Amitava Kumar

Writer

1963-03-17

Amitava Kumar is an Indian writer and journalist. He is a Professor of English at Vassar College and is known for nonfiction and fiction focused on identity, politics, and migration.

Quotes by Amitava Kumar

We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps, but in the differences that thrive behind settled, more clear-cut divisions.
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'An Obedient Father' is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote 'The God of Small Things.'
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Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes and cinema houses, village squares, and half-forgotten libraries.
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Muslim anger has, of course, been stoked by America's war in Iraq and by Israel's brutal policies toward Palestine and Lebanon.
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I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me as a challenge, is the idea of doing strange things with what is real. Take what is real and make it more or less real.
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A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.
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When we were getting married the Hindu way in Arrah, we had an old guest who asked my wife what her 'good name' was. I think she'd heard that I had married a Muslim. When my wife said, 'Mona Ahmed Ali,' the lady looked at me and exclaimed, 'Oh, so you've married a terrorist.'
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I was seen as a traitor for marrying a Muslim - a Pakistani at that.
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Capitalism might everywhere be spreading havoc, but it is also triumphant everywhere.
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The lives of the young are so tumultuous.
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If India breaks your heart with untold inequalities, it also surprises you with the unheralded achievements of its most humble citizens.
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India allows you the luxury of a million inequalities. You can be a schoolboy selling tea to passengers sitting in a state transport bus, but you are royalty when compared to a shirtless, barefoot village boy, from what was traditionally considered an untouchable caste, living on snails and small fish - and sometimes rats.
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Each employed immigrant has his or her place of work. It is only the taxi driver, forever moving on wheels, who occupies no fixed space. He represents the immigrant condition.
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