Fever Peak
Review of Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (USA: Knopf, 2020)
By Tarini Tilve
The Indian caste system has its roots in the Rig Veda, a sacred text. There are more than 3000 Jatis (castes) in India but the four more well-known main castes are: Brahmins (priests and teachers), Ksatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (traders and merchants) and Shudras (labourers). Today, this caste system still has a significant influence on Indian societal beliefs and even dictates what actions are acceptable in social institutions like marriage. While many in India believe that the caste system is no longer influential, it remains a systemic factor impacting social mobility and access to education and technology, among many areas of life. Megan Majumdar’s breakout novel A Burning demonstrates how the caste system persists in invisible ways. It is a revealing portrait of a country caught in the illusion of social mobility, even as it fails to dismantle the beliefs and structures that marginalize many.
The novel’s central conflict is contemporary and digital. Jivan, a Muslim girl, waits in jail for her trial by the country’s judicial system. She has been arrested for allegedly seditious comments made on social media during a time when Facebook is aflame with conspiracy theories, calls for justice, and cries for donations in the wake of a terrorist firebombing. Jivan is under attack on the Internet, as circumstantial evidence shows that Jivan had (unknowingly) been speaking with a terrorist recruiter. Jivan’s hope of being acquitted rests on testimonials from Lovely, to whom she teaches English, and PT Sir, who taught Jivan physical education and took to her after seeing her passion for sports. Presented as three separate stories in A Burning, the narratives of these characters yet intertwine to comment on the news media and how it has failed to democratize.
Majumdar’s strength as a novelist is her use of distinct voices for her three characters. Each of the three protagonists has a voice that reflects their socioeconomic status and circumstance. Jivan, alone in her jail cell, provides a first-person narration of her fight to stay alive. Lovely’s speech, reflective of someone learning English, contains grammatical and vocabulary mistakes. PT Sir’s narration is largely in the third person, a perspective reflecting an obsession with his public image, befitting his aspiration to join politics. Despite their differences, each narrative voice is almost epistolary. The reader is privy to the three protagonist’s innermost desires and fears.
Majumdar also regularly interjects vignettes in the form of interludes that show how nationalism is consuming the country. For example, the interlude “A Policeman Fired for Excessive Violence During Slum Demolition Has a New Gig” reveals that an ex-cop has made it his job to check if trucks on the highway were secretly transporting cows to slaughterhouses. He calls himself a “moral” man who is helping to safeguard Indian culture. In actuality, this selfless facade veils the barbarism of the truck ‘inspections,’ which are but a means for him to feed his false sense of superiority by oppressing people who cannot retaliate. Short chapters like these give readers a reprieve from the fast-paced main plot while adding to the novel’s world-building, giving readers a sense of how public sentiment shifts over the course of the narrative to a fever peak.
Amidst this chaos, Majumdar’s protagonists are driven to better their lives and circumstances, even if it means plunging into the morass of moral ambiguity. When Lovely decides to betray Jivan for her acting career, she reflects that “In this world, only one of us can be truly free. Jivan, or me. Every day, I am making my choice, and I am making it today also.” In a system that is prejudiced against outcasts like them, Lovely’s agency in making this choice is questionable. Elsewhere she ruminates, “When I am thinking about it, I am truly feeling that Jivan and I are both no more than insects. We are no more than grasshoppers whose wings are being plucked. We are no more than lizards whose tails are being pulled.” The way Majumdar equates her characters to insects and lizards hammers home the idea that these characters are subject to broader societal forces beyond their control. This conflict between the oppressive realities confronting these characters and their sustained efforts to reclaim their agency is heartbreaking to read.
What gives A Burning its contemporary feel is the tension between personal agency and the media. Throughout the novel, the media narratives about oppressed communities such as the Dalit limit, even dehumanize, them. Even when a marginalized character has the opportunity to use the media to penetrate the upper echelons of society that is otherwise inaccessible to them, they are still acting in response to embedded societal narratives. For example, Lovely is initially overjoyed when her acting teacher helps her to secure a role in a movie. It is soon revealed, however, that Lovely is to take on the role of a “bad luck hijra,” who is chased off-screen with a broom. This demeaning role capitalizes on existing public sentiments against an already marginalised group, fanning the flames of public discrimination. Later, when Lovely becomes famous through a viral clip and is cast in a music video, her role reeks of tokenism. She describes her role as such:
My scene is only one. But it is repeating and repeating.
Now the couple is getting married, and I am looking up from blessing the bride and winking at the camera.
I am looking up from blessing the bride and winking at the camera.
I am looking up from blessing the bride and winking at the camera.
I am looking up from blessing the bride and, again, winking at the camera. My eye is twitching.
Time and again, Lovely’s roles are confined by the public’s understanding of hijras. Like Jivan, she is but a pawn used to project and enforce a hetero-normative image of Indian society.
More unfortunate is Jivan, who undergoes a twofold trial by the media and the judicial system. While she is detained, she is unable to debunk speculation about her involvement in the terrorist bombing. Her attempts to remedy this by sneaking a reporter into the prison backfires when the reporter twists her story to fit into the state’s narrative. Though the media appears to amplify the voices of the marginalized, in reality, it twists these stories for its own purposes.
Through Jivan and Lovely, Majumdar explores how the rise of Indian nationalism affects the marginalized and oppressed. PT Sir, on the other hand, represents the oppressors who occupy positions of power. The third-person narrative renders a less sympathetic judgement of his character. When we are first introduced to PT Sir, he is preparing for the national day parade, which he describes as “the one time in all the school year when he […] showcases his work.” To PT Sir, his work is only worth as much as the public’s opinion of it. It is with this attitude that PT Sir gradually climbs the political ladder: by prioritising his image above all else. Things come to a head when interreligious tensions get out of hand at one of the rallies he is headlining. Although PT Sir is initially horrified by the incident he witnesses, he eventually downplays his involvement before accepting a higher position in the local political party. Instead of taking responsibility and seeking justice, PT Sir distracts himself with shiny new symbols that show off his status. Right after the incident, he purchases a new tandoor for his family, paying “the full amount right away” “in a sheaf of cash,” and feeling “powerful” for it. PT Sir’s upward mobility is enabled by the very nationalist propaganda that oppresses the other two characters.
A Burning, with its candid and impactful writing, delivers heavy questions about social mobility, the influence of politics, and the nationalist agenda. Majumdar carefully draws the curtain back on marginalized communities most people overlook and presents them in a way that humanizes them without limiting their existence to their castes. Focusing sharply on the rise of Indian nationalism, Majumdar shows how an extreme nationalist rhetoric affects both marginalized outliers and wannabe apparatchiks. She does it all, along with a contemporary commentary on the role of media in Indian society.
Tarini Tilve is an undergraduate reading English for a BA at Nanyang Technological University. She enjoys reading Victorian and Gothic literature. Currently, she is working on a short-story collection that revolves around coming-of-age as a minority in Singapore. In her free time, she likes to listen to musicals and write as a freelancer for blogs and magazines.
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