Lunch With a Bigot

To be a writer, Amitava Kumar says, is to be an observer. The twenty-six essays in Lunch with a Bigot are Kumar's observations of the world put into words. A mix of memoir, reportage, and criticism, the essays include encounters with writers Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, discussions on the craft of writing, and a portrait of the struggles of a Bollywood actor. The title essay is Kumar's account of his visit to a member of an ultra-right Hindu organization who put him on a hit-list. In these and other essays, Kumar tells a broader story of immigration, change, and a shift to a more globalized existence, all the while demonstrating how he practices being a writer in the world.

“Heterogeneous and complex, this book offers insight into Indian culture from a multitude of complex spaces between East and West. An exuberantly inquisitive collection of essays.”, “[Kumar’s] rhythms and insights beguile, and the trip itself is as rich as the destination. The reader returns with a broader sense of power, religion, oppression, familial love, censorship, and the power of the written word, to name but a few.”, “Kumar is an artful, frank and clean-cut writer, with a compassionate curious mind and a dry sense of humor. He includes his personal responses in his journalism and maintains his questioning skepticism even in his most emotional essays.”, “A dexterous and entertaining book that mixes personal essay, reportage, and criticism, Lunch With a Bigot never loses sight of its subtitle: each piece, in its own way, is about the writing life, whether it deals with paper as an object of the sacred and profane, the immigrant writer’s experience of ‘being brown in America,’ or the temporal dislocation of returning home.”, "Taken together, these essays written over the last 15 years of cataclysmic wars, fanaticisms, environmental disasters, and turbo-capitalism, tell the story of what has really been happening while those of us in the West have looked the other way. As the media caters to our fascination with Donald Trump’s hairstyle and his vitriolic one-liners, Syrian refugees have had to find refuge in Dachau. To see how one narrative has obfuscated the other ought to enrage us, and asks us to examine what is absent from our daily conversations. Kumar provokes us with his vulnerability, his observations of our shared flaws, and his impassioned interest in a world he hopes to make more livable. He reminds us what the writer — the writer as rioter — can do. And he reminds us that to be alive demands that we search for new forms of intimacy all the time, in order, as Adrienne Rich insisted, 'to extend the possibilities of truth between us.'" 

Amitava Kumar is Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College. He is the author of A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, and Nobody Does the Right Thing, all also published by Duke University Press.