A Burning Stage

In Firebird, Saikat Majumdar crafts an elegy to the forgotten worlds of Calcutta’s stage life — a world both dazzling and damning. Set in a society grappling with the tensions between tradition and modernity, Majumdar’s novel is a tender yet brutal portrait of a woman who dares to live outside the strictures imposed upon her. Garima Basu is a stage actress — an artist whose performances ignite adoration inside the proscenium but provoke suspicion and scandal beyond it. Her only son, Ori, watches with a conflicted gaze as his mother’s glamorous public life becomes the source of private shame. Torn between his innate pride in her artistry and the misogynistic whispers of a rigid society, Ori undergoes a tragic emotional journey that culminates in an almost Biblical betrayal.

Majumdar’s great strength lies in his atmospheric writing. Calcutta — with its crumbling theatres, suffocating homes, and labyrinthine red-light districts — becomes a character in its own right. The city’s dusty colonial grandeur and its moral hypocrisy are rendered with exquisite precision, offering readers a setting as volatile and alive as the characters who inhabit it. Intertextuality is woven throughout the novel like a second skin. While Majumdar references a play about Joan of Arc, the title Firebird also inevitably evokes Igor Stravinsky’s iconic ballet — a mythic symbol of beauty, sacrifice, and destruction. This resonance deepens the reader’s sense of Garima’s doomed brilliance: an artist too radiant for a society eager to extinguish difference.

Ori’s gradual alienation from his mother is portrayed with aching delicacy. In one haunting sequence, he roams the notorious Sonagachi red-light district, searching for a distorted reflection of his mother among the women society deems unclean. Majumdar resists sensationalism here; instead, he offers a meditation on the cruelty of moral codes that collapse complex lives into simple labels.

Firebird also critiques the theatre itself — not merely as a space of performance, but as an industry of compromise. Directors, like the enigmatic Ahin Mullick, are portrayed as both visionaries and predators, blurring the lines between artistic genius and exploitation. In drawing parallels between characters onstage and off, Majumdar highlights the uneasy bargain artists must make: to expose the self is also to risk destruction.

There are moments where Firebird risks being overwhelmed by its own symbolism. The novel occasionally lingers too heavily on metaphoric parallels, especially in later chapters where Shakespearean allusions pile onto the already dense narrative. Yet even here, Majumdar’s prose carries a quiet elegance, and his characters — especially Garima — pulse with heartbreaking authenticity.

Garima Basu is ultimately one of the most affecting literary figures in recent Indian fiction: not because she triumphs, but because she endures. Her survival is not heroic in the conventional sense; it is the fragile, weary persistence of someone who refuses to surrender entirely, even as society conspires to erase her. In Firebird, Saikat Majumdar has composed a lyrical and devastating meditation on art, shame, and the loneliness of those who dare to create. It is a novel that smolders long after its final pages, leaving the reader scorched — and changed.

Nasreen Iqbal Kasana, Independent Researcher