Book Review of Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel

Book Review of Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel

Writing isn’t always necessarily art. A good example that stands true by this assumption is the literary genre non-fiction. A non-fiction writer will depict life as it is seen from any understandable distance whatsoever. This distance is enough for the resulting work to resemble fiction, and, at the same time, too little for it to become journalism. Non-fiction is a writer’s perspective on real life situations. In Delhi: A Novel, by taking personal accounts of various people through history the author opens up his reader to the possibility of multi-cultural human existence as he saw it possible in the city of Delhi. Still, the novel isn’t exactly non-fiction. It stems from his perspective that is an ideology in itself. 

Khushwant Singh is an Indian writer. He has authored works such as, Train to Pakistan, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, The Company of Women; a two volume History of the Sikhs; as well as numerous translations and non-fiction books.

Delhi: A Novel is a crash course on the history of Delhi. Where writing is to be measured by literary standards this book sets an example on great narrative style and technique.

First things first, taking up this task of reviewing a Khushwant Singh novel was difficult. Writers are often learning to give their work a sense of location and atmosphere they are sabotaged by this will to learn and the work comes off as amateurish. This is not the case here. Key is that Khushwant Singh lays his secrets bare.

It is a novel set in the city of Delhi no doubt, but a timeless, place-less Delhi?

How can one set a story in any one location? Singh gives us images from the well recognized places of Delhi like the coffee house of CP, the monuments and the gardens and the brothels of Lal Kuan and he is never shy of telling us what exactly he was up to in those places. 

He lusts for life. It is revealed in the very beginning that he is one of the characters in the novel.

But the novel isn’t aimed only at the audience residing in Delhi, those who would be familiar with its locations. It is an international novel. It speaks to those who are alien to its soul and familiarizes them with it. How does he achieve this?

Delhi: A Novel is a document of Indian history. It tells of the days of Delhi when it was Indraprastha. It recounts Islamic rulers and their barbaric invasions, their faith in Allah and their patronage of the arts. The novel remembers the presence of the East India Company and tells us why the Brits moved their capital from Calcutta to New Delhi and what were its consequences. It gives an account of the mutiny of 1857 and later describes the aura left there by a Mahatma. It is an extremely relevant novel by todays standards.  

I chose to look at Khushwant Singh’s writing because he continues to give his audience the appropriate intellectual fodder for inquiry and discourse.

The premise of the novel is simple. An Indian journalist is going through tougher days in his life, giving tours of Delhi’s historical sites and monuments to earn a little extra dough. He speaks to the reader on Delhi’s cultural and social fabric, for the sake of inquiry into the bloodshed this city has seen over hundreds of years and what is accepted socially normal as a result of it. The resulting scenes are gross. For Singh, normal is simply that which has impunity and goes unforgiven.

Khushwant Singh is a master of rhetoric. The plot of the novel isn’t totally political. Love is opposed by violence. That is to say the way love is natural violence too might be inevitable. The plot completes full circle when both love and violence are said to be the sole cause for misery.

Chapters where love between Hindu-Muslim is exhibited the desires of the characters are both invoked by love and sexual desire. These sentiments are normal. The theme of sexuality has been dealt with considering the individual conscience residing with the ordinary people. The novel is in fact a carnival of love-making and absolutely nothing is off-limits. 

But the novel is definitely not a romance. In fact, love as an idea cannot even be defined in the context of Delhi: A Novel. Every act of seduction, even sexual assault  is a fact worth documenting to aid the plot. Nothing is hidden from the reader, not even the disgusting. In the context of the novel it is perhaps best to be debated more openly whether human sexual liberation can cause social anarchy and whether such a social state would come to mean good for humanity. In the end, Singh rightfully hails this conscience of the individual in critiquing faith and morality.

Besides this, the author includes the overall accounts of a divided India as well. These accounts stretch from the Punjab to the Deccan, from the Qutubs to those Hindu fascists of India who spread propaganda to create difference in society in thirst of power. The novel asserts that the history of Delhi has been one of eradication. During one such account of riots that once took place in history this novel reads:

“Ram Dulari and I spent the rest of the night praying for the safety of our son and his bahoo. (But as becomes wise Kayasthas they had locked themselves inside a room, painted the numeral 786 on the door to indicate that it was the house of a Muslim and so escaped the blood-thirsty Turks)” (p 96)

These narratives between what is divided India and what is united India move in non-linear fashion throughout the plot.

This novel uses dirty incestuous abuses, as is custom to Delhi, and gets its tone of farce and satire through the point of view of an aged pervert, that is the narrator. On one hand it describes the human body with an eye that is over-powered by lust, while on the other it uses history to suggest the unique sense of faith and spirituality present in this city by taking us to the holy shrine of Auliya Nizammuddin.

Singh again showcases the age old tussle sparked by the clashes between politics and religion in the guise of conflict between rulers and dervishes concluding that faith trumps power every time. The story goes that upon the downfall of Shahjahan, when Mughal princes used to kill each other over their impatience to become king, Aurangzeb came to the throne simply by being a man of Islam. Not showing any signs of religiousness himself, the author takes to a questioning tone when he speaks of those Sikh Gurus of Hindustan who were killed in large numbers for their own religious views. 

The problem with his rhetoric is ethical. But the novel does not dive deep into ethics. Delhi: A Novel reads like a document of history at times but it is never lacking in wit and comic interpretation of hard times. However, before calling it a comedy or a tragedy, I must note that it grapples primarily with facts and history that have been well researched by the author.

“Too many of the historical chapters begin apropos of nothing in particular, giving the book (which was twenty-five years in the writing) a ragged quality.” (Robert E McDowell, 1991)

It is difficult to refine the novel into an exact literary sub-genre or style.

Narrative storytelling techniques used to report upon real-world events and situations can stem into various concepts of literary journalism but in terms of style and structure it resembles literary fiction. (Kobie Van Krieken, 2019)

In trying to establish the writing style of this novel, history surfaces and proves inseparable from the deeper fact findings of the author while writing it. The idea is clear. Reality within the novel is being narrated as non-fiction to establish the “socio-political framework” of a society. This society transcends time and geography because of its history.  However, the narrative technique used here has yet another vital aspect hiding in the novel. And that is what separates it from non-fiction or literary/narrative journalism.

“The difference between narrative journalism and narrative history lies in the topicality of the issues of interest. Narrative journalism deals with events and situations of the present rather than the past. (Kramer, 1995) It is therefore to be distinguished from the genre of narrative history, in which historical events and people are – most often in book form – portrayed in a story format. (Lepore, 2002).” (Kobie van Krieken & José Sanders, 2017)

Delhi: A Novel would have classified as narrative history if the author was not so deeply personal and at the same time so good at scripting make-believe. It is the recount of an experienced Delhi man well acquainted with the toxic masculinity of the Indian society and the poetic attitudes of the artists of the region. At times I feel I am reading someone who is upset so much power lies with rulers and politicians when it should be shared with the artists. Though his writing isn’t lofty, subtle traces can be found leading the audiences towards mystic ideas and metaphysics.

The character of the poet of Uttar Pradesh Meer Taqi Meer in the novel says, “I speak the language they cannot comprehend. They do not know that every word of Meer has a meaning beyond meaning. The language I speak is best understood by the common folk of Delhi. O Meer why bother to speak of this assembly of dead? Tears flow like rivers from my weeping eyes; my heart like Delhi lies in ruins” (p 255)

In his pursuit of Delhi, as an idea rather than as a place or a collective of people, the author uses languages that are entirely Indian. Phrases have been borrowed from multiple north Indian languages ranging from Farsi, Urdu, Punjabi and Hindi and somewhere in between them all. These languages have history, languages are born, they evolve and eventually die.

History does not only describe those events within which the links between all the facts can be explained entirely, but it aims at this clarification; it does not attempt to leave causality in the dark in order to release the power of its plot. It is the very definition of historiography as a hermeneutic discipline based on sources, clues and testimonies, commands this pursuit of truth of plot, this attempt to shed light on the world’s events. (Marie Vanoost, 2013)

The novel, for me doesn’t attain its ragged quality because it is non-linear or disjoint, it is ragged because it gives up on ethics in the pursuit of multiplicity of truths.

Ethics, while spinning a narrative and the consequent denouement – especially here, is the primary concern in my reading of this novel. The reader response to this novel must question the ethical standing of the characters because issues of sexuality, religion and power are located problematically both inside and outside the minds of these characters. 

Even though most of the incidents outside their minds are out of their control, the incidents inside their minds, their thoughts are very much in their control. The question is whether the author is an unreliable narrator (here exchanged with irresponsible narrator) because these characters appear to be insane. 

As the work of the narrative journalist is influenced by the perception of the journalist as contrast to old school journalism that simply tells the facts, the narration of a novel is influenced by the voice of its characters. The character’s voices channel the narrative towards their own personal emotions and subjective lives.

One such Documentary Novel, or should one call it Literary Journalism, is John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie in search of America which reads at times like a travelogue but ends up giving social and political commentary on the socio-political fabric of the United States of America. Scholars who have studied Steinbeck have asserted that his work be considered as social documents rather than works of just fiction. Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel falls under that same category in my opinion, that of an invaluable social document of Indian English Literature. It is representative of a particular personality at times yet it is more, it is provocatively representative of an identity. It left me feeling I should be responsible because the narrator was irresponsible. 

Delhi: A Novel isn't a complete picture of Delhi, like history, it cannot entail all the aspects of a life or a city.

In conclusion, since the author lets go of any unity in the novel, unity of place, time or action, a sense of multiplicity is created as opposed to unity, leading to wider readings of a text. 

Multiplicity of voices create internal dialogues within the novel. The same reasoning was used here to investigate ethics and narrative. Two or more of anything are bound to be different from one another else they would simply be called one. The important question however, is that if there were unity in the novel what would that oneness be called? Would it be the author's fact findings that bind the writing all together, would it be the history of Delhi, or would it be the author's narrative? I would say it was his manner of weaving narrative through fact findings and history stands tallest because that is what best stands out in the novel. The novel is written in a style that is ahead of its time. It manages to bring the attention back to the text. 

 

 Work Cited:

McDowell, Robert E. World Literature Today, vol. 65, no. 1, 1991, pp. 188-188.

Van Krieken, Kobie & Sanders, Jose, ‘Framing narrative journalism as a new genre - A case study of the Netherlands.’ Journalism 2017, Vol. 18(10) 1364–1380.  

Van Krieken, Kobie. (2019). ‘Literary, Long-form or Narrative Journalism.’

Vanoost, Marie. ‘Defining narrative journalism through the concept of plot’ Diegesis 2.2, 2013