Life portrait

Khushwant Singh’s love, truth and malice need an airing

KHUSHWANT SINGH, now in his eighties, remains as irrepressible as ever and on Tuesday he received the court’s permission to be just that. A division bench of the Delhi High Court has vacated a stay on the publication of Singh’s autobiography, Truth, love and a little malice. This is great news for three obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. The first, of course, is the one tucked away in Article 19 1 (a) of the Constitution, which guarantees every Indian, including Singh, the right to freedom of expression. Then there is the indisputable fact that there are innumerable readers in the country who are looking forward to being educated about the finer details of an exceedingly interesting life. Singh, it may be recalled, was not just a celebrity editor and celebrated writer, but one who happened to interact closely with members of the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a book like this could help broaden the culture of biographical and autobiographical writing, something that has been curiously absent in the Indian literary scene. Oliver Cromwell, the puritan leader who transformed the course of British politics in the 17th century, may have instructed his portraitist to paint him ‘‘warts and all’’, but it needs greatness of the kind Mahatma Gandhi possessed to submit to the truth of a mirror. His autobiographical Experiments with truth dredged up personal details that a lesser mortal would squirm to own up to. Yet, despite this shining example, Indians generally — with a few notable exceptions like historian S. Gopal’s incisive and frank biography of his father, former president S. Radhakrishnan — have been extremely wary of venturing beyond the hagiographic in their delineation of public lives. Going back to the Singh autobiography, the trouble started when excerpts of the work describing Maneka Gandhi’s celebrated exit from her mother-in-law’s home appeared in a newsmagazine. So incensed was Maneka Gandhi that she went to court and obtained a stay on the publication of the book on the grounds that it was both defamatory and intruded into the privacy of public figures.

The High Court has made short work of both objections. As a consequence, an important principle has been upheld, one that recognises that the moment an individual becomes a public person, he or she has to necessarily submit to public scrutiny. This is because their actions, both public and private, have consequences for the nation at large. This implies that their right to privacy is to that extent curtailed. Incidentally, this is a principle that is constantly being put to the test, most notably in the Tehelka exposure of corruption in high places. As for Maneka Gandhi, instead of rushing to get court stays on accounts that may have more malice than love in them, she should consider coming up with her own version of the truth.