ABSTRACT
Bombay-London-New York is especially rich even among Kumar's multidimensional texts. It's at once a travel story and a novel, and a novel about novels and of course a sophisticated meditation on the intersecting circulations of people, texts and currencies. The fact that it does deal so often and in so many ways with mobilities, however, helps set up one of the curious features of the book for me and perhaps for anyone who has followed Kumar's career. It's one of the few books he has written, edited or worked on where he has not explicitly foregrounded issues of class and class divisions. While the experiential contours he reveals so often involve barriers and limits, they also reveal passageways, angled intersections and impossibly twisting bends where direction isn't necessarily pre-stressed into the circuit. And all of a sudden class consciousness opens again. Seeing things clearly in a subordinate class position doesn't mean just powerlessness, anger, resentment, the constant weight and effort of holding fast against implacable pressures. It means that, but it can also mean shifting oneself through an astonishingly intricate network of paths, even "in these parts" where dissent and real opposition become very difficult indeed to imagine.
