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Journalism of Courage
On August 14, 1947, Bhisham Sahni climbed aboard the last train out of Rawalpindi bound for India. Outside, the Punjab he had known all his life was breaking apart, while inside, the carriage was packed with uncertain families clutching whatever they could gather in cloth bundles. The abstract idea of Partition had become a lived reality. Sahni, then 32, had already witnessed the riots that tore through his hometown while working with the Relief Committee. Now, he was part of the human tide spilling across a new border.
That summer, some 12 million people fled between India and Pakistan, the largest forced migration of the 20th century. Around a million were killed in massacres, starvation or disease, while 75,000 women were abducted or assaulted (The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Urvashi Butalia). Between August 15 and September 8 alone, an estimated 700,000 refugees travelled by train. Passenger coaches and goods wagons alike were pressed into service. Some arrived safely; others rolled in burning or silent, every passenger dead.
Years later, Sahni would write in Tamas: “From now on, no Hindu will live in Muslim mohallas and no Muslim in Hindu mohallas… Pakistan or no Pakistan, it is very clear that each community is going to live in watertight compartments.” His own home was gone, and that loss became the dark thread through his fiction, from his early short stories to his most famous novel, Tamas, which became a landmark novel on the Partition. This year, had he lived, Sahni who was born on August 8, 1915, would have turned 110.
The train that carried Sahni away from Rawalpindi would return in his work, transformed into literature. In his short story The Train Has Reached Amritsar, the journey begins in easy conversation and shared food. Towards the end, a once-timid passenger strikes a Muslim man clinging to the carriage door: “Two or three thin streams of blood began to flow… and he fell to the ground like a tree that had been chopped down.”
Tamas (1974), would draw on the same well of memory. “Some of the things I saw in Bhiwandi,” he said in 1996, “were so similar to what I had experienced in Rawalpindi that I started writing… Perhaps I merely wanted to recollect and relive my past.” Set in a fictional Punjab town, the book opens with the slaughter of a pig left at a mosque, which sparks a riots.
Critics have called Tamas “an intellectual anatomy of the Partition.” The novel traces how British “divide and rule” policies, local political opportunism, and slow-drip indoctrination can turn grievance into violence. It also records acts of courage such as Rajo, a Muslim woman, shelters her Sikh neighbours, and moments of bitter irony, such as Murad Ali, who helps incite the riots, later riding in a peace procession shouting, “Hindus and Muslims are one!” In Sahni’s telling, there are no singular heroes or villains, it describes the collective unravelling of civil society.
Sahni’s contemporary author Krishna Sobti, famously said the Partition of India was “difficult to forget but dangerous to remember”. That refusal to forget or focus on a single protagonist is central to Sahni’s politics of memory. In Tamas, a record clerk tallies only numbers (dead, wounded, property lost), unconcerned with the stories behind them. It is a reminder that statistics can strip away lived experience, and why the events of Partition needed to be documented in literature, both fiction and non-fiction. As the foremost chronicler of the time, Sahni understood this. Scholar Nandi Bhatia writes, the novel “consciously engages in censoring the human side of this reality.”And in the smallest gestures, a seat offered on a crowded train or a hiding place given to a neighbour, Sahni saw what he once described as “the all-pervading and deep-seated humanism of our people and our centuries-old culture.”
And in the smallest gestures, a seat offered on a crowded train or a hiding place given to a neighbour, Sahni saw what he once described as “the all-pervading and deep-seated humanism of our people and our centuries-old culture.”
