Jharokheझरोखे

About the book

Jharokhe is a Hindi novel by Bhisham Sahni, published in 1967. It was Sahni's first novel, written seven years before Tamas, the Partition novel that made his name. Its title means windows, and the book is built the way its title suggests: not as one continuous story, but as a series of views into a boy's life in Rawalpindi, in undivided Punjab, from his earliest memories to his coming into manhood.

Readers in English know the book as Boyhood, Anna Khanna's translation for Penguin Classics, made in consultation with the author. Sahni was born in Rawalpindi in 1915 and spent his childhood there before going to Lahore for college, so the city in the novel is the city he knew first. The novel is fiction, not autobiography, but it draws on the same streets, the same kind of house and the same world he grew up in.

The book is short, and it asks to be read slowly. Its scenes do not join up into a single plot; they fall like pieces of a kaleidoscope, as one reviewer put it, into patterns the reader traces at leisure. That is the point: a boyhood remembered is not a story with a beginning and an end, but a set of windows opening onto a life.

What happens in Jharokhe?

The narrator is a boy growing up in a prosperous Hindu family in Rawalpindi. We see him through the eyes of his adult self, who watches rather than explains: the adult does not step in to comment on what the boy does or feels, so the childhood arrives without the softening of nostalgia. The family fills the house: a father who spends most of his time in his office at home, a mother, an elder brother and two sisters.

The figure who stays with the reader is Tulsi, the family's servant. He recurs through the fragments almost as a second hero, the narrator's shadow and mirror. Caught between his humble origins and the comfortable household he serves, Tulsi tries to live in both worlds and falls between them, and through him the novel quietly brings class into focus in a house that otherwise seems only warm and busy.

The fragments run from the boy's first memories to his young manhood, and the book comes full circle, ending with a scene that repeats the one it began with. The outside world presses in as the years pass: the novel reaches the communal tensions of the 1940s, and one scene readers remember follows a fifteen-year-old boy during a riot, walking beside an old Muslim perfume seller who, not knowing the boy's purpose, promises to see him safely home. It is a measure of the book's honesty that it does not flinch from the cruelty children can carry, or from the kindness that meets it.

Themes: windows onto a boyhood

The first theme is memory itself. Sahni refuses the usual shape of a coming-of-age story, in which a boy grows step by step into a settled adult. His narrator reaches young manhood with no clear vocation and no fixed place in life, unlike his father, who has his office and his routines. The fragments refuse to add up to a single meaning, and that refusal is the book's argument: a life, especially a childhood, does not arrive as a finished story.

The second theme is home. Almost everything in the novel happens inside the family house, yet home is not a safe place in the simple sense. Warmth and harshness live side by side there, and sudden tragedy can enter it, just as the outside world can. Sahni shows children as they are: absorbed in their own world, often unaware of the feelings of others, funny and careless by turns. The tone stays melancholic without becoming bleak, and there is real comedy in it too.

The third theme is class, carried by Tulsi. The servant's wish to rise above his station, and the price he pays for it, gives the novel its sharpest edge. Through him, Sahni shows a household that is kind and unjust at the same time, and a boy learning to see both things at once.

ਲੇਖਕ

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. He took a master's degree in English literature from Government College, Lahore, joined the Quit India movement in 1942 and spent time in jail, worked with the Indian People's Theatre Association, taught English at Delhi College, and spent seven years in Moscow translating Russian books into Hindi. His full story is in his Kosh entry.

Jharokhe was the first of his seven novels. After it came Kadian (1971), Tamas (1974), Basanti (1979), Mayyadas Ki Madi (1987), Kunto (1993) and Neeloo, Nilima, Nilofar (2000), along with more than a hundred short stories and several plays. Tamas won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1975, and Sahni received the Padma Bhushan in 1998 and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 2002.

Reception and legacy

Jharokhe has lived a quieter life than Tamas, but it has never gone out of print in the way first novels often do. Anna Khanna's English translation, published by Penguin Classics as Boyhood, brought it to readers who do not read Hindi, and reviewers have praised the way it holds a child's point of view without ever talking down to the child or dressing the past in nostalgia. It is now read alongside Tamas as the other half of Sahni's Punjab: the city before the riot, the home before the border.

For Punjabi readers the book has a particular pull. Rawalpindi, the city of Sahni's childhood, is now in Pakistan, and the novel keeps a record of a Punjab that existed before 1947: its streets, its households, its mixture of communities. Read today, it is both a small, tender book about growing up and a record of a world that Partition took away.