Full Extended Interview: Arundhati Roy on Democracy Now!

[Music] this is democracy Now democracynow.org the Warren peace report I'm Amy Goodman and I'm n she 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 it's been 20 years since her debut novel The God of small things made her a literary sensation when the book won the booker prize and became an international bestseller selling over 6 million copies Roy soon turned away from fiction she became a leading critic of us Empire the wars in the Middle East and the rise of Hindu nationalism in her home country of India her non-fiction books include the end of imagination field notes on Democracy listening to Grasshoppers and capitalism a ghost story in 2010 she faced possible address arrest on sedition charges after publicly advocating for kashmiri Independence and challenging India's claim that Kashmir is an integral part of India two years ago AR andati Roy made headlines when she visited NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in Russia she was joined by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel ellsburg and the actor John cusac she co-authored a book with John kusac 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 AR andati 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 world's most fragile people even while it assaults the subcontinent's most brutal villains it'll leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its comp compassion they wrote the Indian literary critic Nilan janoy has hailed the novel as quote an elegy for a bulldozed world AR andati Roy joins us in our studio for the hour arti welcome back to democracy now you thank you Amy lovely to be here how does it feel to be back um uh to fiction uh you've been writing now for years this book the ministry of utmost happiness um talk about how you feel upon its publication well um fiction was always in reality as well as in my imagination my real home but uh this time it's home with the roof blown off you know so somehow um it's always been the thing that absorbs every part of me fiction you know every every skill I may have is is is is actually part of writing this so to me I I just feel that you know even if in a lifetime you had two opportunities to spend many years lavishing everything all your brains and your toenails and your hair and your teeth and your gallbladder on creating one thing you know it's it's it's it's it's a Grace that you should be happy for whatever the product is you know whatever comes out of it it's such a a beautiful thing to have had the opportunity to do for me you've called fiction writing the closest thing you know to prayer why because of this you know because to me the idea of being able to concentrate on trying to um you see the the the the the non-fiction that I've been writing you know these are all essays that I uh I mean were urgent interventions in situations that were closing down in India and each time I wrote an essay I would you know it would it would lead to so much trouble i' promis myself not to write another one but I would but they were arguments you know they were urgent they were they had a definite purpose a worldly important purpose but when you uh when I write Fiction it's it's it's to me the opposite of an argument it's like creating a universe you know it's like doing everything you can to to create a world in which you you want people to wander you know well tell us about the title of the book the ministry of utmost happiness and also the dedication it's dedicated to the unconsoled who are the unconsoled all of us in secret even if we don't show it some of us do and some of us don't but I think the world is unconsoled right now um and the title is not uh you know though many think it's a satirical title it's it's not a satirical title because it's uh it's a title that uh for 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 this in this book it is it is a specific story and and people who who understand that it's a fragile thing happiness is not a a building or an institution that that is is is is there forever it's fragile and you you you enjoy it when you can and and you you may find it in the most unexpected places well you also said in a in a 2011 interview uh when you were asked about the writing of this book you said I'll have to find a language to tell the story I want to tell by language I don't mean English Hindi Udu malyalam of course I mean something else a way of Binding Together worlds that have been ripped apart what did you mean by that uh sounds quite clear doesn't it well really uh um but what worlds have been ripped apart together well the worlds the worlds that have been ripped apart in I mean in the in the world as in including here but in in in the subcontinent where I live it's as though uh people have ceased to be able to speak to each other again I don't mean in in real languages of Hindi or U or malayum but it's as though people who live in cities they don't even know how to go into a village anymore you know they don't even understand what it means to live on the land anymore people who live there don't know what to do when they come into the other modern world I mean India has always lived in several centuries simultaneously but it's just becoming almost psychotic now and and and also I mean in real terms we we live in several languages in real languages here I do mean Udu and Hindi and English and all of that together and all the um and and fundamentally I think what I mean is that there is a danger of of of fiction becoming domesticated you know of too much of a product that has to be quickly described cataloged 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 it's 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 as part of a universe in fiction because you can't do it otherwise this is democracy Now democracynow.org the Warren peace report I'm Amy Goodman with Nur Sheik Our Guest for the hour AR and dati Roy would you read from the ministry of utmost happiness AR and dati sure I'll I'll read a a part which is when anjum who hanum is born she was she was the fourth of five children born on a cold January Night by Lamplight in Shah Jahan Abad the wall city of Delhi Alam baji the Midwife who delivered Ed her and put her in her mother's arms wrapped in two Shaws said it's a boy given the circumstances her error was understandable a month into her first pregnancy janara beam and her husband decided that if their first baby was a boy they would name him afab their first three children were girls they had been waiting for their afab for six years the night he was born was the happiest of Jara beam's life the next morning when the sun was up and the room nice and warm she unswaddled little afab she explored his tiny body Eyes Nose head neck armpits fingers toes with sated unhurried Delight that was when she discovered nestling underneath his boy parts a small unformed but undoubtedly Girl part part is it possible for a mother to be terrified of her own baby Jara beam was her first reaction was to feel her heart constrict and her bones turned 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 worlds she knew and the 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 Udu the only language she knew all things not just living things but all things carpets clothes books pens musical instruments had 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 him Hijra two words actually Hijra and kinner 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 afab and rest like the god of the ch 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 Jara beam rested after what she had created had scrambled her sense of the world AR ATI Roy reading from her new novel the ministry of utmost happiness so introduce us to some of your characters and where and how lived introduce us to the trans community that has you've both created and you've been living with for so many years now well uh first I I do want to say that you know anjum who was aab or the book in general is you know she's not a signifier this is not a sort of social history of the trans Community I think she's a character like many other characters in the book very unique very much herself and when she's born in the wall City and grows up and then when she uh she she actually moves out of her home to a to a place close by called quaba which in Udu 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 kuaba that though there are many trans um women people who are Anum for example she's a homop frite but there are others who who who uh are men who are Muslim and don't believe in having surgery some who do there are Hindus there are sunnis there R Shia so they themselves are a very diverse Community but they look at the world and call it dunia which means the world in Udu which is something else but they have a history of of 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 there you know there is that feudal story overlapping with the new modern language and so on but actually anjum the she does have this incendiary border of gender running through her all the characters have a border which is for example one of the she she moves into the graveyard and she builds eventually she builds a guest house called jut which is the paradise guest house and one of the people who becomes a very close comrade of hers is a young man who was uh uh who was a who is a dalit who has watched Hindu mobs beat his father to death as is happening every day now uh with Muslims and dalits uh because uh he was transporting a carcass of a dead cow and so he's beaten to death by people who call themselves cow protectors and he converts to Islam and so and calls himself Saddam Hussein because he's very impressed by this video he sees of saddam's execution and the disdain he shows for his executioners so so Saddam has this border of cast and religious conversion incendiary in India running through him uh the other major character is a woman called toota from from the south and she is also a person of indeterminate Origins as far as India's concerned there's Musa who's now a Kashmir fighting with a national border running through him so it's not conceptual I mean what happens is that India is a society of such minute divisions such such institutionalized hierarchies where where where where cast is a mesh that presses people down and holds them down in a grid and so all these stories somehow uh are about people who just don't fit into that grid and who eventually uh create a little community and and uh a kind of solidarity emerges which is a solidarity of the heart you know it's not a solidarity of memoranda or academic discourse but a solidarity which is human which is based on unorthodox kinds of love not even sexual love or anything it's just based on on humanness and uh yeah so so what you say you say that the characters are kind of uh uh who don't don't fit in uh to the grid the places the principal places where the novel uh is set are uh old Deli the wal city as you said uh and Kashmir so is the focus did you did you focus on these places also because they stand somehow outside the grid they don't fit into the grid yeah it's not just old Delhi and Kashmir actually starts in Old Delhi and it's pools out into the New Delhi the modern sprawling Metropolis the the supposedly the the center of power of the new India and and then uh into Kashmir and uh actually you know the thing is when you write a novel you don't think about it conceptually it would be terrible to do that so I uh you know as I as I go along and have to talk about it these Concepts emerge and it sounds as if that's what it was about it's not though so so the nerve center of the book though it's not the start of the book the nerve center is this place in Delhi called J manter where all the ragged and beautiful resistance movements all the dreamers and idlers and nut jobs and uh protesters you know gather it's it's a wonderful place in Delhi no longer though I mean it's being that too is being policed in terrible ways and it's a place where I've actually spent much of much of my time and a baby appears in the mid in the middle of the night and nobody knows whose baby it is and it actually happened to be and and there were all these protest movements all this politics all this wisdom all this beauty and then the baby just nobody just just nobody knew what to do with her you know and and and from there you know the the the nerves of the novel spread out cuz cuz all all of it is brought together in that place and then you follow the appearances and disappearances of these baby girls and and and the theme of graveyards of course I mean anjum builds the paradise Guest House on a graveyard in Delhi whereas Kashmir which is called jut which is Paradise by many people is is is is a paradise that's covered in graveyards you know so um so so the graveyards are also I mean apart from the borders inside the characters graveyards also the borders between the living and the dead and also the there are porous borders between human beings and animals in the book so it's a it's a book of porous borders Aron D you said that you actually lived um with these communities these resistance groups in Delhi outside your home you live in Delhi also yes talk about what you mean spending days there and also your times going to cashmir uh you know the thing is that Delhi is a place where all these groups from all over India come to jant this place called J where in the past they they were allowed to stay there so many people would be on hunger strike the people from bopal the people from the NADA Valley resisting the dam people who are you know resisting displacement for some mining project uh 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've who who've kind of gone over the edge but who dream of a better world in in the most charming and beautiful ways and uh and sometimes it's it's there's a lot of violence the police will come and beat up people um so it is so I I mean obviously because I was uh you know closely involved with the anti-dam movement and uh I I I I just would go there and I found it a very um you know a place those a place of resistance is also a place of Peace where you think you know people who are just not uh who just don't agree to allow things to roll on so it was also a place where I felt at home and a place where I talk to a lot of people I mean there many of them are characters in The Book pamphlet tears you know uh art installations whatever so um and and uh of course Kashmir is is is you know the the mothers the Disappeared in Kashmir also in the book and in that place uh and the baby appears actually right next to them and so there's this whole thing about how the mothers of the Disappeared don't know what to do with the baby that has appeared you know and then uh uh one of phota is a character who who who who who actually just picks up the baby and runs you know cuz the police have come and Anum wants her the baby and that's how kind of it gets connected and tillow has a long connection with with Kashmir and the thing about Kashmir is that yes I've been going there for for many years and my uh dearest friends are Kashmir actually and I realized long ago when I 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 tortured or the atrocities because it's not just that you know what do you do when a people have lived under the most under 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 don't know when their children will come home now you you see school girls throwing stones at the Army you know last year they blinded people with pet guns and crucially what does it do to Indians who are not protected from this war they are fed these atrocities as uh as um you 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 US government goes and destroys a country you know and you're all supposed to stand up and applaud but what does it do to us to hold that in our stomachs how do we for people aren't familiar with with Kashmir um 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 it's happening well Kashmir was uh uh at the time of independence in 1947 Kashmir was one Jammu and Kashmir was one of the independent princely kingdoms one of the 500 and something princely kingdoms who are all required to decide whether they wanted to be with India or Pakistan and and Kashmir of course had a majority Muslim population but a Hindu king and it's called The Unfinished Business of Pakistan because you know initially the king didn't decide while while partition and bloodshed was happening also in Jammu which is which is part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir and then eventually he he um he um fled to India and signed a secession based on the fact that there would be a referendum which there never was and so it's it's as I said called The Unfinished Business of Pakistan but I mean of partition but so India and Pakistan have been fighting over it and it's become a toxic situation a flash point uh the Indian Muslim population is of course held hostage to all the debates between India and Pakistan and Kashmir and we're talking about two nuclear Powers so you're talking about a place with with with proliferating 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 were throwing stones were actually firing at them so he could do what he liked with them uh just last month they tied a Kashmir civilian to a tank used him as a human shield and uh the officer who did that was was rewarded was honored and many people in India applauded it and that's by no means the worst thing that has happened there well uh Kashmir uh and Kashmir is just one uh of the languages I mean in the literal sense that uh uh appear uh in this uh novel you also cite a number of Udu literary and poetic traditions and sources in the book uh lyrics poetry songs and what do you think um the importance is to all of these references uh Muslim dalit Kashmir uh at a time when India's image uh often is projected as much more uh homogeneous so the I mean I have written about this in non-fiction a lot but right now what we are seeing is a very very dangerous moment in India because since 1925 the forces the organizations that uh I 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 India's Constitution calls it a secular socialist republic uh so right now the 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 you're hearing stories about lynchings about killings about vigilante groups so so you have minority populations and by minority I'm still talking about millions of people being 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 delit parties like the bsp led by mayawati or Lau or mulam Singh yadav which seemed to be bringing some sort of representation have also been pushed out and a h the idea is and always has been to create this constituency called the Hindu constituency and now the difficulty is that uh if you're if you're you're going to celebrate the idea of the Hindu Nation you're turning what is pain into pleasure when when things like the demonetization happened when jobs are being lost when people are being displaced and you're told you're 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 uh it's a psychological model you know which analysis and numbers and figures and facts don't seem to help you know before we talk about um modi's 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 arati who has a lot of similarities to one you uh she was trained as an architecture student um and talk about that talk about um her place and your place in this novel well actually to me T tilma is is is the the fictional child of AMU and Wella in the god of small things had their story ended differently she's the younger sibling of esin and Rahel so uh you know I know her well but I'm not her but uh she's she's um yeah she and anjum are in some ways um you know women with with such different kinds of strengths and moods you know and and uh generosities and uh very different in that anjum is is is is is much more external in her expressions of pain or grief or Joy or poetry and what she wants to do she's an extravagantly uh outwardly expresses herself and tillo in the book is called the the city a country who lives in her own skin a country with no consulates a a person whose quietness destabilizes people you know uh a person who's most intimate whose signs of being intimate with someone is to not greet them or you know to to not change her expression when someone she loves comes so very different but most of all different in the in in their attitude towards Womanhood like Anum uh finds a young child on the steps of the JMA Masjid and she just falls in love with her an abandoned little girl and she falls in love love with her mostly because the the baby just holds her hand and starts howling and isn't scared of her so she she takes her back to the kuaba where she's adopted called zanab and zanab grows up with lots of mothers and fathers and in this unorthodox way tillow on the other hand is someone who who who who who Who's a little bit wary of motherhood she could have a baby and uh but she doesn't want it and she doesn't want to to to to to put another version of herself into the world she thinks that she'll be an even worse mother than her mother was to her and uh she's also curiously alone like she has a relationship with Musa who 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 she's very very strange strong woman though you know and uh little bit um a little bit on the edge of crazy but um uh yeah that's who she is but let's go now to um Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi W what a jump speaking countries yeah his uh trip to uh the United States coming to DC next week uh uh to meet uh Donald Trump president Trump for the first time let's go to comments that Trump made uh last year uh to the Republican Hindu Coalition I am 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 India's 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 so that's uh Trump speaking on the campaign trail to the Republican uh Hindu Coalition and now uh just recently on the occasion of Trump's birthday uh a right-wing group in India called the Hindu Sena uh celebrated uh Trump's birthday so could you uh talk about that uh first of all and also you know a lot of people have been saying that Trump and Modi are very similar but you think you said that there are very important distinctions uh between them so if you could talk about that I don't know whether it was this group that you're talking about or whether it was last year or whenever there was a in the same J Man where much of this book is set some people were celebrating Trump's birthday and they had a cardboard picture of him and they were feeding the cardboard picture cake and some TV it was just now earlier this month on the no so I'm talking about an early occasion and then they uh the TV crew asked them what was happening and they said oh we are celebrating the birthday of Donald Duck but it was very funny but anyway uh yes there are to my mind very serious distinctions between the phenomenon of trump and Modi um look I'm not you know like a real close commentator in American politics so I might be wrong about what I'm saying but I from what I see Trump somehow has sprung up from the sort of affluent of a process where the Democrats who claim to be the representatives of workers of unions of the people H has has betrayed has betrayed them has left a group of people disenchanted Furious and even more Furious when when Bernie Sanders was was um you know not the candidate and it was Hillary Clinton so Trump comes in as a kind of Outsider suspected uh and mocked perhaps rightly so by the media by American institutions there's 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 uh slum Wing its own women's Wing its own publishing Wing its own schools its own books its own history it's people are everywhere the the the movement is from the ground you have to give them that they have worked endlessly so he's Modi is the opposite of an outlier he is he is someone who who Who's who's right now uh the RSS is in control the only thing is that the RSS is a little bit I mean I I think a little bit worried about this single man who's taking all the attention and maybe they are preparing an an air to Modi because he has destroyed government it's just between him and what on the street you know so much of what government policy is is being executed by vigilante mobs and the bureaucracy the party itself is being put into a corner and it's just Modi and his leftenant Amit sha and everyone else is humiliated and then there is this whole you know the great strong man and temples being built to him and so on if you could create the meeting that will happen between Modi and Trump as you've created the communities in this book what would you make happen What would help India uh the India you want to say Aron DTI uh it would help if both of them were sent to the frying pan Park in Virginia with all the turkeys that are forgiven on Thanksgiving I think you know I mean the meeting isn't going to help us because that's not the issue right issue is that what do they represent and why I mean to me the I I don't I don't it's not important to me to mock Trump or to say things about Modi because the real question is why are they and you cannot you cannot dismiss the fact that they are people who have been elected democratically so this there this there's fire in the ducts and that is the problem you know not it's just you know they're both easy meet you know they're both easy to laugh at but I don't think it's a laughing matter you know and the point is that someone like myself you know I I am in a position where where where where you know one is one is in a in a minority of voic is right now and even though I'm a writer and I don't necessarily believe ever that the majority is always right so there's 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 more I mean you you've been following it and you know that better than I you know and the same in in India you know the congress party has opened every door lit every fire now uh that is burning we can't look at them as an alternative they have been involved with massacres themselves they have created vigilante groups themselves they have created communal conf floration themselves they're just a B team so you visited Edward Snowden in Russia with the actor John cusac and with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dan ellsburg who was just in our headlines today what was that like we have less than a minute to go oh it was wonderful phenomenal I mean most phenomenal to see Dan and Ed talking to each other about what it meant to be whistleblow 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 vetnam there's Korea there's Iran I mean history just keeps Reinventing itself and again today you hear them saying Oh it's going to be a long War you know so uh uh you know one enemy of America turns into another turns into another turns into another but the big wheels keep on turning and we don't have enough Snowden and El elburg around 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 um affect how you could write and lead to what you're doing today um well it was obviously you know thrilling to win the booker prize it wasn't something that I you know had thought about as being even a possibility but uh after that it became complicated because if if you actually um become very well known and then you let's say you move to a place London or New York where lots of well-known International people live then then then it's 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 Booka Pride and the fame and it's really hard but it's okay but the the thing that happened was that very soon after I won the book of prise the 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 National IST overtly ugly things that could not have been said even if they were thought publicly were now acceptable and and if I hadn't stepped off that train I would have been part of it I didn't have the space to be neutral or as Howard in says you can't be neutral on a moving train but especially not if you're 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 you 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 um you held a news conference and I can't remember which women's magazine um came up to you after or maybe I can and said can we just follow your shopping oh really I don't remember that really but what it means to be a kind of star like that as you're taking on um these critical issues well it's you know the thing is that I've now been baptized in fire you know because I've had I've had uh so much happen in the course of the political writing I mean just last last month based on some fake news in a Pakistani website saying that I had said something in Kashmir uh a BJP member of parliament suggested that instead of the Kashmir man I should be used as a human shield in Kashmir you know so but that's all part of how they are with a lot of women who who who stand up to them you know there's that whole thing going on and uh so but eventually it it just makes you more uh more sharp I think you know I mean you don't you know people call me fearless and all that I'm not Fearless I'm I I think it's stupid to be Fearless really you have to be extremely fearful extremely knowledgeable about the possible consequences and then do what you're doing people rode in around the world when they heard you were going to be on um Abdullah Abdus Salam in Nigeria wrote something that is very sounds like it fits right in with what you're saying said I would like to ask AR and Dy Roy how she copes with the hatred against her in India and how we can combat the tyranny of opinion in the world today well see the thing is that uh you know the hatred is also a bit exaggerated because they have these troll factories you know they have they have uh they have it's a it's a it's a factory product too you know so it exaggerates the extent when I walk on the streets I certainly don't feel hated in India but they would like to you're Reed as well they would like to project it as such you know and uh there are many people in India who are standing up to what's going on there many people people more vulnerable than me too you know so it's a remarkable uh country for that reason you know students uh there there were so much trouble in the campuses last year you know so I certainly they would like me to portray myself as some lone War Warrior the soul voice that's not true I'm just one of many people who believe the things I believe you know I mean many people don't write the novels but many people do believe what there would be something wrong with my politics if I was really just a lone person I I am in the heart of a of a crowd well it seems that with the publication of this book um you can expect only more Fame because the book is already due to be uh uh translated into at least uh 30 languages and I want to go to what some of uh the reviewers of this book who who've suggested that there there may analogies between the ministry of utmost happiness and other Indian novelist writing in English but it strikes us that you may have a greater Affinity uh to writers like the Uruguayan novelist and journalist Eduardo gallano who died in 2015 two years before he died in 2013 democracy Now spoke to gallano in our New York Studio let's go to a clip I didn't receive a formal education I was educated in the Mont Cafe in the cafes of monteo there I I received my first lessons in the art of telling telling stories the 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 uh cut in pieces and u i i i write trying to to recover our real memory the memory of man of humankind what I call the the human rainbow which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one the other rainbow but the human rain had been mutilated by Macho racism militarism and a lot of other reasons who have been terribly killing our greatness our possible greatness our possible Beauty that's Eduardo gallano the uruan writer who passed away in 200 15 so could you tell us L dearly yes and so could you tell us about uh him and the possible affinities between your work and his um well Eduardo uh was a master of the shattered story even though I don't think he wrote fiction as far as I know he never wrote any novels but uh he uh wrote uh a a beautiful book called The Open veins of Latin America and uh he had that U I think you know perhaps uh he had that way of making realism magical without being a magical realist you know uh what a writer he was and what a Seer wonderful that's on the back of your book um 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 well that's actually a a little scribble in one of pho's many notebooks so it's in quotes uh but what do I mean well uh I think what I mean is that the power of of of telling a story which is not a subject heading you know a story that is not afraid of looking at the connections like Eduardo was saying you know what is is there a connection between the the the the the new emerging uh you know uh 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 what's happening I mean that we are a s we are a society that practices cast which is the most institutionalized form of hierarchy and yet few people write about it it's like writing Arts apartheid South Africa with 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 where each of them is a subject Heading an academic piece or journalism you don't understand fully the rainbow that he's talking about not a beautiful one necessarily sometimes but each of so so that's what I mean this is what makes up the air we breathe and so it's a it's a shattered story but actually if you want to breathe in that air you have to become everything you know and the creatures and the fact that perhaps the most profound U political education I received was in the NADA 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 how a river that belonged to a civilization the water can be centralized and then then once it's centralized it can be controlled and once it's controlled it can be given to the hotel industry or to the golf courses instead of to the people who lived and grew crops uh by its banks and you can say that this is development you know so you you have to become that River too um 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 um uh a republican plan to dismantle Women's Health Care particularly focused on Planned Parenthood there is an abortion in this book yes there's but that's I mean as is not controversial in India but it's always interesting to see how uh you know the the same people who are happy to bomb whole countries to smithin to Massacre people to to destroy uh whole populations suddenly begin to talk about uh abortion in this way you know and uh it's the same in India I mean I 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 of women in in Gujarat Yesterday by the way in the Brooklyn Academy you know who was present the daughter of asan Jaffrey the member of the legislative assembly who was hacked to death in 2002 Gujarat his wife zakya jafre has has spent all these years in court after court trying to get Justice and she was at your reading last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music um explain the significance of that and you know we're leading right up to president Trump meeting Prime Minister Modi on Monday asan Jaffrey was uh obviously a Muslim but he was uh a Trade union leader and a former member of the legislative assembly in Gujarat in 2002 and when the post the uh the Train the burning of the Hindu pilgrims on a train when the mobs decided that Collective punishment of the Muslim Community was the answer to that and started to Massacre Muslims on the streets rape women and so on something like 60 people sheltered in asan jaffre's very middle class home in a housing colony in Amad uh hoping that you know because he was a politician he would be able to save them a mob gathered asan jafre made 200 phone calls to all the politicians the police came and went nobody did anything he came out of his house uh to reason with the mob to ask them to at least spare the women and children they hacked him to death they killed him and then they killed everybody else and then the killers boasted about this on camera right and uh his daughter was there at at the reading yesterday and what was modi's Role at this time Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat at the time so he was the man responsible for Law and Order at the time and uh when he was Campa and then he of course it was very close to elections you know most massacres in India are very close to elections and they and uh uh but but you know they polarized the vote and so he won the elections and when he was campaigning for prime minister Reuters asked him whether he regretted what had happened under his stewardship in Gujarat in 2002 and he said I mean I don't remember the exact words but he said something like even if I was driving a car and a puppy came under my wheels I would regret it yeah one of the things he said is I feel sad he's quoted by uh a British author and TV producer saying I feel sad about what happened but no guilt and no court has come even close to establishing it yeah so the point is that it's it's not about it's not about legal I mean if you cannot establish a handson legal link that you're really involved in in in any of it but you were the chief minister you know you do have a moral responsibility I mean it's it's it's not about just you know legal recourse has never helped the onset of this kind of majoritarianism and fundamentalism I mean what's astounding is you have uh Narendra Modi the Prime Minister about to meet president Trump about to make a historic address to Congress um he is he was once banned from entering the United States right as a Hindu nationalist denied a visa to enter the US in 2005 stemming from allegations he tacitly supported the Hindu extremists um during the Riots of 2002 yeah well I would not call them riots but they were it was a massacre you know but I think Tech read Artic yeah I think technically um the technical reason I'm I think that he was banned was that uh there was also assaults on the Christian Community in Gujarat and that I think has some legal um play over here which which led to his banishment but then of course when he became prime minister you you can't ban the the prime minister of the so-called largest democracy in the world before we end arati I wanted to turn to a person who is seminal and you giving birth to this book well earlier this year year the revolutionary British novelist screenwriter literary critic John Burger died Burger is most famous for his 1972 book and television series ways of seeing he won the booker prize that year for ways of seeing this is John Burger speaking in 1972 about his reaction to winning the booker prize and how he planned to give half the money to the Black Panthers the prize is is given by Bookers Booker Kel who are a firm uh who have extensive trading interests in the Caribbean for 130 years the extreme poverty is the direct consequence of the exploitation of companies like Bookers and others and so I intend as a revolutionary writer to share this prize with people in and from the Caribbean people who are involved in a struggle to resist such exploitation and eventually to expropriate companies like Bookers I'm actually going to give half the prize to the london-based Black Panther Movement that's the British novelist screenwriter literary critic John Burger um he before he died uh was seminal in your writing this book why how AR d uh well obviously you know the the the first words in the god of small things are a quote from John Burger which says never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one and uh I didn't know him obviously personally I admired him very much and one day I came home to find a letter from him this was after I had started writing the political essays and he said to me they are like your walking on two legs you know he he understood how important they both were was always people have you know these debates about uh which is the more important thing so uh then then I began to meet him every time I whenever I could and um once I was speaking with him in Ferrara and I went home with him to his village and he just um said okay now open your computer and read to me the fiction you're writing he didn't even know that I was and you know he may have been the only person in the world that could just demand that I did that and I obeyed and then he told me look just go back and please please do not do anything else finish this book you've got to finish this book and I promised him that he used to call me utmost cuz he knew the title and and and he um sent me off back back to Delhi to finish and within days of my getting back this note came under the door asking me to go into the forest uh to walk with the comrades you know and I couldn't say no and that set off a whole other thing but when I finished the book uh which was in September August the first thing I did was to go to him I read it with him parts of it and then he it was the last book he read before he went away but he's he's around in the other room I talk to him AR and daddy Roy thanks so much for spending this time to see part one of our conversation go to democracynow.org AR and Dy Roy has written a new novel that's called the ministry of utmost happiness her first fiction book 20 years ago the god of small things I'm Amy Goodman with nine Shake thanks so much for joining [Music] us

Channel: Democracy Now!

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Keywords: Democracy Now, Amy Goodman, DN, News, Politics, democracynow.org, Video, Independent Media, Daily News, Breaking News, World News, Interview, web extra, Arundhati Roy, author, book, The God of Small Things, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Trump, Modi, India, Kashmir, Jantar Mantar, Pakistan, Delhi, LGBTQ, transgender, Hindus, BJP, Muslims, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, whistleblowers, Edward Snowden, fiction, nonfiction, Urdu, Dan Ellsberg, John Cusack, Booker Prize, Eduardo Galeano, abortion

Id: -kH6NBHqcdE

Length: 61min 53sec (3713 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017