Journal of Asian American Studies

The slickly designed cover of Amitava Kumar's Bombay-London-New York features an image of three South Asian-looking cab drivers standing amid a blur of urban traffic. This, along with the title, suggests the book is a contribution to academic work on globalization and "global cities." And it is—but in a much different way than one might expect. Instead of an expert typology of globalization, Kumar offers a meandering literary exploration of these cities as lived and imagined in the work and movements of diasporic colonial and postcolonial writers. Like Kumar's first nonfiction book Passport Photos (UC Press, 2000), Bombay-London-New York is a multiple-genre text, incorporating Kumar's own autobiographical ruminations, poetry, and photographs with criticism of literary texts. The book's ostensible scholarly topic is diasporic "Indian writers in English," yet to Kumar "it is also, I have found out, about how and why we read" (1). Specifically, it is about how and why—and where—Kumar reads: what different texts have meant to him at different times and places in his life, and by extension, what books written in the colonizer's tongue can mean in a postcolonial diaspora.

As in Passport Photos, in which sections are labeled as the different sections of a passport, the structure and style of Bombay-London-New York are central and not incidental to the book. Kumar interweaves accounts from his own life into his readings of work by diasporic South Asian writers such as Amit Chaudhuri, Pankaj Mishra, Hanif Kureishi, V.S. Naipaul, and Arundhati Roy, among a host of others, thus placing his own journey from India to the United States into this broader context of a diaspora of South Asian intellectuals. Several poems by Kumar, as well as a poem by Hindi poet Alokdhanwa, end chapters and sections, and numerous black-and-white photographs also by Kumar appear uncaptioned in the text. While the poems and the photographs would perhaps be unremarkable on their own, incorporated together they create spaces to breathe in the text—to [End Page 95] think differently, for a moment. Kumar's willingness to experiment with multiple genres in one text is still rare enough in scholarly work to be respected for its intent and the effect of the whole, even if the quality of the individual pieces is uneven. Perhaps more importantly, Kumar's pleasure in engaging with and producing different kinds of texts shines through consistently. This is most apparent when he mixes his own words with skillfully culled, pithy quotations from the writers whose work he critiques. For instance, about V.S. Naipaul's autobiography Finding the Center, "I too wanted that life of hopes and fears about putting words on a page, the life that Naipaul had described in a single phrase in the book that I was reading: 'such anxiety, such ambition'" (107). Or, quoting E.M. Forster while Kumar describes the "unsentimental education" he received from "Raj fiction": "'I think that most Indians, like most English people, are shits, and I am not interested whether they sympathize with one another or not'" (149).

Kumar organizes Bombay-London-New York into three sections divided by city and bracketed by an introductory section, a conclusion of sorts, and an epilogue. Part I looks inward at India, beginning with an exploration of Bombay as a center for Indian bids for modernity. In the past Bombay was "paraded as the prime example" of a "cosmopolitan hybridity" which has since been sullied by "the brazen ascent of a hybrid alliance of capital and the lumpen underclass" (56). Kumar employs Arundhati Roy's critiques of hybridity and cultural nationalism, praising Roy's work as an example of a more admirable kind of hybridity—that of a writer-activist—but concluding that "there is no golden hybridity. The only standard to work by has to be, to use Roy's phrase, 'the greater common good'" (57–8). Kumar uses Roy's novel The God of Small Things as a bridge into the remainder of Part I, which engages with Indian small towns in the work of Pankaj Mishra and R.K. Narayan, and with Kumar's own upbringing in the town of Patna. Narayan's work, Kumar argues, "marked a shift in Indian writing in English, a turn away from the big cities to life in the less glamorous small towns" (62). Yet Kumar's deep ambivalence toward Patna effectively suggests the complexity of coming from "nowhere" for the cosmopolitan diasporic writer. As he puts it, "I tell stories about Patna because they are a part of my shame at having come from nowhere. And also my nostalgia because Patna is all I ever had" (93).

Part II (London) begins with V.S. Naipaul and ends with Hanif Kureishi. Kumar effectively evokes the metropole of the colonial subject's imagination: "London was the place where, arriving from the colonies, Naipaul had begun to write" (107). Kumar writes of Naipaul's father, who never got to see England, and how the Naipauls "link[ed] colonial life with the promise of writing" (112). For the colonial, London was "a point of entry" to the world and writing was "a [End Page 96] record of arrival" (116), a mark of "world citizenship" (120). Kumar then turns to the work of second-generation Britons Meera Syal and Hanif Kureishi to show how the "map of London has been altered" by immigrants and "the arrival of Indian writer" (136). Kumar also meditates on the use of English by Indians both in India and in the diaspora—how Indians in Delhi will use English for "'noble thoughts or higher emotions'" (such as "I love you") (145), yet as colonials, "Indians, with all the ambiguity that accompanies the following term, get fucked in English" (158). While Kumar's logic isn't always legible (particularly in his use of examples from his own early curiosities about sex and love, and his discussion of Forster's literary treatments of sex with male Indian servants), the discussion of language is a provocative and important one in a book whose premise is the fame and ubiquity of "Indian writers in English," and furthermore, is written by one such writer.

Part III (New York), while giving a loose outline of Indian immigration to the United States and comparisons between Britain and the United States, also takes on the concept of translation—the diasporic writer as a translator of one culture to another. Kumar describes Bengali American writer Jhumpa Lahiri as a "seasoned translator," a concept he builds upon from Pico Iyer. Seasoned translators are "citizens of the West who have easy access to the East," and move easily in between. Kumar is uneasy about Lahiri's facility with "cultural translation." "At her best," he writes, "Lahiri would strike an immigrant as one he or she can never be: one who is able to speak in her own language as well as the language of the immigration officer" (178). Further, "Any translation is also an act of betrayal, a sharing of intimacy with another tongue" (179).

This last charge speaks to one of the limitations of Kumar's book, for at times his analyses valorize the alienation that often characterizes first-generation immigrant experience as somehow more authentic to "diasporic Indianness" than Lahiri's apparent comfort in "American" culture, creating an unexamined discourse of authenticity. Yet for the most part he doesn't make clear distinctions between first- and second-generation immigrant writers, nor extensively contextualize them according to the very different times and circumstances of their living and writing. Kumar also doesn't explain his valorization of what he considers to be politically progressive writing (e.g. Roy's work compared to what Kumar considers to be Naipaul's politically regressive stances, or his implicit critique of the lack of global/political orientation in Lahiri's writing): why must Indian diasporic writing be political to be considered true to the genre?

Bombay-London-New York, however, makes a provocative and welcome contribution to a variety of fields including literary studies, diaspora studies, [End Page 97] memoir, Asian American studies, and American Studies. Scholars interested in shaking up academic stylistic conventions will enjoy engaging with Kumar's text. At his best, Kumar provides nuance to deep and complex questions faced by all diasporic communities, who deal with not just loss but gain, not just memory but imagination. Is it possible, he asks, "to use the memories of our loss . . . and even our sometimes huge gains to reflect not only on our past but also on the processes through which we create our pasts?" (31).