THE ROLE OF CIRCUMSTANTIAL ELEMENTS IN REPRESENTING PARTITION: A SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF TOBA TEK SINGH

Abstract

This study examines how Khalid Hasan's English translation of Saadat Hasan Manto's beloved short story, Toba Tek Singh, uses the circumstantial elements of Time, Place, Manner, Cause, and Contingency to depict the trauma of the 1947 Indian Partition. To investigate how these grammatical features relate to the story's main themes of madness, identity crisis, and spatial displacement, the study employs a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework and qualitatively analyzes the translated text at the clause level. The analysis shows a high frequency of temporal and spatial circumstances, which anchor the story in the fractured post- Partition landscape, using the UAM Corpus Tool for systematic annotation and categorization. Additionally, it is demonstrated that the conditions of Manner, Cause, and Contingency improve the representation of political absurdity and psychological trauma. Data analysis was done using the UAM Corpus Tool. To ascertain the function of circumstantial elements in the narrative representation of Partition, the results were qualitatively interpreted. According to the study's findings, the most common circumstantial element is spatial location (28.9%), which is followed by temporal location (23.6%), extent (distance, duration, and frequency combined at 30.2%), manner (9.2%), means (6.6%), cause (3.9%), contingency (2.6%), matter (2.6%), accompaniment (1.3%), and role (1.3%). By showing how language mediates historical trauma, this study advances both SFL and Partition studies.

This study emphasizes the crucial role of functional linguistic analysis in understanding how a translator’s grammatical choices affect the reader’s experience.