Arundhati Roy With Howard Zinn Conversation18 September 2002

arundathi just said to me well we can now talk about the things that I left out well I guess what did you leave out you know I was sitting there listening to you and thinking there it was there it is okay let's go you don't want me you don't me same thing nice that no okay no but really what what I thought I was sitting there is it was this mastery of detail all expressed in the most poetic and beautiful way that combination so hard to achieve I know this is not a lead-in to a conversation it's just it's a final statement but but let me ask you this Arundhati how did you come to this side you know after writing the god of small things that you were not gonna immediately sit down and write another novel well I actually I would have had to decide to sit down and write you know in that I never you know I mean I've never believed in this thing of having a single profession and sort of doing it doing the same thing all your life it feels like your brain is growing in one direction you know like some tumor I I never I you know a lot of people keep saying to me that you must be under a lot of pressure from your publishers to write another book well I think that's I mean it's a bit dishonest to put it that way for me because know no one can pressurize me I mean they don't have a handle on me it's only if I wanted to accept that pressure that it would be a pressure and I i I just think that I'm very soon actually very soon after I finished writing the god of small things and it came out India did you know its nuclear tests and and I recognized the fact that here was the you know the papers and lots of public people and writers and painters and everybody was standing up in applauding this horrible act and I realized then that you know staying quiet was as political and act as speaking out and I had the space to make a statement and if I didn't it was something that I couldn't live with which was when I wrote the end of imagination and and also I think being involved in the kinds of things I've been involved in the last few years have been wonderful for me because I've met the most extraordinary people have been close to the most extraordinary political happenings and and I also know that when I'm ready to write another book if I'm ready to write I keep saying the god of small things was a collaboration between me and a little bit of magic and you have to know how to wait you know if it doesn't that's alright but if it does it'll come you can't you can't just for you know it's not some factory product no one would accuse that being effective but I was interesting what you said about you know that turning to the political world from writing a novel you encountered people you know you suddenly found all these these people that you could work with and do things with and is the writer working alone writing a novel or poem it doesn't experience that and the writers who never come out of their study you know or out of their agents office I and get out into the struggle and turmoil of the world they are missing something you know very very important I think I mean the truth is that I was actually always a political person obviously you know it's not something that suddenly happens to you so when I was studying architecture by the time I was in fourth year I knew that I would never practice architecture and I had become very interested in in in town planning and how cities came to be the way they were and how land-use plans and architectural plans are designed to exclude most people and make them illegal and you know the whole business of the citizen and the non citizen so in a sense the god of small things is also very political book and I think I I don't think I ever I mean obviously I was never the kind of person who was only in their agents office because I didn't have an agent I didn't even know there were such things until you know I'm sorry too but you're right I think the business of getting into the world you know living your life living and then writing about what you live is is what interests me you know and the idea that I mean I live in times and I think those times are here in America now but they've been in India for a while where when you write something the worst thing that can happen to you is not a bad review you know if it's somehow it's it's injected directly into into life and you never know what's what what's going to happen if you write a book I mean the god of small things I was of course taken to court for corrupting public morality which which I had a technical problem with because I said at least he should have said further corrupting public morality you know when I when I read about that charge against you I immediately went back to God of small things because I wanted to see what pages they were you know that were possibly corrupting public morality and I found that and it was wonderful but you know you said before you were always a political person well I mean not from the age of three or four or five but you said something about you know when you were somehow finishing work at a school of architecture you know at some point you decided no this is not for you so something must did something happen absurdly it does start from the age of three or four you know because because I lived you know you know my mother came from this very little village in Kerala coloman and she we she belongs to a very parochial community called the Syrian Christians and she married a Bengali you know outside the community and then made the mistake of marrying him and then divorcing him and came back to the village and you know so so we grew up sort of outside the realm of all the protections that that society chose to offer its members and so from a very young age one was aware of the fact that you were not going to be given those protections and you you had to constantly try to understand what was going on and how to survive in this space and how not to to go under and so my mother was very pleased very political in in not in this you know overt way but I think the minute you lose the protection of this nuclear family that protects you from the world you're on your own and then politics is in your life you have to ride the waves you have to understand it you are on your own as a woman which is a special situation I mean not just in India I suppose you know being a woman on your own anywhere is something to deal with but I imagine that maybe in India there was something it was about that yeah it was I mean I though my mother and I agreed mates now when I was 79 I left home and I was on my own being that woman as the Supreme Court judges right and I think you see what happens in India is that the system you know the real life is so frightening that the middle class really protects itself and really turns inwards and it's almost blind it it's almost like they have some some lenses that fall over their eyes and they can't see they can't see the horrors around because that's the only way to survive in some sense and and I think when you fall out of that that cozy little nest and there's no safety net you realize that it's not all that horrible actually you know and you I don't think you can ever unlearn that once you've been there however briefly or however temporarily you you don't forget you know you don't forget whatever happens to you I keep thinking that there are people in the world who are safe and there are people in the world who are unsafe and if you're unsafe you always seek out the unsafe you know whatever happens to you in your life you're always sort of taking that walk so it was the best university I think to go to it's interesting what you say about the other you know the middle-class blinding itself protecting itself from what is happening is so much of the population and this is so much the history of the United States you know which you know developed perhaps the largest middle class and does the United States has had enough wealth so it could bribe enough people in the population to create a middle class which became useful as a buffer between the very rich and that part of the population which could not even rise into the middle class and and so the middle class in the United States has always been that enticed by the establishment into thinking that it can rise into the upper class and not told that it can also descend and but the result is the United States educational system teaches us from the very beginning we said it once and we're not a class Society to use the term class in the United States it's just a term used for school right this is my class you know yeah but the idea of a class Society is something that has always made people in power nervous if anybody brings up the idea of class class conflict class struggle you mustn't you mustn't talk about that and the we brought up in the United States to believe that were one big happy family no I want you and you know it's we all have the same interest you know we have in fact we have the language to to try to make that imprint on the American people you know the language of national interest the phrases national interest as assuming yeah we all have the same interest you know Exxon and I and you yes yeah and you know and and so it takes but you know there's a there's a perception that people in the United States have growing up especially people in the working classes of the United States they know that their interests in Exxon are not the same and they show it you know it's so it's so complicated that sometimes the more you the longer you live there the more confused you get you know because it's when you when you think of class in India you have so many other things to you know you have caste which is a complex business because you know I grew up in Kerala where which is which had the first ever democratically elected Marxist government in the world but all the leaders of the Marxist party are Brahmins you know so it's it's a very complex way in which they they use all these things to make you know the Indian democracy is must be one of the most fascinating beasts on earth and then you have such a complicated network of region and religion and language so you have a situation where you have a country where we have I think 18 or 19 official languages and then there are hundreds of hundreds of dialects and you can't the you know the Supreme Court functions in English nobody can understand what's going on in there I mean even if you speak English you can't understand like imagine when they give a judgement about me they said vicious calcification and well that debunking cannot be permitted to pollute the pure stream of justice that's what you were doing just kept saying the respondent is not hearing like a reasonable man at least I can follow what they're saying but you know the people from no idea what is this court and how do you find a police case so if there's a police case filed against you what does it say what I use of you know it's just like living it's like I keep thinking is like if I were living in Czechoslovakia or something huh how would I function and that's the way most Indians have to function in India no we understand our Supreme Court either the whole object of going to law school yeah is to not allow people to understand what you're saying one of the reasons that the court got very angry with me was because when they filed this case I I said I won't get a lawyer and I will write my own reply which I did and it was perfectly legal I mean you know I checked it with a lawyer but it was a written in language that what any people could understand it was published in the press and that they didn't like so every time I went to court they got a rash you know why she while defending yourself is not something you're supposed to do because you're taking a job away desperately unemployed and so they don't they don't like people to defend themselves but it's interesting during during the Vietnam War we began to get used to people defending themselves in court because we had you know these anti-war protestors were part of this new 60s generation you know forget the experts forget the professionals we don't have any faith in them all these lawyers are over 30 no we don't want and we don't trust professionals and we want to speak for ourselves I mean there's such a refreshing thing actually that they were breaking through this notion if somebody must speak for you and and so in trial after trial it took place of anti-war protestors people represented themselves which was made judges very nervous you know made the you know the prosecution very nervous but enabled you know the honest feelings of the defendants to come across note to the court but in you know India actually the whole thing about contempt of court it has a very sinister edge to it because see the Supreme Court is actually the most powerful institution in India and as the government and the politicians get more and more corrupt the Supreme Court has started making huge decisions on their behalf so the Supreme Court decides whether a dam should be built or not but the slums should be cleared or not where the industry should be in the city or outside whether privatization should be you know endorsed where the structural adjustment is a good thing or not all these decisions which affect the lives of millions of people are being taken now in the Supreme Court and the contempt of court act law says that while you can criticize a judgement you cannot say put a series of judgments together and say what is the Supreme Court up up to what is the politics of the Supreme Court if I supposing I had evidence that a Supreme Court judge was corrupt supposing I had him on film taking a bribe it's not admissible in court because you can't lower the dignity of the court by saying that a judge is corrupt this is the this is the situation you know and so you know even when I went to prison for contempt of court and came out we had a big press contract there were hundreds of journalists a lot of senior editors spoke out quite bravely about this act because they are most scared of the court more scared of the court and of politicians and you know a normal journalist it's not that you're going to have a death sentence if you do if you commit contempt of court but six months in prison you're going to lose your job you're going to have maybe two or three years of a criminal trial you have to hire a lawyer no one's willing to take the risk so there's just dead silence on that subject you know it's very very frightening and that's what I said in my affidavit or judicial dictatorship is as bad as any other kind of dictatorship we have a situation where the Supreme Court doesn't make decisions which are important but not usually on the most important things and by that I mean on issues of war and peace that is when it comes to issues of war and peace the Supreme Court may just as well not exist they defer they defer to the power of the president just as Congress the first to the power of the President there's no democracy in foreign policy I mean you brought up the issue instead democracy in India is very complicated well democracy in the United States is very complicated because we have democracy and we don't have democracy it's here and it's not here yeah and you have you know you have democracy you know once in four years for a moment and even there you don't have democracy no but you have you know you're you are supposed to have political democracy with elected representatives and so on you know you know but you certainly don't have economic democracy you're not a democracy in the workplace you don't don't have democracy in everyday life and so you know you there's a pretense that you have democracy in political life but in all the other nations you go into the voting booth and you pull the chain and and you know and you look fulfilled your duty you know and and that's it and then you can sit back and let the president do what he wants and and you know during the Vietnam War the you know there are Americans who are naive enough to believe the Constitution of the United States but to believe what they learned in in junior high school about American democracy and they learned that we have three branches of everybody learns the same thing you know you must have some very things that everybody learns right and he'll we learn we have three branches of government the teacher always makes a diagram on the board which is very good you know you can't imagine it in your head you see so you know that you can keep two things but not three things in your head and so give three branches of government the executive the legislative and the judicial and what you learn is that there are checks and balances and that each branch is there to check the other and when you sit there as a young person you say this is marvelous nothing bad can happen and then you grow up and you see nothing but bad things happen and you see and this is what I'm during the Vietnam War you see the president decides on war or I should say the president and the people around him some of them unknown to the public others not known to the public and but the president and the people around him decide on war he goes to Congress I mean it's to me it's absurd that liberal people today the the most courage that some congressmen can muster up against the war in Iraq is to say let Congress vote on it to say as as if we don't know the history of congressional obsequious nough simply don't know the history of Congress approving every war that has ever been fought and one way you know or another so what happened in during the Vietnam War is that a number of GIS and this is you know one of the glorious things about - juliette' Nam war was the uprising of soldiers fans the war and the organization of so Vietnam Veterans Against the War you know a wonderful wonderful dramatic scenes of that kind of positions and there were these GIS who refused to go to Vietnam and they said the Constitution says Congress must declare war Congress has not declared war and they had learned in junior high school that the job of the Supreme Court is to see to it that things are constitutional so they appealed to the Supreme Court now what did the Supreme Court do it said we can't handle this it's funny you think the Supreme Court they have black robes that you know you think they have power and they shrink into the distance as soon as war appears and so what it's left then to the people which happened during the Vietnam War and I think what you you're talking about in India it's left to the people of India ice when I saw that film wonderful the wonderful film was made about armed Dottie's little tiff with the Supreme Court I didn't know how to describe it III didn't want to say a war with the Supreme Court's notation but a little encounter with but there's a wonderful film made about it which you should see in with it was great to see the those huge crowds of people supporting you know during that but and and I'm sure it was because of those huge crowds that the Supreme Court you know went easy on you didn't sentence you to life in but I liked what you said about the that in India there is a kind of inherent anarchism which will save India I think it's like trying to corporatize India's like trying to put an iron grid on the ocean even the fascists are not disciplined mess it up well I think they we can count on them to mess it up we we need that I mean because it we'll try our best you know and we'll accomplish a lot but we do really need them to mess it up but I think we can count on it because they do it the trouble the only trouble how is that in India is right right now I think few Americans know about this but in March this year the you see the the BJP which is the Bharatiya Janata Party is is part of what is they call the Sangh Parivar which is the whole sort of family of Hindu right-wing organizations the BJP is the political end of it and the what's called the RSS which is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is the cultural guild now the Prime Minister the Home Minister Investment Minister all these people belong to the RSS the RSS's has been preparing the ground for this kind of writing you know India is only for the Hindus thing you know since the late 20s and they are openly open admirers of Hitler and his methods and so on and in March this year there was a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat and as soon as the massacre was over the Gujarat government headed by the BJP wanted to hold elections because they felt that they would win the elections because they had polarized the world and all over India you know they have what are called chakras which are branches where young people ten year old children are being indoctrinated into religious bigotry and hatred and how to you know create communal trouble and how to rewrite history books and all this is happening so the fascists will definitely mess it up in fact the reason they are so desperate is because in state after state they were losing the elections but you see now whether they are in power or not they've injected this poison into the veins of a very complex country and that's very frightening very very frightening to have to deal with on a daily basis because you cannot imagine the things that happened in Gujarat you know little children 2,000 people were killed women were raped women had the stomach flipped open and their fetuses pulled out not one or two but many many little children were forced to drink petrol and then matches were put down their throats they just blew up like bombs you know so it's a very very frightening situation just now and this government in India keeps saying that we're natural allies of the u.s. so there hasn't I mean it's not just a coincidence that this was not reported or that is being suppressed you know the whole nuclear flashpoint with Pakistan was mostly due to the fact that the Indian government wanted to distract attention from the world's attention from Gujarat to this and and it was very very successful in doing that well if I hadn't read what you wrote about Gujarat and what happened there I would never have known because people in the United States do not know what's happening in India in fact people in the United States generally know very little about what is happening in the rest of the world thanks to the Free Press yeah and and it's clear that what we need more and more know is this you know interchange across boundaries and the globalization yeah people's globalization and you talked about that no yes I sort of feel like you know I see I see the world with sort of chalk lines dividing everybody and I see us as having the job of little by little walking across those rubbing them rubbing those chalk lines out so I keep saying that I think literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb you know when when I wrote the goddess small things I would go to Estonia and Finland and hear from China and we were say oh but this was my childhood one of the reasons why I never wanted it to be made into a film was because I thought there are six or seven million films going on in people's heads and this one filmmaker will come and take it away you know let it be the world the idea that that that there is that you know that there is the human beings across the world do share love and terror and gentleness and these things which which which literature links up and which nuclear bombs just build the walls and separate I think you're coming here does that not only your writing does that but you you're you're coming here and us listening to you and knowing that you know we are part of a chorus I don't know if any of you read Kurt Vonnegut's cat's cradle you know it could Vonnegut this is this remarkable you know it's just this remarkable interesting odd mind you say and then cat's cradle he talks of a caresses press when people feel an affinity with one another they don't know exactly why but it's a it crosses all lines across his national racial sexual crosses all lines but that's what we depend on it's like I've never been to Pakistan you know Delhi and Pakistan I mean Lahore maybe you're one of flight away from each other I went to Pakistan last month I had to go from Delhi to Dubai to Islamabad through the whole took me 18 hours and you know there's so much in the Indian press and equally in the Pakistan press about anti India demonstrations and anti Pakistan demonstrations and we are all going to kill each other and everybody hates everybody and so on I landed in Lahore and within you know seconds we were all sitting at this dining table and I felt like I was in Delhi we were it was it was just so sad and and the audience that came people were just in tears because not because of me or what I said or anything just because it's such a relief not to always be subjected to this media's representation of government position you know and I really feel that the media the corporate media has played a terrible part in all this and people are just going to have to blow holes in in this in the dam between them and and you know insist on listening to two independent real voices real human beings we were saying to one another when you are not listening it's very hard to end a conversation on stage and so the thought was that we would finish by r-not e-reading something that you would like to read to all of us okay it'll just be two minutes and it's just I just want to leave you with a with the thought with the way of seeing this is part of the essay that I wrote when India tested nuclear weapons in 1998 it's quite a long essay so it's just a very small extract a very post the very personal part of it in early May 1998 I left home for three weeks while I was away I met a friend of mine whom I've always loved for among other things her ability to combine deep affection with the frankness bordering on savagery I've been thinking about you she said about the god of small things what's in it was over it under it around it above it she fell silent for a while I was uneasy and not at all sure that I wanted to hear the rest of what she had to say she however was sure that she was going to say it in this last year less than a year actually you've had too much of everything fame money prizes adulation criticism condemnation ridicule love hate anger envy generosity everything in some ways it's a perfect story perfectly Barak in its success the trouble is that it has or can have only one perfect and her eyes were on me bright with the slanting probing brilliance she knew that I knew what she was going to say she was insane she was going to say that nothing that happened to me in the future could ever match the buzz of this that the whole of the rest of my life was going to be vaguely dissatisfied and therefore the only perfect ending to the story would be death my death you've lived too long in New York I told her there are other worlds other kinds of dreams dreams in which failure is feasible honorable sometimes even worth striving for worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth there are plenty of Warriors that I know in love people far more valuable than myself who go to war each day knowing in advance that they will fail true they're less successful in the most vulgar sense of the world would but by no means less fulfilled the only dream worth having I told her is to dream that he will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead which means exactly what she said looking a little annoyed I try to explain but didn't do a very good job of it because sometimes I need to write to think so I wrote it down for her on a paper napkin and this is what I wrote 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 you

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Length: 40min 55sec (2455 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2012