On the anniversary of the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri, I wrote a brief prose-poem which was published by The Wire: A lot of life is left in a man being killed. He does not at first foresee the end. He knows, of course, that anything can happen. When it begins his only worry… Read more »
Posts By: Amitava Kumar
In Patna
I have returned to my hometown to read from The Lovers as a part of a #BiharKalam event.
Two Or Three Things I Know About Her
Here’s what I remember about the love-stories I like–I wrote this in a piece for DailyO: Let’s talk about favourite lines. That is, let’s talk about what one loves. Here is a favourite line of mine from a short-story by Junot Diaz: “The half-life of love is forever.” More
Mumbai
Heat of Life
My brief piece for the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Lingua Franca on Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2017. In an author’s note, Desmond has written that often the very people he was studying taught him how to see. Nevertheless, he missed much, at least at first, “not… Read more »
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
My review of Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in Bookforum: On the morning of June 9, 2012, Avtar Singh called 911 in Selma, California, to say that he had killed his family and was about to turn the gun on himself. When the police reached his house, they sent in a… Read more »
We, the Mistaken People
My piece for the New Yorker on the attacks on Indians living in America. On a September evening in 1987, Navroze Mody, a thirty-year-old Indian man living in Jersey City, went for drinks at the Gold Coast Café, in Hoboken. Later that night, after he left the bar, he was accosted on the street by… Read more »
Heart of Darkness
“Central India’s Ugly Fight for Environmental Justice.” That’s the title of my report from Bastar about a meeting organized by Soni Sori. If you threw a dart at the heart of India but your aim was off, a little low and to the right, you would hit the village of Matenar, in the administrative division… Read more »
Santosh Yadav Must Be Released #PressFreedom
The excellent Indian magazine, Caravan, has published a report I wrote on the repression of journalists in Bastar: “Yeh raat mein sapna dekh raha tha sarkar ke khilaaf,” Kamal Shukla, a veteran reporter said. I was travelling with him for a few days in Bastar, in December, and Shukla was describing the dire conditions journalists… Read more »
The Lovers: A Novel
Forthcoming/Monsoon, 2017/Indian subcontinent only/Aleph Book Company. The book will also be published under the title Immigrant, Montana: A Novel by Faber in the UK, Knopf in the US, and in translation by publishers elsewhere.