TABISH KHAIR is associate professor in the Department of English, University of Aarhus, Denmark.

Born and educated mostly in Gaya, India, he is the author of various books, including the poetry collection, WHERE PARALLEL LINES MEET (Penguin, 2000), the study, BABU FICTIONS: Alienation in Indian English Novels (Oxford UP, 2001) and the novel, THE BUS STOPPED (Picador, 2004), which was short-listed for the Encore Award. His honours and prizes include the All India Poetry Prize (awarded by the Poetry Society and the British Council) and honorary fellowship (for creative writing) of the Baptist University of Hong Kong. OTHER ROUTES, an anthology of pre-modern travel texts by Africans and Asians, co-edited and introduced by Khair (with a foreword by Amitav Ghosh) was published by Signal Books and Indiana University Press in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

Academic papers, reviews, essays, fiction and poems by Khair have appeared in Indian (Hindu, Times of India, Biblio: A Review of Books, Indian Book Review, Economic Times, PEN, DNA, Telegraph, Outlook etc), British (Guardian, New Left Review, Wasafiri, Third Text, Independent, New Statesman, First Post, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, London Magazine, P.N. Review, Salt, Metre, Thumbscrew, Stand etc), Danish (Information, Politiken, Weekendavisen etc), American, German, Italian, South African, Chinese and other publications.

Khair latest novel, FILMING, which examines memory and guilt against the backdrop of the Partition and the 1940s Bombay film industry, has been very positively received by critics internationally. It was published in the summer of 2007; the paperback edition is due in 2008. MUSLIM MODERNITIES: Essays on Moderation and Mayhem, a collection of Khair's essays edited by Renu Kaul Verma, has just been published by VITASTA in India. The leading feminist house, ZUBAAN, will publish Khair's first illustrated book for children (Glum Peacock) in the winter of 2008.

Some recent reviews of FILMING (shortlisted for the Vodafone Crossword Fiction award):

INDEPENDENT, London:
Superb...Most readers will cherish Filming for its magical evocation of the cinema's beginnings. Indian movie aficionados will delight in decoding the sly allusions to famous films (Amar Akbar Anthony, 36 Chowringhee Lane, perhaps even Pather Panchali) in the names of characters and places. But this is not just a novel about movies. It shows how the dream-world of cinema, for all its distance from everyday reality, is perpetually vulnerable to the nightmares of history. Elegantly structured and taut with understated passion, Filming is a brilliant recreation of the lost world of early cinema and the continuing tragedy of religious hatred. Although set in an India that has now vanished, its delights as well as its message should find admiring readers everywhere.

INDIA TODAY:
Filming...[is]...a multi-narrative that intermixes straight-forward low key story-telling, flashbacks, dream sequences and action shots with admirable elan, unfurling a tale in print that mimics -- both in content and in style -- the flaming allure of the Indian bioscope...The picture that emerges may sear your soul much like your all-time favourite film.

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (TLS), London:
...an absorbing novel which is distinguished by its ambition, its structural inventiveness and its highly evocative prose.

OUTLOOK India:
But ultimately, and despite the fact that it is structured in reels, not chapters, this is not a novel only about films. The politics of Partition looms large over the screen. Where dreams can enter, so can nightmares...Filming is an assured and competent effort to tell a story whose strands "are entangled like the spools of a film slipping from its reel, like lengths of barbed wire.”

NEW STATESMAN, London:
...it is in keeping with Khair's pertinent and thought-provoking musings on self-deception. Khair's skill lies in making us question our own assumptions about what we do and why we do it - given that our consciousness is at times at war with our subconscious, just as India was for a time at war with itself. Khair warns us of the perils of self-justification borne of partial self-knowledge. Given our capacity for self-delusion, can we cope, this novel asks, when our dreams come true?

ASIAN REVIEW OF BOOKS, Hong Kong:
Every reader knows the pleasure in finishing a suspenseful book and immediately beginning it again to discover the artful clues missed on the initial read. Filming isn't a whodunit or a thriller, but made me go back for a second read just the same.
                          
THE GUARDIAN Review, London:
Often unable to inhabit the present moment, Filming's characters tend to slide instead between traumatic memories and grandiose dreams, and it is here that the novel finds its considerable emotional force.

DAILY TELEGRAPH, London:
...a new kind of novel, without narrative coherence, and drawing instead on historical connections and coincidences. This is definitely fiction for adults only, and a refreshing alternative to bestsellerdom...

FINANCIAL EXPRESS, Delhi:
You know? It's very hatke ['different' (from other novels)].

CITY WEEKEND, Beijing:
This novel will delight those with an interest in the Indian film industry or in Indian history, or in a story that is skillfully crafted and craftily told.

THE TELEGRAPH, Calcutta:
Tabish Khair is a dream merchant. He understands the texture of dreams and, like a master weaver, brings together the particular dreams of each character in his novel, Filming: A Love Story -- a technicolour narration of the evolution of the Hindi film industry...But Filming is that and more. History and fiction meld in this novel of gradiose structure, where overlapping narratives, drifting between the realistic and the dreamlike, and a multi-layered plot, tell an unassuming love story...

HINDUSTAN TIMES, Delhi:
[Filming's]..strength lies in the use of clichéd [Indian cinematic] images to examine the unstated. Khair has used the ephemeral to probe the eternal. What else can a Bioscope be about?

DNA, Mumbai:
Tabish Khair skilfully juxtaposes the stormy 1920s with the early years of Indian cinema.

WEEKENDAVISEN, Copenhagen:
Flimrende og glimrende. (Flickering [like film images] and excellent.)

TIME OUT, London:
Novelist, poet and academic Khair has scoped out an epic that’s hard not to compare to ‘Midnight’s Children’.

THE HINDU, Chennai:
History, encoded in the uncensored possibility of dreams, moves like the neighbour’s wife, a parable of sight without sound: the different stylisations, the bold letters, the different fonts and italics, are Khair’s visual tropes for a heteroglossic novel; reality subtitled with dreams on the printed page, so that the footnote becomes the central text, and Shakespeare (“Under the greenwood tree”), Gandhi, Manto, a “dented pair of US Army binoculars”, 1947 and “a thoroughbred horse” can inhabit the same space.
   The dreams-prefaced chapters, tagged with dates, the burden of lost history, bear names that are an homage to the history of cinema as well as a commentary on the novelist’s technique: “The Magic Lantern”, a tribute to William Henry Jackson’s “Magic Lantern India” series, prefigured motion pictures and had an epical quality, produced largely by magnification of details, a technique that Khair uses liberally; “The Panorama Box”, a kind of “peep show”, incorporated a series of vignettes to illustrate a story such as the scenes from an historical event, as Khair does in Filming; “The Phantom Bird”, a phrase reminiscent of the “Phantom Ride” films, is an apt metaphor for the invisible narrative force here; “The Kiss in the Tunnel” is the name of G. A. Smith’s film, where two visual perspectives are presented, as in the chapter which carries the name; “The Dream Machine”, a flicker device that produces visual stimuli, created by Gysin and Sommerville, could be an alternative title for Khair’s novel; “The Ride on Grapeshot”, a phrase from Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism”, anticipates the speed of modern day cinema and the narrative violence at the end of the novel.
   Khair’s novel is a parody of the “formula Hindi film” (“fragmentary … a mishmash of Western and Indian elements”); a re-formulation of Bharatamuni’s Theory of Rasa (Epigraph) to accommodate the genre of the new novel (a tautology, for the word demands invention, a claim which Filming can make by virtue of its architectonics) by dedicating chapters to all the Rasas except the Comic, another acknowledgement, albeit with a sly wink, to a different tradition, to Aristotle’s Poetics which treats comedy almost like a bastard child; an homage to the power of the oral (“Khul Simsim”) which gives the novel the inward-looking flavour of a fable; an archivist’s scratches on the names of the characters (Harihar and Durga, for example, are names of characters in Ray’s “Pather Panchali”). It is, ultimately, the late-born post-colonial writer’s claim to the cusp of twin streams, two traditions, not just where horizons seemingly meet, but where the angler’s net finds the best catch.

Bruce King, in the JOURNAL OF POSTCOLONIAL WRITING, UK:
Tabish Khair's excellent third novel also involves the early days of Indian cinema, the partition of India into two nations and the lives of women...FILMING is a complex novel and its complexities are not limited to its structure, references, imitations, and social analysis...While it is natural to compare FILMING to MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN in that both concern how independence affected India, Khair's novel is more ingenious...

Urvashi Butalia in BIBLIO, Delhi:
This is a lovely book, read it.

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