When India battled in Kargil, Amitava married Pakistani

Bihar-born Pennsylvania varsity professor Amitava has had a parallel delivery - a daughter and a book on marrying his Pak friend.

Bihar-born Pennsylvania University professor Amitava Kumar has had a parallel delivery - a daughter secularly named Ila Ali Kumar and a book on marrying his Pakistani Muslim girlfriend during the Kargil War.

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"Ila is the reverse of Ali, it was very apt," Kumar said in an hour-long interview in Delhi, which he is visiting to promote his book Husband of a Fanatic.

When India and Pakistan battled in the Kargil heights in the summer of 1999, Kumar, a professor of English from Ara in Bihar, was getting married to Mona, a Pakistani Muslim.

In the book, Kumar uses his wedding and the anxieties and questions surrounding it as pointers to sketch a broader map of India-Pakistan relations and, indeed, Hindu-Muslim ties in India.

Published by Penguin India, the book begins with Kumar's "Lunch With A Bigot", his encounter with a rightwing Hindu activist at the Hindu Unity website supporter's Queens, New York, apartment.

In the book he mentions that in their telephone conversation before the meeting, the man abuses him profusely. "He called me a harami, which means bastard in Hindi... He also called me a dog."

This hatred is because Kumar is a "traitor" to the cause of anti-Left, ultra-nationalistic Hindu ideology. Because he does not hate the minorities, primarily Muslims, he does not follow the worldview that "Islam is not a religion, it is a political ideology to capture land and rape women".

And because Kumar is married to the "enemy"!

This is the hatred that Kumar tries to reflect upon which takes him across the world - from the war zones of Jammu and Kashmir to riot-torn Gujarat, schools in Bihar and Karachi and retracing the roots of Mahatma Gandhi in Johannesburg.

"Today, there is a disturbing clarity. I am Hindu, they, 'the other', are Muslims. This rigidity frightens me," said Kumar, whose conversation veers from acutely intelligent and elegant English to slightly rustic Bihar-accented Hindi.

"I would be much happier if people were a little confused. If they thought, 'What kind of a Hindu am I?'"

As an author, identity is a constant quest for Kumar. His first two books "Passport Photos" and "Bombay-London-New York" were searches into the identity of the immigrant Indian.

This one is even more inward looking, as he grapples with having to convert and take a Muslim name for the marriage. He visits refugee camps in Gujarat, where a large number of Muslims were killed in riots two years ago.

"It is problematic," said Kumar, about his having to take a Muslim name. "I tried to intellectually adjust to it as a process of gaining a new identity rather than losing one. But it is not so simple."

Especially when his mother wrote to him asking when his wife had not been asked to convert, why did he have to do it?

"My mother had written," pens Kumar in the book, "Please don't glorify your marriage as one between a Hindu and a Muslim; it was a marriage between a Muslim and a Muslim."

Around the same time, Kumar met scores of rape and violence victims and saw scores of methodically destroyed homes by Hindu fundamentalists. "The polarisation was both heinous and reprehensible," said Kumar.

"But after 9/11, more and more fundamentalists are gaining strength from the speeches of (George W) Bush and (Tony) Blair. The East, specially the East under the crescent, is getting more reactionary as a counter - and what is set aside by the zealots is centuries of coexistence and shared history.

"Especially in India, the liberal and secular must stake a strong claim to plural identities. My marriage was an event that allowed me to delve into the issue. Gujarat sort of crystallized everything in perspective.

"You cannot purge shared history, it is impossible to wipe out the intrinsic intermingling."

As an anecdote to this vision, Kumar shares an idea a rickshaw driver gave him about the disputed site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya that was pulled down in 1992.

"He said build a Ram-Rahim hospital for all faiths at the site. And break the legs of anyone who objects. Of course, they can get treatment at the hospital for their broken legs later."