Author Tabish Khair: 'We're watching, and it isn't affecting us'

Tabish Khair loves small towns and uses a similar setting in this book. He admits that he’s very much a small-town writer

Man Asian Literary Prize (2010) shortlisted author Tabish Khair was in the city as part of his book tour. We caught up with him to discuss his new release, Drown All the Refugees (HarperCollins India), which explores displacement through Gothic tropes.

Excerpts from the interview

What spurred you into writing a story about absent people?
Displacement has been a matter of concern for me. I don't use the word ‘refugee' in the novel just for people who are recognised refugees, but a lot of displaced people. From an Indian perspective, this is important. India never signed the International Refugee Convention of 1961 and the Protocol of 1967. So, technically, there are no refugees in India. On the other hand, India had a lot of refugees.

Illustrations courtesy/Vikram Nayak; Harpercollins India

There are 42 million official refugees in the world, and 93 million internally displaced people suffering from similar problems. I'm interested in not just what happens to those who leave, but also what happens to the spaces they leave behind. What happens if and when they come back? Can they ever? All this started assuming force when the Gaza crisis (October 2023) began because, for the first time, you have a very visible kind of violence towards the displaced. We're watching it, and it's not affecting us.

Which elements of Gothic horror helped you explore this theme better?
It had to be a Gothic novel because what really happens in such novels is that something that has been made invisible erupts, and now we have to deal with it. In the colonial Gothic, it's done by putting a stake in the heart of the vampire. But there are other ways of dealing with it, and what erupts might not be evil. In this novel, what erupts is not evil; it's not necessarily good either. It's a mix of everything.

Tabish Khair. PIC/ATUL KAMBLE

Moreover, the genre focuses on difference. Difference is important. I wanted to talk about it not as something that can be changed into sameness, but difference as a fact of life and something we need to negotiate.

You've also included ideas of superstition and belief in the supernatural...
I am much more sceptical of the supernatural than this novel would indicate. For me, the supernatural does not exist in terms of spirituality or religion, but as that extra space that rationality can never totally permeate. Language can only cover that much, as can reason. And obviously, sometime in the future, something else will be covered, but something else will be discovered too, and left uncovered. We can never exhaust reality, either in experience or in language.

The narrator addresses a writer from the West who doesn't understand the textures of language in India. Why this narrative choice?
The only thing the narrator shares with me is that he's also a writer, but he writes in what would be called a minor language internationally. It's not English, Hindi, or Bangla. We don't know what it is; it's a northeastern language. That means it might be spoken by 20 million people, and have rich literature.

As a writer, I find it a bit unacceptable that so much of Western exposure to India is routed through English. That would be fine, but it's very often English that comes from a certain class that sometimes, unintentionally, evades the complexity of language relationships that exist in India. If you're a writer who is concerned with relationships and power, you cannot ignore the relationship that language has to nourish.

Available At leading bookstores and e-stores
Cost Rs 599