Arundhati Roy: Stories ‘Must Not Lose Their Wilderness’

Arundhati Roy, whose books include the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things along with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and My Seditious Heart, spoke with writer Siddhartha Deb in May at Harlem’s Apollo Theater as part of PEN America’s World Voices Festival. The following is adapted from that conversation.

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Siddhartha Deb: Let’s start with the most perceptive critics mentioned in your lecture: the police! When arresting people found with copies of your work, the police have said that for young, impressionable people to read you is to go down the wrong path. In other words, you’re a writer who creates the wrong path. You also talk about being labeled a writer-activist. And then you have people whispering in your ear that you should either write about politics, or about fiction… What is it about your writing that constantly makes, largely men, but a lot of people, want to correct your course? What is it about your writing that makes them think of it as the wrong path?

Arundhati Roy: You must ask them! I mean, I’m sure a lot of women in the audience will agree that it’s not just me that gets advice like this. Maybe it’s something about our bodies. When I was younger and first started writing, I prevented myself from reacting to the endless advice, and just kept doing what I wanted to do. But now things are changing, everybody’s in flux, and everybody’s talking, advising, telling everyone else what to do. It’s OK. I don’t mind now…

SD: But what is it that makes you love both fiction and nonfiction equally? For instance, let’s talk about The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and the menacing intelligence official you created, and whom you found to be sitting in your head, almost as if he were writing you. What makes you want to tackle that, on the one hand, this openness to imagined characters in fiction, while at the same time spending a tremendous amount of time doing research, gathering facts and data, as a nonfiction writer. What draws you to these opposites?

AR: I don’t know, truly. I think it’s the basic DNA of a writer or a storyteller that one seeks understanding, one is curious. One of the things that’s peculiar to India—it’s such a stratified society in terms of caste, language, religion, ethnicity and so on. A lot of the celebrated, well known writers including myself—ultimately, unless we make the effort to drop through the trap door, we cannot understand the place we live in. Caste in particular is so stratified. People are just locked into their little airtight containers. I, because I am such a mix; it’s not so easy to pinpoint me, I’m such a mongrel in so many ways, caste, religion and ethnicity—I have a little latitude.

Traveling, arguing, or, for example, even going into Kashmir—if you are Indian, people don’t trust you there, for obvious reasons. But my writing earns me trust. My writing lets me in there. My real royalties, I feel, is this. The fact that I can go to places that are usually unwelcoming and, because of what I’ve written, be embraced and trusted and invited to stay for lunch. Curiosity, I’d say, the answer to your question about what draws me to things and people and places. A longing to understand. I can’t just walk down a road in Delhi and look at the people around me and think, this is a postman, this is a guard, this is a baker—they all have stories, they all come from somewhere, and I want to know who they are, where they came from, how they came, and why.

There are so many millions of people who have been displaced, driven from their villages and homes in India. Just because they live within the national borders of a country, it doesn’t mean they are not refugees, or that the trauma of displacement hasn’t taken place. To me, as a writer, I like to know. I like to get my bearings. And that gets me into trouble, and it also takes me places.

SD: We didn’t know each other when we were both in Delhi, but I remember seeing you being celebrated in the media for The God of Small Things. You were this very famous person, and then in 1998, when the BJP won the elections, there was this wave of nationalism and militarism in the country. And you decide to publish this essay called The End of Imagination and it was like a counterpunch, a slap in the face of nationalism. But it was an unusual decision to take. What made you want to take on Indian nationalism when you were being celebrated as one of the great Indian icons of writing?

AR: Precisely that. At the time I was on the covers of magazines because I had won the Booker prize. Within months of that the far right BJP came to power in coalition and conducted a series of nuclear tests. There was an orgy of nationalism, of celebration. It was automatically assumed that I was one of the people on the national pride parade. I was presented as this other new thing that India has to offer the world—beauty queens, Booker winners, nuclear bombs, all of that. I was deeply uncomfortable with that. Because I was so much in the public eye at that point, I understood that saying nothing was as political as saying something. I was being included in something I didn’t want to be included in …. I hadn’t set out to be that person, but I had become that person. So, to say nothing automatically meant that you were willing to go along with it.

SD: You went on this journey of describing the protests against the Narmada dam, the protests against bauxite mining in Niyamgiri, the protests against military occupation in Kashmir. Essentially, for 20 years you’ve tracked the history of India. So how do we connect that to the bigger question of climate change and writing and power? In your lecture you said that literature is built by readers and writers. How do we connect your deeply South Asian subjects to your being read here in America?

AR: The God of Small Things, is set in a village in South India, where I grew up. I would’ve thought that my readership would have been pretty local, more there than here, but it wasn’t. I think that readers have a radar. You don’t have to cater to them. People read things and they extrapolate and understand. One of the things I decided on after The God of Small Things was published, was that I didn’t want to be the “interpreter” of the east to the west. I didn’t want to end up having to explain things in some sociological way to western audiences. I figured they would have to walk that extra mile if they wanted to, or not. It would be up to them.

For example, when I was reading [this lecture] today, I’m sure that you understood the connections in your head between the RSS in India, the Ku Klux Klan here, between racism and caste, between White supremacy and Hindu Nationalsim. The caste system is probably the most ancient institutionalized form of racism. People understand. And I believe that when you’re really specific about what you know, it’s better than trying to generalize for people, because they don’t want that. Well, I don’t know what people want, but I just write the way that I write. I remember the Estonian translator of The God of Small Things saying to me, “But this book is about my childhood—How did you know about my childhood?” The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has been translated into 51 languages. In Poland, someone told me, “This is about Poland.” I think readers are as mysterious as writers.

SD: With childhood, I imagine, it’s easier for readers to identify with that. But I’m also interested in the amount of work that’s gone into your nonfiction writing and into finding a form for it. You talk about a need to find a way to tell a story about dams. Dams involve geology, water, irrigation, which are not exactly the subjects one thinks of, as a writer or as a reader of novels. But I also wanted to connect that with the question of the sense of crisis that we live in, this age of climate change, that this is all somehow connected. What advice do you have for other people who are writing or want to become writers, wherever they are? How do you go about writing about migrants, immigration, or the climate change crisis? How do you do it as a writer?

AR: I guess there aren’t any rules. I’m terrible at giving advice. But I think that in my case, I feel humiliated if I don’t understand. So often, when you look at a conflict … in one of my essays I’ve written, maybe eight or nine years ago—it was about the mountains of Orissa, in Eastern India, the flat-topped bauxite mountains, the site of bauxite. The value of those mountains mean such different things to different people. To a mining company, it is just the value of the bauxite that you can take out. But to the people who live there, they see and understand that bauxite is a porous rock, and therefore it functions as a kind of water tank, and it holds the water that irrigates and sustains life. The bauxite is valueless outside the mountain.

That essay ended with the question “Can we leave the bauxite in the mountain?” because ultimately, unless we develop an imagination that can leave the bauxite in the mountain, we’re doomed. If you don’t have it, at least don’t wipe out the people who do have that imagination. So one of the things that continues to fascinate me about India, even though that’s where I was born and grew up and lived, is that there is still a wilderness there, a wilderness of the imagination, an understanding of a different way of living, and that is what’s under assault.

SD: This reminds me of the kind of conversations in North America around Standing Rock, things we’ve learned about from Native American comrades. Here in the United States and Canada, they’re having these similar debates against the extraction of fossil fuels from indigenous lands. I wanted to ask you to talk about these lines in the lecture that I really liked. When you talk about The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, you talk about the reader—it’s a world where the reader arrives as a new immigrant. And I liked that metaphor, of a reader a little frightened, a bit intimidated, and plenty excited. Is this what you’re telling us in the next lines? “The only way to know it would be to walk through it, get lost, and learn to live in it. Learn to greet people, small and big. Learn to love the craft.”

AR: As I said in the lecture, I studied architecture. I was always very interested in the idea of cities, of urban planning. Obviously, we’re not talking about the setting of the book, but the structure of the novel. I thought, look at this city, ancient, broken, modern, planned, unplanned. Yet always it has that form. Sometimes I feel novels are also being domesticated. Too beautiful, too contained, too well crafted. Like products. They must not lose their wilderness. I wanted my novel to be like the wild, untamed city I live in.

Photo via PEN America: 2019 World Voices Festival.