METAPHORS IN ‘TOBA TEK SINGH’

HUMANITIES

Any word in a language is not limited to its literal meaning but keeps on expanding itself with the contexts, it has been used into, by different people in different times. The first recorded use of the word Partition was in the 15th century meaning to divide into shares, from Middle English and Latin. But in 20th century, the word was given a completely different tangent, not in literal but in psychological manner. No other word would have pierced people’s heart more deeply than those who had witnessed the gruesome partition of all times that laid the path of a timeless rivalry and hatred. The paper deals with the presentation of ‘Madness’ as a metaphor in the short-story “Toba Tek Singh” by Sadat Hasan Manto, where Bishan Singh and the asylum, that he has been put into with other inmates, are not able to accept the ‘sensible decision’ of utterly insensible and heartless governments and leaders, who thought that It would give them freedom from the British rule, barely realising that they were just diving deeper into the swamp of darkness, hatred and division.

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