Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction by Arundhati Roy was my first of 2022. It consists of nine stand-alone essays, written between early 2018 and early 2020 originally delivered in India, Britain or the US.
‘In What Language Does Rain Fall Over Tormented Cities?’ formulates novel writing as an art of translation. While narrating the story of the separation of Hindi and Urdu, it demonstrates how her ‘novels are written in one language but imagined in several languages’. Devanagari, originally known as Babhni, was the script of the Brahmins, and had, like Sanskrit, been jealously guarded, its purity protected from the 'polluting influence' of lower castes, who had for centuries been denied the right to learn Sanskrit. Non Brahmin caste like the Kayasthas used Kaithi. Slogans are performances directed outwords - irrespective of language, Communist party slogan, 'Swadandriyam, Janadhipathyam, Socialism, Zindabad! (Freedom, Democracy, Socialism, Long live! - That's Sanskrit, Malayalam, English and Urdu) . To the Pablo Neruda's question, which is the title of this essay, her answer, is 'the language of translation'.
Election Season in a dangerous Democracy speaks about demonetisation, Make in India, assassination of Gauri Lankesh and others, educational institutions being dismantled, distress in agriculture sector, dilution of the legal protection for minority groups, Bhima-Koregaon - how the vulnerable are being cordoned off and silenced. The vociferous are being incarcerated.
Our Captured, Wounded Hearts speak about attack by Adil Ahmad Dar in Pulwama - Kashmir on 14th Feb. 2019. Lakhs have ben killed in Kashmir in conflicts, disappeared and tortured over the years. Air Force wing commander Abinandan Varthaman was captured by Pakistan and released based on the protection of their rights under the Geneva Convention, and access to the ICRC. Kashmiris should be given a chance to freely and fearlessly tell the world what they are fighting for and what they really want. It is the real theatre of unspeakable violence and moral corrosion that can spin us into violence and nuclear war at any moment.
‘The Language of Literature’ ruminates on her own experience of being a writer during these times, particularly in India. These are indeed worth our time. She speaks about fiction and non-fiction not being same, but it is difficult to describe the differences. They are not converser. One is not necessarily truer than the other, more factual than the other, or more real than the other. She receives contradictory opinions and advises from people on her writings, and what she should pursue, and with smile she thinks of the advise received from John Berger: "Your fiction and non-fiction - they walk you around the world like your two legs." She describes her experience in writing them, and says "Novels can bring their authors to the brink of madness. Novels can shelter their authors, too.
“What India has done in Kashmir over the last 30 years,” she writes in the essay 'The Silence Is the Loudest Sound', “is unforgivable. An estimated 70,000 people – civilians, militants and security forces – have been killed in the conflict. Thousands have been ‘disappeared’, and tens of thousands have passed through torture chambers that dot the valley like a network of small-scale Abu Ghraibs.” "Today Kashmir is one of the most, or perhaps the most, densely militarized zone in the world."
In 'Intimations of an Ending' she talks of the Rise and Rise of the Hindu Nation, for example, she reads the growing popularity of Hindutva, its strategies of warmongering and scapegoating and the autocratic style with which Modi governs as, very plainly, a kind of fascism, a kind of “tin-pot authoritarianism” that resembles, according to her, the dysfunction of Nazi Germany. "The violence of inclusion and the violence of exclusion are precursors of a convulsion that could alter the foundation of India, and rearrange its meaning and its place in the world. She calls out what she sees as the absurdity of a “doctrine of One Nation, One Language, One Religion, One Constitution” being imposed on a region that is “not a country”, but rather a “continent” – “more complex and diverse, with more languages – 780 at last count, excluding dialects… than all of Europe”. It talks in length about Assam, of which I think will need a separate post by itself.
“I have often caught myself wondering,” she writes in 'The Graveyard Talks Back', “if I were to be incarcerated or driven underground, would it liberate my writing? Would what I write become simpler, more lyrical perhaps, and less negotiated?” "The foundation of today's fascism, the unacceptable fake history of Hindu nationalism, rests on a deeper foundation of another, apparently more acceptable, more sophisticated set of fake histories that elide the stories of caste, of women, and a range of other genders - and of how those stories intersect below the surface of the grand narrative of class and capital. To challenge fascism means to challenge all this. " " A precarious solidarity is evolving between Muslims and Ambedkarites and followers of other anti-caste leaders like Jotiba and Savitribai Phule, Sant Ravidas and Birsa Munda, as well as a new generation of young leftists who, unlike the older generation, place caste alongside class at the centre of their worldview. It's still brittle, still full or material and ideological contradictions, still full of suspicion and resentment, but it's the only hope we have. " "Assassination is the extreme end of the spectrum, Elsewhere on it are threats, arrests, beatings and if you are a woman, fake videos and character assassination. She speaks of what one Musa told her " One day Kashmir will make India self-destruct in the same way. You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You're not destroying us. You are constructing us. It's yourselves that you are destroying. The destruction - it has begun. And, yes, if in a dream you've eaten fish, it means you've eaten fish.
In 'There is Fire in the Ducts, The System is failing' she speaks of Justice Loya, Babu Bajrangi convicted for Naroda Patiya, Gujarat 2002, NPR-NRC-CAA, massacres - Delhi, we need people who are prepared to be unpopular, we have work to do and world to win.
"Who can use the term 'gone viral' now without shuddering a little?" thus begins 'The Pandemic is a Portal' . We look at everything and everyone with doubt, question. She speaks of all that has happened during the pandemic and concludes by saying " Whatever it is, Covid - 19 has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to 'normality', trying to stich our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. "...."We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
The essays, cover mainly the contemporary political turbulence in India — mob lynching, attacks on minorities, the Kashmir problem, the crisis in Assam, demonetisation, CAA-NPR-NRC, the arrest of activists, the conspiracy of Pulwama and Balakot attacks, and the mismanagement of the pandemic, among others in a beautiful, matured language of her a masterpiece.
And the back cover has 'What lies ahead? Reimagining the world. Only that. '
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