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. He has translated twenty-five books from Russian into Hindi, including Tolstoy's Resurrection. In addition to Hindi, Sahni is also proficient in English, Urdu, Sanskrit, Russian, and Punjabi. He lived in Moscow from 1957 to 1963 and worked as a translator from Russian to Hindi with the Foreign Language Publishing House, Moscow. In 1950, he joined Delhi College as a lecturer in English. He directed the famous drama Bhoot Gari adapted for the stage by Khwaja Ahmed Abbas. Under the guidance of Balraj Sahni, later he joined the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) in Mumbai and worked as a performing artist. He was the younger brother of the one of the greatest Hindi film actor, Balraj Sahni. When communal riots broke out in Rawalpindi in March 1947, he worked with the Relief Committee. Upon Partition, he and his Punjabi Hindu family were forced to move to Amritsar. He joined the Indian National Congress & jailed for his participation in the Quit India Movement of 1942. īhism Sahni was a part of freedom struggle. He earned a master's degree in English at Government College in Lahore, and also attended Khalsa College, Amritsar.
īhisham Sahni was born on 8 August 1915 in Rawalpindi. Tamas won the 1975 Sahitya Akademi Award for literature, and was later made into a television film in 1987 by Govind Nihalani. It has been translated to English, and several Indian languages including Gujarati,Malayalam, Kashmiri, and Manipuri. He made the point that the real victims of all sectarian violence are the hapless common folk, irrespective of religious or denominational differences. Tamas portrays the terror-stricken Hindu exodus from Muslim majority areas, though the overall theme remained the human-story behind the entire carnage. Bhisham Sahni was a distinguished Hindi fiction writer, playwright, translator, teacher and actor.īhisham Sahni is most famous for his epic work Tamas (Darkness, 1974) which is a novel based on the riots of the 1947-48 Partition of India which he witnessed at Rawalpindi.