Tamas, Bhism Sahni: A review

Bhisham Sahni was an iconic writer who transformed the landscape of Hindi literature.

Tamas, his best known novel won the Sahitya Akademy Award in 1975 and was subsequently adapted into a National Award-winning film by Govind Nihalani. It is regarded as one of the iconic partition novel. After Premchand's Godan, Tamas remains perhaps the best-known Hindi novel in English-reading India.

As a young Congress worker in Rawalpindi, where Sahni was born, he has witnessed first-hand the rioting in March of 1947 that preceeded the Partition; but it was not until he visited the town of Bhiwandi, outside Mumbai, in the aftermath of the 1970 riots there, that he was inspired to write Tamas.

Tamas=darkness.

Structurally, Tamas is a highly unusual work, with no clear human protagonist. Readers who are not familiar with the novel will be confused as it slowly dawns on them that the real protagonist of Tamas is not a person at all, but the riot itself. Indeed, Tamas describes the anatomy of a riot and it is the story of that riot that we follow.

Not only does Tamas's darkness fall due to a concerted policy of Divide and Rule on the part of the British colonial administrators, but local politicians and religious leaders happily play their part in implementing the divisions and fomenting unrest.

Sahni wrote Tamas in the first place because he saw the cycle repeating in communal riots in independent India.

Tamas is one of those rare Hindi novels that has been translated not once but twice. The first translation by Jai Ratan was published in 1981, while the second was undertaken by Sahni himself which was published in 2001.

A third teanslation was obviously made by Nihalani when he made the film, he also made some changes to the main script.

This particular book is translated by Daisy Rockwell, who is an artist and writer living in northern New England. Rockwell holds a PhD in Hindi literature and has taught Hindi-Urdu and South Asian literature at a number of American Universities.