Khushwantnama

by Khushwant Singh

  I am not a learned man. I am as far removed from being a scholar as anyone could be. I was a poor student, a briefless barrister, a tactless diplomat and ended up as an ill-informed journalist. So I was amazed when some pressmen in Bangalore pronounced that I was the Dronacharya of Indian journalism.

  I did no reading in school and college. It was later, when I was doing law and in the diplomatic service, where I didn’t have much work to do, that I began reading in a serious way. For the last fifty years, I’ve read maybe two or three books a week. With works of fiction, there are not many you want to read again from beginning to end. I go back to poetry, prose that comes close to poetry, blank verse, Shakespeare’s plays. I keep The Oxford Book of English Verse by my bedside and travel with it. There’s a lot of Urdu poetry I return to, and poems like Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’, which I must have read about forty times.

  What draws me to poetry is the language, the music of words, the terseness. The essence of good literature is poetry. And the best example you’ll find of good literature, where many sections are so tightly written that there’s not a word you can change, is the Bible. I read the Old Testament over and over again.

  What I do have is a reasonably good memory for poetry. I can dish out couplets and at times an entire verse by rote. People around me get impressed and get deluded that I am a man of learning which, I repeat, I am not.

  The other day I was going through A Collection of Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett (The Wisdom Library), which I had bought over thirty years ago in Honolulu when I was on a teaching assignment at the University of Hawaii. It is heavily marked as I have gone over it many times.

  I came across two lines by Edward Young (1681–1756) under the title Love of Fame. They made me wince.

  Some, for renown, on scraps of learning dote,

  And think they grow immortal as they quote.

  At school, I was hopeless at all subjects. And although I was very keen on sports, I wasn’t any good at games either. The only bright point was a comment from my English teacher in my report card. Miss Budden, who had come from England to teach in Modern School for two years, wrote that I had the possibility of making it as a writer. Even then, I was a good storyteller, the family jester, narrating events with a punchline in a way that none of my brothers could. The comment from Miss Budden more than amused my father, who had already decided that I was going to be a lawyer because I was such a chatterbox.

  An editor once said I had turned bullshit into an art form. So I said, ‘You try it—it’s very hard work.’ I have never taken myself too seriously. I think this has helped me speak and write freely, without worrying about what people might think and how they might react. Frankly, I don’t give a damn. I never have. I have never deliberately sought controversy or wanted to create trouble. I’ve always wanted to be true to myself and write honestly.

  I have never rated myself very highly as a writer. I can tell good writing from the not so good, and first-rate writing from the passable. I know that of Indian writers or those of Indian origin the late Nirad Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth handle the English language better than I do. I also know that I can and have written as well as R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Manohar Malgonkar, Ruth Jhabvala, Nayantara Sahgal and Anita Desai.

  Two writers who had a huge impact on me when I was young were Aldous Huxley and W. Somerset Maugham. Their work left a deep and lasting impression on me.

  When I think of the major Indian novels in the last sixty years that have left a deep impression on me I’d say, in no particular order:

  V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas

  Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

  Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy

  Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines

  Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold

  Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

  Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (this is a collection of short stories)

  I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama

  Jaysinh Birjepatil’s Chinnery’s Hotel

  Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk

  Tabish Khair’s Filming: A Love Story

  M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song

  A question that I am often asked is how does one become a good writer.

  Writing is often therapy for a troubled soul. But you have to be born a writer. No school or classes can teach you how to become one. There has to be something in you, a compelling urge. And you have to keep at it. The motivating force cannot be money (for there is much more money to be made running a gas station or practising law or medicine). And you are extremely lucky if you can write both fiction and non-fiction with equal ease and prowess.

  Writers have different styles and each writer is unique. They can be temperamental, have their quirks and eccentricities. They can be moody and dislikeable; they can be warm and kind human beings. Usually, writers are an interesting and colourful bunch—though I can think of a few who are crashing bores.

  To be a good writer, you have to be totally honest and not afraid to speak out. You have to have the ability to work hard and the stamina for a long haul. Sometimes you will sit for hours staring at a sheet of blank paper in front of you. You will have to have the determination not to get up till the sheet is filled with writing. It doesn’t matter if you fill it with rubbish. The discipline will prove worthwhile.

  Practise as much as you can. Keeping a diary, writing letters, emails—even that is good exercise.

  Along with hard work, read whatever you can—whether it’s the classics or fairy tales or even nonsense verse. Reading will make you capable of distinguishing between bad and good writing. There is no substitute for reading. This is also the only thing that expands your vocabulary.

  Moreover, one should never be pompous or pretentious. Don’t show off by using difficult words. That comes in the way of communicating with the reader.

  Always do your homework. A writer’s responsibility—whether he’s an essayist or a novelist—is to inform his reader while he provokes or entertains him. The challenge is to tell him something he doesn’t know. And don’t talk down to your reader; level with him.

  We read history to learn about the past, and pass exams. We read biographies and autobiographies to acquaint ourselves with the lives of great men and the times they lived in. We read fiction for amusement. At times, we are lucky enough to come across a book which combines history, biography and fiction, from which we learn about our past and present, and which we enjoy reading.

  It is tempting to write one’s life’s experiences. A first novel is very often autobiographical. However, non-fiction is a different ball game altogether. Memoirs of retired generals and civil servants rarely make for good reading. They are so full of their own achievements that they not only make their readers feel inadequate, they also end up being terribly boring. What is permissible in a biography is not suitable for an autobiography.

  Very few people write history the way history should be written: not as a catalogue of dry-as-dust kings, battles and treaties, but by bringing the past to the present, putting life back in characters long dead and gone, in order to make the reader feel he is living among them, sharing their joys, sorrows and apprehensions.

  Above all—and I’m repeating this because it is so important—don’t be afraid to be yourself and to be honest. If you write fearlessly and candidly you have to be prepared to pay the price. It’s because of my writing that I got the reputation of being a dirty old man but it’s never bothered me.

  I’ve always written what I felt and believed to be true. I bared all in my autobiography—if I hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been any point in writing it. If you write, then you also have to be prepared for criticism. I have never felt like giving it back to my critics, because I’m not vengeful. In my writing, I’ve always tried to follow my motto: inform, amuse, provoke.

  I’m lucky that I’ve been able to continue writing into my nineties. M
y eyesight’s good and I keep up with my reading as well. The thing is, I don’t know how to sit and do nothing. So I can’t stop! I don’t know how many of my books will be read after I’m gone. As Hilaire Belloc said:

  When I am dead, I hope it may be said:

  ‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’

  Journalism then and Now

  I was teaching courses on Comparative Religions and Contemporary India in the US when I decided to accept the offer of editorship of the Illustrated Weekly of India. It was 1969 and the job was in Bombay. The Illustrated Weekly was at that time the only magazine of its kind, and I wanted to try my hand at journalism. I had worked earlier with All India Radio as well as Yojana, a magazine brought out by the government, and I had been writing regularly for foreign journals like the New York Times. I was also writing ‘middles’ for Indian papers—the Statesman regularly and the Times of India—so my byline was not totally unknown to people. I wrote what I felt, what I thought about, and what I’d seen and observed. I used to travel a lot so there was always a lot to write about.

  I was able to make a success of the Illustrated Weekly because I had no baggage. I came to it with a clean slate. I was very clear about what I wanted to do and what I had to do. I have never made any distinctions between journalism and literature. They’re both about communication. I had no problems writing about politics because I had opinions and I wasn’t scared to air them.

  I was full of self-confidence, and belief in my three-pronged formula of ‘inform, amuse, provoke’. Because my teaching stint in America had made me aware of how little I knew about the people of India, I had read and learned a lot about different castes and communities, and this now stood me in good stead. I was lucky I had no real boss and so was given a free hand. We began with a series on the people of India—different communities—and then one called ‘I Believe’ where celebrities talked about various topics: God, corruption, destiny, religion, among other things. We had articles covering current issues. And features celebrating the lives of great men—Jain Mahavir’s birth anniversary, for example. I wrote to chief ministers of various states saying honouring his life wasn’t enough—you must practise what he preached, do something concrete. And if they were willing to do that I would give them all the publicity that they wanted. The response was terrific. Many of them banned shikar in their state. We covered it in the magazine. We also published provocative pictures with very detailed captions that legitimized the pictures—a still from the film Siddhartha with Simi Garewal wearing very little; a tribal girl with information about her tribe, that sort of thing. And circulation shot up. There was no looking back.

  In my time, the editor was really the boss of his newspaper or magazine. Now there are national newspapers with all-India circulations like the Times of India and the Hindustan Times, but I do not even know the name of the editor because he no longer runs the paper—it is either the proprietor or the proprietor’s children. The papers carry as much news as they can squeeze in on the front page—that is, if the front page isn’t an advertisement. In the rest of the paper, what dominates is Bollywood or fashion designers, exotic food, restaurants and pretty girls. Take a look at all the papers—they are pretty unreadable.

  These days I don’t think any editor makes much of a difference to a daily paper because, apart from reports from correspondents in different parts of the country and the centre page which carries editorials and columns, more than half the content of a paper consists of material from wire services or syndicated features from foreign journals, and the Page-Three kind of froth. I go through about six to eight newspapers everyday and most of my time is spent doing crossword puzzles because that’s usually the most interesting thing I find in newspapers today.

  Many editors today like to preach, and care little about presenting facts objectively. They are often both pompous and pedantic. It was not so in the past. Names like Frank Moraes, Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, Pothan Joseph and Prem Bhatia had credibility with readers. Dileep Padgaonkar, editor of the Times of India in the eighties, was not very wrong when he said that next to the prime minister he had the most important job in the country. Constructive criticism of the ruling party came not from the opposition but from the free press edited by able, responsible men—people like S. Mulgaonkar. He was a great editor, handled the language with great skill and was highly readable. B.G. Verghese was outstanding—he might have been too stolid, but he was very honest and straightforward. Frank Moraes had impeccable integrity, and an excellent command of the language.

  The scenario changed with television. Television posed a serious challenge because of its enormous reach. We are a lazy people. Once you’ve watched something on the TV screen, you don’t want to read about it in the next morning’s paper. There is a fatigue that sets in. With the growth of 24x7 TV news channels, fewer and fewer people bothered to read editorials. Proprietors of newspapers realized that editors were dispensable and they could find other ways to meet the challenges posed by TV and the electronic media. Which is why newspapers began filling their pages with filmi gossip, society parties and the like.

  The challenge for the print media today is to make subjects readable—subjects such as current affairs, politics, culture. You have to spend time studying the subject and then have the ability to put it across in language that people understand. But the problem is, there are not enough journalists who are interested in specializing, and most of them are therefore not equipped to write on the subjects they cover. They don’t do their homework either—they just can’t be bothered. That’s why so much of the content of newspapers now consists of banal reports of speeches or political meetings. Articles these days are riddled with clichés and Indianisms. The writers’ command of the language is poor. That’s because journalists these days aren’t well read. You have to be able to hold the reader’s attention. If you can’t capture the reader’s interest in the first few lines, then you’ve lost him.

  A good magazine or newspaper should be a cocktail of different things. I don’t much care for listings of best schools and colleges that keep appearing nowadays with alarming regularity. I find these listings both dubious and tedious. What would be more interesting and useful would be regular surveys of the achievements of our various states. There should also be more pieces on subjects like the green revolution, which for most Indians is associated only with wheat and rice. But what about floriculture or horticulture—the prospects for growing fruit like kiwis, avocados or macadamia nuts, or cultivating orchids and exotic lilies. Readers would surely find such articles of interest, as would entrepreneurs; and agricultural universities would be provoked into doing research on these.

  The pictorial content of a journal is also of utmost importance, as important as the text. A picture too needs to inform, amuse and provoke. Journalists today tend to overlook the importance of captions—an incomplete or incorrect caption can destroy the impact of a photograph.

  It is now a very competitive market, so you have to constantly think of your audience. Who are your readers? What are their interests? How intelligent are they? Magazines, for instance, need to be a little more serious, and certainly more amusing than they are these days. Indians lack a sense of humour. We tend to rely too much on strip cartoons taken from foreign syndicates when we have perfectly competent cartoonists of our own. Why can’t we have our own Dennis the Menace, for instance?

  Another thing which might add to a magazine’s readability would be articles critical of religious practices, astrology, horoscopes, superstitions etc. Most of these beliefs are totally irrational. Religion has become a menace in this country. Take the Kumbh Melas—huge state resources are spent to prevent the stampedes that take place. Crores of rupees are given to Muslim pilgrims to perform hajj. Of course, articles criticizing these practices would be highly provocative as religion is a sensitive subject and a very important part of Indian life. But there are ways of putting things across without having the Shiv Sena burn down your office.r />
  Breaking a news story is the thing now—whether it’s on television, or scoops and sting operations conducted by magazines and newspapers. These are important, and I believe a journalist is justified in using whatever means he or she can to expose those who profess one thing and do something entirely different. There is far too much skulduggery in today’s world and it’s the duty of journalists to expose it. Of course, it is important that the journalist must be strictly above board—there have been instances in the past where journalists have ended up as blackmailers. But I’m all for sting operations for the sake of the larger common good, for the sake of public morality.

  While every citizen has the right to privacy and anyone who invades it deserves to be punished, a distinction should be drawn between a private citizen and persons in public life, such as politicians, civil servants, defence personnel, members of the judiciary, leaders of religious organizations, business tycoons and others who preach public morality. And if what they profess in public does not correspond with what they are practising themselves, and if they are cheating the nation or indulging in corrupt practices, then exposing them through sting operations is wholly justified.

  One tactic that the print media often employs in order to get new readers is to change its look. Meddling too much with the layout of a newspaper or magazine can be very disturbing. It makes the reader very uneasy. Newspapers and weeklies are things of habit and there’s a comfort factor for the reader who becomes used to seeing the pages arranged in a particular way. If one has to make changes they should be done subtly and cleverly. Very often, expensive designers are brought in from outside and hired to change the look completely. They make radical changes. When the changes are too drastic, you are sure to lose your readers.

  Thinking Aloud