Living through history as fake news: Arundhati

Booker Prize winning author and activist Arundhati Roy expressed concern over historical facts being manipulated in India, creating a form of fake news in the country.

“What we are living through now, maybe we can call it: history as fake news. There is a sort of Hindu-isation, the corporatisation of education and history,” she said during a lecture titled ‘Utmost Happiness and Utmost Sadness: The Diary of India Nowadays’, a reference to her most recent book ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, in London on Saturday.

Invoking the debates between Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar, Roy suggested a possible disclaimer before Richard Attenborough's Oscar-winning 1980s film ‘Gandhi' to highlight it as a "work of fiction" because it failed to capture the complexity of India's struggle.

She said: "The debate between Gandhi and Dr Ambedkar will tell you the complication of that freedom struggle. For Dr Ambedkar, Hinduism was a form of colonialism in many ways more terrifying than British colonialism.

For Ambedkar, liberation meant trying to draft a Constitution that was far ahead of its time than society itself. He was not willing to just leave it to the people, because he was a man who did not have to go all the way to Africa to find injustice."

“Fiction is truth... there is nothing truer than fiction. Nowadays the world is becoming so harsh and rigid and reactive and twittery. Fiction allows you to be naughty, whimsical to give you that bandwidth which is getting lost to us in some ways.”