A Portrait of India on Fire

“IS IT A CRIME TO WRITE SOME WORDS ON FACEBOOK?”

So asks Jivan, the young protagonist of Megha Majumdar’s powerful debut novel, A Burning, after she is falsely accused of collaborating with a terrorist on social media. More than a hundred people have been killed in an attack at a train station near her slum in Kolkata, and tensions are running high. Given what befalls her, Jivan could have put her question another way: Is it a crime to be born into a poor family in India? To be a Muslim? To be a woman? To imagine a better life, powered by her meager salary as a retail clerk and animated by her new smartphone?

Of course, Jivan’s Facebook post, which starts the novel, was ill-advised—especially given the realities of today’s India, with its surge of nationalism and growing suppression of free speech. “If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean that the government is also a terrorist” she writes. Whatever the police and the government actually are, they know a good scapegoat when they see one. They arrest Jivan, charge