Bombay-London-New York, by Amitava Kumar

How India has transformed the West

Popular Bollywood films of the Seventies and Eighties had a particular appeal for Subcontinental expatriates. They portrayed an India of rural simplicity, pure tradition and a rich ceremonial life wrapped around endless weddings and jolly festivals. It was an imagined homeland radically different from the West. Bollywood beckoned expatriates to return to the abode of their childhood innocence. But the Indian diaspora had other ideas.

They brought Bollywood, and all the music and fêtes associated with it, to Britain and the US. With a shrewd combination of bhangra, Bollywood and Booker prizes, the Indians created a home away from home. In Bombay-London-New York, Amitava Kumar, who teaches English at Penn State University, tells the story of how that magical transformation took place: how India colonised the West and brought it a step closer to genuine multiculturalism.

We begin with Kumar's own childhood, the colourful characters that made up his extended family and the strange Hindu ceremonies that led to his love of books and reading. With relative ease, Kumar moves from autobiography to literary criticism, piling layer of subject matter upon layer. He examines a host of "Indian" expatriate writers, including Rushdie, Kureishi, Naipaul, Roy and Gandhi, looking at each author from his own perspective as a writer in exile.

As Kumar tries to answer the question of why we write, and (perhaps more importantly) how and why we read, he lyrically evokes the standard diasporic themes of abandonment, exile and romantic nostalgia for a "home" left behind. Somewhere in between there are loving portraits of the three cities of the title. The result is not so much a well-cooked biryani, where different ingredients are synthesised into a holistic meal, but more a juicy, multi-layered club sandwich.

Kumar is a skilled storyteller. He manages to pull the different strands of his narrative – the autobiography, the anxieties of the writer in exile, the evolution of indigenous varieties of Indianness in London and New York – with considerable success. His prose is always elegant, his ideas always pulsate with energy and his humanity shines through every page. But his literary criticism, deeply embedded in youthful exuberance, lacks bite. His writers have few, if any, warts and are just too angelic to be human.

Moreover, his India, too anchored to Bombay, is much too truncated. He presents a picture of India that is cut off from the rest of the Subcontinent. Even though, we learn, he marries a Pakistani-American academic and moves among the Pakistani diaspora, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka appear superfluous to the "India" reimagined by the Asian diaspora. I suspect this is unconscious rather than deliberate. The sheer scope and ambition of his writing has unwittingly forced him into a corner.

These minor quibbles apart, Bombay-London-New York is a riveting book. Kumar's passion for his subject matter is infectious. But he is doing much more than simply providing illuminating insights into Indian cultural life in the West. He is showing a way forward for cultural criticism, with the critic as an insightful storyteller. It is the wave of the future.

The reviewer's 'An A-Z of Postmodern Life' is published by Vision