Bhisham Sahni

Social activist Writer

Born: 8 August 1915

Died: 11 July 2003

He was an Indian writer, playwright in Hindi, and an actor, most famous for his novel and television screenplay Tamas (“Darkness, Ignorance”), a powerful and passionate account of the Partition of India.
He was awarded the Padma Bhushan for literature in 1998, and Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 2002.
He was the younger brother of the noted Hindi film actor, Balraj Sahni.
His epic work Tamas (Darkness, Ignorance 1974) is a novel based on the riots of 1947 Partition of India which he witnessed at Rawalpindi.
Tamas portrays the horrors of senseless communal politics of violence and hatred; and the tragic aftermath – death, destruction, forced migration, and the partition of a country.
It has been translated to English, French, German, Japanese, and many Indian languages including Tamil, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kashmiri, and Manipuri.
Tamas won the 1975 Sahitya Akademi Award for literature and was later made into a television film in 1987 by Govind Nihalani.
Two of his masterpiece stories, Pali and Amritsar Aa Gaya Hai, are also based on the Partition.
He wrote the screenplay for Kumar Shahani’s film, Kasba (1991), which is based on Anton Chekhov’s story,In the Gully.
Although he had been writing stories for a long time,
he received recognition as a story writer only after the publication of his story ‘Chief Ki Daawat’(The Chief’s Party) in the Kahani magazine in 1956.
He wrote his autobiography Aaj Ke Ateet (Today’s Pasts, Penguin 2016) and the biography of his brother Balraj Sahni, Balraj My Brother (English).