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435 pages

English

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This volume brings together all the novels, except The Company of Women, by India's most widely read and celebrated author. Included here are the classic Train to Pakistan that describes the tragedy of Partition through the love story of a Sikh dacoit and a Muslim girl; I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, which deals with the conflict in a prosperous Sikh family of Punjab in the 1940s; and the best-selling Delhi , a vast, erotic, irreverent magnum opus centred on the Indian capital.

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	14 octobre 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351181323
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Khushwant Singh

The Collected Novels
Train to Pakistan I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale Delhi

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Books by the Same Author
Introduction
Train to Pakistan
Dedication
Dacoity
Kalyug
Mano Majra
Karma
I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale
Dedication
Please Read This Note Before Reading the Novel
Characters in the Story
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Delhi
Dedication
Delhi
Lady J.H.T.
Bhagmati
Musaddi Lal
Bhagmati
The Timurid
Bhagmati
The Untouchables
Bhagmati
Aurangzeb Alamgir: Emperor of Hindustan
Bhagmati
Nadir Shah
Bhagmati
Meer Taqi Meer
Bhagmati
1857
Bhagmati
The Builders
Bhagmati
The Dispossessed
Bhagmati
A Note from the Author
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
COLLECTED NOVELS
Khushwant Singh was born in 1915 in Hadali, Punjab. He was educated at Government College, Lahore and at King s College and the Inner Temple in London. He practised at the Lahore High Court for several years before joining the Indian Ministry of External Affairs in 1947. He was sent on diplomatic postings to Canada and London and later went to Paris with UNESCO.
He began a distinguished career as a journalist with All India Radio in 1951. Since then he has been founder-editor of Yojna (1951-53), editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India (1969-79), editor of the National Herald (1978-79), and the editor of the Hindustan Times (1980-83). Today he is India s best-known columnist and journalist.
Khushwant Singh has also had an extremely successful career as a writer. Among the works published are a classic two-volume history of the Sikhs, several novels-including Train to Pakistan, which won the Grove Press Award for the best work of fiction in 1954, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale and Delhi -and a number of translated works and non-fiction books on Delhi, nature and current affairs. His latest novel, The Company of Women, has been published by Penguin Books.
Khushwant Singh was a Member of Parliament from 1980 to 1986. Among other honours he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 by the President of India (he returned the decoration in 1984 in protest against the Union Government s siege of the Golden Temple, Amritsar).
Books by the same author
Fiction
Mark of Vishnu
Train to Pakistan
I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale
Many Moods and Many Faces
Non-Fiction
History of the Sikhs: Two Volumes
Ranjit Singh: Maharaja of the Punjab
Fall of the Sikh Kingdom
Indira Gandhi Returns
Nature Watch
Translations
Umrao Jan Ada - Courtesan of Lucknow
The Skeleton
Land of the Five Rivers
Iqbal s Dialogue with Allah
Essays
Khushwant Singh s India
Editor s Page
Introduction
I had written a lot of short stories before I embarked on writing my first novel Mano Majra, better known by its later title, Train to Pakistan. I had no idea how one wrote a novel. I did not think I had the stamina to write one. But I did have the theme. I had lived through the civil strife that engulfed the whole of northern India. Almost every other day of the spring to summer of 1947, we heard stories of massacres of Sikhs and Hindus in the villages of the Northwest Frontier Province and Rawalpindi and Campbellpur districts; and of thousands of refugees trekking eastwards to areas where Hindus and Sikhs were in preponderance. When communal violence broke out in Lahore there was hardly a night when we were not woken up by the sounds of gunfire and mobs yelling: Allah-o-Akbar from the one side and Har Har Mahadev and Sat Sri Akal from the other. The spreading communal violence did not affect our small circle of friends: Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians continued to meet as usual and enjoy their sundowners. Of course we developed a sense of guilt. There was so much violence and wickedness going on around us and we did nothing about it except talk and drown our consciences in drink. It was after the Partition of the country was over, after ten million people had been rendered homeless and one million slain, that I felt I had to purge myself of the guilt I bore by writing about it.
At the time the novel was taking nebulous shape in my mind, I was in London. I decided to throw up my job and try to live by writing. I took myself off to the Italian lakes to put my ideas on paper. I chose the location for my novel, a hamlet along the river Sutlej. I chose models on which I would base my characters. In the initial draft I picked three, representing the trinity of Hindu gods: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer. The characters of my novels would be a poor farmer symbolizing the Creator; a magistrate whose duty was to maintain peace in this district as the Preserver; a communist as the Destroyer. However, I soon realized that every human being has all the three aspects of the trinity in him in different proportions.
When I actually started writing the novel, I was in Bhopal living alone in a large bungalow overlooking the lake. I made a synopsis of all the chapters before getting down to writing. It was when I started writing the chapters that I discovered, to my dismay, that instead of my dictating to my characters how they should behave and what they should say in a particular situation, they began to evolve independent personalities of their own and dictate their actions and speeches to me. Most writers agree that they have had similar experiences of characters created by them. However, I persisted as best as I could and finished the draft of my novel. I sent it as an entry to the Grove Press competition for the best work of fiction from India. An American friend, Mrs Tatty Bell, wife of a British diplomat, who typed the manuscript for me told me bluntly one day: It s no good. It won t get you anywhere. A few months later, when I was with UNESCO in Paris, came an announcement that Mano Majra had won the award. It was published under this title in the United States and the Commonwealth rights were sold to Chatto and Windus of London. It was my hunch that if the title was changed to Train to Pakistan, it would sell better. And so it did. It was published in most European and Indian languages. It has been reprinted over thirty times. And goes on selling.
The success of Train to Pakistan emboldened me to try my hand at a second novel. All said and done, Train to Pakistan was more a documentary than a novel. This time it would be a simple story of a close-knit family divided by conflicting political loyalties. I chose to set it around the time when the Quit India movement was launched by Mahatma Gandhi during World War II. The main characters were the father who after years of loyal service to the British Raj, expected to be honoured with a title in the King s Birthday Honours list and his young son who, undetected by anyone in the family, had joined a band of terrorists to disrupt arms supplies traffic on road and rail, and perhaps kill an Englishman or two. The story was built around my own family. I located it in Amritsar. This too was published in the States, England and India. I gave it the title (I have a fetish for giving titles to my books after I have written the last word) I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale. I think it is a better novel than Train to Pakistan. Not many people agree with me. It did not do as well as my first novel. Now you have the two together. I leave the judgement to you.
My third novel, Delhi, had a prolonged gestation. The idea of telling the story of my city, in which I had spent most of my life, came after I had read Ivo Andric s The Bridge on the Drina, which tells the story of Yugoslavia through events that occurred on a bridge. (Andric won the Nobel prize for Literature.) First I read all I could find of contemporary accounts of different periods: Prithvi Raj Raso for the Rajput rule in India, the life of Hazrat Nizamuddin and the writings of Amir Khusro for the Sultanate, Taimur s memoirs, volumes on the life of Emperor Aurangzeb, the poet Mir Taqi Meer, of Delhi devastated by Ahmad Shah Abdali, the later Mughals and the trial of the last Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. For the British period, I relied largely on my ancestors; my father and grandfather had taken the lion s share in the construction of New Delhi. Likewise for the impact of Partition and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. I examined Pyare Lal s documentation of the last day of the Mahatma. The final chapter, the murder of Mrs Gandhi and the massacre of Sikhs that followed, were deeply imprinted in my mind. The daunting task was to string these episodes together and make them read like one continuous story. Over twenty years I tried many methods of linkage and admitted failure to find a satisfactory one. At one stage, I decided to give up the project. I let my colleague, David Davidar, have a look at it. He suggested inserting a few more chapter links. I did so. Even so I was not happy with the final product. However, three editions of the novel sold out before the first copy was available in the bookstores. Despite being panned by the literary critics, it remained at the top of best-seller lists for some months. There is no accounting for the tastes of readers!
New Delhi
October 1995
Khushwant Singh
Train to Pakistan
For My Daughter Mala
Dacoity
T he summer of 1947 was not like other Indian summers. Even the weather had a different feel in India that year. It was hotter than usual, and drier and dustier. And the summer was longer. No one could remember when the monsoon had been so late. For weeks, the sparse clouds cast only shadows. There was no rain. People began to say that God was punishing them for their sins.
Some of them had good reason to feel that they had sinned. The summer before, communal riots, precipitated by reports of the proposed division of the country