In the summer of 1999, while the Kargil War was being fought, Amitava Kumar married a Pakistani Muslim. That event led to a process of discovery that made Kumar examine the relationship not only between India and Pakistan but also between Hindus and Muslims inside India. The result is this fiercely personal essay on the idea of the enemy. Written with complete honesty and with no claims to journalistic detachment, this book chronicles the complicity that binds the writer to the rioter. Unlike both
Amitava Kumar is the author of A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna; Home Products, which was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize; and A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, which the New York Times described as a ‘perceptive and soulful...meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions’, and received the Page Turner Award. Kumar’s writing has appeared in Caravan, Harper’s, The Guardian, New Yorker, Vanity Fair and the New York Times. His essay ‘Pyre’, first published in Granta, was selected by Jonathan Franzen for Best American Essays 2016. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. Kumar is Professor of English at Vassar College.
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Amitava Kumar is an Indian Hindu literature professor teaching in a college in the East coast of America, in his early forties, and married to a Canadian-Pakistani writer of Muslim heritage. And this brief bio matters as the subtitle of his book makes clear - A personal journey through India, Pakistan, Love and Hate.
Kumar revels in sharing his reading and travelling experience organised around the theme of the Hindu-Muslim border. But this isn't the physical border that divides India and Pakistan. Instead these are the invisible lines of control that regulate, constrain and deform relations between peoples of similar cultures.
Much of Kumar's book occupies itself with exposing the shallow, unexamined and compensatory machismo of the Hindutva ideologues who dominated Indian political life in the 1990s. Kumar tracks down their representatives in the US, and even provides some frightening examples of how American Hindutva ideologues have squared the American dream with the Hindu meme.
Kumar makes a virtue of the technique of testimony, and an extended section of his book is dedicated to reproducing letters between young Indians and Pakistanis on the state of bilateral relations (Kumar actually ferried the letters).
Kumar provides important reminders of the fusion between Muslim and non-Muslim culture in India before and even after Partition. For example, it is forgotten that before the Partition, Muslims made up many of the shabad singers in Sikh Gurdwaras. And even today, Pakistanis and Indians revere the same local South Asian saints. Kumar visits one of these shrines on the Indian-Pakistani border, and his description of his visit, what he sees and hears, stands out in this travelogue.
Kumar's choppy transitions are one of the major weaknesses. Others have criticised his cut and paste approach, but that a flaw and not a fatal sin. He makes up for it with his inclusive humanism, his wonder at what he calls the "enchanted civil society" and his welcome highlighting of the inter-confessional cooperation of Indians in the South African anti-apartheid struggle.
Also welcome is Kumar's habit of mentioning key sentences and phrases in Hindi (with translation) which allows Hindi-speaking readers a deeper register of meaning.
But perhaps the shallowest part of the book is Kumar's highlighting of his wedding and his 'half-conversion'. The way it is described smacks of hucksterism, but that is less a criticism than a comment. Perhaps he had his reasons, and honestly, in the clamour of reportage on the rising elephant called India, you have to ride the wind.
