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ShareEven Bollywood has turned its back on the poor, says Arundhati Roy, the Booker prize-winning novelist who, over the years has become the most caustic critic of her own class, and of her country's policies.
In the process, while winning new fans, she's also alienated many who were drawn to her by her fiction. In an exclusive interview with G Sampath, Roy explains how her politics, as much as her fiction, defines who she is as a person
How would you categorise your politics?
I find it unnecessary for me to classify what my politics are. It's really time to break out of thinking in so many of the ways in which we have thought. You stop thinking country-wise, then, you stop thinking Left and Right, because now the greatest capitalist nation in the world is Communist China, so all these things get overturned in some way or the other.
I think, now, with what's happening ecologically, we need a different view. But one thing I do want to say is that, for all the things that are wrong here, the real worry is that there are so many things that are right, which are being dismantled and destroyed. For example, we still have people here who know the secrets of how to live lightly on this planet; people who know that when you challenge a consumerist society, it's not as if you have to live with less happiness and less satisfaction; people who know that there is the possibility of ecstasy -- all this is lost in other countries. It's here still, and this is what makes one extreme, you know. You're fighting to protect something, and that is fundamental to what I am-- I think, when you fight to protect something, your anger is huge, because you just see this juggernaut of destruction destroying what ought to be at least the seeds of a future way of thinking, and we still have it.
The Financial Times review of your latest book, Listening To Grasshoppers, says, "The danger is that her extreme views... will alienate those whose support will be essential in India's struggle for social justice in the years ahead." This is a frequent charged leveled against you even by people who broadly, shall we say, empathise with your critiques. Many say that you "overdo it" and by being needlessly polemical, you harm the very cause that you are supposedly supporting.
When you are engaged in a critique on some very-close-to-the-bone issues, not everyone is going to stand up and applaud, and say, waah, beta, kitna achcha kaam kiya. The people who hold these opinions you mention have a voice, and also belong to a particular class. But millions of people who don't have a voice, and whose opinions are not polled in these publications, believe just the opposite.
Supposing I was trying to please this lot, I would alienate the others. It's not as if you can fight these battles and still have everybody on your side. Of course, some people are going to be alienated. Of course, some people are going to have opinions about how I write or don't write. I can't please everyone. I don't have a problem with some people feeling hostile, some people feeling that I should have taken a 'softly-softly' approach, but that's not me. To me, in fact, what finally gets written is after toning down even greater anger. If you go to a place like Dantewada now, even I feel like a moderate. So I am not really polling for popularity. But as a writer, I know who reads my work, and who it alienates.
I have spoken at places where 30,000 people have gathered, so I know what I am doing, and I am okay with the criticism also, because, well, The Financial Times and The Economist -- these are the heart of what most people see as 'the other side'. So there is going to be a conflict. I am not at all saying that I am somebody who makes no mistakes, but I just want to say that I know what I am saying, and I know how I am saying it,and I think about it, and I still do it.
Given the nature of your politics, how come you haven't dissociated yourself from your big, MNC publisher and shifted to a smaller, perhaps not-for-profit publisher?
Well, I could also write these essays and stand outside the station and distribute photocopies. It's very complicated. This system doesn't leave you the option of being pristine. If you write a book, even if it's a book on political stuff, you get royalties, you put it in the bank; even if you don't do it, the bank invests the money in the stock market, so none of us can be pure, really. And if you are, then you have to live in your own purity and outside of engaging. In that pursuit of pristineness, you end up being ineffective in some way. I have to live with certain contradictions, as do all of us.
In your book, you speak of an 'organic relationship' between genocide and progress. Can there be an idea of progress that does not entail some form of violence?
Today, the idea of progress has come to mean just the western idea of progress and development, and a totally industrialised society. Of course, now with climate change, we have no choice but to imagine a different kind of progress, where perhaps everybody has less but your footprint on the earth is lighter. We have to go back to a totally different way of looking at consumption. Right now, the situation is that, unless you consume, the economy will collapse; but if you consume, the ecology will collapse -- if you consume at the current rate. So in a way this is a good time for radical thought, but one doesn't know if human beings are capable of it as a race, because we have historically seen societies collapse doing things that they know will cause them to collapse.
