Book review: A Burning by Megha Majumdar

Days before Safoora Zargar, the Jamia Millia Islamia student in jail for protesting against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, is denied bail for a third time, and while protests against the murder of George Floyd, an African-American man, are spreading across the USA, I am on a video call with Megha Majumdar. 

A Burning, by Megha Majumdar
Reviewed by Paromita Chakrabarti 

The buzz around the 32-year-old New Yorker’s debut novel, A Burning (Rs 599, Penguin Hamish Hamilton), that releases tomorrow, has been dizzying long before its publication. Generous blurbs by Amitav Ghosh and Yaa Gyasi have lauded the book as a zeitgeist of our times; James Wood of The New Yorker remarked on its “extraordinary directness and openness to life” that lays out a patchwork of inequalities in which we might recognise the patterns of our communal lives.

Yet, there’s a strangeness to this time in which fiction’s grip over reality has begun to appear jaded. As an incessant stream of horrors in our sociopolitical lives inures some to its potency and wears others out with outrage, nothing, it seems, can be more aberrant than the present. “This is a difficult, fatiguing time across the world,” acknowledges Majumdar, “So much of this moment here in the US is about historical reckoning. And, of course, I have been following the trajectory of the right wing in India. Scholars and journalists have made the connection between Hindu nationalism and white supremacy. In my book, I wanted to write about people. I wanted to write about how people dream and strive and laugh under oppressive systems.”


A Burning is a quiet, searing study of the underclass and the aspiring middle class in India, whose tentative stake in the capitalist economy is complicated by the many tyrannies of gender, religion and class endemic to society....
https://indianexpress.com/article/books-and-literature/megha-majumdar-a-burning-interview-6457525/




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