Tamas - by Bhisham Sahni (Paperback)

About the Book

"Tamas, Bhisham Sahni's 1973 novel, is a product of the Partition's devastation. It drew immediate and universal critical acclaim for its poignant and striking retelling of Partition and its bloody aftermath. Tamas is a story about how simmering communal tensions snowball into full-fledged riots that grip villages across the subcontinent. In a city in undivided Punjab, Nathu, a tanner, is bribed to kill a pig. When the animal's carcass is discovered on the steps of the local mosque the next morning, simmering tensions explode into riots and massacre. A seemingly well-planned and executed job by the British plants seeds of mistrust and hatred among those who, until the day before, had been close friends and neighbors. As a result of the ever-changing political and social atmosphere of the city, the novel highlights the weakness of human characters whose loyalties shift in times of tragedy. Tamas is a chilling reminder of the consequences of religious intolerance and communal prejudice"--

Book Synopsis

A poignant, politically charged, and timeless novel about the 1947 Partition in a newly revised trnslation by Booker Prize-winning translator Daisy Rockwell

A Penguin Classic

Tamas, Bhisham Sahni's 1973 novel, is a chronicle of the sectarian violence that ultimately led to the devastation of the Partition. It drew immediate and universal critical acclaim for its poignant and striking depiction of the anatomy of a bloody conflagration that comes to engulf an entire region. Tamas is a story about how simmering communal tensions snowball into full-fledged riots that grip villages across the subcontinent. In a city in undivided Punjab, Nathu, a tanner, is bribed to kill a pig. When the animal's carcass is discovered on the steps of the local mosque the next morning, simmering tensions explode into riots and massacre. A seemingly well-planned and well-executed job by the British plants seeds of mistrust and hatred among those who, until the day before, had been close friends and neighbors. As a result of the ever-changing political and social atmosphere of the city, the novel highlights the weakness of human characters whose loyalties shift in times of tragedy. Tamas is a chilling reminder of the consequences of religious intolerance and communal prejudice.

About the Author

Bhisham Sahni, born in 1915, is considered to be among India's greatest writers and a distinguished voice in Hindi literature--having written over one hundred short stories and several plays. He was a writer who transformed the landscape of Hindi literature. Sahni, who was born in Rawalpindi, in present-day Pakistan, was an active participant in the Quit India Movement and settled in India after Partition. Tamas, his best-known novel, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1975 and was subsequently adapted into a National Film Award-winning film by Govind Nihalani. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1998 and the Shalaka Award, the Delhi government's highest literary prize, in 1999. Daisy Rockwell (translator) is an artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator. She has translated numerous classic literary works from Hindi and Urdu into English, including Bhisham Sahni's Tamas and Khadija Mastur's The Women's Courtyard. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand was the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2020, she was the winner of the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work for Krishna Sobti's A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There. In 2023 she was awarded the Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award. In 2024, she was a translator in residence at Princeton University and a translation fellow with the NEA. Born in northeastern India, Siddhartha Deb (foreword) lives in New York. His fiction and nonfiction have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for The Orwell Prize, and awarded the PEN Open Book Award and the 2024 Anthony Veasna So Fiction Prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Dissent, The Baffler, N+1, and Caravan. His latest novel is The Light at the End of the World (2023). His nonfiction collection Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India was released in 2024.