Extraordinary moments in ordinary lives
Detailed reviews of Megha Majumdar’s debut novel, A Burning, have appeared everywhere from The New Yorker to Newslaundry. I can’t remember the last time a novel by an Indian writer got so much global attention. Or in India, one that has been so deeply scrutinised by reviewers along the political spectrum, its criticism neatly split up along the divisions of our times.
A Burning opens with a young woman safe at home in bed staring at her phone reading posts about a terrorist attack on her train station. The more Jivan “scrolled, the more Facebook unrolled.” She watches a video of a woman who watched her husband burn. The police just stood by while the horror unleashed, the woman screams. Jivan shares the video: “If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean that the government is also a terrorist?” she posts.
Nothing good can come out of criticising the government or any of its institution, as we are learning, even on social media. Jivan, who is Muslim, is arrested, framed as a terrorist and falsely implicated for crimes against the nation and sedition. The novel takes place in the course of her trials: first by the media, then by the court. Simultaneously, Majumdar takes us through the moral trials of Jivan’s two character witnesses: her former schoolteacher PT Sir and Lovely, a hijra actress to whom Jivan taught English — both of whom are tempted by the promise of power and fame.
A nationalist party is growing prominence and PT Sir slowly becomes a pawn in the propaganda machine. He is seduced by the way it makes him feel like “he did something patriotic, meaningful, bigger than the disciplining of cavalier schoolgirls.” Lovely, who dreams of becoming a star, is “having to do it myself. Even if I am only a smashed insect under your shoes, I am struggling to live. I am still living.”The pivot is this: how much of choice is determined by chance and circumstance? When larger structural forces are at play, under the weight of systemic — Majumdar infuses her text with steady exuberance to counteract the bleakness of context. A Burning’s remarkable trio of characters, each with a distinctive voice and narrative form, will stay with readers even if its political underpinnings fade.
In the US where it was first published, A Burning was heaped with praises. In India, reviewers heaped praises at first. And then criticisms started trickling in. “A Burning doesn’t give itself the room to hold a mirror up to society in the manner of those great 19th century novels,” read a review. It would be unfair to want A Burning to be a Big Fat Indian Novel. The compactness of the novel’s form itself is a hint to readers to suspend disbelief as they enter the fictional world of Jivan, Lovely and PT Sir. Majumdar
captures India at a cusp of change. Indian readers may not find anything they don’t already know but it will still make them think. Majumdar brings us a glimpse into extraordinary moments in ordinary lives, vulnerable lives. All three characters’ lives are changed by the end of the novel and all three find ways to tell their stories. This isn’t about who they are but who they become. Little interludes of others are interspersed between the three characters. In one about a beef lynching, a villager say s of PT Sir, by now an entrenched member of the Party:
“They say he used to be a schoolteacher, but of what use is that? We all used to be something else.