Published in 2020, this is Megha Majumdar's debut novel.

The bulk of the narrative is told in three voices.

Jivan is our key protagonist. She's a Muslim, and she's bright. But her family live in a slum area of Kolkata, and times are hard. They used to live in a coal village, where her mother dug, and her father operated a rickshaw. But they are forcibly evicted because developers want the land. They try to fight back. It's useless. They're overpowered. The result is that everything is destroyed, including the conveyance that was dad's livelihood. In any case, he has been injured, his rickshaw days most likely over. The family is resettled (very inadequately), and Mum starts a food business. But one night she's attacked, and told to "go back to Bangladesh". "Why was this our life," wonders Jivan, "What kind of life was it?"

But she's a dauntless young woman. She leaves school, and gets a job in a store. She sees herself as "moving up". She has a phone now, and access to social media.

And that's her undoing. After a horrible attack in which a train is set on fire, and many people die, Jivan unwisely comments on social media: "I wrote a foolish thing. I wrote a dangerous thing, a thing nobody like me should ever think, let alone write." The offending sentences were these: "If the police didn't help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn't that mean, I wrote on Facebook, that the government is also a terrorist?"

It's not long before she's arrested. She had inadvertently chatted on Facebook with someone who turns out to be "the terrorist recruiter"; she's spotted carrying an incriminating bag. And a couple of other easily explainable circumstances do the rest, because at the end of the day, she's a Muslim, and that's what really tells against her.

The rest of Jivan's account is her fight for justice. Clearly, all this evidence is circumstantial, and open to other interpretations; she is forced to confess; and she's in prison for a full year before she's even tried.

We meet Gobind, her fairly ineffective lawyer, currently in charge of an eye-popping 74 cases. We meet Purnendu Sarkar, a journalist who turns out to be not so much ineffective as positively harmful, allowing all her statements to be doctored by an editor who wants to make "the story better", distorting it beyond recognition in the process.



The second voice is that of Lovely, a hijra. (I had to look this up. Outsiders call them transgender, but it's rather more complex: They are seen as a third gender by Indian society and by most hijras themselves. That is, they're neither male nor female, nor transitioning. Some, however, do identify as transgender, and may seek gender reassignment procedures. This was the choice of a friend of Lovely's, who died when the operation was botched. Lovely subsequently decides to stay "half-half".)

Driven out of the family home for being an "unnatural boy", Lovely sought refuge in a hijra community. They live in a strangely grey area. Lovely is harassed on an individual basis pretty much all the time, and yet the group she belongs to is sought after for blessings, and regarded as having "a special telephone line to god".

She has recently split up with her boyfriend, because his family wants him to marry "a proper woman". Now her dream is to become an actress, and she's taking drama lessons.

Initially, she testifies in court on behalf of the accused, because she knows exactly what was in the bag Jivan was carrying: Books that Jivan, who had been teaching Lovely English, was now giving her.

But then Lovely gets her film break. Her drama practice video goes viral, and suddenly she's wanted. Initially, there's opinion on both sides about her courtroom appearance. But then she's told to step back, both by her hijra group leader ("you want to be a star or you want to be that girl's defender for ever?") and by movie-maker Sonali Khan, who wants no complications for her production. Lovely backs down: "Only one of us can be truly free. Jivan or me."


Lovely says: "I am going to the number one tourist spot in the whole city, the white marble British palace Victoria Memorial." The pictures are from Kolkata, 2016

The third voice belongs to PT Sir, who once taught Jivan when she was a "charity student". He used to give her food sometimes, as she was clearly hungry. But he's put out when she leaves school after Class 10 without saying a word (we know that she leaves because she has to support her family financially, but he doesn't).

We watch him becoming progressively more involved with the Jana Kalyan Party (Well-being for All), where he comes under the influence of politician Bimala Pal.

His wife is initially sceptical: "In our country, politics is for goons and robbers, you know that." And actually, it turns out she's right... PT Sir starts to become a fixer for the party. One of his key roles is to testify in court against people they don't like (who are generally people of "the wrong religion"). In turn, things he needs done get done. The school lane is magically provided with drainage, for example.

At one point, he witnesses a horrible killing. A Muslim has been accused of slaughtering a cow, and a crowd of vigilantes sets out to punish him. Murder, rape, and destruction ensue -- and yet no beef is found in the icebox at the end... PT Sir initially feels terrible about this, but Bimala Pal tells him not to worry. He walks away, "feeling the protective wing of the party sheltering him".

Meanwhile, he and his wife are earning nicely. They can afford a brand new tandoor over. "He has ascended."

And eventually, the party and PT Sir kill off the "mercy petition" that is now Jivan's only hope. There are no votes in mercy, they have decided.

Other voices become audible from time to time, like a kind of chorus that expands or nuances the points that have been made by the others.

The end -- which is bleak -- came as a surprise to me. I'd kept faith with hope, but ultimately there wasn't any.


Legacies of empire...

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Majumdar grew up in Kolkata, but moved to the US to study when she was 19. I always experience a smidgen of concern when writers evoke the country they have left. Are they adapting their ideas to their new country's audience? Are they writing things that this audience would expect to read? I guess A Burning represents pretty much what a Western reader might expect to read about India... Slums. Goons. Corruption. Religious hatred.

I'm not in the least saying it's not accurate. And Majumdar stresses that the novel sprang out of her own alarm at what was happening in India: "I grew up in a country where we were taught secular democratic values and that the plurality of our society is something to be proud of. When certain people say, 'this community belongs and that one doesn’t', that’s very frightening. Someone like Jivan, the main character, can have a narrative imposed upon them by the state which they don’t agree with and which they never claimed."

All true. But I'm just wondering whether a more nuanced story could have been told, and whether the preconceived ideas of its prospective Western audience factored into the construction of this particular story. I don't know.

Indian reaction has been mixed, according to Saudamini Jain, with critique split "along the divisions of our time". First came the praise; then the criticism started to trickle in. (For Anand Vardhan, for example, the novel is based on "the headlines and commentary of a section of the Indian news media over the last few years, especially the English variant", and "replicates some of the smug assumptions seen in such commentary". For Irfan Ahmad, it plays a useful role in leading our gaze to the terror practised by the state, but lacks depth in its portrayal of this Muslim family.)



So that was interesting. But what particularly struck me about the Western reviews I've read is not the tut-tut-tutting over India that I'd expected, but rather the overwhelming urge to relate this book to AMERICA.

Steve Almond, for example, writes: "A Burning offers a piercing vision of what happens to the individual in a nation where corruption is the coin of the realm, where violent bigotry and calculated deception are essential political tools, where social media become the apparatuses of foment and surveillance, where social justice is seen as sedition, and where the acquisition of fame and power make the conscience expendable. Sound familiar?... [Majumdar] has captured the dimensions of our moment with chilling precision: the deranged national lust for fame, the activation of tribal grievances, the political uses of sacrificial sadism, the gleeful nihilism that disguises our national despair... A Burning enters the world at an historical moment when citizens all across the globe have surrendered their capacity to imagine the suffering of others. This moral lassitude has been a gift to the rich and powerful, to the morally demented who profit by incitement and have happily fortified the legal and economic structures that exploit by design and reduce immigrants and refugees to social vermin."

Or here's Caroline Tew: "What truly makes A Burning stand out are the ways in which the story of a young girl in Kolkata, India, holds a mirror to the current political situation in the United States."

Or Kelly Roark: "A Burning illustrates the striking similarities between the way Jivan is treated by the court systems and how people of color and economic hardship are abused by the American justice system."

Majumdar herself says, in 2020, that "the parallels between India and the US are stunning", and points out the links between Hindu nationalism and white supremacy.

Given the very stark events portrayed in A Burning, these comments are interesting indeed. And things have only worsened since then...



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One final thing to note is that Majumdar is another who falls into the Cushion's AWIALNTO category (Authors Writing in a Language Not Their Own). She comments: "We grew up speaking Bengali at home, and as a kid I learned very early that I needed to learn English. All the adults were telling me I needed to get better at it; I was having trouble getting into school after kindergarten because my English was so poor. I was reading everything I could find: Grimms’ fairytales; Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys when I was a little older; so much Enid Blyton. I realised English doesn’t have to be a language for, you know, blond kids at the beach, building sandcastles; I could use it to write about what I see. It feels obvious now, but it was a huge revelation, that English could be part of my life -- that was really the key thing that allowed me to write fiction."

Wow.