In Drown All The Refugees, Tabish Khair takes on the othered experience in a deceptively damning way. It is the story of the privileged narrator who grows up somewhere in eastern India’s forested foothills, amid estates like his, rotting remnants of British rule, a retinue of servants, a Catholic school and a strict father. The narrator remembers fondly his childhood buddy, Pedro, the son of his childhood nurse Maria. He recollects life with Abdul, his cynical boyfriend who never dealt in absolutes, until the greatest absolute in life—death—snatches him away. Leaving the narrator to ponder over the nature of the refugee experience: what does it mean to never truly find belonging?
All this while, in a slow, implicating way, Khair turns the gyre of convenient pity as a matter of privilege, on the narrator himself. This is the real shock of this story, which has been promoted on every blurb as a Gothic horror. Khair does, however, employ local superstition and tropes it amounts to—such as the chilling story of the disappearance of the corpse of an old Englishwoman in the area—to eke out a layer of formal authenticity to the genre. Esquire India chatted with the Aarhus-based academic and novelist on modern apathy, refurbished history and what, in his view, everybody should be reading.
Excerpts from the conversation:
Your novel is about the lack of will to act against injustice. Why is our capacity for anger fast losing out to performative grief and catatonia? It can't be just neoliberal ascension...
What is missing today is anger at the injustice done to others, especially those we perceive as different from ourselves. Because we evince a lot of anger on our own behalf—many people are always getting angry at real or perceived or even fabricated slights to themselves and those they identify with.
The kind of anger you mention was based partly on the notion of solidarity—with those like or unlike us who are suffering, oppressed or marginalised. This notion of solidarity was always under threat by capitalist ideologies—which are premised on notions like selfishness, competition, greed—and it was largely erased from global consciousness from the 1980s, with the so-called triumph of capitalism. As for performative grief, that is often the option of those who want to have the cake and eat it too: privileged people who seek to feel good without giving up, even at times questioning, their privileges. They are a different group. And catatonia is probably the result of something similar among a third group—compounded by the TINA ('there is no alternative') syndrome, which gathered force from the 1980s, too.
Where are the bones of this novel from?
Coming from my first 25 years in a small town in Bihar, where you could not ignore all that is so easily ignored in places like UK, USA, Denmark, even small-town Denmark, where I ended up.
You chose a Gothic style to tell an uncomfortable, political story. Do you believe in literary inspiration? And if so, where did such a meeting of form and content first impress itself upon you?
Inspiration is too grandiloquent a word for me, but I do believe in things coming together. You have to prepare the grounds for it and wait. As for form and content, it was inevitable, as the hidden and buried, sometimes a crime from the past, erupts into the present in the Gothic. And in this novel what erupts into the light of day is what we allow to happen to the dispossessed and how we bury what happens to them. It called out for the Gothic—but used at a tangent from the mainstream Gothic genre.
“I wish I could recollect the kind of day it was. If this were a novel, I would pretend to do so. I would create a day of sunshine or of clouds, of indolence or of activity. There are many possibilities in fiction,” the narrator says at one point in Drown All The Refugees. Literature has long played dress-up with tragedies. Did you want to go past that—and to what extent did you find yourself successful?
It is a difficult job: how do I write about what happens to others and not dress it up? Tragedy or not. But that is the job of literature. Fiction, of course, but not just fiction, because even non-fiction has to grapple with that problem. For me, this is the first challenge. I think I feel successful to the extent that I can get readers to engage with rather than consume my stories.
Abdul is, sort of, a guiding totem for what the novel says and the complexities of thought and feeling the narrator has to grapple with. When you gave him the “too pat” leitmotif/catchphrase, did you hope to or were guarding against the reader ‘getting it’ too early into the book?
Take prejudice, which rules the world today on all sides. What is it? It is essentially, etymologically, "pre-judgement", a rushed judgement. For me, it is a version of "too pat"—as it stems from our inability to question our easy convictions, our pat answers. So, yes, I think all serious literature should guard against pat assumptions—or readings.
So much of what’s happened in Gaza—the most calamitous tragedy of our times—has been broadcast to the world on screens. Phone screens with terrible visuals of death and destruction. Ironically, this medium of news does make the horror an inconvenience to be lived with. Would you agree that all that this access and availability have done is polarise post-truth bigots and well-meaning hand wringers in places like India?
It has almost been more disturbing than the actual genocide: our ability to watch it as nothing more than an inconvenience, even when we are not among those who have cheered it on. And you can see that many do cheer it on—it shows in the rancour that they display against the few who actually protest.
Of course, this shows that we have entered a phase of history when atrocities no longer need to be hidden, as in the past. They can be shown and algorithms will take care of them—turn them into fodder for bigots or erase them from our conscience in devious ways. Much of the killing is enabled by algorithms too: you are shooting dots and numbers and colour spots, not children and fathers and grandmothers. The revolution might not be televised, as they used to say, but the reaction is widely available on social media now.
Which books would you recommend to the Esquire Reads reader?
Translations, I would say. As many translations as possible. From as many languages as possible. Some very exciting work is happening in other languages - compared to mainstream English writing, which has become too corporatised and society-elitist in its selection, and hence often "too pat."