Beyond "Whereverness": A Conversation with Tabish Khair

Abstract

TRAVEL [3^^^^B^|^^W0ilvS?^^^9K2 Beyond "Whereverness" A Conversation with Tabish Khair Michelle Johnson abish Khair is a poet, novelist, scholar, and coeditor of the travel-writinganthol JL ogy Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian TravelWriting. His latestnovel, Filming:A Love Story,was released in paperback last year, and his Babu Fictions:Alienation inContemporary Indian English Novels is an important second ary texton Indian fiction.Khair has won theAll India Poetry Prize, been shortlisted* fortheEncore Award (uk) and theCrossword Prize (India), and awarded fellowships at JMI University (Delhi), the BaptistUniversity ofHong Kong, and Cambridge University. His study The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghostsfrom Elsewherewill be pub lished by Palgrave this summer, and his second collection of poems, A Man ofGlass, based on the tales of H. C. Andersen, is due out from Harper Collins (India) in2010.He is currently working on a novel set inVictorian London. Michelle Johnson: How do you define travel writing? Tabish Khair: Definitions are minefields, and this one is farmore infested thanmost. A lot depends on the contextwithin which one wants a definition of "travel writing." It is obvious that we cannot take easy recourse to genres: for instance, a personal diary or a report or even a scientific account can contain "travel writing." i6 i World Literature Today Travel writing is itselfa genre thatcontains other genres. The distinction between fiction and fact also fails to an extent.Travel writing has histori cally contained many fictionspresented as facts, and to an extent travelwriting is always an effort to spin a "story"?fictional at least to the extent that it is chosen and related out of various other options and perspectives?based on supposedly "real" facts witnessed "out there." I think Iwould follow scholars likePeterHulme and Tim Youngs in arguing fora "broad definition of travelwrit ing." For me, itwould probably run like this: travelwriting iswriting thatprovides a purport edly factual account of a subject'smovement from one extant geographical space to another,where the spaces are considered discursively different enough to require both depiction and explanation. MJ: Amitav Ghosh has written of a difference between travel writing that records what the writer sees without arrangement around "teleolo gies of racial or civilizational progress" and travel writing that is "guided by notions of 'discovery7 and 'exploration'" and claims the world firstimag inatively,and thenpolitically.1Have you observed thisdistinction in contemporary travel literature? TK: In order to claim anything politically, you need to claim it imaginatively first. Of course, in order to contest anything politically, one needs to claim it imaginatively, too. The dangerous thingabout travelwriting is that it lends itselfto more obvious political subtexts, and mostly from dominant discursive spaces: for it is often,but by no means always, the (relatively)privileged who travel andwrite about it.Colonial travelwriting fromEurope or Europeanized spaces tended to be guided by notions of discovery and implicit or explicit teleologies of progress, as Amitav Ghosh puts it. Some of that seeps into contem porary travelwriting, too. For instance, I greatly admire V. S. Naipaul's fiction?because the basic ambiguity of fiction relieves the problematics of some ofNaipaul's framingdiscourses?but I find his travelwriting largely predictable and disap pointing forexactly those reasons. The exception is a book like The Enigma ofArrival, one ofmy favorites, where Naipaul finallyarriveswhere he has always been headed?into theheart of a nos talgicEnglishness?and thus engages generously with the inevitable enigma of arriving/leaving. On theotherhand, a book like, say,Ghosh's In an Antique Land?another of my favorites?makes a conscious and very successful effortto avoid such notions ofdiscovery or teleologies ofprogress and related discourses, while being fullyaware of and not at all shirking a confrontationwith the issues involved. MJ: In your introduction to Other Routes, you write of two perceptions of travel and writing? entertainment and science, or literature and eth nography?surviving to the present. Are there contemporary examples of each? TK: In subtle ways, yes. Take, for instance, just two books by one writer, V. S. Naipaul's A Mil lion Mutinies Now and The Enigma ofArrival. The former is based on deeply internalized tropes of "discovery" and "reportage." Books like that established Naipaul as an "authority" on India...