TABISH KHAIR

http://www.tabishkhair.co.uk/

Khair was born in 1966 in Ranchi (then part of Bihar, now the capital of Jharkhand) and grew up in his hometown, Gaya. Gaya is a small but historically-significant town in Bihar: it is the most holy of all towns (after Benaras) for many Hindus and it is also the place where Gautama, founder of Buddhism, had attained enlightenment. As such, while situated in one of the most backward and neglected parts of India, it is surprisingly international -- at least during the tourism season.

Khair finished secondary school from the local Nazareth Academy and, after dropping out of medical studies, went on to do a BA in History, Sociology and English from Gaya College and a Masters in English from the local Magadh University. While a college student, he also worked as the district reporter for the Patna Edition of the Times of India. Later, he left for Delhi, where he worked as a Staff Reporter for the Times of India.

Muslim Personalities from Bihar/ Jharkhand

Muslim Institutions from Bihar/ Jharkhand

Profile of Bihar Anjuman (pdf): English || Urdu

Sponsor a student

Sponsor a teacher

With Indra Khanna and Mike Phillips at Tate

Khair had his first collection of poems, 'My World', accepted for publication by a major national house (Rupa & Co., Delhi) before he left his hometown. It was favourably reviewed by senior poets and critics like Keki N. Daruwalla, Adil Jussawalla, Vilas Sarang and Shiv K. Kumar. While in Delhi, Khair brought out two other collections and started working on his first novel, 'An Angel in Pyjamas', which was later published by Harper Collins and described by India Today as "the calling card of a writer with the power to fascinate."

  After about four years as a staff reporter, Khair left for Copenhagen, Denmark, to do a PhD, which he completed in 2000. It was published as 'Babu Fictions' by Oxford University Press in 2001 (a paperback edition came out in 2005) and has since become one of the important secondary texts on Indian English fiction.

In 2000, Khair also published a collection of poems, 'Where Parallel Lines Meet' (Penguin), which is considered to be "one of the most significant collections in recent years by an Indian writing in English." It included poems for which he had won the prestigious All India Poetry Prize.

Khair's second novel, 'The Bus Stopped', was published by Picador in 2004. Along with novels by Hari Kunzru and Nadeem Aslam, it was short-listed for the Encore Award (UK).

Khair has also co-edited various books and journals, including a casebook of essays on Amitav Ghosh (Permanent Black, Delhi) and 'Other Routes', an anthology of pre-1900 Asian and African travel writing, with a foreword by Amitav Ghosh (Signal Books, Oxford, and Indiana UP).

Khair has just completed his next novel, 'FILMING A Love Story', and an illustrated story book for 5 to 7-year-old children. He lives in Aarhus with his two children.

A BLESSING FOR MY CHILDREN
(Excerpt from a talk given in 2005 at the Florence Poetry Festival by Tabish Khair, later also published in The Hindu, Chennai, on 1st January 2006.)

To be born into a minority is a blessing and a curse. I was born into a Muslim family in Bihar: Muslims are the biggest religious minority of India. But within the community of Indian Muslims, my family again belonged to a large minority: that of middle class, professional Muslims. My father was a doctor. His father had been a doctor, and his father’s father had been a doctor too. Before that my father’s ancestors had been impoverished but independent and proudly literate farmers. My mother had a college degree in political science and, for some time, ran her own business. Her father had been a police officer and his father had owned a small tea plantation in Assam.

    When you are born into a minority that is a minority within a minority, you learn to belong in different ways. I grew up as Indian and as Muslim. I grew up speaking three languages and writing two scripts. I was told or I read stories and poems from the West (especially Russian and British) as well as the East (especially Hindi/Urdu and from the Sanskrit and Persian-Arabic traditions). I was brought up on a concept of civilisation and modernity that was not spelled E-U-R-O-P-E or W-E-S-T, for while my family members spoke English, they also spoke other languages; while they had imbibed Western education, they often also had a sense of other sources of rational thinking and possible modernities.

    It is this that often makes me frustrated even with much of acclaimed post-colonial literature, for very often this literature is only concerned about the bridge of West-and-the-Rest. In my family, over centuries, we had crossed many other bridges. It is also this that made me feel �" when I grew older �" that the India I had grown up in was a fragile entity: it was threatened by various kinds of fundamentalisms (Muslim, Hindu and Western); it was always in the minority. There were other kinds of threat too. There were Hindu-Muslim riots, which were more threatening to secular Muslims like me and my family members than to religious Muslims living in ghetto-like colonies. There were constant attempts to bracket our identity. Are you Muslim or Indian, we were asked �" as if one could be only the one or the other. So, when the time came, it was not too hard for me to leave the geographical space of India �" for the India that mattered to me was there in my mind and my memories.

    Not that the questions got better. I was, after all, again part of a minority: the minority of coloured people in Denmark, the minority of immigrants, the minority of Indians, of Muslims. I was complimented on being taller than ‘most Indians’; I was praised for more liberal habits than ‘most Muslims’. And again and again I had to �" I have to �" read largely ignorant articles in newspapers denigrating Asians or coloured immigrants or Muslims. That is the curse of being part of a minority.

    The blessing is that one belongs in different ways, one learns to see different perspectives, one speaks many languages, one is aware of many histories, one is both this and that. If you only stop to listen, you are blessed with so many stories. If you only shut out the screaming of those who will not listen, you recognise the blessing of a coherent identity: for the identity of a person from a minority does not depend on a piece of cloth or a ritual; it is part of his own lived being. It is not external; it is internal. And with it comes the blessing of having cause to write.

    And so, in spite of the curses and the threats, in spite of the screaming and the swearing, this is what I wish for my son and daughter: may you always belong to a multiple minority, to the minority of minorities. For then you may learn to see �" and feel.