As a literary critic and writer of fiction, non-fiction,
screenplays and poetry, Kumar is well placed indeed to write this
survey of Indian literature in the English language. It is not only
his background as a writer that informs his work, however, but also
his first-hand experience of life as an immigrant. His exploration
of the Indian diaspora begins in Bombay, which provides the setting
for a discussion of the worrying escalation in the arms race
between India and her neighbouring enemy, Pakistan, as well as a
new symptom of globalization, the proliferation of Western call
centres, in which Indian workers with many months' training in
American or English accents field queries from eight thousand miles
away. The next stage of his journey is London, 'a city of
beginnings', where he arrived as a young idealist after leaving his
hometown, Patna, in his early 20s. Here he experienced at first
hand the racism that followed in the wake of the mass immigration
of the 1960s as well as the sexual liberation which had been denied
to him in India. He later moved on to New York, the source of his
realization, following the events of September 11, that the United
States' difficult relationship with the rest of the world is
reflected in the way in which India has exercised similar bullying
tactics over its own neighbours for centuries. Such experiences
shape not only his own writing but also his appreciation of others,
from Forster and Ghandi through to Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth,
Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie. This book is more than just
literary criticism, however. Interspersed between Kumar's musings
on other authors and their place in the literary landscape are
poems and photographs, lending a very personal touch to his world
view, critiques of Bollywood films and an Indian perspective on
social and cultural affairs. (Kirkus UK)
When Amitava Kumar left Patna, India, he envisioned himself as an up-and-coming citizen of the world, leaving behind the confines of Indian traditions. Yet like the wave of exiles that preceded him, he found that once we leave our past, we are defined by it: in the U.S. he is pigeonholed by his appearance and quizzed about saris and arranged marriages.
"There is no beginning that is a blank page," writes Kumar. Circling the three capitals of the Indian diaspora, Bombay-London-New York captures the contours of the expatriate experience, touching on the themes of abandonment, nostalgia, and exile that have powered some of the most prominent Indian writers today - Naipaul, Rushdie, Roy, Kureishi, as well as E.M. Forster and Gandhi.
With resonant, poetic language and a storyteller's sensibility, Kumar explores the works of these writers through the lens of his own life as an immigrant and writer. As their fiction reveals, the past of the expatriate is mythical, shaped by memory and loss.
With tales of life in India and London and meditations on the form Indian fiction gives to the lives of those who read about it, this is a sweeping, passionate search to find one's own story in the stories of others.
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