India is the Vishwa Guru of Lying

My interview in Frontline

Green Mountains, Vermont, 2023

Earlier this week, Frontline magazine published an interview with me. The interviewer was Aditya Mani Jha, a thoughtful and serious critic and writer. The magazine carried an old photograph of mine from their files (the photo is from 2013, my hair was still dark) but my views all fresh and relevant. Hope this doesn’t lead to visa cancellations anywhere. Also, if you are a reader in India, and haven’t read The Green Book yet, what could you possibly be waiting for? More about the book here.

Below is the text of the Frontline interview:

“We should be curious about our enemies”: Amitava Kumar

The novelist, essayist, and professor of English talks about his hopes, fears, and latest work of non-fiction, The Green Book: An Observer’s Notebook.

Published: Mar 24, 2025 18:17 IST

Amitava Kumar in Delhi in 2013. | Photo Credit: Kamal Narang

Amitava Kumar’s latest, The Green Book: An Observer’s Notebook (2024), is the third in a trilogy he has been working on these last few years, following The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal (2022) and The Yellow Book: A Traveller’s Diary (2023). These thematic “notebooks” come illustrated with Kumar’s own drawings and paintings. They combine several strands of his life and work: his novels, his travels, and his work as a professor of writing. In The Green Book, there are observations on our “fast-heating planet” and the ways in which an ever-shifting landscape makes its presence felt in all our lives. Like most top-shelf essayists, Kumar is alert to the symbolism of trees and plants across art and literature.

But he is also, at heart, a journalist, and he cannot help but connect the cultural and political dots in the context of rising polarisation around the world. For example, there is a passage here where he is talking to Ravish Kumar about why Indians do not have more words for heat; Inuits have dozens of words for snow, after all. Soon, though, the passage branches out into something else entirely. “Ravish concluded his monologue by saying that if you forget the many words for heat in your own language, you will also forget the names of your neighbours or the fact that people of two different religions used to live peaceably together. You will also forget why you are beginning to forget.”

The Green Book is full of such illuminating, counter-intuitive moments. Long-time Amitava Kumar readers will find plenty of familiar preoccupations while newcomers will discover a first-rate essayist, a mature writer of unusual range and ambition. Kumar discussed his writing, drawing, convictions, and Donald Trump in an interview. Edited excerpts.

AMJ: In The Green Book, you write about drawing trees in Delhi during your time as an undergraduate there. How has your journey with botanical drawings changed with age? Trees and plants have long been associated with memory and keepsakes: think about the practice of keeping a dried-out leaf between the pages of an old paperback.

AK: When I was a boy visiting my village in Champaran, I would want to draw trees and fields stretching into the distance. The symmetry of the mud bundhs [dikes], rosewood trees rising in the mist, the outlines of water buffaloes. Nothing worked. I became a writer instead, though even that took a long time, a very long time. My drawing and painting of trees is a more recent thing. I’ve been doing it for a few years, but I started paying it greater attention while writing this book. I was preparing to teach my course on nature-writing (“Writing about the Anthropocene”) and felt I could fall in love with trees more completely.

AMJ: About teaching at the Fishkill Correctional Facility (a prison in New York), you write that your students “needed no lessons in the workings of power”. Let me flip over that query and ask, what did you learn about power relations from their writings?

AK: I was loath to teach my students at the correctional facility stories that deal directly with prison. (Although, now that I think of it, I remember that one story we read in class was “Cell One” by Chimamanda [Ngozi] Adichie. Another, “Brotherly Love” by Jhumpa Lahiri, has a scene where the cops commit a cold-blooded murder.) I wanted literature to transport the students to another place and maybe another time outside the prison walls. But then I found these incarcerated men writing about their own condition when responding to literature by all these writers, including Zadie Smith and Valeria Luiselli. One student, in particular, produced a stunning series of fiction patterned as dialogues between a prisoner and a prison guard.

The Green Book: An Observer’s Notebook is the third in a trilogy by Amitava Kumar. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

AMJ: There is a passage in this book where you are anxious about potential negative reviews, especially from fellow Indian writers who “might want to scold me for not having written the book they want me to write”. How much of this conundrum is related to the fading influence of the literary/cultural critic, who is ideally a specialist without a “conflict of interest” (their own literary ambitions)?

AK: You are touching on a sore spot here. Our national scene lacks a vigorous public culture of criticism, where the critic isn’t so much someone with thwarted ambitions of becoming a novelist or a poet as a person with serious stakes in shaping a critical cultural discourse. I’ll be honest with you: I’m somewhat wary of accepting not only negative remarks about my books but even positive ones because they spring from such superficial engagement with not just the arc of my own writing but also the broader contexts of national and global literature.

AMJ: In your 2021 novel, A Time Outside This Time, the idea of objective truth is examined at length, especially in the context of fake news, that is, the corruption of large-scale media corporations. How does the average voter (Indian or American) realign their relationship with the media? Is there a realistic path that the media can follow to redeem themselves?

AK: In writing that novel I was trying to understand the role of fiction in the age of that other fiction called fake news. India is the vishwa guru [world leader] of lying and deception. However, just because we are all afloat in lies, should one as a writer only advocate for fiction based on verifiable truths? The novel I ended up writing repeatedly described an array of psychological experiments where the construction of truth and regimes of authentication were under scrutiny.

I was trying to educate myself, and also the reader, about the ways in which we read or recognise the truth. How to be a critical reader? That was the question before me. And that remains the question about how we approach the media. I think the media itself must do its job by continually presenting us our split-screen reality through a study in contrasts: the false or the mendacious in opposition to what is real and verifiable. Isn’t that what Jon Stewart has been doing successfully?

A boy stands inside a mosque burnt in the riots of February 2020 in New Delhi. At least 30 people were killed and more than 200 injured in the violence allegedly instigated by a Hindu rightwing mob against Muslims. | Photo Credit: Altaf Qadri/AP

AMJ: In the titular essay in Lunch with a Bigot (2015), you describe a meeting with an Islamophobic, right-wing Hindu organiser in Jackson Heights, and you say that “the idea of a faceless enemy is unbearable”. Almost a decade after this essay, would you say that progressive Indians and Americans now know enough about their ideological enemies? Or are there lessons that we are still shying away from?

AK: Let me begin with a confession: a year or two ago, I found myself at Patna airport standing in the security check line next to Kapil Mishra, the BJP politician who allegedly played an evil role in the violence and destruction of the Delhi riots in February 2020. He had incited violence in the presence of the police, and yet it was not he but the victims of that violence, mostly Muslims, who ended up being harassed and arrested by the police. I turned to Mishra, wanting to ask how he is able to sleep at night, but I wasn’t able to open my mouth. I didn’t want a confrontation. What I’m saying is that he was the enemy, not faceless but very close, and yet I didn’t have anything to say to him.

I don’t know about ordinary citizens. But at least writers, certainly progressive ones, should be scrupulous observers. We ought to record everything. We should be curious about our enemies. In other words, I’m saying I don’t want to shy away from sitting down with Kapil Mishra and asking how he gets to sleep at night. What are his dreams like?

AMJ: Your 2010 book of essays, Evidence of Suspicion: A Writer’s Report on the War on Terror, was published in America under the title A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. For obvious reasons, the title reads very differently now, when we are going through the second Trump presidency. Do you think America awaits a fresh round of “terror paranoia”, or do you feel Trump might surprise us all in this context, given that he cannot run for President again?

AK: I’m afraid that Trump might be petty enough, and vengeful enough, and angry enough to surprise us with more acts of madness. We are in for a rough ride.