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The Thing About Thugs
By Tabish Khair
₹ 399.00 inclusive of all taxes
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About the book
Shortlisted for: DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, 2012. Man Asian Literary Prize, 2011 . Hindu Best Fiction Prize, 2010 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
Pages: 256
Available in:
Language: English
Tabish Khair
Tabish Khair is the author of various poetry collections, studies and novels. Winner of the All India Poetry Prize and fellowships at Delhi, Cambridge and Hong Kong, his novels – The Bus Stopped (2004), Filming: A Love Story (2007), and The Thing About Thugs (2010) – have been translated into several languages and shortlisted for major prizes in five countries.