Bhisham Sahni

Bhisham Sahni was one of the most important Hindi writers of the second half of the twentieth century — novelist, short-story writer, playwright and translator — and the author of Tamas (“Darkness”, 1974), the great Hindi novel of Partition and its communal violence, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award. A member of the Progressive Writers' Movement and later associated with the Nayī Kahānī, he wrote with quiet, compassionate realism about the lives of ordinary middle-class people, and about how history, politics and prejudice shape and break them.

Life

Bhisham Sahni was born on 8 August 1915 in Rawalpindi (now in Pakistan), into a Punjabi Arya Samaji merchant family; his elder brother was the actor Balraj Sahni. He studied English literature at Government College, Lahore, taught and helped in his father’s business, and joined the Indian National Congress. In March 1947, before Partition, he worked in relief camps after the communal riots in villages around Rawalpindi — the experience that, a quarter of a century later, became Tamas. After Partition he moved to India, worked with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), taught English at Delhi University, and from 1957 to 1963 lived in Moscow, translating some two dozen Russian books, including Tolstoy’s Resurrection, into Hindi. He edited the literary magazine Nayī Kahāniyāṁ (1965–67), was general secretary of the Progressive Writers’ Association and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, and was a founder of SAHMAT, the cultural organisation formed after the murder of the theatre activist Safdar Hashmi. He died in Delhi on 11 July 2003.

Tamas

Tamas is set over five days in a small town and nearby villages near Rawalpindi in 1947, shortly before Partition. It opens with a poor Chamar (tanner), Nathu, being paid five rupees by a local politician’s agent, Murad Ali, to kill a pig “for veterinary purposes”. Nathu struggles all night in his hut to kill the animal. The next morning the carcass is found on the steps of the town mosque. The town erupts. Muslims retaliate; Hindus and Sikhs arm themselves; rumours fly; leaders of every community — the Congress workers who sing hymns and sweep drains, the Muslim League men, the young Hindu nationalists trained in a gymnasium by a fanatic “master” to kill (a boy, Ranvir, is initiated by killing a chicken and later murders a poor perfume-seller) — feed the fire. The British Deputy Commissioner, Richard, a scholarly man interested in Indian history and archaeology, refuses to call in the army while the violence spreads, believing it is not his business to protect the natives from one another — “Rulers have their own interests” — while his lonely wife Liza is appalled.

The riots spread to the villages. In the second half, Sikh villagers of a gurdwara, besieged by Muslim attackers, fight and die; women, rather than be captured and raped, jump with their children into a well — an episode based on real events at Thoa Khalsa. Nathu, haunted by guilt for the pig, discovers what his act has caused, and dies in the riots. When the army finally comes and the violence ends, the same politicians gather for a “peace committee” and drive through the town in a bus shouting slogans of unity — while Murad Ali, who arranged the pig, is among them.

The novel’s power lies in its restraint and its refusal to take sides: it shows how communal violence is manufactured and manipulated by politicians, agents and a colonial administration with its own interests, and how ordinary people — Nathu, the old Sikh couple Harnam Singh and Banto who are sheltered by a Muslim woman, the refugees — are caught up in it. It has been translated into many languages. Govind Nihalani’s television adaptation (1988), with Om Puri as Nathu, provoked legal challenges and fierce debate when it was broadcast on Doordarshan, during a period of renewed communal tension.

Other works

Sahni’s short stories are among the finest in Hindi. “Chīf kī Dāvat” (“The Chief’s Dinner Party”) tells of a young officer, Shamnath, giving a dinner for his British-style boss, who tries to hide his old, illiterate mother in a back room — until the Chief discovers and is charmed by her folk songs and her handicraft, and Shamnath, seeing a chance for promotion, presses his reluctant mother to make the Chief a phulkārī though her eyesight is failing. “Amṛtsar Ā Gayā Hai” (“We Have Arrived in Amritsar”) shows passengers on a train at Partition whose behaviour toward each other changes as the train crosses from one side to the other.

His novels include Jharokhe, Basantī (about a young woman migrant in Delhi’s slums) and Mayyādās kī Māṛī (a historical novel of Punjab), and his plays Hānūś (about a clockmaker in medieval Prague whose eyes are put out by the king so that he cannot make another clock), Kabirā Khaṛā Bāzār Mẽ (about the poet Kabīr and his defiance of the religious and political establishments) and Mādhavī are staples of Indian theatre. His memoir of his brother, Balraj My Brother, and his autobiography Āj ke Atīt are valuable records.

In conversation

• Tamas — “darkness”: the darkness of communal hatred and the forces that profit from it.
• “Chīf kī Dāvat” — hiding where one comes from to please the powerful.
• The pig on the mosque steps — the small, paid provocation that sets a town ablaze.