Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar (born 17 March 1963) is an Indian writer and journalist who is Professor of English, holding the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College.

Amitava Kumar
Kumar speaking at the Asian American Writers Workshop in 2011.
Born	(1963-03-17) 17 March 1963 Arrah, Bihar, India
Alma mater	Delhi University Syracuse University University of Minnesota
Occupation(s)	Writer, journalist, and Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College
Awards	Guggenheim Fellowship <https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/amitava-kumar/>, United States Artists Fellow <https://www.unitedstatesartists.org/fellow/amitava-kumar/>

Personal Life

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. His Father, Ishwar Chandra was a Senior Bihar Bureaucrat from Jadopur, East Champaran Bihar He attended 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. His wife Mona Ali is an economics professor at SUNY New Paltz. Kumar lives with his family in Poughkeepsie, New York.

As a professor at Vassar College, Kumar has made significant connections in the writing and journalism world. Kumar served as a mentor to journalist Kelly Stout and Alanna Okun, a senior editor at Vox, while they were students at Vassar.

The death of Kumar's parents had a significant effect on the content of his writing. He reminisced on his father and ancestors in a 2022 article for the wire. In a 2024 article for Lit Hub, he compared experiencing the death of his father to various literary accounts of death, like in Blake Morrison's memoir When Did You Last See Your Father?.

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), Passport Photos (University of California Press and Penguin-India, 2000), the book of poems No Tears for the N.R.I. (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1996), the novel Home Products (Picador-India, 2007 and as Nobody Does the Right Thing in 2009).

His prize-winning book is A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb: A Writer’s Report on the Global War on Terror (Duke University Press, 2010; and as Evidence of Suspicion, 2009). In his review, Dwight Garner 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." It was also awarded 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; Bombay-London-New York was on the list of "Books of the Year" in New Statesman (UK); 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.

Kumar 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.

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

Kumar, Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil and Hari Kunzru, were threatened with arrest for reading excerpts from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which is banned in India, at the 2012 Jaipur Literature Festival. In March 2013, Kumar collaborated with Teju Cole on a text-with-photographs called "Who's Got the Address?"

Kumar's most recent novel, My Beloved Life, was published in 2024 to positive review.

Published works

Books

• No Tears for the N.R.I., Writers Workshop, 1996, ISBN 978-8171898930, a book of poems
• Passport Photos, University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0520218161, multi-genre book on immigration and postcoloniality
• Bombay–London–New York, Routledge, 2002, ISBN 978-0415942102, literary memoir cum critical report on Indian fiction
• Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate, The New Press, 2005, ISBN 978-1565849266, book on writing and religious violence
• Home Products (published in the U.S. under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing by Duke University Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0822346708)
• A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb, Duke University Press Books, 2010, ISBN 978-0822345626, a non-fiction book about the war on terror, and the literary as well as artistic responses to it.
• A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna, Duke University Press Books, 2014, ISBN 978-0822357049
• Lunch with a Bigot: The Writer in the World, Duke University Press Books, 2015, ISBN 978-0822359111
• Immigrant, Montana, Knopf, 2018, ISBN 978-0525520757, first published in India as The Lovers, Aleph, 2017, ISBN 978-9386021007
• Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on Style, Duke University Press Books, 2020, ISBN 978-1478006275
• A Time Outside This Time, Penguin Random House, 2021, ISBN 9780593319017
• The Blue Book: A Writer's Journal, HarperCollins India, 2022, ISBN 9789354893742, a book of drawings and diary entries
• The Yellow Book: A Traveller's Diary, HarperCollins India, 2023, ISBN 9789356996038
• My Beloved Life, 2024, ISBN 9780593536063

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

• The Little Book of Terror, by Daisy Rockwell
• 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 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. He has also been awarded the Lannan Foundation Marfa Residency, residency at Yaddo, a Fiction Fellowship at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, a Barach Fellowship 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, Stony Brook University, Dartmouth College, and University of California-Riverside. 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
• WNYC interview on the Brian Lehrer Show, 2015
• Amitava Kumar on the PEN-Charlie Hebdo controversy
• Interview on Full Stop
• The Seen and the Unseen Podcast, 2022