Title: A Burning
Author: Megha Majumdar
Genre: Political Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Random House
A Burning has been one of the most talked of novels in the past few months and I was quite excited to get my hands on it, especially because a) the theme is close to my heart and b) both the author and the setting of the novel is based in my city. However, the novel, unfortunately, turned out to be quite unremarkable.
The novel revolved around a Muslim girl Jeevan who is falsely accused of aiding terrorists and is later executed. The story follows her trials and tribulations as she is betrayed one after the other by everyone. The two other main characters in this story are Lovely, a hijra whom Jeevan taught English and who is an aspiring actress and Jeevan’s former PT Sir who gradually rises in rank from a lower middle class school teacher to a cabinet minister of the state government.
What one has to congratulate Megha for is taking up a topic like hyper-nationalism and questioning this sense of mob justice that this country is gradually moving towards. However, it stops only at that. This novel began with some great potential and I waited for that one big twist to come but it never came. One really had to wrack their brains hard to remember that the protagonist Jeevan was a Muslim. Any cultural references were totally absent and the author could certainly have done more research about it. The pace, though, was good and it can be a quick read.
One portion I really liked was the PT Sir’s parts and his journey into politics. It depicted how this man gradually kills his conscience and shuts his eyes to the social realities to rise in the ranks. Politics mostly is a taboo for the Bengali middle class. To witness this man’s journey and the irony and hypocrisy of situations as he convinces his mind that whatever he was doing is for the greater good has been interesting and very close to reality.
In conclusion, it can be said that this novel touched upon some important issues but it seems like it was only to sensationalize the matter and make a point to forcefully mention these themes. This would probably attract foreign readers as another saga of the trail of injustices in a ‘small, poor country like India’ but fails to attract the general Indian population who are aware of the situations at hand. A Burning is a novel of lost potential that could do with a lot of research and details in the story.
That Hungry Reader 