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Books by Arundhati Roy
Broken Republic
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The God of Small Things /
Field Notes on Democracy /
Public Power in the Age of Empire
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Interview
with Arundhati Roy
By Dinyar Godrej
Dinyar Godrej:
Your writings have grappled with ruthless state
violence which is often at the behest of corporate
interests. Much of the corporate-owned media in India
shies away from covering the civil war-like conditions
in many parts of the country. The establishment tends to
brand anyone who attempts to present the other side’s
points of view as having seditious intent. Where is the
democratic space?
Arundhati Roy:
You’ve partially answered your own question—newspapers
and television channels do not make their money from
subscriptions or viewership; in fact, corporate
advertisements actually subsidize TV viewership and
newspaper and magazine readership, so in effect, the
mass media is run with corporate money. Some media
houses are directly owned by corporations, some
indirectly by majority share-holdings. Some media houses
in, say, Central India, have a direct interest in mining
and infrastructure projects, so they have a vested
interest in the push to displace people in the huge,
ongoing land-grab in which land and resources are
forcibly taken from the poor and given to the rich—a
process which goes by the name of ‘development’.
It would be foolish
to expect objective reporting: not because the
journalists are bad people, but because of the economic
structure of the organizations they work for. In fact,
what is surprising is that despite all of this,
occasionally there is some very good reporting. But
overall we either have silence, or a completely
distorted picture, in which those resisting their
impoverishment are being labelled ‘terrorists’—and these
are not just the Maoist rebels who have taken to arms,
but others who are involved in unarmed, but militant,
struggles against the government. A climate has been
created which criminalizes dissent of all kinds.
There are hundreds,
maybe even thousands of the poorest people in jails
across the country under charges of sedition and waging
war against the state. Many others are just charged
under the common criminal penal code. There are the
other ‘seditionists’ too, of course—those who have been
fighting for self-determination after being inducted
into the Union of India without their consent, when the
British left in 1947. I refer to Kashmir, Manipur,
Nagaland… in these places, tens of thousands have been
killed, hundreds of thousands tortured in the
nightmarish interrogation centres and army camps all
around the country.
And now, the Indian
army is migrating to the heart of the country—to fight
the
Adivasi people whose lands the corporations covet.
They say Pakistan is a military dictatorship, but I
don’t think the Pakistani army has been actively
deployed against its ‘own’ people the way the Indian
army has been:
Kashmir,
Manipur,
Nagaland,
Hyderabad,
Goa,
Telengana,
Punjab and now,
Chhattisgarh,
Jharkhand, Orissa…
Anti-corruption
campaigning has been at the forefront of media-reported
news in India.
Dinyar Godrej:
Meanwhile, the relative silence on civil war
conditions continues. How does one explain this gap in
what makes the news?
Arundhati Roy:
I
have mixed feelings about the anti-corruption campaign.
It gathered momentum after a series of huge scams hit
the headlines. The most scandalous of them was what has
come to be known as the ‘2G
scam’ in which the government sold telecom spectrum
for mobile phones (a public asset) to private companies
at ridiculously low prices. The companies went on to
sell them at huge profits to other companies, robbing
the public exchequer of billions of rupees. Leaked phone
taps showed how everybody, from the judiciary to
politicians to high profile journalists and low profit
hit-men, were in on the manoeuvring. The transcripts
were like an MRI scan that confirmed a diagnosis that
had been made years ago by many of us.
The 2G scam enraged
the Indian middle classes, who saw it as a betrayal, as
a moral problem, not a systemic or a structural one.
Somehow, the fact that the government has signed
hundreds of secret
Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) privatizing
water, minerals and infrastructure, and signing over
forests, mountains and rivers to private corporations,
does not seem to generate the same outrage.
Unlike in the 2G
scam, these secret MOUs do not have just a monetary
cost, but human and environmental costs that are
devastating. They displace millions of people and wreck
whole ecosystems. The mining corporations pay the
government just a tiny royalty and rake in huge profits.
Yet the people who are fighting these battles are being
called terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. Even if
there were no corruption and everything were above board
on these deals, it would be daylight robbery on an
unimaginable scale.
On the whole, when
a political movement is mobilized using the language of
‘anti-corruption’, it has an apolitical ‘catch-all’
appeal which could result in a hugely unfair system
being strengthened by a sort of moral police force which
has authoritarian instincts. So you have ‘Team Anna’: a
sort of oligarchy of ‘concerned citizens’—some of them
very fine people—led by the old Gandhian
Anna
Hazare, who talks about amputating the limbs of
thieves and hanging people and who has praised Gujarat’s
Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who presided over the
public massacre of thousands of Muslims in broad
daylight.
On the other hand,
to shun the anti-corruption movement and set your eyes
on a long-term political goal lets the corporate looters
and their henchmen in the media, parliament and
judiciary off the hook. So it’s a bit of a dilemma.
Dinyar Godrej:
Recent Indian government legislation permits web
content to be shut down for a variety of reasons. Film
censorship is still widely used. Why does the state take
such a paternalistic role towards what its citizens have
to say?
Arundhati Roy: I
think overt censorship is slated to become a big problem
in the near future. Internet censorship, surveillance,
the project of the electronic UID (Unique Identity
card)… ominous. Imagine a government that cannot provide
food or water to its people, a government whose policies
have created a population of 800 million people who live
on less than 20 rupees [about 45 US cents] a day, a
country which has the largest number of malnourished
children in the world, which has, as a major priority,
the desire to distribute UID cards to all of
its citizens.
The UID is a
corporate scam which funnels billions of dollars into
the IT sector. To me, it is one of the most serious
transgressions that is on the cards. It is nothing more
than an administrative tool in the hands of a police
state. But coming back to censorship: since the US
government has pissed on its Holy Cow (Free Speech—or
whatever little was left of it) with its vituperative
reaction to
Wikileaks, now everybody will jump on the bandwagon.
(Just like every country had its own version of the ‘war
on terror’ to settle scores.)
Having said this,
India is certainly not the worst place in the world on
the Free Speech issue: the anarchy of different kinds of
media, the fact that it’s such an unmanageable country
and, though institutions of democracy have been eroded,
there is a militant spirit of democracy among the
people… it will be hard to shut us all up. Impossible,
I’d say.
Dinyar Godrej:
You have pointed out that nonviolent positions are
difficult to hold on to when there is no audience to
witness them, and when the opposing force does not blink
at the moral challenge and responds with murder. Why do
you think pointing that out caused such an uproar?
Arundhati Roy: I
have written at some length about this. I do not say
that nonviolent
satyagraha is an obsolete tool of resistance, not at
all. It can be extremely effective; but has to be
carried out in the public eye, in front of TV cameras,
and for demands—like ‘anti-corruption’— which appeal to
the sympathies of the middle class.
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However, I do
believe that preaching ‘nonviolence at any cost’ from a
safe distance to
Adivasi people who live in remote
forest villages and have watched hundreds of security
forces arrive, surround their villages, burn their homes
and kill and rape their people, can also be pretty
immoral.
If the middle class
were to join the battle, then of course nonviolent
satyagraha would be an option. But of course it
won’t. It can’t. That would be a political oxymoron. Why does pointing
this out cause an uproar, you ask? I think because of
the fear that once those millions of people who have
been so cruelly dispossessed of all they have in order
to fire India’s ‘growth’ suddenly unshackle their
imaginations and realize that they are not so
defenceless after all, the Beautiful People know that no
power on earth will be able to protect them.
Sure, there may not
be a perfect, synchronized revolution in which the
masses will overthrow the ruling classes. Instead, there
will be a messy insurrection, when all manner of
brutality will occur. The poor may not win, but the rich
will certainly lose. The feast will end. That’s why
the uproar.
Adivasi woman
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Dinyar Godrej:
Are we talking about the narratives we like to make
up and then believe in, regardless of the reality of the
situation? What is your take on the narratives,
especially those of the Western media, around the
Arab uprisings?
Arundhati Roy:
Well, when the mainstream media begins to report
enthusiastically about a series of uprisings—when they
described the Arab uprisings as the Arab ‘spring’—and
when you know how loaded the reporting around the
Israeli
Occupation of Palestine is, then if you have your
wits about you, you have to be on your guard, a little
wary of swallowing the reports hook, line and sinker. If
you follow what happened over the last three summers in
Kashmir,
for example, when tens of thousands of unarmed people
faced down Indian security forces with as much courage
and determination as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Syria
and Yemen, you can’t help but wonder why the Western
media switches on the lights to cover some uprisings,
and blacks out others.
I found it a little
disconcerting how enthusiastically the 19-day
‘revolution’ in Tahrir Square was being reported, how
excited [New York Times foreign affairs
columnist]
Thomas Friedman was about it—but only a few months
ago reports seemed to suggest that
Hosni Mubarak was sick and dying…
Then you had
headlines like ‘Egypt free, army takes charge’ and you
know that the army is intricately entwined with the US.
I worry that the anger and energy of people who have
been repressed for years by puppet dictators is being
siphoned off, carefully defused, while the West jockeys
to retain the status quo one way or another and replace
the old despots with a more streamlined, less obvious
form of despotism. The last I heard, people were
beginning to gather in
Tahrir Square again…
Dinyar Godrej:
Surges of people power, as in Tunisia and Egypt, and
earlier in the Philippines, are capable of forcing
climactic moments and sudden change. But the aftermath
often sees a return to old systems and old corruptions.
Why is human social organization so resistant to the
change we yearn for?
Arundhati Roy:
While people in these countries lived under repressive
regimes and yearned for democracy, perhaps they didn’t
know that real democracy has been taken into the
workshop and replaced by the market-friendly version,
which is a far more sophisticated form of despotism, not
easy for beginners to decode. It might take a little
time for people to realize they’ve been sold the wrong
model. But meanwhile they have fought heroic street
battles, faced down tanks, celebrated victory. They’ve
been applauded all the way, while they let off steam.
For them to build up that head of steam again isn’t
easy. It’ll take years. Human society isn’t resistant to
change: it wants change; but sometimes it isn’t smart
enough to get what it wants.
Dinyar Godrej:
Another world is possible. What are the ways in
which we can make it likely?
Arundhati Roy: To
work out the complex ways in which we are being conned
and corralled into being ‘good’. To realize we’re on our
own. Help won’t come. We have to conserve energy, know
how and where and when to deploy it. We have to fight
our own battles. Ask the Sri Lankan Tamils what it feels
like when the chips are down and the ‘international
community’ slinks away while your people are slaughtered
and then returns to cluck and commiserate in
hollow ways.
Source:
Newint
Dinyar Godrej—Indian-born—is
a former editor of
New Internationalist, works as a freelance
journalist based in Europe.
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Arundhati Roy—Princess to Pariah
Excerpts by Shoma Chaudhury
Seers are never comforting people.
And no-one can ever accuse Arundhati Roy of being
comforting. Over the last decade, she has been there
first at almost every trench-line: illuminating,
dissecting, warning, presaging. Taunting the cosy out of
their towers. Magnifying the fights of the voiceless. No
other contemporary Indian writer—perhaps no Indian
writer before—has engaged so fiercely and urgently with
the idea and reality of India. And none have taken it
apart as unflinchingly.
In keeping with the
conflicted nature of India, this has earned Roy curious
returns: huge love and huge anger. Two years ago, for
instance, India was convulsed by a gruesome terror
attack that has come to be known as ‘Mumbai 26/11’. For
three days, a stupefied nation watched as a group of
young gunmen held a city hostage, blasting people at
will, in full view of the world. As the tragedies piled
up, news came that
Hemant Karkare, chief of Mumbai’s
anti-terror squad, had been killed. Karkare was widely
considered an honest officer and as the grieving praise
poured in, a prominent Indian television anchor leaned
into the screen and said: ‘We hope Arundhati Roy is
listening. We haven’t invited her to this show because
we think she is disgusting.’
The immediate
provocation for this outburst lay in an incident earlier
that year in Delhi. There had been a shootout in a
minority neighbourhood and a police squad had killed two
young Muslim boys, claiming they were terrorists.
Swimming against the tide, Roy had condemned the
incident stridently, asserting the cops had killed in
cold blood and asking for an inquiry. Karkare’s
martyrdom was now being used to hand out a stinging slap
to her for these supposedly ‘anti-national’ stances. But
the ugly hostility of the television anchor is not a
stray incident: it embodies the way a certain kind of
privileged, English-speaking Indian has come to regard
Roy. It is the legacy of her writing and activism. In a
sense, it is the story of contemporary India.
It is difficult to understand the
profound, yet scrappy, impact of Roy’s political writing
and activism on India unless one recalls the dizzy
euphoria of her arrival and the irony of the journey she
picked for herself afterwards. Roy was first announced
to the world by a breathless article in a leading Indian
magazine. The year was 1996. Liberalization of the
Indian economy was just five years old. A jubilant
middle class was looking for a mascot. Arundhati Roy
came tailor-made from heaven: she had an elfin beauty, a
diamond flash in her nose, a mane of gorgeous hair, a
romantic back-story, and a manuscript that crackled with
heart and scintillating prose and had triggered an
international bidding war. India loved her.
From the moment
The God of Small Things was published, Roy was
deemed the chosen one. As the successes of the book
piled up—huge advances, translations to 40 languages,
and finally the 1997 Booker Prize—it was a done deal. Arundhati Roy was India’s triumphant entry on the global
stage; she was the princess at the ball. No-one could
have anticipated that the princess would strike the gong
even before the midnight hour. Willfully bust the party.
Pick open the seams of the gown. Expose the chariot for
a pumpkin. Smash the glass slipper. But that is what
Arundhati Roy did. In May 1998, barely a few months into
the rollercoaster ride of her Booker win, the right-wing
BJP-led government tested
India’s nuclear bomb. In August 1998, Roy wrote The
End of Imagination, an angry impassioned critique of
the bomb, her first piece of writing after the novel.
‘There can
be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to
have to do than restate a case that has, over the years,
already been made by other people in other parts of the
world, and made passionately, eloquently and
knowledgeably,’ she wrote. ‘But I am prepared to grovel
. . .
because, in the circumstances, silence would
be indefensible.’ Since The End of Imagination,
there has never been a silence from Roy. It was the
first in a series of essays that would grow in moral
strength and clarity, moving from the somewhat
over-emotional hyperbole of the nuclear piece to the
clear-eyed discomfitures of her later ones. She had
crossed over to the dark side.—NewInt
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Arundhati Roy
(born 24 November 1961) is an
Indian novelist. She won the
Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel,
The God of Small Things, and has also written
two
screenplays and several collections of essays. Her
writings on various social, environmental and political
issues have been a subject of major controversy in
India. . . . Roy began writing her first novel,
The God of Small Things, in 1992, completing it
in 1996. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major
part captures her childhood experiences in
Aymanam. The publication of The God of Small Things
catapulted Roy to instant international fame. It
received the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction and was
listed as one of the
New York Times Notable Books of the Year for
1997. It reached fourth position on the New York Times
Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction. From the
beginning, the book was also a commercial success: Roy
received half a million pounds as an advance; It was
published in May, and the book had been sold to eighteen
countries by the end of June.
The God of Small Things received stellar reviews
in major American newspapers such as
The New York Times (a "dazzling first novel,"
"extraordinary," "at once so morally strenuous and so
imaginatively supple") and the
Los Angeles Times ("a novel of poignancy and
considerable sweep"), and in Canadian publications such
as the
Toronto Star ("a lush, magical novel"). By the end
of the year, it had become one of the five best books of
1997 by
TIME. Critical response in the United Kingdom was
less positive, and that the novel was awarded the Booker
Prize caused controversy; Carmen Callil, a 1996 Booker
Prize judge, called the novel "execrable," and
The Guardian called the contest "profoundly
depressing." In India, the book was criticized
especially for its unrestrained description of sexuality
by
E. K. Nayanar, then Chief Minister of Roy's
homestate
Kerala, where she had to answer charges of
obscenity.—Wikipedia
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Occupy Wall Street . . . Heart of Empire
Arundhati Roy:
I was never one of those people who was, you know,
throwing my hat in the air when he [Obama] won, even
though—even though the memory of, you know, old black
people, you know, feeling so happy to have a black man
in the White House was something you just couldn’t
ignore. But to see how he has—I mean, it’s almost
reprehensible. You see—what has he done? He’s expanded
the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan. Those drone
attacks are killing people every day. You know, it’s—I
don’t think he has any idea what he’s doing in that
subcontinent. You know, no idea whatsoever. It is just
devolving into a completely unmanageable, horrendous
situation.
In America now, I
just feel—I just feel a bit upset every time I hear that
smooth, silver-tongued, you know, kind of delivery,
which actually means nothing most of the time. And so,
if—I keep thinking that if George Bush had done what
Obama does, everybody would be saying he’s a fascist,
you know, but we really step back and make so much space
for what’s going on here, that—you know, it’s an old
dilemma, of course, that somebody can do by day what the
other person does at night. And, you know, people are so
caught up in this view that the only choice you have is
between the Democrats and the Republicans or between the
Congress and the BJP. Our imaginations have been locked
into this kind of electoral politics, so we feel like we
have to say nice things about him. But I don’t feel like
saying nice things about him.—DemocracyNow
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India: A Wounded Civilization
By
V.S.Naipaul
In
1975, at the height of
Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency,” V. S.
Naipaul returned to India, the country his
ancestors had left one hundred years
earlier. Out of that journey he produced
this concise masterpiece: a vibrant,
defiantly unsentimental portrait of a
society traumatized by centuries of foreign
conquest and immured in a mythic vision of
its past.
Indira Gandhi
Drawing on novels, news reports, political
memoirs, and his own encounters with
ordinary Indians—from a supercilious prince
to an engineer constructing housing for
Bombay’s homeless—Naipaul captures a vast,
mysterious, and agonized continent
inaccessible to foreigners and barely
visible to its own people. He sees both the
burgeoning space program and the 5,000
volunteers chanting mantras to purify a
defiled temple; the feudal village autocrat
and the Naxalite revolutionaries who
combined Maoist rhetoric with ritual murder.
Relentless in its vision, thrilling in the
keenness of its prose,
India: A Wounded Civilization is a
work of astonishing insight and candor. |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
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1975
1980
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 26 September 2011
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