Megha Majumdar's damp squib

 Naina Bajekar reviews Majumdars 'A Burning' in Time Magazine

“Writers and politicians are natural rivals,”

Plenty of politicians write novels to make a little money. Some novelists become politicians though, like Jeffery Archer, they may end up despised and humiliated. 

Salman Rushdie wrote in his 1982 essay “Imaginary Homelands.” “Both groups try to make the world in their own images;

No. Both tell stories.  

they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth.”

Salman Rushdie has settled in New York and his latest novel is about America. Trump, however, may not consider him much of a rival. Rushdie also wrote of India and Pakistan. But he wasn't the rival of any politician in either country. Why? Because he didn't live there. He wasn't a citizen. He was not eligible to hold political office. His knowledge of both places was derisory. He thought 'Jamshed Joshi' was a possible name for a character. But Joshi is a Brahmin surname while Jamshed- who corresponds to Yama, the Hindu God of death- is a given name exclusively used by Parsis. There are some Parsis who took Joshi as their surname on coming to Bombay two centuries ago but they tended to choose other occupational names because they didn't want to be mistaken for Brahmins. Thus, in writing a novel it is unwise to have a character named Jamshed Joshi for the same reason that it would be foolish to name an Arab Sheikh Jesus Krishna Von Trapp.

Majumdar's protagonist is a Muslim girl. But she has a Hindu, Masculine, name. She may as well have been called Algernon Montclare-Smythe.

This girl is the foredoomed korban, or pharmakos- the inevitable tragic victim. Another reviewer, in the Washington Post, notes  "The publishers have framed the novel as a literary thriller, burdening it, I worry, with an unfair expectation. True suspense is in short supply; in fact, the story is marked by an undertow of bleak inevitability. As a girl, Jivan used to pass by a butcher shop on her way to school. “The goat must have had a life, much like me,” she would think, looking up at the row of skinned carcasses. “At the end of its life, maybe it had been led by a rope to the slaughterhouse, and maybe, from the smell of blood which emerged from that room, the goat knew where it was being taken.”
The problem here is that whereas Hindus have a horror of animal sacrifice, Muslims don't. The festival of Eid, when goats are slaughtered for the feast that marks the end of the month of fasting, is a joyous occasion. This Muslim girl with a Hindu boy's name, identifies with the goat- which is fine if your Religion inculcates belief in re-incarnation- but is decidedly odd in a Muslim child who will see her father or Uncle carrying a goat or a lamb on his shoulders to the butcher so that a delicious meal can be prepared for the family and meat can be donated to the poor. 

Moreover, the author is attributing to her character a type of causal thinking- the goat smells blood and intuits its fate- which can't possibly apply to humans whose sense of smell has been suppressed by evolution. Moreover, even Muslim girls from the slums have minds and are capable of rational thought. When a rope is put around your neck and you are led off by a butcher, you don't need a great sense of smell to figure out that something bad is going to happen to you. 

The fact is Majumdar's protagonist is utterly unreal. Psychologically, the book is nonsense. But then it is not meant to be a psychological study. It is merely a cheap sort of political polemics which suits the Party which is in Power in Majumdar's native West Bengal and which her milieu in New York finds appealing because of a supposed equation between Modi and Trump.

Bajekal, who appears to know little of Bengal, writes-

In her captivating debut novel A Burning, Megha Majumdar presents a powerful corrective to the political narratives that have dominated in contemporary India.

This is a novel about Bengal where Mamta's TMC rules the roost. Previously it was Communist. It may be that atrocities against Hindus by Muslims will cause the BJP to come to power. But only after that happens will 'political narratives' there undergo any change. Till that time, the same narrative- Hindutva is Fascism- will continue to receive more and more proforma or cartoonish depiction.

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, artists and journalists have faced pressure to toe the Hindu nationalist party line.

Not in Bengal. Pressure there has gone the other way for fifty years.

Indian universities have purged “anti-nationals” from campuses.

Whereas, in Bengal, anyone who opposes Mamta gets thrashed.

In a 2015 criminal trial for contempt of court, Booker Prize–winning author Arundhati Roy was accused by a judge of unfairly criticizing “a most tolerant country like India.”

Roy's Mum is from Kerala, where the BJP has little presence. Her Dad was from Bengal, where it is growing but only at the expense of the Communists who have been subject to brutal attacks by Mamta's goons. She lives in Delhi, which is ruled by Kejriwal. She is on the side of power, she is not speaking truth to it.

Meanwhile, in February, the New Delhi police force was widely criticized for standing by as 53 people, most of them Muslim, were killed in riots—the worst religious violence in India for more than a decade.

But the Muslims in that area first killed policemen and non-Muslims. The very next day there was a backlash. The minority was pulverized. Some local politician may have got money for orchestrating the violence to coincide with Trump's visit. What is certain is Muslims lost by it.

Majumdar, who grew up in Kolkata and is now an editor in New York City, tackles this turmoil head-on.

Nonsense! She has said that a Muslim who writes an anti-BJP post in Kolkata can be arrested. This is false. A Muslim can be arrested but only if he attacks Mamta.  Last month, 'The Print'- which is anti-BJP reported that 'Police in Bengal filed 270 cases related to fake news between 18 March and 18 May. At least two dozen of these name BJP members'. In contrast, nobody was booked for maligning Modi.

India’s brand of nationalism has its particularities, but readers around the world will recognize the rightward turn charted in A Burning, with schools criticized for failing to teach “national feeling” and minority communities seen as “disloyal to the values of this nation.”

But this has not happened in Bengal. The opposite has. Who knows? This may cause a Hindu backlash in the Assembly Elections next year. But, having already cried wolf, when no wolf existed, what will Majumdar do then?

The novel opens with train cars ablaze in an attack that leaves more than a hundred dead. Jivan, a Muslim woman living in a Kolkata slum, posts a careless comment on Facebook criticizing the government and ends up in jail, accused of aiding terrorists.

No doubt, Muslim terrorists do carry out such attacks. But 'Jivan' was not criticizing Mamta's police. She was blaming Modi. This would earn her a reward, not punishment.

In the fast-paced plot, two acquaintances are called to testify at her trial: aspiring movie star Lovely, a hijra (a third gender, a community marginalized in India) who was learning English from Jivan;

which is strange. You don't learn English from a Bengali girl from the slums. You ask her to teach you Chinese. 

and PT Sir, a teacher who taught Jivan basketball and yearns to gain favor with a right-wing populist party.

Why does he not join the RSS? Oh. Mamta's goons would kick his head in.  

All three characters seek a way to rise above their circumstances—but, Majumdar asks, at what cost?

This is crazy shit. Bengal, like the rest of India, isn't going to make a 'hijra' a movie star even if she can speak the Queen's English. Furthermore, to get ahead in Bengali Cinema she has to please the old Leftists. She can do this without offending Mamta's goons by blackguarding Modi to her heart's content. Incidentally, Mamta has sent two young film-stars to Delhi as Members of Parliament. But they are not hijras. One of them, a Muslim, has married a handsome Jain businessman. There were reports of a Deobandi fatwa against her but nothing seems to have come of it.

Rewriting the story of India as a nation became particularly urgent in the decade following the national emergency of Indira Gandhi’s rule in the 1970s. Mostly male authors—like Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth—

all of whom live abroad

took it upon themselves to dismantle the idea of a single national identity

which it has by virtue of having a 80 percent Hindu majority 

and affirm India’s founding ideals of secularism.

They are also affirming America's and Britain's founding ideals of multiracialism and multiculturalism and resolute opposition to Racism, Imperialism, Homophobia, Capitalism, the Republican Party and so forth.

Some three decades on, under a government that envisions India as a Hindu nation,

which is what it is. Any non-Hindu majority area has a strong secessionist element

Majumdar offers her novel as a reassertion of the pluralism once at the heart of Indian democracy.

but this 'reassertion' is worthless if she remains in the heart of Western Capitalism.

While Jivan is the protagonist, Majumdar shines most in the stories of her secondary characters, who are of different religions, classes and genders.

But who sound like cardboard cut-outs.

Lovely goes to auditions where she experiences praise as “a tub full of syrupy roshogolla whose sugar is flowing in my veins,”

I should explain Lovely is Bengali. Thus she must talk either of roshogolla or hilsa fish. That's what Bengalis do. This shows Majumdar is expert on Bengali hijras isn't it?

while PT Sir is drawn to rallies where men wave “the saffron flags of ardent nationalism.”

as opposed to what? the green flag of Islam? Or the red flag of Marxism? Plenty of Muslims were killed at the time of Partition. Mamta waded through a sea of Commie blood to take and hold on to power. 

In weaving their voices alongside interludes from marginal characters, Majumdar creates a vivid portrait of India as a polyphonic crowd, a patchwork of differences.

Really? Does gulab jamun get a mention?

All the characters are subject to the nationalist forces pulsing through the country, but in the face of corruption, persecution and powerlessness, they manage to hold on to their dreams and humor.

but they don't come alive.

Yet the members of Majumdar’s cast are also haunted by the sacrifices they make in the service of those dreams.

Sadly, this isn't the case. Majumdar hasn't sacrificed enough of her own time or her own prejudices to properly imagine her characters.

In a broken society, instincts for self-preservation kick in and bonds are exposed as fragile. “In this world, only one of us can be truly free,” thinks one character, weighing a chance to help another at a personal cost. “Every day, I am making my choice, and I am making it today also.”

These two sentences don't run on from each other. Indeed, the first sentence is nonsensical. To free yourself, you may have to sacrifice someone else's freedom. But the character doesn't mean that only one person- perhaps the ruler- can be free. The second sentence looks a bit Babu and 'authentic'. But that is because it is stupid. Majumdar skill is to show that she escaped a part of the world where people are as stupid as shit. Black Lives Matter. Getting away from Bengal to a place where one can gain brownie points for saying so represents a tremendous achievement.  Jhumpa Lahiri has a worthy successor. Bengal must be so proud. Everyday her daughters are making choice not to write in Bengali. Lahiri's last book was in Italian. Today also they are making choice not to write in Bengali and stay the fuck away from that shithole. This is saving Bengal from Fascism innit? Mamta's goons must continue to beat up the Communists. In this way hijras will become Movie Stars and get married to wealthy Jains and have beautiful Amul babies while eating plenty roshgolla and hilsa fish.