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Background Music: “We are the champions my friend…”

Tef– this is all definitional, but no, I don’t think he’s less Indian, I think he is more than just Indian (not that there’s anything wrong with being just Indian). And not because he is ethnically Muslim.

The fact that he is interested in, and willing to critically engage with, Pakistan shows he can transcend national limitations. That his take on PK is critical is not a big deal — many Pakistanis are very critical of PK. It’s that he engages that counts.

Rushdie’s probably transcended Subcontinental limitations as well — he’s a global writer — that’s another story.

how is Rusdhie not ‘South Asian’? I always found him to be the least typically Indian of Indian writers. Shame is a novel about Pakistan. He uses Hindi/Urdu in a way comprehensible on both sides of the Durand line. He accesses a Muslim indian heritage that many Pakistanis identify with. If Rushdie isn’t ‘South Asian’, what the hell does the term mean in literary criticism?

Rushdie has at various times identified himself as British-Indian and British-Asian. I am sure Rushdie would be fine with the term South Asian as well. But I am troubled by your assertion that he is the least typically Indian of Indian writers. Does the fact that he is an Indian-Muslim, make him less Indian?

I‘m not interested in an idealised, romantic vision of India. I know it is the great pitfall of the exile. So you know for me, always, the issue of writing about India has been not to write as an outsider.

But I think actually there are certain things about me that just inescapably, 100 percent, will always be Indian. That’s to say, that’s what I racially and ethnically am.

Regarding his exile from India

All I can say is that I have felt it as the most profound loss and I still do. There have been many losses in this last decade but the loss of the easy return to India has been for me an absolute anguish, an inescapable anguish. I feel as if I’ve lost a limb

I have never known him to make a similar statement about Pakistan. He did spend time in Pakistan after college. His parents had hoped that he would permanently settle down in Pakistan. If I remember correctly they wanted him to run a towel factory. I suspect that he would not quibble with you about the “South Asian” classification, but his love is specifically for India (and Bombay), I find it very typically Indian.

I was not contesting the different manifestations of Hindu and Islamic extremism in the diaspora. I referred to my background because you threw the phrase ‘your diaspora’ at me. In the context of this discussion, I don’t belong to the Muslim diaspora and was pointing that out. So, your rage is wasted – nobody contests that. [Visions of progressive goondas taunting you subside from the horizon]

OK, next….

(you keep missing this, and insist on analzying it as a conspiracy),

Nope. That would be you:

Besides that, like all good South Asianists, he relativizes India and Pakistan, Hinduism and Islam, and always depicts “baddies” from both sides in the interest of “balance.”

A writer with ‘South Asianist’ tendencies (who they? And are they all good?) ‘relativizing’ egregiously by writing on subjects close to him and comparing the tensions and dynamics of fanaticism and extremist nationalism* within his own background in the context of Islamist extremism is part of a dastardly South Asianist agenda/tendency/school/attitude deliberately obfuscating difference between ideologies in order to distract from the murderous nature of Islamic fundamentalism, and not just a writer reflecting on his own life, experience, perspective? Especially given how the two extremisms feed off each other? Mentioning them together is dishonest? In all instances?

Is there no end to their goonda progressive wanking? Does this sophistry never end? Maybe they are just doing it to annoy you. Tripe indeed.

*Whoops! Sorry for repeating those words again. You can slap my wrists.

Sorry intern, I couldn’t resist.

It’s like the Amadeus script flipped, and this over-hyped Salieri is on center-stage in place of the many true Mozarts (like Upamanyu Chatterjee) who continue to labor in relative obscurity.

Why has no one pointed out just how brilliant this statement is?! Acerbic, dangerously witty and now Mozart references….damn.

i may be wrong, but going by the articles on his website and others, mr. kumar seems to focus a lot on rushdie and naipaul.

i am especially curious as to whether he has critiqued “god of small things” in a detailed literary fashion, primarily because roy is another indian writer whose celebrity has outstripped her status as a fiction writer, whose use of the english language is also quite “abstract” at times (he mentions her in several of the articles, and seems to have enjoyed the book but there is no real detail in these articles on her writing, more on her politics). if there is a link to a more detailed critique of her writing, i would appreciate it. thanks.

Yet going by a slightly confusing (to me) article on rediff, mr. kumar appears to be giving her celebrityhood a free pass (with one or two reservations) because she espouses causes that are more in line with and in a manner more in line with his than say, rushdie’s or naipaul’s. nothing wrong with this, but it’s unclear whether he objects to the cult of author as celebrity in general or author as celebrity with whom he doesn’t share the same worldview in particular. granted, it’s an old article, and his feelings on roy may have changed since then. but i am curious as to what he thinks of her actual writing and not her politics.

in that same article he provides a rather strange, to me at least, criticism of kiran desai’s “hullabaloo in the guava orchard.” it’s as if he bit into an apple and is annoyed that it didn’t taste like an orange. it’s one thing to find characters or themes weak or poorly drawn and another to complain that they don’t have the worldview or motives or thinking that you think the author should have given them or that the author never intended to give them in the first place or never intended the book to have, especially in a book like hullabaloo.

‘Rushdie is not averse to criticising Hindu nationalism as well, but unlike Kumar’s relativizing antics, Rushdie has some idea, imo, of the difference.’

Rushdie has in fact on many occasions bemoaned the ascent of Hindu nationalism particularly in his hometown of Bombay. However unlike wannabe intellectuals like Amitava Kumar, he understands the several degrees of difference between the dangers posed by Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism.

‘Kumar cannot reason. When Rusdhie called for the lifting of the ban against the Satanic Verses, Kumar wrote that the Sikh issue was more important, and that Rushdie hadn’t been concerned with democracy in the past. As undoubtedly important as the Sikh issue was (and still is), wtf is that?’

My point exactly.