Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas and the anatomy of hate

That is what makes the novel particularly unsettling to read today.

The first darkness in Tamas is almost absurdly small. Nathu, a poor skinner, is paid five rupees by Murad Ali to kill a pig. He does not know why the animal is required. He only knows that he needs the money.

By morning, the carcass is lying outside a mosque. A single act has been transformed into sacrilege, which in turn becomes a rumour. The rumour then transforms into outrage; outrage into violence.

Nathu is perhaps the most important person in this opening because he does not understand the larger game in which he becomes a pawn. He senses something is wrong, but his hands are tied by poverty.

This set feels quite familiar in an age of WhatsApp forwards, clipped videos and outrage manufactured for instant consumption. The person who presses “forward” may not know where a piece of information originated. The person who shares it may not know whom it will hurt. But by the time the truth catches up, the rumour has already travelled.

Then there’s Richard, the British Deputy Commissioner, a man who loves Indian history more than most Indians in the book do, and does nothing while it burns. He isn’t cruel. He’s just patiently following the orders like an official would do. He tells the local leaders, sincerely, that he has no authority to stop the violence but then goes on to restore order the moment it has served its purpose.

This movement, from the top to the bottom, is what I found most striking about Tamas. Politics is conducted somewhere above, but ordinary people, who are unaware, pay for it below.

Ranvir, a 15-year-old boy, is another example. He is taught that killing can be an initiation, that cruelty can be courage. The boy who might otherwise have grown up worrying about school, friends and the ordinary anxieties of adolescence is taught to see another human being as an enemy.

We often talk about radicalisation as though it produces monsters overnight. Sahni suggests something quieter. A young impressionable mind is given a vocabulary first. Then a grievance. Then a target.

The Muslim scent and oil peddler whom Ranvir and Inder encounter is not some terrifying enemy. He is simply a man carrying his wares through the chaos of a distressed town, he even treats the boys with kindness. Yet by this point the boys have been taught to see him not as a person but as a category.

That is how hatred works. Before it teaches you to hurt someone, it teaches you to stop seeing them.

What Tamas helps you understand is that hatred does not always begin with hatred. Sometimes it begins with grief. Sometimes it begins with fear. Sometimes it begins with the feeling that something that belonged to you has been taken away. And then someone comes along and tells you whom to blame.

Through Tamas, Sahni also reminds us that the communities are not neatly divided into good people and bad people. Individuals can be compassionate and cruel, sometimes within the same family.That complexity is perhaps what hatred cannot tolerate. Hatred needs neat categories.

And then there is the ending, which may be the most contemporary part of the novel. A Peace Committee is formed. The same political machinery that helped create the violence now participates in calls for peace. Murad Ali, who had set the first stone rolling by getting Nathu to kill the pig, appears at the front of the peace procession, shouting slogans of Hindu-Muslim unity.

The darkness has not disappeared. It has merely changed its clothes. That, more than the scenes of violence, is what stays with me. The fact that someone who created an upheaval like that got away without any consequences.

The frightening lesson to take away from Tamas is not that people can become violent. We already know that. It is that people can be made to believe that violence is necessary, justified, even noble, and that those who help manufacture that belief can later present themselves as its solution.

Perhaps this is why a book written decades ago feels uncomfortably close to present. The technology is new. The language is new. The speed is new. But the journey of hatred remains old.

It begins somewhere at the top.Then it travels. And by the time it reaches the bottom, nobody remembers who lit the match.

(As I See It  is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word.)