The Face's Memory, Memory's Face

As long as a person is alive, we often tend to associate one face with him,framed in our mind's eye. But death abruptly shatters this frame and the 'face'breaks free from its confines - what we thought as 'one' dividesitself into many faces, each face with its own memory, each memory with its ownface. What a strange paradox - death, which we thought of as full stop, begins to seem as a fount of thousands of flowing out images of life.

Today, when I remember Bhisham, I recall those images flowing in the streamof memory. The first image is probably the one in the derelict days after Partition where he is reading a story in front of ten or twelve of us in arundown room of a private college. Gentle face, soft voice, restrained, calmbut keeping pace with the ups and downs, every moment alive to the twists andturns of the story. Author, speaker and actor, playing three roles at once.This was a distinctive feature of Bhisham Sahni's life - managing to playvarious roles under pressures of need and demands of time. Taking recourse toan old idiom, it can be said he was such a Hindi writer who had 'tasted thewater of seven streams' (saat dhaaroN ka paanii piyaa thaa).

If we see a long gallery of unmatched characters in his stories and novels,where each person is present with his class and family; pleasures and pains ofhis town and district; the whole world of perversions and contradictions; it isbecause the reservoir of his experience was vast and abundant. At the requestof his father – would anyone believe? – he dabbled in business, in which he wasa miserable failure. With his high-spirits and passion for life of the commonpeople, he travelled through villages and towns of Punjab with the IPTA theatregroup; then began to teach to earn a living; and then lived in the USSR forseven years as a Hindi translator. This sprawling reservoir of experiencecollected in the hustle-bustle of various occupations ultimately filtered downinto his stories and novels, without which, as we realise today, the world ofHindi prose would have been deprived and desolate. The 'simplicity' of his workcomes from hard layers of experience, which distinguish and separate it fromother works of 'simplified realism.'

I feel this insight of experience, somewhere, manages to free him from hisopinionated assertions too. During the cold war years when the terrors of Soviet socialism had come out for all to see, I had long - at times, quitebitter - debates with him, which are possible only between two friends. I wasoften amazed that a person who had such an acutely sensitive view towards theinjustice in his society could shut his eyes to the inhuman oppression in the Soviet society, where he lived for years. This paradox in Bhisham Sahni's lifewasn’t limited to him, it is seen in various Marxist artists of the 20thcentury.

What was this paradox? While on one hand, fascinated by 'humanisticprinciples', he could not believe that the socialist system itself could be'inhuman'; and, on the other, while writing about his own society,fortunately, instead of portraying abstract ideals, he was able to express thehard realities of human condition with great authenticity, in his stories, plays and novels. I don’t recall Bhisham Sahni ever confronting this paradox,not even in his autobiography, where he, uninhibitedly and transparently,writes about the ups and downs of his life

But, on artistic standards, this doesn't shorten Bhisham Sahni’s stature. If despite this paradox the clamourof truth in his stories doesn’tsound false, it is because he was able to tap into the contradictions and helplessnessof Indian middle class to bring out its small virtues smeared indust, distress and sweat, not suffuse it with abstract righteousness of thesocialist ‘man'.

Strangely, this paradox in him marred the truth of that novel the most which is none other than his most talked about, prestigiousand popular work Tamas, where the 'goodness' of man is not verysatisfying when confronted with the terror of Partition. Despite being 'politically correct', the artistic authenticity of the novelseems suspect every now and then. By implicating the British as responsible for Partition, we can not get away from the agony of self examination.

If not on the larger canvas of the novel, Bhisham Sahni is able to expressthe terrifying tragedy of Partition with an extraordinary compassion in hisstories. Amritsar Aa Gaya Hai (‘We have reached Amritsar’) is one suchexceptional work where Bhisham gets away from the external reality and pointsto the bloody fissures etched on people’s psyche. This is possible only for awriter who, in the darkness of historic events has seenthe sudden 'accidents' that happen inside human hearts from up close.

If Bhisham is able to bestow more of a human reality to the terrors of Partition in his stories, it is because in those, his characters, instead ofblaming the circumstances or each other, are able to so manifest their innerfears, cowardice, weaknesses and the human goodness hidden in some corner oftheir hearts that is not visible in the daily interaction of averagelives.  While, in the 'normal routine'of our daily lives we try to stay away from confronting hard realities, thecharacters in his stories, in different situations, act as mirrors for eachother, exposing themselves with all their shining and murky realities.

If he didn’t have this artistic distinctiveness, Bhisham, like other‘progressive’ writers, would have been an idealist and not the loved and likedwriter of the Hindi fraternity. His autobiography, written in his last years, Aaj Ke Ateet (Today'sPasts), where he untangles the knots of hislife with uninhibited humour and honesty, seems second to none. It is a shiningexample of the unpretentious creativity with which a writer can follow hiswriterly "dharma" till his last years.

'Till...his last years’? Writing these words gives a jolt. Despite havinglived a long life, we were so used to his lively and large-hearted presencethat it is difficult to believe that there could be an 'end' or 'ending' to hislife. After reading his last collection of stories Daayan (Witch), I wasamazed that even after so many years there seemed no repetition or staleness inhis writing. Each of his stories seemed to bring something sudden from newerdirections, which was as new for him as it was unexpected for us. That Bhishamnever paused, never halted in such a long creative journey is a bigachievement; but what is bigger perhaps is that his life nurtured his work andhis work nurtured his life, both nurtured each other continuously. After livingsuch a full, beautiful and creative life, his passing away also seems a simpleand calm acceptance.

(Translated from Outlook Saptahik dated 28 July, 2003)