SOME BOOKS
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OTHER ROUTES: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing
(Oxford: Signal Books, in collaboration with Indiana University Press)
Edited by Tabish Khair, Justin Edwards, Martin Leer and Hanna Ziadeh
General introduction by Tabish Khair
Foreword by Amitav Ghosh
Other Routes "opens the reader to a world of alternative traditions to European travel writing and the pieces it contains offer alternatives to the European traveller's gaze. The editors of this imaginative and broad anthology expand the concept of "travel writing" to include journeys such as spiritual journeys that are written about in poetry; extracts include the personal, ethnography, natural history, geography, cartography, navigation, politics, history, religion, diplomacy, politics, pilgrimage and culture(s) in general."
(Garry Marvin, editor Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing)
"For far too long have we been trained to see the world through the eyes of a handful of Western travellers. OTHER ROUTES is a first step in establishing a new perspective, demonstrating, as it does, that the history of Eastern culture has also been marked by the intellectual curiosity and passion for discovery which characterises the literature of travel. This is a long overdue anthology that will be of interest to students of history, postcolonialism and literature, as well as readers of travel writing and any Asian or African who wants to know his or her own history as it has seldom been written."
(Mike Phillips, novelist, critic, author of WINDRUSH: THE IRRESISTIBLE RISE OF MULTI-RACIAL BRITAIN)
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FILMING: A Love Story
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CHOSEN BY KHUSHWANT SINGH AS ONE OF THE BEST TEN INDIAN ENGLISH NOVELS SINCE 1947 in Outlook Magazine, India.]
(For excerpts from reviews, see Homepage.)
A dark, twisted novel about the Indian film industry in the days before Bollywood
Set primarily in India and spanning the 20th century, Filming tells a series of stories, including that of one-time prostitute, Durga, who is persuaded to give away her young son, Ashok, and that of Saleem, the son of a prostitute and two-times star of the silver screen. As these stories - narrated by a writer who relates the details of other people's lives but is evasive about his own, a daughter who has inherited her father's hand-me-down version of their family history, and a scholar who deals in words but learns to read between the lines - intertwine and overlap, they combine to create a novel that is simultaneously about the small details and the bigger picture. Weaving together major historical events - including Partition, the assassination of Gandhi, the rise of photography and the Bombay film industry, and the development of barbed wire - with the everyday moments that make up the main fabric of our lives, Filming is both ambitious in its scope and impressive in its execution; never less than cohesive, it is a novel that is always more than the sum of its parts.
Book Details
Publication Date 06/07/2007 ISBN 9780330419222
Dimensions 216mm x 135mm Weight 0.549 kg Pages 416
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The Bus Stopped (Picador, 2004)
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"On the surface a book about a bus journey, THE BUS STOPPED is a novel that reflects deeply into the nature and circumstances of human mobility in our modern, unforgiving world." - Siddhartha Deb in OUTLOOK.
"Khair manages to carry of his tale, or rather tales, with something close to aplomb. In the hands of a less gifted or less sensitive writer, the device [of connecting a number of stories through a bus ride] can easily look contrived, and fail to work. But Khair makes it work; he manages to be funny and irreverent, serious and compassionate in turn." - Shiv K. Kumar in THE HINDU
"There is much to enjoy here...the twist at the end is hilarious. Khair's talent is as a miniaturist." - Fiona Hook in THE TIMES
"It's a fine work: short, sweet and brutal." - James Smart in the SUNDAY HERALD
"A lyrical journey through small-town India." -- THE INDEPENDENT
"...allows stories to emerge with immediacy and leisure, with abrupt shafts of humour..." - THE GUARDIAN
[Chosen by Pankaj Mishra as a book of the year in NEW STATESMAN, UK.]
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Where Parallel Lines Meet (Penguin, 2000)
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"With uncanny lyrical precision, he captures the fragile beauty of the ever-elusive past..." - INDIAN EXPRESS
"WHERE PARALLEL LINES MEET draws attention to the rising star of a poet whose talent goes beyond pretty lyricism. Khair is a fine versifier and a provocative thinker..." - OUTLOOK
"It is heartening to see that while our established poets are getting long in the tooth (or toothless), we have a young Indian poet who may do his country proud in the English-speaking world." - Khushwant Singh, in his syndicated column published in various Asian newspapers.
[Chosen by Aamer Hussein as a book of the year in THE INDEPENDENT, UK.]
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Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels (Oxford UP, 2001)
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"[An] intelligent and argumentative book on contemporary Indian English novels..." - Michael Wood in the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
"...splendidly written, well-researched...The interweaving of literary and social motifs is also deftly accomplished." - Terry Eagleton
"Brilliant and insightful." - Makarand Paranjape in GENTLEMAN
"...a highly nuanced study of Indian English fiction..." - GJV Prasad in TEHELKA
"Tabish Khair's BABU FICTIONS will long be a useful reference point in discussions of subcontinental anglophone fiction, particularly for its insights into alienation, exile and the language question." - Kaiser Haq in THE DAILY STAR
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