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Literary Review
No easy art
KHUSHWANT SINGH sat in a cavernous armchair, a marmalade cat snoozing by him, as he talked to
ANURADHA ROY about his writing and his life. Excerpts from the interview.
You've lived through many significant periods of history. Which mattered most to you?
PARTITION was a traumatic experience for me. I had gone to Lahore expecting to live there, to become a lawyer or a judge; then to be brutally torn out and never really being able to go back. That was what put me to writing. I wrote Train to Pakistan. I had no intention of becoming a writer, nor any confidence that I would be able to make a living out of it.
Your attitude to the Emergency has been controversial. Can you say something about it?
Emergency I initially supported, like most Indians did. Things were falling apart when Indira Gandhi cracked down on it. At that time it was generally welcomed, to stop the country disintegrating. It was the misuse that came a few months later that gave it a bad name and I too felt it had gone too far. I did protest many times in person and in writing. I have no apologies. Emergency when imposed was justified, but it carried on too long and they paid the price for carrying on too long.
I was intrigued to read in your autobiography that your relationship with your parents was starchy and formal, while you were close to your grandmother.
Like most Indian families, my father was the boss, with hardly any contact with the children. He laid down the law. It did become formal. My grandmother I was close to in the village, and shared my room with her in Delhi. With her there was not so much give and take as being constantly in each other's company.
And your mother?
My mother...she had other children, many others... I liked being with her, she was a lovely gossip.
How have you survived all these years being as rash and presumptuous as you are?
Well I get my punishment from people...one of today's papers has a page and a half calling me a liar by a man I was closest to in Bombay. I taught their children English literature, tennis, swimming, became a part of their family. I don't know what he is talking about. I suppose the truth as seen by me is not the truth as seen by them. I leave it to the readers to decide.
People have the image of you as the eternally bubbly sardar. Have you ever been really depressed?
I am very light-hearted. I have been through domestic depression; like other marriages I have been on a sort of roller coaster and there were times when I was depressed. But never in the professional world. I was fired from jobs, it didn't bother me. When I was fired from The Illustrated Weekly, I just walked home and within five minutes I was working on a novel. I have never gone under.
How do you combine your gossipy writing with serious works of scholarship?
Oh, everyone has many facets...the columns, well other people are politically obsessed. Mine cover a whole spectrum. It becomes a hotch potch. One editor said to me, "You have made bullshit into an art form." It's not easy making art out of bullshit: you try and see!
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