KHUSHWANT SINGH
Witty and fearless writer (1915 – 2014)
In his syndicated column, ‘With Malice Towards One and All’, Khushwant Singh was given an unique logo that finds no parallel among journalist and columnist across the world. He was shown sitting inside a light bulb. This logo was conceived, created and executed by another unique artist Mario Miranda. The ‘light’ signified that Singh was shedding light, humour, satire and punching them with his tongue-in-cheek digs directed at himself. With his passing away last month, that light has gone out forever. One more year and he would have crossed a century in the cricket of life. But that was not to be. His wife Kawal, predeceased him some years ago and Singh is survived by his son Rahul, a noted journalist and daughter, Mala.
But that is not what he leaves behind. He leaves behind much more that go beyond family and friends. He leaves behind memories of his tremendous courage he vested his pen with, easily turning it into a sharp knife, a sword, a drop of acid poured into pages of writing despite being thrown out summarily of his editorial post with the Illustrated Weekly of India during the Emergency because he fell foul of Indira Gandhi as was shunted out without a by-your-leave. He was openly critical of her complete censorship of the fourth estate during the Emergency.
Another instance of his courage was expressed when he returned the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award 10 years after he got it in 1984 in protest against the army siege of the Golden Temple of the Sikhs in Amritsar. Other sources state that he had given the award back because of the destruction of the Babri Masjid calculatingly undertaken by Lal Krishna Advani and his Hindutva brigade.
His novel, Train to Pakistan, remains an all-time classic based on a bloody slice from India’s Partition which was later made into a film. His other noted books are – I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, A History of the Sikhs, The Company of Women among the 30 novels, many short stories, essays and countless commentaries. When he was editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, its circulation leaped to an incredible 400,000 and is still remembered by elders addicted to it as one of the most outstanding magazines in English in the country. He radically introduced a page of jokes, cartoons and a glamour photograph when there was no Photoshop, no Adobe and no Internet to fall back on and the popularity of the weekly was determined exclusively by the quality of the editorial content and the images.
His travelogues beautifully describe his wanderings to exotic lands like Turkey, Libya and Syria and to Papua New Guinea where he encountered a Sikh working as an immigration officer. Singh was founder-editor of Yojana magazine from 1951 to 1953. He was nominated to the Rajya Sabha by Indira Gandhi and was Member of Parliament from 1980 to 1986.
Singh did not think twice before he spanned the entire spectrum of the written word except, perhaps poetry. He created punch lines, jokes addressed to everyone including himself, wrote short essays, short stories, novels and plays filled with lovely settings and memorable characters. Most of us have not read his longer works because his columns, created from within that lovely bulb, kept us entertained, enlightened and busy. In a tribute in the Indian Express, Prateek Kanjilal described him precisely when he writes, “A devastating loose cannon, he needed a persona that played harmless, like that caricature. Finally, it was the delicate art of self-deprecation that let him say almost anything and get away unscathed, all his charmed life.”
He must be laughing his guts out watching us all write tributes to him because they did not matter to him when he was alive. They do not matter to him now that he is no longer around.
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Shoma A. Chatterji
The writer is a freelance journalist, film scholar and author, who has won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema.[/column]