The gothic-horror genre in India still hasn’t reached its rightful audience. In the West, the feminist gothic-horror sub-genre has gained massive popularity in recent times with books like Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Ainslie Hogarth’s Motherthing.
The Burnings by Himanjali Sankar is a timely contribution to this sub-genre of Indian writing in English.
The world is burning; that is how the reader is let into the apocalyptic India where fires are spouting randomly for unexplained reasons. Shalini, a young woman who works as a graphic consultant, gets a mail from her ex-boyfriend asking her to come to see him as he may be dying. Desperate for a change of scene from Delhi and eager to see what her ex is up to, she decides to take a four-day leave and travel to Akshar’s huge mansion in the Himalayas. As she gets there and meets the deadly house and its inhabitants, she begins to realise that her journey to the house was more than a break she had envisioned. With each day’s passing, as events unfold, she finds herself breaking away from who she thought she was. Fast-paced, tense, and thrilling, The Burnings is a story of not one but three women who find themselves trapped, guillotined, and tortured at the hands of patriarchy and its madness.
Sankar has the flare to write with a note of breathlessness. For instance, “It was becoming a pattern... It was exhausting to lie awake every night, hearing the unnerving footsteps outside my bedroom door... I disliked the mansion as if it were a living entity, one that had absorbed into its very being the discontents, hatred and misgivings of all those who had lived within its walls over the years. Sankar’s labour with setting up the story has worked well to induce a sense of horror and of something menacing that awaits the story. Take for instance the scene when Shalini is coming to the hills and is seeing Akshar’s house for the first time. Here, I was reminded of a scene Iris Murdoch had written in her 1963-gothic novel The Unicorn when Marian, the English teacher, was encountering an isolated country house for the first time. While Shalini’s encounter may not have been as detailed as Marian’s, Sankar manages to convince the reader of its ‘iciness’ and the ‘eerie’ life that awaits Shalini in the house.
Each chapter was divided into three sections where we follow the narrative of three women from three different generations. Much like Evie Wyld’s 2020 novel The Bass Rock, the tripartite can be confusing in the beginning, but Sankar’s deft management of these narratives brings them together as we see Shalini at the root of it. The first one, the narrative of the ‘woman in the room’ who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, is particularly interesting and hilarious at places.
The second one, the narrative of ‘the woman who left’ is of a mother who couldn’t like her child and is unsure of her role as a mother, can attract the reader’s attention to something unique. And the third one was that of ‘the woman who was unafraid of the fire,’ where we follow Shalini in first-person. Shalini’s arc was the most convincing, as it becomes the major plot that drives the novel forward in the present. Words and pages were spent on it, and it showed. However, the other two plots were rather sweeping despite their promise.
Despite the plots being messy with too many things happening at once, the novel manages to fulfil its purpose of delivering gothic-horror fiction that tells the stories of women who remain quashed under structures. It can be picked up for an enjoyable read that keeps you glued to its pages. Sankar’s book stands as a proof of the possibilities of the gothic-horror genre in India, particularly when told by women and of women.