BOMBAY LONDON NEW YORK
By AMITAVA KUMAR
New York: Routledge, 2002. 280 pages, $85 (hardcover), $19.95 (paperback)

reviewed by David Vinjamuri

I once asked a food critic the best way to pick dishes on a menu. "If it has too many ingredients," he said, "avoid it." The same could be said for Amitava Kumar's uneven Bombay  London New York. The book is a self-described literary memoir, telling the story of both the author and the literature he reads. The themes are compellingan emigrant's journey, dislocation, the loss of a native language, the literature of a diasporabut the resulting dish is messy and hard to digest.

Kumar combines memoir with literary survey as he traces his own journey from rural Patna, in India's poorest province, to his first years in America. Along the way he appraises the literature of the Indian diaspora, from Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul to Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy. Kumar is an English professor at Penn State, and his literary criticism is effortless and illuminating. Describing Hanif Kureishi's 1998 novella Intimacy, he says,

Jay was a mixture of doubt and desire. As a result, the clarity of the writing produced a strange effect, a tense sense of disquiet . . . Perhaps the tension that the reader experienced while reading the novella was that it mirrored the disturbing closeness that lies between the intimacy of the act of love and, on the other hand, the intimacy of the act of infidelity.

Clarity is something that is altogether missing from Kumar's autobiographical sketches, however. His journey is nearly impossible to track through the first two-thirds of the book. In fact, rereading the section on London, I was unable to find any personal narrative, and suspect the authorlike the eponymous Mr. Biswas in Naipaul's novelnever made it there. Kumar's unvisited London has its charmshis analysis of the Indian underclass and social unrest is incisivebut he leaves us feeling a little shortchanged. Sometimes the political commentary and literary criticism feel like the sleight of hand in a street game of three-card monte; they are distractions used to keep us from us looking too closely at the author.

Indeed, perhaps the most intriguing, unrealized theme in the book is self-loathing. Kumar writes, "I disliked Patna when I lived there as a boy, but what I remember most clearly is how much I disliked myself." He then goes on to shrug this off as something that "diminished" as he discovered his calling as a writer, but the denial is not convincing. As we catch glimpses of him through the rest of the book, as a new arrival in America, calling his aunt's turkey dinner "tasteless" because he perversely believes she will appreciate his rejection of Western cooking, rejecting a student's invitation to participate in a Diwali celebration, or sharing a stolen moment of intimacy with the wife of a friend, our impression is of a writer with mixed feelings about his own character.

Yet when Kumar is personal and honest he is most effective, as in the prologue when he writes, "I have experienced in slow and small ways the death . . . of my mother tongue." He talks at some length about the politics of Indian authors who achieve greatness in the language of the colonial occupiers. His observations on Naipaul and Rushdie, in particular, are balanced and insightful. But Kumar never really gets to the heart of his own struggle with language. The depth of his observations about others makes this shortfall more unfortunate, more profound. One of his best lines in the book ends a chapter it should begin: "If anything separates me from that moment years ago . . . where I sat contemplating a news item about the use of English in India, it is the realization that Indians, with all the ambiguity that accompanies the following term, get fucked in English."

Kumar is clearly capable of great narrative. But we're forced to wait until the epilogue to discover it. In twenty pages, Kumar tells the story of his friendship with another Bihari exile, named Shastriji. In this space, Kumar finally loses his critic's detachment and surrenders to the flow of events. As he contemplates Shastriji's eventual return to Indian, he writes,

I often wonder about Shastriji and ask myself if he had really failed in America. Wasn't there a part of him that could be happy only back in India, in Bihar? He had gone home. All of the others who succeeded in this country did so only by changing. They became someone else. Shastriji, for better or worse, never changed. I don't know why he hasn't written to me. Perhaps that too is a sign of his not having changed.

And here, finally, Kumar has gotten to the root of the problem. His journey has transformed him. But he has not fully accepted the change.