The Novel and the Nation: How A Burning Translates the News of the New India
Photo: Karan Madhok
Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning is a study in media and myth-making, of an India that is no longer an imagined community with the same news-reading rituals, but a collection of nations, each with their own interpretation of reality.
It only takes a Facebook post for Jivan—the protagonist of Megha Majumdar’s 2020 novel A Burning—to get arrested. With a few words on a screen, a young girl becomes a threat to national security. There is no danger like the written word (or words posted online), and it’s the reason why, even outside of fiction, so many poets and journalists continued to be jailed.
For Benedict Anderson however, the written word—particularly the novel and the newspaper—are crucial cogs behind the making of a modern nation. In his book Imagined Communities (1983), the political scientist and historian highlighted the role of the printing press in building a collective nationalist identity, one of shared history and experience. According to Anderson, the mass circulation of ideas through print media creates the illusion of ‘a community in anonymity’, a sense of belonging to a greater narrative.
If Anderson’s book helps us construct the country, A Burning shows us its splintered edges. The characters’ lives balance against each other but this entanglement only forces them apart. While Jivan, Lovely, and PT Sir may all inhabit the world in and around Kolkata’s Kolabagan slum, there is no shared experience here, no illusion of community. Their imagining of India is refracted by the stories they tell themselves—stories of marginalisation, poverty, and the chance of opportunity, drawn from lives they know and envision.
The events of A Burning could easily be the contents of today's newspaper: political speeches, elections, viral videos, lynchings. The brief chapters and shifting narrative resemble the seemingly disconnected chronology of a newspaper… The India of A Burning is held together and broken apart by the dissonance between national headlines and societal margins.
Jivan, a Muslim girl from the Kolabagan slum, is falsely accused of conspiring with terrorists to burn down a train. Her only hope of getting the truth out to the public is an interview with press that hounds the police station and court. But the one interview she manages to give ends up getting published under the screaming, twisted headline “I THREW BOMBS AT THE POLICE”: A TERRORIST TELLS HER LIFE STORY. Later, her mother visits her with another newspaper, one that warns of the dangers of trial by the media, and proclaims Jivan innocent until proven guilty.
In many ways, the fracturing of news is the fracturing of a country. India is no longer an imagined community with the same news-reading rituals, but a collection of nations, each with their own interpretation of reality.
PT Sir, the school sports teacher turned populist politician, realises this soon enough. His entrance to the world of extremist politics is marked by a highly-charged rally. The crowd’s fanatical energy pushes PT Sir within the sight of soon-to-be party chief Bimala Pal, who tests his loyalty and compliance with a series of progressively questionable tasks. He starts off giving false testimonies for petty criminal cases, justifying his involvement as a means of expediting the law. What begins as servility towards Pal eventually takes on a fervent logic of its own, a logic by which truth is always found in the party’s preachings. When PT Sir witnesses the lynching of a Muslim family after one of his rallies, he chooses to believe the defence that Pal offers him and decides that he had no control over the mob, even if the mob has emerged from the same crowd he himself had captivated only moments before. In choosing Bimala Pal’s forgiveness, PT Sir’s crime is not murder, but the ignorance of the truth. This supposedly passive ignorance lays the ground for his active involvement in the rejection of Jivan’s mercy petition.
The apotheosis of this ignorance is Jivan’s execution ‘for soothing the conscience of the city, of the country’. The verdict had been decided before the chance of a trial. By her own lawyer's affirmation, Jivan was nothing but a stand-in for a concept, a replaceable face to identify the imagined other of the imagined community. Her alleged guilt was an easy filler for the holes in the national narrative, and her execution ensured that no one would ever dig them up again.
Nationalism doesn’t always operate in such obvious ways. Lovely, a hijra actor, dreams of making it big in Bollywood. When she lands the leading role in a star producer’s film, she must withdraw her testimony defending Jivan. She knows that if she wants to become a movie star, she cannot be seen as a terrorist sympathiser. She doesn’t have the option of deciding whether the arbitrary sacrifice demanded of her is fair or not. Silencing is also an act of violence, even if symbolic. As Jivan notes early on in the book, public opinion is a luxury that only a few can afford.
The events of A Burning could easily be the contents of today's newspaper: political speeches, elections, viral videos, lynchings. The brief chapters and shifting narrative resemble the seemingly disconnected chronology of a newspaper, especially during the interludes, where characters are brought into the focus for a brief moment of breaking news, before they move along for a possible reemergence in the plot. The India of A Burning is held together and broken apart by the dissonance between national headlines and societal margins.
Benedict Anderson wrote Imagined Communities to study how a country is constructed through a nationalistic narrative. A Burning sheds light on its dangers. Never before has it been easier to shop around for news that tells us what we want to believe in the way that we want to be spoken to. Every morning we scan headlines and read beyond those that catch our eye as if we were browsing titles on a bookshelf. We tune out the bad ones on days when it doesn’t suit our mental health, and doom scroll through the days we need to assure ourselves of our own self-righteous civic participation. If you don’t agree with an opinion or an inconvenient truth, you can choose to circumvent it entirely and still consider yourself informed.
We read the newspaper like we read a novel. The news is something that happens to other people, those turned into convenient characters for the national narrative.
Anderson called newspapers ‘an extreme form of the book’, each issue a ‘one-day best-seller’ whose popularity stems from its temporality. If reading a newspaper each morning creates the illusion of a community to which you belong, seeing the same newspaper in the hands of another is a reassurance that this community is rooted in reality, or at least their version of it. And if the function of a newspaper is narrative rather than truth, does the truth matter at all? Narratives are the glue that holds society together. The truth could be the explosive that tears it apart.
The plot of A Burning is by no means groundbreaking. We already have this information. We already know the dangers of the India that Majumdar describes. We live through them every day. But while these events inherently become obsolete with the churning of the news cycle, in fiction they are kept alive as art. Veracity may or may not be the purpose of the newspaper. Remembering is the work of the novel.
***
Kanika Jain is a writer based in Mumbai. She is interested in media, culture, and gender. You can find her words in The Hindu, Huffington Post, and on Twitter @KanikaKJain.
