Truth, Love and a Little Malice: An Autobiography

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Penguin Books India, 2003 - Biography & Autobiography - 423 pages

Born in 1915 in pre-Partition Punjab, Khushwant Singh, perhaps India's most widely read and controversial writer has been witness to most of the major events in modern Indian history from Independence and Partition to the Emergency and Operation Blue Star and has known many of the figures who have shaped it. With clarity and candour, he writes of leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, the terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the talented and scandalous painter Amrita Shergil, and everyday people who became butchers during Partition.
Writing of his own life, too, Khushwant Singh remains unflinchingly forthright. He records his professional triumphs and failures as a lawyer, journalist, writer and Member of Parliament; the comforts and disappointments in his marriage of over sixty years; his first, awkward sexual encounter; his phobia of ghosts and his fascination with death; the friends who betrayed him, and also those whom he failed.

 

Contents

Prologue
1
Village in the Desert
3
School Years
11
College Years in Delhi and Lahore
30
Discovering England
53
Lahore Partition and Independence
87
With Menon in London with Malik in Canada
116
Purging the Past and Return to India
154
Bombay The Illustrated Weekly of India 196979 and the Aftermath
229
With the Gandhis and the Anands
279
198086 Parliament
284
The Hindustan Times
301
Pakistan
346
Oddballs and Screwballs
359
Wrestling with the Almighty
369
On Writing and Writers
384

Parisian Interlude
164
Discovery of India
192
Sikh Religion and History
205
The Last but One Chapter
403
November 2001
413
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Khushwant Singh was born on February 2, 1915 in the village of Hadali in what is now the Punjab province of Pakistan. He attended St. Stephen's College in Delhi, Government College in Lahore, and King's College London. In 1947, he worked for India's ministry of external affairs and served as press officer in Ottawa and London. From 1980 to 1986, he was a member of the upper house of the Indian parliament. He was an author and journalist. His newspaper column, With Malice Towards One and All, was syndicated all over India. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 100 novels and short-story collections including Train to Pakistan, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, Delhi: A Novel, The Company of Women, and The Sunset Club. He also wrote a two-volume History of the Sikhs, an autobiography entitled Truth, Love and a Little Malice, and a book of biographical profiles entitled The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous. He died on March 20, 2014 at the age of 99.