Tabish Khair on Refugees, Literature, and AI

In your latest novel, Drown All the Refugees, you write: “It’s better to kill a human being than to pity him.” How does pity, in your view, become a form of dehumanisation for refugees and immigrants? How are the ideas of pity and sympathy challenged or subverted in this novel?

These are, of course, the narrator’s words, who is also a distinct character in the novel and clearly not me. Would I put it that bluntly as a [different] person? I doubt it. But, yes, I do share a degree of scepticism towards pity—it strikes me as similar to tossing a coin into a beggar’s bowl. Surely, tossing that coin is better than doing nothing, but it is also not the answer to poverty—it does not even offer any long-term help to the beggar. In a recent article in Frontline, I discussed empathy as a flawed political position, even though it remains a necessary human attribute. In some ways, this novel takes up a similar position—the attempt is to enable the reader to go beyond comfortable platitudes, also because such platitudes are increasingly filling our world with false certainties!

Drown All the Refugees is your first gothic novel. What about the gothic genre appealed to you for exploring immigration and the refugee experience? How do gothic elements best represent the violence and alienation faced by displaced people?

Actually, it depends on how you define the gothic. I take a broad view, and in that sense my earlier fiction contains some gothicised elements too, all the way back to The Bus Stopped. I also wrote the more recent Night of Happiness as a version of the domestic psycho-gothic, though it was mostly read as a psychological thriller—something that happens to that subgenre, as one can see with the way people continue to read A Turn of the Screw by Henry James. But true—Drown All the Refugees is clearly and unambiguously gothic.

I felt I needed to wade into the gothic with this novel as the gothic deals with a hidden crime or the repressed erupting into the light of the day; it deals with displacement, horror, and violence; it confronts the inevitability of difference. All this is done in a different way in the colonial gothic, but it is all there, and I could deploy all of it to a different end in my exploration of crime, violence, and displacement in the context of migration in today’s increasingly inhospitable world. 

There are some striking black and white illustrations by Vikram Nayak in the novel. What specific purpose do these chosen illustrations serve in deepening the gothic atmosphere in the novel?

I am so grateful to Vikran Nayak for agreeing to do the illustrations out of friendship for me and appreciation of my work. This is a highly visual novel—all gothic novels tend to be so. And Vikram bhai brings a brilliant artist’s perspective to it. This, I think, highlights the visual and physical aspects of the narrative and offers the reader something to focus on along with the words of the novel. And then, I do miss the old tradition of illustrated novels, say, like those of Charles Dickens. 

You have lived outside India, in Denmark, for decades, where you might have also witnessed Europe’s anti-immigrant and anti-refugee xenophobia and politics. How has your own experience as an immigrant in Denmark informed the ideas of immigration and refugee experience in Drown All the Refugees?

Actually, I have almost entirely lived in Denmark after leaving India, with only occasional semester-long stays, as a guest writer or scholar, in USA and UK, and the usual travel. I have had a safe existence in two ways. First, racism and xenophobia in Denmark are covert and passive aggressive: you do not risk getting beaten up on certain streets as you would in UK, USA, or even some parts of Germany.

Second, I teach in a university— where I can be ignored or patronised by administration, colleagues, and even students, but that is how far it will go. But of course I can see what is going on around me. One thing about Denmark that has powered Drown All the Refugees is the complacency of well-meaning middle-class people there: they are so good at looking away from what is happening to the precarious inside the nation and in places like Gaza and Sudan, or even really facing up to the increasingly anti-people policies of their various governments over the past few decades. This novel is poised against such middle-class complacency everywhere.

You have written about anti-immigration sentiments, neoliberal capitalism, and the unequal distribution of wealth and power in the West. How do you see similar xenophobic and anti-immigrant politics playing out in India, especially toward internal migrants, religious minorities, and people from border regions?

India offers versions of the complacency that I have noted above. It is a vast space, far more mixed than Denmark, with traditions of living together with differences that go all the way back into its rich history. This offers certain advantages. Despite prejudices, Indians have mostly lived close to other Indians with different practices, beliefs, gods, habits, languages, dialects, etc. They have fought sometimes but mostly existed and worked together, exchanged and conversed, made friends. This has been and is good.

But in today’s more isolated digitalised capitalist world, this vastness and variety also means that “we” can forget what is happening to those different from us—those in some other corner of the vast nation with its many varieties—and blame them for not being who “we” are. This is sad, dangerous, destructive. Anyone who is a true patriot would be against it, but so many who claim to be patriotic are making it worse. 

You have critiqued how Western critical acclaim (e.g., the Booker Prize) can become self-limiting for Indian English fiction, pushing it toward “acceptable” Western tastes. With AI emerging as a perceived threat to authorship and originality, do you worry that AI-aided or AI-generated fiction could further homogenise Indian English fiction to suit those same Western expectations and tastes? How can Indian writers resist this while continuing to engage with global readership?

Yes, that is a danger. But it is a small danger. The bigger danger has already happened: the total commercialisation of writing. So AI will affect the kind of literature written to sell, the kind that most publishers want, airport bookshops mostly stock, algorithms automatically promote. Very soon AI will be able to write such books—and their [human] authors will have to deal with it, maybe lose their readers. As for the kind of literature that people like me write, which is based on exploring problems, raising questions, addressing human doubts, pressing generic or linguistic boundaries, I don’t think that will be seriously affected.

But such literature has already suffered under capitalist commercialisation—and this will not get better on its own either. Regarding Indian English writers engaging with the global readership, I really think there is no “neutral” global readership—instead, it is a class readership that now cuts across nations in a particular language, and why should any thinking writer want to write for it in any case?

In your book Literature Against Fundamentalism, you argue that literature is a mode of thinking. In the Indian context, what is the role of literature in countering religious fundamentalism? Can literature challenge such entrenched ideologies, or does it often remain confined to a relatively small section of elite readership?

Literature has undoubtedly a “privilege component”. You need time and money to read “literature” in many cases, at its simplest. But literature is also not the best of spaces to make money—even very successful writers cannot live off their writing and have to do something, like teaching creative literature in US universities, in order to live. So you are not there just to make money, which places you on the margins of capitalist cultures.

Literature is also, as I argue in that book, not just a matter of elegance or transparency of communication; it is also a matter of narrating through gaps, silence, paradox, screams, etc. that cannot be communicated in disciplined language. Hence, it can be used—sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously—to open up spaces in hegemonic discourses, to point to other ways of thinking, living, acting. Literature also demands a mode of reading that potentially counters any kind of fundamentalist [religious, political, economic] stress on a limited corpus or approved exegesis of texts.

Are Indian writers writing in English hesitant to take on and explore such politically relevant themes in their novels? Do you see many established writers retreating to safer, less contentious themes to avoid trouble in the current political climate?

I think one can often say things without making oneself vulnerable to vulgar or physical attacks. Think of Ghalib, for instance: think of his shers like “Khuda ke vaastey pardah na kaabe ka utha…” So that possibility is there, and there is no harm if some authors embrace it: the right reader will get what they want to say, and time will return to redeem them. I myself believe in that tradition to a large extent. I am not the “sarfaroshi ki tamanna” kind of writer. But, to be honest, I can think of a handful of South Asian writers who are very outspoken, more directly outspoken than I would wish to be, whether you agree with them or not: for instance, Arundhati Roy writing about India and the American empire, or Mohammad Hanif about Pakistan. 

Recently some articles that generated debates online argued that reading culture is diminishing and people in India are reading fewer books. As a writer published in India and regularly writing for Indian publications, do you think readership for Indian fiction and nonfiction is shrinking, especially among young people? What would help revive book readership in India?

This is not just an Indian issue; it is a global problem. Growing up in a small town of Bihar, I suppose I belong to the last generation that had only a reading culture to connect it to the world. Even TV had not come to my town in my childhood. I can see that the youth I teach in Denmark read less than we did—and often take recourse to other options, like audiobooks. Reading on screens is a different matter too. Computers run by the logic of computation, and reading is a matter of contemplation, deep attention.

But I don’t think I can suggest an antidote. All I can say is that reading helps us think in certain ways that are essential to human cognition. I wish more people in power across the world realised this, but then people in power, whether economic or political, do not seem to want us to think.