Kushwant : Il Santo Grande

 

Kushwant : Il Santo Grande

By Ramachandra Guha

In the summer of 1970, Khushwant Singh took a month's leave from editing the Illustrated Weekly Of India. He had been awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation, to be spent in the estate they own on a hill overlooking Lake Como in northern Italy. The Vila Serbelloni, as those who have been there know, is a sensuously beautiful place to live a month in. Or a week, or a day. The food is good, the wine better, the views out of this world. Between meals, one might walk through the pines, or admire the garden, or drink coffee in a cafe by the waterfront. When the Foundation invites a writer here he is not even expected to write.

The one thing the estate lacks is a tennis court. For Khushwant Singh, who had played two sets in a colonial club every morning of his life, this was a real, and unanticipated, hassle. Reluctantly, he decided to make do with a daily swim instead. Clad only in the mandatory kachchha, he would, after an early breakfast, walk down the hill and breast his way across the lake. Then, his abundant hair hung out to dry, his kada glistening in the mid-morning sun, he would climb the hill on the other side. In time he would return, get into the water once more, and swim back to the Villa Serbelloni.

This daily ritual was followed, with increasingly awed fascination, by the residents of the far shore. Back in the 1970s this part of Italy had some peasants, real peasants, who cultivated fields and reared sheep on the slopes around Lake Como. Nothing in their culture or folklore had prepared them for the sight of a Sardar after his swim. The lord who once lived in the manor house had been seen, if at all, only atop a horse. Of the Americans who later patronised the place, the odd fellow might have entered the water, sometimes, but then he was coloured white, had close cropped hair and was clean shaven besides.

A week passed, and still the Sardar came, every morning. Another week and the peasants had convinced themselves that this was a saint, il santo. By the end of his stay he had been elevated further still, to the rank of "great saint", or il santo grande. So epochal was Khushwant Singh's holiday in the Como hills that to this day local history is marked by reference to it. Do you not remember the murder of that inn-keeper, an old man will say, it happened the winter following the visit of il santo grande.

The story of Khushwant Singh's beatification was told to me by the philosopher Ninian Smart, whose wife is Italian, and who owns a little cottage in the hills abutting Lake Como. The Sardar does not, I believe, know of his elevation at all. Were he to be told the tale he would have a hearty chuckle. Heartier still would be the chuckles of the hundreds of thousands of Indians who read him. For these have been brought up to understand that the Sardar is an authentic anti-saint, who has malice towards all and whose worldly ways would make Mahatma Gandhi weep.