Bihar
As a young girl in the 1980s when I first told my father that I wanted to marry a man who happened to be from a Bihari Muslim family, his immediate response was, “Aik to Karela, uper se Neem chadda!” He couldn’t decide what was worse, the fact that he was Muslim or that he was from Bihar.
Back then, for a Delhi girl like me, this disdain for the state of Bihar was something of an enigma. All I knew about it was through newspaper reports which never failed to mention that it was the poorest state in India and that it was infamous for its endemic corruption. I came to understand what made Bihar so “notorious” when I first accompanied my husband on a visit to his hometown of Gaya, as his newly married “dulhin” in 1989. My culture shock in response to Bihar was almost as stark as the one I encountered a few months later when I first arrived in the U.S. as a graduate student.
The intervening thirty-five years of life had whittled away at my memories of multiple visits to Bihar, but they all came flooding back when I read Amitava Kumar’s new novel, My Beloved Life, which is set partially in Bihar and partially in the U.S.
An insider’s understanding
Unlike my early impressions, Kumar’s writing about Bihar reflects the advantage of someone with an insider’s understanding; it bears witness to his love of his native land and its deep cultural and literary roots. He leads the readers through its nooks and crannies, conveying so much more of its socio-political complexities than the popular misperceptions associated with the first of the BIMARU states.
The novel begins with the birth of Jadunath Kunwar in 1935, near George Orwell’s birthplace, Motihari. Although Jadu’s actual birth is uneventful, it was preceded by his pregnant mother’s dramatic near-death experience as a result of a cobra bite. He was born in a hut and his village school has only one teacher. From these humble beginnings, Jadu goes on to attend college in Patna, the very first member of his family to do so.
Here, he experiences life in a large city, becomes deeply aware of the entrenched interplay of caste and class in Bihari society, makes friends with poets and politicians, and later becomes a historian.
The extraordinary in the ordinary
At first glance the trajectory of Jadu’s life appears to be unremarkable, but Kumar has the gift of deftly highlighting the extraordinary in the ordinary lives of his characters. He cleverly juxtaposes the exceptional against the pedestrian and this is often what sets his writing apart. In April of 2024 at a Q&A at Washington University in St. Louis he said, “What is ordinary, conceals the wonder of life. My novel pays attention to those who struggle, who fail, who do not achieve success or fame.”
After graduation, Jadu takes up the position of a teacher at Patna College, marries a woman named Maya, and subsequently has a daughter they call Jugnu. The high point in Jadu’s career is his year-long stint as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, on a Fulbright scholarship, studying what he describes as “a chapter in history.”
Jugnu grows up to be a journalist and marries another journalist, but the marriage is short-lived. Like her father, she travels to the U.S. to attend graduate school at Emory University and later begins working with CNN in Atlanta. Away from home, Jugnu first receives news of her mother’s passing and later of her father’s death from COVID19 when the first wave of the virus hit India in 2020.
A jigsaw puzzle narrative
The novel is divided into several sections, each focusing on a different character’s narrative. In an email exchange with Kumar, I asked him to elaborate on his thinking behind these shifts. He pointed me to the epigraph from John Berger before the section titled Jugnu, “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.”
He wrote, “So, it tells you that Jadu’s story isn’t enough, there is another story that stands next to it, and another, and yet another.” This thread of interconnectivity conveys the idea that the story of life is endless, and like time itself, it constantly keeps unraveling itself.
Kumar’s pace and tone while describing each event are detailed and deliberate. He weaves one event into another and at times completely mixes up the chronology of these occurrences. At first glance, this zigzagging narrative may appear confusing, but as one adapts to the rhythm of his storytelling, the jigsaw pieces begin to fit into one another, and the arc of a longer tale becomes apparent.
At times it seems the narrative is compelling, almost forcing the reader to come along as a participant in the process of putting this puzzle together. When I asked Kumar to elaborate on his thinking behind this stylistic choice, he responded that his novel is “episodic, where one scene put next to another, sets up an arrangement so that a new energy is generated in the text.”
The role of historical events
Kumar describes his central character, Jadu, as a “marginal character,” one who does not directly participate in history in any significant way, but instead, has several brushes with it. He has a knack for weaving together actual historical events (such as Jayaprakash Narayan’s student movement in the 1970s in Bihar, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, the brutal assault on Sureshbhai Patel by three Alabamian police officers in 2015, or the murder of political activist and journalist Gauri Lankesh outside her Bengaluru house in 2017) into the everyday lives of his characters, thereby adding layer upon layer.
In this manner, he builds upon the foundation of not just his own memories, but effectively leverages the collective memories of his readers. He says that “a novel should give the reader a sense of being in the world, that the point of a novel is to tell the reader what it means to be alive today.”
Characters who carry India within them
Jugnu’s story stands next to her father’s and begins when she receives news of his death. Her internal dialogue takes the reader through her personal journey of first distancing herself from her parents, and then struggling with the guilt of having left them behind. Kumar’s characters, much like him, travel the world yet carry their India within themselves. Jugnu’s anguish is emblematic of the pain of a whole generation who left their homes in search of better opportunities abroad.
Told in the first person, Jugnu’s section brings the reader into a closer view of her anguish when she learns of her father’s death. When asked to write his obituary, she thinks, “My writing about my father’s death would make everything terrifyingly true and permanent. In fact, I would be the agent of this change. I would be the one responsible for killing him.”
The human experience of disparate societies
Great literature has enduring appeal because it reiterates the universality of the human experience. In this novel, Amitava Kumar excels at highlighting the common denominators among disparate societies. He repeatedly traverses the distance between his homeland and his adopted country. He goes from obliquely mentioning Modi’s rise to power in India to the U.S. election in 2016 which brought Donald Trump to the White House.
He goes from focusing on the minutiae of the lives of his characters to widening the camera lens to give a panoramic context of historical events. When I asked him to describe the process through which he strings all these together, he replied that he doesn’t map out the plot ahead of time.
An ‘in-between’ writer
He “believes that good writing is always a matter of discovery. You have something you start with or are interested in exploring, and it takes you to interesting places that you didn’t even know were there waiting for you in the dark,” Amitava Kumar describes himself as an “in-between” writer – one whose fiction and nonfiction explore themes of migration, history, memory on the local and the global scale.
In explaining the term “in-between” he wrote in his email, it could be used to “describe a specific form of writing, one that mixes together the novelist and the essayist.” He wrote, “Another way to understand the phrase is by thinking more directly of the immigrant experience, which is what I believe James Wood was doing while discussing the idea of the “translated man.”
On Instagram, Kumar often posts his sketches of landscapes, some of his walks through Central Park in New York City, or the scene outside his window at Vassar College (where he is a Professor of English), and yet others of his travels through India.
Expounding further on his use of the term in-between, which one could interpret as crossing-over or branching out, he says, “In recent years, with greater attention to other forms, notably drawing, there might be yet another way to think of in-betweenness, in this case, trying to operate between image and text. I think the story of the last century and the current one is of human dispersal and new meetings, and I feel that in order to do justice to that history our accounts will also bear traces of fragmentation and mixing.”
My Beloved Life: A novel, Deckle Edge, Feb 27, 2024 | ISBN 9780593536063