Amitava Kumar

5 days ago | amitavakumar.substack.com | Amitava Kumar

A journalist I knew in college in Delhi, a man from my home-town, has been posting pictures proclaiming Indian advances in war. Another acquaintance, a journalist from Pakistan, has been similarly diligent, uploading reports of Pakistani strikes against India. These are otherwise sane voices.

6 days ago | amitavakumar.substack.com | Amitava Kumar

Here’s the first short short-story I have for you about boys. When I was working on my book Husband of a Fanatic, and traveling in Kashmir, several people told me about a story by Akhtar Mohiuddin’s entitled “Terrorist.” The story’s popularity might be explained by the fact that it outlines a situation where the loss of innocence is represented not through the expected assault but, instead, by the seductive power of violence.

1 week ago | amitavakumar.substack.com | Amitava Kumar

I am on my way back from the PEN World Voices Festival in NYC where I participated yesterday on a panel that foregrounded “how changing political environments reflect the shifting nature of personhood.” Yesterday was also World Press Freedom Day and last evening I attending the closing section of the festival titled “Under Siege: The Perils of Journalism in an Age of State Repression.” As it happens, I’m teaching a journalism course this semester—the question of state repression has surfaced...

3 weeks ago | amitavakumar.substack.com | Amitava Kumar

When reading the news from Pahalgam, I thought of Amit’s poem and texted him, asking him whether there can be poetry after a massacre. Then I made the above drawing. I had asked Amit this question because I had also seen reports this morning that called for even greater violence. Arnab Goswami, the news-anchor who has turned rabid nationalism into a rag for polishing the shoes of the powerful, even gave it a name “final solution.” (Hmmm. What does that term remind you of?

3 weeks ago | amitavakumar.substack.com | Amitava Kumar

The poet and performer Aamir Aziz was born in a village outside Patna in 1989. His father worked as a Unani medicine doctor and Aamir studied at first in the village school. Much later, he joined Jamia. His childhood was marked by deprivation; the government salary for his father was erratic. He remembers his mother saying “अब्बा का पैसा बंद है”. These words uttered by his mother, he says, were perhaps his first introduction to language.