This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Im Amy Goodman.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And Im Nermeen Shaikh. Welcome to our listeners and viewers around the country and around the world.
Today we spend the hour with the acclaimed Indian writer Arundhati Roy. Its been 20 years since her debut novel, The God of Small Things, made her a literary sensation. When the book won the Booker Prizer and became an international best-seller, selling over 6 million copies, Roy soon turned away from fiction. She became a leading critic of U.S. empire, the wars in the Middle East and the rise of Hindu nationalism in her home country of India. Her nonfiction books include The End of Imagination, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers and Capitalism: A Ghost Story. In 2010, she faced possible arrest on sedition charges after publicly advocating for Kashmiri independence and challenging Indias claim that Kashmir is an integral part of India.
AMY GOODMAN: Two years ago, Arundhati Roy made headlines when she visited NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in Russia. She was joined by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and the actor John Cusack. She co-authored a book with John Cusack based on their conversations with Snowden, titled Things That Can and Cannot Be Said.
Well, now, 20 years after the publication of The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy has returned to fiction and has just published her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The Washington Post has praised her novel, writing, quote, "This is a remarkable creation, a story both intimate and international, swelling with comedy and outrage, a tale that cradles the worlds most fragile people even while it assaults the Subcontinents most brutal villains. ... [It] will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion," they wrote. The Indian literary critic Nilanjana Roy has hailed the novel as, quote, "an elegy for a bulldozed world."
Arundhati Roy joins us in our studio for the hour.
Arundhati, welcome back to Democracy Now!
ARUNDHATI ROY: Thank you. Thank you, Amy. Its lovely to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: How does it feel to be back to fiction? Youve been writing now for years this book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Talk about how you feel upon its publication.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, fiction was always, in reality as well as in my imagination, my real home. But this time its home with the roof blown off. You know, so, somehow, its always been the thing that absorbs every part of mefiction. You know, every skill I may have is actually part of writing this. So, to me, I just feel that, you know, even if in a lifetime you had two opportunities to spend many years lavishing everythingall your brains and your toenails and your hair and your teeth and your gallbladderon creating one thing, you know, its a grace that you should be happy for. Whatever the product is, you know, whatever comes out of it, is such a beautiful thing to have had the opportunity to do, for me.
AMY GOODMAN: Youve called fiction writing the closest thing you know to prayer.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Because of this. You know? Because, to me, the idea of being able to concentrate on trying toyou see, the nonfiction that Ive been writing, you know, these are all essays that II mean, were urgent interventions in situations that were closing down in India. Each time I wrote an essay, I wouldyou know, it would lead to so much trouble, Id promise myself not to write another one. But I would. But they were arguments. You know, they were urgent. They werethey had a definite purpose, a worldly important purpose. But when youwhen I write fiction, its, to me, the opposite of an argument. Its like creating a universe. You know, its like doing everything you can to create a world in which you want people to wander, you know?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, tell us about the title of the book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and also the dedication. Its dedicated to "The Unconsoled." Who are "The Unconsoled"?
ARUNDHATI ROY: All of us, in secret, even if we dont show it. Some of us do, and some of us dont. But I think the world is unconsoled right now. And the title is notyou know, though many think its a satirical title, its not a satirical title, because its a title thatfor me, you know, I think, fundamentally, as a species right now, we need to redefine what is being defined for us as the path to happiness or to progress or to civilization. You know? And in this book, it is a specific story and people who understand that its a fragile thing. Happiness is not a building or an institution that is there forever. Its fragile. And you enjoy it when you can, and you may find it in the most unexpected places.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, you also said in a 2011 interview, when you were asked about the writing of this book, you said, "Ill have to find a language to tell the story I want to tell. By language I dont mean English, Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, of course. I mean something else. A way of binding together worlds that have been ripped apart." What did you mean by that?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Sounds quite clear, doesnt it? Well, really, Ill
NERMEEN SHAIKH: But what worlds have been ripped apart that you bring together?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah, well, the worlds that have been ripped apart inI mean, in the world, as in including here, but in the subcontinent, where I live, its as though people have ceased to be able to speak to each other. Again, I dont mean in real languages, of Hindi, Urdu or Malayalam, but its as though people who live in cities, they dont even know how to go into a village anymore. You know, they dont even understand what it means to live on the land anymore. People who live there dont know what to do when they come into the other modern world. I mean, India has always lived in several centuries simultaneously, but its just becoming almost psychotic now. And also, I mean, in real terms, we live in several languages, in real languages. Here I do mean Urdu and Hindu and English, and all of that together.
And all theand fundamentally, I think what I mean is that there is a danger of fiction becoming domesticated, you know, of too much of a product that has to be quickly described, catalogued, put on a particular shelf, and everybody has to know what is the theme. And, to me, I wanted to blow that open. You know, what is the theme? The theme is the air we breathe. The theme is the politics that affects our lives. Its not just news headlines. You know, what happens in Kashmir or what happens with people who have been displaced or what happens in intimate spaces, all of it can only be presented as part of a universe in fiction, because you cant do it otherwise.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Im Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Our guest for the hour, Arundhati Roy. Would you read from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Sure. Ill read a part, which is when Anjum, whoAnjum is born.
She was the fourth of five children, born on a cold January night, by lamplight, in Shahjahanabad, the walled city of Delhi. Ahlam Baji, the midwife who delivered her and put her in her mothers arms wrapped in two shawls, said, Its a boy. Given the circumstances, her error was understandable.
A month into her first pregnancy Jahanara Begum and her husband decided that if their first baby was a boy they would name him Aftab. Their first three children were girls. They had been waiting for their Aftab for six years. The night he was born was the happiest of Jahanara Begums life.
The next morning, when the sun was up and the room nice and warm, she unswaddled little Aftab. She explored his tiny bodyeyes nose head neck armpits fingers toeswith sated, unhurried delight. That was when she discovered, nestling underneath his boy-parts, a small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part.
Is it possible for a mother to be terrified of her own baby? Jahanara Begum was. Her first reaction was to feel her heart constrict and her bones turn to ash. Her second reaction was to take another look to make sure she was not mistaken. Her third reaction was to recoil from what she had created while her bowels convulsed ... Her fourth reaction was to contemplate killing herself and her child. Her fifth reaction was to pick her baby up and hold him close while she fell through a crack between the world she knew and worlds she did not know existed. There, in the abyss, spinning through the darkness, everything she had been sure of until then, every single thing, from the smallest to the biggest, ceased to make sense to her. In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all thingscarpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instrumentshad a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby. Yes of course she knew there was a word for those like himHijra. Two words actually, Hijra and Kinnar. But two words do not make a language.
Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl.
"Her sixth reaction was to clean herself up and resolve to tell nobody for the moment. Not even her husband. Her seventh reaction was to lie down next to Aftab and rest. Like the God of the Christians did, after he had made Heaven and Earth. Except that in his case he rested after making sense of the world he had created, whereas Jahanara Begum rested after what she had created had scrambled her sense of the world."
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, reading from her new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. So, introduce us to some of your characters and where and how they lived. Introduce us to the trans community that hasyouve both created and youve been living with for so many years now.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, first, I do want to say that, you know, Anjum, who was Aftab, or the book in general, isyou know, shes not a signifier. This is not a sort of social history of the trans community. I mean, shes a character, like many other characters in the book, very unique, very much herself. And when shes born in the walled city and grows up, and then when sheshe actually moves out of her home to a place close by called Khwabgah, which in Urdu means "the House of Dreams," where she lives with a community of other people, none of whom is like herself. You know, even inside the Khwabgah, though there are many trans women, people who areAnjum, for example, shes a hermaphrodite, but there are others who are men, who are Muslim and dont believe in having surgery, some who do. There are Hindus. There are Sunnis. There are Shias. So, they themselves are a very diverse community. But they look at the world and call it duniya, which means "the world" in Urdu, which is something else. But they have a history of being sort of inside and outside the community, which sort of predates the kind of Western, liberal, rights-based discourse, though, even in the story, as it modernizes, you know, there is that feudal story overlapping with the new, modern language and so on.
But actually, Anjum, though she does have this incendiary border of gender running through herall the characters have a border, which is, for example, one of theshe moves into the graveyard, and she buildseventually, she builds a guest house, called Jannat, which is the Paradise guest house. And one of the people who becomes a very close comrade of hers is a young man who waswho is a Dalit, who has watched Hindu mobs beat his father to death, as is happening every day now with Muslims and Dalits, because he was transporting a carcass of a dead cow, and so hes beaten to death by people who call themselves cow protectors. And he converts to Islam, and soand calls himself Saddam Hussein, because hes very impressed by this video he sees of Saddams execution and the disdain he shows for his executioners. So Saddam has this border of caste and religious conversionincendiary in Indiarunning through him. The other major character is a woman called Tilottama from the south, and she is also a person of indeterminate origins as far as India is concerned. Theres Musa, who is now a Kashmiri, fighting, with the national border running through him.
So, its not conceptual. I mean, what happens is that India is a society of such minute divisions, such institutionalized hierarchies, where caste is a mesh that presses people down and holds them down in a grid. And so, all these stories somehow are about people who just dont fit into that grid and who eventually create a little community, and a kind of solidarity emerges, which is a solidarity of the heart. You know, its not a solidarity of memorandi or academic discourse, but a solidarity which is human, which is based on unorthodox kinds of lovenot even sexual love or anything, its just based on humanness. And yeah, so.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, what you say, you say that the characters are kind ofwho dont fit into the grid. The places, the principal places, where the novel is set are Old Delhi, the walled city, as you said, and Kashmir. So, is the focusdid you focus on these places also because they stand somehow outside the grid, they dont fit into the grid?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah, its not just Old Delhi and Kashmir. Actually, it starts in Old Delhi, and it spools out into the New Delhi, the modern, sprawling metropolis, supposedly the center of power of the new India, and then into Kashmir. And, actually, you know, the thing is, when you write a novel, you dont think about it conceptually. It would be terrible to do that. So, Iyou know, as I go along and have to talk about it, these concepts emerge, and it sounds as if thats what its about. Its not, though.
So, the nerve center of the bookthough its not the start of the book, the nerve center is this place in Delhi called Jantar Mantar, where all the ragged and beautiful resistance movements, all the dreamers and idlers and nutjobs and protesters, you know, gather. Its a wonderful place in Delhino longer, though. I mean, its beingthat, too, is being policed in terrible ways. And its a place where I have actually spent much ofmuch of my time. And a baby appears in the middle of the night, and nobody knows whose baby it is. And it actually happened to me. And there were all these protest movements, all this politics, all this wisdom, all this beauty, and then the baby justnobody justjust nobody knew what to do with her, you know?
And from there, you know, the nerves of the novel spread out, because all of it is brought together in that place. And then you follow the appearances and disappearances of these baby girls. And a team of graveyards, of courseI mean, Anjum builds the Paradise guest house on a graveyard in Delhi, whereas Kashmir, which is called Jannat, which is "paradise," by many people, is a paradise thats covered in graveyards. You know, so, the graveyards are alsoI mean, apart from the borders inside the characters, graveyards are also the borders between the living and the dead. And also there are porous borders between human beings and animals in the book. So, its a book of porous borders.
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati, you said that you actually lived with these communities, these resistance groups, in Delhi, outside your home. You live in Delhi also.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you mean, spending days there, and also your times going to Kashmir.
ARUNDHATI ROY: You know, the thing is that Delhi is a place where all these groups from all over India come, to Jantar Mantar, this place called Jantar Mantar, where, in the past, they were allowed to stay there. So, many people would be on hunger strikethe people from Bhopal, the people from the Narmada Valley resisting the dam, people who are, you know, resisting displacement for some mining project, just dreamers who are on fast for everybody and for the, you know, world peace. And a lot of these movements shelter, you know, people who are just idealists who have kind of gone over the edge but who dream of a better world in the most charming and beautiful ways. And sometimes itstheres a lot of violence. The police will come and beat up people.
So, II mean, obviously, because I was, you know, closely involved with the anti-dam movement andI just would just go there, and I found it a veryyou know, a placethough its a place of resistance, its also a place of peace, where you thinkyou know, people who are just notwho just dont agree to allow things to roll on. So, it was also a place where I felt at home and a place where I talked to a lot of people. I mean, many of them are characters in the bookpamphleteers, you know, art installations, whatever.
Soand, of course, Kashmir isyou know, the mothers of the disappeared in Kashmir are also in the book and in that place. And the baby appears actually right next to them, and so theres this whole thing about how the mothers of the disappeared dont know what to do with a baby that has appeared, you know? And then, one ofTilottama is a character who actually just picks up the baby and runs, you know, because the police have come. And Anjum wants her, the baby, and thats how kind of it gets connected. And Tilo has a long connection with Kashmir.
And the thing about Kashmir is that, yes, Ive been going there for many years, and my dearest friends are Kashmiri, actually. And I realized long ago, when I started visiting it, that you cannot tell anything that remotely resembles the truth about Kashmir in reportage, in human rights reports, in the documentation of the dead or the torture or the atrocities, because its not just that. You know, what do you do when a people have lived under the mostunder the densest military occupation in the world for 25 years? What does it do to the air? What does it do to the soldiers? What does it do to the army? What does it do to the collaborators? What does it do to the intelligence people? What does it do to people who dont know when their children will come home? Now you see schoolgirls throwing stones at the army. You know, last year, they blinded people with pellet guns. And, crucially, what does it do to Indians, who are not protected from this war? They are fed these atrocities asyou know, with a soundtrack of applause, and we are supposed to swallow this absolute cruelty and keep it in our stomachs, much as you are expected to celebrate every time the U.S. government goes and destroys a country, you know, and youre all supposed to stand up and applaud. But what does it do to us to hold that in our stomachs? How do we
AMY GOODMAN: For people
ARUNDHATI ROY: How do
AMY GOODMAN: For people who arent familiar with Kashmir, here in the United States, who are watching or listening now or who will read this, explain. Put that struggle in context, where it is and why its happening.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, Kashmir wasat the time of independence, in 1947, Kashmir was oneJammu and Kashmir was one of the independent princely kingdoms, one of the 500-and-something princely kingdoms, who were all required to decide whether they wanted to be with India or Pakistan. And Kashmir, of course, had a majority-Muslim population but a Hindu king. And its called the "unfinished business of [partition]," because, you know, initially, the king didnt decide while partition and bloodshed was happeningalso in Jammu, which is part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. And then, eventually, he fled to India and signed a secession based on the fact that there would be a referendum, which there never was. And so its, as I said, called the unfinished business of Pakistan [sic], butI mean, of partition.
But so, India and Pakistan have been fighting over it, and its become a toxic situation, a flashpoint. The Indian Muslim population is, of course, held hostage to all the debates between India and Pakistan in Kashmir. And were talking about two nuclear powers. So, youre talking about a place withproliferating with graveyards. In the '90s, the struggle turned militant. The army was fighting militants. Now the population has turned militant. Recently, the army general said that he wished the people who are throwing stones were actually firing at them, so he could do what he liked with them. Just last month, they tied a Kashmiri civilian to a tank, used him as a human shield, and the officer who did that was rewarded, was honored, and many people in India applauded it. And that's by no means the worst thing that has happened there.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Kashmir and Kashmiri is just one of the languagesI mean, in the literal sensethat appear in this novel. You also cite a number of Urdu literary and poetic traditions and sources in the booklyrics, poetry, songs. And what do you think the importance is to all of these referencesMuslim, Dalit, Kashmiriat a time when Indias image often is projected as much more homogenous?
ARUNDHATI ROY: So, I mean, I have written about this in nonfiction a lot, but right now what we are seeing is a very, very dangerous moment in India, because, since 1925, the forcesthe organizations thatI mean, mostly an organization called the RSS, to which Modi belongs, to which many prime ministers and ministers belong, and which is really the cultural guild that controls the political party, the BJP, has always said that it wants India to be declared a Hindu nation, just as Pakistan is known as an Islamic republic. But Indias constitution calls it a secular socialist republic.
So, right now, the people in power are almost in a position to be able to change the constitution. History is being rewritten. School textbooks are being rewritten. People who believe that India should be a Hindu nation are being placed in all the institutions of democracy in positions of power. And as you know, every day youre hearing stories about lynchings, about killings, about vigilante groups. So you have minority populationsand by minority, Im still talking about millions of peoplebeing forced to live in terror, being pushed to the bottom of the food chain, being unrepresented in the media, unrepresented in the judiciary, unrepresented in the bureaucracy, unrepresented in any way, you know. The moment of the big Dalit parties, like the BSP, led by Mayawati or Lalu or Mulayam Singh Yadav, which seemed to be bringing some sort of representation, have also been pushed out. And the idea is, and always has been, to create this constituency called the Hindu constituency.
And now the difficulty is that if youre going to celebrate the idea of the Hindu nation, youre turning what is pain into pleasure, when things like the demonetization happen, when jobs are being lost, when people are being displaced, and youre told you are doing this for the Hindu nation. So, all your pain is being turned into some kind of yearning, like some kind of religious sacrifice, and all your anger is being directed downward to the most vulnerable communities. And so, its a psychological muddle, you know, which analysis and numbers and figures and facts dont seem to help, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: Before we talk about Modis visit next week, I did want to ask you about Tilo, the young woman you referred to who is a character in your book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati, who has a lot of similarities to one you. She was trained as an architecture student. And talk about that. Talk about her place and your place in this novel.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, actually, to me, Tilo, Tilottama, is the fictional child of Ammu and Velutha in The God of Small Things, had their story ended differently. Shes the younger sibling of Esthappen and Rahel. So, you know, I know her well, but Im not her.
But shesyeah, she and Anjum are, in some ways, you know, women with such different kinds of strengths and moods, you know, and generosities, and very different in that Anjum is much more external in her expressions of pain or grief or joy or poetry and what she wants to do. Shes an extravagantlyoutwardly expresses herself. And Tilo, in the book, is called the citya country who lives in her own skin, a country with no consulates, a person whose quietness destabilizes people, you know, a person whose most intimatewhose signs of being intimate with someone is to not greet them or, you know, to not change her expression when someone she loves comes. So, very different.
But, most of all, different in thein their attitude towards womanhood. Like Anjum finds a young child on the steps of the Jama Masjid, and she just falls in love with her, an abandoned little girl, and she falls in love with her mostly because the baby just holds her hand and starts howling and isnt scared of her. So she takes her back to the Khwabgah, where shes adopted, called Zainab. And Zainab grows up with lots of mothers and fathers and in this unorthodox way. Tilo, on the other hand, is someone whos a little bit wary of motherhood. She could have a baby andbut she doesnt want it. And she doesnt want to put another version of herself into the world. She thinks that shell be an even worse mother than her mother was to her. And shes also curiously alone. Like she has a relationship with Musa, who becomes a militant in Kashmir. And Musa is a man of his people. And she loves that about him, because she thinks that she has no people, except for the dogs that she feeds in the park. So shes very, very strangestrong woman, though, you know? And a little bita little bit on the edge of crazy. But, yeah, thats who she is.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, lets go now to India Prime Minister Narendra Modis
ARUNDHATI ROY: Wow! What a jump! From Tilo to Modi.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of countries.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yeah, his trip to the United States, coming to D.C. next week to meet Donald Trump, President Trump, for the first time. Lets go to comments that Trump made last year to the Republican Hindu Coalition.
DONALD TRUMP: Im a big fan of Hindu, and I am a big fan of India! Big, big fan. Big, big fan. ... Prime Minister Modi, who has been very energetic in reforming Indias bureaucracy, great man! I applaud him for doing so. And I look forward to doing some serious bureaucratic trimming right here in the United States. Believe me, we need it also.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So thats Trump speaking on the campaign trail to the Republican Hindu Coalition. And now, just recently, on the occasion of Trumps birthday, a right-wing group in India called the Hindu Sena celebrated Trumps birthday. So could you talk about that, first of all? And also, you know, a lot of people have been saying that Trump and Modi are very similar. But you thinkyou said that there are very important distinctions between them, so if you could talk about that?
ARUNDHATI ROY: I dont know whether it was this group that youre talking about or whether it was last year, or whenever, there was ain the same Jantar Mantar where much of this book is set, some people were celebrating Trumps birthday. And they had a cardboard picture of him, and they were feeding the cardboard picture cake. And some TV
NERMEEN SHAIKH: It was just now, earlier this month, on the 14th.
ARUNDHATI ROY: No, so Im talking about an earlier occasion.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Oh, I see. OK.
ARUNDHATI ROY: And then theythe TV crew asked them what was happening. And they said, "Oh, we are celebrating the birthday of Donald Duck." But so it was very funny.
But anyway, yes, there are, to my mind, very serious distinctions between the phenomenon of Trump and Modi. Look, Im not, you know, like a real close commentator on American politics, so I might be wrong about what Im saying, but from what I see, Trump somehow has sprung up from the sort of effluent of a process where the Democrats, who claim to be the representatives of workers, of unions, of the people, has betrayedhas betrayed them, has left a group of people disenchanted, furious, and even more furious when Bernie Sanders was, you know, not the candidate, and it was Hillary Clinton. So, Trump comes in as a kind of outsider, suspected and mocked, perhaps rightly so, by the media, by American institutions. Theres an inquiry against him. You know, you see the big wheels, or what I call the deep state, also a little bit worried about him, whereas this is not the case with Modi.
Modi, as I said, is a product of the RSS, that from 1925 has been working towards this moment. The RSS has hundreds of thousands of workers. It has its own slum wing, its own womens wing, its own publishing wing, its own schools, its own books, its own history. Its people are everywhere. The movement is from the ground. You have to give them that. They have worked endlessly. So hesModi is the opposite of an outlier. He ishe is someone whoright now, the RSS is in control. The only thing is that the RSS is a little bitI mean, I think, a little bit worried about this single man whos taking all the attention, and maybe they are preparing an heir to Modi, because he has destroyed government. Its just between him and whats on the street, you know? So, much of what government policy is, is being executed by vigilante mobs, and the bureaucracythe party itself is being put into a corner, and its just Modi and his lieutenant, Amit Shah, and everyone else is humiliated. And then there is this wholeyou know, the great strongman and temples being built to him and so on.
AMY GOODMAN: If you could create the meeting that will happen between Modi and Trump, as youve created the communities in this book, what would you make happen? What would help India, the India you want to see, Arundhati?
ARUNDHATI ROY: It would help if both of them are both sent to the Frying Pan Park in Virginia with all the turkeys that are forgiven on Thanksgiving. I think, you knowI mean, the meeting isnt going to help us, because thats not the issue, right? The issue is thatwhat do they represent, and whyI mean, to me, I dontits not important to me to mock Trump or to say things about Modi, because the real question is, why are theyyou cannot dismiss the fact that they are people who have been elected democratically. So theres fire in the ducts. And that is the problem, you know, notits justyou know, they are both easy meat. You know, they are both easy to laugh at, but I dont think its a laughing matter, you know?
And the point is that someone like myself, you know, I am in a position where one isone is in a minority of voices right now. And even though Im a writer and I dont necessarily believe ever that the majority is always right, so theres something very wrong going on. And that wrong has been created by the people who are criticizing Trump now, you know? So we do need to think about that seriously. You know that. I mean, youve been following it, and you know that better than I, you know. And the same in India. You know, the Congress Party has opened every door, lit every fire. Now that its burning, we cant look at them as an alternative. They have been involved with massacres themselves. They have created vigilante groups themselves. They have created communal conflagration themselves. Theyre just the B team. So...
AMY GOODMAN: You visited Edward Snowden in Russia with the actor John Cusack and with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dan Ellsberg, who was just in our headlines today. What was that like? We have less than a minute to go.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Oh, it was wonderful, phenomenal. I mean, most phenomenal to see Dan and Ed talking to each other about what it meant to be a whistleblower in the '70s and then now, you know? And to me, from the outside, I did wonder, you know, like how long is it going to be. You know, that was Vietnam. There's Korea. Theres Iran. I mean, history just keeps reinventing itself. And again, today, you hear them say, "Oh, its going to be a long war." So, you know, one enemy of America turns into another, turns into another, turns into another. But the big wheels keep on turning. And we dont have enough Snowdens and Ellsbergs around.
AMY GOODMAN: Writing is such a solitary act. When you wrote The God of Small Things and then won the Booker Prize, one of the leading international literary prizes, how did that change your life, affect how you could write, and lead to what youre doing today?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, it was obviously, you know, thrilling to win the Booker Prize. It wasnt something that I had thought about as being even a possibility. But after that, it became complicated, because if you actually become very well known and then youlets say, you move to a place, London or New York, where lots of well-known international people live, then its a different story. But if you want to carry on living where you lived and being with your old friends, you know, all of them have to deal with the Booker Prize and the fame, and its really hard. But its OK.
But the thing that happened was that very soon after I won the Booker Prize, the BJP government came to power, did the nuclear tests. And I was, at that point, you know, on the cover of every magazine. I was the face of this new India. And then the new India, to my mind, suddenly turned ugly. The public discourse after those tests became overtly nationalist, overtly ugly. Things that could not have been said, even if they were thought, publicly were now acceptable. And if I hadnt stepped off that train, I would have been part of it. I didnt have the space to be neutral, or, as Howard Zinn says, you cant be neutral on a moving train, but especially not if youre suddenly famous, you know? So, I wrote "The End of Imagination," which was the first essay, condemning the tests. And, of course, that was the end of my romance as the face of the new India.
AMY GOODMAN: I remember when you came to the United States, after writing one of your essays around the Iraq War. You were fierce in your criticism of President Bush. You held a news conference. And I cant remember which womens magazine came up to you afteror maybe I canand said, "Can we just follow you shopping?"
ARUNDHATI ROY: Really? I dont remember that. Really?
AMY GOODMAN: But what it means to be a kind of star like that, as youre taking on these critical issues.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, itsyou know, the thing is that Ive now been baptized in fire, you know, because Ive hadIve had so much happen in the course of the political writing. I mean, just lastlast month, based on some fake news in a Pakistani website saying that I had said something in Kashmir, a BJP member of parliament suggested that instead of the Kashmiri man, I should be used as a human shield in Kashmir, you know? So, but thats all part of how they are with a lot of women who stand up to them. You know, theres that whole thing going on. And so, but eventually it just makes you moremore sharp, I think. You know, I mean, you dontyou know, people call me fearless and all that. Im not fearless. I think its stupid to be fearless, really. You have to be extremely fearful, extremely knowledgeable about the possible consequences, and then do what youre doing.
AMY GOODMAN: People wrote in around the world when they heard you were going to be on. Abdullah AbduSalam in Nigeria wrote something that is verysounds like it fits right in with what youre saying, said, "I would like to ask Arundhati Roy how she copes with the hatred against her in India and how we can combat the tyranny of opinion in the world today."
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, see, the thing is that, you know, the hatred is also a bit exaggerated, because they have these troll factories. You know, they havethey haveits a factory product, too, you know? So it exaggerates the extent. When I walk on the streets, I certainly dont feel hated in India. But they would like to
AMY GOODMAN: Well, youre revered, as well.
ARUNDHATI ROY: They would like to project it as such, you know? And there are many people in India who are standing up to whats going on there, many people, people more vulnerable than me, too, you know? So its a remarkable country for that reason. You know, students, they were so much trouble in the campuses last year. You know, so I certainlythey would like me to portray myself as some lone warrior, the sole voice. Thats not true. Im just one of many people who believe the things I believe, you know? I mean, many people dont write the novels, but many people do believe what Ithere would be something wrong with my politics if I was really just a lone person. I am in the heart of a crowd.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, it seems that with the publication of this book, you can expect only more fame, because the book is already due to be translated into at least 30 languages. And I want to go to what some of the reviewers of this book, who have suggested that therethere may be analogies between The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and other Indian novelists writing in English. But it strikes us that you may have a greater affinity to writers like the Uruguayan novelist and journalist Eduardo Galeano, who died in 2015. Two years before he died, in 2013, Democracy Now! spoke to Galeano in our New York studio. Lets go to a clip.
EDUARDO GALEANO: I didnt receive a formal education. I was educated in the Montevideo cafe, in the cafes of Montevideo. There, I received my first lessons in the art of telling stories, storytelling. I was very, very young and sat at one table, neighbor of other table of people, old people, or more or less old, and they were telling stories, and I was hearing, because they were very good storytellers, anonymous. ...
We have a memory cut in pieces. And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow. But the human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Thats Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer, who passed away in 2015. So could tell us
ARUNDHATI ROY: Who I loved dearly, yes.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, could you tell us about him and the possible affinities between your work and his?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, Eduardo was a master of the shattered story, even though I dont think he wrote fiction. As far as I know, he never wrote any novels. But he wrote a beautiful book called The Open Veins of Latin America. And he had thatI think, you know, perhaps he had that way of making realism magical without being a magical realist, you know? What a writer he was! And what a seer! Wonderful.
AMY GOODMAN: Thats on the back of your book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, that quote of yours: "How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything." Explain what you mean by "shattered story" and that quote.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, thats actually a little scribble in one of Tilos many notebooks, so its in quotes. But what do I mean? Well, I think what I mean is that the power of telling a story which is not a subject heading, you know, a story that is not afraid at looking at the connections, like Eduardo was sayingyou know, what isis there a connection between the new, emerging, you know, great economy, nuclear superpower, and patriarchy? Is there a connection between the rise of the Hindu right, what is happening in Kashmir, how women are treated, whats happeningI mean, that we are a society that practices caste, which is the most institutionalized form of hierarchy? And yet few people write about it. Its like writing about apartheid South Africa omitting to mention there was apartheid. But what is the connection between the way women are treated and all these things that I mentioned? If you write books where each of them is a subject heading, an academic piece or journalism, you dont understand fully the rainbow that hes talking, not a beautiful one necessarily sometimes. But each ofso thats what I mean.
This is what makes up the air we breathe. And so, its a shattered story, but, actually, if you want to breathe in that air, you have to become everything, you know, and the creaturesand the fact that perhaps the most profound political education I received was in the Narmada Valley and the understanding of what big dams do to rivers, to populations, to fish. It was not just about human beings and progress and development, but, you know, a mind that looks at a river and thinks, "I must pour tons and tons of cement into it," but how a river that belongs to a civilization, the water can be centralized, and thenthen, once its centralized, it can be controlled, and once its controlled, it can be given to the hotel industry or to the golf courses, instead of to the people who lived and grew crops by its banks. And you can say that this is development, you know? So, you have to become that river, too.
AMY GOODMAN: You also take on many controversies, that may not be as controversial where you are, but you come to the United States. Abortion is a centerpiece of a Republican plan to dismantle womens healthcare, particularly focused on Planned Parenthood. Theres an abortion in this book.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes, theres abut thatsI mean, its not controversial in India. But its always interesting to see how, you know, the same people who are happy to bomb whole countries to smithereens, to massacre people, to destroy whole populations, suddenly begin to talk about abortion in this way, you know? And its the same in India. I mean, I remember watching people demonstrating outside the Irish Embassy because an Indian woman who could not get an abortion had died in Dublin. And they were the same people who are celebrating the massacre of women in Gujarat.
Yesterday, by the way, in the Brooklyn Academy, you know who was present? The daughter of the Ehsan Jafri, the member of the Legislative Assembly who was hacked to death in 2002 Gujarat. His wife, Zakia Jafri, has spent all these years in court after court trying to get justice. Nothing.
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Full Extended Interview: Arundhati Roy on Democracy Now! - Democracy Now!