Tabish Khair’s new book Jihadi Jane is on the fiction long list for the Tata Literature Live book of the year award. Giving up his career as a journalist in India, Tabish is now an associate professor, teaching English in the University of Aarhus in Denmark. His books include, Babu Fictions, The Bus Stopped, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position and half a dozen other fiction and nonfiction works. Known for his non-fiction work, Jihadi Jane is an unusual work, located in war-torn Syria.

Book Link asks Tabish:

You are known as a poet and also known for your non-fiction like The New Xenophobia, How to Fight Islamist Terror. Your fiction are less known. Jihadi Jane is a very catchy title. In India, Syria and what is happening there is very little known. What took you to Syria in fiction? To create Ameena and Jamilla? How did the writing come about?

Tabish Khair: I write books about issues, from the past and the present, that exercise me; things, events, stories, people I cannot stop thinking about. I think that is the reason. With Jihadi Jane, the writing came about on its own: I have seen people being ignored, abused; I have seen people getting angry and bitter; I have seen people going to religion for good reasons and being turned into monsters by religious ideologues. Also, bear in mind that we live in a world where what happens in one country effects people in distant parts more and more. We can no longer stick our individual heads into parochial sands.

In 2015, Anupam Kher called Tata LitFest audiences paid. This Litfest is trying to position itself as ‘Secular’. How difficult is it for a writer from India to remain impartial in his/her writing (whether fiction or non fiction) today?

One has to be very careful when using or abusing words like ‘secular’ or ‘democratic’: it is one thing to rationally criticise how such words are defined or applied, and it is another thing to dismiss them and ridicule them by creating sound-bites like ‘sickular.’ I have engaged with such definitions and re-definitions too, but I have never dismissed what the terms stand for, and I never will. That will be like throwing the baby out with the bath-water. Secularism is the political enactment of the desire of decent human beings to live with other human beings, despite differences of belief. Democracy is a political enactment of the desire of human beings to have a say in what happens to them.

Writing, sitting away from India, does it give an Indian writer a more global perspective, than if one were to write, being in India?

I don’t think there can be any global perspective without cultural location: the only perspective of that sort would be that of floating financial capital, which is a faulty and dangerous perspective of sheer numbers. So, I do not see this as a simple matter of looking at India from within or without, though of course what you see might be influenced by where you view it from. This does not mean one is more ‘global’ because one is outside India. Actually, I believe that you can be universal only through occupying a particular position that takes into account other particular positions. As for the past, it is always being defined in the present: one can use the past to learn from, but not to fight and discriminate with.

The wrongs of the past, real or imagined, can never be righted in the present: any attempt to do so just creates more wrongs in the present. And as every present is a past in the future, this means even more wrongs in the ‘past.’

How coldly clinical and impartial can a writer be in an atmosphere of fear? I mean, Leon Uris, Solzhenitsyn, even a modern writer like Khaled Hosseini---their best works captured ‘fear’, you have never consciously done this before.

Fear is a simple and basic emotion: even the simplest multi-cellular organism feels fear of some sort. Rats, pigeons, deer, all these complex organisms feel basically the fear that human beings feel. So, in my view, it is impossible to escape dealing with fear when relating human realities. But it is also a mistake to stop with basic fear: because there are other things about human beings, which are not shared or not shared in the same way by other animals. Even fear is used differently by human beings: animals do not have political leaders who paint entire groups in a certain light in order to evoke and capitalise on basic human fears. Animals fear immediate threats, but human beings, as the poet put it, do not just look before and after and pine for what is not, they also fear what might or might not be, and project their fears into the past and the future. I think such matters are more my concern than just plain, basic, boring fear.

Tell us something about your writing in the last one decade. The shift from your earlier works....how different things are from then, now? Jihadi Jane is very topical...As a teacher of Literature, how different is writing fiction on a current/contemporary subject?

Jihadi Jane and the novel I wrote before it are both topical: they deal with Islamism from very different perspectives. I come from a Muslim family; I cannot ignore these issues. My earlier novels were set a bit further back in time: actually The Thing About Thugs in the 19th century, and filming around the time of the Partition and in the Bombay film industry of the 1930s. I still do not feel that one should jump out and write a poem or a novel about a topical issue, and if you look at my recent (last two) novels, you realise that I am not giving a journalistic picture of events and personalities; I am trying to examine causes and factors which are not just topical. Islamism, for instance, has been building up from the 19th century, like Hindutva. Migration has been a visible issue for many decades now, used in nefarious ways by politicians of all sort, including ‘religious’ ones. I see my last two novels as relating to these larger issues, and not just a topical event. I do not just narrate in my novels; I try to contemplate too. There is no culture without contemplation, as I think we will realise more and more as cyber-reading makes contemplative reading difficult or impossible.

Your thoughts on current writing in English coming out of India.....both fiction/non-fiction, Indian bestsellers.

What would I know about bestsellers, honestly? I have never tried consciously to write one, and I do not think any of my books can be called bestsellers in a commercial sense. ‘Literary bestsellers’ are a contradiction in terms. But I do have thoughts about writing in English, from India and internationally. I think the English publishing and literary scene -- because it is so huge -- is far more commercial than the German, Spanish, French or Korean scene, and that this is largely detrimental to literature.