Bhisham Sahni

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Bhisham Sahni

Born August 8, 1915 (1915-08-08)
Rawalpindi
Died July 11, 2003 (aged 87)
Delhi, Flag of India India
Occupation Author, Playwright, Activist
Writing period 1955-2003

Bhisham Sahni (August 8, 1915 - July 11, 2003) was a Hindi writer, playwright, and actor, most famous for his novel and television screenplay Tamas ("Darkness"), 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 brother of the noted Hindi film actor, Balraj Sahni.

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[edit] Biography

Bhisham Sahni was born on Aug 08, 1915 in Rawalpindi. Later he earned a master's degree in English at Government College in Lahore, and also attended Khalsa College, Amritsar.

He joined the struggle for Indian independence, and was jailed for his participation in the Quit India Movement of 1942. Upon Partition, he and his Punjabi Hindu family were forced to move to Amritsar.

In the late 1940s, he worked with his brother as a stage performer in Mumbai with the Indian People's Theatre Association. In 1950, he became a lecturer in English at Delhi College.

From 1957 to 1963, he lived in Moscow and worked as a translator from Russian to Hindi, during the period he translated twenty-five books from Russian into Hindi, including Tolstoy's Resurrection. In addition to those languages, Sahni was fluent in English, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Punjabi.

He was general secretary of the Progressive Writers Association, and was the founder and chairman of 'SAHMAT', an organization promoting cross-cultural understanding, founded in memory of the murdered theatre artist and activist Safdar Hashmi.

Late in life, he appeared in several films, including Saeed Mirza's Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho! (1984), Tamas (1986), Kumar Shahani's Kasba (1991), Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha (1993) and Aparna Sen's Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002).

[edit] Literary works

Based on the 1947 Partition of India riots he witnessed at Rawalpindi[1], Bisham Sahni wrote his epic work Tamas(Darkness, 1974), a novel portraying the terror-stricken Hindu exodus from Muslim majority areas, though the overall theme remained the human-story behind the entire carnage. It has been translated to English, and several Indian languages including Gujarati, 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 'Chief ki davat' and 'Amritsar aa gaya hai' are also based on the Partition.

Sahni's prolific career as a writer also included five other Hindi novels, over hundred short stories spread over nine collections of short stories, (including Bhagya Rekha (1953), Pahla patha (1956), Bhatakti rakha (1966), and Nischar (1983)); a collection of children's short stories 'Gulal ka khel', six plays including Hanusa (1977), Kabira khara bazar mein (1981), Madhavi (1982) and Muavze (1993), his autobiography "Aaj ke Ateet" (Pasts of the Present), and the biography of his brother Balraj Sahni, "Balraj My Brother," (English). [2]

During his life time, Bisham Sahni won several wards including Shiromani Writers Award,1979, Uttar Pradesh Government Award for Tamas, 1975, Madhya Pradesh Kala Sahitya Parishad Award, for his play 'Hanusa', 1975 the Lotus Award from the Afro-Asian Writers' Association, 1981 and the Soviet Land Nehru Award, 1983, and finally the Padma Bhushan for literature in 1998, and India's highest literary award the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 2002 [3] .

[edit] Quote

"If people knew each other, they would find it hard to hate."

[edit] References

  1. ^ Tamas
  2. ^ Bhishma Sahni at U.S. Library of congress
  3. ^ Sahitya Akademi Fellowships

[edit] External links