- ISBN13: 9781565849266
- Condition: USED – Very Good
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Product Description
A lyrical journey into the heart of hatred.
“I went to my high school in Patna, India, and asked kids to write letters to children their own age across the border. Then, I visited my wife’s high school in Karachi, Pakistan, and asked the kids to write letters in response. One student began with charming candor: “Dear Indians, First of all hello!! I am a Pakistani Muslim and I want to inform you that you are liars.” ?from Husband of a Fanatic
In the summer of 1999, while India and Pakistan were engaged in a war, Amitava Kumar ?a Hindu Indian writer living and teaching in the United States ?married a Pakistani Muslim woman. That event led to a process of discovery that prompted Kumar to examine the hatreds and intimacies joining Indians and Pakistanis, Hindus and Muslims, fundamentalists and secularists, writers and rioters.
In Husband of a Fanatic, Kumar chronicles the entanglements that his new marriage provoked ?from ambivalent encounters with family to his disquieting lunch with the amiable bigot who had posted Kumar’s name on his internet blacklist of Hindu traitors. Kumar also travels across the South Asian continent, visiting a classroom in riot-torn Gujarat, a village beside the Ganges, and a psychiatric ward in Kashmir. With a poet’s eye for detail, Kumar draws a map of violence, moving between the wars and nuclear rivalry dividing two nation-states.
Employing elegant and spare prose, Husband of a Fanatic is a fiercely personal reflection on the idea of the enemy. 12 black-and-white photographs.
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Amitav Kumar’s “Husband Of A Fanatic” is well written but I came away feeling pity for the author’s lack of spine. Marrying a Pakistani Muslim, he feels he hasn’t converted to Islam but has no guts to stand up to his convictions when being forced to change his name to a Muslim one. Despite acknowledging the Official ban on Hindu-Muslim marriage in Pakistan and unbroken legacy of forced conversions, he has the gall to spend 99% of the book criticizing India’s openness and secularism (however flawed) & Hinduism in general hiding behind the excesses of RSS, Shiv Sena and BJP. What is sickening is that he feels very little compunction to apply the same standards to a much more closed and brutal society and religion in Pakistan.
So here is one more spineless Hindu intellectual essentially apologising to his “superior” Muslim Masters and in the mean time collecting a few more browny points with the appeasing Liberal Intellectuals in the West. Very depressing indeed.
Rating: 2 / 5
Title is provocative but deceptive and in no way connected to the story. It looks like author wrote this book to prove something to his muslim wife(a Tajmahal ???). He seems to somehow feel guilty for being a hindu; which lot of left liberals do. The stories he recounts may be true but they are one sided and biased. He completely ignores equally horrible stories of hindus as victims in Kashmir. He sure wears very thick left liberal glasses. I wonder if he is doing this out ignorance or on purpose. But He does come out as much more sincere and genuine than the likes of Teesta and other leftists. He keeps interviewing some uneducated right wing fringe or riot affected muslims to soft-pedal his view point, instead of honestly presenting equally if not more terrible acts by muslims.
Part of what he writes might be true but mostly it his own understanding of the hindu muslim divide and lacks in depth undestanding of the subject. Perhaps not being from a place with substantial muslim population is the cause (Bihar is not one of those states). All in all book is waste of time.
Rating: 1 / 5
This is one of my favorite books. Though I have looked far and wide, this is the only book that I have found that begins to explore the complexity of the causes of the ethnic violence that plagues nearly every corner of the modern world. It offers no answers or definitive explanations because, so far, no one has found any. Instead, it presents an impressive array of examples and evidence of Hindu and Muslim views of one another.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a highly superficial book! Never resolves why, he is in an enigma….
could learn a bit more about righting deep and lucid prose
converting one’s religion should be a matter of principal not out of convenience—so there is the story for u in a nutshell……someone who despises the Hindutva in the book but would have no problem with Naipaul’s right wing bigotry………
A waste of ur time and money
Rating: 1 / 5
The title of the book is deceptive and am not sure whether it adds any value barring catching the attention of the would be buyer. Or it is a clever play on the word ‘fanatic’ as the book demonstrates the many facets of fanaticism that he encounters. I found the book to be interesting but it did leave me with an ambivalent feeling as huge chunks of the book are devoted to retelling of stories from other writers..I found this to be particularly disturbing when reading the section on Gandhi in SA and was struggling to understand how this long section added any value to the text. The same applies to the extensive citing of authors and books written by them and then a synopsis of the story is embedded in the text. Felt that this could have been eliminated as this was not an anthology of stories but the writer’s exploration of the impact of fanaticism, social exclusion and the rise of anti-secularism. The jumps in chronological time can also intrude as when he is in Pakistan you expect a coherent account of this: instead one flips past and forward which detracts from the main objective.
An intriguing read but it does leave you somewhat bemused!
Rating: 3 / 5