Wit, wisdom, and a whiff of mischief

By Mohan Singh

You cannot brand him; you cannot put him in any class. But he was a rich and qualified barrister, a lawyer who went on to be called a historian, a diplomat, a littérateur, a top-class journalist and yes, a jokesmith, but not a jester. He never lost his sense of humour.

Well-mannered, highly civilised and cultured, he led a clockwork routine. He knew Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi, spoke Punjabi, but wrote mostly in perfect, flawless Queen’s English. He answered each and every letter he received in his fan mail but replied only in one-liners on 25-paise postcards!

I once asked him to read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Pat came his reply: ‘I don’t want to read Animal Farm again. We are living in one’. But the genius of Khushwant Singh bloomed when he became the editor of India’s most popular tabloid, The Illustrated Weekly of India. He brought about far-reaching changes in its layout, and his choice of subjects, coupled with a bold style laced with eroticism, more than doubled its circulation.  I am sure he had an awareness of the psychoanalytic profile of the Indian male. 

As a journalist, he was perhaps the only one who defended Indira Gandhi for imposing the state of internal Emergency in June 1975. On the literary front, he made his mark with his maiden entry, Train to Pakistan, a vivid portrayal of the bloody aftermath of the Partition in 1947. The detailed topography of Mano Majra, an imagined village housing a healthy population of rich Hindus, artisan-class Muslims and the landed Sikh Jats, and their laid-back life near a railroad and a river bridge, all acquire a merciless ambience as events unfold amid mass killings and an inter-faith romance. However, the remarkable aspect is that as Khushwant aged, his writing output became increasingly prolific. 

He never took to the keyboard or the screen. And whatever he wrote on, he made it simply unputdownable. Whether they were translations of the Sikh scriptures (he was an avowed atheist), novels or his writings as a freelancer, he remained glued to his fountain pen. Nothing can better represent him than the author encapsulated in a glowing incandescent light bulb, which became his logo after his long stint with the Weekly. 

The once suited-booted aristocrat left us long ago, but the image of a Sardar sporting a henna-dyed but unkempt beard, wearing only the shred of a turban to cover a bald head, writing with a fountain pen will remain with us for long, very long. These days when there are complaints over a pliant media, heroes of his ilk are difficult to find except perhaps on these pages.