An authoritative survey of Indian writings and Indian diaspora

books:

	• Bombay--London--New York Amitava Kumar Routledge, 2002 - 296 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Being Amitava Malkovich

What we get with this book is a sure-footed survey of indian writing in English that feels like a grand tour by a docent who also happens to be your close friend. Amitava Kumar is an emerging literary voice from the indian subcontinent. The intimate prose evokes feelings of alienation and displacement that serve as a recurrent theme in a manner common to many expatriate authors but what is special with this book is a poignant sociological component. The author is not content to rely on his own keen observations of the real world; he delves into the world of fiction that many writers of eminence have created. The academic and the writer of fiction come together in a way that left me feeling good about myself.

Several photographs adorning the book give an air of authencity to the prose. The book brings a sense of immediacy to the forgotten places in india in a way that was never done before.With this book he has created a portal to his brain much like the movie "Being John Malkovich".

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An authoritative survey of Indian writings and Indian diaspora

Amitava Kumar in this work surveys Indian writing in English. He explores socio-geography of the Indian diaspora (some 20 million people living outside their home country), touching upon the common feeling of nostalgia and nationalism. His social view in not only limited to his own experience, but also draws from fictional worlds created by various exemplary authors like V S Naipaul and Hanif Kureishei.

This book is a curious mix of autobiography, literary commentary, stories from Bollywood movies and contemporary News!

Apart from its luminous prose, the book is adored with absorbing photos and poems. At places, photos do not fit well with the text. The poems are brief and simple. Quotations from various authors make this work an entertaining read. I highly recommened it to those interested in exploring Indian writings.

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for more information click here

Being Amitava Malkovich

What we get with this book is a sure-footed survey of indian writing in English that feels like a grand tour by a docent who also happens to be your close friend. Amitava Kumar is an emerging literary voice from the indian subcontinent. The intimate prose evokes feelings of alienation and displacement that serve as a recurrent theme in a manner common to many expatriate authors but what is special with this book is a poignant sociological component. The author is not content to rely on his own keen observations of the real world; he delves into the world of fiction that many writers of eminence have created. The academic and the writer of fiction come together in a way that left me feeling good about myself.

When Amitava Kumar left Patna, India, he envisioned himself as an up-and-coming citizen of the world, leaving behind the confines of Indian traditions. Yet like the wave of exiles that preceded him, he found that once we leave our past, we are defined by it: in the U.S. he is pigeonholed by his appearance and quizzed about saris and arranged marriages.
"There is no beginning that is a blank page," writes Kumar. Circling the three capitals of the Indian diaspora, Bombay-London-New York captures the contours of the expatriate experience, touching on the themes of abandonment, nostalgia, and exile that have powered some of the most prominent Indian writers today -- Naipaul, Rushdie, Roy, Kureishi, as well as E.M. Forster and Gandhi.
With resonant, poetic language and a storyteller's sensibility, Kumar explores the works of these writers through the lens of his own life as an immigrant and writer. As their fiction reveals, the past of the expatriate is mythical,shaped by memory and loss.
With tales of life in India and London and meditations on the form Indian fiction gives to the lives of those who read about it, this is a sweeping, passionate search to find one's own story in the stories of others.

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