How a novel on Partition written almost 50 years ago challenges our religious sentiments today

He adds that, in the aftermath of the Partition, some of the major fiction writers of that time in Hindi, such as Krishna Sobti, shifted from erstwhile west Punjab to India. “They became the chroniclers of Partition in north India. Sadly, the social void that must have been created in the towns and villages of north India, when a large number of Muslims went over to Pakistan, has not resulted in any significant writing,” says Vajpeyi.

Published in 1974, Tamas was adapted into a television mini-series, and later a film, by Govind Nihalani in 1988. In August this year, the work became controversial after the repertory company of the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi, India’s premier theatre school, withdrew a play based on it, reportedly due to political pressure. “We were making the play for Partition Diwas on August 14 and also to inform the younger generation that does not know about Tamas. The opening scene is about a boy whose father tells him to must read good books and understand his mother tongue. He picks up Tamas, reads the blurb and that’s where the play begins,” says Rajesh Kumar, chief, NSD Repertory.

Still from Govind Nihalani’s Tamas

Set in Punjab, Tamas begins in the days before India got Independence, when some sections were trying to calm communal tensions and others provoke it. The novel travels through the conflagration that consumed humanity but also brings out incidents of goodness in many people across religions. The work deals with victims and attackers of three religious communities — Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus.

Kumar had first read Tamas as a young theatre artiste in Delhi’s Mandi House when he was a regular at the Sahitya Akademi Library. “It was when I revisited the book for the play that I realised the honesty in Sahni’s writing. He was a writer, with a political background, as he had been a part of the Congress before becoming a communist. When a person has a political background, it reflects in their work. Sahni did not take that path. Tamas openly tells us about conflicts in the party and all kinds of situations, right or wrong. Sahni had a personal experience of the Partition riots in Rawalpindi, where his family was living before they took the train to Delhi, and he brings these human stories to us,” says Kumar.

Another time Tamas evoked strong questions was when the series was telecast. Nihalani writes in the introduction to an English language translation to Tamas by Jai Ratan (1988), “It evoked an unprecedented response all over the country, both emotional and political”.

Amid allegations that the series would inflame sentiments in a country that was forever on the edge of communal violence, the Bombay High Court in 1988 said, “Tamas is an anatomy of a tragic period. It depicts how communal violence was generated by fundamentalists and extremists… how realisation ultimately dawns on the futility of it all…”

The story has grappled with violence in several forms. Theatre director Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry remembers the entire film team coming to Punjab, where they visited villages and stayed at her house. “During one conversation, my father said there used to be these Muslim kirtan singers called rababis at the Golden Temple. But, because of Partition, they were not allowed to sing hymns to their guru and they were in a complete dilemma. This was not a part of the script but Govind (Nihalani) was fascinated by this fact,” says Chowdhry.

Punjab was going through its own brutal phase of terrorism at the time so the shooting was moved to Film City in Mumbai. “You would never have believed this was not Punjab. Right from planting the trees that used to be there, they were thorough with every detail,” says Chowdhry.

Tamas would win three National Awards, for Nihalani, actor Surekha Sikri and music director Vanraj Bhatia. The book and the film are still available in shop, e-commerce platforms and YouTube.