Sahitya Akademi

Bhisham Sahni (1915—2003)

Author(s): Alok Bhalla
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 47, No. 4 (216) (July-August 2003), pp. 8-16
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23341094
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 TRIBUTES

Bhisham Sahni
(1915-2003)

Alok Bhalla

hisham Sahni, one of the most

respected writers of fiction and
plays in contemporary India, passed
away in July 2003. Bhisham was not
only a distinguished man of letters, he
was also a dignified and articulate
spokesman of India's moral and social
commitment to a rational, secular and
humane society. In any literary history
of our times, he would find a place
in the great tradition of socially-en
gaged Indian writers like Rabindranath
Tagore, Premchand, Tarashankar
Bandyopadhyay, T. Sivasankara Pillai
and others.
There are some people whose
presence makes our lives seem
a little
brighter, gentler and less fallen. They are not saints or stern moralists.
Instead, they have the grace not to judge us too severely when we
talk carelessly or think coarsely In their company we begin to wonder
why we, too, cannot behave less dishonourably, act more courteously,
or see more clearly. Bhisham was one of them. Each one of us who
knew him somehow felt more enriched in his presence.
I have two abiding memories of Bhisham as a charming and
graceful companion, and as a serious and concerned citizen, from
the days we spent together as Fellows at the Indian Institute of

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Advanced Study in Shimla. One evening aswe sat talking, the
conversation drifted to Bhisham's involvement with the Indian People's
Theatre Association in Bombay (IPTA). In those days, he had wanted
to be an actor like his brother Balraj Sahni. He spoke nostalgically
about the 50's in India when it was still possible to feel that one
was a part of an intellectual and social community. Suddenly, his
wife, Sheila, reminded him of a song they used to sing about social
change and triumphant hope. And, then, both Sheila and he began
to sing remembered fragments of old IPTA songs of protest and
defiance. They smiled at each other's failing memories, told anecdotes
about the plays they had acted in, were critical about the political

positions they had taken back then, and recalled fondly other writers
and actors who had marched with them down the streets of Bombay

protesting about this and that. There was no bitterness in what they
said; no denigration of the people they had known, and no sadness
about the life they had lived. It was as if they had understood that
grief and sorrow had to be met with courage and a commitment
to a better future.
My other memory is of the long personal interview I conducted
with Bhisham about his life in Rawalpindi and Lahore and the
different fictionalrepresentations of Partition of India. As we talked
about his childhood in Rawalpindi, and his student days in Gov
ernment College, Lahore, between 1915 and 1947, it seemed as if,
in the process of recreating his personal, political and religious past,
Bhisham was reaffirming a few of the basic moral and political
assumptions of his life and writing. It occurred to me that there were

perhaps two rules of thought and action which he held onto firmly
throughout his long life: one, never humiliate anyone; and, two, never
give in to religious and sectarian hatred. Both were derived from
his experiences of life at a strange juncture of history. He had been
a witness to the violence of Partition and had been forced to leave
behind all that he had known and cherished when he left Rawalpindi
on 14 August, 1947. His conversation with me was remarkably free
from rancour and vengeful memories. It was not that he had forgotten
the days of riots, arson and murder. Rather, for him, they were grim
aberrations, which sometimes scar communities when social and
political reason
is suspended. In a larger human sense, the years
around Partition
were, he thought, empty of meaning, logic and
purpose; years of tamas, of blank darkness. Partition, he insisted, was
a mistake; the result perhaps of the fatal idolatry of religious politics,
which had tempted many amongst us and against which we failed
to guard ourselves. The horrors of Partition, he admitted, had so
shocked him that he had come to the despairing conclusion that as

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a people we did not have the capacity for decency and freedom.
His memories, however, refused to let him forget that there was also
a time, prior to Partition, when our social and experiential habitat
was such that we were able to conduct our religious affairs in tolerant
regard for each other and without paranoiac hatred.
Hislife prior to Partition, he insisted, was dominated by anti
colonialist politics and not by communal antagonism. It was inter

esting to note that what he remembered of his pre-Partition past was

consciously inflected by Gandhian and Nehruvian concerns — concerns
which he rarely abandoned through the rest of his life, even when
he was an active member of the Communist Party. As he talked about
his childhood and youth in West Punjab, I felt that he was reaffirming
days of deep-rooted friendships among Hindus and Muslims, reliable
acts of world-making and exemplary beliefs; that he was once again
reordering for himself a historically stable world, before Partition
suddenly forced him to confront the horror caused by the politics
of religious identities. Of course, he never suggested that pre-Partition

Rawalpindi and Lahore were idyllic communities. He was more than

ready to acknowledge that life's contingencies that were there, as

everywhere and always, offered enough chances to prejudice, bigotry,
stupidity, opportunism and contradictory loyalties to make for the
usual miseries of everyday life. But, still, life was stable enough to

suggest that Rawalpindi and Lahore were 'home'. These cities had
their own claim to culture and civilisational purpose. He could not
remember any compelling examples of religious prejudice to suggest
that the relations between the Hindus and the Muslims were so
marked with opposition, suspicion and humiliation that the genocide
of 1947 was historically foredoomed. Memories of a more communally
harmonious life before Partition, he said, still guided his present
secular politics and gave him hope.
Inevitably, thereafter, our conversations turned to Tamas, which
was first published in Hindi in 1974 and fetched him the Sahitya
Akademi Award in 1975. We talked about the series of communal
riots in post-Independence India, which had persuaded him to re
examine the violence of Partition in his novel. Partition, we agreed,
was a particular historical event, the result of a singular moment
and its ideological passions. The Hindu-Muslim violence had other
causes and other provocations. It was important for us to make that
discrimination, because our ways of dealing with many of the present
conflicts in the country hinged on our understanding of Partition
either as a unique event or as merely a bloodier example of a long

history of communal conflicts. Neither of us was tempted by the

argument of the ideological and religious right in India and Pakistan,

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that the agenda of Partition had still to be completed. If there was

nothing 'historically necessary' or 'natural' about Partition in the first

place, there was even less justification in the campaigns to divide

the nation further into smaller religious fragments and in the acts
of vandalism designed to undermine the secular structure of the
nation. Instances of communalriots, the destruction of the Babri
Masjid and the sectarian terror in Punjab or Kashmir did not point
to the existence of a tragic fault-line in the identity of the country;
they were, instead, temporary distortions of the composite ethos
of the nation; signs of unresolved economic and social difficulties,
and not examples of unredeemable antagonism between religious
groups.
We talked at length about the film based on Tamas, directed
by Govind Nihalani. The film was made in 1987, about thirteen years
after the publication of the novel. Bhisham was one of the writers
of the screenplay, and, hence, partly responsible for the radical changes
in the narrative structure of the story. He also acted as Harnam Singh,
the moral centre in the filmic version. While considering the dif
ferences between the novel and the film, I wondered why he had
agreed to play the role of Harnam Singh, an old Sikh who runs a
tea shop in a small village. By accepting this role, was he in some
way reliving the political refusal of his father, who was a reasonably
prosperous businessman in Rawalpindi, to migrate in 1947? His
father's historicalunderstanding, he told me, was not very different
from that of millions of Hindus and Muslims. Like countless others,
his father did not believe that a mere change of rulers meant 'exile'
for people like him from their land, their memories, genealogies and
traditions.
I wondered why, in a significant departure from the novel,
Harnam Singh had
become a figure of moral courage in the film.
In the novel, Harnam Singh is an emblem of uncomprehending sorrow
and suffering. After he reaches the refugee camp, he talks obsessively
about all that he has lost and pleads inconsolably for help. In the
film, however, he acquires a tragic dignity and becomes a Gandhian
figure who sets aside his own sorrow in order
to help someone in
greater need of solace. Instead of being a bewildered old man, whom
one pities, because he has no hope of a life of meaning and purpose,
he decides to adopt Nathu's pregnant wife (played by Deepa Sahi)
as his daughter. He neither inquires into her past nor worries about
the fact that she is the wife of a Hindu and a chamar. The novel
is bleak,and promises neither forgiveness nor redemption. The film,
however, ends with Harnam Singh's instinctive resistance to barbar
ism. His decision to make Nathu's wife a part of his family is not

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only a fine gesture of 'in-gathering' and community-making, but is
also contrary to the politics of separate identities and hysterical
assertions of religious difference, which led to Partition and which
still threatens our peace. Therefore, in the film, the name Harnam
Singh acquires a new resonance. Instead of being everyman who
suffers, he becomes an example of what any man ought to do
and be ('Harnam' is an abbreviation of 'Hari Nam' meaning God.
However, 'Harnam' can also be translated as 'everyman's name' or
'any name').
Bhisham said that when he played the role of Harnam Singh
in the film, he felt more empathy for him than he did for the character
depicted in the novel. He added that the moral fortitude of Harnam
Singh in the film was perhaps a result of his own increasing confidence
in the ability of the country's composite ethos to withstand new
separatist threats and, at the same time, to reach out to its neighbours
in order to establish a new peace in the Indian subcontinent.
I suggested that despite some fundamental differences in the
narrative thrust of the novel and the film, the primary force of both
the versions of Tamas lay in the assertion that, even during the darkest
hours of Partition, there were a number of non-heroic and fallible
people, who continued to abide by the covenant of a civil society,
which always places greater value on 'well-doing' than on religious
fatwas. Thus, Nathu (played by Om Puri) intuitively knows that he
has done wrong by allowing himself, out of greed and lust, to become
the cause of the defilement of a mosque. He does not regard the
communal frenzy that follows the discovery of a pig's carcass on
the steps of the mosque as a triumph of his Hindu identity, but sees
it «is a sign of the ruin of his ethical
self. This aspect of his character
is highlighted in the film version.
When he sees the dead pig before
the mosque, he says to himself: "Maine paap kiya hai" — I have sinned.

Typical of many other characters in Bhisham's work, he feels the

indignity of having been used because he is poor. He accepts that
his error of judgement has caused such grievous harm to the com
munity that he will have to atone for it with his life. It is this process
of thought that makes him so achingly human and the subject of
our profoundest sympathy and pity.
Similarly, when Harnam Singh andhis wife (played by Dina
Pathak) knock on Rajo's door seeking refuge and mercy, she does
not forget that she is a Muslim, but finds herself facing the only
elemental question that really matters: What is the human worth of
the politics of religious identities being played out around her?
Confronted with their plea for help, Rajo (played by Surekha Sikri)
understands that her sense of self-worth, which has been formed

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within a multi-religious society, can survive only if she fulfils her
responsibility towards the old couple, no matter who they are and
what their religious faith is. After some hesitation, she decisively says:
"Na jao ji, rukjao, sankal chada do... Ghar aaye ko nikaal dun? Allah ke
dargah mein sabhi ko jam hai." (Don't go. Stay. Lock the door...You
knocked at my door. How can I throw you out? We shall all have
to stand before Allah's dargah someday...)
Bhisham agreed with my assertion that the essential subtext
of almost every narrative instant in Tamas is that, prior to Partition,
hardly anyone would have asserted that their identities as Hindus
and Muslims had been formed in contempt of each other. Indeed,
if seriously questioned about the traditions within which they located
themselves, they would have, like him, constructed a life-world which
was communally shared. It is not that they would have presented
their villages and towns as Utopian communities—obviously not, since
utopias are merely imaginative structures against which we judge
our various failings. They would, however, have affirmed that their
finite human lives, their social fates, were entangled with each other;
that their religious selves were not separate from the work they did,
the friendships they formed or the language they spoke together
within the same living spaces. That is why, when Partition did finally
happen, and was accompanied by such enormous violence, it left
them utterly bewildered.
My interview with Bhisham was a sort of flow-chart of thoughts,
tentative conclusions and reformulations, pauses and shifts in argu
ments, detours through the shadow land of memories and recognition
of something understood with clarity. What emerged at the end was
a sense of the presence of Bhisham, a feeling of what he had become
as a result of his childhood in Rawalpindi and youth in Lahore, his
interactions with his family and his Muslim neighbours, his early
ideological fascination with Gandhi and later involvement with the
Left, and his work as a writer of some of the most significant novels
and plays about our national identity.
Tamas is Bhisham's most famous work. It must, however, be
recorded that his other fictional work and his plays are as carefully
crafted and marked by the same compassionate imagination which
refuses to accept that suffering cannot be alleviated and that op
pression cannot be resisted. For him, the writer's problem was not
merely an aesthetic one. As a writer, he was not only concerned with
how to keep the shape and flow of a story, or how to find the right
timbre and voice. His characters were always so finely inflected as
to create the widest range of social reality. The real substance of a
work, he thought, came into being only after the writer had found

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a way of giving his fiction a structural coherence and a unique

linguistic form. The writer's craft had value for him if it was
mindful of the most ordinary of things that make up our social
habitat.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the moral characters of his
fiction and plays are neither fiery rebels nor inspired prophets, but
simple and non-heroic people who refuse to surrender the autonomy
of the self to the fatal idolatries
of revolutionary ideologies, religious
enthusiasms, caste
arrogance or linguistic pride. They are men and
women who assume, out of long habit, that reason and common
sense, tolerance and a lively engagement with the world around them
are sufficient guarantee of their ethical survival and all that is required
to define the civilisational purpose of any decent society.

Bhisham Sahni was born in 1915 in Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan.

His father was a middle-class trader who had earlier migrated from
Kabul to Rawalpindi. Bhisham studied first at the local Gurukul and
then at the D.A.V. School founded by the Arya Samaj in Rawalpindi.
After High School, he went to the prestigious Government College
in Lahore where he studied English Literature. He obtained his
Master's Degree from the University of Punjab in 1937. For a few
years after his graduation, he worked with his father, and also taught
as an honorary lecturer in a small college in Rawalpindi. In 1942,

inspired by the Quit India Movement, he became an active participant

in the anti-colonial struggle and worked in the local Congress party
to implement Gandhiji's social programme. When there were com
munal riots in Rawalpindi in 1947, he joined the Relief Committee

set-up to help the Hindu and Muslim victims of the violence. A few
months later, Partition of the country changed his life dramatically.
He migrated to India, leaving his home and his place of birth, on
August 14, 1947.
For a while after that, he lived in Bombay, where his brother,

Balraj Sahni, introduced him to the work of the Indian People's Theatre
Association (IPTA) established by a group of gifted progressive
writers, directors and actors. He was an enthusiastic member of IPTA
and directed a number of important plays for it. His love for the
theatre and the cinema lasted a lifetime. Just a few months before
he passed away, he acted as an old Muslim who becomes a victim
of Hindu fanaticism in Aparna Sen's film, Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. Typically,
he also acted as a simple man who gets caught in the vicious coils

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of the Indian legal system in Syeed Mirza's film, Mohan Joshi Hazir
Ho.
In 1950, Bhisham moved to Delhi and joined Delhi College (now
Zakir Hussain College) as a lecturer in English. In 1958, he received
his Doctorate for his work on the concept of the hero in Hindi fiction
from the University of Punjab, Chandigarh. Except for a brief period,
he continued to teach at Delhi College till his retirement in 1980.
Between 1957 and 1963, he worked in Moscow as a translator of
Russian texts into Hindi for the Foreign Languages Publishing House.
He translated more than twenty-five Russian works into Hindi. Some
of his best-known translations are Tolstoy's Resurrection, The Kreutzer
Sonata and The Death of Ivan Ilych, and Chengez Aitmatov's My First
Teacher. In addition to his translations from Russian, Bhisham also
translated extensively from Hindi and
Punjabi into English. Indeed,
his translations alone are sufficient to grant him an important place
in the history of Hindi literature.
Bhisham began to write his fiction and plays rather late in life.
His first collection of stories, Bhagya Rekha, was published in 1953.
His other well-known short-story collections are Pahla Path (1956),
Bhatakti Raakh (1966), Patariyan (1973), Wangchoo (1978), Shobhayatra
(1979), Nishachar (1983), Pali (1986) and Daiyan (1997). Many of his
short stories like, "Amritsar Aa Gaya Hai" (We Have Reached Amritsar),
and "Pali" are regarded as classics of Hindi literature and find a
place in nearlyevery anthology of contemporary fiction from India.
Bhisham's first two novels, Jharokhe (1967) and Kadiyan (1971),
won him considerable attention from literary critics. His major success,
however, came with Tamas (1974). Tamas was followed by two major
novels, Basanti (1980), an angry tale about life in a bastí near Delhi,
and Maiyadas ki Mardi (1988), an epic which begins with the Sikh
wars against the British and ends with the social reform movements
in the first quarter of this century. These three novels, I think, can
be read together as Bhisham's attempt to think about the formation
of the Indian nation through anti-colonialist struggles and its betrayal,
first by Partition and later by policies which were ruthlessly incon
siderate of the poor. His last novel was Neela, Nilam, Neelofer, published
in 2000.
Bhisham's first play, Hanush (1977), based on a Czech legend
about the first clock-maker in the country, is a profound investigation
of an artisfs struggle with his conscience. This was followed by Kabira
Khara Baazar Mein (1981), a classic play about our pluralistic heritage
which has always respected men of God — any God — who take
upon themselves the enormously difficult task of retrieving all that
is good in life, and of repudiating hatred. It is significant that the

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play continues to be performed before large and appreciative au
diences even today. Bhisham wrote four more plays — Madhavi (1984),
Muawaze (1992), Rang De Basanti Chola (1994) and Alamgir (1998) in
which he continued to deal with the problems of oppression, religious
bigotry and possibilities of resistance which had been the basis of
his entire literary canon.
Bhisham's work has been translated into a number of Indian
languages. Many of his stories, novels and plays have also been
translated into English,German, French, Spanish and Japanese.
It is not surprising that Bhisham was the recipient of many
honours and awards. Apart from the Sahitya Akademi Award, he
received the MP. Kala
Sahitya Parishad Award (1974), the U.P.
Government Award (1975), the Shiromani Lekhak Award (1979), the
Lotus Award from the Afro-Asian Writer's Association (1981), and
the Soviet Land Nehru Award (1983). Further, in recognition of his
outstanding contribution to literature and society, in 1998 the Gov
ernment of India conferred upon him the Padma Bhushan. He was
made the Fellow of Sahitya Akademi in 2002.

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