Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar
Kumar speaking at the Asian American Writers Workshop in 2011.
Born	17 March 1963 (1963-03-17) (age 48) Bihar, India
Alma mater	Delhi University Syracuse University University of Minnesota
Occupation	Writer, journalist, and Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College

Amitava Kumar is an Indian writer and journalist who is currently Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College.^[1]

Early life and education

Kumar was born in the city of Arrah in the Indian state of Bihar on 17 March 1963. He grew up close to his birthplace in Patna, also in Bihar.^[2] There he spent his formative years at 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. Currently, he lives with his family in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Work

Overview

Kumar is the author of Husband of a Fanatic (The New Press, 2005 and Penguin-India, 2004), Bombay-London-New York (Routledge and Penguin-India, 2002), and Passport Photos (University of California Press and Penguin-India, 2000). He has also written a book of poems, No Tears for the N.R.I. (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1996). The novel Home Products was published in early 2007 by Picador-India, and appeared in the US in August 2009 under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing. Early in 2009, Picador-India published his book Evidence of Suspicion;^[3] the book was later published by Duke University Press in August 2010 under the title, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb: A Writer’s Report on the Global War on Terror. In his review of this book, Dwight Garner (critic) at the New York Times called it a "perceptive and soulful – if at times academic – meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions."^[4] A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb was also judged the Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the Asian American Literary Awards.

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 The New Statesman (UK);^[5] 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.^[6]

He was the scriptwriter for two documentary films: Dirty Laundry — about the national-racial politics of Indian South Africans — and Pure Chutney — about the descendants of indentured Indian labourers in Trinidad.

His academic writing and literary criticism has appeared in several journals, including Critical Inquiry, Critical Quarterly, College Literature, Race and Class, American Quarterly, Rethinking Marxism, Minnesota Review, Journal of Advanced Composition, Amerasia Journal and Modern Fiction Studies.^[7]

As a journalist, Kumar has regularly authored articles for newspapers and magazines across the world such as The New Statesman, The Nation, 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.^[8] In February 2011, Kumar interviewed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy for Guernica Magazine.^[9]

Kumar, along with Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil and Hari Kunzru, risked arrest by reading excerpts from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which is banned in India, at the 2012 Jaipur Literature Festival.^[10]

Published works

Books

The cover of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb, Kumar's latest book published in 2010.

• A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb, a non-fiction book about the war on terror, and the literary as well as artistic responses to it.
• Home Products
• Husband of a Fanatic, book on writing and religious violence.
• Bombay-London-New York, literary memoir cum critical report on Indian fiction
• Passport Photos, multi-genre book on immigration and postcoloniality.
• No Tears for the N.R.I., a book of poems

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.

Forewords and introductory notes

• Where the Wild Frontiers Are, by Manan Ahmed.
• “Duty-Free Indians,” a Foreword to Suburban Sahibs: Three Immigrant Families and their Passage from India to America by S. Mitra Kalita.
• “In Class,” a Foreword to Class and Its Others, edited by J.K. Gibson-Graham.

Awards and fellowships

Kumar has been a Fiction Fellow at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, a Barach Fellow at the Wesleyan Writers Festival, and has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association for three consecutive years. In addition, he has been awarded research fellowships from the NEH, Yale University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Dartmouth College, and University of California-Riverside.^[11] A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb was also judged the Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the Asian American Literary Awards.

External links

• Official website
• New York Times review of Husband of a Fanatic
• Interview for the Wisconsin Book Festival, 2008
• Interview on blogsite "Between the Lines"
• Amitava Kumar's short story "Postmortem" on NPR
• WYNC interview on The Leonard Lopate Show, 2010

References