This review was first presented at the 2025 Graduate Student Book Review Colloquium on Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies organized by the Maydan/ AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies at GMU on December 18, 2025.
What does it mean to be “lucky” after surviving state-sanctioned mass violence? In The Lucky Ones: A Memoir, Zara Chowdhary interrogates this very notion through her account of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom that claimed over two thousand Muslim lives. Her central argument is provocative: survival without justice is not luck but another form of violence, one compounded by state erasure that demands Muslim silence. Writing from her teenage perspective, Chowdhary constructs a testimonial archive capturing both systematic violence and the precarious conditions of Muslim belonging in postcolonial India.
The memoir opens in the immediate aftermath of the Godhra train burning on February 27, 2002. Narendra Modi, then Gujarat’s Chief Minister and now India’s Prime Minister, framed the incident as an Islamic terror attack. This official framing became permission for violence. Mobs mobilized rapidly to loot, rape, and burn alive Muslim citizens while the state apparatus ensured no legal consequences followed. What Chowdhary documents is not communal riot, but calculated state terror designed to destroy Muslim belonging in India.
The memoir’s urgency intensifies with Modi’s continuing political ascent. Against twenty-two years of state-mandated forgetting, Chowdhary insists on her right to remember, grieve, and stay angry. Her epilogue declares: “My home is in this memory I hold of India, of who we once were. And my uprising is to keep this story writ into history no matter how much erasure stamps over it” (294-295). Through the act of remembering, she creates an anti-erasure archive where memory becomes the most powerful weapon against state-mandated forgetting.
The memoir is structured around five elemental themes: Fire, Threads, Flowers, Air, and Water, preceded by a powerful prologue. This organizational strategy allows Chowdhary to move fluidly between the immediate terror of those three months and the deeper structural conditions that made such violence possible. In the prologue, she traces fire-related catastrophes from Halley’s comet in 837 CE to the Reichstag burning in 1933, culminating in the 2002 Godhra train fire. By paralleling Gujarat to Nazi Germany, she shows how the Godhra fire, like the Reichstag burning, became a state-crafted pretext for mass violence rather than an isolated tragedy. Her training in creative writing is evident in this approach. She merges personal testimony with political analysis, using historical montage to establish the memoir’s central argument. The 2002 pogrom was not spontaneous communal violence but calculated state terror. It was designed to destroy the very possibility of secular coexistence in India.
Having established this framework of state terror, Chowdhary’s Fire section demonstrates how Gujarat Pogrom operated through three interconnected mechanisms: constitutional, gendered, and spatial. In The Man Who Saved Sparrows, she meticulously reconstructs former MP Ahsan Jafri’s murder at Gulbarg Society. Her deliberate, restrained prose reveals how a man who protected nesting sparrows and believed in law was burned alive by a mob (33-41). Daughters of Fire extends this analysis through survivor testimonies like Bilkis Bano showing how Muslim women’s bodies became battlefields where communal hatred was violently inscribed (42-48). The Making of Our Ghetto then exposes how spatial segregation preceded and enabled targeted violence (64-70).
By weaving these three narratives together, Chowdhary demonstrates how the pogrom systematically targeted Muslim bodies through three interconnected systems. It stripped away constitutional protections, inscribed communal hatred onto gendered bodies, and used spatial segregation to facilitate violence.
The Threads section expands Chowdhary’s analysis beyond the pogrom itself. Here she examines Muslim erasure across cultural, institutional, and domestic spheres in postcolonial India. Darning and A Wali establish deep Muslim belonging through the majnu khes weave (75-76) and the sufi saint Wali of Gujarat (87). These symbols reveal how Muslims shaped South Asian material and spiritual life for centuries. Yet the pogrom exposed how this belonging could be violently erased. In When They Come for Us, Chowdhary shows secular institutions abandoning Muslim neighborhoods entirely, leaving impoverished slum dwellers as unexpected protectors (103- 106). In Patchwork, she introduces slow violence to show how systemic discrimination against Muslims enables patriarchal violence within homes (143-151). Placing her father’s abuse alongside institutional abandonment, she reveals that both state and domestic violence rely on shared logics of control and disposability. Her critical intervention lies in refusing to portray Muslims as perfect victims. By challenging patriarchy within her own community while simultaneously arguing for Muslim protection, Chowdhary insists that nobody must be morally flawless to deserve safety and the right to live.
In the Flowers section, Chowdhary argues that violence operates not only through spectacular killings but through the erasure of ordinary life itself. In Indefinite Postponement (169) and Uniform (182), she shows how institutions demand Muslims perform normalcy while denying them safety. Against this erasure, Chowdhary centers women’s invisible labor as everyday resistance. In Annapurna, she invokes the Hindu goddess of nourishment to show how Amma’s cooking becomes sacred defiance, maintaining rhythms of normalcy when institutions abandon them (173-180). By placing everyday domestic moments alongside scenes of political violence, Chowdhary shows that women’s labor sustains life even as the state actively attempts to destroy it. This tension between erasure and survival intensifies in the memoir’s final sections. In Air, Chowdhary argues that speech itself becomes weaponized. For instance, Saying My Name shows how announcing Muslim identity in classrooms transforms from mundane ritual into potentially fatal declaration (231-236). When even speaking one’s name risks death, migration becomes the only refuge. The Water section examines this forced displacement. A Train to the Ocean mourns lost mobility (263-265), while Daughters of the Sea invokes Prophet Muhammad’s Hijra to frame the family’s migration to Madras as necessary exile (286-291). With the final section, Chowdhary leaves readers questioning. Can geographic escape heal the wounds of pogrom, or do the lucky ones carry Gujarat’s violence with them wherever they go?
While The Lucky Ones makes vital contributions, certain analytical gaps suggest directions for enrichment. Even though Chowdhary critiques Hindu nationalism trenchantly, she offers limited analysis of colonialism’s foundational role in constructing the very categories that made 2002 possible. She briefly references the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act, showing how colonial criminalization created lasting stigma that anti-Muslim forces later exploited. In 2002, Hindu nationalist groups mobilized members of formerly criminalized tribes for violence by blaming Muslims for their poverty (53-54). Chowdhary thus gestures toward colonial legacies, but does not trace how deeply colonial governance structured contemporary communal violence precisely what Peter van der Veer’s Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (1994) demonstrates. Van der Veer shows that Muslim otherness itself is a colonial production: census categories and orientalist scholarship transformed fluid religious practices into fixed political identities that rendered Muslims perpetually foreign to the nation. Similarly, Gyanendra Pandey’s Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001) reveals how postcolonial nationalist historiography inherited and amplified these colonial frames.
Without this genealogy, 2002 appears as a sudden explosion of Hindu-Muslim hatred. With it, the violence becomes legible: the ideological infrastructure enabling such rapid mobilization was centuries in the making.
Yet what van der Veer’s structural analysis and Pandey’s historiographical critique cannot provide, Chowdhary powerfully offers: an archive of lived memory that refuses state narratives. Van der Veer maps how religious nationalism became possible. Pandey theorizes how official histories erase complexity. But neither captures the affective and intimate dimensions of survival. Chowdhary recovers these elements through her fragmented, lyrical form, centering women’s labor, the weight of names, and everyday erasure tactics. Chowdhary’s argument is convincing because she systematically dismantles pervasive assumptions. She challenges the notion that survival constitutes luck. She refuses the demand that Muslims be perfect victims. She demolishes the myth of spontaneous communal riots. Her argument succeeds through accumulated detail and structural analysis that creates knowledge theoretical frameworks alone cannot generate.
The Lucky Ones speaks to many audiences at once. Chowdhary’s creative writing background makes the memoir accessible to general readers seeking to understand contemporary India. At the same time, her analysis of state violence makes the book valuable for graduate courses in anthropology, postcolonial studies and feminist theory. It is especially well suited for undergraduate teaching in South Asian studies, human rights, and political violence. Chowdhary’s lyrical memoir makes state terror tangible through lived experience, offering students both emotional depth and analytical clarity. Beyond India, it enables comparative understanding of genocide and ethnic cleansing, revealing how minoritized communities worldwide navigate survival, belonging, and erasure under systematic state violence.
References
Chowdhary, Zara. The Lucky Ones: A Memoir. New York: Crown, 2024.
Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Van der Veer, Peter. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Gungun Islam is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in Anthropology at Michigan State University, working at the intersection of medical anthropology, the anthropology of Islam, gender, and South Asian studies. Her work explores how religious marginalization shapes experiences of health, illness, and care among Muslim women in India.