Tabish Khair’s new novel, Drown All the Refugees, begins with the narrator screaming the line at a literary event, to the astonishment of liberal minded onlookers, amongst whom is a famous writer who feels disgusted and leaves. The narrator ought to have left too, but he realises that it is necessary to show liberals that “the right to move freely is secondary to the right to stay free.” The novel is the justification of this idea, which prevents a setting, names, or identification from pinning it down. Anonymity, the novel contends, is a way to remain free in this world of "hollow self-performance". The reader may decipher the clues in the text and the illustrations.
The metafictional narrative blurs the lines between fact and fiction. The author-narrator insists on writing in his native language, which is neither Bengali nor Hindi, but has many words from both. He had lived in the spectre of the American dream once and his disillusionment made him return to his land and language in search of his own self. But his return was complete only after he came back to his plantation estate and realised how little of the land and the people he knew.
The novel is the story of...