Jokes apart

It helps to become a legend if you live a very long life. Khushwant Singh did do that, falling, in cricket parlance, just one short of a century. But what a 99 it was! I was lucky to have met him just a few months ago. At the Mumbai International Literary Festival, we instituted the “Landmark Literature Live! Lifetime Achievement Award”, and Khushwant Singh was an automatic choice for that. He received the award with grace and humility, and after the reporters and TV crews had gone, we celebrated with a drink.

It astonishes me to know that he wrote as many as 85 books, which is being extraordinarily prolific for even such a long life. In this massive literary output, he will be best remembered for two works. The first is his two volume A History of the Sikhs, which from the time it came out, became the definitive reference book on the subject. The other was his novel, Train to Pakistan, regarded by most people as the best novel written about the Partition. Like many wonderful books, it was made into a film, but like most wonderful books made into film, the movie was a disappointment. (Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children became a damp squib in the hands of Deepa Mehta, while Pamela Rooks made a forgettable Train to Pakistan.)

However, both these books came a very long time ago, and the danger for any creative person who leads a long life, and whose best work is done at an early age, is that he becomes irrelevant in his later years. This did not happen to Khushwant simply because he didn’t rest on his laurels but did a variety of things and did them in his own way. Some would say that the best thing he did was the Illustrated Weekly of India; others would say it was his column, With Malice Towards One and All (later also This Above All). To me, it was all of these things combined.

The one quality that shone through the publications he edited, and the columns he wrote was irreverence. Khushwant was no respecter of reputations, and if need be he was quite willing to call a spade a shovel, even in obituaries. He often said that just because a person is dead, it doesn’t make him great. This tendency to be blunt about things often drew an angry response. Rahul Singh, his son and formidable journalist himself, tells the story of a postcard which was delivered to Khushwant: The only address on the card was “Khushwant Singh/Bastard/India”. Khushwant probably framed that card.

When I became editor of the Illustrated Weekly, I got a call from the Great Man himself. “Anil,” he said, “Are you sitting in my chair?” I said, “Yes Khushwant, but only in a manner of speaking.” For one thing, his were different times, with no TV and not too many publications, there was no competition to the Weekly. But for those very reasons, people who ran magazines got away with doing very little: You could carry on doing much the same thing. What Khushwant Singh managed to do in this soporific environment was to wake everyone up. With a mixture of irreverence (his trademark), community pride, discreet sex, and the occasional daring subject, he suddenly made the staid and boring Weekly into something you actually looked forward to reading. And talk about.

As for his columns, I don’t think anyone would accuse them of being literary, which is precisely why they were so very popular. Syndicated all over India, without doubt, the most syndicated column in the country, his snippety weekly pieces had a certain homespun quality about them, occasionally sharpened by cutting observations about people and happenings. Each column ended with a joke, which was quite often corny. The point was that the jokes came from his readers, so well before the world began to talk about “reader engagement”, Khushwant had already been doing it for years! Incidentally, he started his columns in 1969, and they ran, week after unfailing week, till just a few months ago, when he decided that, perhaps, at 99 he should retire.

When I met him last, he was a little frail, but still up and about. The evening Golden Hour at 49, Sujan Singh Park continued its tradition: from seven to eight in the evening, you could just drop in and have a whisky with him. I did so that evening, and I am sure even till his last day people came in, for what had virtually become a pilgrimage.