Autumn of the patriarch

Speaking Volumes

 Sahni was born in Rawalpindi in 1915; one of his sharpest childhood memories is of watching giant tongues of flame from the smouldering grain market light up the skies when the first communal riot took place there, as he recounted in an interview to Outlook some years ago.

 If that specific memory showed up at all in the work by which most people recognise him, Tamas, it was in diluted form. The memories that he drew on to create what is certainly one of the iconic novels of Partition came from a later period in his life, when he witnessed scenes of violence and tragedy as a volunteer relief worker post-1947.

 To remember Sahni only for Tamas, however, is to do him a grave injustice. By the time I arrived at Delhi University as a young student, Sahni had already begun to acquire the aura of an eminence grise, respected but slightly overshadowed by younger, more fiery and more experimental talents in the world of Hindi literature.

 The first generation of Indians writing in English were beginning to emerge from the shadow of Mulk Raj Anand, Manohar Malgaonkar and R K Narayan; Midnight