Tabish Khair

"In a small Bihari village, Captain William T. Meadows finds just the man to further his phrenological research back home: Amir Ali, confessed member of the infamous Thugee cult. With tales of a murderous youth redeemed, Ali gains passage to England, his villainously shaped skull there to be studied. Only Ali knows just how embroidered his story is, so when a killer begins depriving London's underclass of their heads, suspicion naturally falls on the "thug." With help from fellow immigrants led by a shrewd Punjabi woman, Ali journeys deep into a hostile city in an attempt to save himself and end the gruesome murders.  Ranging from skull-lined mansions to underground tunnels concealing a ghostly people, The Thing about Thugs is a feat of imagination to rival Wilkie Collins or Michael Chabon. Short-listed for the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize, this Victorian role reversal is a sly take on the post-colonial novel and marks the arrival of a compelling Indian novelist to North America. "--

The thing about thugs

A novel of suspense and intrigue set in the post-pandemic world Harris Maloub, a killer with an erased official past, now in his fifties, is visited by someone who could not be alive and given an assignment. In Aarhus, Denmark, Jens Erik, police officer on pre-retirement leave, somehow cannot forget the body of a Black man recovered from the sea some years ago. On an abandoned oil rig in the North Sea, turned into a resort for the very rich, Michelle, a young Caribbean woman, realizes that the man she has followed to this job is not what he claims to be. And neither is the rig, where a secret laboratory bares to her a face that is neither human nor animal. Behind all this, there lurks the ghost of a seminar in 2007: most of the participants of that seminar are dead or untraceable. Why was their obscure research on plants and fungi and microbes so important? What is the secret that killed them? What is the weapon that powerful syndicates are trying to obtain - or develop? Narrated from the perspective of the post-pandemic world around 2030, but moving back in time to cover all of the 21st century, and even bits and pieces from the 20th and the 19th, The Body by the Shore is a novel of suspense and speculation about the complexity of life and intricacy of the earth. It is also a novel about reason and emotion, love and despair, greed and hope, human beings and microbes. When the narrative strands come together, a world of great terror and beauty is revealed to the reader.

The Body by the Shore

a love story

Filming

La notte della felicità

?Tabish Khair is the author of three critically acclaimed novelsThe Bus Stopped (2004), Filming: A Love Story (2007), and The Thing about Thugs (2010)and several poetry collections.

How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

Jihadi Jane

Pragmatic entrepreneur Anil Mehrotra has set up his thriving business empire with the help of his lieutenant, Ahmed, an older man who is different in more ways than one. Quiet and undemanding, Ahmed talks in aphorisms, bothers no one, and always gets the job done. But when one stormy night, Mehrotra discovers an aspect to Ahmed that defies all reason, he is forced to find out more about his trusted aide. As layers and layers of Ahmed's history are peeled off, Mehrotra finds himself confronting some deeply unsettling questions. Does Ahmed really have a wife? Does he keep her imprisoned in their flat? Is Ahmed deranged, or is he just making desperate sense of the horrors that afflicted him in the past? By turns poetic, chilling and heartbreaking, Night of Happiness is an unforgettable novel set in a world without tolerance.

Night of Happiness

Harris Malouf, a killer with an erased official past, is visited by someone who could not be alive. In Aarhus, police officer Jens Erik cannot forget the body of a black man recovered from the sea some years ago. On an abandoned oil rig in the North Sea, Michelle, a young Caribbean woman, realizes that the man she has followed to this job is not what he claims to be. Set in the post-pandemic world around 2030, but moving back in time to cover all of the 21st century, The Body by the Shore is a novel about reason and emotion, love and despair, greed and hope. When all the narrative strands come together, a world of great terror and beauty is revealed.

In Where Parallel Lines Meet, his fourth collection of poems, Tabish Khair captures with uncanny lyrical precision, the fragile beauty of the past. This past is preserved in a country (India) he no longer inhabits, but in which lives the language of his memory. Each poem tells a storyýwhether it is in the smell of rain on earth, in the taste of mangoes ripening in the straw, in an old nurseýs tales, or in a murder in South Delhi. In poems about love, the family, landscapes, and belonging and exile, Khair returns to a time and place that hold within them all his deeply-felt experiences of both innocence and discovery, cruelty and charm. They express his acute awareness of how rooted we really are in both history and the physical world. Rich in metaphor and intensity, Khairýs poems shine with an inner luminosity and sensuality.

Where Parallel Lines Meet

Amir Ali leaves his village in Bihar to travel to London with an English captain, William Meadows, to whom he narrates the story of his life the story of a murderous thug. While Meadows tries to analyse the strange cult of the Indian Thug, a group of Englishmen sets out to prove the inherent difference between cultures and people by examining their skulls with bizarre consequences. Set in Victorian London, this story of different voices from different places draws intricate lines of connection from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, between England and India, across individual and cultural differences. Known for his refusal to fit his work into established 'diasporic', subalternist or post-colonialist narrative traditions, in The Thing About Thugs, Khair finally engages with these traditions by subtly and ironically deploying echoes from Victorian literature, ranging from Charles Dickens to P.M. Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. 'Khair's skill lies in making us question our assumptions about what we do and why we do it.' New Statesman Formally and intellectually intrepid, and emotionally resonant, Tabish Khair's novels are some of the most exciting to have come out of the Indian subcontinent.' Pankaj Mishra

The Thing about Thugs

Just Another Jihadi Jane

The collection includes pilgrimage accounts, which describe a 'national' circuit (as in Lady Nijo's, c. 1280, or Sei Shonagon's, c. 990, accounts) or move across vast regions to places of learning and pilgrimage or to a particular centre of religio-cultural significance (the early Chinese travellers to India in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, the Hajj pilgrimage of Ibn Jubayr in the 12th century, Blyden's Africanist-Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the 19th century). These pilgrimage accounts can also taper into other genres: for instance, while ibn Battutah (b. 1304) set out to go to Mecca (which he did), he ended up travelling across 50 countries and dictating what is undoubtedly a travel book in a narrow generic sense rather than the account of a pilgrimage. Other extracts range from the influential medieval travel-geography of al-Idrisi in the 11th century; the global history,

1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing

Other Routes

A very angry bus driver, abandoned by his wife and going nowhere in his career; a sanctimonious conductor; a hijra, or eunuch, a remnant of India's Muslim glory days; a nervous, half-Indian businessman clutching a briefcase-full of cash; a right-wing Hindu matriarch; a young boy returning to his village after robbing his employer . . . They meet – and witness a tragic event – only because they are all travelling on the same bus, in the same direction, on the same day. With exceptional poise and beguiling simplicity, Khair introduces a range of voices, thoughts, ideas and identities, allowing each individual’s story to unfold gradually. ‘A novel that reflects deeply into the nature and circumstances of human mobility in our modern, unforgiving world’ Siddhartha Deb, Outlook ‘There is much to enjoy here . . . The twist at the end is hilarious. Khair’s talent is as a miniaturist’ Fiona Hook, The Times ‘It’s a fine work: short, sweet and brutal’ James Smart, Sunday Herald ‘A lyrical journey through small-town India’ Independent ‘[The Bus Stopped] allows stories to emerge with immediacy and leisure, with abrupt shafts of humour’ Guardian

The Bus Stopped

This Book Examines Ghosh`S Fiction Through Separate Critical Essays By Reputed Scholars In Six Countries. These Thoughtful, Incisive And Highly Readable Essays Are Grounded In The Interests That Infuse Ghosh`S Fiction: History, Science, Discovery, Travel, Nationalism, Subalternity, Agency. It Is Invaluable For Those Interested In Ghosh`S Work, Prtoviding Ideas And Starting Points For Scholars And Students.

A Critical Companion

Amitav Ghosh

Johan Höglund

Long before the publication of Bram Stokers Dracula, vampires have eagerly transgressed the borders of gender, race, class, propriety, and nations. Such fervent violations of boundaries intensified during the final years of the twentieth century, and the early years of the current millennium have been known as 'the decade of the vampire'. Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires is a unique and timely collection that examines the past and present vampire narrative as a postcolonial and transnational phenomenon. Through a series of important contributions by well-known scholars in the field, it illustrates how vampires have mapped and continues to map the fear of the Other, the ravenous hunger of Empires and the transcultural rifts and intercultural common grounds that make up global society today. The collection is framed by a foreword by Elleke Boehmer and an afterword in the form of a poetic intervention by David Punter.

Dark Blood

Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires

A subversive, macabre novel of a young Indian man’s misadventures in Victorian London as the city is racked by a series of murders In a small Bihari village, Captain William T. Meadows finds just the man to further his phrenological research back home: Amir Ali, confessed member of the infamous Thugee cult. With tales of a murderous youth redeemed, Ali gains passage to England, his villainously shaped skull there to be studied. Only Ali knows just how embroidered his story is, so when a killer begins depriving London’s underclass of their heads, suspicion naturally falls on the “thug.” With help from fellow immigrants led by a shrewd Punjabi woman, Ali journeys deep into a hostile city in an attempt to save himself and end the gruesome murders. Ranging from skull-lined mansions to underground tunnels a ghostly people call home, The Thing about Thugs is a feat of imagination to rival Wilkie Collins or Michael Chabon. Short-listed for the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize, this sly Victorian role reversal marks the arrival of a compelling new Indian novelist to North America.

The Thing About Thugs

?A novel about friendship, faith, and alienation, Just Another Jihadi Jane tells the tale of Islamist radicalization from the inside. Two children of Muslim immigrants in Englands industrial norththoughtful Jamilla and rebellious Ameenabecome best friends, and find in religion and social media a community as welcoming and encouraging as their public education is estranging. After Jamillas father dies and her brother marries, the two girls leave England and join the Islamist cause in Syria. The intellectual and emotional poverty as well as the violence they find there creates a story as gripping as it is heart-wrenching. As did All Quiet on the Western Front, Tabish Khairs novel reminds a new generation that heroism and sacrifice are not limited to one side in a conflict, and that the first victims of a murderous regime are those who live within it.

Tabish Khair

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