K L Gauba

( From the segment; On People, With 'Malice', from 'Sex, Scotch & Scholarship' - Khushwant Singh's selected writings )

The initials K L stand for two names, Kanahya Lal and Khalid Latif. Both belonged to the same man. No one knew which really applied to him. No one will ever know because last week when he died, he took both with him.

Half-a-century ago, if the name of K L Gauba had been in any general knowledge examination paper, almost every candidate would have got the answer correct : eldest son of the banker millionaire and first Hindu minister of Punjab, Lala Harkishan Lal Gauba; barrister, author, politician; a man who took his religion and his women as it suited him; much censured and much reviled for whatever he did. But a living example of "badnaam agar hongey to kya, naam na hoga". The world didn't give a damn for K L Gauba; K L Gauba didn't give a damn for the world. He left it, unsung and unhonoured as he would have liked and as he deserved.

K L Gauba made his debut in Indian society as the author of "Uncle Sham", a reply to Katherine Mayo's "Mother India". As Mayo had maligned India, Gauba maligned Mayo's motherland, the United States of America. "Uncle Sham" was a scissors and paste job consisting largely of reports of incest, juvenile prostitution, dope and drink and all that was seamy in American life. He followed it up with another best-seller on the lives on Indian princes entitled "His Highness". The book began with a memorable quote which ran somewhat as follows : "Some people begin their morning with a cup of tea, some with the morning paper, His Highness prefers a virgin." It was a scandalous account of sex orgies performed by our Maharajas.

What made Kanahya Lal Gauba the odd man out in every society is not very hard to guess. His father was the most distinguished and respected Punjabi of his times. K.L. , as he was popularly known, flouted social norms of the times, by going through a much publicised conversion to Islam almost entirely to hurt his father - as Mahatma Gandhi's son had done to him. He was careful to retain his initial identity and never used his new name Khalid Latif in full. As a convert, he won the hearts of Punjabi Muslims and cashed in on his popularity by winning an election to the Punjab Assembly from a purely Muslim constituency which included Lahore's notorious red light district, Hira Mandi, where he had been a familiar figure even before his conversion. Although he wrote a book on the life of the Prophet Mohammed, it was common knowledge that his conversion was 'naam ke vastey' and 'kaam ke vastey'.

I first met K L Gauba some time in 1948 in Lahore. He was then married to a Muslim lady (cartoonist Anwar Ahmed's sister) and lived in considerable style in a spacious bungalow along the canal bank. I devilled for him in a number of cases. Then he wrote a very scurrilous book on Chief Justice Sir Douglas Young, accusing him of womanising and taking bribes. It was odd that K.L. who had renounced Hinduism only to spite his Hindu father went out of his way to malign Young who had jailed his father. He was hauled up for gross contempt of court and was sent to gaol. He, however, succeeded in blackening the face of Douglas Young who was given a very cool farewell by the Lahore bar and died in obscurity in South Africa.

On the partition of the country, Khalid Latif Gauba did not stay on in Muslim Pakistan but migrated to India with other Hindus and Sikhs. A few months later I ran into him in Simla. He had acquired a very lovely, young, burqa-clad Begum from Hyderabad. After some time the Hyderabadi Begum vanished and was replaced by another lady, and later yet another. K.L. settled down in Bombay but his practice never picked up. He moved from big to smaller apartments and then to a lodging house. He tried to add to his meagre income by writing articles and books. He churned out another scissors-and-paste job listing atrocities committed against Indian Muslims which, though entirely unauthenticated, provided plenty of propaganda fodder to Pakistan. K.L. gradually sank into poverty and spent his last years living on the charity of his step-brother, M L Gauba and his generous-hearted Sindhi wife, Gopi.

In his later days K.L. could be seen in his sola topee and tattered clothes, shuffling along Flora Fountain towards the Asiatic Society where he spent all his days reading magazines and sleeping in armchairs. The last time I saw him, he was sitting on the pavement outside a Parsee fire-temple munching parched gram out of a paper cup. It was a pathetic sight : the story of, "from the log cabin to the White House in reverse"; from a palatial Punjab mansion to the pavement of Pherozeshah Mehta Road.

Fifty years ago, K L Gauba's cortege would have been followed by half the city of Lahore; last week he did not have a dozen to mourn his departure.