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DOI 10.1215/016424721299947 © 2011 Duke University Press Sa’adat Hasan Manto (1912 – 55), the Urdu short story writer, starts his story “Toba Tek Singh”1 with the assertion that after British India’s partition the respective governments of India and Pakistan decided that inmates of mental asylums should be exchanged. So mentally ill Muslims in Indian hospitals were to be transferred to Pakistan, and Hindu and Sikh patients in Pakistani asylums would be sent to India. Manto’s representation of partition’s “insanity” in this and other stories is now well known in literary and popular circles. It is by now also well known that the violence that followed the partition of British India was unprecedented in its scale and method.2 As the violence in South Asia during the last few months of 1947 became a reality, social turmoil forced many, like Manto’s mentally ill, to cross the stillporous borders toward unsettled lives in new and unseen lands. This essay will discuss some of the intellectual debates among literary figures that followed the partition of South Asia in the newly formed state of Pakistan. As I develop my argument in the following pages, I suggest that as much as the new country was formed on an ideological platform of Muslim nationalism in South Asia, the shape of its future culture initially remained an open question.3 Let me again turn to Manto to explain this point further. In an essay written as an introduction to a collection of his short stories in the early 1950s, Manto looks back at the time he spent in Bombay (twelve years) just before he migrated to Pakistan. He writes about the city with warmth and a sense of extreme loss yet is reconciled to the inevitable fact that he is now in Pakistan. But, he says, coming to the new country was an act full of uncertainty and anxiety: Progressives and “Perverts”

Progressives and “Perverts”: Partition Stories and Pakistan's Future