ANURADHA ROY: ART OF THE MATTER
Anuradha Roy is not a natural polemicist. Physically slight and mild-mannered, she seems too quiet, too self-contained to seek out trouble. This is to misunderstand her, to be misled by appearances. Her novels—a celebrated 2008 debut, An
Atlas of Impossible Longing, and subsequent prize-winning books, The Folded Earth and the Booker-longlisted Sleeping on Jupiter—don’t shy away from confrontation, from horror, violence and injustice. Neither does her journalism.
Last year, writing about Ranikhet, where she lives and from where she and her husband, Rukun Advani, run their independent academic imprint Permanent Black, Roy argued that “India’s impressive GDP growth figure is meaningless to people in the hinterland”.
Telling the nasty, brutish and short life story of Jogi, a troubled taxi driver who hung himself from a deodar tree using his wife’s sari for a noose, Roy notes that a town like Ranikhet, mired in poverty and joblessness, is a “rural rat trap... With such hopelessness, the impulse for violence is a hair’s breadth away”.
Some weeks ago, briefly in Delhi on the way to London for the release of her new novel All the Lives We Never Lived, in the incongruous setting of a coffee shop in a five-star hotel, Roy reflected on her visceral response to the rape and murder of eight-yearold Asifa Bano near Kathua in Kashmir. She was on the way to the airport when she heard. “Who among us today, if we were born Hindu,” she said, “does not have at least one relative or acquaintance who hates Muslims?” She felt an unusual despair, an anger, a desire to respond immediately, even as she boarded her plane. “For a long time,” she wrote, “I told myself my usefulness lay in doing my own work... is it merely a way of legitimising my desire to somehow carry on living only as I know how to... Is it possible to construct perfect paragraphs while your house is burning?”
It’s a question Roy confesses that she cannot answer to her satisfaction. Gayatri, the heart of All the Lives We Never Lived, chooses, in a sense, to set fire to her house in order to make art. She leaves her nine-yearold son—nicknamed Myshkin, as a feeble child prone to fevers, after the epileptic protagonist of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot—and escapes her stifling marriage.
Gayatri, who paints and dances, longs for a bohemian idyll, for space to create, to become an artist, to be free to create.
Her husband, self-serious and immersed in fighting for India’s freedom from the British (the irony of making his wife a virtual prisoner is, of course, lost on him), mocks these aspirations, views art as irrelevant.
He too has an answer to Roy’s question: to construct perfect paragraphs while your house is burning is to be without moral scruple, is to put the personal above the general good. “Painting, singing, dancing, these are wonderful things,” he says to his wife. “Everyone needs hobbies. But there are hobbies and then there are serious matters... what about the history of India?”
The novel begins with Myshkin, now in his 60s, recalling how in his childhood he “was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman”. Actually, the man is German, one white man being much the same as another to those who live in Muntazir, their small town near the foothills of the Himalayas.
The German is the artist Walter Spies, whose biography, like that of other famous figures in the novel, including Rabindranath Tagore, has been adapted to fit Roy’s fiction. Alarmed by the political direction Europe is taking, Spies moves to Indonesia in the 1920s. Tagore is in Bali too. As is Gayatri, taken there by her father so that she can meet Tagore. It is Gayatri’s father who tells her that when empires have long crumbled, it is the work of masons, sculptors, painters, “who had no role to play in the great games of power”, that “remained after all else had vanished”. Art, Gayatri learned, when “the world was in turmoil... was not an indulgence but a refuge”.
Of course, Roy knows that artists too can wreak devastation and havoc, as Gayatri does, with the lives of others. But Gayatri, privileged as she might be, is also a victim of her time. As is her husband. As is Spies, fleeing from the right-wing politics of Europe. It’s hard to ignore contemporary parallels.
“In the India where I grew up,” wrote Roy in April, “the necessity of secularism was drummed into us. We knew that our politicians were largely venal, but it was still a country in which morality and humanity mattered.” Her art is a reminder of the value of sympathy, of fellow feeling for individuals crushed in the grip of tragedy.