ปาลิน: ฉันจำได้ว่าในบทสัมภาษณ์หนึ่งคุณเคยพูดถึงความตึงเครียดที่เกิดขึ้นระหว่างการ ‘เปล่งเสียงของตัวเองออกมา’ กับการ ‘ป่าวประกาศด้วยสุ้มเสียงที่เป็นน้ำหนึ่งใจเดียวกับหมู่มวลชน’12อ่านเพิ่มเติมใน “Arundhati Roy on ‘Walking with the Comrades”, The Paris Review (1 November 2011). https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/11/01/arundhati-roy-on-walking-with-the-comrades/ ไม่ทราบว่าคุณคิดเกี่ยวกับทางสายกลางที่มาสอดประสานน้ำเสียงสองรูปแบบนี้อย่างไรบ้าง?
On the opening page of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2018), Arundhati Roy dedicates her latest novel ‘To, The Unconsoled.’ When asked about who she meant by the ‘unconsoled’ — “All of us,” she responded.
It was during the eve of the virus epidemic when we met Arundhati at her apartment in New Delhi, before it escalated into a pandemic a few months later and the whole world plunged into precarity and chronic problems became visibly dehiscent. She writes in herarticle for the Financial Times1https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca: ‘Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.’ Thailand is no exception. This extensive interview with Arundhati Roy unfolds itself in a time when the country falls deeper into starvation, economic recession, and a call for real change from the younger generation looms large against the fragility of power.
As the pandemic exposes human-made syndromes, a brooding truth also surfaces for Arundhati: ‘we can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.’ We, too, decided to take time and commit ourselves to an earnest route as we attempt to grasp a reality rupturing before us.
It has taken us almost a year to publish this interview. All the while the global outbreak has come full circle and been given its second life (a ‘new’ — not second — wave according to weasel-worded politicians). Not only does this interview contain the conversation we had with Arundhati in person but also encounters and conversations initiated afterwards across physical distances and political movements. The past months confirmed that what was discussed in this interview still rings true, even truer after witnessing how the voices of the democratic protests in Thailand have become so amorphous and plural for addressing intersectional issues in our society. It ultimately assures us that the literary imagination is crucial in a time when the seams of silence are beginning to break apart, when the walls and ceilings that oppress us are beginning to fracture. In such a time, we believe creating richly nuanced meanings out of the resplendent mixture of cultural metaphors, while declaring the grounds of our own. It is in this dissection of historical tides that we will arrive home.
1
A GRAVEYARD THAT TALKS
Judha: What are you writing at the moment?
Arundhati Roy (AR): I’m writing the Clark Lecture2 The Clark Lecture is an annual event where thinkers and writers are invited to deliver their lectures to students at Cambridge University. In her lecture titled “The Graveyard Talks Back”, Arundhati begins by acknowledging the list of previous speakers, ‘the many ‘“Sirs” and Sir-sounding names’, in the history of this 132 year old ritual. Read more in https://lithub.com/the-graveyard-talks-back-arundhati-roy-on-fiction-in-the-time-of-fake-news/ — a lecture on English Literature — that is to be delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge. But just last night I was told of a standoff between the teacher’s union and the college over the teachers’ pension fund. So suddenly, last night the Union asked me to withdraw from the lecture as a gesture of solidarity. The title of the paper is “The Graveyard Talks Back.” So it’s about how in this new Hindu Nationalist regime — I don’t know how much people in Thailand are aware of it — but the rise of majoritarianism and the Hindu Right and the vicious attack on Muslims and their complete isolation, socially politically and economically. So in India, the Muslim graveyard—because as you know Hindus are cremated and don’t have graveyards — has become a metaphor for the Muslim ghetto — the site of survival under the attack of Hindu fascism.
The Thai version of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Judha: As in your novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is also…
AR: …about graveyards. So that’s really what I’m talking about. A conversation between two graveyards. There is the graveyard of Kashmir — where the movement for freedom and self determination has claimed the lives of 70,000 people and turned that little valley into a vast graveyard — and then the Muslim graveyard in India. Indian Muslims and Kashmiri Muslims have completely different prospects you see… Kashmiris can at least dream of freedom, but Indian Muslims — who number in the hundreds of millions even though they are a minority — have to face the onslaught and find a place for themselves here in India. I will send you the lecture when I publish it. It’s long. It’s also about the Hindu caste system in India — the idea that in this system of social arrangement some human beings — the privileged castes believe that they are superior to others by some kind of divine mandate. It’s the seed of fascism, the beginning, the very foundation of fascist thought.
Judha: Your metaphor for the graveyard unfolds some kind of sensibility in the political realm. Since a graveyard is a domain of the dead, of silence; no one talks there, although such a place diffuses into the domain of living bodies. Saying ‘graveyard talks back’ implies a persistence of the past, of memory, of the unspeakable, which found its way back into an image of the buried, of the forgotten, and perhaps — in your own words — of ‘the unconsoled’. If I further the metaphor of the ‘talking graveyard’, it may refer to a haunting spectre which is never gone but endured in history, waiting to be conjured. In such a ghetto-like space of minorities and the excluded, what kind of rites and rhythms enable them to talk, and perhaps, dance?
AR: That’s exactly right. The graveyards that I am speaking are about places where the boundaries between life and death are blurred. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, one of the main characters, Anjum who survives the 2002 massacre of Muslims that took place in Gujarat (when Modi, the current Prime Minister was the Chief Minister of that state) returns to Delhi but finds herself unable to go on with her everyday life. She moves into a graveyard close to Old Delhi and gradually as she recovers, builds the Jannat Guest House — Jannat is Paradise in Urdu — in which every room has a tomb. Later it becomes the Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services — where Anjum, her partner Saddam Hussain (A Dalit who has converted to Islam) and an old Muslim Imam bathe, say prayers and bury those who are shunned by society. In Kashmir too, the graveyards of the martyrs to the Freedom struggle are at the heart of life, not death. As Musa Yeswi says in his letter to his little daughter who has been killed by a stray bullet — “Babajana.. in Kashmir the dead are alive and the living are only dead people pretending..”
Eventually if you stare at these graveyards in The Ministry — who lives in them, who dies, who is buried, who says the prayers, what those prayers are — it’s the staging place of revolution. I didn’t plan it that way. But that’s where the story took me.
Judha: Apart from the innate queerness of graveyards depicted in The Ministry, which is a place that resists the linear sense of time, a place of refuge for those persecuted for their social or sexual practices that strays from the norm, there is also a queer character, Anjum. That character gives the novel so much potential to shed light on the complex reality of India, particularly on gender issues. Would you like to talk more about this?
AR:Well, you know in India the thing is that it’s such a strange country where everything happens together. So there’s great emancipation, there’s also great persecution. As you can see in the book, there’s always been a space traditionally for people like Anjum in India. And that space is now, in some ways, getting a kind of western language and legal language and all that — but there was a cultural space earlier. It’s the same with queer. It wasn’t actually something so frowned upon until the British came in and made it so.3Let us think more about this with Thai terms like ‘dtút [ตุ๊ด] and kratoey [กระเทย]’, which are later considered backwards and derogatory in comparison to ‘LGBTQ+’. However, the former terms may attest to certain identities who stray from the sexual norms dictated by the gender binary in society. Kratoey, in itself, is not a pejorative (in fact, its definition also pertains to animals and plants and points towards nature’s innate queerness), but it only becomes problematic with the existing prejudices in society. Let’s not forget that definitions can always be contested or reclaimed, while terms like ‘LGBTQ+’, which is considered ‘lighter’ in its historical baggage in the Thai context, is also derived from a violent history of discrimination and struggle in other contexts.
Palin:Like the Hijra4Hijras, a sociocultural group of trans women and intersex people described as the ‘third gender’, have a long history in South Asian culture. But for centuries, hijra and ‘transgender’ have been used interchangeably, which has led to India’s trans community being misunderstood and undervalued. Read more on: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170720-the-semi-sacred-third-gender-of-south-asia and https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/style/india-third-gender-hijras-transgender.html figure.
AR: Hijra, all queer… so it’s between worlds now. There’s another character, Saeeda, who’s the modern Hijra who knows all the languages of Trans and M to F. Anjum is from another generation who has a more traditional and fluid understanding of things.
Palin: And I like how Anjum has a nimble grasp on language, even more so than the modern trans person like Saeeda. Her character really shows fluidity, rather than the rigidity of activism when talking about gender issues.
AR: Quite often people ask me, “Why did you write about Hijras?” I find it such a peculiar question. I mean nobody asks about the character called Garson Hobart — nobody says “Why did you write about an intelligence officer?”. Why must we act as though Hijras are not a part of our world, of our society? Everybody is part of this world. So, Anjum is not a Hijra, she’s Anjum. A very unique, extraordinary person. Not a billboard, not a fill-in-the-blanks category. Similarly Tilottama is not every woman, she is Tilottama. Each person in the novel is a unique person. These are people who are all part of the texture of our lives, so to separate it into an issue is also disrespectful, I think. I turn to fiction because every human being is a Russian doll. You have a person inside a person inside a person, and sometimes it all turns inside out, depending on which part of your complex identity you — or others — wish to privilege, to emphasise, to present to the world.
The world is simplifying identities nowadays, turning people into labelled products on a supermarket shelf — I mean, Anjum, she’s Muslim, she’s Shia, she’s an intersex person. What are all these identities? Today, in India, being Muslim is as dangerous, or perhaps even more dangerous than being a Hijra. Anjum gets caught up in the Gujarat massacre of Muslims because she is Muslim. She gets spared by the butchers because they believe that killing a Hijra will bring them bad luck. Even the other characters, Saddam Hussain, Tilotamma — who are they really? You can’t really say who they are. How do you define them? Where do they fit into these definitions?
A friend of mine, a professor of cinema who happens to be queer noticed something about the novel that I hadn’t — she pointed that every character in the book was ‘passing’ — they had changed their names, their identities, or were called by a name that wasn’t their own. Some did it several times over. It was an astonishing observation… and I think she noticed because in her youth, when being queer was not an easy proposition she had a lot of experience ‘passing’ — not being attached to a single identity.
Judha: Each writer has their own way of grappling with their text. Your literary texture is evidently dense and diverse, I’m keen to know how you make sense of the world and write about it, especially when writing fiction which, you once said, is fundamentally who you are.
AR: Even though The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is written in English, it has been imagined in so many languages, there are so many languages in the book, each of the characters speaks a different language, they are constantly translating themselves to each other because that’s the way it is in this country with 780 languages and thousands of what are called dialects. We swim in an ocean of languages. So in some ways translation is not something that happens after a book is written — it happens beforehand, it is a primary act of creation.
In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, there is English, Hindi, Urdu, Kashmiri… Malayalam. Arabic. And then there’s the business of translation across cultures which is more than just about language. For example, there’s a moment where Anjum, who is a Shia Muslim from Old Delhi, receives a letter from the forest in Dandakaranya in Central India from Revathy, the mother of the foundling baby Anjum has adopted. Revathy is a Telugu speaking Maoist guerilla writing in a kind of Telugu-ised English that is being translated into Urdu by the person reading it out to Anjum. The letter ends with ‘Lal Salam’, which is the Communist greeting — it means Red Salute. And Anjum, murmurs in response ‘Lal Salam Aleikum’, which is Salam Aleikum with Lal Salam. She only means it in the way of an ‘amen’, like at the end of a sermon. But a discerning reader would know that it could actually sound like an explosive slogan of solidarity. It’s just playfulness of course, and it doesn’t matter if it isn’t picked up.
It’s just a part of the many layers of the book. A part of the texture of caste and class and religious conflict in this country. The majority of well-regarded Indian intellectuals and writers and filmmakers have erased caste, erased all these discussions, erased the fact that this country is this country because the army has been at war with its own people since 1947. In all the border states — in Kashmir, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed but we are still marketed a ‘great democracy.’ It’s their Great Project of Unseeing. For me, writing a novel is being able to create the universe of the familiar, but to make the unseen seen. Not issue by issue or identity by identity or gender by gender—but as a whole.
2
POLITICS OF FICTION
Judha: The difference between fiction and non-fiction, you say, is simply the difference between ‘urgency’ and ‘eternity.’5Read more in https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/27/arundhati-roy-fiction-takes-time-second-novel-ministry-utmost-happiness I agree that a sense of urgency needs a sense of eternity to steer us to where we don’t know exactly what awaits. No one should dictate what is the most urgent for once and all. For example, chants from the crowd often share some intimacy with literature; they nourish each other. Not everything can be said through a direct gesture or even regarded as a case in political demand, and those compounds can be said through literature.
AR: When I made that differentiation between fiction and non-fiction I did not mean it generically. I meant it in terms of my writing. My non-fiction essays are usually a response to a situation that is urgent.
As to the rest of your question—These days when so much news is fake and you don’t know what’s going on, particularly in places like Kashmir where the Indian media and the India government just lie brazenly. It’s not just that, anybody, journalists, bloggers who try to tell the truth are hunted down. So in some ways the only way to tell the truth about Kashmir is through fiction because it’s not just about how many people have been killed or how many people have been tortured—its more vast than that. How does a place that has been bludgeoned, that has lived for so many years under the densest military occupation in the world survive? How do the people hold on to their spirit? — What happens to that place? What happens to the language? What happens to relationships?
And so, when I started visiting Kashmir, the first thing I found myself doing was writing a Kashmiri—English dictionary because you can see that peoples’ entire vocabulary is changed by the violence and the militarisation. And then you see viciousness and violence that don’t make it into human rights reports. Things that are not news, but they are devastating.
For example, in The Ministry, the soldier Amrik Singh visits a family that he has befriended. He knows that one of the older sons—Musa—has links with militants. It’s a terrifying visit, he sits down cross-legged on the floor, loosens his belt and lays his revolver among the snacks and biscuits he has been served. Everybody is forced to laugh at his bad jokes. When he gets up to leave he pretends to forget his revolver. When the family hands it to him, he looks Musa in the eye and says, “Imagine if I had forgotten my gun here and they found it in a Cordon and Search operation, what would’ve happened?” Nobody is confused about what he means. It’s only in fiction that you can describe this.
Palin:Reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I was interested in how the animals are portrayed through the eyes of Zainab. Actually, I was reminded of this in Kolkata when we were walking into the butchery area of the New Market. What struck me at first was how theatrical the atmosphere was — of course, I say this with a taint of exoticisation from someone who has never witnessed such a scene before — but also how everything was happening all at once in such a compressed space and time. There were sheeps, goats and chickens queuing up for the chopping board, then there were the crows flying around, scavenging for the remains. Living and dying is not just a human affair but it involves so many other lives we are so entangled with — I feel like in The Ministry I get that sense very strongly.
AR: Animals — I cannot visualise a world of human beings, of human society, even in cities that does not include animals. That does not include the landscape. In The God of Small Things the landscape of Kerala, the river, the trees, the fish and insects was so important to me. In The Ministry the landscape of the city is almost a person, so is the landscape of Kashmir. They are as important as any human character in my fiction.
Palin: You once mentioned an English historian on a radio show who commented that ‘the very fact that you write in English is a tribute to the British Empire.’6 ‘Only a few weeks after the mother tongue/masterpiece incident, I was on a live radio show in London. The other guest was an English historian who, in reply to a question from the interviewer, composed a paean to British imperialism. “Even you,” he said, turning to me imperiously, “the very fact that you write in English is a tribute to the British Empire.” Not being used to radio shows at the time, I stayed quiet for a while, as a well-behaved, recently civilised savage should. But then I sort of lost it, and said some extremely hurtful things. The historian was upset, and after the show told me that he had meant what he said as a compliment, because he loved my book. I asked him if he also felt that jazz, the blues, and all African-American writing and poetry were actually a tribute to slavery. And if all of Latin American literature was a tribute to Spanish and Portuguese colonialism.’ read more on https://lithub.com/what-is-the-morally-appropriate-language-in-which-to-think-and-write/ It’s like you were shoved into this paternalistic narrative as a former colonial subject who had ‘benefited’ from the Empire, which in itself is a perverse kind of redemption for all the violence the Empire had ever inflicted. At the same time, some of the criticisms that people might have about you is based on a stigmatising view that someone with the privilege of being able to write in English should not be ‘writing about’ the lower caste who are divested of such things. What I find interesting is that these two different reactions to your position as an Indian writer who writes in English complicate the simplistic narrative of colonialism where you are either the victim or the oppressor. Rather, it is about recognising that we are all a part of the historical process that is colonialism. Can you perhaps reflect more on this?
AR: I have addressed this at length in an essay called “In What Language Does Rain Fall Over Tormented Cities.”7 “In What Language Does Rain Fall Over Tormented Cities”, an essay delivered at the W.G. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation at the British Library, 5 June 2018. When the English Historian said that the fact that I write in English is a tribute to the British Empire I told him later that it was like telling the child of a raped parent that they were a tribute to their father’s brutality. But in India, every one of the hundreds of languages contains within it some tale of conquest, colonization and subjugation. Including Hindi and Urdu. And of course Sanskrit—the language that only Brahmins were allowed to speak. Dalits were prohibited from studying it. English is really the only language that is spoken across states. It is a language of privilege and exclusion, but also the language of emancipation. The great Dalit leader, B.R Ambedkar wrote his iconic essay Annihilation of Caste in English. Many radical Dalits campaign for the right to learn English as a means of escaping the trap of caste. Language is a hellishly complex ball of wax in India.
Judha: Looking from the other side of the Empire, it’s a story of anti-colonial nationalist, Mahatma Gandhi, who becomes an iconic figure for ‘nonviolent resistance.’ You have openly been criticising Gandhi, especially in “The Doctor and The Saint” as an introduction of the book titled Annihilation of Caste by Ambedkar. Whilst Gandhi has become this international icon, people know less about Ambedkar. It indeed manifests a politics of storytelling and which version of stories serve best to the existing power.
B R Ambedkar called for the annihilation of caste for India to be a society of equals. photo: The Telegraph.
AR: The manipulation of the legacy of Gandhi and his mythification is an outright falsehood. His racism, sexism, his contempt for the working class, his glorification of caste — he was against the performance of untouchability, but he valorised the ‘genius’ of the Hindu caste system — all this has been papered over.
He was a cunning and brilliant politician. Part visionary, part obscurantist in awful ways. Almost every historian in this country has lied about Gandhi in the sense that no one talks about what Gandhi did in South Africa, no one talks about his politics on gender, on workers, on caste — his confrontation with Ambedkar, his insistence that he, in his body was the sole representative of all “Untouchables”. I mean talk about appropriation!
No doubt Gandhi is a complicated person. We have to retain that complexity. All of it. This means we cannot shy away from the fact that some of the things he did have come at an enormous cost to people. He succeeded in drawing a curtain of piety around what is perhaps the most brutal system of social hierarchy the world has ever known. Today in India if you go into a poor person’s house, or a Dalit home, you’d never see a picture of Gandhi. Never. You’d see a picture of Ambedkar.8From a private conversation with Khorapin Phuaphansawat, I (judha) shared my view on the connection between Ambedkar’s caste and class issues in Thailand. I had no prior knowledge that Nattawut Saikua (the leader of Red Shirt Movement) mentioned this topic in his speech in 2010. Thanks, Khorapin for sharing the ‘Classwars’ speech delivered by Nattawut in Korat (the city in the Northeast of Thailand): Brothers and sisters, we have always been in a class war ever since Thailand transitioned into democracy in 1932. Any fruits from the lower class’s labour continues to be destroyed, one by one, by bureaucratic polity. […] Respected brothers and sisters, my fellow compatriots. We are not the untouchables, but we are commoners who are all equal in Thailand. Why do we not fight to liberate ourselves from our class? Why do we not fight as commoners, as honourable people and dignified human beings? I tell you here that this fight could never have gone further than today. This is the largest people’s movement in the history of Thailand and if change will bring equality to Thailand, it will be a change brought by the power of the people today. Respected brothers and sisters. The fight of the untouchables in India reminds me of Thailand. In India, the most inferior human beings are called the untouchables. In Thailand, there is a group of people who think they are superior, more superior than ordinary people who are also commoners. They are called the untouchable bastards. So in India, Ambedkar fought for the untouchables. In Thailand, the Red Shirt fought to dethrone the untouchable bastards. This is the caste of the untouchable bastards. Untouchable bastards who put themselves above the law, exploit national resources, and think they’re always right when people who oppose them are always wrong. This is the fight between the lower classes and the class of untouchable bastards in Thailand. These bastards have always used the law as a tool to oppress people. Respected brothers and sisters. The untouchable bastards can live without paying taxes, but when ordinary people don’t pay tax, it’s illegal. People are imprisoned for reclaiming protected forest lands, while the untouchable bastards get away with expropriating land for no real reason. Not illegal. Our children become stateless and denied their birth certificate for dodging military conscription, while a minion of these untouchable bastards who did the same gets to be prime minister. Not illegal. Respected brothers and sisters. The people rise up to fight for their own rights and freedom. Fight with humility. Fight with the knowledge that people without any connections have been prosecuted for various charges, while the minions of the untouchable bastards that seized the parliament house, seized the airport, are vindicated and get to be prime minister. This is the reason we need to overthrow the untouchable caste in this country. Fight, people. Fight, commoners. To overthrow these bastards and bring democracy to the land. It’s the elite that talks about Gandhi. That’s the truth. There’s a tremendous amount of falsification that amounts to a Great Big Lie.9Arundhati describes her personal reading experience of Dr. B R Ambedkar’s The Annihilation of Caste as if ‘somebody had walked into a dim room and opened the windows. Reading Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar bridges the gap between what most Indians are schooled to believe in and the reality we experience every day of our lives,’ so she points out ‘gaping hole in our pedagogical universe’ that the mainstream history has partially represented someone, and concealed the rest of him.
Judha: There is a core curriculum at Columbia University called ‘Contemporary Civilization’ — with so few texts written from the perspective of the colonised — comparing Gandhi’s various writings on nonviolence with Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth due to their similarly anti-colonial subject matter relative to the rest of the woefully white syllabus. The place where Fanon is writing from and whom he is writing to is indeed vastly different from Gandhi and his audience; it’s problematic when students are encouraged to make such comparisons without demanding nuanced recognition of the specific colonial experiences both texts are speaking from. Often, they simply don’t encourage students to engage with the histories of Gandhi and Fanon’s texts, and how they are uniquely formed. So, I’m wondering how students in India have been taught about their own colonial history and their historical colonial subjects? From your time to the present, perhaps?
AR: Well that’s a huge question. I would say that Fanon and Gandhi have almost nothing in common. It would be interesting to teach Ambedkar and Fanon…because Ambedkar complicates the view of colonialism. He sees Hinduism as a form of colonialism that long predates British colonialism in India. The conquest of the Dravidian peoples of India has been mystified in tales like the Ramayana—the conquered have been turned into asuras and evil folk, their Gods and Kings have been made into vanquished demons. So you have the mythification of history and historification of mythology. A double-pronged attack by privileged castes on the conquered who have been turned into lesser mortals by divine mandate. It’s all extremely clever. So Ambedkar was also aware of the fact that western colonialism was in some ways emancipatory for Dalits. Other intellectuals from the oppressed castes like Jotiba Phule felt the same way about the advent of Islam. Hundreds of millions of Dalits converted to Islam, Christianity and Sikhism to escape the scourge of caste.
3
RADICAL CONNECTEDNESS
Judha: You’ve attempted to draw such unprecedented connections and you often say that if we can configure these massive networks and complexities, that would be immensely radical. So I understand that you see the true connection between fiction and politics, not only that they feed each other meat on a table of their disparate powers—say, fiction delves into politics to unfold human dilemma, while politics devour fiction to exercise its power. But fiction and politics also illuminate each other in a more subversive way, like the famous line from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: ‘How to tell a shattered story?, By slowly becoming everybody. No, by slowly becoming everything.’ It’s such an ambitious proposition, to connect everything, you have to ultimately become everything, which is unlikely possible while speaking through a limited capacity of humans.
AR: Yeah, it’s like if you don’t see the connections then it’s easy to make everything into some subject — my subject is caste, my subject is environment, my subject is peace in Kashmir, my subject is whatever — whereas, to me, all these things are so connected and if you try and separate them you do not develop the radical understanding. So The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is not a book about Kashmir, or about sexuality or about gender or about caste. But how does all this play — these are all interconnected under the grand narrative, right?
So it’s like, for example, in The God of Small Things people don’t understand, even though they praise it and all that, they don’t understand that the relationship between Ammu and Velutha is not a relationship of class alone, it’s a transgression of caste, which most people, including most Indian liberals, Indian left, want to see through, or beyond and not address. They very dishonestly remove the question of caste from the story. It’s like writing about South Africa during Apartheid and not saying that there was Apartheid, you know? So it’s a kind of fake history.
Judha: I agree that we cannot only see things as one subject without acknowledging these complexities or complex networks. Would you say that formal education, university disciplines, which try to categorise knowledge into compartments …
AR: I don’t know if you’ve read an essay I wrote called “Capitalism: A Ghost Story,” part of it is about how pedagogy, sponsored by vested interests, is a product of a certain way of seeing, something that evolves from hegemonic certainty. However, I can’t and won’t just dismiss formal education altogether in one simplistic swoop. But surely there is a reason why we have histories that conceal more than they reveal, that kind of stuff… You have to just continuously question too, that’s all I can say.
4
FROM THE HEART OF THE CROWD
Palin: From your previous interview, you were talking about the tension between ‘honing your individual voice’ and ‘declaring it from the heart of the crowd.’10Arundhati Roy on ‘Walking with the Comrades’, The Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/11/01/arundhati-roy-on-walking-with-the-comrades/ How are you thinking about that balance now?
AR: Well, now is a very good question to ask because I find it quite interesting that I seem to be out on the street most of the time. Today there are millions on the streets in India protesting this new overtly anti-Muslim citizenship bill. I’m a little bit away from the protests because there are lots of national flags being waved and pledges of allegiance to the Indian Constitution. It’s understandable because Muslims who are constantly under attack and being called traitors and anti-nationals are doing it to prove their love and allegiance to this country. I’m just not constitutionally built to wave a flag. It’s not something I can do. I can’t do it. I can’t wave a national flag. I just don’t believe in any national flag. I’m not much of a flag waver. But it’s a very interesting tension, because much of my non-fiction is written from that seditious heart — whether it was the anti-dam movement or Walking With the Comrades. It questions what people define as The Nation and ‘National Interest,” which is always, of course, in a Feudal, Capitalist society, the interest of the elites.
The tension that arises from being a writer in the heart of a crowd has to do with ‘voice’. The fiction writer has a unique voice, or strives for one. The person in a crowd speaks generically, often on behalf of a crowd or else as one of the myriad voices in the crowd, with a certain anonymity. There is nothing either anonymous or generic about me. Nor have I any desire to speak on behalf of anybody as their leader or their representative.
My voice is a whimsical one. Even so, I feel it’s important to stand my ground in the public space, especially as a woman living in a society like ours — always expecting women to be self-effacing, sacrificing, accommodating. Always mother, sister or wife. Or matriarch. I say no, thanks. I’m here, this is who I am, this is what I think and I’m willing to take the flag, to suffer the consequences. I’m willing to stand there, out there. And it’s often from that place, that public place, the public march and public solidarity, that I construct my most private understanding also, which goes into the fiction. I need to understand the world I live in. Radically. Deeply.
The most valuable thing I’ve earned with my writing is not royalties or awards, it’s the invitation into places that few would be allowed to go. Nobody is allowed to go into the forest with the Comrades, nobody is invited into the heart of the Kashmir story. My royalties come in the form of trust I have earned from people because of my previous writing. Therefore, the exchange is a kind of trust, a kind of secret pact, which you’re allowed into, which is all that a writer wants — an invitation to deepen one’s understanding.
Judha: In Walking with the Comrades, you were invited to be in the forest in Central India, because they expected that you can experience and then maybe share something with readers. And you discuss that there’s a coalition of different groups of people in that movement. Can you talk about that?
AR: The conflict — a kind of civil war — is unfolding in the forests of Central India, homeland to many indigenous tribes people whose land has been signed away to large Mining and Infrastructure Corporations. So the government wanted to clear that forest so that these projects can go ahead. So around 2004 they unleashed hundreds of thousands of paramilitary troops and also raised a vigilante army of local people. They burned villages and raped women and unleashed a reign of terror, hoping to frighten people into moving.
It’s an age-old story of course, played out all over the world. They called it “Operation Green Hunt”. The result was that it radicalised the local population and the Maoist guerilla army, fifty percent of which are women. They began to fight back. Then the mainstream TV channels started calling them terrorists, and began baying for their blood. That’s when I decided to go into the forest and stay there for a few weeks. When I came out I wrote an essay called Walking With the Comrades.
5
PUBLIC RECEPTION
Judha: Have you ever come across being challenged by male activists?
AR: Oh gosh. All the time! And they don’t have to be activists. I have received plenty of advice about what to write, how to write, what tone to take… but on the other hand I have to say that that is not my overall experience. There have been plenty who are wonderfully supportive and kindred souls.
Judha: What about those who dismiss, if not ridicule, the work of fiction, and those who draw a rigid line between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction,’ a work of ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’? In New York, I heard one political editor saying that literature is useless to political movement —
AR: Only fools say that. Although interestingly, when I started writing non-fiction essays, when I wrote about dams and privatization, when I went walking with the comrades, some great and well known men would say, ‘she should go back to writing fiction’, because that’s the proper place for a woman.” But I don’t get that sort of thing much anymore. I think the years of writing have constructed its own readership. People who are more interested in political writing have begun to read fiction and vice versa.
Palin: And when you do talks like this, how is it received by western readers? Is it more diverse than how it’s received in India?
AR:I really can’t say, there are different kinds of reactions… Recently in Chicago, I was in a conversation with Imani Perry, a wonderful African-American professor. The depth of her understanding was so beautiful, it was such a pleasure talking to her. Even though she isn’t from India, the things she picked up — I could not have asked for a more discerning reader. She was someone who understood things in ways that sometimes people who live here often don’t.
Judha: You started writing non-fiction before you wrote The God of Small Things, that means your literary path comes later.
AR: Yes. A new collection of all my non-fiction, My Seditious Heart was published in 2019. At the end, in the Appendix are the essays that I wrote before The God of Small Things —“The Great Indian Rape Trick.” They are about a film called The Bandit Queen. Phoolan Devi was a famous female bandit… the most notorious bandit of her time who had never been arrested. She was an obsession for many years. Eventually she gave herself up and served a prison sentence. And the film, supposedly a true story based on her life story that she dictated to fellow prisoners and smuggled out of prison, ends up being a long serialization of how she was raped—although she never mentions rape overtly in her memoir. The film turned India’s most famous bandit into History’s most famous victim of rape. It was infuriating. Phoolan Devi was infuriated too. So that series of essays I wrote before I wrote The God of Small Things.
Judha: So then I wonder why some male readers told you to go back to fiction, if they know that you’ve started writing non-fiction much earlier than novels?
AR: They just want to tell you what to do all the time. You know, what to do, what to wear, how to think. How to do all these things under their supervision.
Judha: Do you work with young people directly? Are there any activists at the moment that you are engaged with?
AR: No. I’m a loner, meaning I don’t know myself what I’ll be doing tomorrow and the day after. I don’t have any … umm.. No.
Judha: Maybe that’s your energy — to be unpredictable.
AR: Yeah, I don’t like to even know. That’s why I live alone and I don’t produce children. I just want to be free to be anything tomorrow. Like I don’t know what I’ll be tomorrow.
Judha: I remember you got some offers from Hollywood to make The God of Small Things into a film, and then you said that you intended to write a book that’s unfilmable.
AR: Yes. Very stubbornly visual but unfilmable. I mean there isn’t any book or thing that’s ‘unfilmable’, I know that. But I used to work as a scriptwriter, you know I worked in cinema before I wrote The God of Small Things. First, I studied architecture then I worked in cinema, first as an actor and then as a writer and designer. And then when you write a screenplay and you write ‘Scene 1. Exterior. Day. River’ or whatever. It’s all sort of the bare bones. And then I used to think, but I want to spend 3 pages describing the river, or what the fish are thinking. The God of Small Things is full of that kind of infusion of a kind of fevered imagination into whatever, fish and dragonflies and airport dustbins. I don’t know what would happen if you try to film that. I like the idea of writing things which are not meant to be something else, like a film that can’t be a book, a painting that can’t be a photograph, a novel that can’t be an essay, an essay that can’t be a … A thing that is very particular to its form.
6
LITERARY FRIENDSHIP
Eduardo Galeano and Arundhati Roy at Town Hall, New York City
Judha: In 2006, you and Eduardo Galeano shared the stage of Town Hall in New York City, you regarded him as your ‘twin’ living faraway. From my understanding, you are both an acute storyteller, you both invite the readers to explore beyond an appearance of things, and your works are imbued by the playful substance of literature. In the opening paragraph of “In Defense of the Word,” he wrote and I quote: ‘One writes out of a need to communicate and to commune with others, to denounce that which gives pain and to share that which gives happiness. One writes against one’s solitude and against the solitude of others. One assumes that literature transmits knowledge and affects the behavior and language of those who read… One writes, in reality, for the people whose luck or misfortune one identifies with — the hungry, the sleepless, the rebels, and the wretched of this earth — and the majority of them are illiterate.’ Here we come to a paradox of writing for people who can’t read, I suppose that his literary desire pivots on the political potential of literature. Likewise, your works, both fiction and non-fiction, show an ardent will to touch on the heart of the people.
AR: Ah.. it is presumptuous of me to call Eduardo Galeano my twin. I respect and adore him. But yes… I understand the dilemma of a writer who writes for people who cannot read. I love the idea of literature as a shelter. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is dedicated to The Unconsoled.
Judha: You are a good friend with John Berger. Can you share with us how this friendship started?
AR: John Berger. He is gone. I miss him and talk to him often. He made me feel safe. Few people have that effect on me. As you know the epigram on The God of Small Things is a quote from Berger.11‘Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one’, from John Berger’s 1972 novel, G. At the time I didn’t know him, I just read him and loved his words. And then when I started writing my non-fiction on the dam and India’s nuclear tests, I came home one day and I found a long fax written in this beautiful handwriting and it was John Berger. In his letter he said “Your fiction and non-fiction, they walk together like your two legs”. A couple of years later when I went to Paris, I met him. We became close. And when I started writing The Ministry of Utmost Happiness I went to his village. I didn’t say anything about my work— I’m very secretive when I write fiction, I don’t discuss it with anyone — but John just said, “I know you’re writing something. Open your computer and read it to me”.
John Berger
Judha: How did he know that?
AR: I don’t know, he just knew! So I started reading some parts to him and he said, “I want you to promise me that you’re not going to do anything else but this. You’re going to just finish this because it’s very, very important”. I said, yeah, I promise you. I came back to India and I got this note slipped under my door inviting me to go to the forest. I couldn’t refuse. I went. Walking with the Comrades became a book. There were battles, arguments, and other essays. But through it all I was still writing The Ministry. And then when I finished The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the first thing I did was — I knew John was very ill — I went to Paris and went to his house, I held his hand and I read to him for hours from the book. Then I left it with him and he read it. It was the last book he read before he died.
Judha: I’m not surprised that both of you were good friends. I trust, like you, he also discerned a profound relationship between nonfiction and fiction, and how the art of storytelling impels human perception.
AR: What a beautiful mind he was. He was the father I never had. I felt safe with him. Absolutely protected. It’s a rare feeling for me. The greatest thing about him was that, if you were reading to him it was like rain falling on earth. Not one drop was wasted. All his attention was focussed — it was amazing. Really amazing.
ซอย สควอด | soi squad
ซอย | soi or ‘soi squad’ accounts the practices of writing, translating, and publishing for its transformative power in giving an access to knowledge. This stance has driven us to explore these practices through multiple facets.
ซอย | soi or ‘soi squad’ accounts the practices of writing, translating, and publishing for its transformative power in giving an access to knowledge. This stance has driven us to explore these practices through multiple facets.
