Lunacy and its embedded emotions

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZVNJjqbfPEuSkI9e9nQIarBzKoTQQVAZ/view?usp=drivesdk 

 

Anupriya Jacob

20SJCCC309

Where is my homeland?

 There was a crooked silver abyss

The lands on either sides were shrouded in darkness

The war cry rang in every ear,

The rivers of blood carried forgotten prayers,

And the silenced voices of those slain remained a distant echo.

They said it'll be the rise of a new dawn

But they failed to understand

That this wasn't a dawn at all

Not in the land of Toba Tek Singh

Not in the life of Toba Tek Singh.

We were left to gather the shattered memories of starry nights and happy souls,

To preserve them and pass them as beacon

To those who will never know

The day when it was so dark

That even God couldn't see us fall.

 

 

     One (such as a creative artist) of great imaginative and expressive capabilities is that of a poet. The creative form of expression I used to engage with Toba Tek Singh is a video-visual poetry.

All poems are insights into the most intimate inner workings of the writer's mind and soul. You trust the writer to guide you. You pick up the poem, you read, you listen, and you feel.

There’s an opportunity to connect more emotionally through video as a medium…stimulating different kinds of emotions that the written word can’t.

Making a video to accompany the poem is an extension of that artistic performance. Videos can add depth to your poems through visuals and sound.

A video-poem can be considered as a wedding of word and image. The greatest challenge of this hybrid genre is fusing voice and vision, aligning ear with eye. A video-poem stars the poem rather than the poet, the voice seen as well as heard.

 

   Artists can increase empathy in others through their work. A creative mode of expression can therefore add focal points to the viewers, enhancing the content illustrated, eliciting that feeling from people who may be numb from all the terrible things going on in the world, making the viewer more sensitive and vulnerable.

This is most relevant when a crucial topic sensitizing emotions of the past is being discussed. The Partition of India haunts the people to this day. It was deeply scarring and traumatic, changing their lives dramatically, uprooting them from places and communities where they had lived for generations. There’s no overstating the need of a creative mode of expression in order to convey the long lived struggles that resulted due to the partition.   

 

   The historical context I’ve selected is-Partition of India and Pakistan illustrating Toba Tek Singh as a sentiment. It tells stories of the long lived strife between the two parties. The power oversees it all and the land carries the emotions of the dwellers. The lunatic asylum ironically shields the insides from an overly polluted society whose only motive is the want of power. Religion stands no hindrance to thoughts of power, it, in fact promotes ideals to the grounds of politics in the minds of those in authority. The embedded emotions of people are overlooked and they suffer ages of eternal bloodshed within the nation. Families are shattered and the nation is broken and the people of the land suffer the brunt of it all.

The timeline of the reimagined history of Toba Tek Singh predates to a 1950 storyline.

The characters are lunatics of an asylum. Mental illness is an important theme in “Toba Tek Singh.”

The asylum in a sense represents the whole subcontinent; the madness of its inhabitants symbolising the madness of the partition violence.

In a context where mental illness was commonly regarded as shameful, Manto’s explicit engagement with the emphatically draws attention to the madness of partition.

Bishan Singh could be a figurative representation on the trauma of displacement. His intense suffering reflects that of partition refugees.

The constant questioning and demands to know about his homeland are evocative of fractured identities and loss of sense of belonging.

‘I found it impossible to decide which of the two countries was now my homeland’- Manto

  In this way, Bishan Singh’s character can be read both as a mirror to the general displacement suffered by so many as well as a more specific portrayal of Manto’s own personal experience. From both perspectives, the pain and emotional trauma of displacement is significant.

“In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.” In the end, Bishan Singh, finds solace in no-man’s land belonging to neither sides.

What followed in the aftermath of the partition was one of the largest forced migrations of the 20th century. Over the next two decades, nearly nine million Hindus and Sikhs moved into India and approximately five million Muslims to a spatially fragmented East and West Pakistan. This movement was accompanied by horrific mass violence which targeted women through rape and abduction and left an estimated million dead. The partition displaced between 10 and 20 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming refugee crises in the newly constituted dominions. The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that affects their relationship to this day.

 

   The Partition of India still haunts us in the 21^st century, within the nation, among its own people, within one’s own self. The lunatics of Toba Tek Singh are the true sane of today. They represent the shattered fragments of what’s left of the partition. There’s a huge loss of identity that befalls the nation.

None would have predicted it to lead to such horrific violence and mass uprooting, causing long-term memories of exile and loss.  

Today, the two countries’ relationship is far from healthy. Kashmir remains a flashpoint; both countries are nuclear-armed.  Seven decades on, well over a billion people still live in the shadow of Partition.

Recurrent episodes of Hindu-Muslim conflict in India (going back to the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and earlier) have continued through the second half of the twentieth century, accounting for over 7,000deaths over 1950–2000, and many more at the time of Partition.  So — and beginning with the violence unleashed in the state of Gujarat in 1992 — 21st century India is just more of the same, and in its pervading sense of menace and repression, possibly much more.

What could have been different could have saved the lives of millions. Dividing India was a decision that goes down in history as a colossal mistake, having unforeseen consequences which still shatter the two countries today.

A good first step is to envision the change you want to see. The knowledge that on the wrong day, at the wrong time, and under the wrong circumstances, I could find myself with a knee on my neck, gasping for air. We can do better. We must do better. Change should begin right now, and it should begin with me.