: Khushwant singh editors page small.
Khushwant Singh (Punjabi: ਖੁਸ਼ਵੰਤ ਸਿੰਘ, born February 2 1915 in Punjab) is one of India's most prominent novelists and journalists.
Singh's weekly column, "With Malice towards One and All", published in The Telegraph and several other newspapers in India, has been one of the most widely read columns in the country.
His fiction is written in English. He is known for his humor and love of poetry. His comparisons of social and behavioral characteristics of Westerners and Indians was laced with his inimitable wit.
Life and career
His father was Sir Sobha Singh a prominent civil contractor in Lutyen's Delhi. He received his bachelor's degree from a Government College in Lahore and was later qualified as a barrister from King's College, London.
In August 1947, days before the independence of India and Pakistan, Singh, then a lawyer practicing in the High Court in Lahore, drove to his family's summer cottage in the foothills of the Himalayas. From there he went on to Delhi, along 200 miles of strangely vacant road, until he came upon a Jeep full of armed Sikhs who boasted that they had just massacred a village of Muslims. The same killing was occurring in what was about to become Pakistan, with Sikhs and Hindus among the million victims.[Sengupta, Somini, "Bearing Steady Witness To Partition's Wounds," an article in the Arts section, The New York Times, September 21, 2006, pages E1, E7]
Khushwant Singh has been the editor of Yojana, a government journal for two years; The Illustrated Weekly of India, a society journal; The National Herald, a newspaper; and Hindustan Times, one of the most popular English newspapers in India. During his time as the editor, The Illustrated Weekly of India became hugely popular, and after him, it suffered huge drop in readership." [Khuswant Singh's Journalism: The Illustrated Weekly of India]
He was also member of Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's parliament until 1986. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the President of India for his services to country and society in 1974. He returned the honor in 1984 in protest of the siege of the Golden Temple by the Indian Army.
In 2006 Roli Books in New Delhi published a new edition of Singh's 1956 novel Train to Pakistan, about the India-Pakistan partition. The new edition is illustrated with 66 of photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White's pictures of the aftermath of the violence. In late 2006, Rodi was hoping to find an international distributor for the edition at the Frankfurt Book Fair (in October, 2006)[
]
Honors and awards
In July 2000, Sulabh International Social Service Organization awarded him "Honest Man of the Year Award" for his courage and honesty in his "brilliant incisive writing." At the award ceremony, Chandrababu Naidu, the then Chief minister of Andhra Pradesh described him as a "humorous writer and incorrigible believer in human goodness with a devil-may-care attitude and a courageous mind." The then Indian external affairs minister Jaswant Singh of BJP said that the secret of Khushwant Singh's success lay in his learning and discipline behind the "veneer of superficiality."
On February 20, 2006 the Canadian High Commission in Delhi honored Khushwant Singh, in which he was feted at a reception where his long and eventful writing career, which had its inception in the years he spent in Canada as a young diplomat at the Indian High Commission, was recognized.
Bibliography
- The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories, 1950
- The Sikhs, 1953
- Train to Pakistan, 1956
- The Voice of God and Other Stories, 1957
- I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, 1959
- The Sikhs Today, 1959
- The Fall of the Kingdom of the Punjab, 1962
- The History of the Sikhs, 1963
- Ranjit Singh: The Maharajah of the Punjab, 1963
- Ghadar 1915: India's first armed revolution, 1966
- A Bride for the Sahib and Other Stories, 1967
- Black Jasmine, 1971
- Tragedy of Punjab, 1984
- Delhi: A Novel, 1990
- Sex, Scotch and Scholarship: Selected Writings, 1992
- Not a Nice Man to Know: The Best of Khushwant Singh, 1993
- Women and Men in My Life, 1995
- Uncertain Liaisons; Sex, Strife and Togetherness in Urban India, 1995
- The Company of Women, 1999
- Truth, Love and a Little Malice(an autobiography), 2002
- With Malice towards One and All
- The End of India, 2003
- Burial at the Sea, 2004
- Paradise and Other Stories, 2004
- Death at My Doorstep, 2005
- The Illustrated History of the Sikhs, 2006
Notes
External links
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia |
