Moxham's book is about a hedge of trees in India which was used to restrict the flow of salt across regions. This was important for the British EmpireMoxham's book is about a hedge of trees in India which was used to restrict the flow of salt across regions. This was important for the British Empire because it gained a huge amount of revenue from the salt tax. The discussion in this book about why salt is perhaps the most cruel thing that one might tax is particularly good. The book is structured as a history of the British Raj in India, interwoven with Moxham's search for the hedge on his frequent trips to India. I liked the alternate chapters in which he focuses on the history of the Raj. On the other hand, his experiences are interesting but they did not rise to the level of an astute observer's accurate account of a foreign land (as in The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World, for instance.)
However, Moxham gives us a Bird's-eye view of the salt tax by exploring why salt is required for the human body, how the commodity was taxed around the world, and a specific comparison between the French and the Indian peasant. Moxham's history of the East India Company (EIC) and its enforcement of the salt tax through customs houses for trade /within/ India forms the major part of this book. But the context that Moxham gives is very informative. If you have read about why Salt was important for the independence struggle in India, this book is a great companion work to understand the importance of salt to people and the atrocities that were committed in the collection of the salt tax. ...more
--- layout: post comments: true title: Notes and Review - A Burning (Majumdar) categories: book-review india poverty ---
A Burning is ostensibly about 3 peo
--- layout: post comments: true title: Notes and Review - A Burning (Majumdar) categories: book-review india poverty ---
A Burning is ostensibly about 3 people. Their lives are entwined in rather banal ways: teacher, a former student, a young woman helping a slum dweller learn English, a transgender beggar who is learning acting, an acting teacher who has never had a real audience. Their hopes and dreams are conventional: The young woman gets into a good school and manages to escape her past and moves solidly into the middle class. The slum dweller hopes to learn acting and make it big in the movie industry. Under this shroud of normalcy, and sometimes using it as a tool, Majumdar captures the depressing nature of the life they lead. And these characters stand-in for a whole group of people; the group that has missed the social mobility bus; the bus was packed in the 1970s with first-time engineers and doctors and lies overturned on the side of the highway today.
I lived for 5 years in West Bengal during college. The college was situated inside an insulated cocoon where the outside world rarely interfered. Every time I went to Kolkata, I had to go through Howrah Station. This railway station has been around since colonial times and it has remained mostly unchanged during that time. The abject poverty that is prevalent in the state and the stark income inequalities which are prevalent across India crystallized into a solid object which I had to wrestle with, every time I went through the railway station on my way to a waiting Uber driver. Majumdar has captured all of this terribly well.
For all the astute observations about poverty as a way of life, and the irrational character of social mobility, this novel is surprisingly dispassionate. The chapters titled "Interlude" are testament to this feature: The stories inside these chapters are the most touching renderings of poverty I have ever read. In particular, the story in which 2 young men are demanded to pay an exorbitant entry fee to enter a mall, a fee that seemingly does not apply to plump women who look rich, has remained in my mind ever since I read it.
So Raju and I stepped away from the entrance. We looked at each other. Neither of us wanted to say it. So Raju clapped my back and I smacked his shoulder, and we went to the syrup-ice stall and had some orange syrup-ice. Then we went back to work. Him to his house painting, that paint-smelling turban on his head again. Me to my electrician's shop. It was giving me pain in my wrist, pain in my thumb. At least the syrup-ice was delicious.
This is the shadow of discrimination that inequality inevitably creates. While many of my middle-class and upper-middle-class acquaintances strongly believe that India has come a long way from the days of unemployment and poverty in the late 20th century, the improvements have been captured by a few segments. There has been limited society-wide improvement in the decades since.
All three characters have an arc of social mobility. This arc is defined by the sacrifice that they have to make. In the case of the soon-to-be politician, it is the witnessing of a mob lynching, fueled only by communal hatred. In the case of the soon-to-be actor, it is the abandonment of a benefactor and friend. The main character sacrifices her life to "answer" the demands of the public, that blame be placed upon someone.
[In the courtroom, the judge announced his ruling,] "And, on the other hand, we have the word of a hijra1, an individual who begs on the streets for money, saying the defendant taught her English. Be that as it may"–the judge takes a deep breath, … –"it is clear that the defendant has long been disloyal to the values of this nation. The defendant has spoken clearly against the government, against the police, on the Internet, on Facebook dot-com. This lack of loyalty is not something to be taken lightly. It is its own strong piece of evidence. There is a case to be made, as well, for soothing the conscience of the city, of the country. The people demand justice." He goes on.
These sacrifices are irrational. Towards the end of the book, that last sacrifice made by the protagonist enraged me. How can one person be sacrificed at the altar to pacify the demands of a nation for justice? Yet, what right do I have to be enraged? The first decade of the 21st century in India was ridden with terrorist attacks across the country. After each attack, security was increased and people (sometimes, communities) were sacrificed. The nature of these sacrifices is the same and if I am enraged by the fictional one, then I must battle with the injustice inherent in the non-fictional ones too.
The final notable feature of the novel is that the main incident in the novel, the burning of the train, takes up so little of the story. It is described. And the main character's feelings about it and where she was in relation to the attack are also described. But we never get to see the damage that it has done. Our perspective is forcefully limited to the daily lives of the 3 main characters. Unfortunately, it includes such useless sources such as the nightly shows that PT Sir watches on his TV or what Lovely's friends tell her about their opinions. In this, I think that the author has pointed towards the horrifying nature of life in a world of information abundance: What has happened might be important. What others are saying about it is always more important.
As tragedies engulf countries around the world in the form of inflation, food insecurity, heat waves, and war, there is a sense that this is business-as-usual. Today's tragedy is the latest of a series of vignettes; certain to fade away when the next one appears.
P.S. One nice part of the novel that I appreciated was that one of the characters who is in the process of learning English, speaks in broken English throughout: (even in her inner monologues)
Even a dog which is looking like a wolf is enjoying the ride in AC comfort. All of them are ignoring me. The public is wanting blood. The media is wanting death. All around me, that is what people are saying.
This character, Lovely, is learning English and she makes the kind of mistakes that are characteristic of a beginner in India, prominently, the usage of the continuous tense everywhere.
A promising premise is ruined through lazy writing and an unwillingness to dig into the experiences of the main characters or their relationships with
A promising premise is ruined through lazy writing and an unwillingness to dig into the experiences of the main characters or their relationships with each other.
This novel failed to hold my attention and it was disappointing. First off, it's not erotica. (The title becomes clear within the first few pages.) The story is fast paced and predictable, so don't expect anything surprising on that front. It's not much of a challenge to figure out what the main character is thinking or going to do. There's nothing past the surface here. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. The writing is lazy. Some tropes about Indian behavior are inexplicably repeated endlessly. ("Indians love their masala chai" or the classic "Indians love their salwaar kameez" or the new-age "Indians go to Britain and have children who are indistinguishable from Britishers," even though, as the author paradoxically insists, "They will always be Indian, humiliated by Britishers, and never be fully accepted into British society." None of those sound anywhere close to a real person's experience.)
Instead of this novel, I would recommend the first half of the Hindi movie English Vinglish (2012), Kanan and Biswa's review of the Hindi movie DDLJ, the first act of "This American Life" podcast's "Americans in Paris" episode or the Tom Hanks movie Terminal (2004). These works are a much more proficient expression of the life of a "fish out of water," which will leave the reader gasping for a similar experience of their own, rather than feeling disappointed by the things they did not discover about the characters.
The erotica that makes up a small part of this book is not very good. It is apparently written by amateurs. I don't know if that was a device which the author used to produce mediocre erotica, or whether it was just a disguise for what turned out to be mediocre. The novel did not include anything about the characters' reactions to erotica or what they were doing outside of their classes which was fueling their (apparently) ever present creativity. If their creativity had no space for expression before, what was their life like before these classes began? There's no arc to follow; no one really changes during the span of the book.
The novel is also very limited in it's perspectives. It has only two types of characters: Indians who did not change at all after moving to Britain, or Indians who were born to Indian parents in Britain and are on the opposite end of the spectrum. (Nikki is "so" British that she doesn't have any Indian chai in her house. Surely, the author did not think that this Earl Grey-preference actually signified something about Nikki's identity?)
There's no interesting intermingling of perspectives. Nikki doesn't have complex thoughts about arranged marriage. (For e.g., why does she not struggle with the apparent success of arranged marraige and the apparent failure of the system that she believes in so fervently?) Kulwinder doesn't have complex thoughts about Nikki's behavior; indeed, Kulwinder tags Nikki as a "gori" (white woman) when they meet for the first time. (Why does Kulwinder not feel jealous of Nikki's ability to choose what she wants to do? Kulwinder could not have been that indoctrinated but simultaneously have thoughts about independence and the importance of teaching other women in her community to read and write.)
The repeated botched portrayal of these kind of incidents is what I found frustrating and what finally drove me to quickly read through to the end and be done with this book. The meeting between Kulwinder, an older Indian woman who has lived in both India and London, and Nikki, a young woman who was born and bred in London, can be very interesting. Honestly portrayed, it would be very interesting to watch the two characters discover each other's perspectives about life. (Think back to the interaction between Anne Hathaway and Robert de Niro in the movie Intern (2015).)
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