Khushwant Singh

Khushwant Singh received his bachelor's degree from Government College, Lahore and qualified as a barrister from King's College, London. His father, Sir Sobha Singh, was a prominent builder in Lutyens' Delhi.

In August 1947, days before the partition of India and Pakistan, Singh, then a lawyer practicing in the High Court in Lahore, drove to his family's summer cottage at Kasauli in the foothills of the Himalayas. Continuing on to Delhi along 200 miles of strangely vacant road, he came upon a Jeep full of armed Sikhs who boasted that they had just massacred a village of Muslims.Such experiences were to be powerfully distilled in Singh's 1956 novel Train to Pakistan. (The 2006 edition of Train to Pakistan, published by Roli Books in New Delhi, also contains 66 photographs by Margaret Bourke-White that capture the partition's violent aftermath.)

Khushwant Singh has edited Yojana, an Indian government journal; The Illustrated Weekly of India, a newsweekly; and two major Indian newspapers, The National Herald and the Hindustan Times. During his tenure, The Illustrated Weekly became India's pre-eminent newsweekly.[citation needed] After Singh's departure, it suffered a huge drop in readership.

From 1980 through 1986, Singh was a member of Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament. Awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 for service to his country, in 1984 he returned the award in protest against the siege of the Golden Temple by the Indian Army. Undeterred, in 2007 the Indian government awarded Singh an even more prestigious honor, the Padma Vibhushan.

Honors and awards
Padma Bhushan, Government of India (1974)
Honest Man of the Year, Sulabh International (2000)
Punjab Rattan, Government of Panjab (2006)
Padma Vibhushan, Government of India (2007)

Books written by him
The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories, 1950
The History of Sikhs, 1953
Train to Pakistan, 1956
The Voice of God and Other Stories, 1957
I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, 1959
The Sikhs Today, 1959
The Fall of the Kingdom of the Punjab, 1962
A History of the Sikhs, 1963
Ranjit Singh: The Maharajah of the Punjab, 1963
Ghadar 1915: India's first armed revolution, 1966
A Bride for the Sahib and Other Stories, 1967
Black Jasmine, 1971
Tragedy of Punjab, 1984
Delhi: A Novel, 1990
Sex, Scotch and Scholarship: Selected Writings, 1992
Not a Nice Man to Know: The Best of Khushwant Singh, 1993
We Indians, 1993
Women and Men in My Life, 1995
Uncertain Liaisons; Sex, Strife and Togetherness in Urban India, 1995
The Company of Women, 1999
Truth, Love and a Little Malice(an autobiography), 2002
With Malice towards One and All
The End of India, 2003
Burial at the Sea, 2004
Paradise and Other Stories, 2004
Death at My Doorstep, 2005
The Illustrated History of the Sikhs, 2006