Khushwant Singh "Train To Pakistan"

About the author

Khushwant Singh (born 2 February 1915 in Hadali, Punjab, which now lies in Pakistan) is a prominent Indian novelist and journalist. Singh's weekly column, "With Malice towards One and All", carried by several Indian newspapers, is among the most widely-read columns in the country. An important Indo-Anglian novelist, Singh is best known for his trenchant secularism, his humor, and an abiding love of poetry. His comparisons of social and behavioral characteristics of Westerners and Indians are laced with acid wit. He served as editor of several well-known literary and news magazines.

Having begun writing during his diplomatic postings, his first book entitled The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories was published in London in 1950 before he returned to India. The stories in this volume, almost all vignettes of rural and urban Indian life have continued to be read and reprinted all across the globe. While in London, he deeply researched the history of his own religious community and this work found fruition in his next publication, The Sikhs (1953), the first of a succession of books on Sikh history, politics and sociology that he was to publish throughout his career.

bIn August 1947, days before the partition of India and Pakistan, Singh, then a lawyer, drove to his family's summer cottage at Kasauli in the foothills of the Himalayas. Continuing on to Delhi along 200 miles of strangely vacant road, he came upon a Jeep full of armed Sikhs who boasted that they had just massacred a village of Muslims. Such experiences were to be powerfully distilled in Singh's 1956 novel Train to Pakistan.

He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 for service to his country. Singh continued his spirited writing and was deservingly awarded an even more prestigious honor, the Padma Vibhushan.

One of the most striking aspects of his weekly writings is his outright honesty. More you read about him, hungrier you get. He is the high priest of journalism. Under his...