Punjabi writer Khamosh passes away

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 21

Name any literary master, his imagination captured the lives of almost every major wordsmith: from Tolstoy to Pushkin, Gogol to Chekhov, from Hugo to Voltaire. Punjabi writer Inder Singh Khamosh, who opened a new paradigm in Punjabi literature with his biographical novels on literary masters, passed away today in the United States. He was 88.

He hailed from Harike village in Barnala. Before taking to full-time writing, Khamosh was a school teacher who retired in 1989. A couple of years ago, he moved to the US where his daughter is settled.

His literary career spans more than five decades, but it was during the past two decades that he wrote biographical novels based on the lives of literary masters. Some of them are “Kafir Masiha” based on Leo Tolstoy’s life, “Adarshan Da Vanjara” on Nikolai Gogol, “Samundri Kabootari” on Anton Chekhov, “Kuthali Peya Sona” on Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Husan Prasat” on Pushkin and “Lat Lat Laat Bale” on Victor Hugo.