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AMITAVA KUMAR'S Passport Photos styles itself as a "forged passport", being "an act of fabrication against the language of government agencies" (ix). The author's critique of the state, and of national boundaries as they are established and policed by states everywhere, originates in his immigrant status; he is an Indian academic resident in the United States. This makes him part of a long history of legal and illegal immigration: he claims as his forbears those late-19th Century Indian immigrants to California who organised themselves as the Hindustan Ghadar Party and pledged to fight slavery everywhere, and disavows today's professional immigrants, members of the "model minority", whose ambitions are as conformist as their success is conspicuous. Passport Photos thus sees itself as part of a search for "a new poetics and politics of diasporic protest". Kumar's protest is not directed solely at the country of his residence however; since he is "at home in a variety of places or perhaps in none" (x), his critical address is transnational, and his polemical agendas both local and cosmopolitan. But Kumar does not write only as a critic here. Indeed, the form of the book, its compilation of anecdotes, histories, meditations and cultural- political analyses, is derived from his attempt "to try, in different ways, to restore a certain weight of experience, a stubborn density, a life to what we encounter in newspaper columns as abstract, often faceless, figures without histories" (xi). For Kumar, the modern immigrant condition is reified by government statistics, journalistic reportage and cultural- theoretical discourse; in contrast, his writing will attempt to both individuate such diasporic experiences and collectivise them (that is, understand them in political-economic terms).

While these are laudable ambitions, they are realised only in part in this book. Rather than put on display the "stubborn density" of difficult lives, each chapter turns into an excursus into topics and ideas that suggest themselves to the roving and entirely fertile imagination of the author. Collage and pastiche provide the method of the book, and the only certain link between topics is the author's sensibility, his literary and political concerns, and his awareness of the state of post-colonial cultural studies generally. Thus a single chapter on Language links lyrics from the rock band Guns N' Roses, the Hollywood revenge fantasy "Falling Down", the murder of Vincent Chin by immigrant bashers in Detroit, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Jesse Jackson, washermen and women in Ara (Bihar), Abraham Verghese on Indian doctors applying for visas at the U.S. consulate in Chennai, the shorthand terminology used by U.S. Immigration and Naturalisation Officers to describe immigrants, a short story by Salman Rushdie, a section of a poem by a Sri Lankan-Canadian poet with the resonant name Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta, Rushdie again, this time out of The Moor's Last Sigh, the novelist Michelle Cliff, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, the Shiv Sena and Bal Thackeray, Sunil Khilnani, the post- independence renaming of streets in Patna, Upamanyu Chatterjee's English August, a poem by the author called "Lord Macaulay's Tail", Pankaj Mishra on English-medium schools in provincial cities, Midnight's Children, another poem by the author, a photograph of a highway sign near the U.S.-Mexican border that warns motorists of illegal immigrants who might try to cross the highway, the status of Spanish in the U.S., and the fate of a young woman who fled Togo to avoid genital mutilation and was held by U.S. authorities when she tried to enter the country. As this list suggests, Passport Photos offers a roller-coaster of a ride occasionally exhilarating, often dizzying. The critical landscape speeds by, and in the blur the reader might see patterns otherwise invisible, but after a while what you really want is to slow down.

Thus, what this book does not offer is sustained or systematic analyses of, or even meditations on, its chosen themes, which are as varied (or as connected) as Bihari migrant workers in Trinidad and in Punjab, as South Asian gay rights activists marching in New York or Medha Patkar mobilising support against big dams, as Chinese immigrants who change their names when they arrive in the U.S. or Utpalendu Chakravarty's film "Deb Shishu", which dramatises the power of religion in cementing rural inequalities. If female foetuses are aborted en masse in India, Kumar is quick to point out that General Electric supplies and profits from the imaging equipment that allows parents to determine the sex of the foetus. This suggests, of course, the global reach and culpability of transnational capital, but the suggestion is all, for the book does not belabour what it believes to be obvious. Instead, Passport Photos is a veritable compendium of left causes across the globe; not a map as much as an assemblage of progressive concerns, interspersed with the author's "political" poems and photographs. The digressive, looping narrative that results works by accretion of ideas and by repetition of commentary, and since Amitava Kumar writes well, the book in its entirety has a gadfly charm and purpose. It does flit from place to place, settling briefly on one object before flying off to rest on another, but it also pricks, irritates, insists that its reader not remain comfortable with the state of his or her world. It offers myriad reminders of the inequities that enrich and disable lives across continents and socio-economic divides; as the author moves from topic after topic, and offers sound-bite after sound-bite, he reminds us of much that demands our attention, that should get under our skins, should sting us into response.

SUVIR KAUL

Passport Photos, Amitava Kumar, Penguin Books, 2000, p.xiv+276, Rs. 250.

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