Sanchari Sur
Janika Oza, A History of Burning.
Toronto: MccLelland & STEWART, 2023. $36.00.
Janika Oza’s debut novel, A History of Burning, takes on the grand task of contextualizing nearly a hundred years of a single South Asian family, beginning on the shores of Gujarat, India, moving through East Africa (Kenya and Uganda), and ending in Toronto, Canada. It follows four generations through upheavals put into motion through the machinations of the British colonial empire.
The novel begins in 1898 with Pirbhai, a teenage boy, who is tricked by an Indian businessman into getting on a boat headed to East Africa, as one of the many indentured labourers to work for the British on the East African Railway. This journey of crossing the “kala pani” (literally, black waters) will change his life and the life of those to come after him. As Pirbhai understands after his contract with the British comes to an end, he has lost his “caste” by crossing those waters; here, caste is symbolic of his connection to the land he was a part of (geographically, physically, and metaphorically). For Pirbhai, there is no return possible, and the only way forward is to make these foreign shores his new home. Holding on to the British promise of his own square of “land,” Pirbhai builds his life with Sonal, the daughter of the shopkeeper he ends up working for. The marriage becomes a transactional understanding, where his future in Uganda with Sonal’s uncle comes with conditions. He must send money back to Sonal’s family, and, as the oldest son, he also sends money back to the mother and sisters he left behind in India. In this way, familial connections transform into communal connections. In Oza’s narrative, family and community are interchangeable.
Land becomes a symbol for “pain,” where it is “seized, unclaimable,” but also a space of rootedness where Vinod, Pirbhai’s son, feels it “ancestrally, moments before what should have been his death; not a call from the gods above, but a pull from the earth below.” This idea of rootedness is fraught, as Vinod and his daughters and grandson are forced to flee Uganda in the wake of Idi Amin’s expulsion in 1972. In this expulsion, there is a scattering: Vinod’s oldest daughter, Latika, refuses to leave, instead giving up her infant son, Harilal, to the care of her mother. She stays back in the hopes of tracking down her husband, Arun, who has been disappeared by the army. The violence before their formal leaving from their Gur Nu Ghar (or “home sweet home”), a space Pirbhai had seen as the home his future generations could grow into, is reminiscent of the violence of the 1947 Partition between India and Pakistan. While Oza doesn’t show us the Partition violence that Vinod’s wife, Rajni, once left behind, the family’s memory of the loss of Rajni’s two brothers to that violence is ever present. That past violence haunts the 1972 violence against South Asians in Uganda.
The idea of the ownership of land is fraught throughout the novel. Pirbhai’s family, when they make it to Canada, is othered in the context of anti-Black violence, anti-refugee rhetoric, and Indigenous land claims dating back “two hundred years.” The novel, too, ends in 1992 with a missive of the resilience in rebuilding; that despite losing what they own even in Toronto as a result of anti-Black, anti-immigrant violence, Vinod, his children, and his grandchildren, will “let it burn and insist on something better.” Oza’s novel is an archive of yet another family born of multiple migrations and traumatic histories that end up finding their roots in a new space they can call home.
Sanchari Sur
Sanchari Sur is a PhD candidate in English at Wilfrid Laurier University. Their writing can be found in Joyland Magazine, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, Michigan Quarterly Review, Al Jazeera, Toronto Book Award–short-listed The Unpublished City (Book*hug, 2017), PRISM international, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. They are a recipient of a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellowship in fiction, 2019 Banff residency (with Electric Literature), and Tin House Summer Workshop residency in 2022.