Seeing through his eyes

Published August 28, 2016

August is the month for paying tribute to Bhisham Sahni and commemorating the enduring legacy of his writings. He was born in August and would have celebrated his 101st birthday this year. Through his books, his devoted readers still commemorate his legacy. August is doubly relevant as this month marks the tumultuous events of Independence and Partition, which bifurcated his life into two halves, each half now belonging to a different country. He became one of the most remarkable chroniclers, emblematic of his times, as he went on to write Tamas. Having mentioned Tamas, I must say at the outset that Sahni has a claim to fame as a writer of not just one but many masterpieces.

The date of his birth is not very clear. He wrote that while his father did mark his birth in the family register, his mother did not pay much heed to calendars but remembered significant events in relationship to each other. For her, Bhisham was born one year and 11 months after his brother, who was to become a luminary of Indian cinema himself. More than the date, it was the place which was to become memorable. His family had moved from Peshawar and settled in Rawalpindi, which has its claim to fame as being the setting for Tamas.

The year of his birth puts him in close proximity to Ismat Chughtai, Krishan Chander and Rajinder Singh Bedi, while making him a little younger than Saadat Hassan Manto — all of them very different from each other and all remarkable fiction writers. Their centenary years have been marked with varying degrees of fanfare, but Sahni’s birth centenary went largely unnoticed in the city where he was born and the city where he completed his college education and began his literary career. I wonder if we have stopped taking any interest in some writers because they belong to a pre-Partition past that we do not wish to relate to or engage with.


On 101 years of Bhisham Sahni, a prolific writer whose Hindi short stories, novels and plays are as much enjoyed in their English translations


Anniversaries come and go, but a writer like Bhisham Sahni continues to be relevant in Pakistan, particularly for Tamas. Only a handful of his books were once available in Pakistan, but new translations have made his work more accessible. A volume of selected short stories was made available a few years ago, and Penguin India has now published attractive paperbacks of his novels Basanti, Boyhood and Mansion in the Modern Classics series, which seems to me to be indicative of his status. A new translation of Tamas, the third so far, has been published by Penguin. The translator, Daisy Rockwell, is a well-known scholar who has also translated Upendranath Ashk’s remarkable Urdu-Hindi novel Girti Deewarein as Falling Walls. Rockwell’s introduction makes its case for a new translation and, in hers, the novel reads even better. Translated by Snehal Shingavi, the memoir Today’s Pasts, a remarkable feat by Sahni in his later years, has recently been published as a Penguin Classic in a handsome hardback edition. From his early days spent in Rawalpindi and Lahore to writing his remarkable books, this memoir puts his entire life and literary career in fine perspective. This book is especially relevant reading for local readers and scholars for Sahni’s analysis and experience of the Progressive Writers Movement, and his encounters with a number of Urdu writers.

A retrospective look at a life full of significant moments and a sort of summing up, Today’s Pasts is a remarkable read, offering a vantage point for an assessment of its author’s life and literary career. In the translator’s introduction, Shingavi offers his assessment of the book as “perhaps one of the most important pieces of intellectual and cultural history we have of 20th-century India, written by one of the most significant personalities of 20th-century Hindi theatre and fiction.” High praise indeed, but well deserved. The swift flowing narrative is close in spirit to his fiction, in its remarkable readability and the way it imprints itself on the reader’s mind. In the first few pages we have a toddler who is given to wandering all over by himself and has to be brought back by a brother or a servant, until he is made to wear a brass medallion around his neck that tells people what his name is and the address he should be sent back to. Red chilli powder was the punishment he would find at home. The medallion is perhaps the beginning of an identity tag characterising his work. He wrote that he was still given to wanderlust and had found much pleasure in it. In a remarkable vignette, we are told that the family had moved from Peshawar following a series of murderous attacks by people who would descend for a looting spree and then dash back up to their encampments.

He describes the small lanes and bazaars with great flourish, just as he brings to life the many characters inhabiting the area. In a few brushstrokes he manages to say much more than many writers: “Rawalpindi was a city suspended between two other cities — Lahore on one side, and Peshawar on the other, in between was Rawalpindi. The people of Peshawar were old-fashioned, while Lahore was a modern city. The people from Peshawar were known as Pathans. A Pathan meant being quick to kill or die, being angry, wearing shirts with hundreds of wrinkles, and walking around with a bandolier across the chest. On the other hand, people from Lahore were thought to be skinny, bespectacled, calculating, sharp, intellectual and independent-minded. Rawalpindi was influenced by both of them. But in order to maintain its independence, it sang praises of Peshawari arrogance and Lahori modernism.”

For several years Sahni worked in Moscow as a translator; his impressions of the problems that Soviet Russian citizens encountered are first-hand and sharply etched. He does not get into political commentary, but his narrative builds up a sense that the Soviets cannot continue like this and are headed for disaster.

Sahni initially gained fame as a short story writer and became associated with the Nayi Kahani movement. While I don’t know his work as a playwright, I first read his stories in Urdu translations. I did not really care for his Partition stories as much as I did the work of other writers. I still recall the story ‘Cheel’, which I read in manuscript form when it was translated by the poet Inaam Nadeem. His most ambitious book is Mansion, bigger in scope and volume than his other novels. It shows how the Khalsa rulers lost their hold over Punjab and how the British established their control. Then there is ‘Basanti’, a dramatic story of a defiant girl from Delhi’s slums, who would surely have been killed in the name of ‘honour’ had she been born in Pakistan today. Included in this smart new Penguin set is Boyhood, an intense coming-of-age short novel better described by its original name, Jharokay, in which childhood and sexual awakening are sensitively captured.

Readable and interesting as his other novels are, his best known work remains Tamas. The source for Govind Nihalani’s justly famous mini-serial, the novel demands to be read. The opening scene, in which Nathu slaughters a pig without realising that its carcass will be thrown near a mosque to inflame a riot, is unforgettable. Dramatic in the way it unfolds, the tension builds up as the inevitable riot is unleashed upon the city. The literary genre of ‘fasadat kay afsaney’, or stories about riots, was much in vogue with Urdu writers and critics around Partition. Tamas, it seems to me, is the riot novel par excellence. It describes the anatomy of a riot, according to its translator Rockwell, who considers the riot to be the main protagonist of the novel, creating its unusual form, since it offers no neat endings or tidy narrative patterns. The narrative comes to a stop but the story does not end; further riots remain an open possibility.

I had the honour of meeting Sahni in Delhi during a Saarc Writers Conference, organised by Ajit Cour. He seemed shy and pensive, and back then I had not read much of his work. The conversation with him that I found most revealing was recorded by Alok Bhalla in his invaluable Partition Dialogues, along with conversations with Intizar Hussain, Bapsi Sidhwa, Krishna Sobti and others. In response to questions put forward by Bhalla, Sahni spoke of how a writer draws upon his experience and memories, and then went on to say that, “the partition of the country should have put an end to the riots, but it didn’t.” No wonder then, that the latter-day riots in Bhiwandi made him relive the violence of 1947.

I see Sahni in fiction’s hall of fame, standing in close proximity to Intizar Hussain. Not because of any ideological affinity. In fact, they were poles apart. Sahni was a full blown progressive and remained close to socialist-realist fiction, while Hussain, who maintained his distance from any kind of ideology, moved from realism towards fables and myths. They could be described as parallel lives, moving in opposite directions. After 1947, Sahni moved from Lahore to Delhi while Hussain travelled in the opposite direction. I find another affinity between the two, this time in their memoirs. There is a kind of shyness and hesitancy in Sahni that Sanghavi describes as “omissions”. “It is almost as if Sahni is consistently and constantly erasing his footprints from his own story, trying very hard to reroute his book into the story of something other than himself,” he writes in his introduction. In a similar vein, Hussain’s memoir, Charaghon Ka Dhuwan, is so full of people that it takes a while to realise that the author is not at the centre of the stage. In spite of this, in both books you begin to look at the world through the eyes of the respective author. Each, in his place, gifted with a distinct, personal voice and the ability to impart to their readers the gift of seeing the world anew.

The author is a writer and critic who is currently teaching Partition literature at a private university. His latest book is a study of the life and works of Intizar Hussain.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 28th, 2016

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