“People Must Realise that Reality is Not What is Shown on TV”

In an engrossing interaction, eminent author, public intellectual and activist Arundhati Roy discussed a range of issues – from her Malayali roots and patriarchy to Kerala politics, Hindutva, caste, corporate greed to Youtubers and the young generation’s inner world – with KS Ranjith, Chief Editor of Chintha Publishers. The interview appeared in the Onam special issue of Deshabhimani Weekly. Below are translated excerpts:

1. Let us start with a question in connection with your Kerala background. It seems ‘God of Small Things’ reflects your quiet personal experiences … As a person born and brought up outside Kerala, does your inner self still identify yourself strongly with Kerala?

The God of Small Things is as public and political as it is quiet and personal. I was born in Shillong, yes. But my parents—my father was Bengali— were divorced when I was less than three. I spent my childhood in Kerala. In Ayemenem and Kottayam. I was in boarding school for a few years but always home for the holidays. I grew up on the Meenachil. I used to speak, read and write fluent Malayalam. Only, in those days, we would actually be punished and made to speak in English. I’ve been away so long my Malayalam is rusty. My inner and outer self — both identify completely with Kerala. I love the landscape. The food. Most of all I am so proud of how it has withstood what has happened in the rest of the country — this wave of Hindu Supremacism that has swept over us. We are such a proud people. We cannot fall prey to the utter stupidity of fascism.

2. Normally, the upper-class Christian families in central Travancore are upholding very orthodox social and political values. But we all know about your mother’s fight against the patriarchal family system and how it revolutionised the Christian women’s status. Does this ignite the political and activist in you?

Almost everything about me, personally as well as politically, everything about me as a writer—has been formed by growing up in the Syrian Christian community while being reminded by them all the time that we, my brother and I, were not ‘pure’ Syrian Christian, and were ‘outsiders’. It was rough stuff. Very early on it was made clear to me that I had no future there. I have been forged in fire by my mother in ways that nobody can possibly imagine. In good ways and bad. I left home at the age of seventeen. I was in second year in Architecture School in Delhi and stopped going home altogether. I made my own way through college and onward. I returned after about seven years. The Syrian Christians are remarkable community. But many among them are insular, chauvinist, casteist and elitist. And of course, patriarchal. They need to take a hard look at themselves.

3. The institution of family is normalising and legalising almost all the traditional values in the society. It's a mechanism or medium of extending the status quo. But we rarely see sharp criticisms against this institution. Why?

I am so glad you asked this question. It is something I think about all the time—the valorization of the family that comes at us from every direction. In movies, in literature, in the media, on TV, in the social media and in real life of course. It disturbs me greatly. As you can tell from my books so far (and as you will see from what is still to come) — in The God of Small Things but most especially in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – the idea of the family is questioned deeply, radically. It is the most conservative prism through which to view things, it deepens stereotypes, it justifies all kinds of selfishness in the name of parental unselfishness. Most of all it perpetuates the iron brand of caste, the most disgusting, stagnant and malignant thing about Indian society. The only time the idea of ‘family’ is questioned is when it comes to dynastic politics. And there too some dynasties are acceptable, and some aren’t. It’s ok, by all means question that. But all those dynasts have to win elections at least, they don’t inherit their parents’ seats in Parliament. What about our great corporations that virtually own our country? All of them are family-owned and run. Almost all those big family-owned corporations belong to one particular trading caste. That obscene amount of capital accumulating generation upon generation… and there are no questions asked.

4. Seeking jobs and opportunities, Keralites will reach any place on this planet. This is specifically true about the people from central Travancore. As a person coming from this place, you might have noticed this. But we normally forget the social history behind this capacity building. Social reform movements, land reforms, development of public education systems and primary health centres…all these factors played a role in developing human resources with the skill matrix of competing anywhere in this world. Do you align with this thought?

I absolutely do. And even though I have in the past been accused of being a critic of the Marxist party, I am actually for the most part an admirer. All those reforms have made Kerala not just a unique place in India, but in the whole world. There are many, many things we need to worry about still, but we must give credit where it is due. What I feel is that the education — to which Christians too have contributed a great deal — and land reforms and political awareness have made all Malayalis, regardless of what party they belong to, a little Marxist. Nobody can mess around with them. That is why I also feel that it’s so important that the Marxist Party and the Congress party take turns in running the state. They must respect each other and still fight each other. It’s not easy. But it has to be so. That way we avoid what happened in West Bengal to the Marxist party. Those forty years of continuous power is what finished off the CPM in Bengal and allowed the BJP in. A healthy opposition is so important. We need it in order to prevent the fascists from sliding through the cracks. If either the Marxist or the Congress Party starts to dissipate because they have spent too many years in power or too many years out of it, fascists will creep in. And once they are in, they will move fast.

5. Historically, Kerala civic society is very much political. We can see serious political discussion in tea shops and barber shops and each and every nook and corner in our countryside. Presence of active student politics in the campuses is another thing. But with the penetration of capital, the sociology of Kerala is changing. And it reflects in the political landscape also. Younger generation is not much concerned about political or social issues. How do you see this? Is it practically possible for human beings to keep away from politics forever?

I am surprised to hear you say that the younger generation is not politically aware in Kerala. I had the opposite impression. But you know better than me for sure. If what you say is true, then we are in trouble. Big trouble. The religious and social composition of the population in Kerala and their relationship with each other is, when compared to the rest of India, unique. If that gets corroded by greed and idiocy, we are looking at disaster. The BJP and its corporate friends will seize every opportunity to pit communities, castes, religions against each other. It will blackmail people with threats of ED. This includes religious leaders. To get a toe-hold into Kerala it needs the Christians. So, while the goons of this regime are burning churches and smashing Jesus statues in the rest of India — look at Manipur, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat — they are wooing or arm-twisting Christians in Kerala. Over the past few years there have been hundreds of attacks on churches. People must understand. It will be the greatest irony and the greatest betrayal of Christianity itself if the Syrian Christians of Kerala become the ones to invite Hindu Supremacists into Kerala. When I hear certain priests and bishops praising or doing deals with the BJP my jaw drops at their short-sightedness.

6. There is a stark difference in human living indices in north Indian states and south Indian states. And currently, a discussion is going on linking the BJP’s poor performance in south Indian states with this factor. As a person living in North India and having roots in South, what is your opinion?

My opinion is that the strong sense of peoples’ political awareness of their own rights has kept them out of the South so far. Also, in places like Tamil Nadu a long history of anti-caste struggles have made people aware of what Hindu Nationalism actually is. It’s nothing but a Trojan Horse to smuggle in and continue to uphold caste supremacy. I feel that the collusion of the mainstream media with this regime has drawn a screen over the real situation our country is in. When it is all finally unmasked we are going to see the level of devastation… the economy is in shambles. Health care, education are in crisis. Every tiny move towards social justice has been reversed. Poor Dalit and OBC students are being pushed out of the education system. Health care is completely unaffordable. Going to most private hospitals is its own special form of hell where doctors are there to loot and rob you, not cure you. Our Constitution has for all practical purposes already been set aside unofficially. The new criminal laws are a declared permanent Emergency. We live in a police state. Every institution has been hollowed out ... to see the state of universities is particularly heart-breaking. Those universities, Delhi University, JNU, they were legendary places… now it’s all being turned to dust by a regime that hates intellectuals, hates science, hates all forms of intelligence — the intelligence of farmers, weavers, musicians, writers — every form of intelligence is seen as a threat. But today the fake news industry is making it all seem otherwise. However, now that the complete, totalitarian control is gone, the scandals are coming out, each worse than the next. So, as a Malayali who lives in Delhi when I come to Kerala—I want to stop each person on the street and describe the horrors of the North and say, “You must do everything possible to prevent that happening here.”

7. Quite unexpectedly rural people from UP rejected the BJP in this election. At the same time, for the first time BJP opened its account here in Kerala. A similar phenomenon happened in the parliament elections after the Emergency. When the whole country stands for democracy people of Kerala took a different stand. The high percentage of middle class presence in Kerala and their secured approach to life may be the reasons behind this. How do you see this?

It took a long time for people in UP to realize that their own reality is what counts and not what they see on TV. Their own hunger, their own joblessness, their own malnutrition. Not the ‘reality’ that corporate owned TV channels sell them. But the main thing is that people realized that the idea of a ‘Hindu’ majority is a scam—it’s a way for privileged-caste people to hold on to wealth and power while making the very people they oppress vote for their own oppression. Big swathes of the population of Dalits and OBCs saw through this finally. That is what lead to the seismic shift. We have to hope that it holds. Middle-class people in Kerala ought to travel to BJP ruled states to see what life is like there even for middle class people. I mean every bridge, road, tunnel and airport and even temple they build seems to have a life span of two years… its insane what is going on. The NEET scam… all centred in Gujarat. All the chief honchos of the scams seem to be pals of the BJP. Also, it is extremely disturbing that so many men accused of sexual assault and rape are connected to the current regime loosely or directly. Once that ideology of religious chauvinism moves into Kerala, Kerala could turn into the Lebanon of the seventies. Lebanon has a similarly complex population. And we see from history how when one community begins to radicalize, as a reaction all communities begin to radicalize. But I am sure Malayalis are not going to be manipulated into self-destruction. Every religious community has a responsibility and must see that that doesn’t happen. Yes, the fact that the BJP won one seat is worrying. But from what I hear it was a vote for Suresh Gopi and his work and not BJP. But still, it’s the thin edge of the wedge. We have been put on notice.

8. In the last decade, India is passing through an entirely different political situation compared to its long democratic history. The very ideological foundation on which this nation stands is in jeopardy. Even the propaganda of rewriting the Constitution was spelt out publicly in the election campaigns. But the results, at least for the time being, put a halt on this. Do you think so?

The fact that the BJP does not have a majority of its own is a great relief. But it still has its hands on the levers of power. It still controls institutions. For the first time since he became the Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002, Modi faces a real opposition. He is being challenged to his face. He has been stripped of the image he has spent 20 years building. It’s gone. But I am very very worried. Because his only reaction to any kind of political defeat is to turn up the knobs of hatred. You remember that the 2002 Gujarat pogrom came on the back of local elections defeats. Already now lynchings of Muslims have increased. The new criminal laws make it easier for them to go after Muslims and also, the opposition. They will try to return to power by polarizing and with more bloodshed… I hope that Indian people have seen through all this.

9. Religious politics of Hindutva is just a mask to conceal corporate interests and the neoliberal project. Do you endorse this proposition?

Not at all. I disagree completely. It’s dangerous to minimize the danger of pure, unadulterated, casteist, fascist Hindu nationalism. That is a thing in itself. It is the main thing. Corporations are colluding with it because they are happy at the muscular state’s ability to beat down resistance and cut through red tape to reward those industrialists who are most loyal. To further their interests Corporations will collude with anyone who is in power. A secular state like the one Dr Manmohan Singh headed was no less friendly to corporations. No less friendly to the privatization of education and health and infrastructure… all so disastrous. The rhetoric of Rahul Gandhi and the new Congress is different of course. That is a relief.

10. There are very few people writing political essays with the intensity and creativity you are showing. Your writings stand out from the general stuff of political writing. What's the X factor behind this organic writing?

I’d say it is a commitment and respect to the craft and art of writing. I want to be able to write about power and powerlessness, dams, irrigation, mining, war with the same attention I pay to writing about childhood, love and heartbreak. Before I am anything else, I am a writer. To my very core. For me, writing is prayer.

11. For a person writing fiction and creative nonfiction, what is the demarcating line between these two modes of writing?

The more I think about this—the less I understand the difference. Both require different kinds of discipline. But both are forms of prayer.

12. Language of Marx is highly intense and creative. Even in writing the dry subject of political economy his language stands on a different plane. It seems language becomes organic and creative when it dives deeper into reality.

Language is something a writer has to go out and find. Nobody gifts it to us. And it is cleaved to ourselves. It’s not a coat or outfit you wear when you go out. As I have said before, language is the skin of my thought.

13. The political essayist of Arundhati is a strong critic of Imperialist interventions and financial capitalism. Your writings stand with the marginalised sections and the victims of developmentalism. How do you enter this stream of thought? Do its roots lie in your intellectual exposure to humanitarian ideas, or does it emanate from your empirical observations?

It comes from having a sense of justice. Justice in all its elaborate and complicated glory. It’s that simple. And when I say justice, I do not mean simply ‘human rights’. The neo-liberals would like us to conflate the two. But we musn’t. Human rights are important, but a far narrower concept than the idea of justice. But speaking up for justice must never make you feel you have the right to speak on ‘behalf’ of anybody. One of the tropes I most hate is this idea of ‘the voice of the voiceless’. Perhaps the most often repeated quote of mine—one which I believe in deeply is ‘There is no such thing as the voiceless. There is only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.’

14.You are vehemently upholding thoughts of Ambedkar. And you tried to evaluate Ambedkar’s thoughts and actions with that of Gandhi. Do you like to revisit this argument in the current Indian context?

Yes, I have written a book about it. Not just the Ambedkar-Gandhi debate but also about how caste and capitalism have combined to form a peculiarly Indian alloy. In the last paragraphs of that book — The Doctor and the Saint – I say that unless those who call themselves revolutionary develop a radical critique of Brahminism (which is the anti-caste movements traditional term for Hinduism) and unless those who understand Brahminism sharpen their critique and understanding of capitalism—our country isn’t going anywhere.

15. Similarly, thinkers like Anil Teltumbe are upholding Ambedkar’s thoughts and Marx’s ideas parallelly. How do you see the class and caste orientations in politics?

This has been something I have been pre-occupied with since I wrote The God of Small Things. The Left in India has not managed to make serious inroads because it has failed to address caste and has comforted itself by saying ‘caste is class.’ There are overlaps sure, but caste is not class. Read Ambedkar and you will never say that again. Anand Teltumde I have always maintained is one of the most important intellectuals in our country. He should be honored, listened to. Instead, he has been jailed and humiliated.

16. Many recent popular films and novels in Malayalam are focusing on the sentimental and inner world of youth. Craftwise most of them are below par. But they are communicating with the youth quite successfully. How do you see this?

Quite honestly, an inner world that does not place itself in the context of an outer world is of little or no interest to me. It mostly bores me. I am not suggesting that everything has to be a manifesto. I am merely pleading for some basic intelligence. And some decency, given the state of our outer world. To cut it out altogether is a kind of politics too. Equally, literature or cinema that is just a disguised manifesto doesn’t interest me either.

18.We are now living in a neoliberal paradigm. Getting out of its categories of thought is becoming more and more difficult. A situation similar to the person trapped in Plato's cave. How do we overcome this dominant discourse?

We need a prison break! The first thing is to stop watching mainstream TV. Including the entertainment channels. In that beautiful silence, our brains will return to us. Our IQs will be enhanced.

19.Nationalism has always been a very serious political project in modern human history. In the era of anti-colonial movements, nationalism was very much a revolutionary and progressive idea. But even in the same era, it has been used to legalise and implement fascist and authoritarian rule and suppress people racially. We ourselves are now seeing similar attempts of sectarian nationalism. It's a double-edged sword. How do you see this phenomenon?

Nationalism is for fools. Or, at best, for Sports. Some good fun. For the rest— we try and live in a society that has wonderful and terrible things about it. We celebrate the wonderful, we fight against the terrible. We keep the conversation going. For me, all the fighting comes from great love. I laughed so much when a Malayali security guard at the Delhi airport while checking my ID said “In our Kerala we also have one Arundhati Roy. Always in trouble.” He didn’t realise that I was the same one. As a writer, human beings aren’t necessarily the only thing I care about. My books are full of animals, insects, rivers, skies and mountains too. Imagine a nationalistic insect or a flag-waving tiger. We have to love and tend to our land, our rivers our mountains… but we are destroying them in the name of nationalism. Flags are bits of cloth they use to shrink-wrap our brains and as shrouds to bury us when we are dead.

20.Mainstream media is fully focusing on the lives of the upper crust. Life of the majority, the stories from rural India are never visible in the mainstream media. It is a world dominated by the narrative created in the corporate media houses. Any practical suggestions to overcome this?

There has been enough criticism of the mainstream media for it not to be necessary to repeat it. In India our mainstream channels, many of them the equivalent of Radio Rwanda before the genocide that took place in that country—have not merely facilitated fascism’s arrival in India—they are a fundamental part of the fascist project. Nobody needed to censor them, they were enthusiastic participants in all of the dog-whistling. Some of the anchors are like captains literally directing Muslim-murdering lynch-mobs. It is largely because of them and their lies that people like Umer Khalid, Khalid Saifi, Gulfisha have been in jail for so many years. We know all this. But what to do about it? As I said there is a structural problem, a conflict of interest in economic model of these channels and newspapers. Some of them are owned directly by the companies like Adani and Reliance, others get all their money from government and corporate advertisement. This goes into hundreds of thousands of crores. So why expect anything from them? The problem is in how they are structured and financed. We need to come up with a model for a few TV channels and newspapers where they are financed through a public trust and are editorially completely independent. Not vulnerable to political parties or corporations.

21. Finally, a Dhruv Rathee is needed to speak publicly that the king is naked and the impact he created is huge. Is it an indication of the potential of new media? Do you see a ray of hope in new generation social media activists?

Dhruv Rathee is just fabulous. There are other Hindi language Youtubers who are awe-inspiring. They are articulate, professional, and totally fearless— Ravish Kumar of course. But also, Punya Prasun Bajpai, Deepak Sharma, Naveen Kumar, Sanjay Sharma, 4pm news, Satya Hindi news with its many anchors, so many of them. Within minutes of uploading their shows they have hundreds of thousands, and in a few hours millions of viewers. Each of them has a unique take on things. They are actually a phenomenon. New in the world. I follow them closely. We owe them a lot. I’m really proud of them.

This interview was first published in Malayali language in Deshabhimani Weekly. Reproduced with kind permission.