Narrative mechanisms and the contrivance of violence in Tabish Khair’s The Thing About Thugs and Jihadi Jane

Abstract

There is an intricate relationship between violence and language, revealing the profound impact of narrativization on the manifestation of both personal and collective suffering. As a narrative construct, language has an inherent insufficiency and incompleteness [Khair 2012. The Thing About Thugs. HarperCollins India], which can transform an individual’s identity through different forms of narrativization, inflicting violence. The human body embraces significant meaning, but with different narratives, one can make it meaningless, a ‘thing’ to commit violence. The paper argues that the act of naming something, even unintentionally, constitutes a form of violence, as it objectifies/ ‘thingifies’ the original essence of the being in question. The narrativization of violence, manifested through the trope of glorification or heroism, when intertwined with fundamental and radical narratives, perpetrates violence by normalizing and valorizing suffering. People also use language symbolically for their own benefit, as certain acts of violence are trivialized or rationalized to make them acceptable, whether for a sacred cause or an evil intention, through symbolic narrativization. By analyzing Khair’s novels Jihadi Jane and The Thing About Thugs, this paper argues how language can perpetuate systemic violence when people narrate it across different contexts, exploring three narrative mechanisms: glorification, thingification, and symbolic narrativization. © 2026 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.