Khushwant Singhਖ਼ੁਸ਼ਵੰਤ ਸਿੰਘ

Early life

Khushwant Singh was born on 2 February 1915 in Hadali, a small town in the Khushab district of Punjab, in what is now Pakistan. He was born into wealth and prominence: his father, Sir Sobha Singh, was one of British India's most successful builders, the contractor whose company raised much of New Delhi, including the Viceroy's House and Connaught Place. The young Khushwant grew up between two worlds, the devout Sikh tradition of his mother and grandmother and the Westernised, English-speaking milieu of his father's circle.

He was educated at Government College in Lahore and then at King's College, Cambridge, and was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in London. Returning to India, he practised law at the Lahore High Court from 1939 until Partition. In 1947 he joined the Indian Foreign Service of the newly independent nation, serving as a diplomat for several years before discovering that his true vocation lay elsewhere.

The journalist

In 1951 Singh entered journalism with All India Radio, and he soon founded and edited Yojana, the government's planning journal. But it was as the editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, from 1969 to 1978, that he became a national institution. He transformed the staid magazine into India's liveliest weekly, doubling its circulation with a mix of sharp writing, gossip, and fearless opinion.

He went on to edit the National Herald and the Hindustan Times from 1980 to 1983, and his Saturday column, "With Malice Towards One and All", was syndicated across dozens of newspapers. Witty, provocative, and deliberately irreverent, Singh cultivated the persona of India's most loveable rogue: the whisky-drinking, plain-speaking Sikh who said exactly what he thought about politicians, godmen, and sacred cows alike.

The writer

Singh's first book, The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories, appeared in 1950, but it was Train to Pakistan (1956) that secured his literary fame. Set in the fictional border village of Mano Majra during Partition, the novel's account of communal slaughter and individual courage remains the most widely read fictional treatment of 1947 in English. I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale followed in 1959.

His range was enormous: Delhi, a sprawling novel about the capital he loved; a definitive two-volume History of the Sikhs; translations, essay collections, and joke books. His autobiography, Truth, Love and a Little Malice (2002), was as candid as his columns. He wrote daily into extreme old age, publishing new books in his nineties.

Public life and honours

Singh served as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha from 1980 to 1986 and was an unabashed supporter of Indira Gandhi, defending even the Emergency of 1975-77. He received the Padma Bhushan in 1974 but returned it in 1984 in protest against the army's storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, an act that cost him friends in government but won him respect for consistency.

In 2007 he accepted the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honour. He lived for decades in the same Delhi apartment in Sujan Singh Park, holding court each evening over whisky for a stream of visitors, writers, and politicians.

Legacy

Khushwant Singh died in New Delhi on 20 March 2014 at the age of ninety-nine. He was survived by his son Rahul, a journalist and writer, and his daughter Mala. His niece, the film actress Amrita Singh, carried the family name into Bollywood.

Few Indian writers have been so widely read or so thoroughly themselves. Singh wrote about Partition, about Delhi, about the Sikhs, and about sex and death with the same bracing candour, and he did it in prose of enviable clarity. The old rogue of Sujan Singh Park remains, in the affection of his readers, not a nice man to know, but an impossible one to forget.