One interesting insight we reached in class last week was about Sadaat Hasan Manto’s various ways of expressing how the demarcation of India and Pakistan condemns all potential liminal space between the two. In “Toba Tek Singh,” the first effort to do this comes from one of the people held at the asylum. After climbing up a tree and refusing to come down, he declares: “I want to live neither in Pakistan nor in Hindustan — I will live on this tree” (15). He attempts to escape from systems of sovereignty by looking to the nonhuman: how could a plant be subject to such human constructions? Of course, what he is doing is nonsensical. Sadaat Hasan Manto points to the inevitability of the categories of nation: anyone who attempts to carve out a space outside of those categories is simply talking nonsense. Whatever liminal space there may be outside of these categories is condemned to insanity.
At the end of the same story, Bishan Singh finds himself in the no man’s land between the two fences that separate Pakistan and India. Throughout the story, Bishan Singh was characterized as never sitting or lying down. He is perpetually standing. But when he finds himself in this liminal space, “the man who had stood on his legs day and night for fifteen years now lay on the ground, prostrate” (19). His way of being in the world dissolves when he is in the liminal space between India and Pakistan. Though he was insane, there was an order and a logic to his insanity. Once he is in between the two nations, even that order and logic breaks down.
Just as no tree could be allowed in between India and Pakistan, neither could the dog in “Tetwal Dog.” Completely uncomprehending of the respective identities that the men in either trench construct for him, the dog simply wags his tail and accepts the food given to him. But by the simple fact of going about life, he coincidentally ends up in a situation where his identity is contested: is he Chappar Jhun-Jhun, the Indian dog? Or is he Sappar Sun-Sun, the Pakistani dog? His contested identity leads the men to force him into the no man’s land between the trenches, where he is the subject of violence. In this case, an in-between existence is briefly produced, but that existence cannot be tolerated, and must be met with violence. The men shoot and kill the dog. There can be no in-between.