Insanity in the Age of Reason – A Foucauldian Reading

Since one of the main concerns of this course is examining structures of power and their portrayal in literature, I felt a Foucauldian reading of ‘Toba Tek Singh’ was not only valid but in some sense necessary. Upon my very first reading, I felt an immediate resonance between Manto’s portrayal of madness and Foucault’s conception of madness as outlined in his text, ‘’Madness and Civilization’’. For Foucault, madness is not an absolute condition as much as it is a creation of the ‘rational’ State as an instrument through which to control the populace. The State has monopolized madness by turning it into a medical condition that falls under the domain of professional medical practitioners and specialized State institutions such as the psychiatric wards and mental asylums.  Similarly, in ‘‘Toba Tek Singh’’ we see that the State is orchestrating the entire event of patient exchange. From the very first sentence, the narrator informs us in a very sarcastic tone that the governments of Pakistan and India finally came to the delayed realization that the patients in the mental asylums should be exchanged accordingly. Hence, from the very beginning the reader gets the sense that even though the State is acting very half-heartedly; they are somewhat in complete control of the lives of the asylum patients.  It is no coincidence either that the border officials to whom the patients are handed are also directly synonymous with the State. There is great disparity between the individual’s own wishes and the decisive will of the State.  It is interesting that Foucault also mentions the creation of brothels along with psychiatric wards as a conscious State-mandated process called ‘The Great Confinement’. The idea is that as the State consolidates power, it confines certain groups of people to certain physical localities that are cut off from wider society. It is interesting how both these spaces have considerable significance in Manto’s works.   

Moreover, Foucault also mentions that the individual condemned to be ‘mad’ may engage in creative acts in response to the structural limitations of the system he finds himself in. In this light, the final scene whereby Bashan Singh defies convention by lying flat between the border of India and Pakistan can be seen as the ultimate act of creative opposition. What exactly does Bhashan Singh oppose by doing this? Ostensibly, he is opposing the orders imposed by State-sanctioned authorities. Secondly, he is disregarding national boundaries and in doing so he rejects not only the idea of State authority but also the artificial notion of the ‘nation’.