Indian · 1915–2014
Khushwant Singh was born in Hadali, in what is now Pakistan, trained as a barrister at King's College London, practised at the Lahore High Court, and left everything behind at Partition. He turned that year into Train to Pakistan, still the most widely read novel about 1947. He then had four careers at once: diplomat, historian of the Sikhs, editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, where he raised circulation from sixty thousand to four hundred thousand, and a columnist whose weekly piece ran for decades under a cartoon of himself inside a light bulb. He wrote about sex, whisky, and hypocrisy with a bluntness that offended everyone in turn. He supported Indira Gandhi's Emergency and then returned his Padma Bhushan over the storming of the Golden Temple in 1984. He received the Padma Vibhushan in 2007. He died at ninety-nine, having written a column the week before.