Truth, Love and a Little Malice

About the book

Truth, Love and a Little Malice is the autobiography of Khushwant Singh, published by Viking in 2002, when its author was 87 years old. It runs to 423 pages and takes its title from his long-running newspaper column, With Malice Towards One and All, which appeared in the Hindustan Times and was syndicated in newspapers across India. Where the column gave him a page a week, the book gives him a whole life: family roots in Punjab, schooling in Delhi and Lahore, the law, diplomacy, journalism, Parliament, and the friendships and arguments of more than eight decades.

It is also a history of modern India told from inside the room. Singh was born in 1915 in Hadali, in undivided Punjab, and lived through Independence and Partition, the Emergency and Operation Blue Star. Because he edited national newspapers and knew many of the people who ran the country, his memoir doubles as a first-hand account of how India governed, fought and argued with itself across the twentieth century.

What does Truth, Love and a Little Malice cover?

The book covers Singh's life in order, from his family and childhood in Hadali and Delhi to his years as a lawyer, a diplomat, an editor, a writer and a Member of Parliament. He writes with clarity and candour about the leaders he knew, among them Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, about the painter Amrita Sher-Gil, and about ordinary people who were caught up in the violence of Partition.

He is just as direct about himself. The publisher's summary lists what he records without flinching: his professional triumphs and failures as a lawyer, journalist, writer and parliamentarian, the comforts and disappointments of a marriage of more than sixty years, his phobia of ghosts and his fascination with death, the friends who betrayed him and the friends he failed. The malice of the title is aimed at the author as often as at anyone else, and that is the book's method.

A Punjabi life at the centre of India

Singh was born on 2 February 1915 in Hadali, a village in what is now the Punjab province of Pakistan, the son of Sir Sobha Singh, one of the builders of New Delhi. He attended St Stephen's College in Delhi, Government College in Lahore and King's College London, and trained as a barrister. In 1947 he worked for India's Ministry of External Affairs and served as a press officer in Ottawa and London. Journalism then took over: he was founder editor of Yojana and editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, the National Herald and the Hindustan Times. From 1980 to 1986 he sat in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament.

For Punjabi readers the interest is double. This is the memoir of the man who wrote Train to Pakistan and the two-volume A History of the Sikhs, and it explains in his own words how a Hadali childhood and a Lahore education produced both the novelist of Partition and the most widely read historian of the Sikhs of his generation.

Why was the book delayed for more than five years?

The book was ready years before it appeared. On 31 October 1995, India Today published authorised extracts, including material from the chapter titled Gandhis and Anands, about Indira Gandhi and her daughter-in-law Maneka Gandhi. Maneka Gandhi sued the author and his publishers for an injunction and damages, arguing that the passages were defamatory and invaded her privacy. An interim court order in December 1995 stopped publication, and a single judge confirmed the injunction in 1997.

The appeal became a closely watched test of free expression against privacy. On 18 September 2001, the Delhi High Court decided the case of Khushwant Singh and Another vs Maneka Gandhi in the author's favour, holding that a pre-publication ban was not justified and that any claim would have to be tested after publication. The autobiography was finally published in 2002, more than five years after it was first held up.

The author

Khushwant Singh (1915 to 2014) was a writer, lawyer, diplomat, journalist and politician, born in Hadali in Punjab and educated in Lahore and London. His newspaper column, With Malice Towards One and All, was syndicated all over India, and he wrote more than 100 books and short story collections, among them Train to Pakistan, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, Delhi: A Novel, The Company of Women and The Sunset Club, as well as the two-volume History of the Sikhs. He died on 20 March 2014 at the age of 99.

Reception and legacy

The autobiography has stayed in print since 2002, first with Viking and then in a Penguin Books India edition of 2003, through which most readers now meet it. It remains the starting point for anyone studying Singh, because it is the one place where he tells his own story whole: the Punjab boyhood, the courtrooms and embassies, the editor's desk and the Parliament benches. Its court battle also gave it a second life in Indian law, where the 2001 judgment is still part of the debate about how far privacy can hold back a memoir by or about a public figure.