Ajoka Theatre's Toba Tek Singh - A review

Sixty years down the road, we as a nation are facing what seems to be a mid-life crisis. The formula of Pakistan’s creation that clicked so well for the first decade or so has now been reduced to a torrent of blame debates questioning its very existence.

Some intellectuals are even of the opinion that the whole Partition business was a huge folly that had and continues to have great repercussions on the lives of humanity on this side of the world.

Holding similar views, Ajoka Theatre recently staged an adaptation of Saadat Hassan Manto’s short stories, Toba Tek Singh, Siyah Haashiye and Khol do in a production titled Toba Tek Singh (TTS).

Staged at the Alhamra Arts Council in Lahore on August 17 and 18, the play was a depiction of the monumental human losses suffered by people on both sides of the Wagah Border during the birth of the two nations. Controversial as the Ajoka plays are, the adapted version of Toba Tek Singh too contained some debatable strains of thought.

According to Madiha Gauhar the play was staged to encourage soul-searching among the audience on the events of 1947. “We need to delve into the human tragedy of 1947 in order to put our house in order and move forward,” she said, adding, “for 60 years we have been fed with the ideology that the migration was voluntary on both sides of the border which is not true. The issues of religious extremism in our country can directly be attributed to the hurried and ill-planned Partition that robbed our country of its religious diversity and reduced a multi-cultural society into a monolithic one. The scars of Partition are still not going away, which is perhaps why it is important for us to think whether it was really needed.”

Set against the backdrop of a pathway lined with barbed wires, TTS shows the fate of lunatics in the Lahore Mental Hospital and how they are treated and transported to India on the basis of their religion. The mental asylum is actually a metaphor used by Manto to describe the insanity of the human losses suffered during Partition.

One particular lunatic, Bishan Singh (played very well by Sarfaraz Ansari), keeps asking whether Toba Tek Singh is in India or Pakistan, and hurls a volley of inanity at anyone who responds to him either seriously or in ridicule. The play is interspersed with screenings of actual stills and video footage of the migration carnage. Black-and-white images of mass cremations and graves, piles of naked dead bodies heaped along roadsides and a vast sea of humanity trekking on foot to its destination casts a grim shadow, driving home the point that the Partition was creation as well as destruction. The story of Sirajuddin’s search for his beautiful daughter, Sakina, in Lahore’s hospitals and refugee camps and her eventual appearance — brutally violated by Pakistani volunteers — was particularly poignant.

In the mental asylum, the inmates are treated like animals, thrown here and cooped there on their onward journey to India, depicting that those arbitrarily deciding their fate were bigger lunatics. Two officials from both the countries are shown filling files of refugee data while a mime of lunatic refugees being dragged violently in the background depicts the callous attitude of bureaucracy towards a highly emotional affair.

The play ends with Bishan Singh alias Toba Tek Singh refusing to cross over to India. The aged Toba stands in deaf and mute grief on no man’s land till one day he falls dead on his feet between the two borders; stateless in death.

While agreeing with the play’s thrust on the catastrophic human losses of Partition and the fact that they etched deep scars on the hearts of people on both sides for years and years, I thought Ms Gauhar’s argument was flawed — that the migration of millions of people was forced and that only those people left for the new countries of their choice voluntarily who had cushy jobs or guaranteed futures. If that had been the case, we might not have survived the past six decades under some of the most oppressive political and social circumstances.

Is it really wise to slur the noble intentions of Mohammed Ali Jinnah and his league of men with integrity who gave us a blessing we haven’t really treasured?