Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Dog of Titwal’ places a mongrel in between two similarly looming hillocks where the stationed Indian and the Pakistani soldiers are engaged in a futile battle with bouts of guns blazing and evenings spent in a longing for the home they have left behind. In the evenings, the hills, being quite close to each other, echo with each camp singing songs of love and loss, with which they try to fill the vacuity of their otherwise banal existence, where each new morning brings more senseless gunfire and shows of bravado to once again relapse into a night empty of meaning. A narrow stream runs between the two hills, where the despair of a home far away fuels the young hearts with a resoluteness as they rain bullets on the opposing hills. Their banal despair, swaddled in pride for a swathe of land, asserts a new identity forged in blood, and even more despair. Death rechristened as martyrdom becomes a celebration and evokes a lust for giving and taking more lives as a heroic cause and a service to one’s humanity.
One may argue that this is a sickness unto death, a spiritual illness, one that is mediated by a fear of the ‘other’ and sublimated as a heroic cause.
This is a sickness that is to be admired, feared and served as a symbol of the ultimate price in service of one’s fellowmen, even as it pushes the ‘other’ further away from an exclusive humanity that is unwilling to simply share the beauteous earth. In being condemned to be free, what path will man choose to actualise this freedom that he has wrested from the heart of God and claimed as his own? How does he go about defining his morality? How does he create his essence as he forges human institutions that define him and the rest who are not ‘him’? Often, this despair can serve as a premise from which he enlightens himself, even as he confronts the absurdity that he is confronted with. Life then has worth, in its living, not so much in its dying.
In such a weary and dreary evening, a mongrel emerges scurrying from the Pakistani side towards the Indian hillock. His name is Jhun Jhun, announces an Indian sepoy after the initial suspicion that the mangy mutt could be a Pakistani. That is somewhat resolved subsequently. A biscuit is thrown to the dog before he is let loose, with a tag on his collar announcing his name and Indian citizenship. Running over to the Pakistani side, his identity is questioned once again, and an equally combative tag is tied to his collar, rechristening him as Shun Shun in a retaliatory posture and granting him Pakistani citizenship. All this before he is chased out of that camp towards the Indian side. The Indian sepoys shoot at the approaching traitorous dog, who yelps and runs towards the Pakistani side, which shoots back, causing the bewildered mongrel to run towards the Indian side, only to be shot at again. The witless dog is now running around in circles and getting shot at from both sides, eventually succumbing to a bullet to his head, dying a dog’s death in the no-man’s land between the two hills, Indian and Pakistani.
Bishan Singh, in Manto’s Toba Tek Singh, has its protagonist equally stuck in a startlingly anonymous space between India and Pakistan. His narrative unfolds in a mental asylum where the inmates have just found out that some of them are Indian and some are now Pakistanis, a foreign term, very alien and hence causing some fear of this new unknown. Bishan Singh, is now old and forlorn, having lost his family, his land and even the memory of his young daughter whom he loved more than himself. Today, unable to recognise her or the rest of his family, he feebly attempts to negotiate his way within this new time and space that has been thrust into his otherwise predictably meaningless existence. This news of a new identity, gratuitously bestowed on him and his fellow inmates by the revolution’s wise leaders, leads him in his terror to consider a revolt or at least resist this uninvited invasion into his sense of self.
There is a certain precision with which this new reality has been constructed in consultation with the colonial power, which has consented to yield to the revolutionaries and to assist them in navigating their new role as governors. Oddly, the oppressor and the oppressed have come together, shedding the bondage of centuries of dominance and struggle, even if only temporarily, embodying a moment in this absurdly created space where they negotiate how a new reality can emerge from a historical rupture in how a civilisation could have emerged in a differently imagined reality. Transiting from leading a revolution to leading a complex State machinery with multiple overlapping and segregationist interests requires experience and political sagacity; something the colonisers have in abundance and something that the revolutionaries find missing from their core competencies, which have thus far included skills in disruption and withdrawal from the social and political inequities that they were subjected to. So far, these have served them well. Now, how does one negotiate one’s way in this ambiguous space in between, where their successful revolution has placed them?
Rebelling and governing are two different spaces, and the new leaders find themselves in the in-between space, attempting to comprehend the absurdity they confront.
How does one navigate this space as a transition is attempted, and where the attempt requires the revolutionary to trust in the wisdom of the coloniser who is relinquishing power to these revolutionaries-turned-statesmen? How should the new countries look? Who really fights for liberation and equity? What is an equitable position that can be reached where each man is accorded dignity in the new space that is being constructed? Who is leading the construction of these new spaces and with what motive?
“I’d prefer to live in neither India nor Pakistan”, declared one of the more sensible inmates of the mental asylum who was, in fact, mad as a hatter. “I think I’d rather live in a tree somewhere between these two places.” Manto writes with his sardonic and potent humour as he dares and compels his readers to grudgingly examine their stained morality, even as he was held in contempt for moral transgressions more than a few times in his life. To question a terrible slaughter and a politically potent weaponisation of scarring the human psyche due to the displacement of identity and the difficulty of resolving these questions of identity is a struggle that the subcontinent continues to battle with. Even as these wounds are politically expedient artefacts, it is necessary to keep them simmering and bring them to a boil whenever the opportunity finds itself in the play for power and lust to rule. It does not take much time for the revolutionary to legitimise murder in the name of the cause, which requires him to rebel against the murderous tendencies of his oppressor. In this, he ultimately becomes his own oppressor, as Camus puts it in The Rebel.
Bishan Singh searches for his village, Toba Tek Singh. His search takes his wobbly old legs to the physical space between the newly constructed two countries, where his old village has been uprooted from its original place and relocated, all in the space of a night. His incoherent mutterings grasp at the air around him as he searches for meaning in this new reality, which has created an existential dilemma. The familiar chaos and yearning for a village which has rejected him and relegated him to the confines of his mental asylum has given way to the unfamiliarity of the dread of two new nations which have threatened to orphan him. It was better to ‘know’ his loss than find that his ‘loss’ is now missing in between two new countries that were born from a womb of sorrow that the coloniser has bequeathed to the revolutionaries.
Bishan Singh shares a palpable fear as he straddles the space between these two unknowns. Where must he be? Like the dog of Titwal, he finds himself being shot at from both sides, made to run in circles. Finally, and with a terrible cry of anguish, he will drop dead in that unclaimed space which tragically claims him in the similarly absurd fashion in which the space itself has no definite meaning that it can claim, not very unlike the two countries that lie on both sides of it – at least that is how it seemed, when Manto wrote those stories sitting somewhere in between this unstable liminality.
References (unformatted)
Homi K Bhabha’s ‘The Third Space’: a sociological postcolonial/cultural theory of identity negotiation (see The Location of Culture – Book)
Saadat Hasan Manto’s The Dog of Titwal (a short story)
Saadat Hasan Manto’s Toba Tek Singh (a short story)
Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre – Existentialism (See The Rebel, Existentialism is a Humanism)
Søren Kierkegaard – The Sickness Unto Death (essay/book)
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