At long
last, shortly before he would turn 100, Khushwant Singh has gone. India loses a
pleasant writer and frequently humorous political and social commentator. He
was a forthright spokesman of the Nehruvian English-speaking elite, at one time
even the direct press chief of Jawaharlal Nehru himself. He also served as an assistant
to Sikh leader Master Tara Singh, as novelist and historian of Sikhism, as
editor for an array of papers, and as columnist, best known for the title of
his long-running column “With malice towards one and all”.
By
coincidence, I met Khushwant Singh on the airplane Delhi-Frankfurt some 22 years
ago. Frankly, I got a rather good personal opinion of him. It was timely that
we met, because I needed to prove my existence. He had just written a newspaper
column stating that my book on Ayodhya had been written by Sita Ram Goel using
a European name as pseudonym to confer an air of outside objectivity on his pro-temple
thesis. Well, that matter was settled then.
We struck
up a conversation, of which I distinctly remember that, upon my enquiring, he
confirmed that he believed in a separate Sikh identity, as demonstrated by
sporting beards and turbans, but that he did not believe in the need for any
religion. (In my book Negationism in
India, I devote some pages to Khushwant
Singh’s argument for the separate identity of Sikhism, and wonder aloud about
this contradiction.) For emphasis, he repeated his main point: “No religion.” In
a way, this is a classical Hindu position: one’s belonging to a community does
not depend on a particular belief, so one can be an unbeliever all while
remaining a card-carrying member.
He had
always made fun of religion as such (and this without anyone charging him under
Art. 295A), lampooning pieties such as “work is worship” with additions like “yes,
but worship is not work”. And he did so till the end: as late as 2011 and 2013,
he published books against religion and the belief In God, afterlife or
rebirth. While Western scholars are now wavering about their long-held thesis
of “secularization”, seeing a revival of religion in Russia and China and a
demographic explosion among believers, here was one Indian who did see
secularization as the wave of the future. He inferred that the development of the
“scientific temper”, as enjoined by the Indian Constitution, would necessarily
lead to the people’s outgrowing Scriptural beliefs.
Yet he had deplored
it when his son came home from the West divested of his turban. The son saw no
point anymore in wearing the uniform of a particular religious sect when
religion itself made no sense anymore. The simplicity of common sense reasons
that religious identity presupposes religion. But the convoluted logic imposed
by Indian identity politics and Nehruvian secularism will have none of it. If
you manage to sell the identity of your religious community as somehow non-Hindu,
ex-Hindu or anti-Hindu, secularists feel honour-bound to defend it. So, even
without religion, a Sikh identity must be upheld because it irritates Hindus.
Or that at
least is what secularists, in their utter ignorance of Hindu history, think.
They do not know that Guru Govind Singh was cent per cent a Hindu and founded
the Sikh militant order to serve and defend Hindu Dharma. They have defined
Sikhism as a separate religion, and they don’t look any farther than the
present legal arrangement, somewhat like foreign tourists who rely on a
guidebook to quickly teach them about India. Indeed, the best appreciation of
Nehruvian secularism is that it is the incomprehending tourist view of India’s
religions.
Like an obedient
secularist, he was very good at getting the Hindus’ goat, e.g. by condemning
Shivaji for disposing of his enemy Afzal Khan; but he was not so good at
lampooning Islam or Christianity. Yet, unlike other secularists, he did occasionally
criticize even Islam and Christianity. But not too much, so he did support the
ban on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic
Verses: avoiding the inevitable bloodshed was more important than upholding
freedom of speech. In this manner, the religious obscurantists always have their
way on condition of credibly threatening violence, for then the secularists
will present it as virtuous and wise to drop freedom of speech and give in to
the demand for book-banning.
He also did
the secularist thing in supporting the Emergency dictatorship. Nehruvian secularism,
being a despotism by nature, always disliked unmanipulated democracy. Indeed,
it was under the Emergency that the Costituion was enriched with the
declaration of India as a “secular, socialist”
republic, the only part of the Constitution without genuine democratic
legitimation.
Once he
fell from his usual anti-Hindu stance. Condemning Congress for the 1984
anti-Sikh riots, he ppreferred to vote for their most credible opponents, the
BJP, in subsequent elections, before the Ayodhya demolition of 1992 made him
revert to his more familiar opposition to Hindu nationalism.
But he had the
virtue of being able to take a laugh at himself, much in contrast to the
pompousness and self-importance of most secularists. As a dabbler in erotic
writing, he gracefully accepted the sobriquet “dirty old man” of Indian public
life. At least I will vouch for “old man”, and hope to emulate him in remaining
active as a writer till age 98. That is when his last book came out: The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous
(October 2013), another argumentation against religion, which he saw as his
farewell to writing. And now, on 20 March 2014, he has taken his leave from
life, peacefully in his own home in Delhi.
Since he is
not going to heaven or hell, and since he is not coming back either, we had
better get used to living without Khushwant Singh. For a committed atheist, it would
mean nothing to wish him “Fare well” or “God be with you”, so I will only say: “It
was nice knowing you.”
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