Reviews

Husband Of A Fanatic: A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, And Hate by Amitava Kumar

red_magpie's review against another edition

2.0

I think my problem with this books was that I wanted it to be something else. Given the title I expected it to look at Muslim-Hindu relationships at a very personal level but instead it was a long, repetitive ramble through various communal riots on the subcontinent. Lots of horrific stories from survivors of violence, lots of discomfort on the author's part, but not the in depth look at the relationship between Muslim wife and Hindu husband (and their families) that I'd expected from the title. It wasn't a bad book but I didn't find it terribly engaging and I wasn't sad to be done with it.

rickmanreader's review

4.0

In 2000, Amitava Kumar's name was placed on a hit list belonging to a right-wing Hindu group because of an article he wrote describing a visit to Pakistan and his marriage to a Muslim. Amitava was living in the United States at the time, as was the man who placed his name on the list. This book was written in response ... as a way of exploring the idea of an enemy. "I wanted to meet face to face a man who thought I was his enemy, to see if I could understand why he hated me so much, and why he hated other people who were different from him." It's also an enlightening/horrifying report on the history of violence in the Indian subcontinent. No easy answers here, but an honest grappling with enmity on a personal as well as societal level. A couple of quotes I want to remember:

Pg. 39 - There was also a report from Calcutta. It mentioned that Mahatma Gandhi, while addressing the crowd gathered for a prayer meeting with him, had said that Hindus should not object to the cry Allah-u-Akbar which was raised by the Muslims. Gandhi "held that it was probably a cry greater than which the world had not produced. It was a soul-stirring religious cry which meant that God only was great. There was nobility in the meaning. Did it become objectionable because it was in Arabic? Hindus should have no hesitation in uttering the cry together with their Muslim friends." ... I found this bewildering ... But I also understood that Gandhi was trying to remove that fear by reading the meaning of the cry literally and reminding everyone of that basic truth. More than that, in that utterly radical appeal to Hindus that they too should participate in saying Alla-u-Akbar, he was underlining the respect one has to have for other religions distinct from one's own. He was laying claim to the belief that he himself, and also everyone else, was bound to God and not to religion, and hence, as he had once famously declared about himself, we were all, each one of us who were Indian, simultaneously Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Sikh.

Pg. 154 - I realized that the Hizb militant from the other side of the border had no such memories of a shared life. He had known only sameness. He has not experienced the force, or the grace, of religious difference as a vital part of his society. What the Kahsmiri poet was lamenting that day was the killing of a syncretic culture ...