A Burning
"We all used to be something else."
Dear Reader,
We’re officially halfway into 2020. Crazy, isn’t it? A friend popped up on my phone out of nowhere after this interview came out last month and asked how far I’d reached with the new book. Listening back to that interview, I realised I’d told Tara and Michelle of Bound that I planned to finish writing a sequel to Hush A Bye Baby this year.
So yeah, let’s not hold our breath for me writing a book this year. Instead, I’m putting The Lit Pickers down under things I’m proud of having done in 2020 (even though most of it was recorded, ahem, last year); and giving thanks for the brain still functioning enough to finish reading books.
There's a special place in hell for those who send password-protected PDFs of books. While I understand there is a pandemic upon us and I happen to live in one of the hottest of Covid-19 hotspots, if there is a sure-fire way to make the reader groan before they've even started a book, it is to give them a PDF of said book.
This seems like a good point to mention that Penguin Random House sent me a PDF of A Burning by Megha Majumdar.
A lot of us bookish folk in India perked up when A Burning was showered with praise in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. All I'm going to say about that review is that when I first read it, the name of the protagonist’s school and Kolkata were misspelt. “Kolkota” has since been fixed, but last I checked, SD Ghosh Girls’ School was still “SD Gosh”. Imagine if I'd written a review of a Harry Potter book in which I typoed that Harry lived in Loudon and studied in Hogwash. But we're far more forgiving of the New Yorker.
Moving on.
A Burning is the kind of fiction that you hope to read from India. It’s rooted in contemporary reality and a sharp reminder of how much the country and its people are changing. At one point, Majumdar, channelling the voice of a violent mob targeting an innocent, writes, “They say he used to be a schoolteacher, but what use is that? We all used to be something else.”
Indeed we did.
Unfortunately, the novel doesn't specify where and when it’s set (more on that later), but there are enough hints of Bengaliness dropped for some of us to pick up that most of A Burning happens in Kolkata. After a train is set ablaze in the city, a young woman named Jivan casually posts a comment on Facebook, questioning the police's role as bystanders in the tragedy. Next thing she knows, she's been arrested and accused of being an anti-national who collaborated with the terrorists to set a train on fire. Her arrest is a catalyst in the lives of a number of people, including Lovely, a transwoman who learns English from Jivan and aspires to be an actor; and PT Sir, Jivan's physical education teacher in school and the uncle whom everyone would ask to please sit if he had the nerve to speak his mind. Lovely lives a life of determined optimism, dreaming of Bollywood glory even while she’s occasionally forced to beg on local trains. PT Sir, surrounded by dominant women, wades into politics after a chance encounter with a political party gives him a heady sense of the power of politics.
A Burning flits between Jivan, Lovely and PT Sir’s stories, with interludes by minor characters like Jivan’s state-appointed lawyer. Together, this chorus of voices examines modern India, the aspirations that capitalism sows and the cancer of opportunism and everyday violence. I’m not going to tell you exactly what happens in the novel, but given this is literary fiction and Jivan is accused of being a terrorist, you have a pretty good idea of where this is headed, right?
Perhaps the most obviously fictitious part of A Burning is the speed at which Jivan’s trial moves. Court cases linger for years, even decades, in India. Leaving this detail aside, much of Majumdar’s novel is rooted in reality, but the facts have been given a bit of a makeover so that they can pass as fiction. Jana Kalyan Party, which PT Sir joins, is most likely a shoutout to the Jana Sangh (and not “a clear allusion” to Telugu actor-politician Pawan Kumar's political party as the New York Times claims in its review of A Burning. You have no idea how much effort it’s taking me to not roll my eyes). I say this because the Bharatiya Janata Party rose out of the ashes of Jana Sangh.
The burning train is reminiscent of the Godhra train burning of 2002. The story of Jivan’s parents, who are forced off their land because a company wants to set up a mine in that area, is true for countless villages across India. Other episodes in the book recall more recent tragedies, like Muslims being lynched by Hindu neighbours. The novel also describes how false witnesses have become the norm and the mockery this makes of the Indian judicial system. If you've been following the news in India, you'll find strong whiffs of it in Majumdar's fiction.
As Jivan tries to break out of the chokehold that she finds herself in, your heart breaks with every failed attempt, every careless betrayal. Most of us who read novels in English have little in common with this girl who lived in a slum, dropped out of school, found a job as staff in a clothing store, and who is in jail. The two things we do share with Jivan are helplessness and an attachment to our smartphones.
As a journalist, I felt my heart sink when Jivan started imagining how a newspaper article might set the record straight for her. I’m not sure if any Indian newspaper can cough up the kind of money that The Daily Beacon does in A Burning, to score an in-prison interview with Jivan, because the reality is that print media is broke and one article rarely changes anyone’s fate. But hey, this is a novel, not non-fiction.
One of Majumdar’s greatest strengths is her ability to recreate a sense of space. Jivan’s home, her jail cell, Lovely making her way through crowded train compartments and past street carts piled with guavas — practically every place in A Burning is constructed skilfully. Without ever exoticising poverty, Majumdar paints a portrait of India where every day is a battle for survival and dignity.
So yes, A Burning is very well-written and I did like it, but it left me unsatisfied for many reasons. Some of these are idiosyncratic. For instance, Majumdar’s decision to name her protagonist Jivan. Not only is it on-the-nose — the Sanskrit-origin word means life in a number of Indian languages, including Bengali and Hindi — it’s ironic that Majumdar chose a name that actually obscures religious identity for a character who is targeted for being Muslim. If there had been a hint of a backstory to explain why Jivan was given her name, it would have sat easier with me. Naming the protagonist Jivan felt performative and while there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be allegorical, I just wish the focus would be on serving the tale, rather than the symbolism. Especially since A Burning operates on the premise that the protagonist is vulnerable because she’s Muslim, a conventional Muslim name may have felt less tricksy and more authentic.
Another bit of literary performance is Majumdar’s decision to have Lovely use awkward constructions and speak in the present continuous tense. This means Lovely’s stream of consciousness commentary is constantly having, thinking, being, noticing … essentially, she’s perennially suspended in the present, between the binaries of past and future tenses. We can only hope this was not supposed to be a metaphorical take on being intersex.
The present continuous tense might have worked for Lovely if the conceit was that she is speaking to the reader in English, but that’s not the case. She’s speaking in Bengali, which is a language Lovely knows; so why is she saying things like, “Many things I am doing are making her laugh”? Perhaps Majumdar was trying to mirror a certain musicality and swag that a lot of languages have in their colloquial form, but what she ultimately crafts as Lovely’s voice is faintly demeaning to this character. There’s also a naivete in Lovely which could have been a wonderful nuance if she was wilfully choosing optimism over cynicism, but that’s not how Majumdar has written Lovely. For instance, no one would seriously believe someone who charges Rs 50 for an acting class is likely to transport their students to Bollywood fame. However, Lovely does.
Wittingly or unwittingly, A Burning reveals the cautiousness and fear in contemporary India. The novel is careful to not make any obvious references to contemporary politics, which feels surreal when you keep in mind our real-life politicians are freely spewing hate speech. The novel’s politicians and ground level political workers don’t talk in the crass, offensive terms that we hear in daily news. Saffron as a colour that has been co-opted by the Hindutva brigade appears only three times, and it’s a sign of “ardent nationalism”; not militant Hinduism. Jivan’s Muslim identity isn’t clearly mentioned until well into the novel and it’s only in the final chapters, when we’re allowed to peek into the workings of Jana Kalyan Party that we’re shown how Muslims are vilified and victimised as party policy.
A few years ago, Facebook posts were sending a staggering number of people (across religious identities) to prison, particularly in Bengal, so outlandish as Jivan’s situation might seem, A Burning rings true. Yet it’s a reflection of the speed at which liberties are being eroded and resistance is regrouping in India that those episodes now seem dated. While the government has honed weapons like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the citizenry has taken to the streets despite continued intimidation — remember Shaheen Bagh and the protest sites it inspired across the country, and thwarted attempts like #OccupyGateway? The events of the recent past have forced people to take sides, to examine neutral posturing and commit to their chosen ideology, whether it’s conservative or progressive.
For instance, PT Sir, who is quickly absorbed into the Jana Kalyan Party, doesn’t seem to have much of an ideological affinity with the Hindu Right. This would have been credible when the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014, but since then, our politics have become markedly more toxic and the socio-cultural fault lines are wider. Today, PT Sir would need to be more vocal and obvious about justifying prejudice and religious bigotry. His position in the party would depend on it.
The decision to not date A Burning and make it seem as though Jivan’s story could have happened at any time in modern India feels questionable. Perhaps I’m being naïve when I say that we’re not the same India that we were in 2014; that the current present is distinctive, not just for the toxicity and oppression we’re seeing, but also for the resistance that is being nurtured. Placing the characters of the novel in a specific time would have rooted them better because these are sharply shifting times. The abuse is getting worse, our liberties are more eroded, and our societies are more polarised. In many ways, A Burning felt like a throwback.
While reading A Burning, rather than the cartoons and satire on social media that were once held up examples of sedition, I found myself thinking of the activists, protesters and journalists (most of them Muslim) who are now targeted by the government of India. Some, like award-winning Kashmiri photojournalist Masrat Zahra, are out on bail. Others like lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj and student activist Safoora Zargar remain in police custody, despite there being no credible evidence to support the charges against them. A few, like Assamese activist Akhil Gogoi, remain in jail despite being granted bail. Yesterday, 19-year-old protester Amulya Leona, from Bengaluru, got bail after being in jail since end-February — not because the police or state relented, but on a technicality. The authorities had forgotten to file a charge sheet and so Leona got bail. Her ‘crime’? Raising a slogan some people found objectionable during a protest in Bengaluru.
And now, since this newsletter is in danger of turning into a novella, I’m going to stop. If you’re in the mood to do more reading, my blog’s here.
Thank you for reading. Take care, stay well and Dear Reader will be back soon.