The truth of fiction
Arundhati Roy brings 20 years of activism into her second novel
When a government turns to building its national power in the world, rather than helping its own people, the country can fracture. Deep empathy for those who’ve been harmed by this choice in India is an animating force behind Arundhati Roy’s humane, risk-taking second novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”
After winning the Booker Prize for “The God of Small Things” in 1997, Roy became an activist in India, writing urgent nonfiction about injustices such as the Gujarat pogrom and the plight of Maoist tribal people and Kashmiri freedom fighters. What she observed firsthand has been absorbed into “Ministry,” which has become a national best-seller. In her review for The Chronicle, Heller McAlpin called the novel “a complex saga of unconventional love among the marginalized and persecuted, society’s so-called ‘surplus people’ ... (a story) infused with so much passion — political, social, emotional — that it vibrates.”
Roy spoke by phone from
“In the last 20 years in India, the political climate has become so ugly.” Arundhati Roy
Chicago while on a U.S. book tour. She was warm and erudite, but her tone grew somber at times. This year, she’s faced contempt charges and received a veiled death threat.
The interview has been edited and condensed. Q: Over the 10 years you worked on “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” how did you balance writing a novel with political action? A: I learned to think from the heart of a crowd. I actually write in chaos. When someone offers me a retreat to write, I fly into a panic. I couldn’t write in some pristine environment. But sometimes it’s been hard. Q: Do you think activism changed your artistic sensibilities, or were you always that way? A: I was always that way. In the last 20 years in India, the political climate has become so ugly, particularly after the nuclear tests. Some of us long for the hypocrisy again because it’s gotten so out there. Just yesterday, again, a young Muslim boy was lynched off a train. I saw it coming 20 years ago. Anybody who had eyes to see could see it coming 20 years ago. The prime minister was the chief minister of a state where there were daylight massacres. There were daylight massacres before, too, but they were not sanctioned by an accepted ideology.
The RSS (the Hindu nationalist organization) to which (Prime Minister Narendra)
“History textbooks are being rewritten. Vigilantes have been released on the streets.” Arundhati Roy
Modi belongs has been at work since 1925. So all the institutions, including the media, for the most part, have capitulated. History textbooks are being rewritten. Vigilantes have been released on the streets. All the universities and institutions are being headed by RSS men. It’s penetrating the security, the intelligence, the army, the judiciary. Q: Looking back, what do you think your mother did to make you as courageous as you are? Babies are an important symbol in this novel. A: My mother is the only woman I know who unleashed the full bandwidth of her insanity and fury and creativity and unleashed it on the world. Even though, very often I took the brunt of it, and left home when I was 16 because I just couldn’t take it anymore, she was fundamental to putting a bit of steel in my spine, even when it came to dealing with her. She runs a school in Kerala still. I studied in that school, and there was certainly a big premium put on expressing yourself. Q: I loved the James Baldwin epigraph in “Ministry”: “And they would not believe me precisely because they knew what I said was true.” A: That was such a powerful thing he said, and so true. History can’t do what fiction can do because you can’t provide footnotes for the kind of terror that’s been unleashed. Fiction, when you get it right, can tell you that — and they will not believe you because they know it’s true. It’s like hitting a musical note that’s not off. It’s right, and then it vibrates. Q: There’s a lot of emotional affinity between black American writers and the condition of Dalits and other stigmatized identities in India. A: Yes. The reason the parliamentary left was furious with “The God of Small Things” was that they saw it was true. It points out how the left doesn’t understand identity, which is true of left politics all over the world. The politics of caste and race and identity are just as important as the understanding of class and economic structures that the left has. They have to understand each other and work together, not separately.
And in India — I don’t think it’s true in America to this extent — the language between rural and urban India is being lost now, too. People don’t understand how to speak to each other. It’s not even possible for a judge to understand what the villager is saying about the land or the salinization or about the crocodiles that wash up in the reservoir and then walk around the villages. It sounds fantastical to an urban magistrate, but it’s not; it’s true. Q: After going to Kashmir and bearing witness to the horror and psychosis, which you captured in this novel’s architecture, how do you keep your hope up as an artist? A: Your hope doesn’t stay up all the time. It goes down, and it floats up. Many of my closest friends are Kashmiri, and you can see the resilience, the graveyard humor, the despair, the fear. Every time I go there, I get put under bumper-to-bumper surveillance, but they live with it all the time. Kashmir taught me you can’t write that story without writing fiction. In a reporter’s dispatch or a human rights report or a torture manual analysis, you can’t explain the terror of an Amrik Singh (a character in “Ministry”) leaving his gun among the biscuits or the psychotic games that are played. The lessons of those massacres are in the air.
Even if you don’t keep your hopes up, you keep your breathing regulated. I keep regulated with what I write, with literature. Creating the novel over 10 years, when the attention span of the world seems to be 10 seconds, seems to be an act of defiance. Q: In a time when so much is urgent, do the small things still matter? A: Yes! They matter more than ever. It’s the accumulation of small things that make big things.