Is Megha Majumdar really like William Faulkner?

James Wood has praised Megha Majumdar's debut novel- 'The Burning'. He compares it to Faulkner's 'As I lay dying' where working class characters speak their stream of consciousness in their own voice.

Wood is not Indian. He does not understand that it is absurd to think a Muslim girl in Mamta's Bengal would be prosecuted for an anti-BJP facebook post.  Equally, a middle-aged Physical Training instructor would not be so stupid as to join a Hindutva organization. Mamta's goons would beat the shit out of him. As for a transgender dancer, it is utterly mad to think they could become a mainstream star.

A novel may, for polemical reasons, have an implausible plot. A literary critic from another country is not concerned with this. Wood tells us Majumdar's style is like Faulkner. Is this really true?

I chose this passage at random from Faulkner

And now them others sitting there, like buzzards. Waiting, fanning themselves. Because I said if you wouldn’t keep on sawing and nailing at it until a man can’t sleep even and her hands laying on the quilt like two of them roots dug up and tried to wash and you couldn’t get them clean. I can see the fan and Dewey Dell’s arm. I said if you’d just let her alone. Sawing and knocking, and keeping the air always moving so fast on her face that when you’re tired you can’t breathe it, and that goddamn adze going. One lick less. One lick less. One lick less until everybody that passes in the road will have to stop and see it and say what a fine carpenter he is. 

This is poetic. A coffin is being built for a man's dead mother. This stream of consciousness has a sort of authenticity because Faulkner has projected something of his own complex mind into that of an inarticulate carpenter.

Now let us look at Megha ventriloquising a Muslim shop-girl who is in prison for a Facebook post, not against Mamta- which would be understandable- but against the BJP- which is silly.

Uma madam taps her steel-tipped stick against the bars of our cells. Down the corridor she goes, clang clang clang.

Megha is a book editor in New York who studied Social Anthropology at Harvard and John Hopkins. She left India at the age of 18 or 19.

What do we learn about the mind of this Muslim girl who, improbably, sports the masculine, Hindu, name 'Jivan'?

Firstly, her thoughts are childish. She notices the steel tip of the lathi- something anyone who has grown up in India long ceases to do. She thinks of the guard as 'Madam'- like a kid in school.

“Up, up,” she calls. “Time to get up!” I hear the sound coming closer. In front of my cell it stops. I look up from the mattress, where I have been, not asleep, but unwilling to begin the day.

So her 'Muslim' identity is purely notional. The fact is, when you are in prison in Bengal, you make it a point to rise for the morning prayer. It wins you protection and respect. You don't loll about on your mattress.

It is six in the morning, and the sun’s heat has already warmed the walls and cooked the air.

A foreigner would notice this. A young Indian wouldn't. The heat will grow much more intense.

My skin sticks. When I raise my head,Uma madam points her stick through the bars. “Especially you!” she says. “Because of you we are having to take all this trouble. Why are you still sleeping?”

Why indeed? The girl is not a habitual offender. She would have risen early, performed what ablutions she could, offered namaz and started preparing herself for her appearance on TV.

My case has brought scrutiny upon the women’s prison.

Because Kolkata is a small town where TV cameras show up when some girl from the slums is put under judicial custody. Bengal is under the rule of Mamta's TMC. Before that it was under the Communists. Both parties would have wanted to ensure the well-being of a Muslim girl, critical of the BJP. However, her interview would be done in the Jail Superintendent's Office. The State Government would not want to draw attention to horrible conditions in Jails under their management.

TV channels and filmmakers want to show how we live, what we do. I imagine them crawling inside, observing us like we are monkeys in a zoo:

New Yorkers see monkeys only in zoos. In Kolkata they roam free. Indeed, they are considerable nuisance.

“Now the inmates have one hour to watch TV. Then they will cook the food.” The more requests the administration denies, the more suspicious they look. The men and women of the administration protest that it is a matter of security and safety. But what does our prison have to hide? How bad are the conditions? The public wants to know. It is looking likely, we hear, that some TV requests will be granted. Before the camera crews appear, the prison must be “beautified.”
“Beautification!” Uma madam scoffs as she walks away.

'Beautification' is a word associated with Indira Gandhi's Emergency. But only for the English speaking classes. It has no such connotations for Muslim girls from the slums.

This morning, I receive the task of scrubbing decades of grease and black soot from the kitchen walls.

But those walls are scrubbed every day!

Others mop and wipe the floors, replace lightbulbs, and plant saplings in the garden. A favoured few do the gentle work of painting murals on the walls. Americandi, leader of all, sticks a melting square of Cadbury in her mouth and supervises.

This may be how things look like to a visitor. It may be a description from some Social Anthropology dissertation. But it isn't lived life. It reflects no interiority of consciousness. It aims at reportage but fails. The thing is mere scene setting of a scenes a faire type.

The work causes old aches to flare.

But this girl is young.

Throughout the week, women complain about the long hours on their feet. The steel wool and kerosene with which I scrub grease make my palm burn, but who knows if this hand, at this task, in this prison, is mine?

The problem here is that these thoughts are not that of a Muslim girl from the slums unfairly incarcerated. Since, in the previous paragraph, she had become a place-holder for all the prisoners- including the elderly with their aches and pains- she rightly feels her hand belongs to a collective. But that is because her author hasn't bothered to give her a working mind of her own.

In my mind my hand grips the table in front of me in the courtroom, watching as my supporters—Kalu, with his neck tumour; Lovely, of course; some regular customers of my mother’s breakfast business who have been asking her to reopen her morning shop—appear in the courtroom to tell all gathered that they have seen me taking books to Lovely. They know I teach her English. Lovely’s neighbours know too. Isn’t this, the knowledge of a dozen people, a kind of evidence?

This 'foreshadowing' serves a narrative purpose. It moves the action along. But this isn't Faulkneresque. What on earth was Wood thinking? I suppose this is his contribution to 'aesthetic affirmative action'. Back in the Nineties, Paul Kafka similarly praised a novel by Indrani Aikat Gyaltsen. But it turned out to be plagiarized from some low-brow English chick-lit of the Nineteen Fifties.

The next time Purnendu comes, I tell him about the day I told my mother I was quitting school. “Ma,” I said to her one day, “I will tell you something, but you can’t be angry.” Purnendu leans forward, as if he is my mother. She turned around from the stove, a flour-dusted ruti on her upturned palm, and looked at me. “After class ten,” I said, “I will leave school. I will work and support you and Ba.” My ears were hot. My mouth was dry. “Who taught you these stupid things?” Ma said, looking up at me. “You want to leave school? Look at this smart girl! And do what?”
“Work, Ma, work!” I said. “Ba has not worked in months, because his back is not healing. That nighttime market is not safe for you. Did you forget how you got attacked? How are we making money?” “That’s nothing for you to worry about,” she snapped. “When did you become such a grandma? Just go to school, study hard, that is your job.” But I could not give up. If I let her talk me out of it, I would never attempt it again. “Class ten graduates,” I said, “can get well-paying jobs. I can finish class ten, sit for the board exams, then look for a job.”

We can hear the Bengali behind the English. But it isn't Muslim Bengali. It isn't the language of the poor.  Is this why 'Purnendu' is required as interlocutor?

After days of back and forth, Ma gave up. One night, as we were finishing our meal, she threw up her hands. “Now this job ghost is sitting on your shoulder, what can I do?” she said. “So fine! Ruin your life, what do I care? Grow up and live in a slum, that will be good!”

Jivan already lives in a slum. Her mother should say 'Rot here in this slum all your days'

What is bizarre is that the mother does not say 'If you don't study, we will marry you off.' In Islam there is bride price. A 15 year old would fetch a goodly sum. In Majumdar's class, there is dowry and the demand is for at least B.A pass.  She is projecting her own social identity onto a Muslim girl with very different life-chances.

Maybe that was a poor decision. But whom did I have to teach me how to build a better life?
In the month leading up to the board exams, I studied hard. Late nights I sat on top of the high bed, a flashlight in one hand aimed at the page, my body swaying back and forth as I murmured paragraphs. As night grew deeper, in the silence around me, sometimes I heard a man pissing in the gutter right outside the house.

But growing up in a slum, she would have heard this all the time.

Sometimes I heard footsteps, soft like a ghost’s. I don’t know how much I learned, but I did memorise whole textbooks by heart.
In March, the board exams began. I went to my assigned school building—we were assigned seats in different schools, away from our own, so that we could not scratch answers into our desks beforehand.

I recall giving my Science Talent exam under similar circumstances. However, 'Convent Schools' of the sort Majumdar and I attended were trusted by the Boards to administer exams on their own premises. This is why Majumdar notes this circumstance. It is novel to her. It shows she's done a bit of research. But it does not show that she has got into the mind of a Muslim girl who, for some mysterious reason, has the name of a Hindu boy.

A few girls were pacing in the lane, textbooks open in their arms, their lips moving. Some distance away, a girl was bent over and vomiting while her mother patted her back.

So Megha had done some basic 'research'. But what she notices are things the upper middle class notice. A girl vomiting because of exam nerves not because the neighbour raped her and got her preggers.

Inside, in a classroom, it was strange to take my chair, a sloping desk before it that belonged to somebody else. The desk was scratched with hearts which said S+K. Sheets of answer paper were passed out by a teacher, and I waited with my sheets, gripping my new ball pen, until the question paper was distributed. Outside the window a tree held still.

Anyone of any class could have written this. Why not mention the prayer this girl must have recited? Just post a question in Bangla on an appropriate internet forum- 'Hi, I'm from Kolkata due to sit my Board exam. Which ayat should I recite to get success?'

I suppose Megha is 'Secular'. She wants to present us with a Muslim victim of the evil BJP. But she does not want to show the victim as having any type of Islamic identity. That would defeat the purpose. Why? Islam is not a Religion of victimhood. It is a Religion of piety, courage, and self-sacrifice.

Three hours later, when the bell rang, I handed over my sheets, bound with an elastic string, to the invigilator. My middle finger was swollen with the pressure of the pen. In the corridor, girls stood in clusters, hands smudged with ink, some rubbing their aching hands. I left, overhearing pieces of conversations. “What did you write for the summer crops question?” “Sorghum!” “I knew this diagram would come.”

Again anyone who has been through the Indian Educational system could have written this. Nothing individuates what is presented. It is scenes a faire.

On the day of results, my heart leaped

a lapidary phrase worthy, Wood must think, of Faulkner's pen

to see I had passed, with fifty-two percent. It was the poorest score in my class, and my classmates looked at me with concern. They expected me to cry, or collapse in despair. A few girls were standing in the corner, sniffling into handkerchiefs because they had received seventy percent. But unlike them, I was not planning to go to college. All I needed was to pass, and I had. At home, I was feted as a graduate. How proud were my mother and father. In celebration, my mother pressed a milk sweet in my mouth, and distributed a packet of sweets to the neighbours.
“My daughter,” she announced proudly, “is now class ten pass!” It was as if she had forgotten my plan. I had not.
The week after, with a copy of my exam certificate in hand, I walked into the New World Mall and got a job, in the jeans section of Pantaloons.

The problem here is that middle class Indians know the sales-staff at such places. They are not hired on the basis of their 'Exam Certificate'. The truth is, even Rahul Gandhi would be considered highly employable at Pantaloons. Say what you like- the boy looks mighty fine in jeans.