Writer Tabish Khair on how a good book can be an instrument to engage with the ‘outside world'

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13-07-2025

'I used books the way some people use alcohol, to obliterate the noise of the outside world.' I came across this quotation, attributed to an author I am not familiar with, on Facebook, and it was accompanied by comments highlighting the seclusion and isolation that books purportedly provide to various readers.
As a writer of a certain kind, I feel that such quotations are only partly accurate – or only partly understood. Yes, it is true that this is what a lot of people feel when they read: they retreat into a safe space, far from the madding crowd. They create a vacuum around themselves, a kind of cocoon.
But they partly misunderstand their own activity of reading, because a book is always the outside world. In that sense, there is no 'vacuum' in a good book, no space devoid of the other, no safe island. Even the worst book is by someone else about the world out there – and/or 'in there', inside this stranger-writer's head. Good books are very complex invitations to enter – and get totally absorbed in this world that also exists outside you. Hence, one claims to get absorbed by a book.
This feeling of absorption is what sometimes misleads us into thinking that a good book shuts out the 'outside world', and to compare reading to something like getting intoxicated on alcohol. But if alcohol simply deadens your awareness, numbs your pain, makes you forget your troubles, acts like Karl Marx's understanding of religion as the opium of the people, then it is not a good simile to apply to books. You do not look into the brimming glass of a good book and see only yourself looking back, like dejected drinkers have stereotypically been depicted as doing in Bollywood films.
What a book does is insert you into another world, and your addiction – or intoxication – is not an inebriation with your own self, but an engagement with another self. That is, firstly, the self of the writer, and secondly those many selves contained in the 'outside world' narrated by the writer, whether it is given to you as fact or fiction, whether it comes to you as a collection of poems or a series of scientific discoveries.
This is one of the reasons why I found Salman Rushdie's Knife disappointing. Bear in mind that I had responded strongly against the stupid and murderous attack on him, and I had even suggested that he should be given the Nobel, just to put across the message that such attacks are to be condemned and resisted by the rest of us. Hence, I came to Knife with much anticipation: Rushdie is an accomplished writer and he has, given his tragic experiences, a lot to say about many things that afflict the world today.
There was also much of interest in Knife, but slowly Rushdie's greatest failure, exacerbated during and after his exile, started grating on my nerves: his loud confidence that often has an upper-class origin rather than just an intellectual one. Then he went on, and after defining his confused and deplorable assailant as an 'ass' – a word that obviously belongs to arm-chair public school club circles – the book moved into a dialogue between the assailant and Rushdie. Except that the assailant never spoke: he was imagined as speaking by Rushdie.
This, of course, can be one of the strengths of fiction, as I argue in my last book, Literature Against Fundamentalism. It can get to enunciate perspectives, fill in silences, explore contradictions that stolidly 'factual prose' cannot. But in this case, actually, it did not do so: I could imagine a far richer and provocative conversation between a real person and someone like Rushdie. What happened was, at best, a simple version of the Socratic dialogues: the questions were angled in such a way as to inveigle certain answers, so that what one heard was the voice of the self, and the other was again silenced.
This is exactly what I feel that literature at its best does not do, and Rushdie, being capable of great literature in the past, surely knows that too. The other speaks in every good book, even in a good genre novel.
We cannot and do not exist in isolation. The richness of our 'inside world' is intertwined with the richness of our 'outside worlds.' A book expands the possibility of this richness a million times. As a reader, you visit more places, experience more lives, and encounter more ideas than you ever would as an individual in life.
And even more than that, a book provides you with the necessary space in which you can actually 'hear' the outside world. That point about 'noise' in my initial quotation was partly correct. The outside world, as we encounter it in living our harried lives, is full of distracting noise: these often retard any real engagement, and sometimes actively thwart it. A book enables you to leave behind this noise of the outside world, so that, actually, you can engage with the outside world in a fuller manner. It means going out into the world; it also means coming home to yourself.
What a book enables is a deeper and better relationship between the reader's 'inside world' and the 'outside world', by shutting out all kinds of noise. A book is not a vacuum, and if it is a cocoon, it is one only to the extent that, if it is really good, you are going to hatch into another reality, become another being. A good book is more like a telescope, a microscope, a stethoscope, a hearing aid, and a dozen such instruments to engage with the otherness of the 'outside world' – all rolled into one, and with something else added to their sum effect!