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 *

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.