Bhisham Sahni

Tamas

(Rajkamal Prakashan, New Delhi, 1973)

(Sahitya Academy Awardee-Hindi-1975)

"Sri Bhisham Sahni, distinguished novelist and writer of short stories in Hind~ was born in 1915 in Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan. He took his MA. and Ph.D. degrees in English and is a Senior Lecturer at the Zakir Husain Memorial College, Delhi. He spent nearly seven years in the Soviet Union where he trans­lated a number of Russian and Soviet classics into Hindi. During 1965-68, he edited Nayi Kahaniyan, a magazine of short stories. He has published three novels and four collections of his short stories so far. His works have been translated into Russian, English and Malayalam. The Government of Punjab honoured him with the Shiromani Lekhak Award last year.     .

Tamas is considered an outstanding contribution to Hindi literature for its artistic control, firm grasp of reality, excel­lence of characterisation, and its humanity and authenticity of experience." (Citation)

“Tamas” means darkness, i.e. darkness of communalism and also is suggestive of ignorance on the part of our people who fall victims to the sinister designs of the forces of communalism, an offshoot of imperialism left over by the foreign rulers in our country. This novel is based on the communal riots in the early parts of 1947 which broke out in Rawalpindi (now in Pakistan). The author, Bhisham Sahni, had joined the relief committee at that time as a member of Congress State Committee. In this novel, he has been successful in transforming, his experiences, observations and close knowledge of the eyewitness accounts during the culmination and epidemic spread of the one of the most ghastly communal outbursts of the 20th century in this subcontinent.

The secular and progressive outlook of the author has enabled him to project an objective, dispassionate and a purposeful epic scenario of the most tragic events which took place at that time. The peculiarity of the fiction partly lies in the fact that it is a story of five days only with a spread over of epical dimension and partly that it is a story of circumstances prevailing over individual characters without any hero or anti-hero as such. It presents a spectrum of contradictions arising out of a communal mentality of human mind, carried over by the imperial forces, in collusion with narrow minded persons with their self-styled interpretation of history and social surroundings. The role of foreign rulers has been appropriately underlined in a suggestive style. The foreign rulers in India always proved to be the starters and catalytic agents of these communal riots even though they never escaped any opportunity to project themselves as mediators and peace makers after the riots have developed into an atmosphere of uncivilised behaviour, insecurity and violent anarchy. Communal forces in the country are still active and never miss any opportunity to flare up for selfish and narrow motives. It is in this context that the novel is all the more relevant even today and the story of five days, before Independence, becomes a story of more than a period of fifty years; what has been depicted about the events around Rawalpindi becomes a description of a chain of events in the country.

The novel is written in a simple, lucid and natural style with a balanced outlook. The language and diction used in the fiction takes a creative form which looks like a transparent crystal with the combination of its content. There is also a view that the story content is too small to assimilate in itself, the characteristic of an epic novel and due to this the plot seems to be over dealt with.

Tamas transmits a message of warning to our people. The people should not be misled by the communal propaganda. They should not fall a prey to the onslaught of communalism. It clearly depicts the sad after affects of such onslaughts of communalism. The novel demonstrates beyond a shadow of doubt that it is the common people, the poor and the innocent that are worst affected in communal riot~.

Raj Kumar Saini

(Source: Sahitya Academy Awards – Books and Writers – 1955-1978

Published by Sahitya Academy. ISBN 81 7201 014 1)