ABSTRACT
This chapter reads Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” as an experience of the phenomenal sublime. For this purpose, the chapter critically investigates Gulzar’s Urdu poem by the same name and depicts how Gulzar’s poeticization of “Toba Tek Singh” sublimates insanity from the textual into the experiential and takes Bishan Singh, the chief character in Manto’s short story, beyond the textual contours of the imagined into the realm of the (im)possible. The chapter interrogates into the poetics of representation through which Gulzar de-contextualizes Bishan Singh and his anxiety of rootlessness only to manifest him as the primordial sufferer of homelessness, who is not just a name but an experience, thus making him a phenomenal subject in the economy of sublime.
