‘We should be hysterical’ – Arundhati Roy

On a Thursday morning in Joburg, Arya Lalloo, Avantika Seeth and Charl Blignaut sat down to talk with internationally celebrated Indian novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy. A wide-ranging conversation returned repeatedly to a world where corporatisation and nationalism continue to trample on the poor and minorities- oh, and her epic second novel. 

There’s something that the petite woman with the greying curls, unpainted fingernails and fierce gaze says that sums her up.

Settled on her couch of brightly coloured pillows beneath the hanging plants, wrapped in a dark green and magenta shawl, Arundhati Roy is talking about the Sufi saint Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed, whose shrines get a look-in in her bestselling second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

“He’s the one who is the blasphemer among the believers, the believer among blasphemers, the person who doesn’t allow majoritarianism to shut out the possibility of something else.”

The majority she refers to differs from country to country.

In her homeland it is the rise and rise of corporatised Hindu nationalism. Either way, it is “the system”, a construct she determinedly stands outside of and prods with words as gentle as flowers, as sharp as razors.

The novel, an epic puzzle reconstructing the history of contemporary India through outcasts, freedom fighters and bureaucrats, is in its own way a summary of the 20 years of polemic essays penned by the prolific Roy since her debut novel, The God of Small Things, catapulted her to international fame, cracking open words to release emotions charting the trauma of the caste system in her now-flooded home province of Kerala.

The proceeds of these essays often go to the grassroots causes she fights for – be they Kashmiri independence, deforestation or the impact of dams built that will displace the poorest of the poor without compensation.

Her literary rock star profile is of such a calibre that before we meet her, we ask her publicist if there are any rules, such as no selfies, a preferred drink? “Nope, nothing,” comes the reply. Ms Roy allows all selfies, signs all books in her neat scrawl and takes very few refreshments.

WATCH: Arundhati Roy on Mandela and Gandhi 

Saffron robes and business suits

We are interested in the post – in the post #MeToo, in the post student protests, in the post revolution, post democracy, because Marikana is post six years today. I was listening to the radio this morning, thinking: What would Arundhati Roy do? You’d be very vocal and vociferous.

Well, the question in my mind is less what I would do, which is pretty predictable, but what I was feeling, really, is how important it is for South Africa to at least not lose this independence. I was watching the SABC today and I was thinking that all they are talking about is the Marikana massacre. In India there is no way that would happen.

And indigenous people are shot down, killed in areas which are being purged of journalists, of activists – and no TV channel would be doing what the SABC is doing today. Massacres are forgotten.

Forget the mining massacres; the massacre of Gujarat is the chariot on which the chief minister of Gujarat [Narendra Modi] rolled into the prime minister’s office. Even the liberals don’t talk about it.

Even the liberals are like, “let’s forget the past” – a past where more than a thousand, unofficially two thousand, people were massacred on the streets, women were gang raped and burnt, and the killers came out and proudly spoke about what they had done.

It seems in our world, with these shattered kinds of histories and multiple impositions and disruptions, that democracy starts coming up against itself more and more frequently?

This is something that I’ve written about extensively, in a book called Listening to Grasshoppers, and the introduction of it is called Democracy’s Failing Light.

In India, the Constitution is a more progressive and more enlightened document than society itself. And one of its architects, Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, said it’s like a lotus on a dung heap.

Because he said that a democracy without a constitution – which is, in fact, its moral framework – is nothing. Now today, Modi’s government and party to which he belongs has long wanted to change the Constitution and call India a Hindu republic.

So, today in India you have, on the one hand, the rhetoric of democracy, and on the other hand, you have thousands of indigenous people in jail charged with sedition for either standing up for human rights or for fighting against their own displacement.

While I am listening to the Marikana coverage, I’m thinking that just last month there were 13 people shot while protesting in Tamil Nadu [against a copper plant run by a British mining company].

And I was at the meeting, and they were talking about there being snipers picking off people in the crowd and people inside the crowd being shot at point-blank range.

This same mining company funds and sponsors the Jaipur Literature Festival, where all the great writers will come and speak about freedom of speech and so on. So, how does all this work in a so-called democracy?

Since the late 1880s onwards, when the ideas of representative government, as opposed to empire, began in the Indian subcontinent, you had this huge anxiety about creating a constituency out of a very diverse population.

Before that you had millions of ‘untouchables’, converting to Islam, converting to Sikhism, converting to Christianity, to escape the scourge of being lower caste.

But when it became necessary to create a majority Hindu community, that was when Hinduism sort of became an evangelic religion, which it never was. How to keep numbers and yet maintain the caste system. How to construct constituencies and pit them against each other, is the very nature of democracy in a way. Massacres and elections go hand in hand.

You can see directly how the television media in particular work as a lynch mob, continuously working to propagate lies about activists until people take it upon themselves to kill them and then strut around. All based on propaganda. So, now you have certain online independent portals from where we get our news.

In a sense we also rely on Daily Vox and GroundUp, on the small, online indie voices to tell us the truth about the student protests, because the patriarchs who run the mainstream media were saying: ‘But we already fought this war that the students were fighting and we won it...’

The thing is that somebody like Modi, he is the embodiment of corporatisation and nationalism. So, ever the corporate, he can drop his saffron robes and put on his business suit ... I don’t know if you heard about the demonetisation – you know, suddenly overnight 80% of our currency was not legal tender.

Then there’s the new goods and services tax, which destroys small business but helps big business. This as the rage of joblessness and a kind of invisibilising of the poor goes on.

There’s something that I find really interesting about the informal and the unregulated, and how to regulate and bring into formality these systems. Like surveillance technologies, which India is ahead of...

The new identity card, they call it. Surveillance now is the whole world living in that digital era. It is about how to control populations which are increasingly going to be surplus in some way, increasingly not required to contribute to economic activity. Therefore, in some ways dispensable, but they require to be managed.

The great Indian rape trick

I’m interested in how you choose the battle. How do you find your way to your fight?

Well, it is not my fight; it’s the air that I breathe. If you look at God of Small Things, what is it about? It is about childhood and all that, but it is primarily about caste and about the left’s inability to look at caste. Comrade Pillai, he’s unable to; I mean it’s not just an inability, it’s an actual collision within the caste system.

When you’re talking land-for-land or displacement, and that battle which is being fought in the 1990s, even today, even people’s movements that are considered radical – like the anti-dam movement or like the battle in Chhattisgarh forests of Bhaskar, against displacements and mines – today the radical position is to fight against displacement, but in the late 1960s, the radical position was to ask for redistribution of land. Today you are seeing people say: ‘Let us just hold on to what little we have.’ So, even our own imaginations have shrunk and we have been pushed against the wall, you know.

Your critics like to portray you as this hysterical woman, and in the book are these broken women who find the shelter and the quest for freedom, and I go back to the moment you impacted me most fundamentally, which was your commentary on the film, Bandit Queen. With #MeToo it seems that there’s real change, like the depiction of the rape of a living woman without her permission today is almost unthinkable. There is some progress, but at the same time what is the ‘post’ in this progress – because the resistance to this position is to call you a hysterical woman, to reduce your power...

I’m so happy that you brought up the Bandit Queen essay, The Great Indian Rape-Trick.

When I was a kid I didn’t understand why suddenly you cut to the ceiling fan and some reflection. It was very, very traumatising for me.

I grew up believing that every woman gets raped, so when I saw Bandit Queen I was infuriated, not just because of the depiction of the rape of a living woman, but because that film turned India’s most famous bandit into history’s most famous victim of rape.

Phoolan Devi was a bandit whom the police did not and could not catch. In her memoirs, she doesn’t really talk about being raped.

The story she tells is that her father’s brother stole her father’s land. This fight for a woman for land has turned into some kind of excitement about showing more and more rapes, in the guise of being concerned about women.

So one of the things I really worry about – for instance, a few months ago you must have read about the little Muslim shepherd girl who was raped in a temple in Jammu and killed.

It’s more dangerous to be a woman than a cow, I’ve said. Sometimes it’s more dangerous to become a Muslim than a woman. Sometimes it’s more dangerous to be a Muslim than a homosexual. It depends on the atmosphere.

I’ve been called all sorts of things; I don’t even give them the good feeling of being upset. Put up your hands, any woman who hasn’t been called hysterical. It’s just a defence mechanism on their part. And one should be hysterical about what’s going on at this point, don’t you think? Isn’t that a sane reaction?

The art of tenderness

I mean that’s the question, that you’ve come out of over two decades of fighting with this humour, and the glow is intact and your humanity is still there.

I think the main thing that one must remember is that there is a small section of people whose job it is to be like an insult factory. Troll factories, WhatsApp farms and so on. But in truth, the love I receive is huge. Huge, you know.

I was 17 when you wrote The God of Small Things, and Arundhati Roy arrived to offer the possibility of a different future. You could be rebellious and you could be disobedient, like suddenly that impossibility was made more possible. Today it’s not as disruptive or subversive to be hyper political or very serious and be an author of fiction, as it was in 1997 for many young women of colour.

I’m not saying this as some lecture, but for me, I think one of the things we must never forget, also, is the beauty, the joy, the laughter, the poetry, the love.

At all kinds of love and weirdness. For me, this book is a universe that I created to shelter myself. I might have written Anjum and Tilo but they comfort me. They are with me, they travel with me, I ask them stuff. They are like a universe that protects me and makes my organs feel at ease. So, it’s an insane form of creating your own friends; they are more real to me than many real people. So, even if they were to throw me in jail, we’d all be together.

Does that sort of tie in with the graveyard guest house that Anjum builds in the novel and the residency that’s taken up there?

A lot of the Western people say it’s magic realism and I ask, ‘Which part?’ Come, I will show you that cemetery, it exists.

In truth, when you come to the end of the book and you see who lives in that guest house, who dies in it and who says the prayers, and what prayers are said, it’s a revolution. Because you have the Imam Ziauddin who does the Muslim prayers, you have the Tilottama’s mother’s ashes who’s buried with Shakespeare, The International sung in Hindi ... So, sometimes when I’m on my own, I fear that I’ve begun to divide the world up into people whom Anjum will welcome and bury in Jannat Guest House and whom she won’t.