Pankaj Kapur’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’ Fails to Capture Manto’s Essence

A review of the film ‘Toba Tek Singh’ featuring Pankaj Kapur that’s streaming online now.

Saadat Hasan Manto—a man variously identified as controversial, cynical, troubled and even arrogant, has managed to become one of the most sought-after twentieth century literary voices to emerge out of the Indian subcontinent. It is not too hard to understand the reason why there has been an abiding interest in his work not only in academia but also in media such as film, radio and Internet. Manto’s creative engagement and his humanistic stance over issues of power, exploitation, subversion has the perennial quality to transcend its specificities of time and place and speak universally to the contemporary pressures of similar nature.

Having closely followed recent adaptations of the author and his works such as the Pakistani serial—Manto directed by Sarmad Sultan Khoosat, or the whimsical short-film on one of his essays Muft Noshon Ki Terah Kismein directed by Muhammad Aasim Qamar as Muftnosh, I was no doubt filled with sheer excitement when an adaptation of Toba Tek Singh (directed by Ketan Mehta) was released on the Zee 5 app on August 24. The film runs a little over 70 minutes and stars Pankaj Kapur in the lead role of Bishan Singh and Vinay Pathak as the mental asylum superintendent who is additionally introduced as the master storyteller Manto himself.

Who is Toba Tek Singh?

Manto’s Toba Tek Singh is about the traumatic implications of the absurdity that characterises statist procedures that seek to validate national identities by narrowly conflating them with the religious ones. Following the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the respective governments of India and Pakistan decide that just as the ordinary populations, patients of lunatic asylums too must be exchanged across the borders. As the orders reach Lahore lunatic asylum, the inmates—Muslims, Sikhs, Anglo-Indians etc. find themselves in a state of disarray, unable to comprehend the overnight shift in their identities that an arbitrary drawing of geographical borders has affected. Bishan Singh, a man who has never slept in fifteen years and belongs to a village Toba Tek Singh, situated right at the border between the two countries, ultimately dies without ever receiving an answer to his question—“ Where is Toba Tek Singh? ”.

Pankaj Kapur steps into the persona of Bishan Singh as a man whose unflinching gaze, almost like a bewildered stupor, and the cadences of his gibberish—“ Upar di gad gad di annexe the bay dhayana the moong the dal of the Pakistan and Hindustan dur fittay moonh” are themselves a rendition of the plight of thousands like him, their existential crisis having found no resolution except death and exile. Yet in a film that tries to narrate rather than interpret the written text word-by-word, the creative potential of an actor such as Kapur unfortunately seems wasted. The idea of lending an authorial voice to the superintendent (Vinay Pathak) leaves little room for the viewer to engage imaginatively with the story. The film tries hard to make its point: there is an intertextual reference to another eponymous partition story by Manto, namely “Khol Do” that records the trauma of women subjected to rape and violence during partition, and invocation of Bulleh Shah’s classic—“Ki Jana Main Kaun”. In a film that appears more as an imitation of the written text on screen rather than an inventive adaptation, there is even a footage of the actual event of migration in black and white, which rather than reinforcing the realism of the movie drowns it into artifice. The antics of the asylum inmates lack the sensitivity that characterises Manto’s stories even in their depiction of the most sordid, tragicomic realities of life. One cannot but hope now for a much deeper and nuanced portrayal of a difficult author such as Manto and his works, most notably in the hands of the supremely talented Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Nandita Das.

Pankaj Kapur As Toba Tek Singh

What did remain with me in the end was Pankaj Kapur’s hard stare into the oblivion signifying his realisation even in his inchoate state of the changed dynamics of affiliation in the new dispensation, and ultimately the final shriek of gibberish before Toba Tek Singh—the lunatic, and the unidentified strip of no-man’s land metonymically become one, his tragic death a telling commentary on the madness that Partition stands. Yet, Manto readers and fans who understand the grim mockery, the trenchant satire of his works would be left desiring a lot from an overall insipid narrative that unfortunately does not do justice to the sheer force of the original text shaped by the author’s creative efforts to envision a more humanitarian, equal, and a just world.

(Girija Suri is a Ph.D. research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is pursuing her doctoral research on Saadat Hasan Manto’s radio-dramas written for All India Radio before Partition.)