Writing In-Between: An Interview with Amitava Kumar
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Amitava Kumar's recent novel, Immigrant, Montana (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), recounts living in "the gap between India, the land of my birth, and the United States, where I arrived as a young adult." It tells the story of Kailash, an immigrant from Bihar, India, to the U.S. for graduate school and his experiences in love as well as academic life. It was a New York Times Notable Book and one of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2018.
In all his work, Kumar recounts the region in-between—between post-colonial places and the metropole, immigrant and citizen, critical theory and journalistic writing, poetry and politics, fact and fiction, and words and photographs. His early books, Passport Photos (U of California P, 2000) and Bombay—London—New York (Routledge, 2002), carve out a hybrid genre blending criticism, journalism, autobiography, and photography to reflect on the experience of immigration. Passport Photos and Immigrant, Montana also intersperse poems, many of them drawn from his first book, a chapbook, No Tears for the N.R.I. (P. Lal, 1996). In conjunction with those books, Kumar also made two films, Pure Chutney (1998) and Dirty Laundry (2005) about Indians who had settled in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the world.
His next set of books turn more directly to nonfiction, reflecting on the politics of multiple worlds. Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey through India, Pakistan, Love and Hate (New Press, 2005) deals with religious tensions, drawing on his own situation as a Hindu Indian married to a Pakistani Muslim; A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb (Duke UP, 2010) is a work of reportage of conditions after 9/11, focusing on injustices of the war on terror; and A Matter of Rats: A Short History of Patna (Duke, 2014) sketches an idiosyncratic picture of his hometown. In addition, Lunch with a Bigot: The Writer in the World (Duke, 2015) collects shorter journalistic pieces.
Alongside his nonfiction, Kumar published his first novel, Home Products, about a murder in India, in 2007 (rpt. in the U.S. as Nobody Does the Right Thing [Duke UP, 2010]). Most recently, he offers a guide to writing in Every Day I Write the Book (Duke, 2020), which includes interviews and comments from a range of writers, as well as his own advice. [End Page 487]
In addition, Kumar has edited several collections, including Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere (NYUP, 1997); Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (St. Martin's, 1999); The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V. S. Naipaul (British Council, 2002); World Bank Literature (U of Minnesota P, 2002); and Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate (Routledge, 2003).
Born in 1963, Kumar grew up in Patna and attended Delhi University (B.A., 1984; M.A., 1986). He migrated to the U.S. to attend Syracuse University, where he received an M.A. in English in 1988, then continued on at University of Minnesota to do his Ph.D., writing a dissertation on "The Politics of Culture and Protest" (Ph.D., 1993). He has taught at the University of Florida, Penn State, and Vassar College, where he is Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English.
This interview took place on March 19, 2019 in Pittsburgh, PA. It was conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams, and transcribed by Maggie Laird, an M.A. student at Carnegie Mellon University.
You've worked in different genres, writing for academics and academic presses but also doing nonfiction and journalism for trade presses. And now your new novel, Immigrant, Montana, is on the New York Times Notable Books of the Year list. Unlike some academics, you did not leave academic writing to find your true self, but had tried to do an alternative kind of writing all along, and there are a lot of consistencies through your work. Your first book, Passport Photos, which is a critical book from an academic press, is actually very similar to Immigrant, Montana. How would you characterize your writing?
In the Author's Note in...
