The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories

About the book

The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories is the first book by Khushwant Singh, published in London in 1950. It is a collection of short stories in English, and it announced a writer who would become one of India's best known: funny, unsentimental, and sharp about the clash between old belief and new science in the Punjab of his childhood.

Singh was 35 when the book appeared, a lawyer who had turned to diplomacy and journalism. The stories draw on the world he grew up in: the village of Hadali in Punjab where he was born, school in Delhi and Lahore, and the servants, schoolboys and small town characters of that India. The title story is the best known of them, and it has been anthologised again and again.

The stories are short, plot driven and built on irony, the qualities Britannica picks out as the mark of Singh's short fiction. Their subjects are ordinary people caught between two Indias: one that feeds milk to a cobra out of faith, and one that wants to dissect the cobra in the name of science.

What happens in "The Mark of Vishnu"?

The story is told by one of four schoolboy brothers. Their household servant is Gunga Ram, an illiterate Brahmin who believes all life is sacred, even the life of a serpent or a scorpion or a centipede. Every morning he smears a V mark of sandalwood paste on his forehead to honour Vishnu, the preserver, and every day he pours milk into a saucer for Kala Nag, a six foot black cobra that lives in a hole by the wall of the house.

The boys laugh at his faith. One rainy morning they find the cobra, stone it until it is a pulp of black and white jelly, lift it on a bamboo stick and shut it in a tin box. The next day they carry the box to school, meaning to present it to their science teacher. As soon as the lid comes off, the cobra bursts out, its hood undamaged, and lunges at the teacher, who topples backwards off his chair.

At that moment Gunga Ram appears at the classroom door, saucer and jug of milk in his hands. He kneels, pours the milk, and bows his head to the ground, begging forgiveness for the injury the boys did to the snake. The cobra, in desperate fury, bites him all over the head. The poison blinds him at once and he turns pale, and within minutes he collapses and dies. The teacher wipes the little drops of blood from his forehead, and underneath is the V mark, where the cobra dug its fangs.

The prank at the heart of the story came from Singh's own schooldays. Britannica records that he and his brothers once presented a cobra to their chemistry teacher, and the incident came to be recorded in this story. The story is fiction, but its sting comes from a memory.

Faith, superstition and the modern classroom

The story refuses to choose a side cleanly, and that is its power. Gunga Ram's faith is gentle: he tends wasps the boys have battered with badminton rackets, and he will not let a creature be killed. The boys' science is cruel: they stone a living animal for a joke and carry it to school as a trophy. Yet the faith kills Gunga Ram and the science tortures the snake, so both the believer and the rationalists stand condemned.

The same argument runs through the collection: superstition against reason, tradition against modernity, the village against the English educated town. Singh's sympathies are with ordinary people, but he never flatters them. His servants are pious and foolish at once, his schoolboys clever and heartless at once, and the comedy of the stories comes from watching those certainties collide.

ਲੇਖਕ

Khushwant Singh (1915 to 2014) was born in Hadali, a village in Punjab that is now in Pakistan, the second son of the builder Sobha Singh. He studied law in Lahore and at King's College London, practised at the Lahore High Court, and served as an Indian diplomat before turning to journalism. In 1969 he took over The Illustrated Weekly of India and raised its circulation from 80,000 to 410,000. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1975 and returned it in 1984 in protest against Operation Blue Star. His full story is in his Kosh entry.

After this first book came the work that made him famous: Train to Pakistan in 1956, The Voice of God and Other Stories in 1957, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale in 1959, and the two volume A History of the Sikhs, published in 1963 and 1984. But the short story remained his first love, and this collection is where it began.

Reception and legacy

The book was well received in Britain and in India, and the title story became Singh's most anthologised short story, a set text in Indian schools and colleges. It is still the story readers meet first when they meet Khushwant Singh, and it is still argued over: was Gunga Ram a fool, a saint, or simply a man whose kindness had no sense of danger?

The collection set the pattern for all of Singh's short fiction: short, plot driven, ironic, and crowded with village and small town characters. Some critics rate him higher as a short story writer than as a novelist. Read it beside Train to Pakistan and The Voice of God and Other Stories, both in this Kosh, to see the writer of the Partition novel learning his trade.