MY BELOVED LIFE, by Amitava Kumar
Amitava Kumar’s new novel is titled “My Beloved Life,” but a more accurate (and clunkier) title might be “My Beloved Life and the Life of Every Other Character in the Book.” The novel has a “One Thousand and One Nights” feel as it yields tale after tale — the life stories of the main protagonists, a father-and-daughter duo, yes, but also that of random guests at a wedding, college friends, old crushes and well-known politicians.
Indeed, it is a deceptive book, one that belies its ambitions. It begins with the story of one Jadunath Kunwar, an ordinary man born to peasant parents in the Indian state of Bihar. But as Kumar walks us through Jadu’s life, from his student days at Patna College to his episodic political activism and career as a history professor, we begin to realize that the novelist has larger ambitions in mind — to tell the story of pre- and post-independence India through the eyes of one citizen, with Jadu as a kind of Zelig character, who crosses paths with those famous and anonymous.
Figures like Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who climbed Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary, and J.P. Narayan, the Indian political activist, populate the novel. Mostly, though, Kumar tells Jadu’s story with a dispassionate stenographer’s air, a dutiful rendering of the minutiae of one man’s life.
For instance, Jadu’s affluent college friends call him Gandhiji for his ascetic lifestyle. But there is minimal exploration of how he feels about the teasing. “This bothered Jadu,” Kumar writes, and leaves it at that.
The book’s other major character is Jadu’s daughter, Jugnu, an Atlanta-based journalist for CNN. Here Kumar focuses mainly on the personal — Jugnu’s failed marriage and her subsequent relationship with Motley, a Black American, who she is uncertain will be accepted by her father.
The pandemic features prominently in Jugnu’s section, which is told in the first person and is a little more introspective. The novel points out the devastating impact that the lockdown-fueled separation has on father and daughter, each on a different continent. When important family events occur in India, she cannot attend, a fact that haunts her; it’s only to cover the second, devastating wave of Covid that she goes back the following year. A new character is introduced in the very last section; the pandemic also makes an appearance there.
Many of the political events described in the book — the mid-70s state of emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi; the demolition of the mosque at Ayodhya; the rise of Narendra Modi — will be familiar to Indians of a certain age. Non-Indians may find this aspect, the sheer scale of name-dropping, a little overwhelming. “He spoke as if he were reading out a Wikipedia entry,” Jugnu says of her father at one point.
The novel moves at a breathless pace, as if Kumar wants to get it all in, with stories large and small, important and unimportant. Before we can get into the interior life of one character, he leapfrogs into the life of another. Even Jugnu’s narrative, which is less sweeping and more intimate, is often interrupted by the stories of the people she interviews in India.
Kumar, the author of three previous novels and numerous works of nonfiction, is an observer to his core. He successfully enumerates the many forces and influences that shape an individual life. But what the novel lacks is the kind of quiet interiority that makes for unforgettable characters. We are told what Jugnu and Jadu think; it is seldom that we see for ourselves what they feel.
MY BELOVED LIFE | By Amitava Kumar | Knopf | 352 pp. | $29
