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KATHMANDU
AMITAVA KUMAR is one of the exciting new voices in global cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Kumar was born in Ara, Bihar, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. An Associate Professor of Literature at Penn State University, Kumar is a poet, literary critic, journalist, filmmaker and photographer. He is the author and editor of books of poetry, politics, teaching, cultural studies, and radical aesthetics. Like his earlier book Passport Photos (University of California and Penguin-India, 2000) that treated the related themes of immigration and postcoloniality, his latest book Bombay-London-New York (Routledge and Penguin-India, 2002) is also a multi-genre celebration of the fascinating literary journey that Kumar has undertaken as a reader and critic of Indian fiction. His own fiction and poetry, along with personal accounts, make the book an imaginative exercise that explores many of the impulses that have helped create contemporary Indian fiction in English.
AB: In Bombay-London-New York you have written that you came to books or anything literary late in life and you did very little reading and writing when young. But that didn't prevent you from
harboring a desire of being a writer; how come that happened?
AK: Yes, it is true that I did very little reading in my childhood and even youth. I think the desire to write came not from doing any reading--though that became true later on, when I found writers I liked---but from a deeply felt need to make sense of my own surroundings and the way in which I sough to transcend them.
AB: Your first language is not English, and it is very difficult for someone whose first language is not English to start writing in English from a very young age. Around what age did you start writing seriously?
AK: I went to an 'English-medium' school in Patna. Although at home we spoke Bhojpuri, the main language of learning was English. Whatever knowledge I had of the language then was not in any way exceptional.
I began writing when I was in higher secondary school. I wrote poems and some stories. The poems I wrote were not any good. Most of them were written while I was in class, trying to ignore what
the teacher was saying about economics or mathematics.
AB: I felt traces of Naipaulian prose--simple, short and pruned down to the essentials---in your writing. Are you in any way influenced by Naipaul's writing?
AK: Naipaul has been an important influence, and he is also a presence in the book. I cannot ignore him. Just this morning, having returned from Srinagar yesterday, I was reading what he had written about his own visit to the city. I am amazed at his clarity and more than that, at his intelligence. I do not always agree with him, of course, but I find it impossible to remain unimpressed by him.
AB: The title gives the impression that your book is a travelogue, but it isn't; at least not in the sense of a body journeying into different geographic locations. Isn't the title misleading? However, the book is about a journey, but an unusual journey made through the reading of books.
AK: The book is a travelogue, but it also makes the argument that often we travel only through books.
I have never lived in London. Yet, like many other children of the empire, I carry a London in my head.
AB; Your book is a smorgasbord of poetry, story, article, literary reading, autobiography, social critique and whatnot. How would you categorize this unusual book? Or is it a deliberate attempt to blur the distinction between the literary and non-literary, which the back cover attests to?
AK: I am a writer; I practise journalism; I teach. This means that I employ different languages every day. These languages are a part of me and they make me who I am. In my book I have tried to give voice to my experience---and to what I think is the complexity of the world we inhabit---by employing a more mixed form. In the process, as you suggest, I have tried also to point out how the literary cannot always be sealed off from the nonliterary.
AB: Your book is rife with diasporic concerns, dislocations, dispossessions, rootlessness, nostalgia about the home left behind. You seem to have heightened
diasporic concerns. Is it because you always wanted to leave your country? Or, does that heightened diasporic concerns stem from your reading of third world literature, something which you have to do as a part of your teaching job?
AK: The book is about migrant lives. It is but natural that what you call 'diasporic concerns' will loom large in my account. My interest in the diaspora is not because I always wanted to leave my coun-try---I am not sure I always wanted that, and if it was ever as simple as that---but because I want to under-
stand the politics of the immigrant condition. One of the questions I take up in the book is why among the Indians abroad the 'soft' emotion of nostalgia often turns into the 'hard' emotion of fundamentalism. The support that overseas Indians have given to vicious, rightwing campaigns waged by the Sangh Pariva makes this a very urgent issue.
AB: Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad says third world literature does not exist. Writer Amitav Ghose says that Commonwealth literature is a
mere myth and does not exist. What both of them were voicing against was the politics of labeling, which is too limiting. You teach third world literature and you talk frequently about diasporic literature. Aren't you engaging yourself in the politics of labeling? Does the third world and diasporic literature exist?
AK: If you read Bombay-London-New York you will discover that I am interested in questions of imposed labels. I write in an early chapter about how I was hired to teach 'world literature' and how by using the writings of people like Arundhati Roy I end up asking my students to think of a category like 'World Bank literature.' As a writer, I must admit, I am more interested in your picking up my book and reading it with an open mind.
AB: A loose thread of diasporic concerns binds your genrebreaking book. At least that is what I feel. Do you feel that way?
AK: As the title suggests, this book is about travel. I would say, therefore, that the idea of travel, and what results as loss but also as insight from the displacement that
accompanies travelis the principal concern of the book.
AB: You have talked about Indian writing going provincial. Is this the manifestation of a desire to peddle an exotic image to the West? Or is it the other way round, the demystification of the exotic image of the East?
AK: Such questions (about "the desire to peddle an exotic image to the West") are repeated mechanically by many critics in the subcontinent. There is good reason to ask such questions of course, but I think writers have the right to ask a question in turn: can reviewers and interviewers use their imagination and try to think of alternative possibilities. For instance, if you write about the provincial, is it possible to think of other good reasons why you might want to address that subject? If I write of a small town, is it not possible that I do so also because I am interested in giving voice to the vernacular experience? Must critics always reduce the complexity of the world in order to say anything that is even half meaningful?