Conversation on ‘Partition’

Narration: In the subconscious of our nation, looking at history from below, there lie nightmares, experiences of thousands of men and women as nightmares - gory scenes of daughters and wives being raped, males running for their lives or digging knives into the hearts of their own friends, mothers killing their babes to save them from something worse than death, dismembered bodies—that was 1947, the Partition; Partition that drowned the joy of freedom in its screaming violence. For a long time as a nation we have remained in amnesia if only to avoid confronting the reality of the experience of partition. But for a healthy purgation, not only do we need to face what happened, we also need to understand the way it happened and why it happened the way it did. If we wish to understand the phenomenon that was Partition, we will have to turn to literature; literature that reveals the human face of the age, the history of the times experientially both at the subjective as well as the objective levels. We are fortunate to have had an opportunity to talk to Bhisham Sahni, who is eminently known in Hindi, as also outside the Hindi world, for his sensitive observation and the articulation of the experience of Partition. 

Sukrita: Bhishamji, much of your creative writing seems to have a nodal point, that of Partition; you seem to be going back to it again and again. The geographical aspect of the division of land seems to be of least interest to you but the process and impact of Partition on the psychological, the religious and the cultural levels comes up in your works many times. Am I right when I say that your consciousness seems to continue revolving around this experience of Partition and what happened later?

Bhisham Sahni: I would not say that it revolves around only the issue of Partition. It was a very big and disturbing event and yet one does not wish to live in the past all the time. One essentially grapples with one’s destiny as it emerges in the future. By nature, a human being wishes to move on.

Narration: While literature transcends time, its roots are in the soil and time in which it is born. A writer such as Bhisham Sahni could not have skipped his times. Bhishamji was born in Rawalpindi in 1915 and his life and writing are soaked in the sociology and the history of the 20th century India. 

Sukrita: Bhishamji would you like to focus a little bit on the idea of how partition may have consciously affected you through rupture and renewal?

Bhisham Sahni: Partition has affected my life in a big way. Many incidents took place before my eyes. The society in which I lived got more and more tense everyday and I saw the bitterness among people. When I was a child, I witnessed the first Hindu-Muslim riot in my own place. I was just 11-12 years old. The onion market in our city caught fire and it was so wild that almost half the sky turned red. We used to sleep on the terrace of our house. Though my father said it was nothing, but the red sky which I saw after lying on my bed, left a deep scar in my mind.

In your childhood you do not hold any hard feelings for anyone for long. Most of my friends were Muslims. I liked to play hockey and most of my player friends were Muslims. My father was an Arya Samajist. We were brought up on Arya Samaj ethical principles—simple life, fear of God, havan, and sandhya. Our house had Muslim neighbours on all sides because we lived in an area predominantly Muslim. On the streets we played with Muslim boys. Occasionally my mother would peep over the wall and the lady in the neighbourhood would also look out and they would both chat for a long time together. 

I remember the Ramzan months, the Fakir coming and waking the people in the area to observe the Roza (Fast). I used to beat a tin to wake people up. My neighbour used to complain to my mother laughingly and say, “All the year, your son wakes us up early in the morning to observe the Roza.” When I look back, I am not too conscious of the fact that there was any emphasis on the communal identity of the people. It was there but in a very vague way. Later I went to Lahore to study and there also I played hockey. There the Muslim boys were excellent players. Some of them were Olympic players.

Narration: In 1947, Bhishamji came to Delhi to witness the Independence Day. Little did he realise that he had lost his home forever to the other side of the border. The riots had spurted and he could not go back. One by one, memories of partition stored in the sensitive mind surfaced and compelled Bhisham Sahni to produce a novel like “Tamas” and stories such as “Amritsar Aa Gaya.” He stepped thus into a powerful gallery of Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi writers—Manto, Krishan Chander, Amrita Pritam, Mohan Rakesh, Rajendra Singh Bedi and many others—all of them anguished by the division, pained by the insane violence of the Partition riots. 

Bhisham Sahni: When I grew up, the kinds of books that I read - Premchand’s writings, Sudarshan’s writings and other similar writings - did have considerable influence on my thinking. It may be that it was my own sensibility that drew me towards Premchand. That may be indeed possible. But it cannot be denied that the literary environment in which you live and breathe does affect your way of looking at things to a considerable extent. One cannot keep one’s self aloof from the situation through which the country passes.

Narration: An active member of IPTA, Bhishamji thoroughly enjoyed acting, too. He himself played small roles in several television serials. He did have an anxiety though, a fear carried from his early life, that he should not imitate his brother Balraj Sahni whom he loved dearly—Balraj Sahni of the powerful partition film “Garam Hawa” and Balraj Sahni of “Kabuliwalah”.

Bhisham Sahni: My brother also played a big role in shaping my sensibility. He was only two years older and had a very independent and innovative mind. He had a very sensitive appreciation of literature. I began to hero worship him at a very young age. 

Sukrita: You once said that this was deeply influencing your personality somewhere.

Bhisham Sahni: That is true but I strongly resisted his influence because I was convinced that it was necessary to go my own way. That feeling began to grow stronger in me as I grew up.

Narration: Bhishamji’s novel “Tamas” moves like a camera over the entire scenario of 1947. No wonder the director Govind Nihalni picked it up to serialise it for the television. The writer looks back at partition twenty-five years after it happened almost photographically—incidents, characters, dialogues creeping into the narrative so naturally, so simply. Bhishamji’s writer’s eye captured the reality of the times with a human insight transcending all communal biases.

Sukrita: The beginning of “Tamas” is so intense when the character Nathu is trying to kill the pig. The intensity is poetic and the reader senses an impending event to come up after this. I would like to pick up the question that comes up again and again in the novel and of course you may have also some conscious thinking about it. To what extent do you think the British were responsible for what happened—the Partition itself and the way it happened.

Bhisham Sahni: I wish I could cite a particular letter written by one of the British viceroys in which he says, “The day Hindus and Muslims come together, the day of our departure from the shores of India will have arrived.” It was a clear enough indication that the empire flourished so long as the Hindus and Muslims were flying at one another’s throat. The leaders of the movement, Gandhi included, all along put forth this view that a policy of “divide and rule” was being followed by the British. It was a consciously evolved policy. They did not cover only the political aspect but also the cultural aspect of life. They would pat the Hindus at the back at one time and the Muslims at another time and this went on for quite sometime. 

Sukrita: I would like to go back to “Tamas” now and pick up one incident which you refer to several times—the ‘well’ incident. Is there any real life situation that you may have witnessed which corresponds to this incident in the novel?

Bhisham Sahni: Of course. When the riots subsided in the towns and villages of Rawalpindi, where more than a hundred villages were involved, this incident took place in one of the villages. It so happened that I was working in the Congress in a Relief Committee and the health officer of the town was asked by the Deputy Commissioner to go to that particular village and put some disinfectant in that well in which a heap of dead bodies was decomposing. The health officer was a neighbour of ours and I requested him to take me along with him and he agreed. What I saw was horrendous! The bodies had come up to the surface, it was a very painful experience. It is very difficult to get over it even today. I still hear voices like one of the persons next to me pointing out to me saying, “That is my wife. That child entangled between her legs is my son.”

Sukrita: Speaking about “Tamas”, the suggestion of insanity in the character of Jarnail Singh which you portrayed, corresponds with the Manto’s character of Toba Tek Singh. Were you in any way inspired by Toba Tek Singh in the delineation of Jarnail?

Bhisham Sahni: I don’t know. It is very difficult to say. “Toba Tek Singh” is one of the greatest stories written on Partition. Besides this story Manto had written a few others too which were very moving and poignant stories. But this character Jarnail was based on the life of a character with whom I had worked in the Congress and with whom I had quarrelled a number of times. He was very vividly present in my mind. When a film was made on this novel, I received a letter from Patna, somebody who belonged to my home town and after partition settled there. He wrote to me saying, “What business did you have to kill that man? That man is living and is now in Ambala.” It was rather amusing but whether a person is living today or not, he assumed some significance through the writer. It is a strange thing. 

Many people were for the struggle for freedom but the lower middle class people had a role peculiar of their own. They had no personal ambitions. They did not have any ambitions of becoming leaders even during the freedom period or after the freedom was won. They came from backgrounds which was poor. I think of a carpenter, a Sardarji, who was not very healthy. His main job used to be that whenever a jalsa of the Congress was organised before freedom, he was to sing songs with his harmonium and attract the audience. He was neither a singer nor anybody. He could only say witty things and make people laugh. The man had been to jail several times. He was ill and poor and yet there was a certain commitment. Such characters were impressive in their own way for their sheer selflessness.

Narration: Bhagya Rekha, Pehla Path, Nishachar, Wang Choo, and other volumes of short stories, novels like Maiyadas ki Madi, Basanti, and plays like Kadhiya, Hanush, Kabira Khada Baaza Mein came year after year offering characters and narratives from life experience with starkly realistic perception delicately and sensitively woven into stories. Combating the abstract, modern story, Bhisham Sahni’s stories grounded themselves in social realism. Not surprisingly therefore is his rich bonding with the Progressive Writers Association and the Afro-Asian Writers Organisation.

Bhisham Sahni: While working in the literary sphere, I made many friends. In “Nayi Kahani Movement” there were Mohan Rakesh, Kamleshwar and Rajendra Yadav and others, and in the “Progressive Writers’ Movement” there were Sajjad Zahir and others. I felt enriched by what they had written. It is wrong to think that progressive writing was a uni-dimensional kind of movement. The objectives were very positive and healthy. They brought writers from all languages together on a basis of equality and mutual respect. The social orientation in art had already started taking place in Premchand’s time and even earlier; only they gave it another dimension. 

Narration: Talking about Bhishamji’s languages, Punjabi gently rolled down his tongue as his mother tongue. Urdu, Hindi, and English in which he had his PhD flowed out of his lips with an equal ease. He edited “Nayi Kahani,” an important Hindi magazine for nearly two and a half years leaving his mark as an editor on the journal. While Bhishamji had been translating from Russian, he chose to write in Hindi, a language that reflects the common cultural heritage of Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi.

Bhisham Sahni: My mother tongue is Punjabi and I write in Hindi. I have been educated in Urdu and all these three languages have a lot in common. I believe that we have been very short-sighted about our own culture, in realizing the contribution of Urdu to our culture and how this language has enriched India’s treasure house of literatures, as very few languages have done. Therefore, it is a thousand pities that sufficient attention has not been paid to Urdu; and on the contrary, a very negative attitude has been adopted towards the Urdu language which was somehow, with partition, communalised. Urdu is not the language of one community; it is the language of the entire north of India. It had its birth in India, it flowered in India and it has left behind its rich legacy for our entire country.

Narration: The quiet wisdom of a sage on the one hand, and on the other the innocence of a child, Bhishamji’s personality reached out to everyone. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award along with many other literary laurels. He remained the humble and gentle torch-bearer, someone for the younger writers to emulate. Presenting the spool of real life … of society… of history…of haunting memories…

Sukrita: I would like to know Bhishamji, if you have anything more which you may wish to articulate about partition. Do you still feel the need to say something or you are done with it?

Bhisham Sahni: I do not think that I am done with it but it depends. It is the subconscious that suddenly becomes active. Some things may surface that upset you. I have written a number of stories decades after the partition, all over again. I cannot rule out the possibility but at present I do not have anything in my mind. 

Sukrita: Thank you very much Bhishamji for having given us the opportunity to know your life as much as your writings about Partition. Your life and writings highlight not only that aspect of history that happened at a particular time, but the way it has left its lasting scar and the way it continues to impact our lives.