ON 11 July, noted Hindi literary personality, the author of ‘Tamas’ (Dark Night) Bhishm Sahni breathed his last at a time when the dark night of communal frenzy still looms large over the future of the sub-continent. Born in Rawalpindi (1915), Bhishm Sahni migrated to India with his family after partition, Though the influences of his Arya Samajist father and the ethos of Gandhian freedom struggle shaped his childhood, he imbibed the Marxian worldview from Faiz Ahmad Faiz (the legendary 20th century Urdu poet of the sub-continent), his teacher at Lahore college and his brother Balraj Sahni (renowned film-actor and cultural personality of his time). Apart from his brilliant literary career, his engagement with theatre as writer and actor continued all through his life. As an excellent teacher at Delhi University he inspired many generations of students.
Bhishm Sahni’s treatment of the communal question and the partition tragedy is the most political amongst the entire lot of novelists, poets and storywriters of Punjabi origin who suffered the tragedy first hand. His celebrated novel ‘Tamas’ portrayed it with such authenticity that the novel acquired the distinction of a modern classic. His exposition of the work-style, rhetoric and the ideology of communal outfits in ‘Tamas’ incurred the wrath of Hindu communal organisations to the extent that a PIL was filed in the Supreme Court (1988) asking the court to stop the screening of the film based on the novel as it portrays ‘Hindu organisations in a bad light’. RSS made noises in the media about the film and started a smear campaign against Sahni. Needless to say, he depicted the role of Muslim fundamentalist organisations with the same honesty and incisive clarity and exposed the crass opportunism and impotence of the Congress rank and file on the eve of Partition. The episode of Harnam Singh (acted billiantly by Sahni himself in the film) and Banto, a Sikh couple taking refuge in a Muslim family is heart-rending, poignant, and yet thoroughly unsentimental. The characters in the episode betray complex and contradictory feelings of hate, helplessness, empathy, greed and sacrifice in an extraordinary, turbulent situation. The character of Jarnail Singh (a Sikh worker of the Congress party who could not bear the horrors of the communal holocaust and became insane) is reminiscent of the legendary ‘Toba Tek Singh’ of Saadat Hasan Manto and continues to haunt public memory.
Bhishm Sahni was a storyteller of a ‘nation in the making’, its colonial modernity with all attendant distortions, its post-independent emerging middle class and the trauma of its constant struggle to become a secular democracy. Sahni carried forward Premchand’s legacy of social realism and simplicity of style and enriched it further in the sense that he consciously captured the ‘class essence’ of the ‘social phenomenon in motion’ in his stories, novels and plays. His play ‘Hanoosh’, a big stage success, is about an artist who invents a clock and who is blinded by the King of Prague, lest he produce similar clocks for trade to other places. The play contextualises the indomitable zeal of a creator and his tragedy in the historical setting of conflict between the medieval feudal forces, which abhor creativity, and the nascent mercantile classes.
Similarly, in his play titled ‘Kabira Khada Bazaar Mein’ he constructs Kabir’s life-struggle in its concrete social-historical context rather than the spiritual-philosophical-mystical one and thus imparts a contemporaneity to the character.
Bhishm Sahni’s demise comes at a time when most of the cultural, literary, educational and research institutions funded by the government have effectively been cleansed of all ‘Marxist’ remnants. Bhishm Sahni had seen better times when progressive writers and artists held prominent positions in such institutions in an overall atmosphere of CPI’s closeness with the ruling Congress party and the ‘benevolent’ presence of the USSR. With the collapse of Congress and the rise of BJP, some ‘progressives’ of his generation changed sides and got rich rewards (the Jnanapith award in the cases of Naresh Mehta and Nirmal Verma), and many made tactical adjustments with the new reality of ‘cultural nationalism’ in power, Soviet collapse and the hegemonic sway of post-modernism over the academia and intelligentsia. Many big names of the progressive movement are still busy sending overt and covert signals to the people in power, denouncing their ‘Marxist’ past and lobbying for share in the cultural establishments, academies etc. As the space for democratic, secular and progressive artists is continuously shrinking in the establishment, the competition becomes bitter day-by-day resulting in mud-slinging matches seen especially among the Hindi literary writers. Bhishm Sahni’s uncompromising literary personality, his unfazed conviction in the wisdom of the common masses and his firm commitment to the Marxist worldview stands in stark contrast to the opportunist and decadent trends in the progressive literary circles in Hindi. q