Nov 11 04, Funraising with AMITAVA KUMAR
Interview with acclaimed writer-poet-journalist-screenwriter AMITAVA KUMAR about his recently published book, HUSBAND OF A FANATIC.
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In the summer of 1999, while India and Pakistan were engaged in a war, Amitava Kumar - a Hindu Indian writer living and teaching in the U.S. - married a Pakistani Muslim woman. That event led to a process of discovery that prompted Kumar to examine the hatreds and intimacies joining Indians and Pakistanis, Hindus and Muslims, fundamentalists and secularists, writers and rioters.
In Husband of a Fanatic, Kumar chronicles the entanglements that his new marriage provoked - from ambivalent encounters with family to his disquieting lunch with the amiable bigot who had posted Kumar's name on his website blacklist of Hindu traitors. Kumar also travels across the South Asian continent, visiting a classroom in riot-torn Gujarat, a village besides the Ganges, a psychiatric ward in Kashmir. With a poet's eye for detail, Kumar draws a map of violence, moving between the wars and nuclear rivalry dividing two nation-states to the more blurred, and more complicated, relationship between two religions and their adherents.
A beautifully and brilliant written book, reported with painful candor and searching intelligence, Husband of a Fanatic refuses to glorify suffering - instead, it presents tragedy as ordinary, and hence, more difficult to accept easily. The result is this fiercely personal essay on the idea of the enemy.
Amitava Kumar is Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Passport Photos and Bombay-London-New York, the editor of several anthologies, including Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, and co-edits the webjournal Politics and Culture. His writing has appeared in The Nation, Harper's, American Prospect, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Times of India among others. Kumar is the scriptwriter and narrator of the prize-winning documentary film, Pure Chutney.
Press Review(s) for Husband of A Fanatic
‘…a very powerful and highly readable thesis’ – Khushwant Singh
‘Kumar makes you sit up and think…’ —Hindu Business Line
