Manto back on city stage

With the Independence Day just being celebrated recently, the country is still reeling under the grip patriotism. Also reviving, Toba Tek Singh a play written by Saadat Hasan Manto will bring alive this feeling anew.

The story is set two or three years after the Partition in 1947, when the governments of India and Pakistan decided to exchange their Muslim, Sikh and Hindu people. 

The play revolves around  how people have lost the significance of unity. Here, the plot revolves around the characters in asylum. Being insane they are incapable of understanding but  in a weird twist of fate they were infact making more sense.

The twisted fate of the two nations entwined by history and the people who carry the carnages of the living and the death both alike after the partition is highlighted with a hint of comic relief.

Set in the post partition years, Bishan Singh, a Sikh inmate of an asylum in Lahore, hailing from  town Toba Tek Singh. 

As part of the exchange, Bishan Singh is to be escorted by the police to India, but upon being told that his hometown, Toba Tek Singh is in Pakistan, he refuses to go. The story ends with Bishan Singh lying down between barbed wire that separates India from Pakistan, saying 'There, behind barbed wire, was Hindustan. Here, behind the same kind of barbed wire, was Pakistan. In between, on that piece of ground that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.'

The play will be in hindi directed by Sunil Rawat and done by the Akshara theatre. So don't miss out on the play as it gives a glimpse of finding Neverland.