Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning became a surprise bestseller in 2020, shortly after its release, catching fire (pun intended) in part because of a page-turning narrative and terse chapters that keep the pace moving. It’s a well-written book, crafted as if by a far more experienced writer, but a simple plot and poorly developed characters make it a less satisfying read than other novels with similar themes and settings.
A Burning revolves around three characters in Kolkata: Jivan, a teenaged girl who aspires to the middle class; PT Sir, her former physical education teacher who finds himself rising quickly in the ranks of a Hindu nationalist party; and Lovely, a hijra and aspiring actress whom Lovely is teaching to read English. When Jivan witnesses a terrorist attack on a train near her home, she posts some anti-government comments on Facebook, and finds herself arrested and charged as an accessory to the crime. Lovely could serve as her alibi, as Jivan was with her right before the bombing took place, and PT Sir could be a character witness. Yet they both find that helping Jivan would hurt their own aspirations. PT Sir has gained this status with the party by serving as a witness against various defendants in criminal cases, claiming he saw them commit the crimes in exchange for a small payment and increased favor. Lovely seems to be falling for some kind of predatory scheme aimed at would-be actors, but when a demo reel she posts to WhatsApp goes viral, she’s suddenly famous for that and her connection to Jivan’s case.
The book is gripping, and extremely hard to put down; I read it inside of 48 hours, even knowing more or less what would happen to Jivan. The short chapters keep the book humming along, and the prose itself is clear and concrete. There’s little here beyond the purely descriptive – we don’t get a lot of inner monologues and there are no characters of any note beyond the main three. It’s a just-the-facts novel, almost like an old detective story, which makes the book feel urgent throughout.
There’s also some unsubtle commentary here about upward mobility in modern India, a society that has seen rapid growth of its middle and upper classes in the last 30 years, but that still has an enormous underclass that measures in the hundreds of millions of people. That backdrop may explain how, or why, two otherwise moral individuals, neither of whom had any real status prior to the terror attack, would consider throwing away the life of someone they knew just to help themselves. PT Sir comes across as venal, but Majumdar gives Lovely enough of a back story to depict her with nuance, as someone who survives, and has always had to grab any lifeline she sees.
However, there’s not a lot else going on below the surface, starting with Jivan. She’s less a character than a victim of fate and circumstance, bobbing along on the surface of an ocean she can barely see. She’s an object of pity, and Majumdar gives us just a sliver of her life in flashbacks, as a journalist interviews her, somewhat covertly, for a profile in a tabloid newspaper. They’re not that illustrative of why Jivan is in the situation she’s in, because Jivan didn’t actually do anything wrong – her Facebook comments weren’t even that inflammatory, and it’s a little hard to believe she’d end up charged with a capital crime for them, although that’s probably part of the point. It’s mob justice dispensed by a religious plurality operating with the power and impunity of governmental authority.
The religious divide in India forms a key subtext to the novel, although it doesn’t show itself directly much in the content. Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister since 2014, is a Hindu nationalist and member of a paramilitary group aligned with that ethnocentric philosophy. Since taking office, he’s overseen the passage of laws discriminating against the country’s large Muslim population and Muslims trying to emigrate to India while also revoking the special status of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir regions. PT Sir’s political rise is tied to a Modi-like politician whose party also espouses Hindu nationalist aims, so Jivan, a Muslim girl, is a convenient target for them, a way to stoke outrage and try to drive voters to the party, just as the current Republican Party in the U.S. is targeting LGBT people, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and so on.
That reduces Jivan to a prop, a useful plot device without much agency or complexity as a character, and that’s ultimately what led me to feel like A Burning fell short of the mark. It’s such an easy, fast-paced read that it’s understandable why it became a bestseller, and it has the veneer of a Very Important Novel. It’s more of a facsimile of works that deal with similar subjects, like the novels of Arundhati Roy or Salman Rushdie, without their thematic depth or character development.
Next up: After finishing Scott Hershovitz’s Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, I’m reading my friend Eden Robins’s debut novel When Franny Stands Up.