Author Tabish Khair, in an interview with Sparsh Sharma, speaks about his writing career and? the literary scene in India and its Northeast
Born and educated in Bihar?s Gaya, Tabish Khair is a poet, journalist, critic, educator and novelist. His works include Where Parallel Lines Meet, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English Novels, The Bus Stopped, Filming: A Love Story, The Glum Peacock, Man of Glass, The Thing About Thugs, and The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness. He has co-edited Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing.
His most recent books are How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position and the co-authored Reading Literature Today. His works have been translated into nearly a dozen languages.
Winner of the All India Poetry Prize, Khair?s novels have been shortlisted for the Encore Award (UK), Crossword Vodafone Fiction Prize and Hindu Literature Prize (India), Man Asian Literature Prize (Hong Kong) and for major translation prizes in Denmark and France.?
- H ow was the journey from Gaya, B ihar, to Aarhus, Denmark, of a prodigious Indian, now a global literary figure?
It was a hard journey, and it has not ended for me, and never will, because I see myself as a ?small town cosmopolitan? writer. This makes it difficult for me to accept some of the perspectives of many metropolitan writers or editors, and leaves me without the kind of powerful patronage that has become essential to m ajor literary success these days. But I am happy trekking on my own journey, and I have luckily had a fair bit of success on my own too.
- Some of the remarkable memories of this long journey of hard work and commercial/critical success?
I will save those for my memoirs, if I ever write one, or (what is more likely) I will fashion them into fiction. But one strand that runs through my memories is an awareness of these supposedly peripheral spaces and a suspicion of worldly success, including my own. I feel lucky. I know that many others with just as much to give will not be so lucky. And hence I feel humbled.
- How was the initial reception in the West of your writing in Indian English?
My novels, The Bus Stopped and Filming?, were published to good reviews in The Independent, The Guardian, The Times, New Statesman, etc., so I guess the reaction was very favourable. Personally, though, I do not much care for British or American commendation; I am happy if I get it, just as I am happy to get a perceptive review in France or Portugal. But finally I am writing for South Asians first, and the rest of world (which just includes the UK and the USA) after that. I think it is very sad that Indian English literary reputations have to depend so much on ?Western?, particularly British, commendation.
- Any frustrating moments in the illustrious literary career?
This is a line in which the frustrations usually outstrip the satisfactions: it is a constant struggle, in every possible way. To write is to struggle, and to know that you can only improve, not achieve perfection.
- Why do you write in English? Why not your first language?
Unfortunately, English is my first language. I grew up speaking Hindi, Urdu and English, but reading and writing almost exclusively in English. I went to a missionary school, and learnt to write and read English first, and was taught all subjects via English. I can still read English much faster than Hindi (which I read well), and I can hardly read Urdu, though I speak it well enough. For every 50 books I have read in English, I have read one in Hindi, and one in some other language. So Hindi-Urdu-English (Hindustani?) might be my mother tongue, but English is my first language.
- How can one capture the street idiom and the essence of an Indian scene in English or any second international language?
It is a problem: Once you write in English about India, where most people do not speak English or do not speak it from choice, you are faced with a number of limitations of this sort. You can ignore them or you can fashion your art to grapple with them, creatively and honestly. I do the latter. Fiction, in any language, is an art, so you have ways out: there are limitations and possibilities, and you need to work with both. You can see it as a drawback, or you can consider it a challenge.
- Which one is more sexy ? journalism or creative writing?
Both have their attractions for me.
- You were also a journalist earlier in your rich career. Can journalists make a neat crossover to literary fiction?
I was basically a writer who went into journalism for the experience and to earn a livelihood. I have never been anything other than a writer in my heart, though I have done many other jobs, ranging from journalism and university teaching to dishwashing and house painting. I do not come from the sort of family where you could choose not to work and simply be a ?writer?.
- As a Danish citizen, your experience of Denmark ? and of Europe?
I am not a Danish citizen. I refuse to apply for a Danish passport and I still hold only an Indian passport. This is important for me, for personal, political and cultural reasons, though not for narrowly nationalistic ones.
- Who are the formative literary influences on you?
I never had a model I tried to imitate, but there were many writers I found very exciting: Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekov, RK Narayan, Manto, Premchand, Kafka, George Eliot and Victor Hugo. That is in my earlier years, up to high school; later on I discovered others: Italo Svevo, Ismat Chughtai, Anne Carson, Mahasweta Devi, Stendhal, Roberto Bolano?
- How do you view Urdu as a medium of literary expression?
Major language of literary creativity; it is a pity I have trouble reading the script and have to read it in translation or in the Devnagari script.
- T he writers in Indian English t hat still fascinate you.
RK Narayan, Attia Hosain, Anita Desai, Arun Kolatkar and then certain specific books by Raja Rao, Shashi Deshpande, Amitav Ghosh, Siddhartha Deb, Salman Rushdie, Pankaj Mishra, Khushwant Singh, Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Keki N Daruwalla, Manu Joseph, Githa Hariharan, some others? I might not like all their books, but these are some of the writers who have written at least one book that I found extraordinarily good, and in some cases more than one book.
- What are the reasons that young Indians are deserting India for foreign shores?
Money. Opportunity. The hard sell of the ?West?.
- Are we becoming less tolerant and more communal?
Hard to tell, but I do feel that we are becoming much more impatient with each other and less capable of listening, and this can translate into a lack of tolerance.
- Your philosophy of life as a reputed global citizen?
I don?t know if I am one or have one. The one benchmark I have is this: ?Any justified claim to rights has to be a universal claim, but we are oppressed only in our particularities.? I try to remember this.
- What is the main purpose of literary writing in a changed context of globalised world?
For me, literary writing is always a bid to use words to explore the various tracts of silence.
- Your view of Chetan Bhagat and his kind of success?
Delighted for him. It must be good to make that sort of money. Not what I set out to do as a writer, but why get all high and mighty if someone else wants to do so?
- What is your opinion on the writing in English from Northeast India?
Highly neglected. But that is true to the region in general.
- Do you think writers have convincingly portrayed the region?s ethno-cultural hopes and aspirations, and the conflicts and contradictions the people there live with?
I don?t think writers have a brief to represent a people or place; they might choose to do so, but they may choose to do something else. What they cannot avoid doing, however, is to engage with life. So the question to ask is this: have writers engaged fully or deeply or interestingly with life? Every reader has to answer this question on his or her own.
- How do you see the future for northeastern literature?
No idea. I don?t pretend to be a prophet. But I hope it gets more visibility.
The interviewer is a former journalist from Mumbai and is now pursuing his higher studies in Denmark
Source: http://sevensisterspost.com/northeastern-literature-is-highly-neglected/
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