The 12 Best Khushwant Singh Books, Ranked Honestly

Mano Majra is a village on the Sutlej where Sikhs and Muslims have lived side by side long enough to stop noticing, until the summer of 1947 puts a border a few miles away. Singh gives you a village dacoit in love with a Muslim weaver's daughter, a city communist who arrives to organise nobody in particular, and a magistrate who would prefer the problem to solve itself. Then the trains start coming. It is under two hundred pages, it never editorialises, and it lands harder than most of the Partition writing that followed it.

The book alternates between a present-day narrator, a journalist who is not trying very hard to be likeable, and long historical chapters that drop you into Delhi under different rulers, among poets, invaders and massacres. His companion in the present is Bhagmati, a hijra, and she is the best thing he ever invented, because through her he can say what the city does to anyone it has decided is disposable. He worked on this for decades and it shows in both directions: some chapters are extraordinary, others are dead weight you push through.

Here is the life: a Sikh boy in a family that helped build New Delhi, law in London, a diplomatic posting he was poorly suited to, editing magazines and newspapers where he made them matter and made enemies at speed, the Emergency and the friendships it cost him, the writers he loved and the politicians he did not. It took years to reach print because several people disliked their portraits and said so through lawyers. He is honest about his own cowardice more often than you expect, and that is what saves the book from being a long boast.

This is the work he wanted to be judged by, and he gave it years. Volume one runs from Nanak in the fifteenth century through the building of the Sikh community, the wars and the martyrdoms, to Ranjit Singh's kingdom in Punjab. Volume two carries the story through annexation, the colonial period and Partition, and later editions push it further still. He writes it as narrative rather than as argument, with no jargon and no defensiveness, which is why it became the book people are handed first and why it stayed there.

The stories are the part of his work people quote without knowing whose it is. The title piece is a portrait of his grandmother, her mornings, her sparrows, her steady disapproval, and the distance that opens once he goes abroad, and it does in a few pages what his novels take three hundred to attempt. Around it sit the crueller ones, village stories that turn on a single act, and a few where his cynicism gets the better of the material. The collection gathers work written across decades, so the quality moves around.

Ranjit Singh took a Punjab of feuding chiefs and made it a kingdom run from Lahore, hired European officers to drill his army, picked up the Koh-i-Noor along the way, and kept the British on the far side of the Sutlej for forty years. Singh tells it without the devotional tone that usually attaches to the man, so you get the drinking and the appetite and the political cunning, and you also get the central failure, which is that he built nothing capable of surviving him. The kingdom was gone within a decade of his death.

Singh wrote obituaries the way most people write about an ex: with affection, accuracy and the occasional score left unsettled. This gathers the ones he wrote about politicians, writers, editors and friends, and the pleasure is watching him refuse the form's basic rule, which is to lie kindly for a paragraph and move on. Running underneath all of it is his own approaching death, a subject he circled for years with a cheerfulness that never quite reads as performance.

If you want one book that covers every Khushwant at a single price, this is the sensible buy. It pulls from the novels, the stories, the reporting and the profiles, and sets the serious writer beside the entertainer so you can see how far apart the two of them stand. The title is his own line about himself, which tells you how much he enjoyed the reputation, and the edition carries a foreword by Vikram Seth. As with all anthologies, the shape belongs to the editor and the pieces are cut out of longer work.

A Sikh, a Hindu and a Muslim, all in their eighties, meet at sunset in Lodhi Gardens and talk their way through a year: the news, prostate trouble, memory, sex they can no longer have, and death they can see arriving. The book is built on the calendar, month by month, which gives it a gentle rhythm and almost no forward motion. He published it at ninety-five, which is either the best or the worst reason to read it, depending on your patience for an old man enjoying himself in print.

This is Khushwant Singh sorted into topics: on religion, which he did not have; on sex, which he wrote about far more than anybody his age was expected to; on death, which he had made his peace with; on writing, on Pakistan, on his own routine of exercise, whisky at seven and bed by nine. The chapters run two or three pages each. It is genuinely easy to read and it is also a product, put together late in his life and aimed squarely at the airport shelf.

Singh spent sixty years within arm's reach of the people who ran India, wrote its books and made most of its noise, and this is him going through the address book in public. Politicians, editors, writers, socialites, a few friends he genuinely loved. He is warm about the ones he respected and merciless about the rest, and he rarely bothers to disguise which is which. How much you enjoy it depends almost entirely on how many of the names still mean something to you.

Mohan Kumar has money, a failed marriage and a plan: he will spend the years he has left in the company of women found through the newspaper. What follows is a sequence of encounters written in considerable detail, with a moral arriving at the end like a bill nobody asked for. Singh was in his eighties when he published it and clearly enjoying the freedom of a man with nothing left to protect. The prose moves easily. The imagination is narrow, and the women exist mostly as bodies with a backstory attached.