Tabish Khair

Q: To quote poet and publisher P. Lal from his questionnaire sent in the 1960s to an earlier generation of Indian English poets: “What are the circumstances that led to your using the English language for the purpose of writing poetry?” And of course, is such a question relevant to today’s poets, several decades after Lal’s query?

Tabish Khair (TK): I could say it was because I went to an English Medium school, but this was Nazareth Academy in Gaya, not some top anglophone school in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore or even places like Ranchi. We spoke Hindi outside the classrooms, and between us in the classrooms too. Many of my classmates did not grow up to be fluent in English, let alone want to write in it. So the main reason was that I wanted to write, and English was the language that chose me. This was partly because I grew up in an Urdu-speaking family, but the school offered Hindi (and Sanskrit) as the second language, and the sad semi-communal language politics in Bihar (and India) in the 1970s-80s meant that my Urduised Hindi compositions were always given low grades in school. I grew up suspicious of both Urdu (which I saw, growing up among non-Muslims in the Hindi heartland) as a narrow Muslim language, and in due course I also grew suspicious of Hindi, despite writing some initial poems in it, because I was told by my teachers that I was not writing it well. But I was just writing it as I spoke it. Both Hindi and Urdu were minefields for a young boy like me, who loved literature and wanted to write. English was neutral territory. I knew where I stood with English. I started writing more in it and reading almost entirely in it. That, I think, was the decisive factor. By the time I realised how the stupid and communal politics of language in India had limited my scope, it was too late. I was in college and had read a hundred books in English for every one book that I had read in Hindi or Urdu. English was by then my first language. And one writes primarily in one’s first language.

Q: In addition to poets from the Anglo-American canon, has your poetry been influenced by Indian English poets of an earlier generation (whether the 19^thcentury pioneers like Derozio and Toru Dutt, or early 20^th century poets like Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, or those from the post-1947 generation like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, and A.K. Ramanujan)? Do you consider your poetry a part of this two-hundred-year-old tradition?

TK: Of course, I educated myself in college and later on, but in school we knew little about Indian poets, apart from those in the Hindustani tradition, such as Kabir, or Tagore in translation, and a scattering of Sarojini Naidu, a poem or two by Nissim Ezekiel or Kamala Das. This was the 1970-80s. In college and later, I read up all of them: Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Ramanujan, Daruwalla, Kolatkar, Agha Shahid Ali etc. I had to educate myself. (Just as I read up beyond the Yeats-Eliot generation outside India, because our school reading stopped largely there.) But to say that I consider my poetry to be part of this 200-year old tradition would be to exaggerate: there is much I share with some of them, and there is much I do not share. Just as there are elements that I feel I share with some non-Indian writers, and there are elements I do not. One makes one’s own extended family as one goes on, uncles and aunts and step-siblings, but writers like me are essentially bastards: we do not have any known parents. Just uncles, aunts and step-siblings. Distant cousins, more often than not. Literary parents are an impossible luxury for writers from the margin. Or you need to belong to a certain literary and economic class, usually metropolitan, in order to have them.

Q: What are your views on a readership/audience for Indian poetry in English? Does such a thing exist outside English classrooms and literary circles? How much of a consideration is the readership in your poetic process?

TK: I do not think much about the readership. The thought might cross my mind when I write fiction, though it is not a significant worry, but poetry is something much more personal for me. Finally, you write it for yourself. You might publish it for other reasons, mostly because you feel that you have said something well that might appeal to others like you, but you write it solely for yourself. At least I do.

Q: Do you read, write, or translate poetry in a language other than English? If yes, how does it influence your poetry in English?

TK: I have translated the occasional poem, and would like to translate more from Hindi and Urdu, maybe Danish, when I have time. I read occasionally in Urdu (using the Devnagari script mostly), Hindi and Danish, but not too often. Again, time is the problem.

Q. Have you ever taught poetry in a class, at a workshop, or in an informal setting? If yes, which aspects of poetry do you think can be taught?

TK: I have taught poetry, but with great reluctance. I would not even teach literature, even prose fiction, if I had a choice. But I need to earn my bread and butter. I don’t think literature, let alone poetry, can be taught. It can be learnt, but not taught. All a teacher can do is open a door or two; the student has to enter on her own, and then make the most of it.

Q: What are your views on the poetry that appears today on such popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram?

TK: At the moment, digital reading is too fast. It does not enable the deep attention, the contemplation that literature requires. Computerisation, it has been argued by philosophers, is opposed to contemplation. And contemplation, or deep attention, is essential to all art, literature, thought.

Born in Bihar, India, Tabish Khair is a poet and novelist. He has authored several books including the poetry collections, Where Parallel Lines Meet (Penguin, 2000) and Man of Glass (HarperCollins, 2010), the studies, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English Novels (Oxford UP, 2001), The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (Palgrave, 2010), The New Xenophobia (OUP, 2016) and the novels, The Body by the Shore (2022), his most recent work and Night of Happiness (Picador, 2018). His novels have been shortlisted for 16 prestigious prizes in five countries, including the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award.