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Khushwant Singh
‐
Indian author, journalist and politician
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
Place of death
New Delhi, India
Date of time spent in Britain
1934–9
About
Khushwant Singh was a journalist and novelist. Born to a Sikh family in Punjab, Singh tells in his autobiography, Truth, Love and a Little Malice, that his exact date of birth is not known but it was sometime in August 1915. His father was a building contractor in Delhi.
Following a degree from Government College, Lahore, Singh went to London in 1934 and registered for an LLB degree at King's College. He also enrolled at the Inner Temple. In his second year he lived in lodgings with English and Scottish students and then in his third year he lodged with Indians near Hampstead. Singh competed for the Indian Civil Service but was unsuccessful. Following his success in the LLB exams, he returned to India and was called to the Bar in absentia.
Upon returning to India in 1939, Singh set up a law practice in Lahore but he gave this up seven years later. He left Lahore in 1947 in the face of partition riots. Through the Indian Ministry of External Affairs he was appointed to a job in public relations at India House, London and then worked in Canada. He then joined All India Radio and Singh became a full-time writer, editing journals and writing novels and political commentary.
The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories (London: The Saturn Press, 1950)
Train to Pakistan (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956)
The Voice of God and Other Stories (Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1957)
I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale (London: Calder, 1958)
The Sikhs Today (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1959)
The Fall of the Kingdom of the Punjab (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1962)
Ranjit Singh: The Maharajah of the Punjab (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962)
Ghadar 1915: India's First Armed Revolution (New Delhi: R & K Publishing House, 1966)
A History of the Sikhs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966)
A Bride for the Sahib and Other Stories (New Delhi: Orient, 1967)
Black Jasmine (Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1971)
Tragedy of Punjab (New Delhi: South Asia Books, 1984)
Delhi: A Novel (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990)
Sex, Scotch and Scholarship: Selected Writings (New Delhi: UBS Publishing, 1992)
Not a Nice Man to Know: The Best of Khushwant Singh (New Delhi: Penguin, 1993)
We Indians (New Delhi: Juggernaut Publication, 1993)
Women and Men in My Life (New Delhi: South Asia Books, 1995)
Uncertain Liaisons; Sex, Strife and Togetherness in Urban India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1995)
Train to Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998)
The Company of Women (New Delhi: Viking, 1999)
A History of the Sikhs: 1469–1838 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Truth, Love and a Little Malice: An Autobiography (New Delhi: Viking, 2002)
The End of India (London: Penguin, 2003)
Burial at the Sea (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004)
Paradise and Other Stories (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004)
Death at My Doorstep (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2005)
A History of the Sikhs: 1839–2004 (Noida, UP: Oxford University Press India, 2005)
The Illustrated History of the Sikhs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Why I Supported the Emergency: Essays and Profiles (New Delhi: Penguin, 2009)
OA3/01/05/04, Interview with Khushwant Singh, 30 December 1996, India: A People Partitioned Oral Archive, SOAS Library and Special Collections, London
Image credit
Shri Somnath Chatterjee presenting National Amity Award to Shri Khushwant Singh at a function, in New Delhi on September 26, 2008 (cropped)
Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs (GODL-India), Government Open Data Licence-India, via Wikimedia Commons
