Tabish Khair talks of books, colonialism, majoritarian constructs, the idea of India and more in a conversation with Sayan Bhattacharya.
The title of your latest novel ‘How to fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position’ is extremely cheeky and seems to have a sexual connote. Please explain.
I know that terrorism, Islamism and the war against Terror are deadly serious business, and full of needless tragedy. But there is also something grotesquely funny about so much anger and self-righteousness on all sides. It is important to be able to laugh at such deadly serious matters. And finally, to misquote Shelley, our funniest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Are you taking a dig at political correctness in an increasingly sanitized world where Tintin is racist, cartoons are banned?
Not really. I have no problems with political correctness, as I have never really believed in it. Political correctness is a comfy middle class remedy for deeply ingrained problems and prejudices: racism or sexism or xenophobia do not disappear just because you start avoiding some words. It takes much more than that. I am more interested in laughing at a world that says something and does something else. It is true that the novel is not very politically correct in a narrow sense, but that is because it does not believe in such narrowness; it believes in addressing the diseases, not the symptoms. But I don’t just laugh at the world; I also laugh with it.
What have been the triggers for the novel?
Many… the world today, the misunderstandings between the religious and the secular, terrorism and the war against it, my own experiences as a coloured immigrant in Denmark, etc. But above all the fact that I want to talk to those people — the 90 percent in the middle, religious or irreligious — who are crushed between the ends of any extremism. I am interested in how we narrow down life and love, how we fail to communicate and understand each other; I am interested in what safety means and what danger signifies. Actually, at its core, this is more a novel about life and love today than about politics and war.
First novel, set in a bus, and then of course, ‘Filming’ against the backdrop of Partition, and then ‘The thing about thugs’, set in the Victorian era… so tell me something about these disparate settings.
Well, some of it just has to do with the kind of person I am. I get bored very easily – I don’t think I can write the same novel twice, for me… and again, I also believe that it’s more interesting if one tries something else. Of course, again, I don’t just write for the sake of writing or making money – I write because I have a story to tell, I have something that I want to talk about in a certain way. With ‘The Bus Has Stopped’, I felt that I had stories to tell that, in my part of Bihar, where I lived for the first twenty-five years of my life. ‘Filming’, I wanted to explore Partition and the film industry –
The Romance of cinema…
Exactly. All of that, and these are also very much part of who I am – including the Partition, coming from a Muslim background and all that. And, with ‘The thing about thugs’, perhaps I wanted to engage with what can be called our colonial heritage, but I didn’t want it to be a Raj novel or a multicultural London novel, because I feel there are too many of those already. That’s why I went back in time, and in some ways also because I had been reading up colonial texts and I realised that there were a number of discrepancies in the colonial account of what thuggee was and what captured thugs themselves claimed. I decided to use those gaps and discrepancies to tell the kind of story that might not have been told before.
Discrepancy, as in?
For instance, British officers always wrote or spoke about thuggee as a cult, which involved families and people who passed on one generation to next becoming members of thuggee cults. On the other hand, many of the thugs who were captured and sometimes hanged, said things like “my father used to be a farmer, then we lost our land, that’s why I started doing this.” So in that sense there was a discrepancy, this colonial conception of India as hierarchical, with professions being handed down, and this extremely complex reality present in flux, so that whatever might have been the history of thuggee, the present was much more complex. Those were things I wanted to explore. What really fascinated me was the fact that these lives and realities that you’re talking about are not a part of your lived experience.
So tell me about the research process and also how important is it for the writer to live through what he writes about?
Definitely… The story that I tell is not lived. Because thugs and Victorian gentlemen, I have no experience of them. On the other hand, some of the relations and tensions that exist or that existed in the Victorian period, as I understand it, and that exist in my novel, are very similar to the relations and tensions that exist between privileged classes and serving classes even today. Those tensions are still there, the way we look at people who don’t speak like us, the way we think of people who are seen as less cultivated or who are poorer sometimes, those relations were there. But, but the rest of it, of course, wasn’t there. And that involved research. I do think that writing based on one’s own experiences is, of course, important enough, but one also needs to go beyond one’s own experiences, using it to actually enter other people’s experiences and trying to narrate them. That requires research, whether the novel is historical or not. In this case, it was a historical novel, it required research, and the danger there was to write like a researcher. The way I tried to avoid it was by reading as much as possible, but not maintaining detailed notes or trying to remember exactly as I would if I were writing an academic paper, instead letting all of it settle in, and then writing about it.
If you’re talking about colonial literature, you’ve said somewhere that you are wary of postcolonial literature because it’s mostly around “West and the rest”. So do you take a conscious effort to stay away from these stereotypes?
As a writer, definitely. I don’t mind being read as a postcolonial writer or anything like that, as long as a tag like that gets me readers. I have no furious objection to it. But I do object to being understood with the use of just those tags, because I feel that I am a writer, from a certain kind of background, and the best way to understand me is to engage with my writing, without using these tags. But I again understand why universities or publishers use tags, because people need tags to order reality (laughs). So I’m not saying I am dead against all of it, but postcolonialism in particular I find a bit problematic because of the reason that you gave – “the West and the rest”, but also colonisation and eternity. It’s like a lot of other things went into what is India today. The European colonial experience was just one part of it, so how come we end up being postcolonial forever? That’s also part of the problem. The other problem is that why is it that we are postcolonial and the British are not postcolonial? Because if colonisation ended, it affected both the coloniser and the colonised – so technically, all of us are postcolonial as long as we engaged in that kind of colonial relationship. But on the other hand, there used to be some advantages – for instance, in the name of postcolonialism, some Asian or African writers used to be taught in European or American universities – even some of that has disappeared, because increasingly the term ‘postcolonial’ is being used to teach writers who have mostly grown up in Europe or America but tend to have non-European names. They are excellent writers, many of them, but they have grown up in the West. And I think it’s time to start talking of them as British or American writers, because that’s what they are. Just because they have Indian or Pakistani or Nigerian names, it doesn’t mean that they are African or Asian writers.
When we talk of Indian literature in English, on one hand there’s this elitism associated . Of course a lot of good literature has come out of it but these writers come from a similar background and on the other hand we have a phenomenon like Chetan Bhagat – so how do you negotiate between these two extremes?
I’ll deal with two different situations- you have a class of Indians writing about India in English and most of them share certain experiences of Indian and world realities, and do not share certain other experiences (laughs). That’s the first part. But Chetan Bhagat is a different phenomenon, an example of a writer in globalising India who decided to use publicity and media to promote his writing, and did it very cleverly and with great success. So these are slightly different elements. In my case, partly because I’ve spent twenty-five years in Bihar, and partly because I’ve spent more than ten years now in Denmark, and both these spaces are marginalist spaces. I mean, writing from where I write, and growing up where I grew, both of these things affect me marginally. I mean, I cannot really sell my writing, even if I wanted to do it, because I don’t live in Delhi or London, and I cannot just write like some other cosmopolitan Indian English writers, because though I grew up in a professional middle-class family, I saw many other kinds of Indians and lived with many other kinds of Indians. I can never ignore their realities as well as the fact that I know that any claim on my part to tell their stories ought to be viewed with suspicion, because I can only tell parts and bits of their stories, like how much can I really tell of the experiences of a rickshaw-wala? I can try, but I have to be extremely wary of my own limitations.
But besides the marketing bit, Chetan Bhagat has made Indian English writing accessible to a lot of people who never read before. Of course there are questions about the content.
Well, I agree that he is read by a lot of people who would not read other kinds of writing, and in that sense one can say that Chetan Bhagat has marked the coming of pulp fiction in India. Shobhaa De did a bit of it too, to be honest. And pulp fiction needs a large readership. Some of it has to do with the fact that Indian readership in English has been exploding. People, when they read in English, no longer look for literary novels, they also look for entertainment and other things associated with pulp or genre fiction, and there’s no harm in that. I mean, it’s good to have readers looking for that, and good to have writers who are catering to that. I’m not one of them, but that is a different matter. (laughs)
So where does Tabish Khair find his niche?
I think I find my niche to the extent that I do among readers who care for literature, but more than that, readers who want to engage with life. I think that’s more important for me. I don’t approach literature as an aesthetic or cultural activity, for me it’s my way to engage with the world, a world that has a lot of beauty but also a lot of cruelty and sadness. So I think people who look for that in literature are the people I write for.
What have been your literary influences?
Oh, lots, lots. I read widely. I was born half-deaf, so the only thing I could really do well was read (laughs). If you’re born blind, people take pity on you, but if you’re born deaf, people don’t notice it or they laugh at you. (laughs) That was a joke, but it’s true – I have a hearing impairment, and so, I read extremely widely, and most of it – unfortunately – to begin with, was European literature. A lot of Russian and especially British literature. Russian literature because my grandfather had a good stock of Russian literature in translation, I read all the classics by the time I finished high school – Tolstoy, Gogol, all of them. And then of course a bit of French, and German, but not that much – but then, when I went to college, then I started realising that while many of these writers would stay with me all my life, whether it was Emily Bronte or Nikolai Gogol or Dostoevsky or Charles Dickens, in order to write about the world I wanted to write about, I needed to find other registers – other tones, other voices. So I started reading around and I reached other Indian writers, Indian English writers, Indian writers in translation, postcolonial writers, and Caribbean writers have been a strong influence in recent years, so it’s very wide.
First, a collection of poetry, then non-fiction, then novel – is there a certain pattern to it?
No. No, I think I’m just – I think when I come up with an idea, I usually have a gut feeling what kind of genre it belongs to, and then I go to that genre. I don’t set out to write a poem or write a novel – I have an idea, and I want to write about it. Some of these ideas, or some of these experiences, or some of these thoughts, can be expressed better as poetry, some as long fiction, some perhaps as short fiction, and some as some other kids of texts. Some other kinds of ideas I would probably turn into essays or studies.
I was reading somewhere that you had said that it was easy for you to leave the geographical space of India because India is the idea that’s there in your mind. Please elaborate on that…
Yeah. To a large extent, because, see, one of the problems we have is, whenever we say “India” – you say India, or I say India, anyone else says India – we’re talking about the middle class, which shares a lot, across India. We have a certain experience of India, and it doesn’t overlap entirely – there are certain overlaps, but India is so vast, any geographical, historical experience of India is going to leave out other experiences by other Indians. So in that sense, the India that we carry in our minds becomes extremely important. It’s based on our experiences, but it’s also based on a reading of other texts by other Indians who have had different experiences, and those things one doesn’t lose track of even when one leaves the geographical space of India. So in that sense, I feel that there is a kind of relationship that we have to India, which is mediated through thought – other people’s thought, other people’s readings and writings as well as our experiences, and that India we carry with us, so that’s what I meant actually. Which doesn’t mean that it’s always easy to write about, say, contemporary India. For example, if I wanted to set a novel in Delhi, or in Gaya, my hometown, today, unlike some other writers, I would say I would have to go back to Delhi or Gaya and live there for some time and then write, because certain things are more difficult to imagine – what does the sun feel like at 10 o’clock on a May morning – it’s like, one doesn’t want to come up with generic descriptions like “It was hot, and I was sweating” – for me, that doesn’t work. One has to have a more specific description. So in that sense, I still intend to write my Great Bihar Novel, and for that I think I’ll have to go back to Bihar for a year or so.
So what’s your take on the idea of the nation-state?
Good and bad. Nation-states are useful. You can do a lot of things through nation-states. On the other hand, nation-states are also, of course, largely based on an ideology that equates states with nations, and nations with nationalities, and this ideology is something that exists only in books and our minds, because, of course, almost no nation really coincides with a nationality. This is something that is constructed over a number of decades – the wars and genocides of Europe throughout, from the 18th century to the mid-20th century, and some people would say late 20th century in Bosnia and places like that, were of course attempts to create nation-states. So while nation-states are useful for governance and other matters and can have positive values, on the other hand nation-states can also be used to justify xenophobia, oppression, excesses of state power.
India as a nation-state?
India as a nation- state is, I would say, a great experiment. Surprisingly successful in some ways and deeply sad in some other ways. Keeping in mind the fact that India is a patchwork of so many different religions, cultures, languages, I think the nation-state has managed to keep India together and create some feeling of Indianness, and this should not be dismissed. It has managed to provide some kind of social and economic structure, at least in some areas, build roads and bridges, and these things need to be done. It has to be done by a government, and that government of course in today’s world belongs to a nation-state. So, I am not someone who dismisses the Indian nation-state at all. On the other hand, I also realise that it has its limitations. It has participated in certain kinds of atrocities that might have been avoided if people had shown more imagination at the top levels. It sometimes kowtows to populist sentiments which also perhaps it need not always do. But keeping the pressures in mind, I would say that more than half the time, it does a pretty good job.
You have written this very interesting line for your children, “May you always belong to a multiple minority, to the minority of minorities, for then you will learn to see and feel.” Please explain this, and from there, how best can the majority learn to feel?
See, in some ways there is no majority. A majority is always a construct. We decide to select one or two elements and say this is what makes me part of a majority. It can be language – for example, we can say we are Hindi speakers, which means that we are the majority compared to, say, Punjabi speakers. But that’s again a selection. Or it can be religion. We can say that we belong to this religion and most people are members of this religion so we are a majority. But if you really look at people claiming to be part of this majority, all of them also share certain things that make them different as groups. So they are already minorities in there if you shift the definition – for example, shift the definition of what it is to be Hindu and start talking of language and culture and so on and so forth, or even the different kinds of Hinduism that are practised, then again Hinduism is a colourful mosaic of Hindu minorities (laughs) as is, for that matter, Islam or Christianity. I mean, regardless of what Hindi religious leaders or Muslim religious leaders might want to do, there is no uniform Hinduism or uniform Islam. And there will never be, because people live by sharing things, but also by differentiating themselves from others. That’s the way human beings enact their existence – we are same and different at the same time, and every human being does that.
How does one learn to feel?
I think one way to learn – and this is not something that the majority has to do, or the minority has to do, this is something that all of us have to do – is to realise that it’s not just important to stand up for your own rights. What’s more important is to stand up for the rights of others, especially for the rights of others one differs from. That is what is needed, not just for the sake of such abstract ideas as freedom of speech, or political concepts such as democracy, which I believe in but which some other people might not consider that important, but for the sake of something far more basic – something that I would describe as human decency or basic civility. We need it. We owe it to the other to stand up for his or her rights, especially when we see that we do not really agree with what he stands for, but if we feel that his rights are being crushed, then I think that it’s our job to stand up for it. And it’s a price for minorities as much as so-called majorities.
And your future projects?
Well, I’m doing a book for Harvard University Press. It’s a study on Xenophobia because I am trying to trace how xenophobia has changed its character under the impact of global capitalism so that our old categories of xenophobia are not sufficient in order to understand the kinds of xenophobic feelings that we tend to experience, especially in the first world. That’s basically the agenda there.
