“The Architecture of Empire”: Writing as Resistance to Fascism

Rima Majed: “To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”

During the COVID lockdown in 2020, Roy wrote an essay that had gone viral and the essay was entitled “The Pandemic is a Portal.” I remember that I kept going back to that essay over a month, reading it to console myself and remind myself that imagining our world anew is still possible despite the darkest time we were going through in Beirut post-uprising and the episode of inhiyar, infijar, and inshitar, or collapse, explosion, and polarization. In dark times, like the ones we are living today with genocide unfolding in Palestine and the return of fascism from India to Europe and the US, in such times of monsters, reading Arundhati Roy is in itself a portal, a reminder that beauty can still exist despite ugliness, and that new worlds are always possible and there for us to grasp. Friends, comrades, and colleagues, I hope you enjoy this evening’s conversation between two exceptional people, Fawwaz Traboulsi and Arundhati Roy. It’s events like these that make Beirut such a magical city, despite all the pain that is around us.

Fawwaz Traboulsi: It is a great pleasure, and a privilege, for me to share this hour with Arundhati Roy. As we were saying before, India is a complicated country; Arundhati discovered that Lebanon is much more complicated. So, I’m going to spare you the complication of Lebanon and learn a little bit about India, and learn about that great Indian lover that is Arundhati Roy. Lebanon has been turned towards the West for centuries and it is really a shame that we know that little about the East. Of course, we know about China in trade. And we know about the Gulf and oil. But one of the subcontinents, which is not very well-known, is India. That’s why I want to start with the recent elections in India, which opens the whole scene of this fascinating country. So, Arundhati, people say that there was a Modi defeat in the recent elections in India — or is it a partial victory for the opposition? 

Arundhati Roy: It’s such a pleasure to be here. And, you know, in this huge city that I live in called New Delhi, spaces like these have been closed down. There are no spaces for people to have the kind of conversation that I think we’re going to have, so it’s so important to refuse to let these places close because when they close, they’re hard to open again. 

The election results came out just the night before I left for Lebanon. For weeks, nobody in India slept, all of us were messaging each other at two, three in the morning, hoping and praying that something would break this rock lying on our chest that we wake up to every morning. So the first thing I want to say about the Indian elections is that they were very unfair. There was one party, the Hindu nationalist BJP, which is the richest political party in the world, that had several hundred times more money than all the other political parties put together. They have many ways in which they made money, but one of them was a system of what they call electoral bonds where they gave corporations the possibility of giving money to political parties anonymously and just a week before the voting began because of a Supreme Court order they had to actually disclose what money they had gotten from where and it turned out that it was literally what in Hindi was called vasuli, gangsterism, you go to a corporation and you threaten them, you make them pay or you get money from them and then you’ve privatized everything. And these corporations that are completely controlled by the government have complete control of almost 400, 24/7 media channels. 

There was one party, the Hindu nationalist BJP, which is the richest political party in the world, that had several hundred times more money than all the other political parties put together. 

They had almost complete control of the social media, of the intelligence agencies, of the enforcement directorate. Despite all of this, Modi did not manage to reach a majority and today his ministers were sworn in and he has to have allies to form the government. Now, I’m not 100 percent sure where that’s going to take us. Of course, it’s very good news, but they have such a huge arsenal of weapons, of buying over members of parliament and so on. So the good thing is that we have a strong opposition now after 10 years. We can’t be confident that everything is okay now because it’s not, but it’s better.

Fawwaz Traboulsi: Do you think Indian democracy is under a huge threat? You’re talking about the fact that India is transiting towards what you call a criminal Hindu fascist enterprise where violence is [perpetrated] against Muslims, but not only Muslims. 

You also mentioned that Modi’s violent nationalism is heavily supported by big business and the U.S. and here I want to ask you, Arundhati, about this phenomenon that is not peculiarly Indian, which is this mixture between neoliberal policies, semi-fascist political domination and in the case of India, a shift of an ex-Bandung country and of the Tricontinental into an ally and a very strong supporter of Israel. Just to mention one thing which is not always mentioned: How come neoliberalism, which is the cult of the individual versus society, produces such communal violent movements?

Arundhati Roy: In the early, late 1980s and 1990s when Soviet Communism fell and it became a unipolar world, India which had been more or less aligned with the Soviet Union and even though it was the head of the Non-Aligned Movement, it was, in fact, aligned to the Soviet Union and pretty much against the United States. Everything changed and India aligned itself with this Israeli-U.S. axis. And, at that time, this Hindu nationalist government was not anywhere really on the horizon.

“What about this phenomenon that is not peculiarly Indian, which is this mixture between neoliberal policies, semi-fascist political domination and in the case of India, a shift of an ex-Bandung country and of the Tricontinental into an ally and a very strong supporter of Israel?”

But the ruling liberal Congress Party did two things in 1990; it opened two locks. One was the lock of the protective Indian markets, it opened it up to foreign capital. In Indian politics, parties are always trying to create what we call vote banks, constituencies. So in order to please the Hindu constituency, the liberal Congress Party opened [a second lock], the lock of a disputed 14th century mosque in a small town in northern India called Ayodhya, this mosque was called the Babri Masjid and it had been locked up because Hindus had been claiming that the mosque was built over the birthplace of Lord Ram.

So, as soon as it opened these two locks, it unleashed two separate kinds of fundamentalisms. One was market fundamentalism: neoliberal, economic fundamentalism; and the other was right-wing Hindu fundamentalism.

So India liberals, who are pro-neoliberalism, would be critical of Hindu nationalism, but they were both actually waltzing together. You could see them, they loved each other, they were like partners on the dance floor and both these fundamentalisms allowed the state to create two kinds of terrorism or two kinds of security problems. One was the people who were supposedly anti-development, Maoists or whatever name they wanted to give it, and the other was the specter of Islamic terrorism and whether it was the Congress in power or the BJP in power, both these terrorisms allowed the state to become more and more like the police state where they use the specter of “oh these Maoists, we need to push policemen into the forests,” and “oh these Islamists, we need to get an anti-terrorism law.”

And, in 1992, the Congress actually opened the lock to the Babri Masjid but within a year, the Hindu nationalists led by this person called Advani had a huge procession. It was like a chariot procession through the country saying that the mosque must be demolished, the temple must be built. And in 1992, a mob of Hindu vigilantes hammered the mosque to the ground. And at the same time, you had this privatization, this taking over of land, this mass displacement, huge social movements, growing to protest those. All of us were being labeled as terrorists, anti-nationalists. 

And by the time 2000 came, you had a situation where 9/11 happened, it gave the Hindu nationalists the perfect pass to live out their dreams of Islamophobia and anti-terrorism. You started having these what we call first flag attacks, sort of fake terrorist attacks. It allowed them to pass a law, where, like the laws all over the world, you could just arrest people, interrogate them, force them to confess things. And then came September 2001.

Within two weeks of that, the Hindu nationalists parachuted  Narendra Modi into chief ministership in the state of Gujarat and within weeks, there was the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat where 2,000 people were slaughtered on the streets in cities and villages, women were raped, burnt, killed. And from that moment, he became known as the Hindu Hriday Samrat, the Emperor of Hindu hearts.

When Modi became prime minister in 2014, these two fundamentalisms, economic fundamentalism and Hindu nationalism, came to rest in this one man’s body.

He never apologized for having been in power once it took place and it projected him straight into power. When Modi became prime minister in 2014, these two fundamentalisms, economic fundamentalism and Hindu nationalism, came to rest in this one man’s body. So he flew from Gujarat to Delhi in a plane from Adani, the mining corporation and an industrialist friend of his who then became the richest man in the world. So you saw these two fundamentalisms, neoliberalism and fascism, literally coincide and came to rest in the government that has been in power for the last 10 years.

Fawwaz Traboulsi: Many Arabs look at Kashmir as if it is the Palestine of India. 

Arundhati Roy: I’m not a person who believes that this thing is equal to that thing because everything is pretty unique. And there are similarities and differences. Nowadays, I told Fawwaz that you’ll hear me being a little cautious because when I’m speaking in Beirut, I’m not speaking in Beirut, I’m speaking on the internet, and, at least right now, there are cases against me and it’s not easy to say a lot of things that I would like to say. Maybe these elections will help us, but if the elections had not gone this way, all of us are seeing the possibility of India becoming the new Israel, the similarities in which they function. For example, as soon as October 7th happened, all the national Modi supporters changed the profile pictures on their WhatsApp to the Israeli flag. You have a situation which you never thought possible where India was once a friend of Palestine, there’s not been a single mass demonstration or a single mass expression of solidarity with Palestine since the genocide began. And this is something that is terribly, terribly shameful.

Kashmir is a state that has been shut down. Kashmiris are not allowed to express their opinion, Kashmiri journalists are imprisoned, Kashmiri politicians are imprisoned, it is a place that lives and breathes through the rifle of the security forces, which has more soldiers per person than any place in the world.

But Kashmir is a state that has been shut down. Kashmiris are not allowed to express their opinion, Kashmiri journalists are imprisoned, Kashmiri politicians are imprisoned, it is a place that lives and breathes through the rifle of the security forces, which has more soldiers per person than any place in the world. So I don’t know how to explain things that happen. What happens is, when I speak, they’ll take one sentence and then distort it and put it out. 

I thought I would just read a little bit from this novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” a lot of which is set in Kashmir. Just to give you a little idea of how it is.

The insurrection in Kashmir became an armed struggle in the 1990s. I’ll just read two pages (you can follow along by clicking on the black dot [note:1]). 

During partition in 1947, Kashmir was partitioned, too. This is a description of men who crossed over to the other side, the Pakistan side of Kashmir, on a train and then ended up coming back [note:2].

Fawwaz Traboulsi: In those two pages, you’ve said everything that can be said about our present situation in this world. You’ve talked about Palestine, you’ve talked about massacres, you’ve talked about dictatorships, you’ve talked about transnational migration, you’ve talked about work, about labor. You’ve said much more that I wanted to ask. But Gandhi is one of your favorite topics and I think it will be very interesting for our audience to say a few words about your critique of Gandhi and also the caste system.

Arundhati Roy: It’s really difficult to talk about caste outside of India, except to say that caste is the engine that runs Indian society. If you come to India during elections, only during elections, not otherwise, all the corporate media channels will be talking about caste: This caste is going to vote here, that caste is going to vote there, this caste is divided. This party is collapsing. So will the vote of this caste be trumped? This is the conversation. And as soon as the elections are over, it will be as if caste does not exist in India. But, I’m just going to say two or three things about caste. One is, that to understand it, even though it is specific to Hinduism, although it is practiced by Muslim Sikhs and Christians in India, is to understand how the most vicious form of social hierarchy works. Caste is not just that there are four castes and one is below the other. No, there are more than 4,000 different castes and each one has a necessary occupation. And each one has a place in the ecosystem, not laterally, but hierarchical. So it turns people’s minds vertical instead of horizontal, it does not allow solidarity. It’s a kind of incredibly sophisticated surveillance network, where everybody is in the system because everybody has someone to oppress and someone to be oppressed by. So this is how caste1 functions and then you have class and then you have what were known as untouchables or the Dalits, or scheduled castes, who were outside of the caste system and then you have indigenous people who are outside. 

In the late 19th century onwards, there were millions of people in India who were converting to Islam to Christianity to Sikhism to escape the scourge of caste. India has more than 200 million Muslims of which 90 percent or more are people who converted from oppressed castes to escape from caste. to become Muslim, but the Hindu nationalists tell them: “Oh, you Muslims, you have been ruling over us for centuries, we are your victims” so they’ve turned their own victims into their oppressors, for the cause of Hindu nationalism, and all fascism, which requires you to present yourself as a victim. So, this is the caste system.

Caste turns people’s minds vertical instead of horizontal, it does not allow solidarity. It’s a kind of incredibly sophisticated surveillance network, where everybody is in the system because everybody has someone to oppress and someone to be oppressed by.

I have written a little book called “The Doctor and the Saint," which was about a debate between Gandhi and perhaps the most beloved leader in India today, unknown to most people outside of India, Dr. Ambedkar. If you go into a poor person’s house, especially a poor Dalit person’s house, that is whose portrait you will see, not Gandhi’s. And this book, "The Doctor and the Saint" is about the debate between Dr. Ambedkar and Gandhi. It was written initially as an introduction to a speech called “Annihilation of Caste” that Ambedkar was to deliver in 1936, but he was not allowed to deliver the speech because it was too radical. So he published it. And now it is one of the most read texts in India, but then Gandhi responded to it. So, I was writing “The Doctor and the Saint” and I was, as all Indians are, brainwashed into the Gandhi story which begins in South Africa, that he was thrown off a train in Pietermaritzburg by white people. And there he began this campaign against segregation, and for equality and so on. And to my horror, I discovered that this was not the case at all. Gandhi was sitting in the whites-only compartment because he believed that Indians should not be treated the same as savages, which is what he called black people. His  first fight in South Africa as a lawyer was to demand a third entrance to be opened to the Durban post office, so that Indians and blacks didn’t have to share the same entrance. And then I just followed his whole time in South Africa and I was absolutely horrified that there wasn’t a fight against segregation. Even at the beginning of Satyāgraha2, the non-violent protest, it developed because there were two kinds of Indians in South Africa.

There was the indentured laborer who came from the lower, oppressed castes, and then there were the traders and the rich people, the businessmen. After the war against the Boers, the British said that Indian traders can’t go into the Transvaal and Gandhi developed Satyāgraha to implore the British to allow these traders to go into the Transvaal. In prison, there were campaigns, again, to say we should not be put in the same prisons as black people. And so when he left South Africa in 1913, he went from South Africa to England where he was given the highest civilian award by the British, the Kaisar-e-Hind for service to the British Empire. And then from Britain he sailed to India. And somewhere on the way, a friend of his who was a Gujarati diamond merchant began to call him Mahatma and so he arrived in India as a Mahatma, he was met by the biggest industrialists and his first years in India were spent literally breaking mill workers’ strikes. And then I followed this whole thing; what was his attitude to workers, his attitude to women, and then what was his attitude to caste? Because people in India joke that how come he had to go all the way to South Africa to discover injustice. There was plenty of it available in our country. 

People in India joke that how come he had to go all the way to South Africa to discover injustice. There was plenty of it available in our country.

He said that caste was the genius of Hindu civilization. So he believed in the Varna, the division of ancestral occupations and caste, but he said everyone should be treated equally. The Brahman should do what the Brahman does, which is to pray and be a priest, and the untouchable should do what the untouchable were born to do, to scavenge and to clean sewage, but we should treat them all as equals. He was continuously blocking the idea of people representing themselves, he said, I in myself in my body, represent the untouchables of India and this was a big debate that he had with Ambedkar. And so in “The Doctor and the Saint” I call him the saint of the status quo. Don’t get me wrong, I think he was a brilliant politician and I think he was a visionary in many ways. He was a person who saw through the ideas today, which we should have thought of many years ago, about consumption, about climate, about... all that is written about. I’m just presenting it in a slightly skewed way because we have the other side, you all know the other side of it. 

Fawwaz Traboulsi: The side about non-violence. About independence. 

Arundhati Roy: To believe in non-violence is a great thing. But how can you not understand that a society that lives in this kind of hierarchy, where let’s say you’re a farmer, your crop has ripened, you have to have that Dalit person on your field, there’s no time for strikes and arguments and all this. So you maintain the caste system by the permanent threat of violence. If you ever ever, try and change the way things are meant to be. So if you see, even today, when there is violence against Dalits — who upper-caste people think have got too many fancy ideas— who are Ambedkarites, who believe in education, who have a proper house in the village. The violence is not normal, it’s exhibitionist violence, it’s to show everybody that if you step across the line, this is what’s going to happen to you. And so, it is a society that is kept in place by the permanent threat of violence. 

“What does non-violence mean?”, at that time, is a question that I asked a few years ago. I had gone into the forests of central India where there’s a sort of Civil War unfolding because the government had signed over indigenous people’s lands to mining companies and a guerrilla army that called itself a Maoist Army was fighting this acquisition. And of course the corporate media was full of “these are terrorists,” the poorest people in the country, in the world maybe, they are “terrorists” they are anti-national.” And I said, look, you have filled that forest with hundreds of thousands of soldiers. There are people who live in villages which are four or five days walk from the main road, you’re burning those villages, you’re killing people. You’re raping the women, people can’t come and live in their villages at night because of the violence. You tell me: What form of non-violence are they supposed to practice deep inside the jungle where they don’t have an audience for their hunger fast? They don’t have food anyway. So how is a starving person to go on a hunger strike? How is a person who has nothing to boycott goods? So you perpetrate violence because the state is allowed to have violence, but you’re preaching Gandhism to people who are being brutalized in the forest.

Fawwaz Traboulsi: India has the largest peasant movement in the world. I mean there are two great peasant movements, the Brazilian and the Indian. In 2020, you had a strike of Indian peasants, millions of Indian peasants marched to New Delhi and imposed their demands — just to supplement what another aspect of struggle would be.

Arundhati Roy: After I wrote the “God of Small Things,” and then wrote the essay which Rima read from, the next thing that happened was that the Supreme Court of India lifted a stay on the building of a big dam in the Narmada Valley. That was the most spectacular movement of peasants that the world had ever seen, so beautiful. And the critique of what big dams do, what is the meaning of taking a river away from someone and giving it to someone else? Who holds the water, who holds the air, who holds the fish, who holds the eggs in this country? That was a movement in which there were millions of people involved. And there were hundreds of thousands of people who were going to be displaced.

What is the meaning of taking a river away from someone and giving it to someone else? Who holds the water, who holds the air, who holds the fish, who holds the eggs in this country?

The dams were built and we did lose that battle, but we did not lose the argument. Again in the forest when we went in, it was the same thing. Those are peasants too, whose lands were being taken away. But in the case of the Narmada Valley and in the case of the forest where the guerrilla war is happening, those are very, very poor peasants. Those are people with no access to the media, no access to money, no access to anything. So those struggles were quieted. But what happened in 2020 was this very process of dispossession now reached the rich farmers where their lands were now under threat. They were going to privatize agriculture. They were giving huge granaries to this industrialist in whose plane Modi flew to Delhi, so that the private sector could control the agricultural produce, could control the prices, could actually impoverish farmers and remove them from the scene as has happened in countries like America. So now you have the farmer’s movement, which started in 2020, coincided with COVID, and hundreds of thousands of farmers came and laid siege to Delhi, they brought their tractors, they blocked the roads.

Fawwaz Traboulsi: You just talked about tens of millions...

Arundhati Roy: I’m just saying the people who came to Delhi, not the people who supported the movement. And 6–700 were killed in the course of these protests. And actually, for the moment, they won. Because they had to repeal those laws, not all of them, but 3 out of 4. So you’re seeing a process where this kind of neoliberalism starts finishing off the very very poor, but now it has come, and the water has risen up to the noses of people who would be considered rich, or big farmers. But even inside the forest, or in the Narmada Valley, there were owners of property, small farmers. And because the owners of property as well as workers on their land were both being threatened by the same thing, you had a situation where they were all together in a protest which was not easy, a lot of contradictions inside of that but it was an amazing protest and it is an amazing protest because it’s not over yet. It’s still there, threatening the state in many many ways. People call me anti-national, but these are the most beautiful things about India. These are the movements and the people one is writing from and within and in solidarity with. It’s just that people who own the state think that they own the country, but they don’t. We own the country and we’re not tourist guides.

Fawwaz Traboulsi: I want to shift here to a related topic. You’ve been a critic of civil society and of the impact of NGOs on popular resistance. I think many would like to hear you talk about this.

Arundhati Roy: I hope that some of these essays get translated into Arabic because it’s easier to read me than to listen to me, I think. But I wrote about it in quite a lot of detail in a long essay called “Capitalism: A Ghost Story.” And it’s about how, as the government withdraws from its responsibilities in health, in education, in infrastructure, in water and electricity and so on, those activities are replaced in minuscule ways by NGOs, a lot of them corporate NGOs and how they pretend to be doing a job that the government should do. Obviously, they cannot on that scale. But they do a lot of damage because they convert your rights into charity. They take away the best minds, the best activists and turn them into salaried employees. 

NGOs do a lot of damage because they convert your rights into charity. They take away the best minds, the best activists and turn them into salaried employees. 

When I was writing about the Narmada Valley, about the fight inside the forest, the battle is led by women, women who are fighting to keep their land, to keep their way of life, who have more at stake than the men do because what happens is the government just gives the men or the head of the family cash compensation. Those guys go and buy motorcycles and cars and within a year or so they don’t even have money to put petrol in them. The women know that this is a reversal of so much that has been fought for. Inside the forest, where the guerilla warfare is happening I met women who belong to an organization called the Krantikari ​​Adivasi Mahila Sangathan, which means the Revolutionary Indigenous Women Association, who are fighting for their land, fighting against displacement. There are around 90,000 members in that forest, but you come out and none of these official feminists consider them to be feminists because the feminists have been NGOized to such an extent, it’s not that they are not doing important work. They are working on gender, on sex work, and all of this but nothing that threatens the architecture of economic imperialism. 

So this is what NGOization does and then you have a situation where a right-wing government comes to power and even that is threatening to them, so they snap their fingers and all the NGOs are gone. And those NGO people are really well paid, they were fat cats, they were very influential, and suddenly the tap is turned off. They are not people on the ground. So they don’t have funds, they don’t have nothing… So it’s like you’re finding a big pumpkin that’s hanging by a very thin stem and you just snip it off. It’s not an organic thing that’s come from support on the ground. So it’s like a system of sensors on the nervous system. It’s also giving these corporations and these people information they need, data that they need. It’s a very deadly game and it’s not that the NGOs are all evil. It’s just that, what is it that gets funded and what is it that is choked off? This is a very serious problem. Now in India, any NGO that has done anything decent is out of funds. It’s just been shut down.

Fawwaz Traboulsi: And you compare this to the necessity of popular resistance, which usually NGOs don’t engage in. But I want to make two more points. You insist on this question of neoliberalism changing the meaning of terms, of words; and the other issue was mentioned by Rima, the comparison you make between strength and power, which are, to my mind, also very relevant in your critique. So to begin with this changing of meaning of terms, it’s a whole industry. You start, you’re a militant; now you’re called an activist, social justice to do with social distribution, equal distribution of wealth, now it means … The European Union has five terms, five meanings of social justice: One is parliamentary justice, the other is social dialogue, the third is backing youth, the fourth is empowering women and the fifth is the fight against drugs. You can read them and you can get an EU grant to work on this and it’s called social justice. 

Arundhati Roy: So when people introduce me as an activist, I’ll say, why are you so scared of writers? Why are you trying to remit the job of the writer? Just because I write about things that matter to people, I can’t be a writer? I have to be a writer-activist, like a sofa-bed. So why have you changed the idea of what a writer always was? But I love this question because I’ll answer it with a story. 

Some years ago, there was the World Water Forum at the Hague. And I was, at that time, really involved in this anti-dam thing. So somebody had invited me to go to this thing and I didn’t go because why would I go there and then I suddenly heard that there was a whole delegation of people from India who were going and it was all about justifying the privatization of water, privatization of dams, building of dams, etc. So I just rocked up there on my own and they put me on some panel of writers who are supposed to be writing about water. You can’t believe that place, there were all these girls in the lobby dressed up like taps, like faucets.

It was all full of these private water companies and then there’s this panel of people who are calling themselves writers, but they were policy people justifying privatization and such. They said everybody has to introduce themselves and say why they write about water. So everyone did it. And the man sitting next to me was an American and he said, “My name is Robert whatever. I write about water because I’m paid to. And I just want to say that, you know, God gave us the rivers, but he didn’t put in the delivery systems and for this, we need private enterprise.” So, I said “Well, my name is Arundhati Roy. And I write about water because I would be paid a great deal not to.” Then I said: “Look, I don’t understand how you can all call yourselves writers like don’t you have any shame? Because I’ll tell you what writers do. Writers spend a lifetime trying to close the gap between language and thought and you spend a lifetime trying to develop a language that masks thought. So every word you use means the opposite. When you say empower women you mean the opposite. When you say deepen democracy, you mean the opposite. So don’t call yourselves writers, whatever you do. And whatever this language you use is, I’ve never been in a room for a long time that was full of dead people, but that’s what you are.”

Fawwaz Traboulsi: Stories. Stories and storytelling. Arundhati, you’re a fantastic storyteller. I want to end with this. You consider yourself a storyteller. We have a common friend who engaged with you on this issue. John Berger, the British architect and literary critic and both of you call yourselves storytellers. 

Arundhati Roy: I never call myself anything.

Fawwaz Traboulsi: You said I’m a storyteller and storytellers listen, no?

Arundhati Roy: Well, part of me maybe, but there are other things about me. 

Fawwaz Traboulsi: I just wanted to ask you about relating stories and writing novels. I think you are not representative of a novelist. I’m not talking about what you do in between novels, I think, with you, there is this mixture, this bizarre mixture in you, between telling stories and writing novels, I can’t see them as being exactly the same.

Arundhati Roy: Well, John Berger is one of the most beautiful writers and the way I actually came to know him personally was that after I wrote “The God of Small Things,” I wrote this essay “The End of Imagination”, which Rima read from. And what happened was that I had written “The God of Small Things” and then won the Booker Prize and I was on the cover of all the magazines and I was this fairy princess, sitting at the high table. 

The Booker Prize happened in October ‘97 and by March, I think the Hindu right had come to power and by May they did a series of nuclear tests and it was like this explosion of Hindu nationalism, you had writers and poets and everyone celebrating this. I just felt like I was so exposed because to say nothing would mean that I agreed with this. So I wrote “The End of Imagination” and I talked about why having nuclear weapons was not just the danger of nuclear war, but of what it did to our imaginations. And I said it colonizes our imaginations. And then there was a line in which I said “if it’s anti-hindu and anti-nuclear to have a nuclear weapon embedded in my brain then I secede, I hereby declare myself a mobile republic.” Of course, this was the anti-national moment and everyone was like “go to Pakistan, get out of here” and then I wrote the dam essay and got a fax from John Berger. And he said “Your fiction and your non-fiction, they walk you around the world like your two legs” and he was the first person who didn’t make them seem like one was the enemy of the other. He understood that both were trying to do the same thing in different ways. One was urgent. One was argumentative. And the other was: I took my time, it was easier. I took my time over it, but even when I went to the Narmada Valley, it was like this valley needs a novelist, needs a writer, to tell the story of the dam. They are both not the same thing when I write fiction and nonfiction. 

Fiction is like a form of prayer. Non-fiction is a knife. It’s like an argument. It’s trying to break a bullying consensus that’s happening. Whereas the fiction is like you’re trying to create a universe and tell somebody you love to come and live here.

My body feels different, I mean to me fiction is like a form of prayer. It’s the one time when everything that I have just comes together and I’m totally calm, and I can do it, and I can’t do it very often because to me, the non-fiction that I have written until now, it’s a knife. It’s like an argument. It’s trying to break a bullying consensus that’s happening. Whereas the fiction is like you’re trying to create a universe and tell somebody you love to come and live here. 

Fawwaz Traboulsi: So that brings us to waiting for the new novel by Arundhati Roy. Now to the floor for the questions.

Audience member: So I’m not going to ask about India because that’s the least I’m thinking about currently, honestly, but I’m going to ask a few questions to Arundhati about her very questionable takes on what happened on October 7th and the following genocide. So one time you say that the unconscionable slaughter of civilians by Hamas, as well as Israel, are a consequence of the siege and occupation and it really sounds like you’re equating what’s happening to Israeli settlers — and you keep repeating here and there that there are Israeli settlers who can coexist with Palestinians under one system and have equal rights. So I was just wondering: 78 years wasn’t enough for you to know that there’s no way to have peaceful talks to end the occupation? And when you say that the world needs to intervene, I wonder do you mean like India is intervening or like Hezbollah is intervening because I think Hezbollah and Iran and Yemen are doing a great job in this genocide. So all these ambiguous positions where you equate Palestinians besieged by Israeli settlers and you go on crying about the Israeli settlers...

Fawwaz Traboulsi: The point has been made, give time for the answer.

Arundhati Roy: I have been very clear, including yesterday or the day before, when I spoke at AUB, that there are three words that I will say about what is happening in Palestine. Those are apartheid, occupation, and genocide and that I have been very, very clear that you cannot equate the resistance and any crimes that are committed by the criminal occupation. So there’s never ever been any equivalence, so you’re actually misrepresenting me and I’m really sad to hear that but you can even look at what I said just now, a minute ago, to the TV crew. There is no question of my trying to say that India – I mean, I’ve just been saying that India is a friend of Israel. India is supporting the genocide in the same way that U.S. is, except with its poverty by sending 6,000 Indian workers to endure Israeli racism to replace Palestinians workers. So I think you have misunderstood me completely.

Audience member: Arundhati, you are one of the few authors that’s spoken out so fervently in support of Palestine and you also just spoke about land grabbing and the resistance of indigenous people and how non-violent resistance was not a realistic expectation. However, in a speech you gave in December while addressing the genocide, you said that that suicide bombing, for example, is not a revolutionary tactic. So then what are some alternatives that you would envision the Palestinians can wield to resist or to liberate themselves?

Arundhati Roy: I don’t think that suicide bombing is the only form of resistance that Palestinians have used. And I believe in what I call a diversity of resistance and I am one of the greatest admirers of how Palestinians have resisted this occupation. If suicide bombing was the only thing that was happening I would say it is not revolutionary. But I don’t think either Hamas or Hezbollah is only doing suicide bombing. I think they have actually got the people on their side. It’s not just some act of individual terrorism. So I don’t understand why you are trying to put a person who has even in my own country not been a person who has been saying “oh there should be nonviolent resistance”, who has understood what apartheid and occupation mean, and the fact is that you cannot accuse people who are trying to resist that and make a equivalence—I’ve been writing about it for years: people who talk about human rights and take the politics out of everything and say this is person is bad, that person is bad, it’s all the same. I’m not that person, so please don’t try and make me that person.

Audience member: This is actually about your creative process as a writer and more about the literature that you have produced in the past 20 or so years. So obviously with everything going on right now writing becomes an obstacle, so much that you’re trying to describe a moment, describe a feeling when things are still happening. What was it like when you were writing “The God of Small Things” and your books after when you were trying to reconcile the world around you and the kind of characters you were trying to portray on the page? How did those emerge and how did those two come together?

Arundhati Roy: Before I wrote “The God of Small Things” I’m somebody who studied architecture, then I worked in cinema. I was feeling a little besieged. I really wanted to be alone, to know what I would think about when I was alone. I had grown up in this little village in South India, and had come to Delhi and then suddenly all those characters and that river and everything came to me and after that, even when I was writing “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” — which I wrote over several years — and so it’s almost as if, although I live alone, I feel like I’m constantly living with the characters in my book, even after the books have been published, they sort of travel with me. They give me advice. I think I have a strange mind where it’s not always that you’re living in the reality that other people perceive. And so the novels sort of enfold me and I live within them and sometimes they are more real to me than what people think of as reality, but there’s a kind of freedom, what happens when you’re a novelist, is that — I find myself sometimes fascinated by interviews with serial killers because I keep thinking the novelist is the opposite of a serial killer. The serial killer fascinates me with their complete lack of empathy and the killing in order to feel something. And I keep thinking: the novelist is just a person who’s constantly a serial empathizer. It’s not just about nice people or good people or whatever, one of the main characters who fascinated me the most when I was writing "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" was this Indian intelligence officer, he was almost like my alter ego and my intellectual equal, but completely politically the opposite of what I was. But to create that character, you almost go a little crazy, because you’re not interested in easy meat and easy villains.

Audience member: A simple question: how do you deal with defeat? Because we are a crowd and we are in a region that is devastating, we are crushed.

Arundhati Roy: If you were to come to India and you look around you, I’m at such an advantage compared to most people —who are crushed, who are defeated in the most terrible ways And yet when you actually go into those spaces when you’re going to Kashmir, or when you’re going to where the comrades are fighting, or you go into the Narmada Valley, you go to places where people don’t know whether they’ll meet each other again. And you realize that hopelessness is a privilege. They don’t have an option but to fight, like the Palestinians. They therefore develop their own dark humor. What do you mean when you say defeat? It’s not a conceptual thing, victory and defeat, you’re constantly being defeated and you’re also constantly — John Berger said something so beautiful to me once, “I keep thinking of you and people like us, all that you do, and everything that you write, you’re telling people ‘we’re not zero, and we’ll never be zero. We will never bow down to you.’” Just the fact that you can smile or speak or survive is a “fuck you” to them.

Fawwaz Traboulsi: And he spoke of undefeated despair. 

Audience member: I would really like a clarification, because you say we are misrepresenting your views, you wrote about condemning Hamas— 

Arundhati Roy: No, I have never condemned Hamas.

Audience member: I could read the sentence. You can tell me if you agree with it or not, it’s in your name: "The horror we are witnessing right now, the unconscionable slaughter of civilians by Hamas as well as by Israel are a consequence of the siege and occupation."

Arundhati Roy: So what does that mean? It means that all the violence that is taking place is because of the siege and the occupation by Israel, that you cannot blame Hamas. That’s what that means. That all the violence that’s taking place is because of the occupation, the illegal occupation by Israel. That is what that sentence means—

Audience Member: And you go on to speak about Israelis and Palestinians living together.

Arundhati Roy: What is the solution going to be?

Audience member: The question is a little bit different. It’s about solutions. You recently spoke out against Israel’s crimes against humanity, and often advocate for a political rather than a militaristic solution whereby Israelis and Palestinians live together or side by side in dignity with equal rights. How do you reconcile this position with the fundamental goal of Zionism to occupy all of historic Palestine and beyond?

Arundhati Roy: We live in a nation that practices what I would call Hindu Zionism and that is an imagination that sees Hindus as superior and every other minority as people who should live there without rights. Supposing this is the situation in India, how do you oppose that? I’m not saying that militarism is not one part of the solution but it can’t be the only solution, right? There has to be an imagination of human beings and how are we to live together. Look at this country that I live in. You cannot have one single monolithic population with a single idea. 

Audience member: I’m really interested in hearing a bit more about engaging with fiction [...] as a reading of reality, that perhaps is a lot closer to the truth than nonfiction is. 

Arundhati Roy: So it’s a very interesting thing that you ask because I’ve been thinking about this. If you write a novel, what informs it?  Your past, your reading, your imagination, but could it be some premonition of the future, too? So, one of the most quoted things that I’ve ever written is at the World Social Forum in 2003. Just before the Iraq War I did a talk and I said “another world is not only possible but she’s on her way and on a quiet day I can hear her breathing.” 

I’m not saying another world is possible. I’m saying another world exists. If you just look for it, it’s there. In all its subversion.

But when I wrote “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” it’s conceived as a conversation between graveyards, the living and the dead comingle. It’s a conversation between Kashmir, which is known as Jannah, which is covered in graveyards and a graveyard in Old Delhi, which has been taken over by someone and she builds a little guest house enclosing every grave with a room. I didn’t intend it but in “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”, every character — and it’s not just that they are at the bottom of the social scale or anything — whether it’s the intelligence officer or whether it’s the militant in Kashmir, or whoever, every character has a sort of border running through them [...] where everyone is like a walking barcode. This is this caste, this is this religion, this is that. These are people who are slightly off grid. But if you look at who ends up in this guest house? who are the people who are very buried there? What are the prayers that are said there? It’s like a little revolution, not just by living people but by dead people, too. One of the characters in the book says in Kashmir the dead are living and the living are just dead people pretending. In this book I’m not saying another world is possible. I’m saying another world exists. If you just look for it, it’s there. In all its subversion.