Hello dear readers, hope you are doing well as you can this summer. Today’s review is of Indian Author – Amitava Kumar’s latest title – My Beloved Life. Happy Reading.
Title – My Beloved Life
Author – Amitava Kumar.
Published May 2024
Publisher -in the UK – Picador (Pan Macmillan)
In India – Aleph Books
Set in – India
Rating – 4/5
Story
A novel that tells the story of modern India, through the life of one apparently ordinary man, from the death of Gandhi to the rise of Modi.
Jadunath Kunwar’s beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He meets the sherpa who first summited Everest. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States – whose perspective sheds kts own light on his story.
All the while, currents of huge change sweep across India – from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham, cholera to COVID – and buffet both Jadu and Jugnu’s lives.
Amitava Kumar’s remarkable My Beloved Life explores how we tell stories and write history, how the lives of individuals play out against the background of historical change, and how no single life is without consequence.
Here’s the Indian Book Cover, which is my favourite by the way, take from Aleph Books, the Indian publisher’s Instagram feed.
My thoughts
The Beloved Life is a Vast Novel. It narrates the lives of a father and daughter , from their own perspectives and also in tiny snippets in a POV vice versa. If we exclude the daily, mundane, interpersonal dialogue between the 2 POV’s in hear, we witness almost very thought, perspective that crosses their mind regarding what goes on in their lives.
It is rich, vast beautiful, tragic inner dialogue of a life lived witnessing society in all it’s gore and glory.
The book starts from while the narrator’s mother was pregnant with him ,to his death and afterwards how his daughter pays a written tribute to him. Jadu, the narrator is an historian, teaches at his alma mater. He comes from a small village which didn’t have electricity right uptill his later years. While he leaves behind the village as he goes to college, it is a place which has left a deep mark on him and his memories are vivid even when he’s older. He tells us about the Bihar he experiences as a hold, youth, professor untill COVID when he dies.
Jadu gives us more than his life story, while he keeps away the mundane life admin in details, he gives us his milestones and what goes on in his mind. Like, Jadu has a classmate in college who is considered low caste and is not treated well by others; Jadu tells us how he sees this outcaste, tries to understand his POV and befriends him. This friendship stays with him till his death and we how Jadu makes sense of this society behaviour of pushing aside someone just because of the name they were born under.
Similarly, we get this simpleton, village born Jadu’s views on every societal prejudice, violence, evolution he experiences as a college youth, a student, a professor, a father and a friend with powerful political acquaintances. Besides Jadu, we meet Jugnu, his daughter who is so much similar and yet different to her father. She gives us the same glimpses of her thoughts about her father foremost , her failed marriage , guilty and leaving India behind to settle in the USA.
It is a lengthy novel sure however since I was familiar with the events, place and the general ethos of where Jadunath and Jugnu come from geographically, it did not feel like I was reading a 350 pages book. It was interesting, thought provoking – especially the society I live in which is so divided internally.
This book is about Bihar and how one of its own rises from a life so basic that it still lacks basics for many and rises to study, live abroad and come back to teach History to the youth of it’s home state. It is a story of someone who’s just a number in a joint family ,it is how Jadu rises and becomes the first, educated, living and earning in the city, person in his family.
I enjoyed reading the diverse aspects of the narrator’s life, hope this picks your curiosity too. Happy Reading and discovering new authors.
To know more about the author and his other written work check out his website, here.
Reviewed by Bharti (Bee)
27 Book Street By Bee 