"Tamas" (1986) TV mini-series

Director:

Govind Nihalani

Writer:

Bhisham Sahni (novel)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

This TV miniseries ("Darkness" in English) became famous in India in the mid/late 80s for its realistic...

Plot Keywords:

Sikh | Partition | Religious Intolerance | Civil War | Hindu Temple

Cast

Om Puri	...	Nathu
Deepa Sahi
Amrish Puri
Bhisham Sahni	...	Karmo
A.K. Hangal
Manohar Singh
Dina Pathak
Saeed Jaffrey
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Riju Bajaj
Veerendra Saxena	...	Jernail Singh (singing voice)

Also Known As:

Darkness (International: English title)

Runtime:

297 min

Country:

India

Language:

Hindi

Color:

Color

Company:

Blaze Entertainment

Distorted book and film

Although this is a technically well-made film that had a major impact on me when I was young I can now see the biases that were inherent in the film and, no, the biases were not anti-Muslim, rather these were anti-Hindu biases. The film portrays Hindus as bloodthirsty and violent as Muslims. However, the fact of the matter is that the partition was a victory of the aggressive, expansionist religion of Islam against a largely passive Hindu civilization that is more diverse and pluralistic in its religious expressions than any other spiritual tradition in the world. The RSS, a Hindu Activist Organization, consisted of Hindus who could see the writing on the wall and thus were prepared to fight back against Islamic separatism, are portrayed in an overwhelmingly negative light. At one point a young, impressionable Hindu is taken by an RSS functionary to practice killing on a chicken. The same youth is then shown killing an old Muslim man along with other Hindu youth. No indoctrination of a similar sort is shown for Muslim youth when Islamic ideology is intrinsically hostile and violent towards non-Muslims, particularly polytheistic 'idolatrous' Hindus. Both the author of the book, Bhisham Sahni, and the film-maker, Govind Nihlani, are alienated Hindus, who would more eagerly describe themselves as Leftists or Marxists than Hindus, their minds warped by the colonial legacy that Nehru nurtured and perpetuated in independent India. This movie is shot through by that very bias and unnecessarily but deliberately seeks to put Hindus and Muslims on the same moral level, when Muslims were clearly for it and Hindus were absolutely opposed to it.