Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate
In the summer of 1999, while India and Pakistan were engaged in a war, Amitava Kumar—a Hindu Indian writer living and teaching in the United States—married a Pakistani Muslim woman. That event led to a process of discovery that prompted Kumar to examine the hatreds and intimacies joining Indians and Pakistanis, Hindus and Muslims, fundamentalists and secularists, writers and rioters.\ In Husband of a Fanatic, Kumar chronicles the entanglements that his new marriage provoked—from ambivalent...
Search in google:
The hatreds are as old as the civilizations, violent, almost conducted as a ritual. Children die, women die, men die, and those in the West read about it all in comfortable rooms. Kumar, however, goes far beyond the comfortable and separate places of the Western observer and deep into his own space and experience as he describes his life as an Indian Hindu, including his marriage to a Pakistani Muslim at a time when their respective cultures were in active warfare. As he encounters the violence described in the West as "nationalistic" or "religious" he ponders the complexities of individual and national faith, belief, identity and relationship to the Other that make lies of the simple explanations offered by those whose experiences consist of sitting quietly by in separate spaces. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR The New York Times - Christopher de Bellaigue In Husband of a Fanatic, his challenging and at times eloquent rumination on Hindu-Muslim tensions in India and its diaspora, Amitava Kumar often summons the dark humor that South Asian secularists use to combat their sense that the battle is not going their way. He opens with his encounter with Jagdish Barotia, a member of the militant group Hindu Unity, who immigrated to the United States over 30 years ago and whose violence of feeling is absurd, even pitiful, because he is doomed to live among Muslims in a multiracial part of Queens. Kumar lets Barotia's grossness stand unadorned and thereby lampoons it. ''On the phone,'' Kumar recalls, ''he had called me a haraami, which means 'bastard' in Hindi, and, after clarifying that he didn't mean this abuse only for me as a person but for everyone else who was like me, he had also called me a kutta, a dog.''
\ Christopher de BellaigueIn Husband of a Fanatic, his challenging and at times eloquent rumination on Hindu-Muslim tensions in India and its diaspora, Amitava Kumar often summons the dark humor that South Asian secularists use to combat their sense that the battle is not going their way. He opens with his encounter with Jagdish Barotia, a member of the militant group Hindu Unity, who immigrated to the United States over 30 years ago and whose violence of feeling is absurd, even pitiful, because he is doomed to live among Muslims in a multiracial part of Queens. Kumar lets Barotia's grossness stand unadorned and thereby lampoons it. ''On the phone,'' Kumar recalls, ''he had called me a haraami, which means 'bastard' in Hindi, and, after clarifying that he didn't mean this abuse only for me as a person but for everyone else who was like me, he had also called me a kutta, a dog.''\ — The New York Times\ \
