Manto and the Mad Muselmann

Abstract

In Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singh”, readers are introduced to Sikh inmate Bishan Singh living in an asylum in pre-Partition India.1 The disfigured, swollen, babbling body of Bishan Singh is redolent of Giorgio Agamben’s representation of the “ Muselmann”, the abject camp prisoners of Auschwitz, in his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Drawing on Agamben’s insights, this article reads the figure of Bishan Singh as the Agambenian “ Muselmann” and Partition witness, caught in the space of the camp under the guise of an asylum for the mentally ill. This article also traces this space or holding centre for the mentally ill as a site of production of an ab-humanity marked not so much by a lack of speech, but by its provocative disorder. The figure of Bishan Singh as “ Muselmann” emerges as marked out by his garbled, traumatized language that signals both his ab-humanity and his exposure to the violence that attends the making of the human subject. This study argues that Bishan Singh’s wounded body and speech constitute traces of the unsayable, and that what is perceptible emerges from what is not.