A master of the fractured narrative: Poonam Saxena on Bhisham Sahni

On August 13, 1947, Bhisham Sahni boarded the Frontier Mail from Rawalpindi to Delhi, to watch the Independence Day celebrations.

He saw a long-cherished dream come true across the new border, as the Indian flag was finally unfurled over Red Fort. But amid the continued rioting and violence of Partition, trains to his hometown were abruptly stopped. His family was scattered across the subcontinent at this point. His father was alone in Rawalpindi. His brother, the actor Balraj Sahni, was in Bombay. His wife, daughter, nephews and nieces were in Srinagar.
It would be months before the family was eventually reunited, in Bombay, in November.
Sahni was 31 at this time. He had been part of the fight for freedom, and was witnessing the horrors of Partition. He often wrote about the latter in later years and is acknowledged, in fact, as one of the most compassionate and powerful chroniclers of that divide.
Sahni’s parents had not been involved in the freedom movement. His father, who ran a textile-commission agency, defined “manliness” as rising at dawn, cold water baths, brisk early-morning walks, simple vegetarian food, and evening prayers before dinner. He often declared that the British were robbing the country blind, but also expressed doubt as to how Gandhi’s spinning wheel could solve the problem.
Even as a child, Sahni felt differently. In his memoir, Aaj Ke Ateet (Today’s Pasts; 2003), he wrote of quietly attending bonfires of foreign cloth in the neighbourhood, and watching demonstrations and early-morning processions led by the Congress.
At one such gathering, a man was arrested for saying he had in his hand salt he had made by breaking the government Salt Law. As he was taken away, he chanted: “Gandhiji ki jai ho (Long live Gandhi)!” At Government College, Lahore, Sahni saw a fellow student expelled for wearing a Gandhi cap.
He was once at the receiving end of racist violence himself. At Kanpur railway station, he was talking to the clerk at the enquiry counter when a British officer pushed him out of the way. Sahni protested that he had been there first, at which the officer caught him by the throat and threw him to the ground. “I felt extremely insulted… I went and sat in my compartment for a while and regretted not doing or saying anything,” he wrote in his memoir.
At the age of 27, just after Gandhi gave the call for the Quit India movement in 1942, Sahni joined the Congress party. There, he met workers who left a deep impression on him. He was struck by “a special kind of patriot who was neither a leader or a professional party worker and who was only drawn to the national movement as a result of the feeling that welled up from within him”.
In a film on his life made by the Sahitya Akademi, he remembered a carpenter whose job it was to play the harmonium and sing songs to draw audiences, whenever a Congress event was to be held. “He had been to jail several times, he was poor, ill, yet there was a certain commitment in him,” Sahni wrote.
He saw how the British exacerbated communal tension in response to the freedom movement. As the struggle intensified, “one of the most potent weapons in their hands was communal riots.”
After Independence, Sahni would spend years teaching, acting, and wandering.
He taught at colleges in Ambala, Amritsar and Delhi; spent seven years in Moscow translating Russian classics into Hindi; acted in films (including a small role in Govind Nihalani’s 1988 TV series Tamas, based on his own novel).
Through it all, he wrote. When he died in 2003, he left behind seven novels, six plays and more than 100 short stories.
Tamas, the Partition novel he finally wrote in 1973, remains his best-known work. Asked why he waited so long, he said the impulse to write it came from the 1970 riots in Bhiwandi, Maharashtra. He visited that town after the riots and wrote that “walking through the streets you felt you were walking through the ruins of an ancient city”. It was all eerily familiar. He felt he had experienced this uneasy quiet before.
For me, his most unforgettable Partition-themed story is Pali, a tender tale about a lost child. Four-year-old Pali is separated from his parents as they are crossing over to India, and adopted by a loving, childless Muslim couple. His parents never stop looking for him, and eventually track him down. But it has now been seven years. Religious zealots on both sides of the border claim him as theirs. But who is Pali really, but the beloved child of two caring sets of parents?
Sahni was such a towering figure that the writer Krishna Sobti called him the Bhishma Pitamah of Hindi literature. He has been gone for more than 20 years, but do check out, or revisit, the rich body of work he left behind.
(To reach Poonam Saxena with feedback, email [email protected])