I don’t want to write from New York, London or Delhi: Tabish Khair

Author and poet Tabish Khair left India at the age of 24. Born and educated in Gaya and today an associate professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, Khair rejects labels like ‘diasporic’ and ‘multicultural’. However, a keen awareness of his displaced identity is evident in his latest works, the novel The Thing About
Thugs and his collection of poems, Man Of Glass.

In the latter, he takes the works of three writers from different eras — Sanskrit dramatist Kalidas, Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib and Danish writer HC Anderson — and makes them his own, in content and form. On a recent visit to Mumbai, Khair spoke to DNA about his literary preoccupations, his identity as a writer, and his relationship with the languages he grew up with.

How did you conceive of The Thing About Thugs?
I had grown tired of the recent multicultural novel based in contemporary London. They make a claim of knowing the native, a claim I can’t accept. I had also done some reading about the thugees and felt that the British narrative on them was just one side of the story. There were lots of other stories that hadn’t been told. And I had a similar feeling about Victorian London. So the two combined to create this novel. Also, in some way, London of that time reminded me of the situation in India today in terms of the difference of wealth.

You say you’re always very careful to avoid what you call the ‘native informer trend’ in your writing. Could you elaborate on that?
That is a very reductive way of looking at literature. When that happens, what the reader or critic is saying is that my text is important for the factual information it conveys. So in effect what is being implied is that it’s not fiction, it’s not art. And that I find impossible to accept. At the same time, all of us are imprisoned in a narrative cage, especially those of us who occupy a subaltern position. I want to be read and I don’t really care what people call me as long as they read me. But my text always contains elements that will enable the reader to read me along lines that are perhaps closer to my perception of what the text is.

Could you give an example of how you do that in The Thing About Thugs?
In the Acknowledgements section, which seems to be so autobiographical, I’ve actually quoted some texts which don’t exist, along with those that do. Any reader who bothers to Google these texts will know that William T Meadows, the English captain to whom Amir Ali narrates the story of my life, is not a real person but a reference to Philip Meadows Taylor, author of Confessions of A Thug.

Being an Indian writer based in Denmark, how do you deal with the sense of dislocation?
Sometimes it can be depressing. I don’t get to attend too many literary events because I’m too far away. But by and large, I find it quite productive. Also, in India, I felt like I was in the margins of the Indian English writing scene. I mean, most Indian English writers are metropolitan, especially the internationally published ones like Tharoor. I didn’t move to any of the centres of the Anglophone world.  I am once again in the margins and I quite relish being there. I don’t want to write from New York or London or even Delhi.

In Man Of Glass, you take Kalidasa’s Shakuntala and turn her into a contemporary woman with very different anxieties. What is her symbolic value in your rendition?
Shakuntala’s prince is not a prince but a fascination that people of our class and generation had for the promised land which many of us seemed headed for. But once we got there, we were not recognised, we had lost our ring, so to say. Shakuntala realises that unless we become aware of how we are placed in the land where we grew up, we can’t really expect to be taken for who we think we are in other lands. So in some ways, her realisation shows her capacity to reflect, which I feel is a very human quality. What makes us human is this fact that we are reflexive.

Your previous novel, Filming, was translated into Danish last year. Given your preoccupation with language and its limitations, what is it like seeing your work translated into an alien tongue?
I have a different relationship with the translations of my novels. I’ve been asked by foreign publishers if I would mind including a glossary of Indian words. I said no. But I would never have such a glossary in the English edition of any of my novels. That’s how I write, that’s how I talk. There are some words that exist in Indian equivalence, in Indian English, and I’m not going to sit and explain it to the reader. I’m sure the reader can make an effort and understand it. Just as when we grew up, we read poems like Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’. I don’t know how many of us had seen a daffodil; I hadn’t. We had to imagine it and we managed. I’m very sure a Western reader can do the same.