-
- The Guardian, Saturday 28 July 2001
Arundhati Roy burst on to the Indian national stage from nowhere in 1997. A drop-out architecture student and one-time aerobics instructor, she had turned her hand to writing a novel. It was The God Of Small Things, and it earned her one of India's biggest ever advances before going on to win the Booker Prize and sell six million copies. The rebellious outsider - southern and female - had trumped the coterie of men who dominate India's literary world, and the reward was an insatiable international fascination. She found herself cast in the role of Indian national mascot, adored and feted for her global success.
Four years later, there have been no more novels, and the now 39-year-old darling of India's middle class has become a painful thorn in its side, writing a series of savage critiques of India's development - its nuclear tests, its huge dam-construction projects and its cringing obeisance to western corporate power. These are home truths that powerful interests in India do not want to hear, and Roy has made herself many enemies. Irritated by her criticisms and the publicity they invariably attract in the west, the Indian establishment has set about trying to cut this awkward rebel down to size. This week, Roy faces a contempt of court charge before the Indian Supreme Court - her first appearance in the drawn-out case was four months ago. Her alleged crime is to have attended a demonstration against the court's decision last autumn to give the go-ahead to the country's most controversial dam project, the Sardar Sarovar in the Narmada valley, central India. Roy is accused of inciting violence and attacking a court official. Ludicrous though many aspects of the case appear to be, the lawyers Roy consulted advised her to plead guilty and apologise. When she refused, none would risk his career to represent her. Undeterred, she wrote her own affidavit and defiantly had it published in a mass-circulation magazine on the day of her first court appearance, much to the fury of the court, which has threatened further proceedings. Roy risks a six-month jail sentence.
How did the writer of an intensely lyrical novel become a committed activist with an analytical prose worthy of a barrister? What induced her to swap her status as Delhi's most-favoured dinner party guest for night marches and sit-ins at the dam sites, and even, possibly, jail? Why did the whimsical chronicler of "small things" - the beetles and creeping, lush greenery of Kerala - turn to fighting big things such as nuclear bombs, dams, the Indian state and globalisation?
Roy comes down four flights of stairs to open the door to her apartment block. Here, where she writes and spends most of her day, she has none of the small army of servants considered necessary by middle-class Delhi. Her flat is surrounded by the contradictions of Indian development, which she analyses in her essays: a comfortable suburb of New Delhi, where cows rummage in the rubbish piled up in the open gutters, and where a man has set up shop in the shade of a tree, ironing the neighbourhood's washing, probably earning in a day just enough to buy one cafe latte in the new, empty, air- conditioned coffee shop.
We sit in a crepuscular gloom, the fierce Delhi summer requiring that all the blinds be drawn, and the air-conditioning is on in Roy's small apartment of strong primary colours, books, a big television and computer. She talks in a low, gentle voice. It's a sharp contrast to the vehemence and coruscating wit of her writing. "I like the fact that my rage goes into bigger things, not into small, petty things with people around me," she says. "I am surrounded by people I love, and what I crave is gentleness." Friends come and go, and the telephone rings frequently.
We get off to a bad start, because Roy hates the "writer-activist" label with which she is saddled - it reminds her of "sofa-bed". She writes what she sees, she says, and she sees no great distinction between fiction and non-fiction; all she does is keep her "aching eyes open". She refers me to an address on writing that she gave earlier this year in the US: "In the midst of putative peace, a writer can, like I did, be unfortunate enough to stumble on a silent war. The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out."
She stumbled on a silent war in 1998, after a giddy year of international celebrity which, she admits, she enjoyed "immensely" (all those hotel towels, she enthuses in one essay), but she knew, in the end, that the "good manners and hygiene" would kill her. What anchored her as she spun around the globe was home, and she resisted the temptations of emigration. "I'm not the sort of person who can buy a life." She came to see fame much like a tin can trailing noisily behind her wherever she went: eventually, it would drop off and she would then write some "worstsellers" and eat mangoes in the moonlight.
But the prospect of such leisure vanished as she returned home to look at her country with new eyes: India was jubilant at its first nuclear test, and Roy penned The End Of Imagination, a furious attack on this symbol of national pride. The title was misplaced, however, because what then captured her imagination, and has done ever since, was that the biggest mass non-violent movement since Indian independence - the campaign against the Narmada valley dams - was then on the brink of victory. She set aside the novels she had been planning to read and threw herself into the detail of technical subjects such as irrigation and drainage. Since then, her voracious curiosity has ranged from export credit guarantees to electricity distribution rates and resettlement programmes for those displaced by the dams.
Roy has spent much time reflecting on the direction her life has taken. She describes, with a romanticism akin to Tolstoy's, how the marches she attends in the Narmada valley have given her a pride in her people and her land, and also a philosophy. The struggle has rooted her, intellectually and emotionally, after the upheaval of celebrity. It also helped assuage the guilt over her sudden wealth, which she once described as making her feel she had "perforated the huge pipeline that circulates the world's wealth... and it is spewing money at me, bruising me with its speed and strength. I began to feel as though every emotion, every little strand of feeling in The God Of Small Things, had been traded in for a silver coin." Her interest in the dam is less personal, she says. Like any writer, she wants to understand and tell stories, and dams sum up, like nothing else, the story of modern India: its greed, its wanton violence and its centralisation of power.
Surprisingly, in all these reflections, Roy steadfastly omits any reference to the deep emotional attachment to the rivers of her Kerala childhood, which is so evident in the novel. In one vivid passage, she describes the humiliation of the river after a saltwater barrage has been built: "A thin ribbon of thick water that lapped wearily at the mud banks on either side, sequinned with the occasional silver slant of a dead fish. It was choked with a succulent weed, whose furred brown roots waved like thin tentacles under water... Once it had had the power to evoke fear. To change lives. But now its teeth were drawn, its spirit spent. It was just a slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea." Almost every page of The God Of Small Things reverberates with the fragile vulnerability of the small - children, for starters, and an intense awareness of millions of tiny living things, and the preciousness of small quotidian events. This reflects a fierce protectiveness towards the small and the powerless that predates her literary fame; her student thesis, she says, was on the housing of the marginalised urban poor. Bombs and dams are the corollary of India's slums: the bombs have diverted the taxes, and the dams have deprived millions of their lands and their rivers.
Despite the legal cases, and the veiled threats and savage attacks in the media, even by erstwhile allies, Roy is standing her ground. Her political writings have evolved from passionate polemic into something more dangerous: a considered and witty analysis of globalisation and its impact on India. She asks questions that are particularly awkward for the nationalist middle classes who are prospering on neoliberalism. Is globalisation "a process of barbaric dispossession which has few parallels in history? Is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote-controlled and digitally-operated?" Roy has a wonderful sense of her own pace - she will not be hurried, or hurry herself - but she is slowly putting together what she calls a "politics of opposition". She already senses her place on the intellectual map of anti-globalisation; she's been reading Noam Chomsky, John Berger and tomes on the history of the third world; she is keen to meet the Mexican Zapatista hero, Subcommandante Marcos; and she wants to attend the next meeting of the World Trade Organisation. But she is aware that this is not just a matter of acquiring the right intellectual baggage. Her politics flow seamlessly from her public life into her private; her analysis of power is not just applied to Indian democracy, but also to how she relates to her family and friends, and how she deals with her celebrity and wealth.
Roy's political essays, powerful though they are, have not so far achieved their objectives. The End Of Imagination in 1998 won her many admirers in the west, but in India it failed to dent the extraordinary consensus behind the nuclear bomb. The Greater Common Good in 1999, on India's preoccupation with dam-building in the 50 years since independence, pointed out that the dams had woefully failed to meet targets for either power generation or irrigation, while at the same time displacing at least 33 million people. Roy argued that the bulk of those displaced were untouchables or tribal peoples, and that this amounted to a form of genocide. The essay won her more admirers in the west and lent weight to the international campaigns against dams.
The worldwide publicity that Roy has attracted by campaigning against the dams has succeeded in scaring off several western contractors of the huge Narmada project - it involves building 3,200 dams, including 30 major ones. But despite all her eloquence, and despite the mass protest movement, the Supreme Court ruled last October that work on the huge Sardar Sarovar dam could resume. It was a bitter setback to a movement that had believed it was on the brink of victory after a series of stunning successes, including the withdrawal from the project of the World Bank. The defeat means that now, as Roy faces her court hearing in Delhi, hundreds of miles away in Narmada the arrival of the monsoon season has set the waters rising again behind the dam. Over the next few weeks, police will have to drag people from their homes to prevent suicide protests by drowning: "While the judges are discussing our contempt of court case, people will stand chest-deep in water for days. Forget the Narmada, where hundreds of thousands of cases [of compensation for lost land] are pending in the courts; a three-judge bench will spend days discussing my case. But losing their dignity is much more important to the judges."
The Sardar Sarovar dam alone will displace 400,000 people, and the state worst affected, Madya Pradesh, has officially declared that it has no land on which to resettle the people whose whole way of life for thousands of years has been bound up with the Narmada, one of the great rivers of India. What has embittered the battle is that most of the thousands of poor farmers and fishermen displaced in the past decade have yet to be resettled. In reality, many of those who lose their lands or livelihoods are likely to receive nothing more than paltry financial compensation. They end up either as cheap agricultural labour or swell the shanty towns. Both options are close to destitution. Meanwhile, promises that the dams will help irrigate dry regions of Gujarat ring hollow, not least because none of the necessary canals has been budgeted for. In reality, the dams will provide electricity and water for the prospering urban industrial interests of the state - which is why the Supreme Court judgment was greeted with jubilation in Gujarat's cities.
The dam presents a stark conflict between the interests of urban and rural, between industrial and subsistence economies; and it crystallises Roy's own questions about progress - that the poorest are crushed in the pursuit of development. "I can imagine in the 50s what a fantastic feat of engineering a dam appeared to be, but now, when what we know about nature is little enough, how can you continue to think this is a wonderful thing to do? To intervene in such a massive way in such a complex process - it's like putting a jackboot into a spider's web. What kind of civilisation is it when you teach men in college to look at a river and imagine pouring concrete into it?" she demands.
The one hope of forestalling the next big Narmada dam scheduled, the Maheshwar, is that it will fail to find the necessary financing within India, now that the project has become too controversial for any western contractor. Emboldened by this success, in her two most recent essays Roy has broadened the scope of her attacks to include the western corporations involved in the privatisation of Indian state electricity companies, in particular the US company Enron. Enron was accused of smoothing the path of its massive contract to build a power plant near Bombay with $20m to "educate" politicians and bureaucrats; now the electricity Enron produces is more expensive than any of its competitors', yet Maharastra state is locked into contractual payments of $220m a year.
Such "business arrangements between these huge multinationals in the west and the third world elite", says Roy, promote a consensus that their model of globalisation - liberalisation and privatisation - represents progress: "It's a form of fundamentalism to believe that this is the only measure of progress - how much electricity is consumed, how much more rice is produced, whether it is eaten or goes to waste in warehouses. Even the tools the economists have developed to measure progress are flawed," she says, adding, "I think of globalisation like a light which shines brighter and brighter on a few people and the rest are in darkness, wiped out. They simply can't be seen. The lobotomy in the west is that you stop seeing something and then, slowly, it's not possible to see it. It never existed and there is no possibility of an alternative."
But the alternative still exists in India, she believes - the country is too old and clever to be lobotomised into believing in the one single idea, "that life is profit".
Defying the tyranny of this idea is a constant thread running through Roy's politics and her private life. It lies behind plans to set up with friends an Indian-based Corporate Watch to monitor corporate power. It informs how she is mapping out a politics that demands accountability, whatever the regime. "The only way to keep power on a tight leash is to oppose it, never to seek to own it or have it," she says. "Opposition is permanent." But these big political ideas also have deeply personal implications, she adds: "Personal politics and what you do from day to day is just as important as globalisation, and opposition to power has to be matched by a reluctance to use power in your own relationships. You oppose by the way you live as much as by what you say and do - and that is painful and joyful."
Joy features prominently in her description of the politics of opposition - against all the odds, you defy your critics simply by having too much fun. That's why they couldn't forgive her and her mother when she was growing up in Kerala, she remembers - they simply weren't as unhappy as a single mother and her "thin, black, clever" daughter should have been. "The whole point of the feminist fight was that there has to be fun at the end of the tunnel. You don't want this image of beaten, oppressed, moaning women. You think about things, engage with the world, and you're aware of the terrible suffering that is happening around you, and the way to be with all of that is to enjoy the process of what you are doing and to speak joy in the saddest places. If you're living in a world that is telling you that only if you have hamburgers, buy diamonds and have a Rolls-Royce can you be happy, then you're saying in the happiest possible way that that is completely wrong." She adds, "It's a game of survival, and if you allow yourself to become unhappy, you will lose everything. I remember what my mother said to me: 'I've never known anyone who guards their happiness so fiercely.' I think it's important to patrol the borders of your happiness, to understand your sources of joy and to protect them, and to know that, so often, it's only when that happiness has gone that you know what it was. But you can be cooking or listening to music and think, I don't need anything else to happen or anyone else to be any other way in order to be happy."
Happiness for her, she says, might be going to the market and choosing glass beads after weeks of late nights drafting an affidavit, or just lying on the floor all day with friends under a ceiling fan in the Delhi summer. Even gossiping with friends about relationships as the police move in to break up a demonstration at a dam site. These are what Roy describes as the "small delights" of her life, a source of the strength that has seen her through the turbulence of her meteoric rise to global fame and, now, the anxiety of the court cases. She describes her friends as "extraordinary people" for dealing with her sudden fame and money, and managing to maintain the "democratic nature of our friendships". None of them had money before, now she gives hers away, "and I know that it is as sophisticated an act to receive as to give it". She has probably made enough from the one novel to live on for the rest of her life; she eschewed more, refusing to sell the film rights, arguing democratically that six million readers had their own version of the film in their heads and she didn't want a single film-maker to replace them all.
The fame has been burdensome, although she claims (somewhat implausibly, since she had her hair cut, a symbol of rare defiance in a culture that fetishises long hair) that she has some anonymity in India (when asked if she is Arundhati Roy, she says her standard reply is that she wishes she were). The causes in need of her celebrity are endless, and she turns down most of the requests that come in from all over the world: would she open a lung hospital in Kerala? Attend a conference on water in the Hague? Give a speech on being a writer at Amherst? Model for Cartier? Make a BBC television documentary? Roy smiles mischievously: "One woman phoned me and said, 'Oh, darling, that essay on the Narmada was absolutely wonderful. I wonder if you could do one for me on child abuse?' And I said, 'For or against?'"
The most important thing, she says, is to keep in mind your own insignificance; she can't speak about every issue and do them all justice. She adds thoughtfully, "Sometimes it's hard, because fate has conspired to make my voice heard, so you have the illusion - or other people have - that you can do a lot."
Roy is wary of the fickleness of fame, and likens it to a wind blowing through a house and all the shutters banging: "There were moments when I was so unhappy that I wished I hadn't written the book and I hadn't won the Booker." The "huge public fairytale" had "another, equal, opposite version in my private life - a terrible dark side". She refuses to expand, preferring to answer questions with general reflections on the nature of relationships between men and women - which perhaps supports rumours in Delhi that her marriage has broken down. In any case, the upheaval in her life has now been resolved. She lambasts the pact of mediocrity to which the vast majority of people subscribe in their marriages, and confesses herself bewildered as to why so many women have children. She has none herself by her marriage to a film-maker 10 years her senior, and has no plans to have any: "Until recently, I was never secure financially or sure enough about my life to think of having children. I'm so scared of the vulnerability of children. I suppose, in some deep way, I have not been able to cope with my own childhood. I wouldn't know how to protect the child's magic. Now, I want to live my life backwards, I want to be free to change my mind, to think my thoughts, and not to be responsible for moulding somebody and for teaching them what is right."
Living backwards means that Roy is now looking forward to living out her teenage years and growing old, becoming a "fit, old witch"; a form of liberation that means being irresponsible, keeping everybody she loves feeling loved (that's not a matter of luck but hard work, she maintains) and depending on no one for anything - dependence is a form of selfishness, she insists.
Roy admits there is a great struggle between political engagement - the demos, the preparations for the court cases - and her desire to concentrate on her writing. Her enthusiasm for the latter is undiminished: "I think writing is such a beautiful thing to play with all the time - having your hands in that stuff. I use it to live my life in the most public and the most private way, and I love all different kinds of writing: a novel, an affidavit, a letter. Writing leads me through my life, and I trust my writing so much more than anything else about myself." In the immediate aftermath of the Booker Prize, she said she would never write another novel - she objected to the way people treated her like "a factory". Now, she says, she will know instinctively when it is time to write and will be ruthless about applying herself to it.
It is Roy's passion for writing that stiffened her resolve not to take the lawyers' advice and apologise to the Supreme Court, and she describes a poignantly revealing dream she had before the last hearing: "I had been sentenced to prison, but that was not the fear. The only way I could live out the sentence and be released was to learn not to form an opinion about anything. There was a sort of big playground with a dazzling dance performance, and I was unable to watch it because I was struggling not to have an opinion about it."
She is more afraid of not being able to speak her mind than she is of prison, but she is also well aware that is a ghastly choice, one that she would much prefer not to be facing. For now, she feels a judge's hammer hangs over her every word. "It's never what it appears to be. It's much more a slow grinding down - of a writer in one way, of a lawyer or an activist in another. It's not about whether you go to jail, but how you have to adjust yourself to survive, and that's the issue - the fatigue, the complete fatigue in the end." This is the Indian state's version of the country's tradition of non-violence, she adds with wry resignation.
But she also well knows that the same establishment can be vicious and violent. It is dark when we finish talking, and the apartment block is silent. She offers me a lift back to my guesthouse and as we leave, the back alley is deserted and Roy seems all of a sudden terrifyingly vulnerable. She is nonchalant, however. We get hopelessly lost in a suburb of New Delhi, going around in circles while she entertains me with anecdotes of being a judge at the Cannes film festival last year. I ask if she sees herself becoming a standard-bearer in the anti-globalisation movement? "Only if I can say something simple, something complicated and something magical," she says, her eyes gleaming with mischief
