Amitava Kumar
Indian writer and journalist (born 1963)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Amitava Kumar (born 17 March 1963) is an Indian writer and journalist. At Vassar College, he is Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair.[1]
Amitava Kumar | |
|---|---|
Kumar speaking at the Asian American Writers Workshop in 2011. | |
| Born | 17 March 1963 |
| Alma mater | Delhi University Syracuse University University of Minnesota |
| Occupation | Professor of English at Vassar College |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship <https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/amitava-kumar/>, United States Artists Fellow <https://www.unitedstatesartists.org/fellow/amitava-kumar/> |
Personal life
Kumar was born in the city of Arrah in the Indian state of Bihar on 17 March 1963 and grew up in the nearby city of Patna.[2] He attended St Michael's High School. In India, Kumar earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Hindu College, Delhi University in 1984. He holds two master's degrees in Linguistics and Literature from Delhi University (1986) and Syracuse University (1988) respectively. In 1993, he received his doctoral degree from the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Kumar lives with his family in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Work
Overview
Kumar has an extensive and wide-spanning body of literary work. His work has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, BRICK, Guernica, and The Nation. Both his non-fiction books and novels have received critical acclaim. His novel Immigrant, Montana was on the best of the year lists at The New Yorker, The New York Times, and President Obama’s list of favorite books of 2018. His next novel A Time Outside This Time was described by The New Yorker as “a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.” Kumar’s latest novel, My Beloved Life, was praised by James Wood as “beautiful, truthful fiction.”
As for his nonfiction work, his book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb: A Writer’s Report on the Global War on Terror (Duke University Press, 2010; and as Evidence of Suspicion, 2009) was the 2011 Winner for Nonfiction in the Asian American Literary Awards. In a review by the New York Times, Dwight Garner called the book a "perceptive and soulful…meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions." It was also the 2010 staff pick at Publisher’s Weekly. Husband of a Fanatic (2005) was an "Editors' Choice" book at the New York Times; Bombay-London-New York (2002) was on the list of "Books of the Year" in New Statesman (UK); and Passport Photos (2000) won an "Outstanding Book of the Year" award from the Myers Program for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.
Husband of a Fanatic was an "Editors' Choice" book at the New York Times;[2] Bombay-London-New York was on the list of "Books of the Year" in New Statesman (UK);[3] and Passport Photos won an "Outstanding Book of the Year" award from the Myers Program for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. His novel Home Products was short-listed for India's premier literary prize, the Vodafone Crossword Book Award.[4]
His academic writing and literary criticism has appeared in several journals, including Critical Inquiry, Cultural Studies, Critical Quarterly, College Literature, Race and Class, American Quarterly, Rethinking Marxism, Minnesota Review, Journal of Advanced Composition, Amerasia Journal and Modern Fiction Studies.
Kumar was also the scriptwriter for two documentary films. He worked on Dirty Laundry (2005)[5], a film about the national-racial politics of Indian South Africans. He also narrated and wrote the script for the prize-winning documentary film Pure Chutney (1997)[6] about the descendants of indentured Indian laborers in Trinidad.
As a journalist, Kumar has regularly authored articles for newspapers and magazines across the world such as New Statesman, The Caravan, The Indian Express and The Hindu. In 2008, on Al Jazeera's Riz Khan Show, Kumar was interviewed on the use of terror threats by governments to advance their own political agendas; the interview aired on the Al Jazeera English Network. In February 2011, Kumar interviewed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy for Guernica Magazine.
At Vassar College, “Professor Kumar teaches classes that mainly deal with: reportage; the essay-form, both in prose and film; cities; literatures describing the global movement of goods and people; war; memory-work.”[7] He has made significant connections in the writing and journalism world as a professor. Kumar served as a mentor to journalist Kelly Stout and Alanna Okun, a senior editor at Vox, while they were students at Vassar.
The death of Kumar's parents had a significant effect on the content of his writing. He explores rituals of death, grief, and memory in his essay “Pyre,” which was selected by Jonathan Franzen for Best American Essays 2016. In a 2024 article for Lit Hub, he reflects on the death of his father and the ways in which writers contend with the loss of their parents in their work.
Published works
Book synopses
- Passport Photos (2000) is “a report on the immigrant condition” that blends “theory, poetry, cultural criticism, and photography.” It explores “the complexities of the immigration experience, intervening in the impersonal language of the state.”[8]
- Blending memoir with literary criticism, Bombay–London–New York (2002) “tells the story of how…India colonized the West and brought it a step closer to genuine multiculturalism.” In doing so, Kumar “lyrically evokes the standard diasporic themes of abandonment, exile and romantic nostalgia for a ‘home’ left behind."[9]
- Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate (2005) explores “a series of journeys over the India-Pakistan border and the interior boundaries of love and hate, as well as to South Africa, New York and London.” In this nonfiction work, “Kumar tells densely wrought stories about forbidden love, his own marriage, tragi-comic border tensions and the poisonous issue of conversion.”[10]
- In Home Products (published in the U.S. under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing, 2010) Kumar examines the “question of how art, which is a representation of life, also impacts life, triggering memories, provoking connections and being assimilated till it practically becomes a home product.”[11]
- A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb (2010) “is about the ordinary men and women, brown-skinned in general and Muslim in particular, who have had their lives upended by America’s enraged security apparatus.”[12]
- A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna (2014) takes the reader through Kumar’s hometown of Patna, exploring the city’s storied past and present reality. It represents “an insider’s alternative to the scornful narratives of Patna made popular by Western writers.”[13]
- Lunch with a Bigot: The Writer in the World (2015) is an essay collection of “intimate stories about people who have not been often represented in our media.” Kumar’s essays complicate “our desire that others be recognizable, familiar, and our relations with them comfortable, and instead seek parallactic intimacies — he writes stories about others about whom we’ve been silent, and about the ‘borders of the self.’”[14]
- Immigrant, Montana (2018), first published in India as The Lovers (2017) “recalls the youthful romantic adventures of Kailash, an Indian-born writer and scholar.” Purposefully blurring the line “between the author’s life and that of his fictional protagonist,” this novel “‘is a work of fiction as well as nonfiction,’” in Kumar’s own words.[15]
- In Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on Style (2020), Kumar provides “a guide for academic writers that is also relevant to anyone who cares about fine prose.” In this “handbook on style and form,” he offers advice for how to make scholarly writing more engaging, creative, and imbued with the writer’s unique style.[16]
- In A Time Outside This Time (2021), “Satya is an Indian writer based in New York, enjoying a residency for artists in Italy… His resilient pursuit of social norms as defined in a post-truth world results in him building a plotline for his book.”[17]
- The Blue Book: A Writer's Journal (2022) is “a memory book with hybrid literary and artistic parentage” in which “words become paintings, and paintings turn into a beguiling literary anthropology of ‘reality and surreality’ that leaves us stunned.”[18]
- In The Yellow Book: A Traveller's Diary (2023), Kumar “designs smooth vignettes that circulate around indicia of contemporary interests,” including “the Covid pandemic, the grievous assault on Salman Rushdie, Kumar’s writing and London-strolling classes.”[19]
- My Beloved Life (2024) is “a vivid exploration of some of life’s most painful experiences—the catastrophic breakup of a marriage, political violence, and social crisis, the death of one’s parents—and how we manage to go on afterward.”[20]
Bibliography
Books
- No Tears for the N.R.I., Writers Workshop, 1996. ISBN 978-81-7189-893-0, a book of poems
- Passport Photos, University of California Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0-520-21816-1, multi-genre book on immigration and postcoloniality
- Bombay–London–New York, Routledge, 2002. ISBN 978-0-415-94210-2, literary memoir cum critical report on Indian fiction
- Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate, The New Press, 2005. ISBN 978-1-56584-926-6, book on writing and religious violence
- Home Products (published in the U.S. under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing), Duke University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8223-4670-8)
- A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8223-4562-6, a non-fiction book about the war on terror, and the literary as well as artistic responses to it.
- A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna, Duke University Press Books, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8223-5704-9
- Lunch with a Bigot: The Writer in the World, Duke University Press Books, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8223-5911-1
- Immigrant, Montana, Knopf, 2018. ISBN 978-0-525-52075-7 (first published in India as The Lovers, Aleph, 2017. ISBN 978-93-86021-00-7)
- Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on Style, Duke University Press Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-4780-0627-5
- A Time Outside This Time, Knopf, 2021. ISBN 9780593319017
- The Blue Book: A Writer's Journal, HarperCollins India, 2022. ISBN 978-93-5489-374-2, a book of drawings and diary entries
- The Yellow Book: A Traveller's Diary, HarperCollins India, 2023. ISBN 978-93-5699-603-8
- My Beloved Life, Knopf, 2024. ISBN 978-0-593-53606-3
Edited works
- Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, edited volume of essays.
- World Bank Literature, edited volume of essays on global economies and literature.
- The Humour and the Pity, edited volume of essays on V.S. Naipaul.
- Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom, edited volume of essays on radical aesthetics and pedagogy.
- Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere, edited volume of essays on radical teaching.
Awards and fellowships
Kumar was a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library for 2023-4. In 2016, Kumar was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for General Nonfiction, as well as a Ford Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists. He has been awarded writing residences by Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio, the Norman Mailer Writing Center, Writers Omi at Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, and the Hawthornden Foundation. Additionally, he has received research fellowships from the NEH, Yale University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Dartmouth College, and University of California-Riverside. Currently, he serves on the board of the Corporation of Yaddo and is a trustee at PEN America.