The problem with Khushwant Singh is that he writes so much rubbish. His incredibly popular mass media persona and the bottomless maw of his many newspaper columns has, over the years, ensured that he casts aside all qualitative nets and trawls the public sewers for whatever they will yield. He sells private, inconsequential tidbits of people's lives, and vapid stories of his junkets; he gives publicity to bad books, and relentlessly promotes stupid, if occasionally pretty, women.
What all this garbage does is to detract from his tremendous achievements. Khushwant is nothing if not a premier man of letters. The writer of Train to Pakistan, and many other competent fictions, is also the acclaimed translator of the Guru Granth Sahib and a slew of great Urdu poets. Nor does he lack serious scholastic ballast, his History of the Sikhs being the authoritative account. Puerile readers of his columns can be forgiven for not knowing all this, brought up as they are on the illusion of the boobs-and-booze sardar—an image he fosters happily. The fact is that Khushwant is that exceptional serious writer who has discovered the bridge to popular appeal.
To know him is to admire him. For me, the most impressive thing about Khushwant is the discipline and professionalism with which he conducts his working life. At 82, he has no more peaks to scale, yet there is no letting up, no trace of bombast or pretension, no resting on laurels. He works long hours everyday—that is, reads and writes—churning out his columns and reviews, translating poetry, writing his books. Contrary to popular impression, he has no more than two or three drinks every evening, and no avalanche of desirable women warm his bedroom. Also, there can be no late nights with Khushwant, for he retires from social company at 9 p.m., no matter whether he is guest or host.
The purpose of this preamble, and the character certificate, is to place in perspective the virtual ban that has been imposed on what many were reckoning would be the sardar's final hurrah. With his memoirs, Truth, Love, and a Little Malice, Khushwant was expected to push the autobiographical genre to new literary levels in India. The literary memoir is a stunning form of storytelling—real life captured by an imaginative master—and in the west in the last few years it has been enjoying a rare vogue. Those of us who had read a couple of chapters were very impressed. The narrative was of a very high quality: brisk, finely detailed, in pared prose. The book was scheduled for release in January 1996.
Thanks to Maneka Gandhi and some retrograde judgements, one-and-a-half year later, the book is still nowhere near being published. Reacting to a pre-publication extract in India Today in October 1995, Maneka Gandhi went to court claiming infringement of privacy, and obtained a stay on the book. The extract dealt with the horrid scrap Mrs Indira Gandhi had with Maneka in 1982, resulting in her exit from the prime ministerial house.
Khushwant's recounting of the event—very even-toned, displaying no bias—shows up both women in rather poor light, no different in cunning thrust-and-parry than any middle class mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. If anything Mrs Gandhi comes out the worse, as she blusters and backs off alternately in a desperate attempt at reining in Maneka. Khushwant received most of his information about the event from Maneka, her sister, and her mother, and he corroborated each version against the other. Ironically, when the fracas erupted, Khushwant was one of the first people Maneka called from Mrs Gandhi's home requesting him to alert the foreign press. Later Khushwant and Maneka fell out. Now she wants his book canned. Understandably. But why are the courts obliging? What Khushwant has written about is in the public domain: the incident was widely covered in the press, and India Today's detailed account at the time was far more scathing, questioning the stature of leaders who "hitch up their saris to scream at each other like harridans in a bazaar brawl". What Khushwant writes about could notionally be called private, but it was being enacted in a fairly public arena, the prime minister's house, with public servants, including personal secretaries and police officers, thrown in.
Indians know most of their politicians lead embarrassingly crooked lives in private while mouthing homilies in public. It is essential that the moral and financial duplicities of their private lives be exposed. This scrutiny is merely the obverse side of the phenomenal privileges politicians accord themselves. We need to know who they are, for they take up a hugely disproportionate space in our community lives. I want to know whether the person who makes the laws for my wife and children is not in reality a wife-beater or a paedophile. The fact is we no longer know politicians by what they state in pulpits, but by what they are in private.
Information is our greatest weapon against tyranny, fascism, and arrogant rule. Nothing should be allowed to dam its flow. In the US, even Larry Flynt and Hustler are allowed to survive because freedom of expression is seen as the great keystone in the democratic arch. There is no way the court should have heeded Maneka's appeal. Derailing a first-rate book's publication for two years is tantamount to gagging it. It is, in a way, censorship. And it is an ominous sign when it can happen to someone of Khushwant's stature. If anything, Maneka should have been allowed to pursue damages, if she could prove libel; but the book should have been allowed to see light of day.
In a curious, embarrassing order, the judge has noted that people expect "high thinking, higher living, and high learning" from great writers like Khushwant Singh, and that they expect from him "materials useful to the society which would inspire the younger generation". This shows poor understanding of the nature and role of a writer. He is neither evangelist, missionary nor altruist. Nor a creator of self-help manuals. Most are in fact neurotic wrecks, manic masterpieces. Randomly, if anything, he is his own idiosyncratic seeker and prophet The courts should tread carefully around matters of art and writing, for these are the frontier areas, the further reaches of no-law lands where the human race continually re-fashions and extends itself. In the 20th century half-assed courts have sat on adverse judgement on books like Lolita and Ulysses. Books now recognised as masterworks, their authors as men of genius.
