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Sat Sri Akal, Sardar Sahib!
In Memoriam -
Khushwant Singh

NAVTEJ SINGH SARNA

Earlier this month, the ageing red-brick buildings of Sujan Singh Park, black rain streaks staining their face like tears, looked down upon an unusual gathering in the lawns below.

In an elegant white pandaal (pavilion), open for the most part to the early spring sky, sat a few hundred men and women around the Guru Granth Sahib. Exactly for one hour, three raagis sang shabads set to classical raags in praise of the Almighty.

There were no speeches, no eulogies, no tears, only a sense of solemn dignity.

As the sky darkened gently and the kirtan came to an end, the family, friends and admirers of the legendary Khushwant Singh lingered for a while over a cup of tea, reluctant to leave. With understanding looks and gentle squeezes of hands they conveyed to each other what could not be said easily in words: a sense of loss whose full realisation would take time; a sense of finality that something vital had gone out of their lives.

Death had finally claimed the grand old Sardar of Sujan Singh Park whose infectious smile, unflagging generosity and ready wit had touched the lives of so many present.

The lights came on one by one in the high-ceilinged flats around the lawns but the eye kept returning to a darkened ground floor window.

Not far from that window, Khushwant Singh sat evening after evening, slumped deep into a soft chair, a loosely-tied turban or a soft woollen cap on his head, a shawl across his legs … an open anthology of Urdu poetry not far away ...

Not the last time I met him though, about six months ago.

He was too frail to come to the drawing room. Instead he received visitors sitting on a chair in the corner of his bedroom. The famous visiting hour, on which reams have been written, the visiting hour that made many literary reputations and spawned several urban legends, too had been shortened.

They had to make their visits quicker and conversation was not as easy as before; one had to speak much louder and closer to be heard and understood.

Nobody has described that magic hour better than Khushwant Singh himself as the evening ritual of the thinly-disguised autobiographical character Boota Singh in his novel “The Sunset Club“:

Though he lives alone, he is never lonely; he has a constant stream of ladies visiting him in the evening, when he opens his bar. He is a great talker and a windbag. He makes up salacious stories of his conquests, which keep his audience spellbound. He uses bad language as if it was his birthright. When he is tired of company, he simply says, “Now bugger off.”

That evening when I asked him how he felt, his answer was ready and quick: “Waiting to go,” he said. But then his mood lightened and we had a brief exchange that belonged to that particular side of his personality that I treasured most -- that of a Sikh historian.

He told me that I should have a copy of Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha’s encyclopaedia at home if I wanted to work on Sikh history. Little did I know it would be his last piece of advice for me.

This scholarly dimension of his personality remains relatively under-explored and under-praised.

When he passed away, a national daily listed his ten best books and put “A History of the Sikhs” at number 9. Obviously they were unaware of what Khushwant Singh himself thought of that unique and hugely impressive work.

“The most fulfilling thing I have done in my life,” he wrote in ‘Truth, Love and a Little Malice: An Autobiography‘, “was working on Sikh religion and history. This was the only time I went through the Guru Granth Sahib with pencil in hand, marking words I did not understand. I made my own selections and translated them as I thought best. I used the language of the Old Testament as my model.”

Armed with a three-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Khushwant Singh turned down the editorship of “The Illustrated Weekly” to research Sikh religion and history -- in India and abroad.

The two-volume History covers the lives and teachings of the Gurus, the rise and fall of the Sikh Kingdom, the annexation of Punjab, the religious, sociological and political movements, the freedom struggle, the Partition and even the years beyond.

It is a monumental work, as ambitious in its sweep as it is immaculate in its execution. The author was fully aware of what he had achieved. As he writes in his Autobiography:

At the end of volume II, I appended two words in Latin -- Opus Exegii -- my life’s work is done. To write on Sikh history and religion was my life’s ambition. Having done that I felt like one living on borrowed time, at peace with myself and the rest of the word. It did not bother me if I wrote nothing else.

Khushwant Singh had decided very early on that he had to specialise in one subject to make a mark as a creative writer, and he chose his own community.

As he writes: “I had been brought up in an orthodox Sikh family, knew the prescribed five daily prayers by rote and was familiar with Khalsa traditions. Though by the time I made the decision, I had been disillusioned by all religions including my own, I had a strong sense of belonging to the Sikh community and was emotionally involved in its vicissitudes.”

Little wonder then that this self-professed agnostic also wrote a biography of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and an account of the sudden demise of the Sikh Kingdom, besides translating large sections of the scriptures with great felicity.

That is why the dignified kirtan darbar that Sunday evening seemed such a fitting farewell.

His advice on matters related to history and scripture was invariably perceptive and his guidance intuitive. When I mentioned to him in 2003 that I was working on a historical novel on Maharaja Duleep Singh, he warned me: “Don’t make him into a hero.” It was clear that he saw Duleep Singh as a flawed character and was worried that communal empathy may gloss over the flaws.

When some five years later the manuscript was shown to him with some trepidation, he not only volunteered a generous cover blurb but told me that justice had been done to the character. It made nine years of despair and toil worth it.

Again, when I told him that I was planning to translate the Zafarnama, but not in rhyme, he was quick to correct me: translation had to be in rhyme, else anybody could do it. Then he told me how he had translated the Japji in rhyme, often vowing not to eat until he had got the right line.

This determined dedication was evident when he began to write The History: “If I had waited for inspiration, I could not have written anything. I had to impose severe discipline on myself. It was during these years that I got into the habit of rising early -- between 4 and 5 am, making myself a mug of ginseng and getting down to going over my notes and organising my material …I had sworn not to get up from my chair till I filled the blank sheets of paper on my table … At times I rewrote every line five or six times till it read smoothly.”

And it continued till the end.

When he was 96 he confided one evening: “If I don’t write every day, it becomes too difficult to start again. The sight of that blank page and the challenge of having to fill it! It gets easier after the first page. I must write three or four pages everyday …”

So behind the self-created image of the leery, bawdy man, behind the smokescreen of sex, seduction and scotch, behind the banter with the beautiful ladies was another man: a painstaking, disciplined craftsman at whose innermost core lay simplicity, scholarship and spirituality.



[Courtesy: Biblio. Edited for sikhchic.com]
April 15, 2014

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