The Woke-Leftist Propaganda Serial "Tamas" Revisited

 

The Woke-Leftist Propaganda Serial "Tamas" Revisited

Shrikant G. Talageri

 

The revolutionary new film The Kashmir Files, and the totally new and revolutionary (I know I am repeating this word, but with full justification) direction (i.e. based on the principle asatoma sadgamaya) in which it is leading the Indian film media, brought to my mind one very typical poisonous woke-leftist serial of the Doordarshan days which best represented the Leftist venom at its worst, and which was touted as the "Truth" by all those in control of the media at the time: Tamas.

This serial was aired on Doordarshan in 1988. The Wikipedia article tells us that this serial is "Set in the backdrop of riot-stricken Pakistan at the time of the partition of India in 1947, the film deals with the plight of emigrant Sikh and Hindu families to India as a consequence of the partition". But see the synopsis of its story given in Wikipedia just below this:

 

"Nathu, a Chamar, is finishing his work in his shop when the thekedar (Pankaj Kapur) walks in and asks him to kill a pig for the Veterinary doctor who needs it for medical purposes. Nathu declines saying he has never killed a pig before and doesn't have the necessary skill for it, offering instead to tan the hide if required provided the people from the piggery kill it. Thekedar insists and gives Nathu 5 rupees and leaves the shop saying by morning the jamadar will come to take the carcass.

 

Early next morning Bakshiji (A.K. Hangal) and a few members of the political party go to a Muslim mohalla to clean drains as propaganda, singing patriotic songs. They're received at the mohalla warmly and are joined in by the residents in cleaning the drains. Later they are confronted by an old Muslim and asked to leave for their own good. Soon stones fly at the party members from neighboring houses and they flee the scene. Party members then discover that someone has thrown a pig carcass at the steps of a mosque.

 

Fearing unrest in the community, Bakshiji and Hayat Baksh (Manohar Singh), the spokesman of the Muslim League, visit the Deputy Commissioner Richard (Barry John) at his house and urge him to take preemptive measures to bring the situation under control. Richard declines the suggestions of Bakshiji and Hayat Baksh to deploy police or impose a curfew and instead tells the party members to urge their respective communities to maintain peace and order.

 

Nathu having seen the pig carcass at the mosque and having witnessed slight unrest in the town, wonders whether it was the same pig he had killed last night. While returning home in the evening he sees the thekedar in the street. Nathu tries to approach him but the thekedar rushes off hurriedly. Now sure that it was the same pig, Nathu feels terribly guilty and goes home and confesses it all to his pregnant wife Kammo (Deepa Sahi). Outside at a distance they see burning houses and

 

Nathu blames himself for the erupting communal violence.

Sensing danger, Nathu decides to leave the city with his wife and mother. They start off on foot, Nathu carrying his old crippled mother on his back. During the travel Nathu's mother dies and has to be burned in the forest without proper funeral rites which further devastates the conscience-stricken Nathu who in his naivety holds himself responsible for the holocaust.

 

In a nearby village Harnam Singh (Bhisham Sahni) and his wife Banto (Dina Pathak) are the only Sikh family. They too are planning to go to their daughter Jasbir's (Uttara Baokar) house in a Sikh village. They travel on foot all night and the next morning reach a village and knock a door seeking shelter. The house belongs to a Muslim, Ehsan Ali (Iftekhar), who has been a friend of Harnam Singh since long. Harnam Singh and Banto hide at the house during the day, but at night are discovered by Ehsan's son and are asked to leave immediately. On their way the next morning they meet Nathu and his wife in the forest and they all go together to a gurudwara where Jasbir and several other Sikhs have taken shelter.

 

At the gurudwara Teja Singh (Amrish Puri), the leader of the Sikh council, informs the Sikhs that Muslims are continually collecting arms and sikhs should do the same. Later that night a junior granthi comes to the gurudwara and informs Teja Singh that the Muslims know that the Sikhs are out numbered and not sufficiently armed, so they’re demanding 2 lakh rupees for truce. Teja Singh and the Sikh council deem the amount too much and send the granthi and Nathu to negotiate with the Muslims. Teja Singh and the council members watch from the terrace of the gurudwara as Nathu and the granthi are approached by the Muslim mob, surrounded and attacked. Sikhs enraged by this take up arms and go out to fight shouting Sikh slogans. Back at the gurudwara Jasbir leads the Sikh women to a collective suicide by jumping into a well, some with their children in their arms.

Richard is later shown addressing prominent figures of the city where he informs the gathering about the relief measures taken by the government and proposes the leaders to form an Aman Committee to send out a message of peace. Bakshiji and Hayat Baksh are made vice presidents of Aman Committee. At the conclusion of the meeting the thekedar is seen shouting communal harmony slogans.

 

Harnam Singh, Banto, and Kammo are at the refugee camp. Harnam Singh requests a government employee to help find Nathu who hasn't been seen since he went with the junior granthi for negotiating with the Muslims. The employee suggests they inquire at the hospital tent where he might've been admitted had he been found in the city. Kammo looks through the dead bodies lying in a row on the ground and identifying Nathu's dead body among them, she collapses, crying. She goes into labor immediately and is taken into the hospital tent by nurses. Harnam Singh and Banto sitting outside the tent hear the newborn's cries from inside the tent mixed with slogans of "Allahu Akbar" and "Har Har Mahadev" coming from a distance."

 

Note the power of the leftist propaganda stranglehold over information in the country at the time: "At the 35th National Film Awards, it won three awards including the Nargis Dutt Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration. In August 2013, it was shown on History TV18 as a series."

 

Does the film, even as per the watered-down synopsis given above, deal " with the plight of emigrant Sikh and Hindu families to India as a consequence of the partition"?

 

Or does it show that:

 

1. The Hindus were responsible for their plight in pre-partition Indian areas of present-day Pakistan: an "upper caste" Hindu tricks an unwary and reluctant  "lower-caste" Hindu into killing a pig, whose carcass is then thrown into a mosque to "hurt the feelings" of Muslims.

2. The Muslims, who, till then, are busy indulging in cleaning drains as part of a social initiative (led by AK Hangal, who plays a Congress party leader in the serial), and in singing patriotic songs, get inflamed and start rioting, causing Hindus and Sikhs to leave their homes. Even then, their kind nature makes one Muslim man give shelter to a Sikh couple on the run, while his more prudent son tells them to go away (for their safety as well as his own).

3. Hindus run for shelter to a Sikh Gurdwara, where as a chain reaction to the process started by upper caste Hindus, the Sikhs also start getting instigated by anti-Muslim propaganda, and then follow Sikh-Muslim clashes with collective suicides by Sikh women and children.

4. The Congress and Muslim League leaders jointly organize help for the Sikhs and Hindus on the run, even as equally raucous cries of "allahu Akbar" and "Har Har Mahadev" rend the air.

 

This is the synopsis given in Wikipedia which already gives the lie to the statement that the serial deals "with the plight of emigrant Sikh and Hindu families to India as a consequence of the partition": it clearly deals with the responsibility of a section of Hindus for the whole of Partition and its consequences. But the serial has very much more to tell us than revealed by this short synopsis.

 

I had written a detailed article on this serial in 1988 itself, picking up every single relevant point in the serial as is my habit. At that time, there was no internet, I was totally unacquainted with computers and did not even (till 2004 or so) know typing. I sent my handwritten article to Sita Ram Goel for his perusal shortly after he agreed to print my first book, and that article is now lost forever. I remember the crucial points in it: the main thing was that the demand for Partition of the country by the Muslim League played absolutely no part in the story of Tamas, except, if at all, as something unimportant and ambigious in the unstated background.

 

The main aspects of the story were the depictions:

a)  Of Muslims as a community which merely reacted (as innocent people will do) to the provocations of the Great Villains: the "Upper Caste Hindus";

b)  Of "Lower Caste Hindus" as mere unwilling and unsuspecting pawns in these "Upper Caste" games;

c) Of the Arya Samaj as an institution where small boys were trained to strangle hens and chickens as training for strangling and killing of Muslims;

d) Of Sikh priests (and fanatical Sikh women) in gurudwaras instigating Sikhs to kill Muslims, by singing a particular song, with appropriate gestures, which drives the Sikhs into a frenzy: "Jo lade deen ke het, shora sohi, purza purza katt mare…" ("He who fights for his religion, he alone is the true warrior, he will allow himself to be cut into pieces but will not flee the battlefield. When the sky resonates with battle cries and the sound of weapons, the true warriors will stand in battle formation, and their swords will not miss their aim…"); etc. etc. And, funniest of all,

e) Of Communist Party leaders in the areas (now in Pakistan) who automatically, as recognized men of maturity, intellect and neutral disposition, take charge of all the all-Party Peace Committees and coordinate all "peace" activities (the Congress leaders being depicted as weak, bumbling and totally confused leaders who would never be able to play such a role, and have to be patronized by the strong-minded Communist leaders)! The main Communist leader, in one part, peremptorily, pompously and contemptuously decides that the Hindu Mahasabha cannot take part in the Committee because He does not recognize it as a political party!

 

I had decided yesterday to see the whole serial once again and note down every single bit and part of the venom and poison in it, every Hindu-hating nuance, every blatant historical falsehood, everything in the hate-film Tamas which contrasted it with the film The Kashmir Files. But, truth to tell, it would be a nauseating experience, and I think this short account above will give an idea as to what that Goebbelsian monstrosity called Tamas was all about.

 

[Let me, for the record,  add a good point that I wrote about Tamas in my article on Hindutva, originally printed in the Sita Ram Goel Commemoration Volume in 2005:

"That the leftist version of secularism is bitter, rabid and vicious in its hatred of Hinduism and everything connected with it is undeniable, but even, for example, in the notorious TV serial “Tamas”, which exemplifies these traits so well (I wrote an unpublished article detailing the many ways in which every scene in the serial exudes ugly anti-Hinduism and false leftist propaganda), we find soul-stirring music and songs steeped in authentic traditions of Indian music  -  to be contrasted, for example, with the pedestrian, pop varieties of Indian music we find in serials like Ramanand Sagar’s “Ramayana”, so dear to the hearts of Hindutva organisations."]

 

The thing to be noted is that the Communists in every country where Islamists exist have always supported and instigated the Islamists. Before 1947, the Communist Party of India actually asked all its members to resign from the Party and to join up with Jinnah's party in order to provide intellectual, ideological, propaganda and logistical support to the separatists. After Partition, all these same Communists were kicked out from Pakistan by the Islamists. No, that was not a one-time-in-history occurrence: the same thing has happened in every country where Islamists have grabbed power, whether Afghanistan, Iran or the erstwhile ISIS regime in Syria and Iraq. Everywhere local Communists have prepared the grounds for the Islamist takeovers, and then been kicked out for their pains. But, as I have repeatedly pointed out in my articles, the central point of Leftist ideology is Hatred: hatred for one's ancestors and ancestral heritage. So, such setbacks do not deter them or bring about any change of heart or tactics: they merely move on to new pastures to carry out their hate activities. It is no surprise that serials such as Tamas (and The Sword of Tipu Sultan, and films like Garm Hawa and other leftist serials and films in India) are very often written, produced and directed by "refugee" Communists: Bhisham Sahni, Govind Nihalani, Bhagwan Gidwani…. (the serial The Sword of Tipu Sultan was, incidentally given the official green signal by a Sanghi "refugee", K.R.Malkani).

 

The actors in these serials and films are, of course, usually the usual suspects: A,K.Hangal and Dina Pathak, in Tamas, for example, about whom I wrote in my 1993 book: "When the Ramayana was being shown as a serial on TV, Leftist and progressive artists, led by doughty warriors like A.K. Hangal and Dina Pathak, organized a march in Bombay to protest against this "communal" act of Doordarshan (Rama being a pre-Islamic Indian hero, any serial on him would obviously be a "communal" one). Addressing a rally at the conclusion of the march, Dina Pathak bitterly castigated Doordarshan for showing another "communal" item on its network—a report of the archaeological discovery, by Dr. S.R. Rao, of the remains of ancient Dwarka, under the sea, off the coast of Gujarat (Dwarka, having sunk under the sea long before the birth of Islam, any report on it would obviously be a "communal" one). Need we say more?"  (TALAGERI 1993:32-34).

 

More recently (in the last few decades), as I pointed out in my earlier article on The Kashmir Files, the stranglehold of Muslim Mafia finances, leftist ideologues and convent-school educated middle-class Hindus on Bollywood has made Hindu-bashing, and distortion of known historical events for that purpose, a mandatory aspect of film-making in India: even the most unsuspected Bollywood personalities indulge in it without turning a hair.

 

Which is why I salute Vivek Agnihotri, Pallavi Joshi, Anupam Kher, and the entire team of The Kashmir Files with all my heart. Hindus, don't let their achievement become a one-time wonder: let it be the strong start of a trend which will completely finish off the rule of Untruth in the world of Indian serials and films. You owe it to your ancestors and to this sacred land and soil on which they lived. Do not fail them.