Azadi - Arundhati Roy

nevertheless. Stories about the massive corporate attack on forests, rivers, crops, seeds, on land, on farmers, labor
laws, on policy-making itself. And yes, on the post-9/11 US and NATO attacks on country after country. Most were
stories about people who have fought against these attacks—specific stories, about specific rivers, specific
mountains, specific corporations, specific people’s movements, all of them being specifically crushed in specific
ways. These were the real climate warriors, local people with a global message, who had understood the crisis
before it was recognized as one. And yet, they were consistently portrayed as villains—the anti-national
impediments to progress and development. The former prime minister of India Manmohan Singh, a free-market
evangelist, called the guerrillas—mostly indigenous people, Adivasis—fighting corporate mining projects in the
forests of central India the “single largest internal security challenge.” A war called “Operation Green Hunt” was
declared on them. The forests were flooded with soldiers whose enemies were the poorest people in the world. It’s
been no different elsewhere— in Africa, Australia, Latin America.
And now, irony of ironies, a consensus is building that climate change is the world’s single largest security
challenge. Increasingly the vocabulary around it is being militarized. And no doubt very soon its victims will
become the “enemies” in the new war without end. Calls for a climate “emergency,” although well meaning, could
hasten the process that has already begun. The pressure is already on to move the debate from the UNFCC (United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) to the United Nations Security Council, in other words, to
exclude most of the world and place decision making straight back into the den of the same old suspects. Once
again, the Global North, the creators of the problem, will see to it that they profit from the solution that they
propose. A solution whose genius will, no doubt, lie deep in the heart of the “market” and involve more selling and
buying, more consuming, and more profiteering by fewer and fewer people. In other words, more capitalism.
When the essays were first published (first in mass-circulation magazines, then on the internet, and finally as
books), they were viewed with baleful suspicion, at least in some quarters, often by those who didn’t necessarily
even disagree with the politics. The writing sat at an angle to what is conventionally thought of as literature.
Balefulness was an understandable reaction, particularly among the taxonomy-inclined, because they couldn’t
decide exactly what this was—pamphlet or polemic, academic or journalistic writing, travelogue, or just plain
literary adventurism? To some, it simply did not count as writing: “Oh, why have you stopped writing? We’re
waiting for your next book.” Others imagined that I was just a pen for hire. All manner of offers came my way:
“Darling, I loved that piece you wrote on the dams, could you do one for me on child abuse?” (This actually
happened.) I was sternly lectured (mostly by upper-caste men) about how to write, the subjects I should write about,
and the tone I should take.
But in other places—let’s call them places off the highway— the essays were quickly translated into other Indian
languages, printed as pamphlets, distributed for free in forests and river valleys, in villages that were under attack,
on university campuses where students were fed up of being lied to. Because these readers, out there on the front
lines, already being singed by the spreading fire, had an entirely different idea of what literature is or should be.
I mention this because it taught me that the place for literature is built by writers and readers. It’s a fragile place
in some ways, but an indestructible one. When it’s broken, we rebuild it. Because we need shelter. I very much like
the idea of literature that is needed. Literature that provides shelter. Shelter of all kinds.
Over time, an unspoken compromise was arrived at. I began to be called a “writer-activist.” Implicit in this
categorization was that the fiction was not political and the essays were not literary.
I remember sitting in a lecture hall in a college in Hyderabad in front of an audience of five or six hundred
students. On my left, chairing the event, was the vice-chancellor of the university. On my right, a professor of
poetry. The vice-chancellor whispered in my ear, “You shouldn’t spend any more time on fiction. Your political
writing is the thing to concentrate on.” The professor of poetry whispered, “When will you get back to writing
fiction? That is your true calling. This other stuff you do is just ephemeral.”
I have never felt that my fiction and nonfiction were warring factions battling for suzerainty. They aren’t the
same certainly, but trying to pin down the difference between them is actually harder than I imagined. Fact and
fiction are not converse. One is not necessarily truer than the other, more factual than the other, or more real than the
other. Or even, in my case, more widely read than the other. All I can say is that I feel the difference in my body
when I’m writing.
Sitting between the two professors, I enjoyed their contradictory advice. I sat there smiling, thinking of the first
message I received from John Berger. It was a beautiful handwritten letter, from a writer who had been my hero for
years: “Your fiction and nonfiction—they walk you around the world like your two legs.” That settled it for me.
Whatever the case that was being built against me was, it didn’t—or at least hasn’t yet—come to fruition. I’m
still here, standing on my two writing legs, speaking to you. But my lecturer friend is in jail, charged with
participating in anti-national activity. India’s prisons are packed tight with political prisoners— most of them