PROSE
Not a genuine quest
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`I think that the personal project he undertakes is fundamentally inauthentic.'
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AMITAVA KUMAR'S new book, Husband of a Fanatic, is written on the occasion of his getting married to a Pakistani Muslim. (The "fanatic" of the title is an ironic reference to the popular representation and perception of Muslims in the public domain.) This event leads to an exploration of the nature of religious violence and fanaticism in India, and, particularly post-Gujarat, is used as a way of analysing prejudices and brutal violence against Muslims. Kumar conceptualises his project along the lines of Murakami's book Underground, a book that investigated the sarin gas disaster in Tokyo. Kumar quotes Murukami, who was living in America at the time this happened, as wanting to "go back and do one solid work — I might reinforce a new stance for myself, a new vantage point."
The nature of violence
Kumar's own journey takes him from the camps in Gujarat to the camps of the Pandits in Jammu, from the Wagah border to meetings with the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the overseas wing of the RSS. He interviews riot victims, observes the conditions in the camps: his narrative encompasses the present communal violence and links it with the violence of Partition. And underlying this is the quest to find other Hindu Muslim marriages in troubled times.
Violence, Kumar says, is central to an understanding of our responses to the "enemy" state, the terrible Other, Pakistan. This, of course, is an understanding of the nature of the violence of Partition: Kumar explores the notion of the border through analyses of stories by Manto and Sahni, as well as through his own witnessing of the armed territoriality at the border. He looks at cricket and the question of obtaining a Pakistani visa, at the reception of the blockbuster "Gadar", at the Kargil war and its colossal waste. The chapter called Textbook Enemies includes a corpus of letters by children from both sides of the border, which then frame his argument of the misrepresentation of each country by the other. Drawing on the distinction made by Gyanendra Pandey between testimony and rumour, Kumar says: "My interest in presenting testimonies and letters is not so much a corrective for rumours as it is a tool for the classroom — even amidst violence it is children who remain open minded and willing to learn."
Narrow nationalism
Some of the more interesting sections of the book are on Gandhi and his years in South Africa, Kumar's meeting with the victims of those blinded by the police in Bhagalpur in 1980 (through which he looks into the metaphor of blinding via Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians) and his exploration of narrow nationalism.
The problem with this book is that Kumar does nothing new or provocative with the material he has. His conclusions about faith, for example, remain at the level of the old and exhausted oppositions between the "Hindu" identity he had been brought up to inhabit in the small towns of his growing up and the "new" secular identity he began to embrace when he left the provinces and came to the city. A phrase used by someone he interviews haunts him: the phrase in question is "enchanted civil societies". But hasn't this concept been relentlessly explored by Nandy et al? Kumar balks at the definition of Hindu identity being foisted upon him, but ends weakly: "To make it worse, I feel that I cannot speak loudly as a Hindu (italics his) because I have not, after all, even visited a temple for a long time."
Fundamental problem
If Kumar's ostensible confusion about his identity was poignant, it would redeem this book for me, however familiar its terrain. But my real problem with the book lies here: I think that the personal project he undertakes is fundamentally inauthentic. It is not moving in the slightest; what, after all, is his predicament? His wife remains an absent presence, obviously a deliberate device, but one that serves little purpose. The history of his marrying is so slight and ordinary that it gives one pause: they have a Muslim wedding and then a Hindu one, he "converts" (acquiesces to a change of name for the purpose of the wedding) and this causes his mother to write him a tearful letter, because, canny writer that he is, he decides to publish an essay on this occasion and she gets to know about it. He then deliberates on conversion and says brightly (publicly disagreeing with Naipaul) that we are all converts.
This would have been a far more honest book if Kumar had stated at the outset that it was a helpful and reasonably written reader for all those who are not familiar with the fierce horror centring around the rise of Hindutva and those who have not bothered to acquaint themselves with history, both recent and otherwise. In other words, it is an amalgamation of critical material and, therefore, of viewpoints, which speaks more of Kumar's desire to publish with an alarming regularity than it does of a genuine quest.
Husband of a Fanatic, Amitava Kumar, Penguin, Rs.295.
IRA SINGH
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