Husband of a Fanatic, by Amitava Kumar, paperback

Description

“In the summer of 1993, while India and Pakistan were engaged in a war, Amitava Kumar – a Indian Hindu 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 Web site blacklist of Hindu traitors. Kumar also travels across the South Asian continent, visiting a classroom in riot-torn Gujarat, a village beside the Ganges, a psychiatric ward in Kashmir. With a poet’s eye for detail, Kumar draws a map of violence, moving from the wars and nuclear rivalry dividing two nation-states to the more blurred relationship between two religions and their adherents.