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What is a Border? An Author Makes Sense of the Birth of Two Nations

Posted on June 12, 2025

A bird sits on a barbed wire fence as the sun sets..

By Jaideep Pandey

“Two or three years after Partition, the governments of Pakistan and India decided to exchange lunatics in the same way that they had exchanged civilian prisoners.” Saadat Hasan Manto’s classic story “Toba Tek Singh” (translated from Urdu by Richard McGill Murphy) tells the story of the inmates in a “madhouse” in Lahore, as they find themselves on the wrong side of the newly installed barbed wire fence that divides India and Pakistan. It’s the eve of the birth of two new motherlands, but not as the stable countries we know today:

Who knew whether Lahore, which was now in Pakistan, might not go over to India tomorrow? Or whether all of India might become Pakistan? And was there any guarantee that both Pakistan and India would not one day vanish altogether?

While we may think of India and Pakistan today as countries with long histories and seemingly natural borders, “Toba Tek Singh” helps readers understand the long and chaotic process through which these two nations separated from each other. As the quote above captures, India’s 1947 declaration of independence from the British, the announcement of the Partition, and the actual drawing of the border later on didn’t clarify where Pakistan began and India stopped, or vice versa, or how fluid this so-called border would be. Manto of course drew on his own experience of uncertainty when migrating from India to Pakistan during Partition.

Tripled black-and-white photograph of Manto, a man with dark hair and glasses in a shite shirt.
Author Saadat Hasan Manto. Fair use, Wikimedia Commons.

“Toba Tek Singh” invites us to inhabit this moment of violent uprooting through the metaphorical location of the “madhouse” in Lahore. By focusing on one man’s story, Manto shows readers that Partition was not just a drawing of borders on land, but a division of identities, homes, cultures, possessions, liabilities—like the “lunatics” of the “madhouse.” Manto’s story asks us to reflect on the dehumanization that necessarily accompanies the drawing of borders, compartmentalizing of identities, and forced migrations of people who have called a piece of land their home for several generations.

Contextualizing the Partition’s “Madness”

To give students some context about the Partition of British India and the key players, have them browse the following resources:

  • How did British rule contribute to the long-term fomenting of religious sentiment and polarization? Read this article in the New York Times.
  • How was British India partitioned into the modern day nation states of India and Pakistan? Watch this short video for a historical overview. 
  • Look at this interactive map of the Partition line from Al Jazeera. Try drawing your own border, and then check it against the border that was actually drawn and took shape over several subsequent years.
  • Watch parts of this longer BBC documentary to get different, specific perspectives on how the Partition was achieved (eyewitness accounts to the 1946 Kolkata riots at 13:55–21:55; British administrative staff between 22:30–33:00; accounts of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim residents of Lahore on the eve of Partition between 57:00–1:00:00).

Partition displaced roughly 15 million people and divided communities that historically lived together peacefully. To fully understand the context, one must turn beyond larger historical narratives to individual voices. Ask students to explore the following resources to get a sense of some personal accounts of Partition:

  • The 1947 Partition Archives are the largest collection of personal histories of Partition. Ask students to explore the interactive map to read stories about the Partition from different locations of the Indian subcontinent (and beyond!). Ask them to find three stories that struck a chord with them, then have them identify differences or similarities with the events in “Toba Tek Singh.”
  • Watch this short documentary about a Hindu former resident from the Pakistani side of the border, going back to Pakistan 70 years after the Partition.

After reading and watching these stories, ask the students to reflect on the following questions:

  • How do different people narrate and talk about the Partition? What does it mean to talk about Partition in different languages? How do these narratives parallel or stand apart from each other? In what ways do large scale historical narratives and smaller, intimate personal accounts tell us the same story of Partition?
  • How do we talk about difficult historical events? Must we remember and talk about them, even if they might be traumatic? What is achieved by narrating traumatic pasts to an audience?

Then, ask them to bring these questions back to Manto’s story:

  • How do maps, statistics, documents, and personal narratives help us understand why Manto chose to write a story in the style of “Toba Tek Singh”? (Why might Manto have chosen to tell a story of Partition through the lens of a “madman”?)
  • What might be the reaction of the different people involved in Partition to a story like “Toba Tek Singh”? Think about how they might react to the humor, pathos, and tragedies that the story describes for us.

For example, several key voices above describe the scramble and confusion of Partition. Some of them describe the odd sensation of returning to one’s (no longer) motherland years after the confusing borders had congealed. How does Manto here choose to describe these moments of absurdity and confusion?

He had made a separate country for the Muslims, called Pakistan. They had no idea where it was, or what its boundaries might be. This is why all the lunatics who hadn’t entirely lost their senses were perplexed as to whether they were in Pakistan or India. If they were in India, then where was Pakistan? If they were in Pakistan, then how was it that the place where they lived had until recently been known as India?

Or consider the concluding sentences of the story:

After fifteen years on his feet, he was lying face down on the ground. India was on one side, behind a barbed wire fence. Pakistan was on the other side, behind another fence. Toba Tek Singh lay in the middle, on a piece of land that had no name.

Do we read this as tragic, comic, pathetic, ironic? How does this compare with how some of the people above talk about their attachments to their native places?

Possible Extension

As an extension for older or more advanced students, you might ask them to go back to the earlier question: why must we remember and recount trauma, if at all? Partition historian Urvashi Butalia might have some answers for us. In a conversation with Partition survivor and celebrated Hindi author Krishna Sobti, she says:

Krishna Sobti talks about how Partition is difficult to forget but dangerous to remember. [. . .] Some of these memories are extremely painful; often they bring back a sense of loss, of anguish; sometimes they bring back resentment. Equally, the danger of remembering has never been greater for this surfacing of histories is taking place at a time when India is going through a resurgence of “nationalism”—this time an ugly, majoritarian nationalism, and there are ways in which such memories are being drawn into the service of this nationalism.

Given both the importance of memory in combating contemporary forms of violence and the traumatic effect of recounting the horrors of one’s past, you may guide your students to discuss the ethical dimensions of reading, hearing, and narrating stories of trauma and violence. How and in what ways must we approach other people’s narratives that they may or may not want to talk about? How do we approach silence, reticence, or obsessive retellings as ways of storytelling? (Resources on trauma-informed educational practice may be helpful here.)

Potential Assignments
  1. Essay: What national borders have defined identities, lives, and spaces around you? How were they originally drawn, before they achieved their current state? (If you’re not sure, try doing a little research.) Do they seem “natural” now, or were they ever in fact “natural”? How do people choose to narrate and talk about these borders and the profound impact that they have on their lives? (Examples might include a contrast between the U.S.–Canada Borders versus the U.S.–Mexico Borders, or the U.S. role in the Partition of the Korean peninsula, and how it continues to resonate with the lives of immigrant populations here.)
  2. Oral History: Interview someone you know or someone around you about how borders of various kinds and at different times impacted their lives. Ask them: what changes when a border is drawn, and how and in what ways may one cross a border? Before the interview, think and plan about how you might approach someone to talk about potentially traumatic events from their past.
Pairs Well with . . .

Other Literature about Partition on WWB:

  • “The First Morning,” by Intizar Hussain, translated by Basharat Peer, a memoir of the train journey from India to Pakistan

Other Literature on WWB Campus about borders and traumas:

Jaideep Pandey is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, studying translation and Islamicate modernities across Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and Arabic literatures. He also translates from Urdu into English.