Books

OTHER STORIES RELATED TO BOOKS Renaissance Man Authorspeak

In the preface to the Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Nirad C. Chaudhuri offered: "I do not think that any apologies are expected from me for the autobiographical form of the book or for the presence in it of a good deal of egoistic matter." Amitava Kumar too has no need to apologise as he embarks on a remarkable travelogue, a journey bookended, elucidated and finally transformed by reading.

The late Niradbabu focused on himself; Kumar's personal musings is one of many sources that include the library, the classroom, an Indian restaurant and images of Gandhi the salesman-saint. But another Chaudhuri aphorism holds the key to Bombay-London-New York: "A man persuades himself best, and best convinces others, by means of his own experiences."

BOMBAY-LONDON-NEW YORK By Amitava Kumar Penguin Price: Rs 250 Pages: 224

Kumar's primary concern is to explore "how and why we read", a quest that turns into a contentious, illuminating travelogue into the heart of reading itself. In the Patna of his youth, books were absent. "Paper was to be worshipped ... (this) freed you from the burden of doing any reading." But it is Patna that shaped him, allowed him to understand the yearning of the small-town boy in The Romantics, to appreciate the dusty learning of the librarian in his home town, to identify with Mr Biswas' urgent desire to find a wider world.

As Kumar broadens the horizons of his world, he embarks simultaneously on an interrogation of the world of Indian writers in English. The journey sets a reverse trajectory to that of V.S. Naipaul as it moves back to Trinidad from England, returns to the urgent contemporary politics of Hanif Kureishi, whose battleground is a complex mix of sexual and political identity, and meanders down several minor but rewarding tributaries.

If Kumar's appreciation of Naipaul is almost fawning, he compensates with an acute eye on other writers. In a fascinating argument, he explores the effects of economic liberalisation as reflected in A Suitable Boy, New World and English, August and other works, casting a questioning light on the way we view ourselves.

A book that aspires to meld Third World power politics with an exploration of immigration, that juxtaposes personal memory with crisp statistics, that employs poetry as a key witness stands in danger of turning into a khichdi. Here, every argumentative grain is freestanding, the parts blending into a whole that provides ample food for thought.

Not that this allows for complacency on the reader's part. In the Conclusion, we move from Tagore's reflections on the morality of altitude to the explosion in The Satanic Verses that sent Farishta and Chamcha tumbling into thin air, to the reality of Mohammed Ayuz, stowaway whose fall to earth is swift, terrible and final. The stowaway, Kumar implies, is the illegal passenger: the one the writers don't write about, the one the critics don't see. The one beyond our reach, who carries a terrible freight-"the memory of a whole weight of dispossession", and the one whose thoughts as he hurtled towards the ground we cannot be impertinent enough to attempt to capture, in words.