Post Colonial English Language Writers

William Dalrymple October 16, 2008

At Partition in 1947, the writers of India were, like everything else in South Asia, divided in two. The madness of the situation was wonderfully satirised by the Pakistani Urdu writer, Sadat Hasan Manto, in his brilliant short story, Toba Tek Singh, which tells of a fictional plan by India and Pakistan to divide their Hindu, Sikh and Muslim lunatics between them. The story ends with a Sikh inmate of the Lahore asylum lying down between the border posts of the two divided countries: “On one side, behind barbed wire, stood together the lunatics of India and on the other side, behind more barbed wire, stood the lunatics of Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.”