Salil Tripathi in The Guardian
Some thought the BJP’s reduced majority after recent elections would humble it. Tell that to the Booker prize-winning author
This month, the highest ranking bureaucrat of the state of Delhi, Vinai Kumar Saxena, gave his permission for the Delhi police to prosecute Arundhati Roy and Sheikh Showkat Hussain for remarks they made at a public event 14 years ago. The opposition Aam Aadmi party governs Delhi, but the capital’s police reports to the central government’s home ministry. While the prime minister, Narendra Modi, lost his parliamentary majority in the recently concluded elections, the prosecution of Roy shows that those who expected a chastened government willing to operate differently are likely to be disappointed.
Hussain and Roy are to be tried for making speeches at a conference called Azadi [Urdu for “freedom”]: The Only Way, which questioned Indian rule in the then state of Jammu and Kashmir. Hussain is a Kashmiri academic, author and human rights activist. Roy is among India’s most celebrated authors, with a wide following around the world.
After Roy won the Booker prize in 1997, for The God of Small Things, she became the nation’s darling. It was the year of India, in a sense: the 50th anniversary of India’s independence, and the year Salman Rushdie, the first Indian-born winner of the Booker, published a volume anthologising new Indian literature. Roy was a fresh voice from the still young, post-independence India, reminding us of the multitude of stories from the subcontinent not yet told. She became an idol to be followed and imitated. Indeed, in Mira Nair’s 2001 film Monsoon Wedding, a character who wants to pursue creative writing at an American university is told by an uncle: “Lots of money in writing these days. That girl who won the Booker prize became an overnight millionaire.”
But many of those uncles – powerful and privileged – are no longer happy with Roy. When Saxena announced that Roy could be prosecuted under India’s draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), because she had said at this event that Kashmir had never been an “integral” part of India, there was outrage abroad from intellectuals and writers’ organisations, but responses in India were less spirited. While politicians such as Mahua Moitra of the Trinamool Congress were prompt in criticising the move, others on social media commended the government and gleefully admonished those who defended Roy. Their reasoning: Roy was “anti-national”, unpatriotic, sympathising with terrorists, and needed to face the full force of the law.
The UAPA is a draconian law – being granted bail is extremely difficult, and the accused can be taken into custody before the trial even begins. And the proceedings may not begin for years, as has happened to several leading dissidents during the Modi years. But its use against Roy in this case is puzzling. Lawyers have pointed out procedural gaps: it is not known if the Delhi police has filed a formal report, known as “charge sheet”, after conducting investigations, which is necessary before prosecution can begin. India’s highest court requires the authorities to explain why they wish to use the UAPA, and Saxena’s order offers no explanation. Nor does a 14 June note published on social media that carries his signature. Under UAPA, central government approval is necessary before prosecution can begin, and the authority can grant such permission only after there has been an independent review of evidence gathered. It is not known publicly if any of those steps have been taken, raising profound questions about the legality of the approval itself. Some lawyers believe that the government may have invoked the UAPA to sidestep the legal bar of the statute of limitations.
Despite this travesty, if Roy is not getting an outpouring of public sympathy, it has to do with how India has changed in the past quarter of a century. Its elite are keen to shed the past image of a poor, struggling country. India deserves a seat at the main table, they say; and dissidents and writers who question Indian policies are inconvenient do-gooders whose pessimism interferes with India’s ascent. On significant issues on which much of India’s majoritarian, powerful elite believes there is consensus, Roy is the naysayer.
Consider Roy’s views on Kashmir, the disputed territory over which India and Pakistan have gone to at least three wars, and where Pakistan-supported insurgents have sought independence. The Indian army has stationed tens of thousands of troops there, and human rights groups have accused the Indian state and extremist groups of abuses. Roy has listened to Kashmiri voices and challenged India’s human rights record for more than a decade. She has persistently opposed India’s governing consensus and conduct in Kashmir – her last novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – describes the Kashmir crisis graphically. Triumphalist Indians don’t like to hear such criticism.
Nor do many Indians like her questioning the wisdom of building large dams to produce electricity or irrigate farms. Building dams was the dream of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; he called dams “temples of modern India”. The dams helped farms and generated power, and well-meaning development experts questioned Roy’s stance. But Roy showed how they also displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The dispossessed saw the mandatory land acquisitions as a land grab by the powerful.
Roy has also written critically of Gandhi’s views on the “untouchable” caste Dalits, calling them discriminatory and patronising, and has been a vocal critic of India’s nuclear tests and arsenal. These views offend India’s conservative and liberal opinion. India’s peaceniks admire Gandhi; India’s Hindu nationalists hate Gandhi but love the bomb. The fact that she wins accolades abroad, and prominent western publications give her space to write, rattles and rankles them even more. The powerful in India want to hear only praise; Roy keeps reminding the world of the rot within.
Whether or not Roy gets prosecuted remains to be seen; prosecuting authorities may feel the evidence isn’t enough, or much time has passed, and her lawyers may succeed with their procedural objections. The government too may prefer the ambiguity, hoping that the threat of prosecution might keep her, and other dissidents, silent.
But one thing is certain: it was wrong to assume that Modi has changed. Pursuing someone as high-profile as Roy is the government’s way of warning critics that they must not expect anything different. The sword hangs over the critics; Roy reminds us why the pen must remain mightier than the sword.
Showing posts with label arundhati. Show all posts
Showing posts with label arundhati. Show all posts
Saturday, 22 June 2024
Friday, 9 February 2024
Monday, 20 July 2020
‘This injustice will not go on forever’: Arundhati Roy writes to her jailed friend GN Saibaba
Arundhati Roy writes to Saibaba courtesy Scroll.in
Professor GN Saibaba
July 17, 2020
Anda Cell
Nagpur Central Jail
Nagpur
Maharashtra
Dear Sai,
I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this is me, Arundhati writing to you and not Anjum. You wrote to her three years ago and she most certainly owes you a reply. But what can I say – her sense of time is entirely different from yours and mine, leave alone the speedy world of Whatsapp and Twitter. She thinks nothing of taking three years to reply to a letter (or not). Right now, she has locked herself in her room in the Jannat Guest House and spends all her time singing.
The remarkable thing is that after all these years she has started singing again. Just walking past her door listening to her makes me glad to be alive. Every time she sings Tum Bin Kaun Khabariya Mori Lait (Who Other Than You Asks Me How I Am?) it breaks my heart a little. And it makes me think of you. When she sings it, I’m sure that she too is thinking of you. So even if she doesn’t write back, you should know that she often sings to you. If you concentrate hard enough perhaps you will be able to hear her.
When I spoke of our sense of time it was wrong of me to have so easily said “yours and mine” – because surely serving a life sentence in the dreaded Anda Cell makes your sense of time closer to Anjum’s than to mine. Or maybe it’s very different from hers too. I’ve always thought that the phrase “doing time” in the English language meant something far more profound than the slangy way in which its used. Anyway, sorry for my thoughtless remark. In her own way, Anjum is serving a life sentence too, in her graveyard – her life of “Butcher’s Luck”. But of course, she doesn’t live behind bars or have a human jailor. Her jailors are djinns and her memories of Zakir Mian.
Khaki Fiction
I’m not asking how you are, because I know from Vasantha. I’ve seen the detailed medical report. It’s unthinkable that they will not grant you bail or even parole. In truth, not a day goes by when I don’t think about you. Are they still censoring your newspapers and withholding books? Do the fellow prisoners who help you with your daily routine stay in your cell, do they take shifts? Are they friendly? How is your wheelchair holding up? I know it was damaged when they arrested you –kidnapping you on your way home as though you were a dangerous criminal. (We can only be grateful that they didn’t Vikas Dubey you in “self-defence” and say that you grabbed their gun and sprinted away carrying your wheelchair under one arm. We should have a new literary genre don’t you think – Khaki Fiction. There’s enough material to hold an annual litfest. The prize money would be good and some of the more neutral judges from our neutral courts would do excellent service here too.)
I remember those days when you would visit me and the cab drivers across the street from my home would help carry you up the steps to my wheeIchair unfriendly flat. These days there’s a street dog on each of those steps. Chaddha Sahib (father), Banjarin (gypsy mother) and their puppies Leela and Seela. They were born during the Covid lockdown and seem to have decided to adopt me. But post the Covid lockdown our cab driver friends are all gone. There’s no work. The cabs are dusty and unwashed. Slowly taking root, growing branches and leaves. Small people have disappeared from the streets of big cities. Not all. But many. Millions.
I still have those tiny bottles of pickle you made me. I will wait for you to come out and share a meal with me before I open them. They are maturing nicely.
I meet your Vasantha and Manjira only occasionally, because the weight of our combined sadness makes those meetings hard. It’s not just sadness of course, it’s anger, helplessness and, on my part, a kind of shame too – shame that we have not been able to make enough people see how unjust your situation is – how immensely cruel it is to keep a man who is certified with a 90% disability in prison, convicted of having committed some ludicrous crime. Shame for not being able to do anything to speed up your appeal through the labyrinth of our judicial system which makes the process the punishment. I’m sure the Supreme Court will eventually acquit you. But by the time that happens, what a price you –and yours – will have paid.
As Covid-19 lays siege to prison after prison in India, including yours, they know, that given your condition, a life sentence could so easily become a death sentence.
So many others, including some of our common friends – students, lawyers, journalists, activists – with whom we have laughed, broken bread as well as bitterly argued, are now in prison. I don’t know if you have had news about VV (I’m talking of Varavara Rao – in case your jail censors think it’s a code for something). Putting that grand 81-year-old poet in jail is like putting a modern monument in jail. The news about his health is very worrying. After days of ill health that largely went ignored, he has tested Covid positive and has been admitted into hospital. His family who visited him says that he was lying alone and unattended on soiled sheets, that he is incoherent and unable to walk. Incoherent! VV! The man who thought nothing of addressing crowds of tens thousands, the man whose poems fired the imagination of millions in Andhra and Telengana, and all across India.
I fear for VV’s life, just as I fear for yours. Many of the others accused in the Bhima Koregaon case – “the Bhima Koregaon eleven” – are not very well and are extremely vulnerable to Covid-19 too. Vernon Gonsalves who looked after VV in prison must be at particularly grave risk. Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde were in the same prison too. But again and again the courts refuse bail. Then there’s Akhil Gogoi locked up in Gauhati who has tested positive.
What a small-hearted, cruel, intellectually fragile (or should we just go ahead and say fearsomely stupid) regime we are ruled by. How pathetic it is for the government of a country as vast as ours to be so scared of its own writers and scholars.
Music, poetry, love
Just a few months ago it really seemed that things were going to change. Millions came out against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens. Students especially. It was thrilling. There was music, poetry and love in the air. A rebellion at least at last – even if not a revolution. You would have loved it.
But it has all ended badly. The entirely peaceful anti-CAA protestors are now being blamed for the massacre of 53 people in Northeast Delhi in February. That it was a planned attack is obvious from the videos of armed gangs of vigilantes, often backed by the police, rioting, burning and murdering their way through those working class neighbourhoods. The tension had been building for a while, so local people were not unprepared, and fought back.
But of course, as always, the victims have been turned into perpetrators. Under cover of the Covid lockdown, hundreds of young men, mostly Muslim, including several students, have been arrested in Delhi as well as Uttar Pradesh. There are rumours that some of the young folks who have been picked up are being forced to implicate other senior activists against whom the police have no real evidence.
The fiction writers are busy with an elaborate new story. The narrative is that the Delhi massacre was a grand conspiracy to embarrass the government while President Trump was in Delhi. The dates the police have come up with suggest that those plans were laid even before Trump’s visit was finalised – that’s how deeply entrenched in the White House anti CAA activists must be! And what kind of conspiracy was it? Protestors killing themselves in order to give the government a bad name?
Everything is upside down. It’s a crime to be murdered. They’ll file a case against your corpse and summon your ghost to the police station. As I write, news comes in from Araria in Bihar of a woman who has filed a police complaint saying she was gangraped. She has been arrested along with the women activists who were with her.
Some of the disturbing things that are happening don’t always have to do with bloodshed, lynching, mass killing and mass incarceration. A few days ago, a group of people – thugs – in Allahabad forcibly spray painted a whole row of private houses saffron and then covered them with huge images of Hindu deities against the wishes of the owners. For some reason, this made my blood run cold.
Truly, I don’t know how much further along this road India has left to go.
When you come out of prison you will find yourself in an utterly changed world. Covid-19 and the hastily called and ill thought-out lockdown has been devastating. Not just for the poor, for the middle class too. Including the Hindutva Brigade. Can you imagine giving a nation of 1.38 billion people just four hours’ notice (from 8 pm to midnight) before announcing a nation-wide curfew-like lockdown that went on for months?
Literally everything had to stop in its tracks, people, goods, machines, markets, factories, schools, universities. Smoke in chimneys, trucks on the roads, guests at weddings, treatment in hospitals. With absolutely no notice. This huge country was shut off like a clockwork toy whose spoilt rich kid owner just pulled out the key. Why? Because he could.
Covid-19 has turned out to be a kind of X-Ray that made visible the massive institutionalised injustices – of caste, class, religion and gender – that plague our society. Thanks to the disastrously planned lockdown, the economy has nearly collapsed, although the virus has travelled and thrived. It’s feels as though we’re living through a frozen explosion. The shattered pieces of the world as we knew it are all suspended in the air… we still don’t know where they will land and the real extent of the damage.
Millions of workers stranded in cities with no shelter, no food, no money and no transport walked for hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles home to their villages. As they walked they were beaten and humiliated by the police. Something about that exodus reminded me of John Steinbecks’ The Grapes of Wrath… I recently re-read it. What a book.
The difference between what happened in that novel (which is about the great migration during the years of the Depression in the US) and here, is what appears to be an almost complete absence of anger among the people here in India. Yes, there has been the occasional angry outburst, but nothing that couldn’t be managed. It’s almost chilling how everybody accepts their lot. How obedient people are. It must be such a comfort to the ruling class (and caste) – this seemingly endless capacity of ‘the masses’ to suffer and obey. But is this quality – this ability to accept suffering a blessing or a curse? I think about this a lot.
While millions of working-class people embarked on their long march home, the TV channels and the mainstream media suddenly discovered the phenomenon of the “migrant worker”. Many corporate-sponsored crocodile tears were shed at their plight, as reporters thrust microphones into peoples’ faces as they walked: “Where are you going? How much money do you have? How many days will you walk?”
But you, like so many of the others who have been imprisoned, campaigned for years against the very machine that created this dispossession and this poverty, the machine that ravaged the environment and forced people to flee their villages. While all of you who spoke up for justice – many of those same TV channels, in some cases those very same journalists and commentators – celebrated that machine. They denounced you, stigmatised you, labelled you. And now, while they weep their crocodile tears and worry about the negative 9.5% growth predicted for India’s GDP – all of you are in jail.
Even through those tears the applause in the media for every move this government makes never dies down. Occasionally it swells into a standing ovation. The first novel I read during the lockdown was Stalingrad by Vassily Grossman. (Grossman was on the frontlines with the Red Army. His second book, Life and Fate displeased the Soviet government and the manuscript was “arrested” – as though it was a human being.) It’s an audaciously ambitious book, the kind of audacity that cannot be taught in creative writing classes.
Anyway, the reason I thought of it is because of an extraordinary description in it of a meeting between a senior Nazi Army officer who has been flown in to Berlin from the frontlines of the war in Russia. The war has already begun to go very wrong for Germany, and the officer is meant to brief Hitler about the ground reality. But when he comes face to face with him, he is so terrified and so thrilled to meet his master that his mind shuts down. It scrabbles around furiously for ways to please the Fuehrer, to tell him what he wants to hear.
That’s what’s going on in our country. Perfectly competent brains are frozen with fear and the desire to flatter. Our collective IQ is plummeting. Real news doesn’t stand a chance.
Meanwhile the pandemic rages on. It’s not a coincidence that the winners of the sweepstakes for the worst-affected nations in the world are those led by the three geniuses of the early twenty-first century. Modi, Trump and Bolsonaro. Their motto, in the now immortal words of the Delhi Chief Minister (who has begun to buzz around the Bharatiya Janata Party like a pollinating bee) is: Hum ab friends hai na?
Trump is very likely to be voted out of office in November. But in India there’s no help on the horizon. The Opposition is crumbling. Leaders are quiet, cowed down. Elected state governments are blown away like froth on a cup of coffee. Treachery and defections are the subject of gleefully reported daily news. MLAs continue to be herded together and locked up in holiday resorts to prevent them from being bribed and bought over. I think that those that are up for sale should be publicly auctioned to the highest bidder. What do you say? Of what use are they to anybody? Let them go. And let’s face up to the real thing: we are, in effect, a One-Party Democracy ruled by two men. I don’t think many even realise that that’s an oxymoron.
During the lockdown so many middle-class people complained that they felt like they were in prison. But you of all people know how far from the truth that is. Those people were at home with their families (although for many, particularly women, that ended in all sorts of violence). They were able to communicate with their loved ones, they could go on with their work. They had phones. They had the internet. Not like you. And not like the people in Kashmir who have been under a sort of rolling lockdown and internet siege since August 5 last year when Section 370 was abrogated and the state of Jammu and Kashmir lost its special status and its Statehood.
If the two-month Covid lockdown has been such a huge blow to the economy in India, think of Kashmiris who have had to endure a military lockdown along with an internet siege that has lasted for the most part of a year. Businesses are collapsing, doctors are hard pressed to treat their patients, students are unable to attend online classes. Also, thousands of Kashmiris were jailed before August 5 last year. It was pre-emptive – preventive detention. Now those prisons full of people who have committed no crime, are becoming Covid incubators. How about that?
The abrogation of Section 370 was an act of hubris. Instead of settling the matter “once and for all” which was the boast, it has unleashed a sort of rumbling earthquake in the whole region. Big plates are moving and realigning themselves. According to those in the know, the Chinese PLA has crossed the border, the LAC, at several points in Ladakh, and occupied strategic positions. War with China is a whole different ballgame from war with Pakistan. So, the usual chest-thumping is little nuanced –more like gentle patting than thumping. Talks are on. So far of course, India is winning. On Indian TV. But off TV, a new world order is making itself known.
This letter is getting longer than I intended it to be. Let me say goodbye for now. Have courage dear friend. And patience. This injustice will not go on forever. Those prison doors will open and you will come back to us. Things cannot go on like this. If they do, the speed at which we are coming undone will develop a momentum of its own. We won’t need to do a thing. If that happens, it will be an epic tragedy on an unimaginable scale. But from the ruins hopefully something kinder and more intelligent will rise.
With love,
Arundhati
Friday, 2 June 2017
Writing fiction is a prayer, a song: Arundhati Roy
Zac O'Yeah in The Hindu
Arundhati Roy opens her door and lets me in – into her kitchen. I wonder if I’ve knocked on the wrong door: the delivery entrance, perhaps? I quickly hand over the humble gift of fresh coffee beans I’ve brought her, on the assumption that all serious writers love coffee.
As we sit down around her solid wood kitchen table surrounded by funky chairs, I realize that the kitchen is the warm heart of her self-designed apartment in central New Delhi. Apart from long work counters, there’s a sofa, a bookshelf, a sit-out terrace with an antique-looking bench – altogether a place where one could spend a lifetime.
But right now she’s all over the world and is somewhat jet-lagged after having just flown in from New York. Following a bunch of interviews in town, she’s soon off again on a worldwide promotion tour for her new novel. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is her first in two decades since the globally bestselling, Booker Prize-winning, The God of Small Things. It appears to be the literary happening of the decade and according to her publishers ‘it reinvents what a novel can do and can be’. I’ve started reading it and can say that it is a ruthlessly probing and wide-ranging narrative on contemporary India, written with a linguistic felicity that reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s classic Midnight’s Children. On the whole, it makes interviewing her an intimidating prospect. While she makes coffee, I rig up my electronic defences consisting of three audio recorders (two of which conk out during the interview) and a backup video camera. She looks on bemusedly and seems used to a barrage of microphones. We embark on a three-hour interview session. Excerpts:
Generations of new Indian writers have seen you as an inspiration, as someone who allowed them to dream that one could sit in India and write and then be read all over the world. How does your iconic status feel to you? Do you ever think about it?
Not really, because I am equally balanced by the kind of rage and craziness that I evoke. For me, I live inside my work. Although I must say that I was thinking at some time about writers who like to remain anonymous – but I’ve never been that person. Because, in this country it is important, especially as a woman, to say: “Hey! Here I am! I am going to take you on! And this is what I think and I’m not going to hide.” So if I have helped to give courage to anybody… to experiment… to step out of line… That’s lovely, I think it is very important for us to say: “We can! And we will! And don’t f*** with us!” You know, come on.
I’ve noticed that you don’t often appear at literary festivals. There are more than a hundred in India these days, and I’ve been to quite a few myself, but never met you before. Do you keep away from other writers?
It’s not about other writers. I don’t know if you’ve read this essay I wrote called Capitalism – A Ghost Story and Walking with the Comrades? The thing is that the Jaipur Literature Festival is funded by a kind of notorious mining company that is silencing the voices of the Adivasis, kicking them out of their homes, and now it is also funded by Zee TV which is half the time baying for my blood. So in principle I won’t go. How can I? I’m writing against them. I mean, it’s not that I’m a pure person, like all of us I have contradictions and issues, I’m not like Gandhiji, you know, but in theory I abide by this. How can you be silencing and snuffing out the voices of the poorest people in the world, and then become this glittering platform for free speech and flying writers all around the place? I have a problem with that.
Do you read a lot of new Indian fiction or non-fiction?
When I’ve been writing this book, I haven’t been very up on current things. I’m not even on Facebook and all that. I don’t have any problem [with it], but as Edward Snowden told me, the CIA celebrated when Facebook was started, because they just got all the information without having to collect it. That aside, I think that when you’re writing, you tend to be a bit strange about reading: sometimes I’m not reading whole books, I’m dipping into things to check my own sanity. ’ (She waves her left hand in a kind of elegantly psychedelic mudra before her face.) ‘Am I on the same planet?
Is there any particular Indian writer who you admire?
I think that Naipaul is a very accomplished writer, although we are worlds apart in our worldviews. But I’m not really that influenced by anybody, you know. I have to say that I find it incredible that writers in India, or almost all Indian writers, or at least the well-known writers… Let’s not say writers, but there’s been a level of eliding of things that have been at the heart of the society, like caste. You see there is something very wrong here. It is like people in apartheid South Africa writing without mentioning that there is apartheid.
Your writing is hard-hitting and outspoken – have you experienced any adverse repercussions?
My God, that’s to put it mildly. Other than of course going to jail and all that. Even now, when the last book of essays was released in Delhi, called Broken Republic, a gang of vigilantes came on stage, smashed the stage up. The right wing, the mobs, vigilantes, they are there at every meeting, threatening violence, threatening all kinds of things. I still go to speak, to Punjab, in Orissa, wherever, I’m not really that writer who is sequestered somewhere and I live perhaps alone, but in the heart of the crowd.
It must have been a bit of a shock, after expressing a personal opinion, to suddenly find yourself behind bars in Tihar Jail?
Tihar. (She sighs deeply.) Yes, it is shocking, but at the same time look at how many thousands of people are behind bars, people who have no understanding of the language, who don’t even know what they’re charged with. So I can’t really be dramatic about what happened to me, because people are in jail for years for nothing – nothing! It’s crazy! I’m currently being tried for contempt of court again for an essay I wrote called Professor P.O.W. which you can read in Outlook Magazine.
Have you ever felt that you should leave India and live in a country where you don’t have to face such problems?
Everything that I know is here! Everyone that I know! And I’ve never really lived outside, abroad, so the idea of going to live all alone in some strange country is also terrifying. But right now I think India is poised in an extremely dangerous place, I don’t know what is going to happen to anybody – to me or to anybody. There are just these mobs that decide who should be killed, who should be shot, who should be lynched, you know? I think it is probably the first time that people in India, writers and other people, are facing the kind of trauma that people have faced in Chile and Latin America. There’s a kind of terror building up here which we have not fully got the measure of. You go through periods when you are feeling very worried, then angry, and then defiant. I think this story is still unfolding.
Do you anticipate upsetting people with the new book? Though the mobs don’t read anything sophisticated, do they?
It’s never about the book or what they read or don’t read, it is about some arbitrary rules they have made about what can be said, what can’t be said, who can say what, who can kill whom – all of that. Yeah, I mean I live here, and I write here, and this book is about here. But the situation here is out of control, from the bottom! It is not about just getting killed, but it is about: How do you even sit in a train or a bus now if you are a Muslim without risking your life? So what happens with me, I have no idea. I’ve written a book and it’s taken me ten years to write it, and there are thirty countries in the world where the biggest publishers are publishing it. I’m not going to allow some idiots to come and disrupt it and snatch all the headlines. Why should I? It is not about their little brains, it is about literature. It has to be protected and tactically done in this climate.
Let’s talk about the book. What was it that made you publish a new novel after spending twenty years being a public intellectual?
Well, this novel has been ten years in the writing, but I think in the twenty years between The God of Small Things and now, I have travelled and been involved with so many things that are happening and written about them at length. There was this huge sense of urgency when I was writing the political essays, each time you wanted to blow a space open, on any issue. But fiction takes its time and is layered. The insanity of what is going on in a place like Kashmir: how do you describe the terror in the air there? It is not just a human rights report about how many people have been killed and where. How do you describe the psychosis of what is going on? Except through fiction.
So that is why you chose…
But it is not that. I didn’t choose to write fiction because I wanted to say something about Kashmir, but fiction chooses you. I don’t think it is that simple that I had some information to impart and therefore I wanted to write a book. Not at all. It is a way of seeing. A way of thinking, it is a prayer, it is a song.
In the book you use a remarkably poetic language to talk about the harshest subjects.
Language is something so natural to you, you know, not something you can manufacture, not for me.
Having studied architecture, you must have at some point thought of that as your field, while today you are one of the most celebrated novelists on the planet. What does your interest in language stem from?
Actually, the idea of language was far before architecture, because in a way architecture came to me as a very pragmatic thing. I left home when I was seventeen and I needed somehow to…
(At this point one of her dogs climbs all over me. I’m more accustomed to dogs barking the moment they see me but, puzzlingly, this one appears to want to lick my face. Arundhati laughs.)
She’s flirting with you. They are both street dogs. She was born outside a drain. Then her mother was hit by a car. That other one I found tied to a lamppost, cruelly.
Do your dogs have names?
Yeah, her name is Begum Filthy Jaan and this one is Maati K. Lal. That means “beloved of the earth”. Both Lal and Jaan mean beloved.
So they make up your family?
Yes.
They’re very well behaved to be street dogs.
Street dogs are more civilized than other dogs. They’re the best. I’m also a bit of a street dog.
I see. So we were talking about your relationship with language and how you left home at 17.
The relationship with language was there from the time I was very, very young. The only thing is that it didn’t seem possible that I would ever be in a position to be a writer.
Why not?
No money… How are you going to earn a living? In the early years of my life my only ambition was to survive somehow, pay my rent. So it didn’t seem like there’d ever be that time where you could actually sit and write something but you’d be so busy earning. It was just a question of: How do you survive?
How did you survive then?
I used to work in this place called the National Institute of Urban Affairs where I earned almost nothing. I used to live in this little hole-in-the-wall near the Nizamuddin Dargah and hire a bicycle for one rupee a day to go to work. All my time I spent thinking about money. (She giggles.)
So at that point you were almost about to become a bureaucrat?
No, no, architect! I could never have become a bureaucrat.
But a government servant?
No, not even that. I was just a temporary, you know at the edges of it.
So then the writing really started with the film scripts?
Basically after Annie [In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989)] – a film that just made its own secret little pathways into the world away from the big hit films – I wrote a second film called Electric Moon and then The God of Small Things. And after that, the essays.
And now you’re making a fiction comeback. Was there any particular idea or incident that triggered off the new book? It seems to be a meditation on the state of the nation.
(She takes a large sip of coffee and rubs her eyes.) ‘It’s a meditation, let’s say, just a meditation. Always, some things spark something and I think in my case I don’t think what sparks it is necessarily what it’s about. Obviously so many years of one’s life and thinking and encounters and all that… but I think one of those nights that I used to spend in front of Jantar Mantar with all these [protesters] who come there, a baby did appear and people were asking: “What to do?” Nobody was sure what to do. So that was one of the things.
I recall that sequence in the novel, and you also narrate many of the individual stories behind the characters you meet at Jantar Mantar?
That was one of the ideas for me that I would – experiment. As you can imagine with any writer who writes a “successful” book, then everybody wants to sign contracts and give you lots of money… and I didn’t want that. I wanted to experiment. I wanted to write a book in which I don’t walk past anyone, even the smallest child, or woman, but sit down, smoke a cigarette, have a chat. It is not a story with a beginning, middle and an end, as much as a map of a city or a building. Or like the structure of a classical raga, where you have these notes and you keep exploring them from different angles, in different ways, different ups, different downs.
About the first hundred pages of the book are set in Old Delhi. What is your relationship to that part of town?
I actually have a place there.
Near Jama Masjid?
Yes, a rented place, a small room, so I’ve been there for many years.
But why do you need that place when you have this apartment?
You sometimes feel under siege. It was not that I went there because I was going to write about it, but because I went there it became very much part [of the book]. I go there, wander around late at night.
All those rabid street dogs, they don’t chase you?
No. Not at all. Humans are rabid, dogs are okay.
The title is intriguing – The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – because inside the book there’s quite a lot of darkness.
But yeah, there’s also quite a lot of light. And the light is in the most unexpected places.
There’s also a character called Tilo, who seems to me very much like Radha in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. Is she a continuation of that character?
(She laughs.) She’s not actually like Radha when you carry on [reading]. Yeah, she’s in architecture school, but I think Tilo is a very different person actually.
But how much autobiographical detail do you use in your writing?
It is hard to say, because where does your imagination end and your experience begin? Your memories? It is all a soup. Like in The God of Small Things when Esthappen says, “If in a dream you’ve eaten fish, does it mean you’ve eaten fish?” Or if you’re happy in a dream, does it count? To me this book is not a thinly veiled political essay masquerading as a novel, it is a novel. And in novels, everything gets processed and sweated out on your skin, has to become part of your DNA and it is as complicated as anything that lives inside your body.
On that note, let me ask: in the years you worked on the novel, did you get tired of it at some point or were you happily engrossed in it for an entire decade?
When I write fiction I have a very easy relationship with it in the sense that I’m not in a hurry. Partly, I really want to see if it will live with me, you know, for long. If I got fed up with it, I would leave it and imagine the world would get fed up too. I need to develop a relationship with it almost like…(She goes quiet.)
Like with another human perhaps?
Or a group of humans. We all live together.
Nerdy question time – are there any rituals you have to go through like putting on a jazz record or uncorking a bottle of Old Monk before you start writing?
Let’s say when I was breaking the stones and really trying to understand what I was trying to do I would never be able to work for very long, just a few hours a day. There were two phases in writing this book, one was about generating the smoke, and then it’s like sculpting it, none of which is the same as writing and rewriting, or making drafts. But when you’re generating the smoke, it would be like – I could write three sentences and then just fall asleep out of exhaustion. But when the book was finally clear to me, I’d be working long hours. It was the same with The God of Small Things, there would be that single sentence which would send me to sleep. Like a strange trance almost.
Has your training as an architect been helpful to you?
Not just helped, it is central to the way I write.
How?
Because to me a story is like the map of a city or a map of a building, structured: the way you tell it, the way you enter it, exit it… None of it is simple, straightforward, time and chronology is like building material, so yeah, architecture to me is absolutely central.
I recall Vikram Chandra once telling me how he adapted a construction project management software, used by architects and builders to control the supply chains and all that, to plan and track all the elements in his novel Sacred Games. Do you – as an architect – plan your writing like that?
Oh God! There’s no algorithm involved in my writing, it is all instinctive… rhythm.
What’s a good writing day like then? You get up at five o’clock and take strong coffee or do you wake at three in the afternoon and pour yourself a glass of champagne before hitting the desk?
I don’t seem to have any rituals as such, it is just a very open encounter between me and myself and my writing. I don’t actually understand what we mean by “when you write” because I kind of wonder when am I not writing? I am always writing inside my head! But right now, I feel almost like if I weighed myself, I’d be half my weight, because the last ten years it’s just been in my head, all the time! At least now’ (she points at the book on the kitchen table) ‘it is with me, but it is not on the weighing scale. You know?
What do you do for inspiration?
You know, one of the reasons it would be so hard for me to leave this country, is that everywhere I turn there is something so deep going on. That way I’m lucky in terms of the worlds that I move through here whether it is in the Narmada Valley or in Kashmir. It is a very anarchic, unformatted world that I live in. To me, if anything it is an overload of every kind of stimulus. I suppose I’m not closed off in some family thing. There’s a porous border between me and the world and lots of things come and go. That’s the way I live. There are so many brilliant people doing things around me all the time, like even just in the process of making this book – if I want someone who is an insane … who’s actually not a human being, but a printing machine, I lean this way. If I want someone who is skulking around the city taking pictures, I lean that way. One is just surrounded by unorthodox brilliance all the time. And that’s my real inspiration. If I want really badly behaved dogs I have them too.(She laughs and hugs one of her dogs who is barking in the background, presumably impatient with our interviewing.)
Between writing fiction and non-fiction – which one gives you more pleasure or are they equally satisfactory?
No, there’s no comparison between them for me. Non-fiction is not about pleasure; non-fiction has a sort of urgency to it and another kind of intensity. But fiction is about pleasure. I know for some people it is very painful, but for me not.
What do you do then when you celebrate a good writing day or a well done story? Do you open a bottle of Old Monk?
(She bursts out laughing.)
You’re just stuck on your Old Monk! No, I… I think I just float around.
Arundhati Roy opens her door and lets me in – into her kitchen. I wonder if I’ve knocked on the wrong door: the delivery entrance, perhaps? I quickly hand over the humble gift of fresh coffee beans I’ve brought her, on the assumption that all serious writers love coffee.
As we sit down around her solid wood kitchen table surrounded by funky chairs, I realize that the kitchen is the warm heart of her self-designed apartment in central New Delhi. Apart from long work counters, there’s a sofa, a bookshelf, a sit-out terrace with an antique-looking bench – altogether a place where one could spend a lifetime.
But right now she’s all over the world and is somewhat jet-lagged after having just flown in from New York. Following a bunch of interviews in town, she’s soon off again on a worldwide promotion tour for her new novel. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is her first in two decades since the globally bestselling, Booker Prize-winning, The God of Small Things. It appears to be the literary happening of the decade and according to her publishers ‘it reinvents what a novel can do and can be’. I’ve started reading it and can say that it is a ruthlessly probing and wide-ranging narrative on contemporary India, written with a linguistic felicity that reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s classic Midnight’s Children. On the whole, it makes interviewing her an intimidating prospect. While she makes coffee, I rig up my electronic defences consisting of three audio recorders (two of which conk out during the interview) and a backup video camera. She looks on bemusedly and seems used to a barrage of microphones. We embark on a three-hour interview session. Excerpts:
Generations of new Indian writers have seen you as an inspiration, as someone who allowed them to dream that one could sit in India and write and then be read all over the world. How does your iconic status feel to you? Do you ever think about it?
Not really, because I am equally balanced by the kind of rage and craziness that I evoke. For me, I live inside my work. Although I must say that I was thinking at some time about writers who like to remain anonymous – but I’ve never been that person. Because, in this country it is important, especially as a woman, to say: “Hey! Here I am! I am going to take you on! And this is what I think and I’m not going to hide.” So if I have helped to give courage to anybody… to experiment… to step out of line… That’s lovely, I think it is very important for us to say: “We can! And we will! And don’t f*** with us!” You know, come on.
I’ve noticed that you don’t often appear at literary festivals. There are more than a hundred in India these days, and I’ve been to quite a few myself, but never met you before. Do you keep away from other writers?
It’s not about other writers. I don’t know if you’ve read this essay I wrote called Capitalism – A Ghost Story and Walking with the Comrades? The thing is that the Jaipur Literature Festival is funded by a kind of notorious mining company that is silencing the voices of the Adivasis, kicking them out of their homes, and now it is also funded by Zee TV which is half the time baying for my blood. So in principle I won’t go. How can I? I’m writing against them. I mean, it’s not that I’m a pure person, like all of us I have contradictions and issues, I’m not like Gandhiji, you know, but in theory I abide by this. How can you be silencing and snuffing out the voices of the poorest people in the world, and then become this glittering platform for free speech and flying writers all around the place? I have a problem with that.
Do you read a lot of new Indian fiction or non-fiction?
When I’ve been writing this book, I haven’t been very up on current things. I’m not even on Facebook and all that. I don’t have any problem [with it], but as Edward Snowden told me, the CIA celebrated when Facebook was started, because they just got all the information without having to collect it. That aside, I think that when you’re writing, you tend to be a bit strange about reading: sometimes I’m not reading whole books, I’m dipping into things to check my own sanity. ’ (She waves her left hand in a kind of elegantly psychedelic mudra before her face.) ‘Am I on the same planet?
Is there any particular Indian writer who you admire?
I think that Naipaul is a very accomplished writer, although we are worlds apart in our worldviews. But I’m not really that influenced by anybody, you know. I have to say that I find it incredible that writers in India, or almost all Indian writers, or at least the well-known writers… Let’s not say writers, but there’s been a level of eliding of things that have been at the heart of the society, like caste. You see there is something very wrong here. It is like people in apartheid South Africa writing without mentioning that there is apartheid.
Your writing is hard-hitting and outspoken – have you experienced any adverse repercussions?
My God, that’s to put it mildly. Other than of course going to jail and all that. Even now, when the last book of essays was released in Delhi, called Broken Republic, a gang of vigilantes came on stage, smashed the stage up. The right wing, the mobs, vigilantes, they are there at every meeting, threatening violence, threatening all kinds of things. I still go to speak, to Punjab, in Orissa, wherever, I’m not really that writer who is sequestered somewhere and I live perhaps alone, but in the heart of the crowd.
It must have been a bit of a shock, after expressing a personal opinion, to suddenly find yourself behind bars in Tihar Jail?
Tihar. (She sighs deeply.) Yes, it is shocking, but at the same time look at how many thousands of people are behind bars, people who have no understanding of the language, who don’t even know what they’re charged with. So I can’t really be dramatic about what happened to me, because people are in jail for years for nothing – nothing! It’s crazy! I’m currently being tried for contempt of court again for an essay I wrote called Professor P.O.W. which you can read in Outlook Magazine.
Have you ever felt that you should leave India and live in a country where you don’t have to face such problems?
Everything that I know is here! Everyone that I know! And I’ve never really lived outside, abroad, so the idea of going to live all alone in some strange country is also terrifying. But right now I think India is poised in an extremely dangerous place, I don’t know what is going to happen to anybody – to me or to anybody. There are just these mobs that decide who should be killed, who should be shot, who should be lynched, you know? I think it is probably the first time that people in India, writers and other people, are facing the kind of trauma that people have faced in Chile and Latin America. There’s a kind of terror building up here which we have not fully got the measure of. You go through periods when you are feeling very worried, then angry, and then defiant. I think this story is still unfolding.
Do you anticipate upsetting people with the new book? Though the mobs don’t read anything sophisticated, do they?
It’s never about the book or what they read or don’t read, it is about some arbitrary rules they have made about what can be said, what can’t be said, who can say what, who can kill whom – all of that. Yeah, I mean I live here, and I write here, and this book is about here. But the situation here is out of control, from the bottom! It is not about just getting killed, but it is about: How do you even sit in a train or a bus now if you are a Muslim without risking your life? So what happens with me, I have no idea. I’ve written a book and it’s taken me ten years to write it, and there are thirty countries in the world where the biggest publishers are publishing it. I’m not going to allow some idiots to come and disrupt it and snatch all the headlines. Why should I? It is not about their little brains, it is about literature. It has to be protected and tactically done in this climate.
Let’s talk about the book. What was it that made you publish a new novel after spending twenty years being a public intellectual?
Well, this novel has been ten years in the writing, but I think in the twenty years between The God of Small Things and now, I have travelled and been involved with so many things that are happening and written about them at length. There was this huge sense of urgency when I was writing the political essays, each time you wanted to blow a space open, on any issue. But fiction takes its time and is layered. The insanity of what is going on in a place like Kashmir: how do you describe the terror in the air there? It is not just a human rights report about how many people have been killed and where. How do you describe the psychosis of what is going on? Except through fiction.
So that is why you chose…
But it is not that. I didn’t choose to write fiction because I wanted to say something about Kashmir, but fiction chooses you. I don’t think it is that simple that I had some information to impart and therefore I wanted to write a book. Not at all. It is a way of seeing. A way of thinking, it is a prayer, it is a song.
In the book you use a remarkably poetic language to talk about the harshest subjects.
Language is something so natural to you, you know, not something you can manufacture, not for me.
Having studied architecture, you must have at some point thought of that as your field, while today you are one of the most celebrated novelists on the planet. What does your interest in language stem from?
Actually, the idea of language was far before architecture, because in a way architecture came to me as a very pragmatic thing. I left home when I was seventeen and I needed somehow to…
(At this point one of her dogs climbs all over me. I’m more accustomed to dogs barking the moment they see me but, puzzlingly, this one appears to want to lick my face. Arundhati laughs.)
She’s flirting with you. They are both street dogs. She was born outside a drain. Then her mother was hit by a car. That other one I found tied to a lamppost, cruelly.
Do your dogs have names?
Yeah, her name is Begum Filthy Jaan and this one is Maati K. Lal. That means “beloved of the earth”. Both Lal and Jaan mean beloved.
So they make up your family?
Yes.
They’re very well behaved to be street dogs.
Street dogs are more civilized than other dogs. They’re the best. I’m also a bit of a street dog.
I see. So we were talking about your relationship with language and how you left home at 17.
The relationship with language was there from the time I was very, very young. The only thing is that it didn’t seem possible that I would ever be in a position to be a writer.
Why not?
No money… How are you going to earn a living? In the early years of my life my only ambition was to survive somehow, pay my rent. So it didn’t seem like there’d ever be that time where you could actually sit and write something but you’d be so busy earning. It was just a question of: How do you survive?
How did you survive then?
I used to work in this place called the National Institute of Urban Affairs where I earned almost nothing. I used to live in this little hole-in-the-wall near the Nizamuddin Dargah and hire a bicycle for one rupee a day to go to work. All my time I spent thinking about money. (She giggles.)
So at that point you were almost about to become a bureaucrat?
No, no, architect! I could never have become a bureaucrat.
But a government servant?
No, not even that. I was just a temporary, you know at the edges of it.
So then the writing really started with the film scripts?
Basically after Annie [In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989)] – a film that just made its own secret little pathways into the world away from the big hit films – I wrote a second film called Electric Moon and then The God of Small Things. And after that, the essays.
And now you’re making a fiction comeback. Was there any particular idea or incident that triggered off the new book? It seems to be a meditation on the state of the nation.
(She takes a large sip of coffee and rubs her eyes.) ‘It’s a meditation, let’s say, just a meditation. Always, some things spark something and I think in my case I don’t think what sparks it is necessarily what it’s about. Obviously so many years of one’s life and thinking and encounters and all that… but I think one of those nights that I used to spend in front of Jantar Mantar with all these [protesters] who come there, a baby did appear and people were asking: “What to do?” Nobody was sure what to do. So that was one of the things.
I recall that sequence in the novel, and you also narrate many of the individual stories behind the characters you meet at Jantar Mantar?
That was one of the ideas for me that I would – experiment. As you can imagine with any writer who writes a “successful” book, then everybody wants to sign contracts and give you lots of money… and I didn’t want that. I wanted to experiment. I wanted to write a book in which I don’t walk past anyone, even the smallest child, or woman, but sit down, smoke a cigarette, have a chat. It is not a story with a beginning, middle and an end, as much as a map of a city or a building. Or like the structure of a classical raga, where you have these notes and you keep exploring them from different angles, in different ways, different ups, different downs.
About the first hundred pages of the book are set in Old Delhi. What is your relationship to that part of town?
I actually have a place there.
Near Jama Masjid?
Yes, a rented place, a small room, so I’ve been there for many years.
But why do you need that place when you have this apartment?
You sometimes feel under siege. It was not that I went there because I was going to write about it, but because I went there it became very much part [of the book]. I go there, wander around late at night.
All those rabid street dogs, they don’t chase you?
No. Not at all. Humans are rabid, dogs are okay.
The title is intriguing – The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – because inside the book there’s quite a lot of darkness.
But yeah, there’s also quite a lot of light. And the light is in the most unexpected places.
There’s also a character called Tilo, who seems to me very much like Radha in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. Is she a continuation of that character?
(She laughs.) She’s not actually like Radha when you carry on [reading]. Yeah, she’s in architecture school, but I think Tilo is a very different person actually.
But how much autobiographical detail do you use in your writing?
It is hard to say, because where does your imagination end and your experience begin? Your memories? It is all a soup. Like in The God of Small Things when Esthappen says, “If in a dream you’ve eaten fish, does it mean you’ve eaten fish?” Or if you’re happy in a dream, does it count? To me this book is not a thinly veiled political essay masquerading as a novel, it is a novel. And in novels, everything gets processed and sweated out on your skin, has to become part of your DNA and it is as complicated as anything that lives inside your body.
On that note, let me ask: in the years you worked on the novel, did you get tired of it at some point or were you happily engrossed in it for an entire decade?
When I write fiction I have a very easy relationship with it in the sense that I’m not in a hurry. Partly, I really want to see if it will live with me, you know, for long. If I got fed up with it, I would leave it and imagine the world would get fed up too. I need to develop a relationship with it almost like…(She goes quiet.)
Like with another human perhaps?
Or a group of humans. We all live together.
Nerdy question time – are there any rituals you have to go through like putting on a jazz record or uncorking a bottle of Old Monk before you start writing?
Let’s say when I was breaking the stones and really trying to understand what I was trying to do I would never be able to work for very long, just a few hours a day. There were two phases in writing this book, one was about generating the smoke, and then it’s like sculpting it, none of which is the same as writing and rewriting, or making drafts. But when you’re generating the smoke, it would be like – I could write three sentences and then just fall asleep out of exhaustion. But when the book was finally clear to me, I’d be working long hours. It was the same with The God of Small Things, there would be that single sentence which would send me to sleep. Like a strange trance almost.
Has your training as an architect been helpful to you?
Not just helped, it is central to the way I write.
How?
Because to me a story is like the map of a city or a map of a building, structured: the way you tell it, the way you enter it, exit it… None of it is simple, straightforward, time and chronology is like building material, so yeah, architecture to me is absolutely central.
I recall Vikram Chandra once telling me how he adapted a construction project management software, used by architects and builders to control the supply chains and all that, to plan and track all the elements in his novel Sacred Games. Do you – as an architect – plan your writing like that?
Oh God! There’s no algorithm involved in my writing, it is all instinctive… rhythm.
What’s a good writing day like then? You get up at five o’clock and take strong coffee or do you wake at three in the afternoon and pour yourself a glass of champagne before hitting the desk?
I don’t seem to have any rituals as such, it is just a very open encounter between me and myself and my writing. I don’t actually understand what we mean by “when you write” because I kind of wonder when am I not writing? I am always writing inside my head! But right now, I feel almost like if I weighed myself, I’d be half my weight, because the last ten years it’s just been in my head, all the time! At least now’ (she points at the book on the kitchen table) ‘it is with me, but it is not on the weighing scale. You know?
What do you do for inspiration?
You know, one of the reasons it would be so hard for me to leave this country, is that everywhere I turn there is something so deep going on. That way I’m lucky in terms of the worlds that I move through here whether it is in the Narmada Valley or in Kashmir. It is a very anarchic, unformatted world that I live in. To me, if anything it is an overload of every kind of stimulus. I suppose I’m not closed off in some family thing. There’s a porous border between me and the world and lots of things come and go. That’s the way I live. There are so many brilliant people doing things around me all the time, like even just in the process of making this book – if I want someone who is an insane … who’s actually not a human being, but a printing machine, I lean this way. If I want someone who is skulking around the city taking pictures, I lean that way. One is just surrounded by unorthodox brilliance all the time. And that’s my real inspiration. If I want really badly behaved dogs I have them too.(She laughs and hugs one of her dogs who is barking in the background, presumably impatient with our interviewing.)
Between writing fiction and non-fiction – which one gives you more pleasure or are they equally satisfactory?
No, there’s no comparison between them for me. Non-fiction is not about pleasure; non-fiction has a sort of urgency to it and another kind of intensity. But fiction is about pleasure. I know for some people it is very painful, but for me not.
What do you do then when you celebrate a good writing day or a well done story? Do you open a bottle of Old Monk?
(She bursts out laughing.)
You’re just stuck on your Old Monk! No, I… I think I just float around.
Saturday, 14 March 2015
“Spare Afzal Guru and hang Arundhati Roy.” A Tribute to Vinod Mehta from Arundhati Roy
When he published the Radia tapes, Vinod Mehta did what a good editor should. By making public the dirty diaries of the ongoing cluster-f..k between politicians, journalists, journalist/lobbyists and their corporate sponsors, he broke the club rules of the cosy oligarchy that runs our country. Not surprisingly, when the curtain went down on the show, for the people who were exposed in the Radia tapes, it turned out to be nothing more than a slightly embarrassing blip in the upward arc of their ambitions. For Vinod Mehta, however, the consequences were serious. I have no doubt they played a role in hastening his end.
Anyway, he’s gone now, and with him perhaps the era of the intractable, unpredictable, idiosyncratic editor. Not because there aren’t idiosyncratic folks around any more, but because we live in a climate where it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to function. The outpouring of grief at his passing by all kinds of people, including those who are professionally his polar opposite, seems to be as much for him as for the end of idea of the independent-minded editor. In some ways it must be seen as a credit to Outlook’s proprietors that they made room for a maverick like Vinod Mehta, despite being targeted and having their offices raided several times. As for the rest of us, while we grieve for Vinod, we cannot give up on the possibility that there can be independent editors in future too.
I will miss Vinod very much. He played such an important part in my life as a writer.
It’s not that we agreed about everything, we certainly had our differences—about the Congress party, about Kashmir (of course), about the politics of caste, about his strange, recently rehashed biography of Meena Kumari. But this time around, the disagreement between us is permanent and irreversible. I maintain that he shouldn’t have left. He could have stuck around with us a little longer. But he’s just bloody well gone. It’s ridiculous. I don’t agree.
After The God of Small Things was published in 1997, I was aware that I ran the risk of turning into a sort of Interpreter of the East for the western media. This I did not wish upon myself. Whatever I wrote, whatever arguments I got into, whatever hooliganism I was involved in, I wanted it to be here. Not for reasons of any great nationalism on my part, nor because this is my country, but simply because this is where I live. Vinod Mehta became my partner in this enterprise. Almost everything I have written since 1998 was first published by him in Outlook.
Very early on in our alliance, regardless of any commentary to the contrary (and of that there was plenty) we both understood that neither was doing the other a favour. That, I believe, is a rare and wonderful thing in any relationship. Over the many years we worked together, we spoke several times on the phone, but we hardly ever met. I’ve never been to his house. He visited me only once, recently, but it was more like an inspection tour than a visit. It was as though he had come just to confirm an idea he had in his head about the way I live. He shuffled in, took a look around and shuffled out. I don’t think either of us knew how to play Guest and Host. At any rate we weren’t very good at it. That’s about it as far as our social life went.
And yet, out of this peculiar, laconic, minimalist relationship came a body of work that amounts to five volumes of collected essays and interviews that have been subsequently republished in several languages in several newspapers and magazines in India as well as the rest of the world. What does all this have to do with Vinod Mehta? Quite a lot actually. I wrote the essays, yes, but the freedom and the urgency with which I wrote had much to do with knowing that Vinod Mehta would publish them—without force-fitting them into some pre-determined magazine format. This was no joke. Outlook was, and is, a major, commercial, mass-circulation newsmagazine. That is its strength. And yet, Vinod had the self-confidence and the flexibility to publish, from time to time, these long, unorthodox, often unpopular essays that almost always created a storm.
The rules were set early on. When I sent him The End of Imagination, the essay I wrote after the 1998 nuclear tests, he called me and said, “Do you really want to say ‘Who the hell is the Prime Minister to have his finger on the nuclear button?’ Can I change it to ‘Who is the Prime Minister?’” I said I’d rather he didn’t. So ‘who the hell’ stayed. Then came my turn to ask him for something. Acutely aware of the mined terrain I was wading into, I asked him whether he could avoid putting a picture of me on the cover. He said he’d see what he could do. It was his delicate way of telling me to take a hike. The issue came out, with a photograph of me on the cover, and the most controversial sentence in the essay splashed across it: I Secede. All hell broke loose.
These then, were our unspoken Rules of Engagement. Vinod would not make any alteration to my text without my consent. In turn, even if my essay was going to be the cover story, I would stay out of any discussions about the content and design of the cover. This went on for fifteen years.
At one point during his funeral, there was a strange, poignant moment that I don’t really know what to make of. I found myself facing L.K. Advani, separated by the length of Vinod’s flower bedecked body. Advani was laying a wreath at his feet. I was standing around trying to say goodbye (or not) to Vinod in my head. I was reminded of the only time he ever cautioned me. It was 2006. The papers had announced that Afzal Guru, convicted for his role in the December 13, 2001, Parliament attack, was going to be hanged in a few days. I was dismayed because I had followed the case closely for several years and had studied the legal papers. I knew that much of the evidence was either extremely flimsy or fabricated. (There was plenty to suggest that it could even have been a false flag attack.) Hanging Afzal would mean putting an end to the possibility of getting answers to some very disturbing questions. Outrageously, the Supreme Court judgement said that though there was no direct evidence against Afzal, it was sentencing him to death “in order to satisfy the collective conscience of society”. Meanwhile, the BJP, with Advani at the forefront (he was the home minister in 2001 when the attack took place), had begun a noisy campaign: “Desh abhi sharminda hai, Afzal abhi bhi zinda hai (The country is ashamed, because Afzal is still alive).” I knew I would not be able to live with myself if I said nothing despite knowing what I knew. I called Vinod and said I wanted to write something. For the first (and only) time he said: “Arundhati, don’t. The mood is ugly. They will turn on us. They will harm you.” It didn’t take long to convince him that we could not keep quiet on this one. I wrote a long essay called And his Life Should be made Extinct—the title was a quote from the Supreme Court judgement.
The Outlook cover said, in bold letters,Don’t Hang Afzal. (Of course, the Congress-led UPA government—and not the BJP—did eventually hang him a few years later, in 2013, in the most cowardly, illegal and shabby way.)
After the issue came out, the floodgates opened and once again Outlook was deluged with insults for weeks. But this was the other part of our Rules of Engagement. Vinod would publish what I wrote, but then would open up the letters pages for abusive responses for weeks at a stretch. (After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Sashi, Vinod’s secretary of 25 years showed me some angry letters-to-the editor that had begun to arrive even before I had written anything.) No other magazine I know publishes insults to itself, its contributors and its editor so gleefully. Vinod seemed to derive endless amusement from those letters. Occasionally, he would call and chuckle about the ones he particularly liked. His favourite letter after the Afzal Guru issue was one that said, “Spare Afzal Guru and hang Arundhati Roy.” Of course, he published it.
And now, suddenly, here we were, Advani and I, grieving at his funeral. I was unnerved. Perhaps it showed grace on Advani’s part and none on mine. I don’t know. I can’t imagine what Vinod would have thought.
The last essay of mine that Vinod published before he retired as the editor of Outlook was Walking with the Comrades, my account of the weeks I spent inside the forest in Bastar with Maoist guerrillas. B.G. Verghese, who recently passed away too, wrote a response to it. And then extraordinarily, Vinod published a reply to his response by Cherukuri Rajkumar, better known as Comrade Azad, a member of the politburo of the CPI (Maoist). It was a remarkable thing for him to have done. He called me, sounding pleasantly surprised at how calm and reasonable Azad sounded. By the time his reply (A Last Note to a Neo-colonialist) was published, Azad had been kidnapped in Nagpur by plainclothes policemen and summarily executed in the Dandakaranya forest on the Andhra-Chhattisgarh border.
I had a last phone call from Vinod just before he fell ill. He said, “Listen Arundhati, I’ve never asked you for anything, but I’m asking now. Actually I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. You have to launch my new book, Editor Unplugged. I know you don’t do these things, but you just have to.” I laughed and said I would. A few days later he called again, naughtily. “Oh, I didn’t tell you, but the other person on stage with us will be Arnab Goswami.” I don’t think he told Arnab his plans. The crafty old fox was playing us!
The three of us on stage together. Hilarious. I’d have done it for Vinod Mehta, though. Gladly. But now he’s shuffled off somewhere. He shouldn’t have gone. I really need to talk to him.
Anyway, he’s gone now, and with him perhaps the era of the intractable, unpredictable, idiosyncratic editor. Not because there aren’t idiosyncratic folks around any more, but because we live in a climate where it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to function. The outpouring of grief at his passing by all kinds of people, including those who are professionally his polar opposite, seems to be as much for him as for the end of idea of the independent-minded editor. In some ways it must be seen as a credit to Outlook’s proprietors that they made room for a maverick like Vinod Mehta, despite being targeted and having their offices raided several times. As for the rest of us, while we grieve for Vinod, we cannot give up on the possibility that there can be independent editors in future too.
I will miss Vinod very much. He played such an important part in my life as a writer.
It’s not that we agreed about everything, we certainly had our differences—about the Congress party, about Kashmir (of course), about the politics of caste, about his strange, recently rehashed biography of Meena Kumari. But this time around, the disagreement between us is permanent and irreversible. I maintain that he shouldn’t have left. He could have stuck around with us a little longer. But he’s just bloody well gone. It’s ridiculous. I don’t agree.
After The God of Small Things was published in 1997, I was aware that I ran the risk of turning into a sort of Interpreter of the East for the western media. This I did not wish upon myself. Whatever I wrote, whatever arguments I got into, whatever hooliganism I was involved in, I wanted it to be here. Not for reasons of any great nationalism on my part, nor because this is my country, but simply because this is where I live. Vinod Mehta became my partner in this enterprise. Almost everything I have written since 1998 was first published by him in Outlook.
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Very early on in our alliance, regardless of any commentary to the contrary (and of that there was plenty) we both understood that neither was doing the other a favour. That, I believe, is a rare and wonderful thing in any relationship. Over the many years we worked together, we spoke several times on the phone, but we hardly ever met. I’ve never been to his house. He visited me only once, recently, but it was more like an inspection tour than a visit. It was as though he had come just to confirm an idea he had in his head about the way I live. He shuffled in, took a look around and shuffled out. I don’t think either of us knew how to play Guest and Host. At any rate we weren’t very good at it. That’s about it as far as our social life went.
And yet, out of this peculiar, laconic, minimalist relationship came a body of work that amounts to five volumes of collected essays and interviews that have been subsequently republished in several languages in several newspapers and magazines in India as well as the rest of the world. What does all this have to do with Vinod Mehta? Quite a lot actually. I wrote the essays, yes, but the freedom and the urgency with which I wrote had much to do with knowing that Vinod Mehta would publish them—without force-fitting them into some pre-determined magazine format. This was no joke. Outlook was, and is, a major, commercial, mass-circulation newsmagazine. That is its strength. And yet, Vinod had the self-confidence and the flexibility to publish, from time to time, these long, unorthodox, often unpopular essays that almost always created a storm.
The rules were set early on. When I sent him The End of Imagination, the essay I wrote after the 1998 nuclear tests, he called me and said, “Do you really want to say ‘Who the hell is the Prime Minister to have his finger on the nuclear button?’ Can I change it to ‘Who is the Prime Minister?’” I said I’d rather he didn’t. So ‘who the hell’ stayed. Then came my turn to ask him for something. Acutely aware of the mined terrain I was wading into, I asked him whether he could avoid putting a picture of me on the cover. He said he’d see what he could do. It was his delicate way of telling me to take a hike. The issue came out, with a photograph of me on the cover, and the most controversial sentence in the essay splashed across it: I Secede. All hell broke loose.
These then, were our unspoken Rules of Engagement. Vinod would not make any alteration to my text without my consent. In turn, even if my essay was going to be the cover story, I would stay out of any discussions about the content and design of the cover. This went on for fifteen years.
|
The Outlook cover said, in bold letters,Don’t Hang Afzal. (Of course, the Congress-led UPA government—and not the BJP—did eventually hang him a few years later, in 2013, in the most cowardly, illegal and shabby way.)
After the issue came out, the floodgates opened and once again Outlook was deluged with insults for weeks. But this was the other part of our Rules of Engagement. Vinod would publish what I wrote, but then would open up the letters pages for abusive responses for weeks at a stretch. (After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Sashi, Vinod’s secretary of 25 years showed me some angry letters-to-the editor that had begun to arrive even before I had written anything.) No other magazine I know publishes insults to itself, its contributors and its editor so gleefully. Vinod seemed to derive endless amusement from those letters. Occasionally, he would call and chuckle about the ones he particularly liked. His favourite letter after the Afzal Guru issue was one that said, “Spare Afzal Guru and hang Arundhati Roy.” Of course, he published it.
And now, suddenly, here we were, Advani and I, grieving at his funeral. I was unnerved. Perhaps it showed grace on Advani’s part and none on mine. I don’t know. I can’t imagine what Vinod would have thought.
The last essay of mine that Vinod published before he retired as the editor of Outlook was Walking with the Comrades, my account of the weeks I spent inside the forest in Bastar with Maoist guerrillas. B.G. Verghese, who recently passed away too, wrote a response to it. And then extraordinarily, Vinod published a reply to his response by Cherukuri Rajkumar, better known as Comrade Azad, a member of the politburo of the CPI (Maoist). It was a remarkable thing for him to have done. He called me, sounding pleasantly surprised at how calm and reasonable Azad sounded. By the time his reply (A Last Note to a Neo-colonialist) was published, Azad had been kidnapped in Nagpur by plainclothes policemen and summarily executed in the Dandakaranya forest on the Andhra-Chhattisgarh border.
I had a last phone call from Vinod just before he fell ill. He said, “Listen Arundhati, I’ve never asked you for anything, but I’m asking now. Actually I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. You have to launch my new book, Editor Unplugged. I know you don’t do these things, but you just have to.” I laughed and said I would. A few days later he called again, naughtily. “Oh, I didn’t tell you, but the other person on stage with us will be Arnab Goswami.” I don’t think he told Arnab his plans. The crafty old fox was playing us!
The three of us on stage together. Hilarious. I’d have done it for Vinod Mehta, though. Gladly. But now he’s shuffled off somewhere. He shouldn’t have gone. I really need to talk to him.
Monday, 2 February 2015
Sunday, 23 November 2014
Arundhati Roy: goddess of big ideas
Arundhati Roy’s fans have been waiting for a follow-up to her Booker-prize winning debut novel since 1997. Meanwhile she has thrown herself into political activism – raising hackles among India’s growing bourgeoisie with fierce polemics against capitalism. A second novel is promised – but will she ever get it finished?
Like India and Walt Whitman, Arundhati Roy contains multitudes. She is, however, far from large. Small, delicately boned, a beguiling mixture of piercing dark eyes and bright easy smile, she is a warm presence. She turns 53 tomorrow and the grey tint to her curls lends depth to a still strikingly youthful face. Looking at her, it’s not hard to detect the author of the richly empathetic The God of Small Things, her debut, Booker-prize winning novel about family life in Kerala, that John Updike described as a “massive interlocking structure of fine, intensely felt details”.
That was 17 years ago and photos from that period show a captivating figure, at once shy and fiercely proud, wary and utterly self-possessed. The book was a huge international hit and the publishing world readied itself to cash in on a phenomenal new talent, galvanised by the fact that so photogenic an author would be a dream to market.
But the follow-up novel didn’t arrive. Instead Roy directed her considerable energies towards political activism, most especially in India where, despite her success, she has remained. It was a path that has led her to express solidarity with groups – such as Kashmiri separatists and Maoist guerrillas – that are seen by many Indians, with some reason, as terrorists. As a result Roy has become a controversial figure, an outspoken heroine in certain radical quarters, but loathed by large sections of Indian society, not least Hindu nationalists.
She has also become a prolific essayist and polemicist. She currently has two extended, book-length essays out. One, entitled The Doctor and the Saint, is an examination of caste, a subject she explored in The God of Small Things, and it forms the long introduction to a new edition of BR Ambedkar’s classic work The Annihilation of Caste. Roy’s essay traces the difficult relationship between Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi. She portrays the neglected Ambedkar – born an “untouchable” – as the true hero of India’s poor, while Gandhi is controversially depicted as a self-dramatising defender of the status quo.
The other essay is called Capitalism: A Ghost Story. It’s written in a very different style from The Doctor and the Saint, which, for all its contentious opinions, is a carefully constructed argument. By contrast Capitalism reads like an extended rant, strident, intemperate, conspiratorial, and relentlessly one-eyed in its outlook. The shrill prose is hard to reconcile with the softly spoken middle-aged woman sitting opposite me in the Soho offices of her publishers.
Her basic argument is that the reforms that liberated India’s economy in the early 1990s and thrust it into the global marketplace may have created a vibrant new middle class, but have been devastating for the country’s poor. She writes of the “800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us [the 300 million members of the middle class]”.
The poor in India are of course not a recent creation. It’s been said that India’s historic problem was the redistribution of poverty, whereas now the issue is the redistribution of wealth. As Roy makes clear, there are vast and intolerable inequalities in today’s India. But the implication of her words is that to make 300 million Indians richer, 800 million Indians have become poorer in real, rather than relative, terms. As she doesn’t supply any supporting evidence for this claim in the book, I ask her if that’s what she means.
“What happens,” she says, “is that statistically people keep playing games with the poverty line. It’s not that people get richer or poorer but they keep moving the line up and down redefining what poorer means.”
She then goes on to say that you only have to visit the suffering villages of India to see the terrible plight of the poor, in particular the mass suicides of farmers whose land has been destroyed by mineral exploitation and industrialisation. This may be true, but has the rapid growth in India’s middle class caused the poor to become poorer?
She continues talking about access to water, the drying up of land etc, until I push her once again on what seems to me a crucial matter of fact. “Well, I think so,” she says finally. “For example, just things like food grain intake has actually reduced.”
This is true, though there are various arguments put forward to explain the drop, including the increase in the consumption of other foods. But there is also compelling evidence to suggest that, while India has become a much wealthier country over the last couple of decades, a hefty percentage of its population continues to experience low employment, malnutrition and other major social deprivations. It’s just that Roy never really gets to grip with the evidence.
She prefers a scattergun approach in which she attacks everything from philanthropy and the “hegemony of the United States” to NGOs funded by Coca-Cola. You could easily get the idea, for example, that arms dealing was a function of capitalism – yet there is no mention of Russia (the biggest arms exporter) or China (the third biggest). Similarly she quotes Pablo Neruda’s poem attacking the Standard Oil Company but makes no mention that he was an unabashed cheerleader for Stalinism when he wrote it. When I ask her about the omission she says she’s written about Stalinism in another essay and doesn’t want to keep repeating herself.
It’s the sort of screed that will bring head-nodding agreement from her core anti-capitalist audience, but it will do little, or at least not enough, to persuade those who genuinely want to know whether or not the new India, for all its many flaws, is an improvement on the old.
She’s used to this sort of criticism, and her answer is that it’s not a subject that she can be dispassionate about. Dry, academic analysis doesn’t alter the conditions of the poor, so someone needs to raise the temperature, invoke some much-needed shame and outrage.
But her detractors argue that Roy’s posturings do nothing to help the poor either. Her fellow novelist and essayist Aatish Taseer wrote in 2011 in the online cultural magazine the Nervous Breakdown: “I don’t think she’s a friend of the poor at all. She would like to doom them to a permanent state of picturesque poverty… The people who get her into the streets [ie in protest] are the new middle classes. This class, still among the most fragile in India, people who have newly emerged from the most dire conditions, are despicable to her. She mocks their clothes; their trouble with English; she hates their ambitions.”
Indeed Roy writes of the “aggressive, acquisitive ambition” of the middle class in Capitalism. Is Taseer on to something?
“Well look,” she replies, unflustered, “obviously mine is a very definite point of view and there are many people who disagree with me vehemently. The only thing I will say is that I’m not a lone operator. Most of what I’ve written is to do with being in solidarity with many resistance movements. I’m not at the front of it. I’m not preaching to the poor what they should be thinking. I’m learning from their arguments.”
Naturally Roy’s wealth exposes her to accusations of hypocrisy. She lives alone in the exclusive Jor Bagh district of New Delhi in a large apartment. Aren’t the acquisitively ambitious simply seeking to gain the material comforts she has in abundance?
“I don’t come from a privileged background, I just happened to write a book that sold a lot. My mother was literally dying. She had nothing. She left her drunk husband. She started a school. I left home at 16, I lived on the streets. I had nothing. Then I wrote a book. I lived for a long time, yes, with a man who had privileged parents but then that had nothing to do with me.”
This seems like a slightly romantic summary of her early life. She was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in north-east India to a Syrian Christian, Mary, who is still alive. Her father, a Bengali Hindu, was an alcoholic who managed a tea plantation. The marriage ended when Roy was two years old. Her mother took her and her older brother to Tamil Nadu and then to Kerala, where her mother, who suffered from asthma, set up an independent school.
Roy was sent to boarding school where she gained a reputation as an indefatigable debater. From there she went to secretarial college, which she quit at 16, moving to Delhi to study at the architectural school. She lived with her boyfriend at the time in a slum, then after a spell in Goa, worked for the National Institute of Urban Affairs, where she met her husband, Pradip Krishen, a widowed former history professor and Oxford graduate from a wealthy background.
The couple made several documentaries and films together, in the first of which Roy played the female lead. But eventually she became dispirited with the elitist film world and spent more time writing, leading eventually to the publication of The God of Small Things in 1997. It was a literary sensation that went on to sell more than 6m copies worldwide.
In a vital sense, as Roy says, her background and material circumstances, whatever they are, should not be the means to assess her ideas. “I’ve never understood the logic that if you’re privileged you should take the point of view of the privileged and argue for more privilege.”
Yet in Capitalism she writes of being compromised by connections with the corrupting worlds of corporations: “But which of us sinners was going to cast off the first stone? Not me, who lives off royalties from corporate publishing houses.”
What does that mean? She breaks out into a big smile. “Yeah, I’ve also thought about that. I was just thinking, living off royalties from corporate publishing houses? In fact those corporate publishing houses are making money off me, and giving me 5%!”
She laughs at herself and says that perhaps she got that wrong. “The thing is no one is pure. I am certainly not a pure saint who lives in a loincloth and eats goat’s cheese and doesn’t have sex and says ‘I’m poor’”, she says in an obvious dig at Gandhi. “It’s crap.”
Moreover, she is no armchair revolutionary, cooped up in the safe confines of her apartment. She does go to dangerous places and she does make powerful enemies: Hindu nationalists, dam builders, mineral extractors, large corporations and the Indian military. And despite a great many threats, she is not easily intimidated.
But danger runs both ways. The picture Roy paints of India is of a vast military occupation, a colonial suppression enacted by the Indian state on its own people. She speaks of hundreds of thousands of troops stationed in secessionist Kashmir and the vicious paramilitary operations in central India against the Maoist or “Naxalite” guerrillas.
In Walking with the Comrades, her book about joining up with the Maoists, she wrote about a Congress politician called Mahendra Karma, whom she said was responsible for orchestrating a campaign of murder, rapes and displacement in the Bastar region. In May 2013 Maoist guerrillas killed Karma, stabbing him 78 times, and 24 other people, including 11 other Congress members, in a truly gruesome attack on a convoy. When asked to comment immediately after the assault, Roy refused to speak.
Incidents such as these have prompted the charge that she is a dilettante, a literary tourist who can beat a retreat whenever it suits her. If that’s true then it’s also a fact that India’s democracy is riven by nepotism and corruption and violence and it suits many who are getting rich to look the other way. The statements Roy makes are often provocative, naive and arguably counterproductive, but the presiding nationalistic silence is perhaps more worthy of condemnation.
And the issue on which India has learned to be most tight-lipped is that of caste. It’s a subject on which Roy has always been refreshingly vocal, quick to remind those who might wish to forget of the immovable social structure that underpins Indian society. InThe Doctor and the Saint she returns to the theme but this time she sets it against two different visions of reform: Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s.
Gandhi wanted to abolish the designation of “Untouchables”, the lowest caste that is today referred to as Dalit. But Ambedkar wanted to get rid of the caste system in its entirety. Although she had always been suspicious of the Gandhi cult, she was largely ignorant of the dispute between Ambedkar and Gandhi before a publisher asked her to write an introduction to The Annihilation of Caste.
“I thought I’d just write three pages of politeness and give it to him,” she says. “Then I started to read and I was shocked by what I was reading and it turned into a huge thing.”
Gandhi emerges as a backward-looking egomaniac who had to be dragged into modernity by the more ambitious and radical Ambedkar. The respected historian Ramachandra Guha, who is in the middle of a two-part biography of Gandhi, has taken Roy to task for “selectively quoting Gandhi out of context [so] that she can paint him as a slow-moving reactionary”.
Guha, whose earlier work looked at forestry in northern India, has clashed with Roy before over her environmental advocacy, which he described as “self-indulgent” and “self-contradictory”. “Ms Roy’s tendency to exaggerate and simplify, her Manichean view of the world, and her shrill, hectoring tone, have given a bad name to environmental analysis,” he wrote back in 2000.
She dismissed his criticism back then as “smug”. She says that she’s quoted Gandhi from 1893 to 1948, “across his adult life. Of course every quote has to be selective. I can’t quote the whole nine volumes.” She says that “it’s dishonest to suggest that Gandhi was an incrementalist or a man of his times”. And in any case, she adds, Guha is a Brahmin, the caste that is at the top of the social hierarchy – if you like, the ruling class.
It has been argued by some that it’s unfettered capitalism that has done most to undermine caste in India, but Roy notes that only a tiny percentage of marriages are cross-caste. She writes that the only way caste can be annihilated is if “those who call themselves revolutionary develop a radical critique of Brahminism”. I quote her a statement from a well-known Indian writer and ask her to guess who it is. The author speaks of his Brahmin identity as being crucial in giving him a sense of “dignity” and through it the ambition not to settle for “some badly paid government job”.
She puts her hands over her face and says “Pankaj?”
Pankaj Mishra, who is now based in London, has built a formidable reputation as radical critic of imperialism, ever vigilant to the incidence of western racism both on a geopolitical and personal level. He was also the first publisher to champion The God of Small Things, when he worked for HarperCollins in India, and thus a longstanding friend of Roy’s. Is he on the revolutionary side of the argument?
“On this one, I don’t think so,” she says. “There are a lot of critiques about many Brahmins who at some point do want to mention that they are Brahmins. The issue is a very vexed one. Look at all the major politburo members, including the Maoists, they are usually Brahmins.”
You sense that one of the reasons Arundhati was drawn to reappraise Gandhi is the consensus he enjoys as an embodiment of decency and tolerance. She has recently caused a stir for downplaying another widely admired figure, Malala Yousafzai. After she gave a TV interview in which she suggested Malala was a pawn in game of global politics, the Pakistan writer Pervez Hoodbhoy wrote an article asking why it was that Malala bothered many on the left, citing Roy as an example.
“I have no doubt she did something wonderful,” she says. “But that was not the point I was trying to make.” She says she wanted to draw attention to the fact that Dalit women are similarly mistreated in India but are never heard about. But that doesn’t make Malala a puppet. She stood up against male oppression. Isn’t that an unambiguously good thing?
“I don’t think you can isolate Malala and say ‘Oh this is wonderful.’” Why not? “I don’t think this world of prizes and awards is an innocent world. It is loaded and it’s precious to suggest it’s not.” She thinks Malala’s Nobel peace prize was an extension of the politically corrupt process that awarded one to Obama, whom she characterises as a warmonger, adding, “I’m not trying to take anything away from Malala.”
But of course she is.
I admire her willingness to confront sacred cows, but can’t help thinking that she sees dark conspiracies where sometimes nobler intentions lie. And in her rush to embrace the oppressed, she can blur the lines between victim and perpetrator.
Enough of the politics. What about fiction? There have been rumours going back to 2007 that she is writing a novel.
“I have been working on it for quite a few years,” she acknowledges. “If those characters are still hanging around in my house, swinging their legs and smoking their cigarette butts, they’re not going to go away, so there must be something there.”
Yet she says she put the novel aside to write The Doctor and the Saint. Writing non-fiction is for her a tense and urgent business. She has to get it out. “It’s like the body doesn’t have room for its organs,” she says, and reading her non-fiction one can see what she means.
She is a different person altogether when writing fiction, which she says she’s able to relax into. “I don’t mean because it’s easy to write but I trust its rhythms and I don’t have to get it out there. There’s no urgency. It’s like cooking, it takes its time. I rather like the idea of just living inside it and not coming out of it.”
That’s an idea that will torment all those millions who have been waiting so many years for her second novel. It may also trouble those critics of her polemical work who hope that she’ll return to fiction at the earliest opportunity. But if there is one thing that is certain about the multifaceted Roy, she will continue to do what she wants to do when she wants to do it.
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