The Company of Women

About the book

The Company of Women is a novel by Khushwant Singh, published by Viking Press in 1999, when its author was 84 years old. The first edition runs to 294 pages. It is Singh's boldest work of fiction: where Train to Pakistan wrote about Partition and A History of the Sikhs made him a scholar's name, this late novel writes frankly about desire, money and loneliness among Delhi's wealthy in the 1990s, and it startled many of his readers for exactly that reason.

The publisher describes the book as an uninhibited celebration of love, sex and passion, and Singh himself called it the fantasies of an octogenarian. It follows one man, Mohan Kumar, through a string of relationships after the end of his marriage, and it uses that simple frame to look at the private lives behind India's new wealth.

What is The Company of Women about?

Mohan Kumar is a brilliant student who wins a scholarship to Princeton University in the United States, where his early love affairs begin, among them Jessica Browne, an American, and Yasmeen Wanchoo, a Pakistani woman. He returns to India, makes a fortune as a businessman and settles in Delhi, but his marriage of thirteen years ends in separation. Convinced, in his own words as the publisher quotes them, that lust is the true foundation of love, he takes an audacious step: he advertises for women companions, offering to pay them to share his bed and his life.

The companions who answer shape the rest of the novel. There is Sarojini Bharadwaj, the demure professor from small-town Haryana who surprises him with her ardour; Molly Gomes, the free-spirited masseuse from Goa; and Susanthika Goonatilleke, a diplomat from Sri Lanka. Between one affair and the next, Mohan falls back on Dhanno, his maid, and on his memories of his first lovers. The pattern is the point: each new beginning repeats the same emptiness, in a richer house.

Desire, money and the new Delhi

Alongside the love affairs, the novel is a portrait of a class. Mohan Kumar belongs to the newly wealthy upper middle class of a globalising India, and the book records its drawing rooms, its appetites and its double standards: a society that condemns openly what it practises in private. Money in this world can buy company, comfort and silence, but it cannot buy attachment, and Mohan's story keeps proving it.

That is why the book is still read as more than a scandal. Read as social history, it catches Delhi at the moment when new money was changing how people married, separated and lived, and it does so through a hero who has everything he wants except anyone who stays.

Written at 84: background and controversy

Singh wrote The Company of Women at the age of 84 and described the result, a sexually explicit novel, as the fantasies of an octogenarian. The frankness drew attention from the start: the press remarked on the graphic scenes, and one lawyer in Chennai filed a complaint about what he called the book's obscene content.

Reviewers were divided. The Hindu wrote that it was hard to associate the book with the author of such serious works as Train to Pakistan and the scholarly history of the Sikhs. India Today, by contrast, called it a rollicking sexual romp with a surprising ending. The argument about the book was really an argument about its author: whether the historian of the Sikhs had any business writing it at all.

ਲੇਖਕ

Khushwant Singh (1915 to 2014), born in Hadali in Punjab and educated at Government College, Lahore and King's College London, was a lawyer, diplomat, journalist and Member of Parliament before he became India's most widely read columnist. His fiction began with Train to Pakistan in 1956, and The Company of Women came near the end of a writing life that still had one more novel in it, The Sunset Club, written in his nineties. He died on 20 March 2014 at the age of 99.

Reception and legacy

The novel received mixed reviews on publication, and it has kept that divided reputation. Yet after Singh's death, The Guardian's obituary counted The Company of Women among the landmarks in Indo-English fiction, a sign of how far opinion had travelled since 1999. Penguin Books India has kept the book in print in paperback, including a 2016 edition.

On Singh's shelf it stands as the counterpoint to everything else: the Partition novelist and historian of the Sikhs writing, in his eighties, about desire and old age with the same refusal to look away that marked his serious work. Readers who come to it from Train to Pakistan meet a different Singh, and that surprise is now part of the book's life.