Fictive Testimony and Genre Tension: A Study of ‘Functionality of Genre in Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’

Abstract

Toba Tek Singh by Manto is one of the finest short stories that capture the mood and the anxiety of the partition while still being satirical and ironic. This short story poses problematic questions when it is called a 'fictive testimony'. This article attempts to deal with the problem of genre classification and how this genre category needs to be understood without being completely ignored. A genre label is not seen here as a final verdict about what the text should be or a cage within which a piece of literature is once and for all locked. Rather, it tries to look at the genre label as that which highlights a function of the text thereby reiterating the fact that a work of literature stands beyond the genre categorisation. The label ‘Fictive Testimony’ is therefore interpreted as underlining a function that the short story serves to accomplish – giving voice to the voiceless.