03-25-2005, 06:14 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-Mudy+Mar 25 2005, 11:38 AM-->QUOTE(Mudy @ Mar 25 2005, 11:38 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin--> <!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->any can post this, if relevant<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
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'Husband of a Fanatic': Sleeping With the Enemy
By CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE
Published: March 20, 2005
A DECADE ago, when I was living in India, a Jewish American woman described for me a Hindu boy who had enrolled in Hebrew lessons she was giving to members of Bombay's tiny Jewish community. When she had asked why he should join a class for Jews, he had replied, ''We share an enemy.'' I told the story to a group of Indian friends I knew were worried by India's growing communal discord. I expected them to shake their heads solemnly. Instead, they burst out laughing.
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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 'b@st@rd' 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.''
Soon enough, we learn the reason for Barotia's contempt; Kumar, an Indian Hindu who is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, has married Mona, a Pakistani Muslim. When they married, he says, he wallowed in a ''tepid tide'' of altruism and ''felt good about myself for marrying 'the enemy.' '' To understand the wider significance of his commitment as well as his own ''complicities and contradictions,'' he embarks on a tour of Hindu-Muslim strife and recalls wars between India and Pakistan -- ''Hindu-Muslim riots fought with tanks and fighter planes.''
At its best, Kumar's reportage has the immediacy and respectful attention to detail of a well-turned Granta essay (it is no surprise to see Ian Jack, Granta's editor, cited in the acknowledgments). <b>Picking his way through lives distorted or destroyed by hatred, Kumar alleviates his own -- and the reader's -- gloom by drawing attention to the fanatics' mordant eccentricities. In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where Hindu nationalist cadres called kar-sevaks destroyed the Babri mosque in 1992, Kumar discovers that children now learn math by answering questions like, ''If it takes four kar-sevaks to demolish one mosque, how many does it take to demolish 20?'' He is dismayed that the nationalists have succeeded in making millions of Hindus feel embattled in a country where they form an overwhelming majority.</b> But he is painfully aware that he himself is the anachronism, one of a dwindling band clinging to the secular ideals of India's first prime minister, Jawarharlal Nehru.
<b>Kumar acknowledges his feeling of unease when he is among the devout, Hindu or Muslim: their language is an alien tongue for him. Nehru gleaned many of his beliefs from his days as a student in England.One senses the imprint of America's tradition of intellectual tolerance and its culture of candor on Kumar, especially when he discusses his own bogus conversion to Islam -- bogus, because he long ago abandoned the remnants of his adolescent Hindu faith, and has adopted Islam only for the purposes of appeasing the Pakistani authorities, who do not recognize marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims. </b>
Kumar's quest takes him from America to South Africa -- where he is heartened by examples of cooperation between Hindus and Muslims against apartheid -- but it is to Pakistan and India that he returns to confront his estrangement not only from the Hindu nationalists but also from Indian society as a whole. In his last chapter, dominated by his inquiry into police brutality in his native state of Bihar, he is discomfited by many of the people he speaks to, perpetrators and victims alike. They have sized him up as rich and well connected, and their confessions turn to supplications -- for money, for a passage to America, for husbands for their daughters, for a government vending license. Kumar writes of an encounter with a blind man and his two daughters: ''I resent being bullied by their father, but I also feel pity for the two. I take out some money from my wallet. . . . As I shut the door, I hear the loud, demanding voice behind me. 'How much is it -- how much did he give?' ''
And so, the door slams and Kumar leaves us with much but not one important thing, a proper introduction to the cause of all this soul-searching. Who, we want to know, is Mona? Kumar barely refers to his wife. The ''fanatic'' remains elusive, an ironic allusion in the title of a book that never quite answers the questions that it poses, and only intermittently lives up to the promise of its opening pages.
In part that is because Kumar the professor has an unfortunate way of intruding on Kumar the reporter. Thus he unnecessarily supplements his own neat description of Hindu political symbolism with the (borrowed) observation that televised Hindu epics had created ''a shared symbolic lexicon around which political forces could mobilize communal praxis.''
We learn much more when Kumar is describing small things impenetrable to outsiders, like the pungency of a communal slogan, the paradoxes and passions of South Asian cricket and the nuances of an Urdu story. Under the kitchen sink of his parents' home, one memorable childhood vignette runs, there was ''a dirty glass and, beside it, a ceramic plate that was white with small pink flowers,'' reserved for a tubercular uncle. ''The only other occasion when the plate and glass were taken out was when a Muslim driver who sometimes ate at our house needed to be fed.''
Here is link <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
'Husband of a Fanatic': Sleeping With the Enemy
By CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE
Published: March 20, 2005
A DECADE ago, when I was living in India, a Jewish American woman described for me a Hindu boy who had enrolled in Hebrew lessons she was giving to members of Bombay's tiny Jewish community. When she had asked why he should join a class for Jews, he had replied, ''We share an enemy.'' I told the story to a group of Indian friends I knew were worried by India's growing communal discord. I expected them to shake their heads solemnly. Instead, they burst out laughing.
Advertisement
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 'b@st@rd' 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.''
Soon enough, we learn the reason for Barotia's contempt; Kumar, an Indian Hindu who is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, has married Mona, a Pakistani Muslim. When they married, he says, he wallowed in a ''tepid tide'' of altruism and ''felt good about myself for marrying 'the enemy.' '' To understand the wider significance of his commitment as well as his own ''complicities and contradictions,'' he embarks on a tour of Hindu-Muslim strife and recalls wars between India and Pakistan -- ''Hindu-Muslim riots fought with tanks and fighter planes.''
At its best, Kumar's reportage has the immediacy and respectful attention to detail of a well-turned Granta essay (it is no surprise to see Ian Jack, Granta's editor, cited in the acknowledgments). <b>Picking his way through lives distorted or destroyed by hatred, Kumar alleviates his own -- and the reader's -- gloom by drawing attention to the fanatics' mordant eccentricities. In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where Hindu nationalist cadres called kar-sevaks destroyed the Babri mosque in 1992, Kumar discovers that children now learn math by answering questions like, ''If it takes four kar-sevaks to demolish one mosque, how many does it take to demolish 20?'' He is dismayed that the nationalists have succeeded in making millions of Hindus feel embattled in a country where they form an overwhelming majority.</b> But he is painfully aware that he himself is the anachronism, one of a dwindling band clinging to the secular ideals of India's first prime minister, Jawarharlal Nehru.
<b>Kumar acknowledges his feeling of unease when he is among the devout, Hindu or Muslim: their language is an alien tongue for him. Nehru gleaned many of his beliefs from his days as a student in England.One senses the imprint of America's tradition of intellectual tolerance and its culture of candor on Kumar, especially when he discusses his own bogus conversion to Islam -- bogus, because he long ago abandoned the remnants of his adolescent Hindu faith, and has adopted Islam only for the purposes of appeasing the Pakistani authorities, who do not recognize marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims. </b>
Kumar's quest takes him from America to South Africa -- where he is heartened by examples of cooperation between Hindus and Muslims against apartheid -- but it is to Pakistan and India that he returns to confront his estrangement not only from the Hindu nationalists but also from Indian society as a whole. In his last chapter, dominated by his inquiry into police brutality in his native state of Bihar, he is discomfited by many of the people he speaks to, perpetrators and victims alike. They have sized him up as rich and well connected, and their confessions turn to supplications -- for money, for a passage to America, for husbands for their daughters, for a government vending license. Kumar writes of an encounter with a blind man and his two daughters: ''I resent being bullied by their father, but I also feel pity for the two. I take out some money from my wallet. . . . As I shut the door, I hear the loud, demanding voice behind me. 'How much is it -- how much did he give?' ''
And so, the door slams and Kumar leaves us with much but not one important thing, a proper introduction to the cause of all this soul-searching. Who, we want to know, is Mona? Kumar barely refers to his wife. The ''fanatic'' remains elusive, an ironic allusion in the title of a book that never quite answers the questions that it poses, and only intermittently lives up to the promise of its opening pages.
In part that is because Kumar the professor has an unfortunate way of intruding on Kumar the reporter. Thus he unnecessarily supplements his own neat description of Hindu political symbolism with the (borrowed) observation that televised Hindu epics had created ''a shared symbolic lexicon around which political forces could mobilize communal praxis.''
We learn much more when Kumar is describing small things impenetrable to outsiders, like the pungency of a communal slogan, the paradoxes and passions of South Asian cricket and the nuances of an Urdu story. Under the kitchen sink of his parents' home, one memorable childhood vignette runs, there was ''a dirty glass and, beside it, a ceramic plate that was white with small pink flowers,'' reserved for a tubercular uncle. ''The only other occasion when the plate and glass were taken out was when a Muslim driver who sometimes ate at our house needed to be fed.''