IF, LIKE ME, you want to read “social” novels describing the society we live in, with characters from the bottom of the heap as well as the higher layers, you might feel too much English fiction just deals with the inner life and outer struggles of the middle class. 

It can be a struggle finding English novels with that big “Dickensian” spread, with characters from the rich and the poor, and plots that throw them together.

Thankfully there are a growing number of Indian authors writing “social” novels dramatising how people try and hustle, or just live, in class-bound, exploitative societies.

One of my favourites is Megha Majumdar’s 2020 debut novel, A Burning. The novel revolves around three characters: Jivan, a young woman making it out of shanty-town poverty, taking a couple of steps up as a sales assistant. 

Until she is made a scapegoat for a crime she didn’t commit, because she said the wrong thing on social media, via her one luxury purchase, a smartphone. 

The second lead character is Jivan’s former PE teacher — “PT Sir,” who  gets to climb a deal higher through a populist party: the party and her former teacher are willing to sacrifice Jivan as they fight for power. 

Meanwhile Jivan’s  one-time friend Lovely, a “Hijra” – a transgender woman – gets a break that allows her to move up from begging, hustling and scraping along the margins to the big time. Lovely also has to turn her back on Jivan to move on up.

You can feel both the tough poverty and the way people strive and struggle to climb up – or just stop themselves sinking down, in Majumdar’s tale. 

Her novel feels a lot more like Steinbeck than Dickens: Majumdar is able to tell a full story from a sometimes-spare prose, with the straightforward, colloquial speech of the characters telling you what is happening in their own language. 

As with Steinbeck, the direct, cut-down prose sometimes feels like how folk talk, sometimes it has a poetry, and feels like a fable. That doesn’t stop the characters being real and complex: Jivan and her family get the dirty end of the stick, but they are not just victims.  

Jivan herself is a convincing striver. Her social media undoing is convincingly driven by the need-to-be-seen, look-at-me urges that can undo us all on social media. 

“PT Sir” is a bit, but his pride isn’t all, arrogance. The party he joins is a convincing “pork chop” populist party: they do deliver material gains to their constituents, even if they are also motivated by grabbing a decent slice of those gains for party officials themselves.

They sometimes twist and corrupt the system, but the system is already twisted and corrupt. “PT Sir” has a real internal struggle before he turns a blind eye to communal violence or party cheating. His uptight standards and contradictory willingness to bend them feels very human.

Majumdar’s book comes from a growing school of Indian “social” novels that have characters who go from rags to riches – showing the sickness of a society which tolerates both – or try climbing but end up stuck in rags: like Vikas Swarup’s 2005 novel Q & A filmed by Danny Boyle as Slumdog Millionaire. 

Or Aravind Adiga’s 2008 novel The White Tiger, which has a village boy climbing up from a bullied servant, to become a bullying boss himself. The White Tiger was filmed in 2021. Both book and film (available through Netflix) are excellent.

These “social” books are, rightly, feted prize-winners. There is one consistent criticism which I think deserves to be taken seriously, but is ultimately unfair.

Some Indian reviewers have seen these books as a kind of “poverty tourism,” a suspicion enhanced by the way they have been published in the West in the English language, often by Indian authors who studied at elite Western universities.

The Times of India said of The White Tiger: “For many of us our worst fears have come true: the West is once again using our poverty to humiliate us,” with too many Western cliches of an India of “broken bodies of beggars, buzzing flies, dirty drains and famished faces,” saying that “India is not shining, despite its claims of a booming economy.”

Some Indian press reviews of A Burning also were very positive but worried the book was distorted by being too “white people friendly” or “broad brush.”

I think there is maybe a danger some Western audiences might read A Burning or White Tiger to feel a bit smug, to feel pity rather than anger. But I don’t believe that, read rightly, this is the main effect of these books.

First, they show India as an intensely dynamic nation, with a big, growing economy, not some kind of backward backwater: they are about people trying to move up the social ladder, about how millions of  Indians are trying to find a better place in a changing society, to move from rural to urban, from old fashioned marginal trades to a place in the modern service economy, to get from shanty to stable housing, to get a foothold in the middle class or for the middle class to make one more jump upwards. 

One theme that appears strongly in A Burning is the way modern , supposedly “democratic” social media and mass media interacts with people’s feelings and views in a society where democracy is distorted by financial and social power.

Second, and more importantly, what these novels show happening in India are things we can understand in our own nations, maybe at lesser intensity. The Times of India worried that White Tiger illuminates or exaggerates “the rot in the three pillars of modern India – democracy, enterprise and justice.”

Well democracy, enterprise and justice are rotten in the US and Britain too.

Similarly A Burning shows how service workers get exploited, populist parties can be corrupt, as can the establishment they are trying to disrupt, that political opportunism replicates the established order, that journalists who claim to be friends can be stab-in-the-back slimy. That the ambitious can be made cruel, that the hard up offered a big chance might turn their back on their friends, and this is interwoven in the system, that injustice falls on the weak, and racist violence grows from a rotten system.

The book isn’t just telling us about India so we can pity the nation, it is telling us about modern capitalist society so we can get moved about it, and I hope angry about it.