Tamasतमस

About the book

Tamas is a Hindi novel by Bhisham Sahni, published in 1974, and it is the book that defines his name. Its title is a Sanskrit word for darkness, and the novel tells, from many vantage points at once, how a city in undivided Punjab tips from tense calm into a communal riot in the time of the Partition of India in 1947. Sahni had witnessed the Rawalpindi riots of March 1947 while doing relief work there, and Tamas is built from that witness: not a history of leaders, but an account of ordinary people caught inside a violence that few of them chose.

The book won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1975. It has been translated into English, French, German, Japanese and many Indian languages, and Daisy Rockwell's English translation for Penguin is regarded as the definitive one.

What happens in Tamas?

Tamas opens with Nathu, a poor tanner, who is bribed to kill a pig. When the animal's carcass is discovered the next morning on the steps of the local mosque, the city's simmering tensions explode into riot. From there Sahni follows the violence from different vantage points: officials and politicians, and the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh residents whose shared streets turn against each other.

The aftermath the novel keeps in view is death, destruction, forced migration and the partition of a country. Yet in the midst of the carnage, as the Penguin edition puts it, rare moments of unexpected friendship and love also surface. Govind Nihalani, who adapted the book for the screen, called Tamas a prophetic warning against the use of religion as a weapon to gain and perpetuate political power.

Themes: darkness, and who lights it

The darkness of the title is not presented as fate. The novel shows communal violence being prepared before it is suffered: a paid killing, a carcass placed where it will wound most, rumour, and political calculation. Its method is patience. Every community in the city contains the frightened and the brave, the men who profit from the riot and the neighbours who hide each other from it, which is why the story is told from so many vantage points rather than through a single hero.

A second theme is what violence does to a shared city. Tamas is set before the border exists, in one Punjab, and it measures the riot not only in lives lost but in a common life, of markets, lanes and friendships across communities, that cannot simply be put back together afterwards.

The author

Bhisham Sahni (1915 to 2003) was born in Rawalpindi and was the younger brother of the actor Balraj Sahni. Punjabi was his mother tongue, though he wrote in Hindi, and he came to Tamas with a witness's knowledge: in March 1947 he had organised relief work for refugees in Rawalpindi as the riots began. He wrote six other novels, more than a hundred short stories and several plays, taught English in Delhi, and received the Padma Bhushan in 1998 and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 2002. His full story is in his Kosh entry, and Tamas stands in this Kosh beside Train to Pakistan as one of the two defining novels of Punjab's Partition.

Reception and legacy

The Sahitya Akademi Award came in 1975, a year after publication. In 1986 Govind Nihalani adapted Tamas into a television miniseries, casting Sahni himself in the role of Karmo, a Sikh character, and the adaptation went on to win a National Award. The book has never gone out of conversation since: reviewing Daisy Rockwell's translation, Nilanjana Roy wrote in Business Standard that Tamas, in either Rockwell's translation or the original Hindi, remains an essential text for the times, and the Guardian observed that the novel drove home the point that ordinary people want to live in peace.

For Punjabi readers, Tamas holds a particular place. Its author was a son of Rawalpindi writing about a Punjab city much like his own, and its subject is the wound that divided Punjab itself. It is read today in classrooms, in translation across India and the diaspora, and alongside the other Partition classics whenever the events of 1947 are studied.