Interview
Politics & Elections
Arundhati Roy on Fiction in the Face of Rising Fascism
by Laura Flanders
December 31, 2018
Truthout
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/opeXClLEdcs
ARUNDHATI ROY
(b. November 24, 1961)
“How to tell a shattered story by slowly becoming everybody. No, by
slowly becoming everything.” That’s the line that stuck with me from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,
the latest book by one of our favorite guests, Arundhati Roy. Roy’s
strength as a writer — and what she does that so many of us struggle to
do — is weave many stories into one fabric, without diluting the
integrity of those stories. I’ve spoken to her often about her writing
on capitalism, nationalism, solidarity and resistance. In this
conversation we’ll talk about all those things again, and visit her new
novel against the backdrop of anti-Muslim violence and landmark changes
for queer people in her home country of India.
Laura Flanders: You dedicate your book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
to the unconsoled, and I believe that we are unconsoled in this moment.
But I do worry that we in the United States, as you’ve alluded, become
inured, become maybe muddied in our seeing, in our thinking, because
there’s so much coming at us at all times. Insofar as you have a take on
what’s happening here, where do you think we are? And then obviously I
want you to talk about home and where India is, because India we barely
see at all.
The thing is, people spend so much time mocking Trump or waiting for
him to be impeached. And the danger with that kind of obsession with a
single person is that you don’t see the system that produced him. You
don’t see that, obviously, there was something about those eight years
of Obama’s presidency that created Trump and if we just keep obsessing
about this one person without seeing what would happen … what would
happen if he wasn’t there tomorrow and Mike Pence came? Would it be
better? You know? The kind of havoc that has been created in the world
when I think about it now, between Europe and America increasingly, the
simple truth is that these economies can only function by selling the
weapons that they manufacture. Weapons which you cannot even imagine
that the human mind can conceive of and they are doing the selling and
we’re doing the buying.
To keep that economy going, you need a world at war, or almost at
war, or just about to go to war, whatever it is. Forget the past, but
just look at it from 9/11 onwards. How many countries have been
destroyed? Europe is now in chaos also because of the refugees and so
on. But what is creating it? How is it possible to continuously believe
that you can destabilize country after country after country and
anything good is going to come of it?
Is India destabilizing or stabilizing in a scary way?
India, it’s hard to say. This year’s going to be very important here.
How so?
Because the elections are coming next May and we’ve had a situation
where somehow, since 1925, the goal of the Hindu nationalists was
achieved in 2014 when Modi came to power with this absolute majority. In
a way I was grateful for the absolute majority because there wasn’t
anyone else to blame. There isn’t anyone else to blame for the chaos
that has been unleashed. But what is very worrying is that, again, I
keep saying you have to look and we have to find ways of keeping up our
understanding of what’s going on. Two years ago Modi appeared on TV at
10 o’clock at night and announced that 80 percent of Indian currency was
illegal from the next morning. That was like taking a baseball bat and
breaking every single citizen’s spine.
They called it “demonetization.”
That’s right. We don’t even have a word in any Indian language for
it. But then when you do that, regardless of the economic implications,
what you’re doing is you’re sending a message saying, “I can control you
at all points, every single one of you.” Now there’s another huge thing
which they are trying to bring into legislation called the Aadhaar card
where every citizen’s private information, biometrics, all of it is
going to be put on a unique identity card. Now, as you know, these
databases are being hacked. People’s private information is being bought
and sold. Information is gold now. That is a form of surveillance and
control that is there forever. Once they’ve got it there, you can’t undo
it.
So, these are things
which are impossible to wrap your head around. You have the whole new
media now. For example, I’m not even talking about Facebook, I’m not
even talking about Twitter. I’m talking about a messaging service called
WhatsApp, which is very, very big in India. And at one point all of us
used to use it because it’s encrypted and the information [is] not
available to the authorities. But now you have these kind of WhatsApp
farms where fake news, fake videos, and videos that are meant to create
communal conflagration are deliberately being sent around. So you have a
situation where the only way now that Modi is going to win the election
again, is to create massive communal strife between Hindus and Muslims,
and so on. Or what they call a limited war with Pakistan, as you know,
both are now nuclear neighbors. But the systematic sort of administering
of hatred, a manifesto of hatred, is the basis of these people.
We wonder about that here in the US, too. Once that hatred
has been unleashed, is the individual required, if Modi doesn’t get
elected or doesn’t get an absolute majority in 2019…? Is that the end of
it? I mean, there was an eight-year-old girl kidnapped, raped, and
murdered, Asifa Bano, recently. We can talk about who did it, et cetera,
but what killed her? How do you reel that back?
The thing is that there are so many different kinds of rape, right?
You might have a group of … [rapists who kill] a child, but do they then
have huge processions [of] people supporting them? Do they have demands
that they be released or that the investigation doesn’t continue or
that the investigation is handed over to people whom the majority
community “trust”?
As happened in this case.
Yes, as happened in this case, but it keeps happening. I mean, there
was another person who was arrested for raping, a sort of god man. There
were massive protests in his favor. There’s another god man called
Asaram Bapu. He was convicted of rape. There had to be security alerts
in three states because it was now a question of people supporting him.
You see? It’s not just that one community rapes and the other doesn’t.
It isn’t that. I’m talking about the public support that comes out. And
then there’s sort of [a] ritualistic, almost satanic element to it. It
isn’t just rape and kill, but there’s something so terrible about it
that you wonder, what is it? What is it? And you read it. I mean she’s
one child, but it’s happening all over now. And sometimes I wonder, is
this something that requires the sacrifice of the most beautiful thing,
which is a little girl? Is there something more to it than just carnal
lust and brutality?
Is there? How do you see it?
I don’t know. Because we are living in this world of feudalism and
all kinds of strange beliefs. I don’t know. I mean, I really don’t know.
I don’t know how to think about it. None of us know. We are all unable
to understand how things have come to this.
Except you are able to talk about it because this entire book is you talking about it.
True. It’s me thinking about it, mourning about it, and then finding
how much beauty still does exist in the saddest places. How much
strength and power still exists. I have in the last 20 years spent time
in what people would consider to be the darkest and most hopeless
places, but they have not been dark and hopeless. There are people
struggling against it, fighting against it, speaking against it. And I
don’t mean in a shallow sort of sloganeering way, but as a way of life.
As a deep, dense understanding with poetry and music. Each of these
things has such a deep history. The poets that ordinary people in the
book recite, love, and whose shrines they go to, to lay flowers. You
look at the power of that. People don’t forget their poets, however much
violence is done.
Is that what brought you back to fiction?
What brought me back to fiction was just that I had become, as I keep
saying, like a sedimentary rock. I have these layers and layers of
looking at things. In non-fiction, I have argued, I’ve fought, I’ve
driven myself, and other people, crazy. But the complexity of it — the
humor, the love, the maverick-ness, the poetry — all of that was
accumulating too. I’ve been writing it for 10 years. I was not
interested in writing just about one particular class. Just this whole
ocean of languages, beliefs, religions, intimacies and anarchies. The
fact is that we are facing majoritarianism, which is actually bordering
on fascism — not European fascism, our own variety of it. Yet India is a
land of minorities. A land whose people are divided formally into
castes, religions and ethnicities. People look at India and think it’s …
archaic, but society lives in a grid. This book is about people who
somehow are off grid and through that off grid-ness, you shine the light
on the grid and you look at it, wonder about it.
Maybe we put our hope in the wrong places. Are we wrong to put our hope in democracy, elections?
Well, right now at this point in time, I am not one, though I have
been one of those people who has all this time said how little
difference there is between the various political parties. But today in
India, we are facing a situation where if the BJP comes back in 2019, I
don’t think there’s going to be anything left of what we thought of.
With all its flaws, it’s not that you’ll be voting for a friend, but
just for the enemy that you want to have. So I don’t think we can afford
to leave any spaces unchallenged and unfought, including the elections.
But if all of us think that by defeating Modi or by impeaching Trump
things are going to be OK, we got to have some extra iodine every night.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND INTERVIEW SUBJECT:
Suzanna Arundhati
Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian author best known for her novel
The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for
Fiction in 1997 and became the biggest-selling book by a non-expatriate
Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights
and environmental causes. She has written seventeen critically acclaimed books.
Bibliography: Arundhati Roy
Fiction:
The God of Small Things. Flamingo, 1997. ISBN 0-00-655068-1
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Hamish Hamilton, 2017. ISBN 0-24-130397-4
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Hamish Hamilton, 2017. ISBN 0-24-130397-4
Non-fiction:
The End of Imagination. Kottayam: D.C. Books, 1998. ISBN 81-7130-867-8
The Cost of Living. Flamingo, 1999. ISBN 0-375-75614-0
The Greater Common Good. Bombay: India Book Distributor, 1999. ISBN 81-7310-121-3
The Algebra of Infinite Justice. Flamingo, 2002. ISBN 0-00-714949-2
Power Politics. Cambridge: South End Press, 2002. ISBN 0-89608-668-2
War Talk. Cambridge: South End Press, 2003. ISBN 0-89608-724-7
An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire. Consortium, 2004. ISBN 0-89608-727-1
Public Power in the Age of Empire. New York: Seven Stories Press. 2004. ISBN 9781583226827.
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. Interviews by David Barsamian. Cambridge: South End Press, 2004. ISBN 0-89608-710-7
The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. New Delhi: Penguin, 2008. ISBN 978-0-670-08207-0
Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. New Delhi: Penguin, 2010. ISBN 978-0-670-08379-4
Broken Republic: Three Essays. New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton, 2011. ISBN 978-0-670-08569-9
Walking with the Comrades. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011. ISBN 978-0-670-08553-8
Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Verso, 2011. ISBN 1-844-67735-4
The Hanging of Afzal Guru and the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament. New Delhi: Penguin. 2013. ISBN 978-0143420750.
Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014. ISBN 978-1-60846-385-5[94]
Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations (with John Cusack). Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. ISBN 978-1-608-46717-4
The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017. ISBN 978-1-608-46797-6
The Cost of Living. Flamingo, 1999. ISBN 0-375-75614-0
The Greater Common Good. Bombay: India Book Distributor, 1999. ISBN 81-7310-121-3
The Algebra of Infinite Justice. Flamingo, 2002. ISBN 0-00-714949-2
Power Politics. Cambridge: South End Press, 2002. ISBN 0-89608-668-2
War Talk. Cambridge: South End Press, 2003. ISBN 0-89608-724-7
An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire. Consortium, 2004. ISBN 0-89608-727-1
Public Power in the Age of Empire. New York: Seven Stories Press. 2004. ISBN 9781583226827.
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. Interviews by David Barsamian. Cambridge: South End Press, 2004. ISBN 0-89608-710-7
The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. New Delhi: Penguin, 2008. ISBN 978-0-670-08207-0
Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. New Delhi: Penguin, 2010. ISBN 978-0-670-08379-4
Broken Republic: Three Essays. New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton, 2011. ISBN 978-0-670-08569-9
Walking with the Comrades. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011. ISBN 978-0-670-08553-8
Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Verso, 2011. ISBN 1-844-67735-4
The Hanging of Afzal Guru and the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament. New Delhi: Penguin. 2013. ISBN 978-0143420750.
Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014. ISBN 978-1-60846-385-5[94]
Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations (with John Cusack). Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. ISBN 978-1-608-46717-4
The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017. ISBN 978-1-608-46797-6
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:
Best-selling author and broadcaster,
Laura Flanders interviews forward thinking people from the worlds of
politics, business, culture and social movements on her internationally
syndicated TV program, 'The Laura Flanders Show.' It airs weekly on
KCET/LinkTV, FreeSpeech TV, and in English and Spanish in teleSUR.
Flanders is also a contributing writer to The Nation and YES! Magazine
('Commonomics') and a regular guest on MSNBC. She is the author of six
books, including The New York Times best-seller, BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a
Cynical Species (Verso, 2004) and Blue GRIT: True Democrats Take Back
Politics from the Politicians (Penguin Press, 2007). 'The Laura Flanders
Show' first aired on Air America Radio from 2004 to 2008. Follow her on
Twitter: @GRITlaura.
