In Brooklyn, writers consider ‘New India’

The “New India” is

(a) A place where the pursuit of individual happiness is now possible

(b) A place that wants to be a part of history

(c) A place where the most common job category for women is “maid”

(d) A place that is not that different from the old India

Put your pencils down now. When Indian-origin writers get together to discuss the complexities of the new India, the answer, naturally, is (e) All of the above.

Siddhartha Deb and Bharati Mukherjee, who respectively have nonfiction and fiction books on India out this year, and Amitava Kumar, whose most recent book dealt with the fallout of the War on Terror, gathered on Sunday in Brooklyn to discuss the subcontinent as part of the New York City borough’s literary festival.

Full report here WSJ blogs

Comedy of errors

In Nobody Does the Right Thing, a quick, breezy novel-sub-novella from Vassar English professor Amitava Kumar, readers are taken through an immense, continuous, and oftentimes painfully ongoing comedy of errors. Well, sort of. Actually, I’ve reread Nobody Does the Right Thing twice now, and still am finding myself thoroughly unable to grasp just exactly what Kumar, in so many ways, is trying to sputter out here, with this particular story and these particular people.

As with most epic tales of woe, lust, and loss, the premise sounds enticingly delicious (and perhaps even just a bit decadent) on paper, but what ends up being carried out on the actual pieces of paper betwixt the book’s thin spine falls disappointingly flat, boasting few true instances of thick, meaty substance. It’s a real shame, too; stories that encompass the elements of murder, sex, infidelity, and the press don’t usually sport the problem of being uninteresting, but somehow, Nobody Does the Right Thing manages to hit all the wrong notes when the correct ones were so near to the fingertips of the player.

Full report here Bookslut

We fight, not over Kashmir but over who will wash the dishes

Amitava Kumar, author of Husband Of A Fanatic (2004), watched the to-do over the Sania-Shoaib match with some bemusement and a great deal of empathy. After all, the professor of English at Vassar College in New York State had not only married a Pakistani himself, but also written a book on it. In an interview with DNA, Kumar provides a characteristically tongue-in-cheek and at the same time insightful view on cross-border relationships that transcend the prejudices bearing down on them.

Where did you meet your wife? Was it love at first sight?
My wife’s name is Mona Ahmad Ali. I met her in New York City, in August of 1997, during the India Day parade. I began to fall in love with her when I found myself writing a poem about that day. “I have lost India, you have lost Pakistan, we have become the citizens of General Electric...”

What was the courtship like? Was it fascinating for you to be going out with a Pakistani and for her to be dating an Indian?
The New York Times had just published a story about Indians and Pakistanis getting along together in places like Queens. I was happy that I was part of an international trend. It is not every day that you have a part of your life validated by The New York Times!

Full report here DNA

Reading terror

War has rarely received such a nuanced uncovering in Indian writing

In two recent magazine essays — one in Open and the other in The Caravan — Hartosh Singh Bal remarked that contemporary Indian literature in English lacked ambition; that our writers wrote mostly of what they knew and seldom went beyond the personal. Finishing Amitava Kumar's new non- fiction book, Evidence of Suspicion, I thought: here is that rare work of ambition. It's ambitious not just in its difficult subject — the mangled victims of the brutal war on terror being waged right here — but ambitiously complex and nuanced (stylistically and philosophically) in its approach and design.

After you read Evidence of Suspicion, you will never look at the global war on terror in the same way again. You will, also, finally know how to look at the war on terror, especially as it is fought here. I've read many fine books on the subject but they are all from the West and they didn't furnish me with enough information or perspective on how I could look at what was happening in India.

Books and films exposing/documenting the travesties of the American war on terror -Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Iraq, rendition, black sites, and the lies of the Bush administration - informed, equipped and incensed the conscience of an American public to protest their outrage. Along with Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night, Evidence of Suspicion accomplishes just that here: reading Kumar's intrepidly researched, unflinching accounts of Muslims brutally tortured in our jails and sentenced without trials in the name of fighting terrorism, we are outraged, aghast, sickened.

Full report here Hindu

REVIEW: Evidence of Suspicion

REVIEW

EVIDENCE OF SUSPICION: A Writer's Report On The War On Terror
Amitava Kumar
Picador
Rs 350
Pp 230

Blurb
Bureaucratic in its convolutions and brutal in its deceptions, the war on terror has had an impact on our lives that we do not yet understand. We sense it. A growing claustrophobia, wariness, suspicion, the stickiness of constant surveillance. But for those who are actually entangled in it, the trap has teeth and they are fierce. Author and teacher Amitava Kumar examines the mangled lives of some of those who tripped. In a US court Hemant Lakhani, an old man with a congenital heart condition, stands trial for selling a fake missile to an FBI informant; in another court Shahawar Matin Siraj, inveigled by the FBI into a conspiracy to bomb a subway, is sentenced to thirty years in prison. In New Delhi Kumar interviews S.A.R. Geelani, the mild-mannered professor apprehended for the 2001 Parliament attack, jailed and tortured. He also tries to speak to Tabassum Guru, the wife of the man on death row for the same attack, at the Sopore hospital in which she works. A few kilometres away, in Srinagar, he visits an army camp, where he sees the peculiarities that develop in an everyday battle-zone that is also a living, working city. And, he catalogues, with the critic’s compass and a curator’s zeal, the fierce renewal in art and literature that has evolved out of the war. Spanning the subcontinents of India and the USA, part reportage, part philosophy, part protest, this is a book whose importance cannot be exaggerated. Its intellectual power and moral force will keep the reader pinned to the page.

Reviews etc:
Manufacturing crime Livemint
Encounters of a different kind The Hindu
A terrible beauty Business Standard
The deceit of information Financial Express
Art as catharsis Business Standard