Drown All the Refugees: Tabish Khair’s gothic novel asks if sympathy is enough

The story opens with a shocking declaration at a literary event: “Drown all the refugees.” The sentence jars the reader immediately, but Khair gradually reveals the pain and experience behind it. The narrator has lost Abdul, a Palestinian refugee he loved. His childhood friend Pedro disappears after crossing borders in search of a better life, and Pedro’s grieving mother, Maria, turns to the occult in the hope of bringing her son back. What returns, however, is no longer the Pedro she remembers, but someone changed by experiences that seem beyond ordinary language.

When history refuses to stay buried

Khair describes the novel as Gothic, and the choice feels significant. In Gothic fiction, ghosts return because something from the past remains unresolved, rarely to frighten us for its own sake. Forgotten crimes, buried memories and unfinished histories refuse to disappear. In Drown All the Refugees, the refugee becomes such a haunting presence. Displacement leaves behind wounds that continue to shape lives long after the journey has ended, well beyond the act of crossing a border. The supernatural elements, then, become another vocabulary for loss, memory and the scars of violence.

Read alongside Khair’s earlier novels, this book feels like a natural extension of themes that have occupied him for years. The Thing About Thugs explored the making of the outsider through empire. Just Another Jihadi Jane examined how vulnerable lives are drawn into extremism. Night of Happiness looked at loneliness as a form of exile. Here, Khair widens that conversation to ask what happens to those who witness suffering from a distance, as much as to those who are displaced.

Beyond sympathy

One of the novel’s most interesting ideas is its refusal to settle for easy compassion. Stories about refugees often encourage readers to feel sympathy, but Khair seems to ask whether sympathy alone changes anything. In recent interviews, he has argued that empathy is valuable but cannot replace political responsibility: feeling sorry for someone is easier than questioning the systems that forced them to flee in the first place. That distinction gives the novel much of its intellectual force.

The question becomes even more urgent today. Images of war, migration and displacement reach us every day, whether from Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine or the Mediterranean. We watch them on our phones, react briefly and move on. Constant exposure to suffering can dull our sensitivity instead of sharpening it. Drown All the Refugees seems to challenge this growing indifference, asking what happens when witnessing becomes a habit and loses its moral weight.

A novel that refuses easy comfort

Like much of Khair’s fiction, this novel is driven chiefly by ideas, with little appetite for dramatic twists. Readers looking for a fast-moving narrative may find its philosophical reflections demanding. Yet that has always been one of Khair’s strengths: his fiction explores questions with no easy answers.

At a time when migration is discussed mainly through the language of borders, security and statistics, Drown All the Refugees reminds us that every refugee carries a history, a memory and a life that cannot be reduced to a headline. The novel asks readers to look beyond familiar debates and confront the human cost of displacement.

The ghosts in Khair’s novel haunt our own certainties rather than deserted houses, reminding us that history never truly disappears, and that ignoring the suffering of others may be one of the deepest forms of moral failure.

Drown All the Refugees
Tabish Khair
HarperCollins India
Rs 599

(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a Bengaluru-based writer, literary critic and festival curator. He writes on literature, culture, sports and society for leading publications.)