San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Terrorist bombing exposes broken politics in ‘A Burning.’
“A Burning” caught me off guard with its urgency and deep understanding of the relationship between an individual and India’s purportedly democratic society. What happens when a mob is allowed to decide the fate of a vulnerable body? And what happens to bystanders and those who allow selfinterest to govern their response to injustice? These are the vital, dramatic questions that Megha Majumdar’s debut novel, “A Burning,” intelligently grapples with.
The novel begins with a mother telling her young, poor Muslim daughter Jivan: “You smell like smoke.”
Jivan had been on her way to the slums to tutor English when men threw flaming torches into a stopped train at the local railway station. The fire spreads and burns nearby huts, and the government promises affected families 80,000 rupees each as compensation. However, the relationship of the government to the people becomes clearer when Jivan notes, “Well the government promises many things.”
That night, Jivan posts a Facebook video of a woman upset by the police response toward her family, which was affected in the fire. When her post provokes a casually cruel online response, Jivan gets angry, thinking, “Wasn’t this a kind of leisure dressed up as agitation?” and carelessly writes an incendiary response.
Jivan’s online remarks lead to officials suspecting her of cooperating with the terrorists responsible for the burning train. Rather than show an interest in justice or protecting those who are most vulnerable, the government tries to control and manipulate the public’s feelings about the incident.
Jivan’s plight also affects Lovely and PT Sir, neighbors who feel their lives are orchestrated by social forces beyond their control. Lovely dreams of life as an actress and offers to testify on Jivan’s behalf, before stardom beckons. Although Jivan had been PT Sir’s prized physical education student when he was a teacher, his feelings toward her are transformed by her arrest. His bloated ambition leads him to become involved with a rightwing populist political party.
Majumdar illustrates how ordinary people find themselves swept up by a broken political situation in which their own agency can become belittled. As Lovely puts it: “When I am thinking about it, I am truly feeling that Jivan and I are both no more than insects. We are no more than grasshoppers whose wings are being plucked.”
Thankfully, this is not a savior narrative. Instead, it’s a scorching and intimate look at those who find themselves bearing the full brunt of an enormous, diverse society’s prejudices and passions. Told in effortless, pitchperfect voices that borrow from traits of prophetic oratory, “A Burning” works on the reader emotionally and directly, free from authorial intrusion.
In a time of brutal governmental intrusions, we need literary voices that eloquently speak complicated truths about individual agency and collective decisions. “A Burning” is a taut, propulsive and devastating debut novel. Gripping fiction, sure, but there’s not a false note in here.