Book review

A haloed visage with warts and all

By

Randeep Wadehra

Absolute Khushwant by Khushwant with Humra Quraishi
Penguin. Pages: ix+189. Price: Rs. 250/-

A list of authors who have made themselves most beloved and therefore, most comfortable financially, shows that it is our national joy to mistake for the first-rate, the fecund rate.

---Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) US writer. Wit’s End (R. E. Drennan)

Khushwant Singh, on the contrary, is both first rate and fecund rate for the simple reason that, through his enormous output, he has the rare ability to cater to all tastes – the evolved and the artless. It is indeed a reflection on our times that he is celebrated more for his faked profanity than his inherent profundity.

His writings are a bemusing mixture of the cerebral, the quasi-cerebral and the fluff ‘n’ waffle. In the first category one can include such books as A History of Sikhs, Ranjit Singh: The Maharaja of Punjab, Tragedy of Punjab, The End of India etc. In the second category one might place most of his works of fiction – novels and short stories. If he can write something as evocative as The Train to Pakistan and I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale he can also write on the more mundane aspects of life, viz., his short stories like Mark of Vishnu etc. But, what makes his fiction popular is his inability or unwillingness to intellectualize the narrative. No arcane philosophical verbiage and no bombastic language.

However, none of the above would have given him the sort of profile he enjoys today had he not been a master purveyor of waffle. This we see in his popular columns – dollops of slurpable gossip topped with the juicy cherry of scandal and garnished with disarming self-mockery or spiced up with malicious denunciation of those who might have treaded upon his toes.

Time and again Khushwant has proved that he is capable of serious scholarship, but his innate talent for self-promotion (ouch!) and his understanding of the marketplace has led him to cater to the lowest common denominator. So sex, scandal and women figure prominently in his works. Long ago, as The Illustrated Weekly’s editor he had perfected the formula of mixing the cerebral with the profane to sell the magazine with unprecedented success. The Weekly’s circulation was poor before Khushwant took over, zoomed up to skyscraping heights during his tenure and tumbled down to the floor after he was sacked. The reason for his success was clear. On the one hand he gave liberal space to scholarly essayists, investigative journalists and litterateurs in the magazine and, on the other, he came up with sardarji jokes and sex ‘n’ scandal laced gossip. If you believe that these lines by Dorothy Sayers apply to Khushwant: “As I grow older and older, / And totter towards the tomb, / I find that I care less and less /Who goes to bed with whom”, perish the thought! He claims that he loves to fantasize about women even today. Lest one should utter the “dirty old man” cliché it would be pertinent to realize that Khushwant Singh has carefully fashioned this persona as his USP for garnering nationwide readership. Behind all that façade of a happy-go-lucky garrulous old sardar is a very shrewd mind of a salesman who knows that branding helps in capturing customer loyalty. And, so, Mario Miranda’s sardar in a bulb with the familiar stuff around him has become a journalistic/literary icon of sorts.

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 The Sardar is highly readable, despite his mischievous flirtations and tongue in cheek comments regarding the fairer sex. His four volume History of the Sikhs is the most authoritative text on the subject. The circulation coup he managed for Circulation figures of the the Ill weekly of India is still cited in Journalism classes. My generation saw the writings of AK Ramanujam, Keki Daruwala, Jayanta Mahapatra and our own Kamala Das because he carried their writings in the issues. Even the writers like Krishna Sobti, Quratullain Haidar and Ismat Chugtai we got to read in the Weekly. "Readability" quotient is really high in his writings. Thanks for the Review.

Bhawani Cheerath | August 22, 2010