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ART & LITERATURE
'ART AND SOUL
BOOKS
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TIME OFF
YOUR OPTION
ENTERTAINMENT
BOLLYWOOD BHELPURI
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WIDE ANGLE
FITNESS
GARDEN LIFE
NATURE
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CONSUMER ALERT
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INTERACTIVE FEATURES
CAPTION CONTEST
FEEDBACK
Sunday, July 27, 2003 Lead Article
Commoners’ Chronicler
Bhisham Sahni (1915-2003)
Bhisham Sahni belonged to the lineof writers who identified
themselves with their soil. The dust
and the heat of everyday life with
its emotions and passions, wins
and losses were all part of his body
of work. He was one with the milieu
yet enough removed from it to see
clearly and delineate sharply the
nuances of a common life. He was,
therefore, one of the rarest who
could write with restrained
compassion about people and their
circumstances, writes Ashwini
Bhatnagar
THE best thing about Bhisham Sahni
was the that he did his work and then
left it at that. He did not want to
either talk about it himself or let
others gush over it. He believed that in
its own way the story that he had told
would speak to the readers in its own
voice.
It did not require him or the critics to be the interlocutors. It was a fine trait tohave and it typified his personality, too. But silence and the self- effacement
brought with them their own tragedy. Bhisham Sahni could never occupy
centrestage of the Hindi literary spectrum and just remained just an important
part of the choir. He could never be the soprano though it was his voice that
provided muscle to the tone and tenor of writing in his time and age. And, when
Bhisham Sahni died on July 11, he did so as quietly as he had lived. Like in his
own life, there was no hype on his death. Bhisham lovers took note of his
passing away like a personal, heartfelt loss. He did not disturb the others.
Bhisham Sahni belonged to the line of writers who
identified themselves with their soil. The dust and
the heat of everyday life with its emotions andpassions, wins and losses were all part of his body
of work. He was one with the milieu yet enough
removed from it to see clearly and delineate
sharply the nuances of a common life. He was,
therefore, one of the rarest who could write with
restrained compassion about people and their
circumstances. He neither dwelt on tragedies too
much nor did he celebrate the victories of his
characters. He would write about them in a benign
detached manner, leaving it to the reader to react
to the situation. In his celebrated novel Tamas, a
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Sikh is forcibly converted to Islam and then
ridiculed. Bhisham Sahni wrote about it tellingly
but did not overuse it. Punjabi writer Krishna
Sobti once told him that he should have placed
greater emphasise on it. He did not agree. It was
a grim episode and he let it remain that. He felt
that it was for the reader to feel shocked or otherwise and not for the writer to
propel him in a certain direction.
In a way, and like his own life, Bhisham Sahni was a democrat who gave fulautonomy to each of his readers to view episodes in his book, as well as the ful
book, in whichever way they wanted to. Tamas or for that matter Mayyadas k
Maarhi (his own favourite) were both drawn from historical sources, in which
there were victors and the vanquished, the oppressors and the oppressed
However, in both cases Bhisham Sahni gave the reader the autonomy to
empathise with any viewpoint. No character or situation or historical process was
unidimensional, leaving the reader no choice but to see the narrator’s point o
view. It is because of this unique quality that critic Roland Barthes distinguished
between a "readerly text" and a "writerly text. "Tamas readily falls into the
former category.
Despite the concern for the reader and various viewpoints, Bhisham Sahni felt
"writing cannot be neutral, it is not neutral. I do not accept that the writer is
outside the text." But even while writing crisis-centred books and plays, Bhisham
Sahni was clear that "it is not for the writer to offer solutions.
One can, of course, point to certain possibilities...I am not saying that literature
should evade issues. Writing is not an escape from reality. Rather it aims at
depicting the complexity of life. It is my belief that life not only offers
complexities but solutions, too. Literature captures man’s hopes and dreams and
his capacity for problem-solving. His thinking is capable of leading him to a
solution, too."
In other words, Bhisham Sahni had assigned
himself the task of being a compassionatechronicler of people and events. He did not see
himself as a visionary or an oracle who could see
beyond life situations and be judgmental. He
couldn’t be, for he was man with a yielding
temperament. He sat back and applauded when
his elder brother, Balraj Sahni, took centrestage
and crafted a legendary space for himself in the
celluloid world. He was with celebrated authors,
playwrights and artistes of his time; people from
the same stock as him such as K.A. Abbas, Mohan
Rakesh, Yash Pal, Krishan Chander, Dharam Veer
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Bharati, Kamleshwar, etc, who became glamorous
names in the literary firmament. But he never
resented any of them. It is said by his
contemporaries that Bhisham Sahni never
gossiped. He didn’t need to because he was never
competing with anyone. The samskara of doing
your best and leaving it at that was deeply
instilled in him. He was happy with himself in his own small world.
There were, therefore, no great flourishes in his writing — the flourishes that
make a writer and his art flamboyant and toasted. He wrote simply. His creativepassion for the story and its characters was like a rumbling volcano topped by
the icy lake of his personality. As such, he did not spew forth angrily like a
Manto on the theme of Partition nor was he limpidly romantic like a
(Phaneshwarnath) Renu. He had seen life red in tooth and claw and had
practised active socialism. But whatever he did, he did it with his trademark
restraint and maturity.
It is no coincidence that he did not create any great heroes in his novels and
plays. His characters were one like us who did not have overarching viewpoints.
Though most of his plots were crisis-driven, they did not throw up a Ulysses
here or a Yudhishthira there. He didn’t feel the need. He was satisfied with his
Basanti and Prakasho or an Allaharakha. Even in Mayyadas ki Maarhi, which he
could have utilised to create a composite hero, each character has a specific
cameo that does not put others in the shade. His more famous plays, Hanush
and Almagir , too, do not create larger-than-life heroes.
Similarly, though he had the opportunity in both his historical novels, Bhisham
Sahni did not create a grand narrative. Tamas and Maarhi are local narratives
that do not span out and beyond. Rather, they unpeel like layers of an onion. In
fact, the real lure of his writing lies in its compactness; in its smallness at first
sight.
Bhisham Sahni had read A Hundred Years of Solitude just before he began
writing Maarhi, just as he had read Tolstoy, Gorki, Pushkin and Camus during
various phases of his writing career. Though he admired all of them greatly, notraces of their influence are apparent in his writing. Like in life, so in his work;
Bhisham Sahni was his own man. He drew from various sources but never
allowed them to dominate or colour his mind. He was a card-holder who spent
many years in the erstwhile Soviet Union. He was an activist in the Progressive
Writers’ Movement and he wished to see an egalitarian society. Ideology was
important to him and he practised what he preached. Yet, surprisingly, his works
are free from polemics and sloganeering that it so typical of activist-writers.
What comes across very hauntingly is his concern for the poor and the
underprivileged and the humaneness of his character. Indeed, he lived with the
emotion of compassion rather than the ideology of socialism. It is because of
this defining quality that Bhisham Sahni would be remembered as a first -rate
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gentleman and a remarkable writer rather than an ideologue and an activist.
“A great writer but a greater human being”Gurdial Singh
AS Krishna Sobti put it very aptly, Bhisham Sahni deserves the
epithet of Bhisham pitamah of Hindi literature. Bhisham Sahni’s
friendship was a boon for me, something I will always treasure.
For more than three decades I knew him not only as a
significant writer but also as a wonderful human being,
someone who never allowed the greatness of his writing to
affect personal interaction.
In 1966 we met with each other for the first time when he was the editor of
Nayi Kahanian, the journal brought out by Rajkamal Prakashan. We were
brought together by destiny on four significant occasions of our lives. In 1973,
the Languages Department honoured us together. He was honoured for writing
in Hindi, while I got the first Nanak Singh Puruskar. In 1975, Bhisham Sahni got
the Sahitya Akademi Award for Tamas and I for Addh Chanani Raat . In 1992, we
were nominated to the General Council of the Sahitya Akademi together. In
1998, for the fourth time we went together to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, hereceived the Padma Vibhushan and I the Padamshri. Perhaps it was our shared
concerns and similar worldview that brought us together on these momentous
occasions of our lives.
When it comes to heart-felt emotions and sensibilities nothing except the mothe
tongue can help one to articulate those. Whenever we met, not only did we
always converse in Punjabi but we also wrote letters to each other in Punjabi in
the Devnagari script during the last three decades. Despite the fact we wrote in
two separate languages, we shared so much with each other, there was a bond
of intimacy.
So self-effasive was Bhisham Sahni that in a friendship that spanned 35 years,
not even once did he speak about his own work or even ask if I had read any ofhis recent works. He would be enthused about whatever others wrote and
shunned self-focus.
More than literature, we talked either about Punjab or about Balraj Sahni, his
elder brother who I knew before I did Bhisham. Particularly etched in my
memory is the meeting when I went to Delhi to condole Balraj’s death. We had
talked about him, shared memories and felt overwhelmed.
As an eminent critic Plekhinov put it, the purpose of literature is to help us share
our joys and sorrows, not only with the characters but also with other human
beings in life. Reading literature hones our sensibility and generates empathy
within us, it enables us to extend that empathy to those we interact with in the
course of our life. That was the kind of literature Bhisham Sahni wrote and
believed in. There was no contradiction between life and literature, no split
between the man who suffered and the mind that created. It was this particular
quality of identifying with the people and the concepts of shared traditions and
value systems—something that still endures in the Indian context—that marked
Bhisham Sahni’s work.
It is precisely this kind of literature that is, unfortunately, not being written
nowadays, because literature has become a commodity and literary pursuits
more than a matter of conviction have become a business enterprise. Writers are
getting lost in the business of writing almost in the way a child gets lost in a
mela. A writer in his mould saved values that are worth saving even in today’s
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world. Not a single literary work of his could be termed as just written for the
sake of writing. They all stemmed from deep convictions and a rootedness in the
socio-cultural milieu quintessentially Indian.
Unlike Bhisham Sahni, no one now focuses on real issues and problems that are
inextricably linked with and related to our milieu and moorings.
It has become fashionable to talk of deep psychological problems and the
argument given is poverty is not our reality, so there is the consequent search
for one’s reality. What is this reality? The search begins and for people like this
it is like being trapped in a maze, trying to figure out what the reality is.
The media, especially the English media too does not want to focus on issues
that concern the masses but do not interest the classes. That explains why there
is not much focus on writers and much less on a meaningful and purposeful
writer like Bhisham Sahni who was a torchbearer of a humane value system.
There might be greater writers but the yug of great men like him seems to be
over.
(The writer, a Jnanapeeth award winner, is an eminent Punjabi novelist)
— As told to Aruti Nayar
“He was a writer in Premchand’s tradition”Namavar Singh
BHISHAM SAHNI was the most important and eminent writer
in the tradition of Premchand. Social realism and the end goal
of an independent, anti-imperialist order had fired the latter’s
imagination, as it did Bhisham Sahni after Premchand’s death in
1936. Not only were his concerns similar to those of Premchand
but he also shared the former’s vision of a socialist, secular
India as opposed to the one dominated by a capitalist
worldview and trader’s mentality (mahajani sabhyata).Consistently this integrated vision and worldview of a composite
culture found expression in his novels, plays and short stories.
It is this very notion of a pluralistic, composite culture that is now being
threatened.
Significantly, the women’s question and a voice of resistance and protest was
raised in a significant manner, perhaps for the first time, by Bhisham Sahni in
the play Madhavi which was based on episodes from the Mahabharata.
As a dispossessed writer, vivid images of Rawalpindi haunted him. It was not
only nostalgia but a deep sense of loss and the anguish of a lost homeland that
pervades his work. A defining feature of literature in the 20th century was the
way being in exile as a compulsion, not as a conscious choice like the diaspora,
writers were influenced by the sense of being dispossessed. This was true of
writers from India, Pakistan or even Europe.
His realism was akin to Premchand’s but with a sense of detail that is enormous
He describes not simply as a narrator but shows rather than merely telling. The
authentic lively characterisation and drama invested a film-like quality to his
works. In this new kind of realism, there was history and a mixture of fantasy
and reality. In terms of technique, unlike Premchand, Bhisham Sahni’s was not
simply a linear narrative but he used the flashback technique adroitly, wherein
the narrative went back and forth in time and space.
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ib i di i h [ ]
What shaped his writings and work were the exposure and impact of three
languages and cultures. During the formative years, it was the Arya Samaj
influence that led to him imbibing Sanskrit. As a student and teacher of English
literature, there was exposure to world classics and the best in the West. Though
Bhisham Sahni wrote in Hindi and was placed in the Hindi literary tradition, his
defining sensibility, milieu and moorings were that of a thoroughbred Punjabi. So
words and influences from all these languages contributed to his oeuvre. The
language of his novels was not bookish or formally stilted but instead had the
effortless ease, cadence and naturalness of the spoken word.
(The writer is an eminent critic and scholar of Hindi literature)
— As told to Aruti Nayar
In Bhisham Sahni’s own words...
Ours is essentially a peace-loving country with a history of great thinkers
and philosophers and poets. The culture of our land is dictated by
common folks.
You see when I read Camus or Sartre, I like them. But if I try to writelike them, I cannot. Their culture, history and belief system I cannot
inherit. If we force ourselves to write like them, the results would be
merely imitative.
If people knew each other, they would find it hard to hate.
It is my belief that life offers not only complexities, but solutions too.
Literature captures man’s hopes and dreams and his capacity for problem
solving.