Unparliamentary Words

In the summer of 1980 The Times sent me to Delhi. My first foreign posting, it rewarded all my hopes of adventure. India and Pakistan were at the heart of my reporting. I also wrote from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Early on 23 June Sanjay, the politically powerful younger son of the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, crashed his sports plane in Delhi and died. It was a big story and I was only three weeks into the job.

Someone said: ‘See Khushwant Singh. He knew Sanjay well.’ Khushwant was editor of the Hindustan Times and I found him in his seething newsroom. Perhaps he saw ‘Help!’ written on my face. ‘I’ll give you ten minutes,’ he said kindly, and launched into the meaning of Mrs Gandhi’s loss. So I got to know him. Then, as now, it was not possible to work in India and be unaware of his stream of newspaper columns, comic short stories, novels and histories. He has been India’s best-known journalist for nearly forty years and has sought always to be frank. His sexual candour sometimes dismays admirers. He is a veteran foe of religious intolerance and an Indian who accepts the unpopularity of speaking up for Pakistan. Someone in Canada once addressed a letter: Khushwant Singh, Bastard, India. It was swiftly delivered. Before he fell into full-time writing he was a barrister, a law professor and a diplomat. He was 41 when his novel Train to Pakistan made him famous. He sent the manuscript to the Grove Press in New York which offered $1,000 for the best Indian fiction. He won the prize and the work was published in 1956. It is a powerful story set in the convulsion of Partition in the summer of 1947. During that year mobs killed a million people. More than 15 million fled their homes in history’s greatest exodus. The novel is set in Mano Majra, a Punjab village half Sikh and half Muslim, overtaken by the spreading violence. In 1947 railways had been integral to Indian life, a unifying force, for more than ninety years. But that summer trains were horrific symbols of Partition’s fallout. On both sides of the new border, gangs ambushed trains and left the carriages crammed with dead. The slaughter mocked India’s political leaders, who had imagined a peaceful partition and failed to foresee the disaster they brought about. Mano Majra’s people, Sikh and Muslim, try to keep their humanity, swearing friendship. But mutual suspicion corrodes the old relationship. In the storm of terror and vengeance religious allegiance is all, the difference between sudden death and survival. A stranger arriving in the village underlines the crucial significance of identity. His name, Iqbal, is enigmatic, cross-denominational. He could be Hindu, Sikh or Muslim. As a Westernized city man, a sentimental socialist with a different accent and eating habits, he doesn’t belong. The police put him in jail. A train arrives from Pakistan, its ghostly carriages filled with 1,500 Sikh and Hindu corpses. Villagers build a funeral pyre, flames pierce the night and old certainties vanish. Iqbal is forced to measure his middle-class socialist ideas and his courage against the Indian reality. The village’s Muslims get ten minutes to quit their homes and board a train to Pakistan. A death squad plots to massacre everyone aboard. The tension stretches to the last line. Given the rawness of Partition’s wounds it was not surprising that half a century passed before the novel was filmed. ‘So much blood and sorrow,’ Khushwant brooded when I talked to him on the fiftieth anniversary of 1947. ‘Fifty monsoons cannot wash them away.’ The political legacy of the rupture – war, suspicion, bitterness and a divided Kashmir – formed the background to my reporting. Train to Pakistan helped me to understand better the local and human cost. In 1980 there were still many in independent India and Pakistan who had seen or fled the massacres. The writer Kuldip Nayar was 23 when he and his family left their home on the Pakistan side of Punjab and made for Delhi. ‘We thought we’d be able to travel between Pakistan and India as easily as you do between England and Wales. In our house I left my copy of War and Peace, and my mother her best shawl, thinking we’d return. We never did and lost everything. I saw rivers of humanity streaming into Pakistan and India, hundreds of thousands, dishevelled and terrified.’ Khushwant Singh had a perilously close view of the violence in Punjab. He left a train just before it was attacked and every Sikh aboard murdered. As the killing intensified a British detective told him to flee. He reached Delhi in August in time to see independence declared. For his scenes of Mano Majra, Khushwant drew on Hadali, the Punjab village where he was born in 1915. It was mostly Muslim with a Sikh and Hindu minority. His grandmother raised him and he grew up with strong feelings for Punjab’s land, people and earthy humour. He speaks and reads Punjabi, English, Hindi and Urdu. And perhaps his frank, irreverent and sometimes bawdy writing springs from the highly coloured sex-and-violence tradition of Punjabi literature. Although he says his roots lie ‘in the dunghill of a tiny Indian village’ he notes that his origins were not at all poor. His grandfather Sujan Singh and father Sobha Singh recruited Indian soldiers during the First World War and the British rewarded them with land. They prospered as textile manufacturers. In the 1920s Sobha Singh earned a knighthood as the leading contractor in the building of New Delhi. As a schoolboy Khushwant watched the great east-west fusion take shape. He remembers wild boar and leopard roaming land now covered with middle-class enclaves. Mahatma Gandhi visited his school and asked if he would not prefer a blazer made of Indian rather than British cloth. He counts Gandhi as a hero, ‘the greatest man of our times’. He read for the Bar in London in the 1930s, fell in love with the city, cycled through the Cotswolds and the Wye valley, and pursued his passion for English and its poetry. In London he deployed his newly learned Milton to woo Kaval Malik, daughter of another Sikh knight. They married in Delhi in 1939 and the 1,500 guests at their lavish wedding included Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder. In 1947, starting a new life in the capital, Khushwant quit the law with relief. He says he hated its injustices. He worked as a press officer at the Indian missions in London and Ottawa, as a radio producer in Delhi, as a delegate at Unesco in Paris. A Rockefeller grant in the 1960s marked a turning-point. It financed research for the two-volume History of the Sikhs that he counts as his most fulfilling work, and led to teaching at Princeton. ‘I translated many manuscripts and translated myself into a scholar,’ he told me once. ‘I have always said I have no religion, but I have translated Sikh scriptures and I am proud to be a Sikh, something important to me, a matter of belonging.’ In 1969 he took to the journalistic stage as editor and impresario of the Illustrated Weekly of India. He made it readable, merry, saucy, humane, provocative, informative. ‘I realized I did not know much about my own country and I became passionate about showing people how they and their communities fitted into India, how we became Indian.’ He hired young journalists to mine the country for human-interest stories and insisted that all the pictures should be of people. ‘Every issue was a sell-out, telling people about themselves, who they were.’ He lifted the circulation from 80,000 to 410,000, but after ten years it all ended, as it often does in newspapers, abruptly. He had revolutionized Indian magazine journalism but had made political enemies. His bosses fired him. He became editor of the Hindustan Times and at the same time was appointed a member of the upper house of the Indian parliament, the Rajya Sabha. He was soon in trouble. An MP called him Mrs Gandhi’s chamcha, or crony, and he called the man a bastard, an unparliamentary word which was struck from the record. He complained of MPs’ sycophancy, snoring and flatulence. With his commitment to candour (one of his gongs is the Honest Man of the Year award), he was perhaps not suited to a political career. Meanwhile, his syndicated column, ‘With Malice to One and All’, grew into an institution: a commentary on politics and events, notes on his travels, freebies and the delightfulness of women, with a peppering of jokes, Urdu couplets and nature notes. He taught himself ornithology because he was ashamed of his youthful ignorance of the vocabulary of nature. Always a believer in India’s secular ideal he denounced extremists during the Sikh insurgency in the 1980s. ‘I could talk to my community because I was part of it.’ He protested strongly against Mrs Gandhi’s ordering of the bloody army assault on the Sikhs’ holiest place, the Golden Temple. When her Sikh bodyguards killed her in her garden in 1984 Hindu mobs murdered hundreds of Sikhs in Delhi. Khushwant was a marked man because he was a Sikh. Just in time, the Swedish embassy in Delhi gave him sanctuary. For more than ten years police guarded his home: when I called on him I showed the stern sentries the Scotch I’d brought and they gave the slightest of smiles. He long ago depicted himself as a Scotch-sipping ladies’ man. A typical popular work is called Sex, Scotch and Scholarship. But while he likes the fun he is serious about his work and his scholarship. His blurbs call him ‘a flirtatious raconteur surrounded by a bevy of beauties’ but I have known him only as a disciplined early-to-bed early-riser. His habits did not vary. He offered evening drinks at seven, scolded the unpunctual, sat in a chair with a Black Label at hand, his feet on a stool. He was courteous and listened more than he talked. Women liked him, as he liked them. By eight-thirty he was saying a firm farewell and heading for supper. Soon after nine he was in bed; and up by five to listen to the BBC and start work, writing by hand on yellow pads. So much for the playboy. He gets dozens of letters a day and answers them all in writing, a few words on postcards. When I last talked to him in Delhi he remained a determined critic of religious intolerance. ‘I am averse to fundamentalism and patriotic chest-beating. It makes me sad and angry. I make fun of people, of course, but humour is a pin pricking the balloon, not a sledgehammer. If you don’t find its comical side, life would be too tragic to live. I cope with a little humour and a little Scotch. And writing – it’s a pain in the arse, isn’t it? How one wants to delay writing! I keep it at bay by doing crosswords. But in the end it’s my sustenance, and I have to keep speaking my mind.’ At 93 Khushwant Singh is still writing and speaking his mind.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 20 © Trevor Fishlock 2008