Tamas

Bhisham Sahni, Siddhartha Deb, Daisy Rockwell , Siddhartha Deb

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Hindi

Penguin Classics
05 August 2025

Classic fiction (pre c 1945); Historical fiction; Religious & spiritual fiction; Fiction in translation; Religious intolerance, persecution & conflict

An essential novel about the 1947 Partition in a newly revised translation by Booker Prize-winning translator Daisy Rockwell

A Penguin Classic

An essential novel about the 1947 Partition in a newly revised translation by Booker Prize-winning translator Daisy Rockwell

A Penguin Classic

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. In a northwestern city in pre-Independence India, Nathu, a tanner, is hired to kill a pig by a shadowy figure who haunts the novel. When the animal's carcass is discovered on the steps of the local mosque the next morning, simmering tensions explode into riots and massacre that grip cities and villages across the region of Punjab. The incident is the linchpin in a British plot to divide and conquer the local population by planting seeds of mistrust and hatred among many who, until the day before, had been close friends and neighbors. Tamas is a chilling reminder of the consequences of colonial rule and the consequences of religious nationalisms.

By: Bhisham Sahni
Foreword by: Siddhartha Deb, Siddhartha Deb
Translated by: Daisy Rockwell
Imprint: Penguin Classics
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 200g
ISBN: 9780143138051
ISBN 10: 0143138057
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 05 August 2025
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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.

Reviews for Tamas

It is Tamas, in either Rockwell's translation or the original Hindi, that remains an essential text for the times -- Nilanjana Roy * Business Standard *