Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar  was born in the city of Arrah in the Indian state of Bihar  17 March 1963. He grew up close to his birthplace in Patna  also in Bihar. There he spent his formative years at St.Michaels 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.. He lives with his family in Poughkeepsie New York.
His debut novel, Home Products, was published by Picador-India, and was short-listed for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award. This novel was also published in the US under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing.
A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm ATiny Bomb, was judged the ‘Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year’ at the Page Turner Literary Award. Kumar’s earlier non-fiction titles are Husband of a Fanatic, which was an ‘Editors’ Choice’ book on The New York Times list; Bombay-London-New York, included on the list of ‘Books of the Year’ in The New Statesman; and Passport Photos, winner of ‘Outstanding Book of the Year’ award from the Myers Program.

The Cover

Kumar has edited five critical anthologies. The publications in which his work has appeared include The Nation, The New Statesman, Boston Review, Critical Inquiry, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Guernica
Kumar serves on the advisory board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop as well as the Norman Mailer Center.
He is Professor of English at Vassar College in upstate New York.

Amitava Kumar, 50, believes that his home town of Patna actually has three avatars - the elsewhere city that lives in the imagination of those who, like him, left it behind;the nowhere city, filthy and frantic, that is inhabited by those who cannot leave it;and the city of hope for those who come from poor districts. He attempts to capture the essence of the city in a short biography, quite unattractively titled 'A Matter of Rats'. But Kumar, who teaches English at Vassar College in the US, says he wanted to write not about rulers but about rats, both the four-legged as well as the two-legged variety.
From an interview:-
From Megasthenes' eulogies to its magnificence to Shiva Naipaul's description of it as the 'heart of darkness', how difficult was it to chronicle the history of Patna's fall?

We learn history and everything else through textbooks. The approach is serious and dull. It lacks imagination. From the day I became a writer, I have tried to oppose everything bad about textbooks. My history of Patna is a personal one. I'll go even further. I'll call it a flawed portrait of a flawed city. The answer to your question is that it wasn't difficult at all. Once I had accepted that my history of Patna would be a mix of memoir and research, the writing became more easy and pleasurable.

My guide here was a mantra I received from V S Naipaul who had written in Beyond Belief: "It was years before I saw that the most important thing about travel, for the writer, was the people he found himself among. " Any teacher of non-fiction will tell you that the trick is to write about ordinary things in a way that is vivid and attractive for the reader. That is why I wanted to write not about our rulers but about rats. Rats, both four-legged and two-legged.

Extract from Amitava Kumar’s book A Matter of Rats

I would not have turned to writing if I was able to draw. When I was thirteen or fourteen, and attending school in Patna, I had not yet given up my ambition to become an artist. My earliest models were rulers and saints from our past. The teacher would be delivering his dull lecture on ancient Indian history, and I would try to copy, over and over again, the illustration printed in the textbook.
The Buddha posed a difficulty. The illustration in the book must have been based on a statue in the Gandhara style. His shapely eyes, shut in serene meditation, were the easiest to outline, and above them, the long arched eyebrows in flight; ditto for the full, feminine lips. The trouble began with the intricate, knotted rings of hair; and, it was altogether impossible to draw the perfect circle of the halo around his head.
Pataliputra, which later became Patna, was mentioned very early in that textbook, certainly by page twenty. The city was founded in the sixth century BCE by Ajatshatru, a monarch who was probably a regicide and a patricide. Until he built the fort-city at the confluence of the Ganga and Sone rivers, it was just a village named Pataligram. Gautama Buddha visited Pataligram shortly before his death and, if guidebooks are to be believed, delivered a prophecy that a great city would rise there.

Postmortem

[A three minute fiction by Amitava Kumar]

The nurse left work at five o'clock.
She had seen the dead woman's husband sitting, near the entrance, under the yellow sign that Doctor Ahmed had hung some months ago. "While You Wait, Meditate." He was sitting with his arms crossed, elbows cupped in the palms of his hands and hadn't looked up when she passed him on her way out.
Just before lunch, a convoy had come from the Army camp. A dark-skinned soldier, holding a small rifle in his left hand, threw open the office door and announced the Colonel. Doctor Ahmed had automatically stood up.
The Colonel was plump. He looked calm and extremely clean, the way bullfrogs do, gleaming green and gold in the mud. He put his baton on the table and asked the nurse to leave the office.
When Doctor Ahmed rang his bell, the nurse went back in and was told to get his wife, Zakia, from their home on the top floor. Usually, he just called her on the phone. The nurse hurried up, carrying news of the Colonel.
Doctor Zakia was a pediatrician, good for offering women advice about breast-feeding, but she understood at once why she was to do the postmortem. The soldiers put the stretcher in the operating room and left. When the doctor removed the white sheet, she made a noise and began reciting the Fatiha in a high voice. It was difficult for her to continue the examination — she had a grown-up daughter.
Then the nurse was alone with the young woman for over four hours, cleaning her of the blood and the filth, and then stitching her up. The abdomen and thighs had turned green, but this was expected. There was a pronounced swelling of the tongue and lips.
The nurse wondered whether the body would last till the funeral. If there was a protest, it would take the entire day in the sun for the procession to reach the cemetery.
A year ago, a doctor in the north had revealed that the corpse brought to him was of a woman who had been gang-raped. This was a mistake. The Army put out the story that the woman used to come to the camp for customers and that her husband found out and had probably got her killed.
In the warm and stuffy room, the nurse realized that her teeth were chattering. She stopped and for a long while stared at the back of her gloved hands. Then she turned them over, as if she were praying, and studied the film of dark coagulated matter on her fingers.
There was no slippage and still it was hard work. Doctor Zakia would probably tell the family that the body had been washed thrice. The women would nevertheless insist on doing what was proper. How was she to save them? No one teaches you in nursing school to cover cigarette burns on the body or to stitch torn nipples.
When she finally stepped out of the room she was startled to see a dozen soldiers in the hallway. She met the eye of the one closest to her and flinched, but he was quiet, even shy, like a dog that has brought in a squirrel and dropped it on the carpet.
At six, she was sitting in front of the television in her tiny living room. And there she was, the young woman in her wedding photograph. The newsreader said the body had been found in a ditch after the woman had gone missing for 26 hours. She had been struck sometime at night by a speeding vehicle.
Courtesy: Many sources