The foundational strength of Janika Oza’s intergenerational work, The History of Burning,’ is characters who grow and pass the torch to the next member of the family
By Rajesh C. Oza
The story of Pirbhai
A History of Burning opens with a boy—Pirbhai—contemplating departure from a Gujarati village at the end of the 19th century when the British still ruled India and much of the world. “The heat was a dry beast, scorching the fields yellow as gora hair. He eased himself onto a step by the water’s edge, letting his chappals graze the foam. Jamnagar offered him nothing.”
Gora. Chappals. Un-italicized brown language reclaimed from the gora Queen’s English. Brown feet shod in chappals walk across a century of their history.
Janika Oza (no known relation to this reviewer) closes her riveting novel at a body of water in Ontario, Canada. Her characters—Pirbhai’s descendants—have come a long way from home to find a home in the family. “Their feet, toughened by sand and stone, arrive where they began, at an ancient knowing.”
An ancient knowing. There’s wisdom here. There is no end to history. Waves of migration cannot be stopped. Telling stories of movement from old to new, forward and back, will not be stopped. “The waves break and mend, break and mend.”
Change is unyielding
From 1898 to 1992, the novel’s calendar serves as a reminder that time moves forward, and change is unyielding. Structurally, Oza wisely shifts her point of view from year to year, chapter to chapter, character to character. Old stories told. New stories nestled inside of the ever-alive old ones. Through subtle, and not so subtle, shifts in diction and syntax, the novel changes the voices of its characters. This is the foundational strength of Oza’s intergenerational work: we see characters grow and pass along the torch to the next member of the family. To be sure, in this history of burnings, fingers are singed in the handoffs, loved ones are lost. But in the end, this is an optimistic work of hope and possibility.
At the intersection of races
Although all of the chapters use Indian names for titles (Pirbhai, Sonal, Vinod, Rajni, Latika, Arun, Mayuri, Kyia, Hari, and Meetu), the book sits at the intersection of different races—brown, black, and white.
As Pirbhai lays down a railway in colonial Africa, one of his fellow Gujarati migrant laborers jokes, “If we ever get to ride that train, it’ll be the British in first class, Indian in second, African in third.” Still a teenager, Pirbhai laughs along. Probably to get along. It’s what children do. It’s what immigrants do. Survive. “The only way to survive was to last the longest, to prove himself the most loyal of them all.” This leads to the novel’s first burning. At the order of a British colonel, Pirbhai sets fire to a cluster of lived-in East African huts: “Clear the path ahead.” Make way for the train. Capitalism. Colonialism. White man’s progress. Pirbhai was only a “coolie” doing the colonel’s bidding. Making his way in the world.
Like the train rumbling across Africa, the calendar moves across this novel’s century. Pirbhai makes his way to Sonal’s Daddy and Mummy’s shop in Kenya’s hinterland. Time barely passes before Mummy recognizes that though a laborer, Pirbhai has potential, could be an asset to her family. Daddy tells Sonal that “she would marry the coolie and move with him to Kampala to work in Daddy’s cousin’s pharmacy and send money back.”
This was—and in many ways still is—the Gujarati social network. From India to Africa to Canada, “kind helping kind helping kind.” This was—and in many ways still is—how love works in an arranged marriage. Sonal “wanted to ask [Pirbhai] if he had thought about marriage before, if he was imagining it all these times she caught his gaze lingering on her.”
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Dr. Oza is a management consultant and facilitates the interpersonal dynamics of MBAs at Stanford University. His novel, Double Play, will be published in 2024 by Chicago’s Third World Press.
Courtesy: India Currents (Posted on November 10, 2024)
