The Shock of the Old

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Indians pride themselves on having one of the world's most open democracies, but an unwritten agreement honored by its media ensures that exposing the love lives of the country's leaders remains taboo. So when the purported sexual peccadilloes of the nation's first—and most important—Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, inspire a new novel, you'd expect Indians to be astonished and appalled. Unless, of course, its author is Khushwant Singh. One of India's oldest and most respected writers, Singh also ranks among its smuttiest, and his compatriots are long used to being astonished and appalled by what he produces. In fact, many look forward to it.

PLEASE DO NOT RING THE BELL UNLESS YOU ARE EXPECTED, reads the sign outside Singh's apartment in New Delhi—a surprisingly inhospitable welcome, given the author's reputation as a bon vivant ready to down glasses of whisky or trade bawdy jokes with visitors. Singh, 88, is one of India's most prolific writers. In addition to his previous four novels well known either for their wrenching portrayals of moral conflict or for their brazen, over-the-top eroticism, he has written scholarly works on the history of India's Sikhs, numerous short stories and newspaper columns, translated Urdu stories and Punjabi poetry into English, edited a famous Indian magazine (the Illustrated Weekly of India) and a prominent Indian newspaper (the Hindustan Times), and has also served as a member of India's Parliament. It's been a busy and fruitful life, and now, with his frosted eyebrows set between the deep corrugations of his forehead, a thick beard, and an ample body beneath his green pajamas, Singh looks like Father Time due for retirement. But he's not ready to call it a day just yet.

Singh is enjoying yet another spell under the spotlight, thanks to his new novel Burial at Sea, a fantasia on an alleged sexual escapade by Nehru. The central character, Jai Bhagwan, "is a takeoff of Nehru," says Singh. Bhagwan, like Nehru, is a Brahman from Kashmir, British-educated, brilliant, agnostic, a follower of Mohandas Gandhi, and with big dreams of modernizing his impoverished country. There's one difference: instead of going into politics, Bhagwan decides to transform India by becoming an industrialist to give his country the economy it deserves. The crux of the novel comes when the middle-aged industrialist, overworked and undersexed, meets Ma Durgeshwari, a holy woman with a pet tiger, and enjoys a reinvigorating bout of Tantric lovemaking with her.

Bhagwan's Tantric tryst is a thinly veiled allusion to one of the more bizarre nooks of modern Indian history. Years after Nehru's death, one of his close aides made the sensational claim that he had had a secret affair with a Hindu godwoman. Singh says he met the godwoman late in her life, and was convinced—whatever the veracity of her story—that she at least possessed the physical charms necessary to bowl over a Prime Minister. "What she must have been in her 20s, I can only imagine," says Singh, with a hint of longing in his voice.

The tiger-loving godwoman is soon joined by a yoga-teaching godman who has mastered the recondite science of breaking wind unaromatically. As a journalist, Singh extensively investigated and exposed godmen, whom he regards as one manifestation of a dangerous surge of Hindu fundamentalism in India. "Religious fascism has taken roots in this soil," says Singh, a vitriolic opponent of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Is the encounter between Bhagwan, the Western-educated agnostic, and Ma Durgeshwari, the Hindu godwoman, an allegory of modern Nehruvian India being seduced by the dark forces of religious fundamentalism? Perhaps. But if Singh the political thinker sees godmen as a danger to India's secularism, Singh the novelist is too deeply attracted to their charlatanry to remember that he's supposed to be warning readers to steer clear of them. "The message gets lost," he ruefully admits.

Still, it's a message worth spreading, Singh reckons, so he's planning to return to the theme of religious fundamentalism in his next book, a collection of short stories. It's unlikely to be his last work. In a scene from Burial at Sea, a colleague advises the young Bhagwan on how to pen a book about his country: "Write a long love letter of many chapters to India as if it were your sweetheart." Khushwant Singh has had a lifelong love-hate relationship with India—and he seems intent on shooting off a few more bittersweet love letters before he's done.