John Abbott
Professor Amitava Kumar Surveys a “Beloved Life”
He’d recommended a Szechuan spot near the New York Public Library, where Kumar is a fellow at its Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center. As we talked shop and shared gossip, he insisted I try some of his entrée. And did I get enough of the dumplings? More green tea?
This is as it should be. Readers of any of his fourteen books have encountered his generosity, attentiveness, and comic spirit. My Beloved Life, published this spring by Knopf, spans nearly a century and follows Jadunath Kunwar and his daughter Jugnu. Its wide scope is subsumed into numinous moments of “ordinary” life across Patna, Delhi, Berkeley, and Atlanta.
One of its epigraphs comes from John Berger: “Never again will a single story to be told as though it were the only one.” I asked Kumar why he chose it. “There is the main character or the main action occupying the stage,” he noted. “But there is always another story waiting in the wings, and my job as a writer is to usher the other story, or stories, onto the stage. History with a capital ‘H’ swallows all those small players who participate in it.” He shared a few lines from Brecht’s poem “A Worker Reads History”: “Young Alexander conquered India. / He alone? / Caesar beat the Gauls. / Was there not even a cook in his army?”
Kumar has taught at Vassar for nearly 20 years, and, as the Helen D. Lockwood Chair of English, his courses range from creative writing to journalism to literature. Fittingly, My Beloved Life contains a bookshelf’s worth of allusions. There’s Babel, Chekhov, Maugham, and Baldwin. (The New Yorker’s James Wood, in his praise for the novel, invokes Naipaul, too.) Kumar says he drew inspiration from Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and Annie Ernaux’s A Man’s Place; the latter informed Jugnu’s first-person narration: “I liked the intimacy of her voice and also its directness.”
My Beloved Life delivers storytelling pleasures in abundance, in a tone urgent and timeless, poetic and precise. It deepens his long-standing inquiry into literature’s purpose and function, and, of course, what constitutes a meaningful existence. Jadu shares a birthplace with George Orwell, in the Indian state of Bihar. I like to think of Kumar as Orwell’s literary descendant. Both writers are prolific and protean, engaging in poetry, memoir, fiction, and journalism; both share a commitment to social justice and political activism. (I thought often of that syllabus staple “Politics and the English Language” while reading Kumar’s crisp, clear prose.)
Teaching is central to his practice. “[I] invite students to step into a zone of freedom and take risks. Ask them to be creative, and they very often come back with spectacularly inventive work. I find myself so incredibly moved and inspired.” He recommends habit and ritual: “I remember with great excitement the first time I came up with my mantra for students: ‘Write every day and walk every day.’ Each person in my Senior Comp class had to commit to writing 150 words each day and engage in ten minutes of mindful walking. I wanted to hold myself to the same challenge. It worked. At the end of the year, I had a book manuscript and so did some of the students.”
As we finished the Chinese food—sinuses cleared from the spices, eyes watering from laughter—I asked Kumar how he was commemorating the end of his NYPL fellowship. No time, he replied. He was off to India to cover their national elections.