My article for the New York Times India Ink:

The recent bombings in Boston threw up many questions. One of the most pressing, in my somewhat narrow view, is the meaning of being brown in America.

On April 17, two days after the bombs went off during the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring almost 200 others, CNN’s John King went on air to say that the suspect was a “dark-skinned male.” In the CNN video, which shows that the time of the broadcast was 1.15 p.m. on Wednesday, we see King pointing to a photograph from the front-page of The New York Times. A positive identification had been made based on a surveillance video from a Lord & Taylor store just outside the frame of the picture in the Times, King said. A little later that afternoon, King would go on to assure viewers that a subsequent arrest had been made.

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Tags: Amitava Kumar, Boston bombing, brown, New York Times India Ink

Afzal Guru was executed on February 9, 2013. A few years ago I had published a piece in PEN Magazine article that is now on BYLINER:

After flights from Delhi to Jammu and then on to Srinagar, I rode north in a taxi to Sopore, closer to the Pakistan border. I’d come to Kashmir to meet Tabassum Guru, whose husband is on death row in Delhi. But when I stood before her, Tabassum waved me away. She had no desire to meet with journalists.

For his role in the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament, Mohammad Afzal Guru was sentenced to death by hanging. Another defendant was condemned to ten years in prison; two others were acquitted. Afzal Guru’s hanging, scheduled for October 20, 2006, was stayed after a mercy petition was filed with the President. In its judgment on his appeal, the Supreme Court had recognized that the evidence against Afzal was circumstantial and that the police had not followed legal procedures. Nevertheless, the judgment stated, the attack on the Indian Parliament had “shaken the entire nation, and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the…

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Photo credit: Marcus Bleasdale

Tags: Afzal Guru, Amitava Kumar, Byliner, Collaborator, Kashmir, PEN

My piece for India Ink at the New York Times:

When the travel writer Trevor Fishlock went to my hometown of Patna, a journalist greeted him by saying, “Welcome to hell.” A few days later, that particular journalist, who had been zealous in his defense of the freedom of the press, was beaten unconscious.

I read the above story in a piece by Norman Lewis titled “Through the Badlands of Bihar.” But it is not only Western visitors like Mr. Fishlock and Mr. Lewis who portray Patna thus. If you have been keeping track of recent Bollywood movies, the badlands of Bihar have become fertile ground for reaping cinematic violence.

I am writing a book about Patna where I want to present what the people who live there think about it. A part of me believes that Patna might be the victim of bad press. Did you know, for instance, that somewhere in the dark recesses of history, Patna produced the best opium?

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Tags: Amitava Kumar, Patna

My latest in Tehelka, Singing the Blues:

A book that I read recently, and which represents the achievement of voice, is Toni Morrison’s latest novel, Home. A short novel, hardly 150 pages long, it is the distillation of a lifetime of writing practice. Here is a voice that records violence in brief, brutal detail, and then, in a testament to human survival, finds honey in the rock.

Frank Money is Morrison’s protagonist in Home. He has survived, if only barely, the Korean War and come back to his segregated motherland. Each page reveals the shock of living in a society built on the exploitation of blacks. Reading the book at a time when the White House is occupied by a black president further heightens the pain of these discoveries instead of assuaging it. And yet, as steady as the cruel blows, are the comforts of community. The strength of conscience. The tender spark of love.

Piercing sorrow mixed with a sense of hope, or sometimes, only a keen appreciation of life’s bittersweet taste. Isn’t that the sublime truth of the blues?

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Tags: Caste, Dalits, norman mailer, Race, Toni Morrison

My piece in the new magazine Margins:

It would be performance art—a bit like doing brownface, except not. The idea thrilled him as soon as it was proposed by his editors. He was to go to a few bookstores in New York City and ask: “Where is your ‘White literature’ section?”

He began with McNally Jackson Bookstore on Prince Street.

In the display window he saw some of his friends’ books; there was a reading that evening by his pal who had written about an Indian-American man who lived out in the desert with his angry wife and autistic son. Inside there was a café. At one table, two women were talking in German. He returned to the front desk, but there were several people there and he felt intimidated. Coming back to the café section, he asked for a Moroccan mint tea.

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Tags: AAWW, Amitava Kumar, Margins, Performance, Provocation, White Literature

I will write a new monthly column for Tehelka. Here’s my first column, a report on the soon-to-be-released film, Gangs of Wasseypur:

On a recent Sunday, I took the Metro North to Grand Central Station; stepped out into the warm afternoon air, and after walking for less than 10 minutes, entered a dark night in Bihar.

A van was driving through a narrow alley in a small town. Men carrying automatic weapons got out and shouted to shop-owners to bring down their shutters. Arriving at a door, they began to fire. The attackers, several clad in kurtas, threw bombs inside. Then they fired more shots.

What impressed me most was not the indiscriminate shooting — irresponsible in its profligacy — but the general lack of personal safety displayed by the shooters. This was not so much a shooting raid as much as a macho staging of rangdaari. I was familiar with this attitude of casual disregard, what managerial pundits would call a lack of professionalism, and it pleased me. On the closing night of the New York Indian Film Festival, in the Greenwich Village theatre where Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur was being screened, I suddenly felt that I had come home.

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Tags: Amitava Kumar, Anurag Kashyap, Bollywood, Gangs of Wasseypur, Tehelka

My review of Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Legend of Pradeep Mathew for NPR:

I have just finished reading Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka’s debut novel, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, and to be blunt, the business of writing this review is interfering with what I really want to do. Which is watch cricket.

I feel free to confess this because the narrator of this novel would be quite forgiving of my weakness. W.G. Karunasena, apart from being a spent sportswriter and a semi-tragic drunk, is also a cricket fanatic: He is dying but is still determined to find and write about the Tamil cricketer who was his country’s greatest and yet most obscure sportsman. When asked by his wife why he loves sport more than her, Karunasena responds that she is talking nonsense, but he confides to the reader: “Some people gaze at setting suns, sitting mountains, teenage virgins and their wiggling thighs. I see beauty in free kicks, late cuts, slam dunks, tries from halfway and balls that turn from off to leg.”

“Balls that turn from off to leg.” If that last phrase made no sense to you, then, benighted reader, I’m happy to inform you that The Legend of Pradeep Mathew contains within its pages helpful diagrams and breezy notes that serve as introduction to the rules of cricket and the magic of spin bowling. That is not all. In one of the book’s asides, and there are many, we read: “Hard to believe, but in the 19th century, cricket was America’s favorite team sport. Cricket clubs flourished in over 22 states, and the sport’s first international game took place not between England and Australia in 1877, but between Canada and the U.S. in 1844.” Unlike many other things in the book, all this is indeed true. One might also add that the 1844 match was the first sporting event in the modern world, predating the revival of the Olympic Games by more than 50 years.

The sun set on cricket in the U.S. and arose in the former colonies. Sri Lanka beat Australia to win the World Cup in 1996, and The Legend of Pradeep Mathew finds a pivot for its narrative in this victory. As W.G. says at one point: “Us brown folk play the game better and we should no longer apologize for our quirks; in fact, we should celebrate them, and, if necessary, defend them.” He is talking of a style of playing cricket, but it’s impossible to ignore the broader implications.

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Tags: Amitava Kumar, Cricket, Shehan Karunatilaka

My short-story “Postmortem” is on a short-list of works chosen from those published at World Literature Today over the past ten years. You can vote too! I had written this story originally for NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction.

The nurse left work at five o’clock.

She had seen the dead woman’s husband sitting, near the entrance, under the yellow sign that Doctor Ahmed had hung some months ago. “While You Wait, Meditate.” He was sitting with his arms crossed, elbows cupped in the palms of his hands, and hadn’t looked up when she passed him on her way out.

Just after lunch, a convoy had come from the Army camp. Two uniformed soldiers carried in the body on a stretcher. One soldier, a small rifle in his left hand, threw open the office door and announced the Colonel. Doctor Ahmed had automatically stood up.

The Colonel was plump. He looked calm and extremely clean, the way bullfrogs do, gleaming green and gold in the mud. He put his baton on the table and asked the nurse to leave the office.

When Doctor Ahmed rang his bell, the nurse went back in and was told to get his wife, Zakia, from their home on the top floor. Usually, he just called her on the phone. The nurse hurried up, guessing that she was also to give the news about the Colonel.

Doctor Zakia was a pediatrician but she immediately understood why she was to do the postmortem. The soldiers put the stretcher in the operating room and left. The doctor removed the white sheet and then, choking, recited the Fatiha. It was difficult for her to continue the examination – she had a grown-up daughter.

Then the nurse was alone with the young woman for over four hours, cleaning her of the blood and the filth, and then stitching her up. The abdomen and thighs had turned green, but this was expected. There was a pronounced swelling of the tongue and lips.

The nurse wondered whether the body would last till the funeral. If there was a protest, it would take the entire day in the sun for the procession to reach the cemetery.

A year ago, a doctor in the north had announced that the corpse brought to him was of a woman who had been gang-raped. This was a mistake. The Army put out the story that the woman used to come to the camp for customers and that her husband found out and had probably got her killed.

In the warm and stuffy room, the nurse realized that her teeth were chattering. She stopped and for a long while stared at the back of her gloved hands. Then she turned them over, as if she were praying, and studied the film of dark coagulated matter on her fingers.

There was no slippage and still it was hard work. Doctor Zakia would probably tell the family that the body had been washed thrice. The women would nevertheless insist on doing what was proper. How was she to save them? No one teaches you in nursing school to cover cigarette burns on the privates or to stitch torn nipples.

When she finally stepped out of the room she was startled to see a dozen soldiers in the hallway. She met the eye of the one closest to her and flinched, but he was quiet, even shy, like a dog that has brought in a squirrel and dropped it on the carpet.

At six, she was sitting in front of the television in her tiny living room. And there she was, the young woman in her wedding photograph. The newsreader said the body had been found in a ditch after the woman had gone missing for twenty-six hours. She had been struck sometime at night by a speeding vehicle.

Tags: Amitava Kumar, NPR, Postmortem, World Literature Today

A new issue of Seminar is out. It is a special issue entitled A Country of Our Own. I have fiction in this issue, “Revolutionary Road.” The piece is not available to all but here is a link to another piece of fiction by me; both pieces are part of the same novel that is a work-in-progress.

Tags: Amitava Kumar, fiction, Seminar

This American Life, my favorite radio show, has issued a retraction. (Read a quick report here.) What I like about this is that the retraction itself makes for a great show. I’m being a trifle pedantic, but truth-telling is a performance. This show is an exercise in revealing the truth, sure, but it is also a staging of the truth. There is drama there, and great artistic skill.

So, Mike Daisey is revealed to be a liar and also somewhat of a coward. As one of his critics put it, perhaps the practice of lying could make a great subject for a one-man performance. I guess I’m saying that the final act of the TAL show “Retraction” could perhaps have been devoted to precisely that question. In such a performance, it would be a little more difficult to pin villainy on only one person. Like the question of one’s participation in the business of propping up unfair labor practices in China, what is the truth and what is outright falsehood can, beyond an easily assignable point, become a more difficult thing. I should mention that I first heard of this via a tweet by Philip Gourevitch, and my first thought was that Gourevitch’s own work with Errol Morris on the Abu Ghraib affair was to complicate the truth rather putting it on a pedestal with a gold medal around its neck.

Of great interest to me is the detail that this debate shares some aspects of the recent controversy over the publication of John D’Agata’s new book, The Lifespan of a Fact. But aren’t there any differences between them? Are the elisions of the same order?

I’d wish for a greater awareness on Daisey’s part of the fact that he was staging the truth, and, more than that, I’d have liked him to have shared this fact with his audience. That sense of self-reflexive awareness is one definition of art and what distinguishes it from mere experience. This awareness, I’d argue, is present in D’Agata’s performative writing. I had liked Jen McDonald’s NYTBR review of D’Agata’s new book, but I’m sure a part of my appreciation for the piece was my desire to see the review as a fine critical performance.

Last night, I sent a message to a former student of mine whose admirable nonfiction thesis, written under my supervision, had won the best essay award here at Vassar. With his permission I’m pasting our midnight exchange–our own small attempt at recreating the dialogue between D’Agata and Fingal:

AK: here’s a tweet that i wanted you to see

Former student:

see, to me, ira glass is kind of a coward.

AK:

you are so hard-core.
but it is more of an intellectual cowardice.
that said, the daisey fellow doesn’t come across as one with very serious intent or artistic ambition. he _is_ a liar, d’agata is not.

 
Former student:

yeah, i see what you mean.  the funny thing is my parents went to see daisey’s show in new york and were blown away by it, moved, entertained, inspired.  and i don’t think that the validity of that goes away.  and the cowardice lies in running something that’s explicitly performance, sort of figuring out what you’re getting into, and then getting attention from attacking the guy, assuring publicly that YOU do not stand by this.  In general, when people start talking confidently about their truthfulness and ethics, as though those things are constant, i get suspicious.

AK:

but you know, both you and i have a great deal of investment in producing writing where we express our own fuckedupness. it is a more truthful or at least a more modest exercise, sure. but i’m also a bit leery for what I see my own propensity to valorize writing that takes a certain pleasure in showing all its faults. we don’t want to be the drunk at a party greeting everyone by saying sorry about how drunk he is.

Former student:

ha, yeah, you’re completely right.  i am, almost always, drunk by the front door.  but still, that’s what I want to be taken as.  I want my writing to be taken as perhaps enlightening but ultimately fucked up.  and i think there’s a reason why those are the ones people remember (didion, hunter s. thompson, david foster wallace, michael herr.)

AK:

good, good, but i don’t know whether i want you to be, to use your own word, so “confident about your truthfulness,” even if the confidence is only about truthfulness-through-lack-of-authoritative-truthfulness.
you’re right abt the suspicion about the forceful invocation of ethics. people who do that are caught the next day masturbating in public.

Former student:

trust me, i am very unconfident about my truthfulness.

AK:

alright, man.
thus contented, i trudge off to sleep.

Former student:

always a pleasure, sir.

Tags: jen mcdonald, john d'agata, mike daisey, Philip Gourevitch, TAL