We are Indian, reflexively stiff about our sex, God and politics. And then Khushwant Singh’s “ribald, rib-tickling and outrageous” joke books taught us to take it easy, knock back a Patiala peg and keep chomping the Viagara.

Singh deflowered many taboos through his dirty writing, and notwithstanding his man-crush on Sanjay Gandhi, the mainstreaming of sex jokes was Singh’s own statement against India’s frustrating culture of censorship. Indians bought these joke books in libidinous droves: in an interview with Pakistan’s Friday Times , Singh admitted that his five joke books earned him more royalty than anything else he had written (he eventually wrote or contributed to more than 100 books).

Frankly, I could never get my teeth into Khushwant Singh’s risqué writing, like The Company of Women (2003), particularly when it was described on the back cover as an “uninhibited, erotic and endlessly entertaining celebration of love, sex and passion”. The rustic Punjabi sex in The Train to Pakistan (1956) was sweet, but there always loomed the bizarre guilt of being aroused by a Partition novel, so Harold Robbins was easier to get off on. On the other hand, Singh’s joke books were delicious quickies, with cover illustrations that set them up perfectly: voluptuous, bikini-clad women, prancing around the beaming sardar.

The joke books held their own beside the cleavage-fest of Debonair at railway station bookstands; as a friend told me, they were the only ‘naughty’ books on her father’s shelves of Tolstoys and Hemingways. And Singh’s books were perhaps the only writings that could unite fundamentalists and some feminists in righteous rage.

Many of the jokes were sourced from his loyal and leery band of male contributors around the country, with a disproportionate number of Saxenas, it seemed. The jokes were quite similar to what goes around on old boys’ WhatsApp groups today, lots of innuendo and plenty nudge-nudge-wink-wink.

Beyond the jest, Singh had a healthy disrespect for the sexual knowledge of Indians. In Sex, Scotch and Scholarship (1992) he rued, “Most Indian men are not even aware that women also have orgasms; most Indian women share this ignorance because although they go from one pregnancy to the next, they have no idea that sex can be pleasurable.”

Singh was much ahead of his time: the clitoris was scientifically discovered only in 1998, and ‘cliteracy’ experts last year claimed, “Freedom in a society can be measured from the (gender) distribution of orgasms.” As early as 1992, Singh was not only standing up for the female orgasm, he was standing up for freedom itself.

Being the son of a smart businessman, he understood quite early that sex sells. Like most men, Singh bragged about his sexual exploits, but only he turned the bragging into a marketable art form, and bragged for his millions of readers, not just for his circle of friends. He probably had a fraction of the sex he claimed to have, but he made good money talking and writing about it. And while doing that, in powerfully funny doses, Singh made sex more real for millions of Indians.

It is said that a team researching the sexual habits of city-dwellers interviewed a cross-section of Mumbai’s business community. A question posed to them was: “What do you do immediately after you have had sex?” The answers were revealing. Ten per cent replied that they simply went to sleep. Another 10 per cent replied that they washed themselves and took some nourishment — a glass of fruit juice, aerated water or sandwich. The remaining 80 per cent, after much cajoling, replied: “Then we go home.”

(From Khushwant Singh’s Big Fat Joke Book, 2000)

After a long, steamy intercourse with Earth, Singh has now gone home.

RIP.

(Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi is a journalist, Fulbright scholar and a media entrepreneur)

Related Topics