Sunday book pick: Bhisham Sahni’s debut novel ‘Boyhood’ is a prelude to a pain-wracked adulthood

“Where does the real course of one’s life actually begin? At what turning point does one leave one’s boyhood behind and start on manhood? Who can say that, before that point, everything was clouded and unclear and without significance, but that everything ahead of it will be clear and meaningful? Isn’t manhood as hazy as childhood? And doesn’t that haziness go on right to the end of one’s life?”

Before his Partition magnum opus, Tamas, Bhisham Sahni wrote a sensitive novel about the a young boy’s coming of age in colonial India. First published in Hindi as Jharokhe (1967), it has been aptly translated into English as Boyhood (2016) by Anna Khanna. Like a jharokha balcony opening into the world, the novel opens into the endlessly confounding journey to adulthood. Sahni, who started his literary career with Boyhood, would go on to become one of India’s most important writers ever.

Looking back

The narrative voice belongs to the protagonist’s adult self, who looks back at his childhood and narrates it as he remembers it. He assumes the role of a spectator instead of the central character, as though his childhood had simply happened, many of the events beyond his comprehension and control. Happiness is interspersed with long periods of anxiety and unknowing. The...

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