Tabish Khair: Holy Cows of Literary Fashion

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All ‘fields’ have their holy cows, which are mostly donkeys in disguise. Think of that absurd notion of the ‘trickle-down effect’ that liberal Capitalists believe in with greater ferocity (and less evidence) than the religious believe in God. Or think of the moronic mantra of ‘dictatorship of the people’ that their opponents, Communists, chanted for so many decades. But of all fields, I fear it is in the pasture of literature these days that we find the maximum number of donkeys pretending to be holy cows.

Take, for instance, that placid cud-chewing that passes for critical opinion on the matter of ‘readability’. It has become almost impossible these days to talk of literature, especially fiction, as something that is not just reportage or veiled autobiography. If one makes the slightest attempt to champion a work of fiction that would require some effort on the part of readers outside, say, a kindergarten, one is faced with loud braying about how fiction should be readable, entertaining etc.

Tabish Khair is a frequent
contributor to PN Review.
Issue 206 is available now.

Yes, of course, fiction should be readable. But the inability of some to read certain kinds of literature and, more often, the ability of many to read only certain kinds of fiction does not necessarily say anything about the text concerned. It says more about the reader’s ability to read. One can argue, with proof, that not just Charles Dickens but even Marcel Proust is far more readable than Dan Brown.

As for entertainment, once again, it depends on what you mean. Entertainment, or ‘escape’ as it is sometimes called, has a very dubious history. There were centuries when watching someone getting flogged was great entertainment. Well into the nineteenth century, there was nothing the masses enjoyed more in places like London than a nice little hanging: an entertainment that, in the words of Dickens, who witnessed one such public hanging, attracted people who displayed 'ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness and vice in fifty other shapes.' When I was growing up in a small town in Bihar, India, I met people who thought that tying a can to the tail of a dog was the height of entertainment. I suspect that some people still find certain kinds of depraved cruelty – ranging from racism to rape – quite ‘entertaining’.

Moreover, we continue to live in a world where the recto of entertainment almost always has the verso of exploitation: both seem to grow in ‘refinement’, so to say, with time, but their relationship remains unaltered. As a simplistic idea of ‘entertainment’ is not a convincing argument in the world on its own, there is no reason why it should be used to celebrate (or dismiss) a work of literature. One cannot really divorce real entertainment from thought, and hence from an ability to read well and with greater complexity. Our preference for Dan Brown over Naipaul or Coetzee says nothing about any of these three writers, but it says a lot about our ability to read and, hence, to be ‘entertained’. 

But if this braying about ‘entertainment’ is a common feature in literary pastures today, there is also a lot of very complacent chewing of cud around the matter of reality and fantasy. You have people who prefer some texts because they are realistic, and others who hate social realism. There are great champions of magic realism, and staunch opponents of its fantastic elements. There are people who hate any kind of literature that carries a direct political value.

In 1969 Natalya Gorbanevskaya
was sentenced to imprisonment
in a Soviet psychiatric hospital
for her dissident activities.

Wait a minute. Is that really true? Many of the cultured types in the West and other affluent liberalized spaces who often snidely dismiss some coloured and feminist writers as being 'too political' also staunchly champion the literature of, say, some Chinese writers for being too political for the Chinese regime. It seems that political content in the writings of people one agrees with somehow translates into ‘serious’ literature in aesthetic terms!

Of course, a Chinese writer in exile for opposing the Chinese government might be a good writer – or not. This can also be true of, say, a Black American writer who opposes racism in his literature. But sometimes the very Western and Liberal circles that fail to see the literary value of the latter’s texts can be very good at discovering the literary genius of the former!

Hugh MacDiarmid was a
founder-member of the
Scottish National Party and
a member of the Communist
Party of Great Britain.
Carcanet publishes his Selected 
and Collected Poems, and
many other of his works.

Evidently, there is something fantastical about reality, even political reality. And there is something very realistic, even political, about every shred of fantasy. And that is the problem with this binarism of reality and fantasy: one cannot talk of the fantastic without a reference to some reality, and vice versa. It is a condition of language that it relates to non-language both in reality and in fantasy. Both reality and fantasy exist in language for us. The moment we engage with reality, which is outside our mind, it gets entangled in language, and hence elements of ‘fantasy’ inevitably emerge. But the moment we engage with ‘fantasy’, which is inside our mind, it gets entangled in language too, and hence elements of ‘reality’. How can we possibly use any language, let alone write in it, without having to deal with both reality and fantasy at the same time?

Carcanet publishes the
Collected Poems of Chinua Achebe,
author of Things Fall Apart.

The final bit of braying that always gets my goat in the pastures of culture and literature relates to the endless debate about the universal and the particular. For centuries the ‘universal’ side has been mostly dominant, though partly in the romantic period and more specifically during anti-romantic modernism and finally in the 1960s and 70s of gendered and politically-conscious writing, ‘particularity’ had moments of ascension. Even then the best opponents of universality did not really dismiss the notion, they just pointed out that mostly universals are hegemonic particulars. As Chinua Achebe put it, in one context, he would like to see the word ‘universal’ banned from the vocabulary of Western critics until they came to see that most of their universals were Western particulars. Achebe has received some unfair flak about dismissing ‘universals’ – which can have progressive uses too – but actually he never really dismissed them. He just postponed them to a period when other peoples could also be heard.

Since then, universals have come back in a big way, though often in disguise: the case of donkeys pretending to be holy cows again. We are often talking of universals when we chatter about the ‘market’, or ‘entertainment’, or ‘readability’, or (increasingly) ‘storytelling’. If, like me, you critique the influence of well-meaning (and once partly enabling) British patronage of Indian English writing, you are accused of being a nationalist or a literary caveman who believes in the ethos of the tribe in these gloriously ‘global’ times.

But the fact remains that it is totally oxymoronic and partly moronic to beat the drum of writing or literature as being universal. Yes, writing is universal, just as humanity is universal. But no human being lives only as a human being: we all become human in our particularities. We are also only persecuted in our particularities: as Muslim, Hindu, Christian, woman, daughter-in-law, aboriginal, black, gay, white, whatever. It is through our particularities that we achieve universality as human beings. (Just as it is only in the many diverse forms of life that we encounter ‘Life’.) This is as true of writing as it is of humanity. And this is what the current UK-facing visibility of serious Indian English writing finally subverts, in India and abroad. It has to be resisted because just as a human being who is universal without being particular would have no character and hence existence at all, a literature that is universal without being particular would be superfluous and hence truly unreadable.


Tabish Khair is the author of The Thing About Thugs and How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position.