Megha Majumdar, Tabish Khair & what's in a name

Guernica: I wanted to ask a little bit about Jivan, who is Muslim. How did you navigate the complexities of writing outside your own religion?
Majumdar: You know, I thought about this a lot. In my mind, I saw her as someone whose whole goal is to rise to the middle class. She wants to keep her job at the mall, she wants to enjoy her new phone, she wants to protect her parents from further suffering. I knew that narratively for her to become a believable scapegoat in the eyes of this particular state, her religious identity would be important.

The problem here is that the Indian State won't scapegoat a Muslim with a Hindu name. Why? People won't believe that a girl whose parents were so Secular, or Communist, as to deliberately give a masculine Hindu name to their daughter, would be a 'jihadi'. At the very least, the police f.i.r must say 'Jivan urf Shahbana'- Jivan alias some Muslim female name-' because it is impossible that Islamic fundamentalists will trust a Muslim girl with the name of a Hindu boy.

So I knew that she had to be Muslim for her character to persuasively make the argument that I wanted this book to make, about how certain people are oppressed and marginalized.

In other words, to write a horror story about Muslim oppression under Modi (but not Mamta) you have to have a Muslim scapegoat. The fact that you didn't bother to supply her with a Muslim name is beside the point. This is a horror story. She could have been called Jemima or Liu Chin Fa or Mogambo and nobody would care. But why stop there? Why not write of a Muslim girl from the slums of Kolkata whose name is Sidney Applebaum? Her goal in life is to rise to the post of Chief Cantor of the Beth Judah Synagogue in Ballygunge. However, she wants to keep her job at Goldman Sachs, she wants to enjoy her new phone, except on Shabos, and she wants to protect her parents from further suffering at the hands of Nazi Vampires whose true master is Donald Trump.

Majumdar is opening literary doors for people of all classes. You too can write a book about the suffering of the Rohingyas without knowing anything about Myanmar or Islam. Name your protagonist Jesus Spiderman, a poor Rohingya girl who was bitten by a radioactive spider while launching a career in Hispanic rap. She was falsely accused of terrorism and ethnically cleansed by Islamophobic Nazi Vampires. We should empathize with her suffering without worrying needless about her complex identity.

But at the same time, I didn’t want to give her a religious identity that I couldn’t write with complexity. So, I imagined her as somebody akin to myself, you know.

But Majumdar has a Hindu girl's name, not a Hindu boy's name. What's more Majumdar is Hindu. How much 'writing with complexity' does it take to Google 'Bengali Muslim girl's names'?

Someone who has a religious identity on paper, perhaps celebrates festivals, but doesn’t see her religious identity as central to who she is, necessarily.

But, a novelist creating a Muslim character must see something at least tangentially Muslim and gendered about her identity. To start with, why not give the girl a Muslim name?

True there is a superhero named 'Kamala Khan'- but at least Kamala is a girl's name. Still, no Pakistani 'Khan' would give a daughter this Hindu name- even Kamaalah would be considered as offending against 'ayn ul kamal'- i.e the evil eye. But comic books are considered a lower art form than literary fiction. At least that was the case till Majumdar lowered the bar.

And it’s another of those narrative logics that is imposed on you by somebody else, where you don’t have the chance to respond and say: look at my religious identity with nuance; this is what I truly believe, this is what I don’t believe.

Majumdar has imposed a Hindu 'middle class' identity on a figment of her imagination. Why? To tell a horror story. It seems Majumdar does not care about Muslims. She only cares about herself. If taking a dig at Modi helps her, then so be it.

You don’t have the chance to say that. You have a piece of paper that says you are this or that, and that is the narrative you’re given.

The problem with a piece of paper with the name 'Jivan' on it is that the police, the Magistrate, the Press, everybody, will believe a Hindu boy, not a Muslim girl, is being referred to. It's like what happens when the Court usher calls Mr. Buthelizi Obaweyo to present himself and a little Chinese lady shuffles forward. The Magistrate says 'you aren't an African man. You are a tiny Chinese woman. What the hell is going on here?'
There may be an explanation but it must be supplied to the Court. The little Chinese lady must explain that she did indeed start of as an African man but then got Michael Jackson disease with Chinese characteristics.

Perhaps Majumdar's next book will provide the necessary backstory. Interestingly, only Tabish Khair- who is Muslim- has picked up on Majumdar's ludicrous choice of name. He writes-

 the Muslim girl is called Jivan. This is an unusual name for a Muslim girl, though, especially in Bengal, poorer Muslims can sometimes have Hindu names, or (most often) nicknames. I have not met any — out of the thousand plus Muslims I have met until now — but sociology assures me that this happens.

Khair is right. It can happen. But the girl's name would be spelled Jeebon, not Jivan. Furthermore, the Magistrate won't sign off on anything till he gets an explanation for why Jivan is not a Hindu boy. The police would have to add a note to explain that this was not a clerical error.

Mixed up

What is less likely to happen is that people will accept a Muslim girl’s claim that her brother is named ‘Purnendu Sarkar’, as they obviously do in the novel. But even this would not matter if there wasn’t a tradition in metropolitan colonial and post-colonial writing in English — even in major novels by non-white authors, such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth — of mixing up Hindu and Muslim names. And even that could be ignored if the details of Muslim living, and festivals, were not so glaringly absent in a novel that, otherwise, pays careful attention to small details.

I grew up a Muslim who knew much about Hindu details of life but met excellent, well-meaning Hindus, including some of my school friends, who seemed to know nothing about Muslim details of life. And hence, I cannot help but notice this aridity in A Burning. And because the author of A Burning is a person of unusual talent and empathy, I want to bring it to her notice. Because the aridity is more significant than it seems, and because it won’t be pointed out to her by the publishing and critical sheikhs who rule over our Indian English destinies from the lush deserts of London and New York.

The problem here is that if 'Indian English destinies' are ruled over by 'critical sheikhs in 'London and New York', then novels like this are not 'brave'. They cater to the prejudices of foreign 'sheikhs'. If they want anti-India propaganda, that is what they get. If they want a Muslim girl to be a scapegoat, they will find one named Shahbana Ansari just as worthy of celebration as one named Sidney Applebaum. Indeed, they may prefer it. Why? They are concerned with obliterating Muslim identity just as they are concerned with reducing Hinduism to a branch of Nazism. One thing they insist on. South Asians must all be depicted as being as stupid as shit. Majumdar has a head start in this respect. Tabish Khair should be taking notes, not protesting against 'aridity'.