| Tabish Khair was born in Ranchi (now in Jharkhand, then Bihar), India and grew up in his hometown Gaya (Bihar). He is a critically acclaimed author and poet. His honors and prizes include the All India Poetry Prize and university fellowships at Cambridge, Hong Kong and Delhi.
His novels have been shortlisted for nine prestigious prizes, translated into several languages and reviews, essays, fiction and poems by Khair has appeared in many countries.
He did Bachelor of Arts (BA) from Gaya College and a Masters in English from the local Magadh University.
Along with his studies, he also worked as a district reporter for the Patna edition of the Times of India in Gaya. Khair’s first collection of poems was accepted for publication by a major Delhi publisher when he was still studying in Gaya. In the year 1996, he left for Copenhagen, Denmark, to do his PhD on Indian English Fiction which he finished in the year 2000.
Since 2003, he has been teaching in the University of Aarhus, where he was awarded a DPhil in 2010. In this interview, given by email, he talked about his journey as a writer and his vision behind his work. Excerpts from the interview:
Q: You have been a journalist for years and then an author and now also a teacher? How did exactly this transformation happen?
A: I was not born in circles where one could just be a writer, so I had to earn my living and write. All I have been trying to do is find time for my writing and reading and to experience life inside and outside the circles of my upbringing. I do not see it as a transformation but aspects of the same struggle.
Q: What qualities a person needs to have to become a writer?
A: Lots of reading, some experience of life, a certain capacity to think and feel, and obviously a modicum of talent.
Q: Do you think that circumstances surrounding a writer play a major role in his thoughts and eventually in his writings?
A: Evidently, but what the writer makes of those circumstances can vary. You can always use your experiences, but only you can discover how to employ it as literature. For instance, I personally feel that journalism requires you to go to a story, while literature demands that you go away from it in some ways. As such, I do not jump out with my pen and write a poem or a short story on any topical happening, personal or public, though I could write an article for a newspaper on it.
Q: You have touched various aspects of religion in your writing? What exactly was your vision behind it?
A: Religion is a complex matter. I am a great admirer of theorists like Terry Eagleton, who is an atheistic Marxist but engages with his religious traditions in depth. I dislike people who believe in ‘god’ blindly or dismiss religions simplistically: both sides show a dismal lack of engagement with the complexities of the past and with human aspirations and thought.
Q: Any important lessons you want to share with other which you have learnt while facing challenges?
A: Keep going. Stay true to your original impulse. Do not compromise for the sake of other people’s notions of success.
Q: What is meant by success to you? Any piece of advice you want to give for others to achieve success?
A: For me, success is a completed book in which I know that I have done what I set out to do. Whether it sells ten copies or ten million does not change that. As for advice, all I can say is that you need to find out what success means to you; it means different things to different people. If you do not know what you really want to achieve, it is unlikely that you will ever achieve it.
Q: You are also fascinated by Bollywood quite a lot; but we often hear that writers in Bollywood are not given the deserved attention? What you have to say about it?
A: I think ‘Bollywood’ is a misleading term and can only be applied to Indian cinema from the 1970s onwards. As it stands today, Bollywood is a harsh commercial industry, and no commercial industry – not even the publishing industry – really cares for good writing these days. On the other hand, what comes out of Bollywood – the films, magazines, fashions, songs, images, even the half-digested ideas, etc. – is a complex cultural heritage, and no Indian writer can afford to ignore it.
Q: You come from the Hindi speaking region from India and most of your work is in English? Do you think that the message you want to convey will not be able to reach the actual people?
A: I write in English because I can write and read it better than I can write and read Hindi or Urdu. This has to do with my education and the unreasonable political rift between Hindi and Urdu, which frightened me away from both the languages in school.
Q: What do you have to say about your Indian connections? How deeply your writing is influenced from this core root?
A: I grew up in a small town (Gaya, Bihar) and left it at the age of 24 or 25 for the first time. I worked for 4 or 5 years as a staff reporter in Delhi. My parents and brother still live in Gaya. I return to India for long periods. Moreover, I live in a small village off a town in Denmark. I see myself as belonging to a long tradition of ‘small town cosmopolitanism’, a tradition often overlooked in metropolitan and so-called ‘global’ circles today.
Q: Do you think that most of the Indians actually lack the technique of proper documentation? Due to which many valuable knowledge has not been preserved.
A:I think resources are the main problem, and at the governmental level it is compounded by political ignorance and apathy. Moreover, most ordinary Indians are too busy surviving in a land of many pressures and much inequality to bother about cultural documentation and such privileged matters.
Q: Why is it so that not many Indian writers are acknowledged globally?
A: Quite a few are acknowledged globally, but they tend to write in English. It is true that some excellent Indian writers in other languages do not get the attention they deserve. The old colonial modes of thinking have not disappeared, obviously. Some of it also has to do with the nature of Indian English writing: the fact that it is in English is both the strength and weakness of Indian Writing in English.
Q: In the fast pace of life where we want everything very fast, when mode of writing has changed from letters to merely tweeting, do you think we will see end of proper writing in future? In some ways?
A: Who knows? I do feel that the ability to read thoughtfully is declining. People read too fast and superficially. If you read on a screen, you automatically read faster most of the time, as your eyes move down (as they do when reading a book) but the cursor moves the lines on the screen upwards too. It leads to shallow reading. This is reflected, among other things, in the short and simple sentences employed by many writers writing in English to day. I think someone should start a Society for the Preservation of the Compound Sentence! One misses well-modulated, long, complex sentences where a thought unfolds and turns and flows on; you cannot do this with short sentences.
Q: Do you think that good authors can play a major role in changing the way society thinks? If so, then how?
A: I believe that good writers engage with society in complex ways. Whether society pays them any attention and enables them to influence it is another matter.
Q: Any message do you want to give to the readers, especially to Indian youth?
A: Protest, but remember this conundrum: while we are oppressed only in our particularities, any just claim to rights has to be universal. You cannot claim for yourself what you deny someone else.
 Jihadi Jane
Tabish Khair
Tabish Khair has a knack for picking the most search-engine optimised titles for his books. They tap directly into whatever aspect of Muslim life most morbidly fascinates us at the moment. In 2012, a year after Osama Bin Laden was killed, he published How To Fight Islamist Terror From The Missionary Position; early this year, as Syrian refugees continued to pour into Europe, he released The New Xenophobia; and now, as ISIS has successfully branded itself the nightmare of our times, he explores the lives of its young, first-world recruits in Jihadi Jane.
 How to Fight Islamist Terror From the Missionary Position
Tabish Khair
Do you remember some Muslims’ violent reactions to the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s decision to print abusive cartoons of Mohammed in 2005? Or the early assumption by many sections of the media that the 2011 shootings actually perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik were the work of Muslim extremists angry with Norway’s role in the war on terror?
 The Thing About Thugs
Tabish Khair
“The Thing About Thugs” is an odd confection of a novel, set mostly in what looks like late-Victorian London. The streets are gaslit. The underworld teems with the flotsam of empire: lascars, Irishmen and so on, the undesirables of many nations. The city is overwhelmed with crime and prostitution and an influx of immigrants. Opium dens abound.
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