Tamas

Tamas opens in a city in pre-Partition Punjab, where a tanner named Nathu is paid to kill a pig. He does the job without understanding what it is for. The next morning the carcass is found on the steps of a mosque, and tensions that had been building in the city break into violence.

Sahni follows the riot as it spreads, moving between the people caught up in it: those who stir up hatred for their own ends, those who carry it out, and those who simply try to survive. The novel shows how quickly a community can turn on itself once religion is made into a weapon, and how easily ordinary people are drawn in.

Yet the book is not only about brutality. Even in the worst of the bloodshed, small and unexpected acts of friendship and love appear, and they give the story its humanity.

Sahni's novel about the Partition of India won the Sahitya Akademi Award and is regarded as a landmark of modern Indian literature. This edition uses Daisy Rockwell's English translation of the original Hindi.