Bair Loss Control & Recovery

aA tribute to the 'son of a gun; now immortalised through his writing

went to Oxford, practiced la,v; was awarded the Padma Bhusban in 1974, and controversially supported the E merge ncy. However, he remrned the Padma Bhusban in 1984 in protest against 'Operation Bluestar' where thousands o f inn o cent Sikhs were killed during and after the siege of the Golden Temple in Amritsar. He was a Rajya Sabha Member at that time, from 1980 to 1986 He was also co.nsulcing editor of the newly established Pe11g11in India, and along with David Davidar, set up the foundations of what would become a powerhouse for contemporary Indian writing. He was awarded tl1e Padma Vibhushan in 2007.

t hose who more than others craved forgiveness for having lied, stolen, fornicated and made illicit money"

.,tI BY ROANNA GONSALVES

MysonJadyn went missing in .Mumbai last year. We were at the Tata Literature Live Festival 2013 at the r ational Centre for the Performing Arts and we had lost each other in the fllda, so to speak. After looking for him in various comers of the building, I found him seated on a sofa near tables laden \vith books, his focus trnwavering from the book he was reading. U pon closer inspection , I realised it \Vas Khusbwant Singh's Big Fat Jok<! Book. An acquaintance who noticed what was going on raised his eyebrows to suggest drnt Khushwant Singh's jokes were not exactly suitable for a ten year old. When l asked Jad)' t1 what he liked about it, he said with trademark h o nesty, "It has many rude words in idn

It is for tl1e rude words, four- lettered and fearlessly multi - lette red, re.11 and symbolic, that I ,-vill remember Khushwaat Singh. The 'son of a gun' i s dead. And with h im an era has ended too. In the contemporary popular imagination , the nan1e of Khnshwanc Singh conjures up the image of 'the sul tan of sleaze'. To be fair, one could be forgiven for thinking li ke this ab out a man who has writeen much that is sexist, much that treats women merely as objects of lust. But it will be a monumental shame if be is only remembered as a ' celebrated lecher', as die late Dhiren Bhagat cheekily called bim in a pre-obituary of Khushwanc Singh written in 1983.

In our contemporary rimes of paid news scandals erupting everywhere, the passing of Khusbwant Singh marks the encl of a more principled age in the med ia.

As the founder-editor of Yqjana, edicor of the l//11strated lP'fekg ef lndia, chief editor of New Delhi, and edicor of the Hi11dt1stan Times, he was irreverent and made no bones about bis views, saying he used "no condom on bis pea". He was born 99 years ago in Hadali village in what is now Pakistani Ptmj ab He ln his masterful two volume History of the Sikhs, Singh pres en ts a social, religious and political history of the landscape, and Sikh communities o f Punjab. Apart from being meticulously researched, the works are fuU of love for the geographies of Punjab, the poetry o f Guru Nanak, the music of kirla11. Yet these two volum es are far from hagiographies of the Khalsa Singh minces no words in cl1ronicling the 'holocaust' of Sikhs in I 984, and the b lood on tl1e hands of all sides of the political spectrum. 1-Iis novel Train to Pakisttm introduced a generation of readers to d1 e scories of the Western partition of India, and to rbe sorrow of Partition lireratute, more broadly. H is co lumn With Jvlafice To1vards One and All in the T-findwfa11 Til!les was widely read for its irreverence and humour. It is this irreverence and the courage to say as be pleased without fear o r favour, aka, the 'rude words', that is an inspiration co us. ln h is essay The Nefdford Neu, Religion - Without a God, he says, "On rare occasi on s whe n I visited ag11md1JJara of a temple, J made it a point to watch people making obeisance before the Granth Sahib (the holy book of the Sikhs) or their favourite God. Those who cook the longest cin1e co rub their noses on d1e grotu1d were usually

Singb's work o n religion and agnosticism are like roucbsrones for our age, especially in a communally charged lndia juse before tl1e ge neral elections later this year.

If you scratch below tl1e surface of his reputatio n as a dirty old man, you will find a who loved women., beginning witb bis grandmother. In the title story of his collection of short stor ies, The Portrait ef a Latfy, he paints a render picture of his grandmother who raised him: " her face was a crisscross of wrinkles running from everywhere to everywhere. No, we were certain she bad always been as we bad known her O ld, so terribly o ld chat she could nor have grown older, and had stayed at the same age for twenty years. She could never have been pretty; but she was always beautiful " Death was o fte n splashed across bis work. In his tongue-in-cheek story Porth11mo11s he imagi nes his own funeral and decides to die, "just for the fun of it," expecting his numerou s friends and wellwishers to grieve pub licly and long for their dearly departed friend. However, bi s tiny ob ituary notice appears at the bottom of page three in the newspaper, and only a few people mrn up to condole w i th his w i fe. B y the time the hearse nears tl1e cremation grounds, there is no o ne witl1- him on bis final journey, except t he driver, and ''even he seemed to be oblivious of tl1e enormity of the soul whose decayed mansio n be was transporcing on irs last voyage". Thankfully, this is not so in real life. In Australia, he will be remembered by those who have read him, and by those who have beard of bis larger-than-life personality. Ha.rwinderj it Singh, a prominent memb er of th e Sikh community in Brisbane says, " He had a knack of seeing, appreciating and writing about th e simplicity of God and religion. He would speal, up against bad praccices and 'man made' rituals, and habi L~"

Traditional and social media are abuzz witl1 tributes to Khusbwam Singh, from former subordinates gushing about the ir boss, to prominent media personalities acknowledging a great debt. However, n o n e can com e close co the epitaph he wrote for himself:

In his masterful two volume History of the Sikhs, Singh presents a social, religious and political history of the landscape, and Sikh communities of Punjab

Singh minces no words in chronicling the'holocaust' of Sikhs in 1984, and the blood on the hands of all sides of the political spectrum

Here lies 011e who spared neither 111a1111orGod

!Waste not)'Ottr tea,,· 011 hi111, he was t1 sod 117riti,l!: nasty thi11g.r he regarded as g-eatj,m

Thank the Lord he is dead, this son ef a gun.

''Vale Khusbwanc Singh! Tbank you for the rude words.