Toba Tek Singh; Bol; Subh-e-Azadi

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Overview

These three Urdu works respond to the Partition of British India in 1947. Saadat Hasan Manto's short story Toba Tek Singh follows an inmate of a Lahore asylum who is caught in the exchange of patients between India and Pakistan. Faiz Ahmad Faiz's poems Subh-e-Azadi, which grieves that independence arrived stained, and Bol, a call to speak while one still can, give lyrical answers to the same period. Together they show how literature recorded what politics left out.

Context

Partition in August 1947 created India and Pakistan and set off mass migration and communal violence. Estimates of the dead vary widely, often given as one to two million, with ten to fifteen million displaced. Manto, born in Punjab in 1912, moved from Bombay to Lahore in 1948 and died in 1955. Faiz, born in 1911, was a leading Urdu poet and was imprisoned in 1951 in the Rawalpindi conspiracy case. Dates given for these works vary by edition.