I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale

About the book

I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale is the second novel of Khushwant Singh, published in 1959, three years after Train to Pakistan made his name. It is set in Amritsar in 1942 and 1943, in the months of the Quit India movement, when the Second World War was going badly for Britain and the call for independence was at its height. At its centre stands one Sikh family: Sardar Buta Singh, a first class magistrate whose family has served the British Raj loyally for generations, his devout wife Sabhrai, and their son Sher Singh, who has secretly become the leader of a small group of young men preparing armed action against British rule.

The publisher's description, quoted by the Times of India, calls it Khushwant Singh's finest novel, and it has been widely acclaimed in those terms ever since. Where Train to Pakistan looks at Partition from a village on the border, this novel looks at the freedom struggle from inside a privileged official household in the city, where loyalty to the Raj pays the bills and loyalty to the coming nation pulls the son in the opposite direction.

What is I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale about?

Buta Singh is close to the young English Deputy Commissioner, John Taylor, and hopes his loyal service will be recognised in the honours list. He does not know that Sher Singh and his friends, among them the dashing Madan, have collected rifles and are practising with them outside the city. The novel opens with the young men shooting a sarus crane, a bird that mates for life, and the surviving bird's grief hangs over everything that follows. The village headman, a police informer who saw more than he should, later goes missing, and Sher Singh is arrested. If the charge against him is proved, he could be hanged.

Buta Singh, disgraced, disowns his son to prove his loyalty to the government. Taylor, who is sympathetic to the family and not unsympathetic to Indian independence once the war is won, lays out the choice: Sher Singh can save his life by betraying his comrades, or refuse and face the gallows. Around this crisis the household's private dramas run in parallel: Sher's wife Champak, restless in her marriage, is drawn to Madan, and Sher's sister Beena is drawn to him too. It is Sabhrai, who speaks no English and turns to the Guru Granth Sahib and to prayer at every difficulty, whose strength holds the family together, and the title is spoken near the end, in an exchange between Sher Singh and his dying mother: he promises her that spring will come to their land and the nightingale will sing again, and she answers that she will not hear it.

Themes: loyalty, faith and a mother's strength

The novel's real subject is divided loyalty inside one house. The father's loyalty is to the Raj that raised his family up; the son's is to a free India he is too vain and too weak to serve well; and the mother's is to her family and her faith, which in the end prove stronger than either politics. Singh does not make his young men heroes: Sher Singh bursts into tears under police questioning, and his grand plans run far ahead of his courage. Nor does he make the father a villain: Buta Singh's service is shown as a lifetime's habit, bought with real status and real fear of falling.

Sabhrai is the moral centre that reviewers keep returning to. Illiterate and deeply religious, she is the one person in the house whose loyalties never have to be calculated, and her matriarchal strength sustains the family through its crisis. Set against her are the novel's frank treatment of desire, in Champak's affair and Beena's longing, which made the book strikingly open for an Indian novel of 1959.

ਲੇਖਕ

Khushwant Singh (1915 to 2014) was born at Hadali in Punjab, now in Pakistan, trained as a lawyer in Lahore and London, and served in the Indian Foreign Service before turning to writing and journalism full time. Train to Pakistan (1956), drawn from his own experience of Partition, became his best known novel. He went on to write a two volume history of the Sikhs, the novel Delhi, and decades of newspaper columns, and he edited The Illustrated Weekly of India and the Hindustan Times. He received the Padma Bhushan in 1974, returned it in 1984 in protest against the army action at Amritsar, and received the Padma Vibhushan in 2007.

Reception and legacy

The novel has been reprinted steadily, including a Ravi Dayal Publisher edition in 1997 and a Penguin paperback, and the Times of India judgement quoted on its covers, that it is Khushwant Singh's finest novel, has followed it through its publishing life. Scholars of social realism in Indian English fiction treat it as the clearest example of his method: a small, fully realised household through which a whole political order, and its ending, can be seen. For Punjabi readers it holds a particular place in his work: an Amritsar Sikh family, drawn from inside its own rooms, in the last years before Partition changed the city and the province for good.

Read it if

Read it if you want the Quit India years seen from a Punjabi city household rather than from Delhi or from a history book; if Train to Pakistan left you wanting Singh's other great novel of the same generation; or if you want to watch a mother, rather than a magistrate or a revolutionary, turn out to be the strongest person in a story about the end of an empire.