Bhisham Sahni Biography: Bhisham Sahni (8 August 1915 – 11 July 2003) was an Indian author, playwright in Hindi, and actor best known for his Partition of India novel and television screenplay Tamas (“Darkness, Ignorance”). The Padma Bhushan for literature was bestowed upon him in 1998 and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 2002. He was the younger sibling of Balraj Sahni, a renowned Hindi film actor.
Bhisham Sahni Biography
Early years
Bhisham Sahni was born in Rawalpindi, undivided Punjab, on August 8, 1915. In 1958, he received his master’s degree in English literature from Government College in Lahore and his doctorate from Punjab University in Chandigarh.
He joined the Indian independence struggle. In March 1947, when disturbances broke out in Rawalpindi, he was an active member of the Indian National Congress and organised relief efforts for the refugees. In 1948, Bhisham Sahni began working for the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), an organisation with which his brother Balraj Sahni was already involved. He was an actor as well as a director.
Bhisham Sahni Works
Tamas (Darkness, Ignorance, 1974) is a novel based on the 1947 Partition of India violence that Bhisham Sahni witnessed in Rawalpindi. Tamas depicts the horrors of senseless communal politics of violence and hatred, as well as their tragic consequences: death, devastation, forced migration, and the division of a nation. It has been translated into English, French, German, Japanese, Tamil, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kashmiri, Marathi, and Manipuri, among other Indian languages. Tamas won the Sahitya Akademi Award for literature in 1975 and was subsequently adapted by Govind Nihalani into a television film in 1987. Additionally, two of his masterworks, Pali and Amritsar Aa Gaya Hai, are based on the Partition.
Sahni’s prolific career as a writer also included six other Hindi novels: Jharokhe (1967), Kadian (1971), Basanti (1979), Mayyadas Ki Madi (1987), Kunto (1993), and Neeloo, Nilima, Nilofar (2000); over one hundred short stories dispersed across ten collections of short stories, (including Bhagya Rekha (1953), Pahla patha (1956), Bhatakti Raakh (1966 But his novel titled Mayyadas Ki Mari (Mayyadas’s Castle) was one of his finest literary works; its historical setting depicts the time when the Khalsa Raj was defeated in Punjab and the British took control. This novel is a tale of a deteriorating social order and values. The screenplay for Kumar Shahani’s 1991 film Kasba, which is based on Anton Chekhov’s short story In the Gully, was written by him. Although Sahni had been writing stories for a long time, he did not receive recognition as a story writer until 1956, when the magazine Kahani published his story “Chief Ki Daawat” (The Chief’s Party).
Bhisham Sahni is the author of the autobiography Aaj Ke Ateet (Today’s Pasts, Penguin 2016) and the biography Balraj My Sibling (English) about his sibling Balraj Sahni.
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Bhisham Sahni Awards and recognition
Bhisham Sahni won numerous awards during his lifetime, including the Shiromani Writers Award in 1979, the Uttar Pradesh Government Award for Tamas in 1975, the Colour of Nation Award at the International Theatre Festival in Russia for the play Madhavi by Rashi Bunny in 2004, the Madhya Pradesh Kala Sahitya Parishad Award for his play ‘Hanush’ in 1975, the Lotus Award from the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association in 1981, the Soviet Land N.
On 31 May 2017, India Post issued a commemorative stamp in Sahni’s tribute.
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