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.
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/