Bhisham Sahni was born on 8 August 1915 in Rawalpindi. He earned a master’s degree in English at Government College in Lahore and also attended Khalsa College, Amritsar.
He was the younger brother of the one of the greatest Hindi film actor, Balraj Sahni. Under the guidance of Balraj Sahni, later he joined the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) in Mumbai and worked as a performing artist.
As an actor 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).
Bhisham Sahni is most renowned for his epic work Tamas (Darkness, 1974), a novel based on the Partition riots of 1947 during the Partition of India. Tamas portrays the horrors of partition, though the overall theme remained the human story behind the entire carnage. He made the point that the real victims of all sectarian violence are the hapless common folk, irrespective of religious or denominational differences. It has been translated to English and several Indian languages, including Gujarati, Malayalam, 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.
On July 11, 2003, at the age of 87, he died in Delhi.
