From the Author of Passport Photos and the (IMO) brilliant Bombay London New York, (see my rather long review of it from the Satya Circle)comes Husband of a Fanatic, “fiercely personal essay on the idea of the enemy,” according to the British Council website. The Council recently sponsored a book reading for Kumar, while he is on a book-tour in India.

More from the Penguin website:

In the summer of 1999, while the Kargil War was being fought, author Amitava Kumar married a Pakistani Muslim. That event led to a process of discovery that made Kumar examine the relationship not only between India and Pakistan but also between Hindus and Muslims inside India. Written with complete honesty and with no claims to journalistic detachment, this book chronicles the complicity that binds the writer to the rioter. Unlike both the fundamentalists and the secularists, Kumar finds—or makes—utterly human those whom he opposes. More than a travelogue which takes the reader to Wagah, Patna, Bhagalpur, Karachi, Kashmir, and even Johannesburg, this book, then, becomes a portrait of the people the author meets in these places, people dealing with the consequences of the politics of faith.

The book, which was released by Penguin India will be published in the States by the New Press in January 2005. Click here to go to the authors homepage.

Luckily, I am headed to South Asia for work in a couple weeks and can pick it up early.