Amitava Kumar

One winter morning, a monkey stole into Mamaji's room. He climbed on the huge white bed and finding Mamaji's pistol brandished it - they say - at my cousin, born two months after me and still in her crib. No one moved. Then, turning the pistol around, the primate brain prompting the opposable thumb to grasp the trigger, the monkey blew his brains out. Meet Kailash. AKA Kalashnikov. Or AK-47. Or just plain AK. His journey from India has taken him to graduate school in New York where he keeps falling in love: not only with women - Jennifer, Nina, Cai Yan - but with literature and radical politics, the fuel of youthful exuberance. Each heady affair brings new learning: about himself, about America, and his relationship to a country founded on immigration, but a country that is now unsure of the migrant's place in the nation's fabric. How do you educate yourself in belonging when you are in a constant state of exile? Immigrant, Montana is the story of AK's sentimental education. His intellectual, emotional, and romantic journey gives the book a new narrative form, one that thrillingly reinvents the campus and postcolonial novel through wry, comic intelligence. A sharp cultural satire for a generation losing an ideological sense of itself, Immigrant, Montana is erotic and tender, provocative and playful - a meditation on courage and endeavour, and what it takes to truly be heroic.

Immigrant, Montana

"When a writer named Satya attends a prestigious artist retreat, he finds the pressures of the outside world won't let up: President Trump rages online; a dangerous virus envelopes the globe; and the 24-hour news cycle throws fuel on every fire. For most of the retreat fellows, such stories are unbearable distractions; but for Satya, these Orwellian interruptions begin to crystalize into an idea for his new novel, Enemies of the People, about the lies we tell ourselves and each other. Satya scours his life for moments where truth bends toward the imagined, and misinformation is mistaken as fact. Sifting through the President's tweets, newspaper clippings, childhood memories from India, and moments as an immigrant, a husband, father, and teacher, A Time Outside This Time captures our feverish political moment with intelligence, beauty, and an eye for the uncanny. It is a brilliant meditation on life in a post-truth era"--

A Time Outside This Time

It is not only the past that lies in ruins in Patna, it is also the present. But that is not the only truth about the city that Amitava Kumar explores in this vivid, entertaining account of his hometown. We accompany him through many Patnas, the myriad cities locked within the city—the shabby reality of the present-day capital of Bihar; Pataliputra, the storied city of emperors; the dreamlike embodiment of the city in the minds and hearts of those who have escaped contemporary Patna's confines. Full of fascinating observations and impressions, A Matter of Rats reveals a challenging and enduring city that exerts a lasting pull on all those who drift into its orbit. Kumar's ruminations on one of the world's oldest cities, the capital of India's poorest province, are also a meditation on how to write about place. His memory is partial. All he has going for him is his attentiveness. He carefully observes everything that surrounds him in Patna: rats and poets, artists and politicians, a girl's picture in a historian's study, and a sheet of paper on his mother's desk. The result is this unique book, as cutting as it is honest.

A Short Biography of Patna

A Matter of Rats

An exceptionally moving novel that traces the arc of a man's life, starting from his 1935 birth in a small village in India. Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. And this is only the first of many challenges in store for Jadu. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He meets the sherpa who first summited Everest. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States—whose perspective sheds new light on Jadu. All the while, currents of huge change sweep across India—from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham, cholera to covid—and buffet both Jadu and Jugnu's lives. Piercing, fleet-footed, and undeniably resonant, here is a novel from a singularly gifted writer about how we tell stories and write history, how individuals play a counterpoint to big movements, how no single life is without consequence.

A novel

My Beloved Life

A writing manual as well as a manifesto, Every Day I Write the Book combines Amitava Kumar's practical writing advice with interviews with prominent writers, offering guidance and inspiration for academic writers at all levels.

Notes on Style

Every Day I Write the Book

"Passport Photos is a radiant text. It connects its own ironic lyricism with an acute awareness of historical context, and is a moving document of the questions posed by symbolic migration."—Sara Suleri Goodyear, author of Meatless Days "Amitava Kumar brings his talents as a photographer, poet, scriptwriter, and journalist to the job of critical commentary, refusing to partition and delegate these skills to separate provinces of his intellectual life. The result is an ethical voice and a technical style that often defies our expectations of the critical commentator. I find that voice and style immensely appealing, no more so than in the multi-genre documentary work of Passport Photos. This is not a heavy-handed screed on the conditions of immigrants. It is a sensuous guide to the common contradictions and experiences faced by immigrants to the U.S., whether they are coming from the underside of the international division of labor or from well-heeled and credentialed birthrights. An undeniably original contribution to several academic and journalistic fields, Passport Photos will, I expect, be a widely-acclaimed publication and much cited as a fresh paradigm-shaker."—Andrew Ross, author of The Celebration Chronicles "An important, timely, and unique book that seems to have multiple lines of descent--as if postcolonial theory were cross-pollinated with poetry, photojournalism, and memoir all at once."—Michael Bérubé, author of Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child "Amitava Kumar is the most grounded of the postcolonial writers today. Passport Photos is a brilliant illustration of his skills. A must read for anybody interested in immigration, transnational identities, and globalization."—Manthia Diawara, author of In Search of Africa "Passport Photos is a meditation on the modalities of the immigrant: on language as law and record of living immigrant dailiness; on place as a world one loses that gives rise to identity and belonging; on knowledge as the possession of some and not others, as what the immigrant can be but cannot have." Lisa Lowe, author of Immigrant Acts

Passport Photos

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Bombay--London--New York

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Writing Badly is Easy

"The author of ... Lunch with a Bigot now gives us a ... novel--reminiscent of Teju Cole, W.G. Sebald, John Berger--about a young new immigrant to the U.S. in search of love: across dividing lines between cultures, between sexes, and between the particular desires of one man and the women he comes to love"--

The Lovers is about a man in search of a love story. This man, our narrator, is Kailash-a new immigrant, eager to shine. His friends teasingly call him Kalashnikov and sometimes AK-47, even AK. In his account of his years at a university in New York, AK takes us through the bittersweet arc of youth and love. There is discovery and disappointment. There are the brilliant women, Jennifer and Nina and Cai Yan. There is the political texture of campus life and the charismatic professor overseeing these young men and women, Ehsaan Ali (modelled on the real-life Eqbal Ahmad). Manifest in AK's first years and first loves is the wild enthusiasm of youth, its idealism, chaotic desires and confusions. A decidedly modern novel that melds story and reportage, anecdote and annotation, picture and text, fragment and essay, The Lovers reminds us of the works of John Berger and Teju Cole. Funny, meditative and shot through with waves of longing, the book explores feelings of discomfort about cultural misunderstandings and the lack of clarity between men and women. At heart though, it is an investigation of love-'love despite, or in spite of; love beyond and across dividing lines'.

A Novel

The Lovers

The author of the widely praised Lunch with a Bigot now gives us a remarkable novel--reminiscent of Teju Cole, W.G. Sebald, and John Berger--about a young new immigrant to the U.S. in search of love: across dividing lines between cultures, between sexes, and between the particular desires of one man and the women he comes to love. The young man is Kailash, from India. His new American friends call him Kalashnikov, AK-47, AK. He takes it all in his stride: he wants to fit in--and more than that, to shine. In the narrative of his years at a university in New York, AK describes the joys and disappointments of his immigrant experience; the unfamiliar political and social textures of campus life; the indelible influence of a charismatic professor--also an immigrant, his personal history as dramatic as AK's is decidedly not; the very different natures of the women he loved; and of himself in and out of love with each of them. Telling his own story, AK is both meditative and the embodiment of the enthusiasm of youth in all its idealism and chaotic desires. His wry, vivid perception of the world he's making his own, and the brilliant melding of story and reportage, anecdote and annotation, picture and text, gives us a singularly engaging, insightful, and moving novel--one that explores the varieties and vagaries of cultural misunderstanding, but is, as well, an impassioned investigation of love.

A Hindu Indian writer living and teaching in the United States describes his turbulent marriage to a Pakistani Muslim woman, which prompted his investigation into the long-standing conflict between Indians, Pakistanis, Hindus, and Muslims as reflected in classrooms, Web sites, psychiatric wards, and more.

A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love and Hate

Husband of a Fanatic

On the challenges of progressive pedagogy

Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere

Class Issues

One day passes. Then another. A whole succession of days turning into months and years. How to mark our separate days? The places we have been. Our individual passions, our pain. Against the blurring of years, the clarity of a record. And even amidst crises, how to keep creativity alive? Also, how to stop time? After the first wave of Covid had passed, the lockdown was lifted and travel resumed in earnest. Amitava Kumar found himself in London with a group of American students on a study tour-in the midst of the Omicron wave. A year later, he was in India, in his native Motihari among other places. Meanwhile, Russia attacked Ukraine and Rushdie was assaulted with a knife in upstate New York. Amitava kept a journal-to record the times he was living through and how he would like to remember them. In these pages, through words and drawings, an acclaimed author and artist reveals how a writer observes the world around us-and the world inside us. The Yellow Book, like The Blue Book, shows us how we can put together not just a journal or a book, but also how we assemble a life; and, in our troubled times, why we must plant memories and continue to believe in spring.

A Traveller's Diary

The Yellow Book

Bureaucratic in its convolutions and brutal in its deceptions, the war on terror has had an impact on our lives that we do not yet understand. We sense it. A growing claustrophobia, wariness, suspicion, the stickiness of constant surveillance. But for those who are actually entangled in it, the trap has teeth and they are fierce. Author and teacher Amitava Kumar examines the mangled lives of some of those who tripped - SAR Geelani, Hemant Lakhani and Shahwar Matin Siraj in the US among others. And, he catalogues, with the critic's compass and a curator's zeal, the fierce renewal in art and literature that has evolved out of the war. Spanning the subcontinents of India and the USA, part reportage, part philosophy, this is a book whose importance cannot be exaggerated.

A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb

The Writer in the World

Lunch With a Bigot

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Indian Writer as an Expatriate

Away

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, 1932, Trinidadian writer of Indian origin and Nobel Prize winner.

Amitava Kumar

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