A growing silence

Books

Megha Majumdar’s debut novel, A Burning, has come out at both the worst of times and the best, forced as we are to stay at home, casting about for something, anything, to read. Published in the US this month to universal fanfare, it’s an Indian horror story. The plot enmeshes the lives of three characters, the pointedly named Jivan, a bright Muslim girl living in a Kolkata slum; PT Sir, her seemingly upright physical education teacher who sees in her an athletic ability and drive that distinguishes her from her indolent, middle-class classmates; and Lovely, a hijra with the ambition and talent to act in films, who lives in the same slum as Jivan.

Jivan is at the local station on the night that train carriages are set on fire, the titular burning reminiscent of the torching of the Sabarmati Express, and over one hundred people die in the flames. Still smelling of smoke, having “rubbed an oval of soap in my hair and poured a whole bucket of water on myself”, Jivan finds herself embroiled in an argument on social media. Egged on, as so many are by the combination of smartphone and dumb troll, Jivan posts intemperately that “if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean… that the govenment is also a terrorist?” It is enough to prompt the police to break down her door in the middle of the night and bundle her into a van, leaving her father mewling on the floor and her mother shouting in impotent, inchoate anger.

Majumdar grew up in Kolkata, leaving as a teenager for the United States to study at Harvard University. She now lives in New York, an editor at a small publishing house with an acclaimed digital magazine. Just 32, Majumdar studied anthropology at both Harvard and Johns Hopkins and confesses to a lingering penchant for ethnographies, which helped with her research for A Burning. Serious and scholarly, Majumdar has spoken in interviews about her intent, how she wanted to use her characters to capture different facets of Indian aspiration. “Jivan,” she has said, “wants to keep her job at the mall, wants to own her new smartphone.”

But, in a country gripped by anti-Muslim sentiment, even such modest ambitions are subject to caprice, to the whims of the state. Having been given a scholarship to study at a ‘good’ school by a kindly woman at an NGO, Jivan appears to be on the right path—“Look at me Ma, with my middle-class friend”, she thinks at a birthday party in which she eats “crushed biscuits and chocolate sauce”, until the road caves in under her feet. At Jivan’s show trial, both PT Sir, by then consumed by his rise in the right wing, Hindu supremacist opposition party that has now become the state government, and Lovely give evidence, the latter’s passionate support winning her a nationwide audience. Through their respective trajectories, Majumdar tries to show that life in contemporary India when you’re on the margins is a zero sum game, that Jivan is sacrificed on the altar of the ambitions and avarice of both PT Sir and Lovely.

But Majumdar overloads the dice. PT Sir, particularly, gets short shrift. Majumdar said in an interview that she wanted to write “complex, full people”, that PT Sir is the result of her attempt to see what an ordinary middle-class man can be driven to do by the frisson of proximity to power. But we don’t get sufficient sense of why PT Sir would be drawn to a Hindu supremacist party, or why his rise would be so meteoric. That said, the party’s anti-Muslim politics appears more cynical than ideological, so maybe it is the ideal home for a man who is willing to overlook a lynching for the promise of an office with airconditioning. As with Arundhati Roy in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Majumdar discerns metaphorical gold in the unsettling combination of reverence and disgust which mark mainstream Indian society’s dealings with hijras. Where Roy’s hijras set up an alternative to India, a carnivalesque paradise where all misfits are welcome, Majumdar is concerned with the compromises and accommodations Lovely must make to win mainstream approval. Her supposed betrayal of Jivan is overstated though, given how little Lovely knows about Jivan and the crime of which she is accused.

Jivan opens the novel with an acute question, isn’t the government also a terrorist? What could have been a powerful j’accuse becomes instead a mildly diverting novel. A Burning doesn’t give itself the room to hold a mirror up to society in the manner of those great 19th century novels. Majumdar’s lavishly praised tight focus is a weakness, her novel too hamstrung by its tripartite device to show us how we got to where we are.

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