'A Burning': How Megha Majumdar's bestselling book captures spirit and complexities of life in India

When tragedy strikes in Megha Majumdar's brilliant debut novel, A Burning, a young Muslim woman called Jivan is carrying a bag of books to give to Lovely, an exuberant member of India's transgender community, to whom she is teaching English in the Kolkata slum where they live.

In the terrorist attack that ensues, more than a hundred people die on a burning train, while the authorities seem to look on impassively.

Horrified, Jivan takes to Facebook and posts: “If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean the government is also a terrorist?”

In the search for blame and retribution, it's fair to say those simple words don't do her any favours. When they go viral, Jivan is arrested and sent to jail to await the trial that gives A Burning its propulsive narrative force. After all, the penalty for conviction of a terrorist offence is death.

Inspired by real life

Majumdar, who grew up in Kolkata and now lives in New York, says Jivan's predicament wasn't inspired by a particular event, rather an "accumulation" of things she has witnessed and heard over the years. "There's a scene in the book where a mob attacks a villager who is suspected of having eaten beef, and you know, that just came out of so many news articles like that," she says.

It's Majumdar's incredible commitment to all the vagaries, contradictions, possibilities and joys of Indian life that has made A Burning such an eagerly anticipated book – it was released to a US audience in June last year, but to the rest of the world only last week.

“I really wanted to revisit the spirit of the place as I see it, all the little interactions and relationships that make up a neighbourhood and a city,” she says.

In the US, Majumdar received the kind of acclaim debut authors can only dream of. Writing in The New Yorker, celebrated critic James O'Brien marvelled at the sophisticated way an Indian panoply emerges, and the book's "extraordinary directness and openness to life". A National Book Award longlisting followed, along with bestselling status and end-of-year acclaim in Time magazine and, well, almost every US publication of note.

"It's been so strange," she says. "I think it will take me years to process that kind of praise. You write your document in a place of quietness and solitude, just tinkering with questions and words and kind of polishing things, and then all of a sudden, to have it be an object that people are responding to …"

She tails off, almost amazed this life-changing situation – she's been compared to Akhil Sharma and VS Naipaul – has happened to her.

“Actually, I’ve just been immensely grateful; there’s so much going on in the world right now that I know many people just do not have the bandwidth to keep up with everything.”

A moral conundrum

Actually, perhaps the reason A Burning has struck such a chord is precisely because it offers such a clear-eyed view of the complexity of the world, through the lens of the India in which Majumdar grew up. She distinctly remembers going to a market in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata and realising the person removing the scales from the fish was a child her age.

"I'd be on the school bus, and look out at kids in roadside eating places washing plates and dishes," she says. "I was very aware how immensely lucky I was, and in time I also saw how people move through networks and systems that don't serve them, and did so with intelligence, humour and determination," she says.

This idea is important in A Burning because its two other brilliantly drawn characters – Lovely, who has dreams of becoming an actress, and PT Sir, Jivan's former teacher who sees a way out of his role via Hindu nationalist politics – both have the ability to assist Jivan. Whether, when faced with their chance to leave their lowly lives behind, they will chose truth or betrayal, is key to a book that doesn't contain bad people as much as bad situations.

“I was very interested in the question of whether such a society allows you to care about justice for everybody, or whether it pushes you into this corner where you realise that either you rise or somebody else rises,” Majumdar says.

"I wanted to see whether these people – who are so close to achieving something that is meaningful for them – will act out of self-interest.

“And, yeah, I felt that perhaps the harder and more complex thing to think about is that they’re not bad people. I never meant to write villains, but they are definitely people who are very aware that they have one chance at rising above their current circumstances, and either they seize it, or they let it go.”

The moral conundrum, but piercing reality, of that notion, along with the injustice of Jivan's situation and a number of other moments in the book that underline Majumdar's desire to process "the rise of this ideology which seeks to determine who belongs in a nation and who doesn't", might make A Burning seem polemical, dark and difficult. But the author simply lays all Indian life out before us. And does so through electrifyingly readable and enjoyable characters, without ever being frivolous.

"I wanted to see if I could write a book that grapples with these important ideas, but would not be preachy or dry," she says. "That could be entertaining, have a tight plot and move really fast. How could I write this intellectually serious book while also making it fun, and what does fun even look like in this context?"

The response from the wider public to these burning questions certainly seems to suggest Majumdar succeeded in her aims. But how does she feel about her book – India, even – now that the dust has settled a little?

"I go back every year – when there's not a pandemic – and my family are all there," she says. "Writing about India was a chance to be closer to it still, and like every place it has its challenges. But what I really wanted to focus on was how people do not give up. People still have their wildest dreams that they chase, they still want a better life, a more meaningful life, despite all of the hurdles in their way.

“And at the same time, I hope the book encourages people to think about injustice wherever they are, and in whatever form they have encountered it. To think about the difficulty of living a moral life, and how people still try to do so.”