaucratic proce-
dures which are the target of Manto’s trenchant satire, not the few belea-
guered mental health professionals.
The story achieves a remarkable critique of statist efforts to establish
control over mixed populations in the wake of the departure of the colonial
masters. This then is the ‘madness’ and absurdity underpinning the seem-
ingly rational calculus based on demographic measurements used by bu-
reaucrats and planners following the lead of Cyril Radcliffe, a form of insan-
ity perhaps more chilling than the delusions and erratic behaviour of the
inhabitants of the asylum. Bishan Singh uncovers the dark underbelly to
such governmental initiatives as he seeks to ascertain the prospective loca-
tion of his village, Toba Tek Singh, in the new dispensation. For Bishan
Singh, the working of governmental machinery is incomprehensible; he ex-
presses his resistance to this opacity and arbitrariness through the string of
seemingly disconnected nonsense phrases culminating in the Punjabi exple-
tive ‘durfitemunh’ (lit., blacken your faces or shame on you). Bishan Singh’s
sense of integrity of self and his commitment to the quest for certainty as
regards where his village of birth is to be located in the new political geogra-
phy creat-ed after the drawing of national boundaries by the Boundary Com-
mission leads to his refusal to move, or accept the directives of the officials,
who eventually let the ‘harmless fellow’ be as he stands resolutely in no
man’s land at the Wagah border.
The narrative thus initiates a contestation of the reciprocal modes of
exclusion ushered in with the consolidation of the two nation-states, mirror-
ed in their respective indifference (on the whole) to such victims, despite
being ostensibly ideologically opposed. Bishan Singh refuses to be taken in
by the consolatory fictions proffered to him as regards the prospect of his
home village being sent to Hindustan by the officials in charge of the
exchange process. There is a demystification here of such false witnessing on
the part of unfeeling representatives of the bureaucracy. His sense of interi-
ority and emotional attachment to the land and to the place of his birth 57
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become inconsequential in the new dispensation ushered in; Bishan Singh’s

slow realisation of this causes the man who had stood on his feet for so many
years to utter a final shriek that pierces the sky, before collapsing on that
stretch of no-man’s land between the barbed-wire fences on either side. Toba
Tek Singh (both man and village) seems to slip through the fissures in the
structure of the nation-state that is sought to be consolidated, albeit in the
moment of his death. The historical trauma experienced by large multitudes
on account of forced displacement is symbolically encapsulated in the fig-
ure of Bishan Singh, who experiences such distress in intensified form.
Manto’s ability to capture the delayed effects of traumatic violence on
the body comes especially to the fore in his stories about sexual violence
during the Partition. In ‘Khol Do’ (Open It!), Sakina’s dissociative state mani-
fests itself in her disconnection from the social domain of language (as evi-
denced in her mechanical response to the doctor’s request to ‘open it’; she
numbly lowers her shalwar, after being subjected to repeated violation by the
volunteers). Here the psychic state of dissociation is the heavy price paid by a
victim whose recovery is by no means certain. The likelihood of the effects of
brutal violence reverberating into the future comes to the fore as the reader
notes the discrepancy between Sakina’s situation and the joyous exclama-
tion of her father that she is alive. It is the doctor’s sense of being chilled to the
bone, even as he breaks into a cold sweat, which reminds us of the difficulty
of understanding her condition, and the urgent need for empathetic care for
such victims who are likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, in
most cases unavailable in institutional or other forms.
As Herman points out, in countries emerging from dictatorships or war
(or such episodes of cataclysmic violence), entire communities may suffer
from symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), trapped in cycles
of numbing and intrusion, silence and compulsive re-enactment. As she
argues, recovery requires remembrance and mourning, including public
forums where the victims can speak their truth and be acknowledged. The
failure to bring perpetrators of the worst atrocities to justice may lead to the
festering of helpless rage. Societies need to grieve, mourn and atone for their
wrongs to avoid reliving them. Manto’s story is suggestive rather than expli-
cit. The next stage, we can infer, must entail the creation of spaces wherein
abducted women like Sakina can begin to articulate their suffering and work
through such traumatic memories, as well as begin to hope for justice, a
possibility largely belied in both nation-states in the wake of the Partition.
The story, despite its brevity, allows us to come to terms with the extent of the
psychic damage done by Partition violence (here, ironically by volunteers
from the same community) as well as the necessity of validation of the
survivor’s suffering.
While the character Toba Tek Singh, at the moment of his death, ceased
to cast a shadow on the ground any longer, the figure of the ‘mad’ witness has
58 cast a long shadow in literary representations of the Partition. This in turn is
 The Long Shadow of Manto’s Partition Narratives

Tarun K. Saint
symptomatic of the perception that the Partition’s ghosts continue to haunt
us. Literary representations of the Partition have largely steered clear of the
naturalisation and normalisation of extreme violence in official discourses
and narratives, as an aberration or episode of temporary insanity. We find a
macabre variation on the theme of Partition-induced mental disturbance in
Joginder Paul’s story ‘Dera Baba Nanak’. Here, a mentally disturbed refugee
begins to collect body-parts of those killed, which he mistakes to be his own.
In a moment of grim irony, the narrator observes him at the end joining a
column of refugees going to the other side – the wrong way. In Krishna
Baldev Vaid’s Guzra Hua Zamana (The Broken Mirror), Yanike or In-Other-
Words and his friends are off-centre figures that posit an alternative to the
dominant ideologies of ultra-nationalism and communal hatred. In Vaid’s
novel, published in 1981, much after the Partition, echoes of Manto’s story
do resound, as we get a sense of alternative perspectives and a different logic
being articulated by figures on the margins, although not actually housed in
a lunatic asylum. Similarly, in a story by Bhisham Sahni, ‘Mujhe Mere Ghar
Le Chalo’ (Take Me Home), the motif of mental illness reappears as the un-
named Sikh protagonist is close to losing his sense of mental balance in the
wake of Partition-related displacement. In this case the loss of equilibrium is
directly tied to the loss of language and the sense of connection with a com-
munity of fellow-speakers, one of the consequences of the rupture from
one’s roots. This condition is explored sensitively by Sahni in this narrative,
where an old woman’s compassion and ability to speak to the Sikh protago-
nist in Multani (as Harish Trivedi points out) enables him to regain a certain
level of composure and not lose his sanity altogether. There is a certain banali-
ty at times to the invocation or echoing of this story. In Sorayya Khan’s ‘Five
Queen’s Road’, Dina Lal, the eccentric Hindu who refuses to leave his resi-
dence at Five Queen’s Road in Lahore at the time of the Partition, despite
losing his family and converting to Islam, is a caricature in comparison with
Toba Tek Singh.
On the other hand, Amrita Pritam’s novella Pinjar (The Skeleton) con-
stitutes a productive reworking of Manto’s ‘Thanda Gosht’ (Cold Meat). Peero’s
later acceptance of Rashida, her abductor, after the initial phase of visceral
and radical rejection of the man who raped her, can be seen as an elaboration
of and reflection on the implications of Manto’s story. Pritam’s view of the
situation entails an acknowledgement of the reality of emotions like visceral
disgust and revulsion (in Peero’s case, for her own body and, initially, her
own child) in the wake of abduction and violation. Peero goes through a
phase of numbing and self-revulsion initially; with time this is replaced by
rage, which abates gradually. Later, the perpetrator of sexual violence expe-
riences remorse, a development of a possibility latent in ‘Thanda Gosht’.
Peero’s reconciliation with Rashida can only happen, though, after recon-
ciliation with her estranged self, after experiencing a form of death in life.
Rashida’s own acknowledgement of guilt and gradual self-transformation is 59
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a key stage in the process of working through the residue of trauma, even as
Peero becomes an agent (with Rashida’s assistance) in the effort to recover
women abducted at a later stage of history, during the Partition, including
her own sister-in-law. Here Pritam engages with some of the lacunae in
Manto’s story, perhaps not adequately addressed, given its rather melodra-
matic conclusion (in which the enraged wife Kulwant Kaur slits perpetrator
Ishar Singh’s throat).
In his important Partition narratives, Manto unflinchingly grasped the
nettle of the ethical catastrophe of the Partition; he was able to get to the heart
of pronounced crises in the social formation and in inter-community rela-
tions. His writing laid bare structures that lurked behind the assertion of
triumphalist nationalism, while reclaiming the ground for an articulation of
an alternative sense of self. The opening of space for the emergence of sub-
cultures predicated on radical diversity was not unique to Manto, but was
taken to the fullest extent by him in his questioning of the ‘logic’ underpin-
ning the partitioning of consciousness. Through his short stories, he grappled
forthrightly with the historical trauma of the Partition and its reverberations
in individual, social and cultural spaces, generating counter-narratives
through which the penumbral world of dissociation, moral ambiguity and
inward decay, as well as the occasionally illuminating possibility of resist-
ance, became visible. Furthermore, the long shadow cast by his Partition
writings in literature and society indicates that the work of time is not yet
done. Given the reluctance to bring perpetrators to trial, the perception of
justice denied and a culture of impunity that emerged, the often-belated
effects of the traumatic event in community life and society remain to be
contended with. Manto’s unsettling ‘fictive’ testimony has enabled, none-
theless, for many the beginning of a process of working through such trauma-
tic memories of violence. Hence the need for continuing dialogue with
Manto’s legacy, as well as new forms of testimonial literature that might
emerge beyond the long shadow cast by Manto’s Partition narratives.

Notes
1 See Tarun K. Saint, Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction, Routledge In-
dia, New Delhi, 2010, esp. Introduction, pp. 1–60.
2 For a cogent discussion of the concept of historical trauma (mainly with reference
to cataclysmic events such as the Holocaust), see Dominick La Capra, Writing
History, Writing Trauma, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2001, pp. 76–
82.
3 For instance, Saadat Hasan Manto, Black Margins: Stories, translated by M.
Asaduddin, edited by Muhammad Umar Memon, Katha, New Delhi, reprint, 2003.
Also, Saadat Hasan Manto, Selected Stories, translated by Aatish Taseer, Random
House, Noida, 2008.
4 Sanjeev Jain and Alok Sarin, ‘Partition and the Mentally Ill’, in ‘Letters’, Economic
and Political Weekly, Vol. XLVII, No. 29, 21 July 2012, p. 4.
5 Saadat Hasan Manto, ‘Fifty-Fifty’, in Black Margins, translated by Mushirul Hasan.
60
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Tarun K. Saint
M. Hasan (ed.), India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom, Vol. 1, Roli Books,
New Delhi, reprint, 1997, p. 93. Translation of ‘Taqseem”’ from Siyah Hashye.
6 Keki Daruwalla, ‘The Craft of Manto: Warts and All’, in Alok Bhalla (ed.), The Life
and Works of Saadat Hasan Manto, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla,
1997, p. 56.
7 Julio Cortazar, ‘Bestiary’, in Blow-Up and Other Stories, translated by Paul Blackburn,
Pantheon, New York, reprint, 1967, pp. 77–96.
8 Saadat Hasan Manto, ‘Saha’e’, in Black Margins: Stories, pp. 168–76.
9 Personal communication.
10 See Saadat Hasan Manto, ‘Shyam: Krishna’s Flute’, in A Wet Afternoon: Stories,
Sketches, Reminiscences, translated by Khalid Hasan, Alhamra, Islamabad, 2001, pp.
524–44, esp. pp. 541–42. Translation of ‘Murli ki Dhun’.
11 For a different reading of this story, see Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony:
The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, N.J., 2007, p. 206.
12 Saadat Hasan Manto, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, in Black Margins: Stories, pp. 212–20.
Translation of ‘Toba Tek Singh’.
13 I am grateful to Alok Sarin for a copy of the relevant page of the Annual Report of
the Punjab Mental Hospital, Lahore, 1950, cited here. These details also appear in
Sanjeev Jain and Alok Sarin, ‘Partition and the Mentally Ill’, p. 4.
14 Ibid.
15 Saadat Hasan Manto, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, in Black Margins: Stories, p. 219.
16 Ibid., p. 220.
17 On the complicity between the two nation-states that emerged out of the Partition,
the strategies of normalisation through which mutual definition took place by
taking possession of the abducted women, see Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony,
205.
18 Saadat Hasan Manto, ‘Open It!’, in Black Margins: Stories, pp. 200–03. Translation
of ‘Khol Do’.
19 On dissociation, see Judith L. Herman, ‘Afterword: The Dialectic of Trauma Con-
tinues’, in Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to
political terror, Basic Books, New York, reprint, 1997, esp. pp. 238–39.
20 Ibid., p. 242.
21 Ibid., pp. 242–43.
22 Joginder Paul, ‘Dera Baba Nanak’, translated by Naghma Zafir, in Sukrita Paul
Kumar and Naghma Zafir (trans.), Stories of Joginder Paul, National Book Trust,
New Delhi, 2003, pp. 11–15.
23 Krishna Baldev Vaid, The Broken Mirror, translated by Charles Sparrows, Penguin,
New Delhi, reprint, 1994. Translation of Guzra Hua Zamana.
24 Bhisham Sahni, ‘Take Me Home’, translated by Harish K. Trivedi, in Tarun K. Saint
(ed.), Bruised Memories: Communal Violence and the Imagination, Seagull, Calcutta,
2002, pp. 1–4. Translation of ‘Mujhe Mere Ghar Le Chalo’.
25 Ibid., fn. 4. For a longer discussion of this story, see Saint, Witnessing Partition, pp.
267–68.
26 Sorayya Khan, Five Queen’s Road, Penguin, New Delhi, 2009.
27 Amrita Pritam, ‘The Skeleton’, translated by Khushwant Singh, in The Skeleton and
That Man, Sterling, New Delhi, 1987. Translation of Pinjar.
28 Saadat Hasan Manto, ‘Cold Meat’, in Black Margins: Stories, pp. 204–11. Transla-
tion of ‘Thanda Gosht’.
29 I am indebted to Udaya Kumar for this idea.
30 On the ways in which memories of the Partition may be folded into the moment of
61
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the present in everyday life, and on the importance of witnessing in transforming

poisonous knowledge into recognition of the being of the other over a period of
time, see Veena Das, ‘Boundaries, Violence, and the Work of Time’, in Life and
Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, Oxford University Press, New
Delhi, reprint, 2007, esp. pp. 79–80.

Tarun K. Saint is Associate Professor at the Department of English, Hindu

College, University of Delhi.

62
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