Hindi Belt
by Kuldeep Kumar
Had he not passed away on July 11, 2003, Bhisham Sahni
would have turned 100 today. Officially, that is. As he mentions in his
autobiography “Aaj ke Ateet” (Today’s Pasts), his parents disagreed on his date
of birth. His mother insisted that he was one year and eleven months younger to
his elder brother Balraj but his father got his date of birth entered in the
school records as August 8, 1915, thus making him younger by a few months more.
It’s a measure of his stature as a political and cultural activist, short story
writer, novelist, playwright and actor that even the Narendra Modi government
at the Centre is celebrating his birth centenary through Sahitya Akademi
although he was opposed to the political ideology of the ruling Bharatiya
Janata Party.
Even those who are not familiar with Hindi literature
know about his novel “Tamas” (Darkness) and the tele-serial of the same name
made by Govind Nihalani who later turned it into a film as well. As a child,
Bhisham Sahni had witnessed communal riots in his native Rawalpindi. As a young
Congress worker, he campaigned against communal politics of the mid-1940s and
experienced the horrors, forced displacement and unprecedented violence that
preceded and followed the cataclysmic event of the Partition. His family too
had to migrate to this side of the newly created border and had to wage a
struggle to survive and settle down. After Yashpal’s “Jhootha Sach” (False
Truth) and Rahi Masoom Raza’s “Aadha Gaon” (Half-a-Village), “Tamas” is the third
significant novel through which a creative writer tries to understand as well
as explain as to what went had gone wrong to bring such a monumental tragedy
upon the Indian sub-continent.
The novel remained dormant for many years and the
memories of the Partition were brought to the surface by a visit to the
riot-hit Bhiwandi in 1971 in the company of his elder brother Balraj Sahni and
some other colleagues. “Tamas” was published in 1974 by Rajkamal Prakashan and
received the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award the very next year. At the
moment, it has got inextricably attached with its writer’s name. It has been
translated into many languages including English, French, German, Japanese,
Gujarati, Malayalam, Kashmiri and Manipuri.
Such phenomenal popularity of a work often overshadows
its writer’s other creations as had happened in the case of Shrilal Shukla who
was known by his novel “Raag Darbari”. I became aware of this fact when
recently, Ramesh Upadhyaya, a well-known fiction writer in Hindi, remarked that
when he started reading Bhisham Sahni’s novel “Mayadas ki Madi”, he enjoyed it
even more than reading “Tamas” and felt that from the point of view of the art
of fiction writing, it was perhaps a better novel than “Tamas."
Although Bhisham Sahni wrote a number of excellent
short stories, “Chief ki Dawat” remains the most admired of them. As a writer,
what distinguished him was his humanism, compassion and an ability to bring
into sharp relief the human essence of even a palpably inhuman situation. In his
life as well as literature, he was a most unassuming person whose humility at
times embarrassed others. His plays such as “Hanush”, “Madhavi” and “Kabira
Khada Bazar Mein” proved to be great theatrical successes and he is perhaps one
of the very few writers who have been awarded by both Sahitya Akademi and
Sangeet Natak Akademi. He was also honoured with Padma Bhushan and Fellowship
of the Sahitya Akademi.
Like his elder brother Balraj Sahni, Bhisham Sahni too
was very closely associated with Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA)
that played a historic role in creating a pan-Indian progressive cultural
movement and bringing artistes such as Ravi Shankar, Balraj Sahni, K A Abbas,
Salil Chaudhary, Shailendra, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and many others on
one platform. This experiece stood him in good stead when he acted in
tele-serial “Tamas” and Saeed Mirza’s film “Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho”, Bernardo
Bertolucci’s film “Little Buddha” and Aparna Sen’s film “Mr. and Mrs. Iyer”. He
also wrote the screenplay for Kumar Shahani’s film “Kasba”.
A Punjabi to the core, he chose to become a Hindi
writer and managed to retain both the identities in a unique manner. He spelt
his name as Bhisham (as Punjabis would pronounce it) in English and as Bhishma
(the correct Sanskrit pronunciation) in Hindi. His other works included
“Mayadas ki Madi”, “Kadiyan”, “Basanti” and “Neeloo, Neelima, Nilofar”. Most of
his books were published by Rajkamal Prakashan whose literary journal “Nai
Kahani” he had edited for some time in the early 1960s.
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