Azadi - Arundhati Roy
accused of being either Maoist or Islamist terrorists. These terms have been defined so broadly that they have cometo include almost anyone who disagrees with government policy. In the latest batch of pre-election arrests, teachers,lawyers, activists, and writers have been jailed, charged with plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Modi. The plot isso ludicrous that a six-year-old could have improved on it. The fascists need to take some good fiction-writingcourses.Reporters Without Borders say that India is the fifth most dangerous place for journalists in the world, ranked justbelow Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Mexico. Here I must pause to thank PEN for the work it does to protectwriters and journalists who are or have been imprisoned, prosecuted, censored, and worse. From one day to the next,it could be any one of us that is in the line of fire. To know that there is an organization looking out for us is aconsolation.In India, those who’ve been jailed are the lucky ones. The less fortunate are dead. Gauri Lankesh, NarendraDabholkar, M. M. Kalburgi, and Govind Pansare, all critics of the Hindu far right, have been assassinated. Theirswere the high-profile killings. Scores of other activists using the Right to Information Act to uncover massivecorruption scandals have been killed or found dead in suspicious circumstances. Over the last five years, India hasdistinguished itself as a lynching nation. Muslims and Dalits have been publicly flogged and beaten to death byvigilante Hindu mobs in broad daylight, and the “lynch videos” then gleefully uploaded to YouTube. The violence isflagrant, open, and certainly not spontaneous. Although the violence against Muslims is not new and the violenceagainst Dalits is ancient, these lynchings have a clear ideological underpinning.The lynchers know that they have protection in the highest places. Protection not just from the government andthe prime minister but from the organization that controls them both—the far-right, proto-fascist RashtriyaSwayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the most secretive and most powerful organization in India. It was founded in 1925. Itsfounding ideologues were greatly influenced by European fascism—they openly praised Hitler and Mussolini, andcompared Indian Muslims to the “Jews of Germany.” The RSS has worked ceaselessly for ninety-five years towardhaving India formally declared a Hindu nation. Its declared enemies are Muslims, Christians, and Communists.The RSS runs a shadow government that functions through tens of thousands of shakhas (branches) and otherideologically affiliated organizations with different names—some of them astonishingly violent—spread across thecountry. Traditionally controlled by a sect of west coast Brahmins known as Chitpavan Brahmins, the RSS today haswhite supremacists and racists from the United States and Europe circling around it, writing in praise of Hinduism’sage-old practice of caste. It’s more accurately known as Brahminism—a brutal system of social hierarchy they envyfor its elaborate, institutionalized cruelty, which has survived more or less intact from ancient times. Brahminismalso has admirers in the most unexpected places. One of them, you will be saddened to know, was MohandasGandhi—who considered caste to be the “genius” of Hindu society. I have written at length about Gandhi’s attitudetoward caste and race in a book called The Doctor and the Saint , so I will not dwell on it now.Let me just leave you with this: at a speech at a missionary conference in Madras in 1916, he said:The vast organization of caste answered not only the religious wants of the community, but it answered too its political needs. The villagersmanaged their internal affairs through the caste system, and through it they dealt with any oppression from the ruling power or powers. It is notpossible to deny the organizing capability of a nation that was capable of producing the caste system its wonderful power of organization. 1India is fighting for her soul. Even if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) loses the elections—which, despite havingmore money than all the other political parties put together, despite its more or less complete control of themainstream media, it well might—it will not mean that we are out of danger. The RSS is chameleon-like, andmillipede-like, too, for it moves on a million legs. Capturing power with an absolute majority, as it did five yearsago, put motors on those legs. But merely losing an election will not prevent it from continuing its long walk to hell.It can change color when it has to, wear a mask of reason and inclusiveness when it needs to. It has proved its abilityto function as an underground organization as well as an overground one. It is a patient, hardworking beast that hasburrowed its way into every institution in the country—courts, universities, media outlets, security forces,intelligence services.If a new, non-BJP government is sworn in—most likely a fragile coalition—it is likely to be met by a ferociousonslaught of manufactured communal violence and false-flag attacks to which we have become accustomed. Therewill be cow carcasses discovered on highways, beef found in temples, and pigs thrown into mosques. When thecountry burns, the far right will once again present themselves to us as the only ones capable of running a “hardstate” and handling the problem. Will a polity that has been deeply polarized be able to see through these games?It’s hard to say.Much of this has been the subject of my writing, fiction as well as nonfiction, for several years.
§The God of Small Things , published in the summer of 1997, was the result of a search for a language and a form todescribe the world I had grown up in, to myself and to people I loved, some of whom were entirely unfamiliar withKerala. I had studied architecture, written screenplays, and now I wanted to write a novel. A novel that could onlybe a novel—not a novel that really wanted to be a film, or a manifesto, or sociological treatise of some kind. I wasastonished when some critics described it as a work of magical realism—how could that be? The setting of the book—the old house on the hill in Ayemenem, my grandmother’s pickle factory that I grew up in (I still have some of thejars and labels), the Meenachal River—all of it gritty reality to me, was exotic and magical to many Western critics.Fair enough. But I reserve the right to think that way about New York and London.Back home in Kerala, the reception was pretty unmagical. The Communist Party of India (Marxist), which hadruled Kerala on and off since 1959, was upset with what it considered a critique of the party in The God of SmallThings . I was quickly labeled anti-communist, a crying-talking-sleeping-walking Imperialist Plot. I had beencritical, it is true, and the sharp end of my critique was that the Left, by which I mean the various communist partiesin India, has been not just opaque to caste, but, more often than not, overtly casteist. The transgressive relationshipin the novel between Ammu (a Syrian Christian woman) and Velutha (a Dalit man) was viewed with consternation.The consternation had as much to do with the novel’s politics of caste as it did with gender. The portrayal of one ofthe main characters, Comrade K. N. M. Pillai, and his relationship with his wife, Kalyani, and of Ammu, a divorcedwoman who “combined the infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber,” “wholoved by night the man who her children loved by day,” was not received with applause and hallelujahs. Five malelawyers got together and filed a criminal case against me, accusing me of obscenity and “corrupting publicmorality.”There were factors outside of the novel that were swirling around too. My mother, Mary Roy, had won a case inthe Supreme Court that struck down the archaic 1916 Travancore Christian Succession Act that cut women out oftheir fathers’ property. Women could now inherit an equal share. This caused a great deal of anger. There was apalpable sense that mother and daughter needed to be taught a lesson. By the time the case came up for its third orfourth hearing, The God of Small Things had won the Booker Prize. That divided public opinion. A local Malayaliwoman, winning a prestigious international literary prize, was not something that could be easily dismissed—shouldshe be shunned or embraced? I was present in court with my lawyer, who had told me in confidence that he thoughtthat parts of my book were “quite obscene.” But, he said, according to the law, a work of art should be seen as awhole and since the whole book was not obscene, we stood a fighting chance. The judge took his seat and said,“Every time this case comes before me, I get chest pains.” He postponed the hearing. The judges who came afterhim did the same. Meanwhile people celebrated the non-transgressive aspects of the book—the language, theevocation of childhood. It’s still hard for many to look at the relationship between Ammu and Velutha withoutflinching a little. It took almost ten years before the case was dismissed.In March 1998, less than a year after the publication of The God of Small Things , for the first time in India’shistory, a BJP-led coalition formed the government at the center. The prime minister at the time, Atal BihariVajpayee, was a member of the RSS. Within weeks of taking office, he fulfilled a longstanding dream of the RSS byconducting a series of nuclear tests. Pakistan responded immediately with tests of its own. The nuclear tests were thebeginning of the journey toward the crazed rhetoric of nationalism that has become a normal form of public speechin India today. I was taken aback by the orgy of celebration that greeted the nuclear tests— including from the mostunexpected quarters. That was when I wrote my first essay, “The End of Imagination,” condemning the tests. I saidthat entering the nuclear race would colonize our imagination: “If protesting against having a nuclear bombimplanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national,” I wrote, “then I secede. I hereby declare myself a mobilerepublic.”I will leave you to imagine the reaction that followed.“The End of Imagination” was the first of what would turn out to be twenty years’ worth of nonfiction essays.They were years during which India was changing at lightning speed. For each essay, I searched for a form, forlanguage, for structure and narrative. Could I write as compellingly about irrigation as I could about love and lossand childhood? About the salinization of soil? About drainage? Dams? Crops? About structural adjustment andprivatization? About the per unit cost of electricity? About things that affect ordinary people’s lives? Not asreportage, but as a form of storytelling? Was it possible to turn these topics into literature? Literature for everybody—including for people who couldn’t read and write, but who had taught me how to think, and could be read to?I tried. And as the essays kept appearing, so did the five male lawyers (not the same ones, different ones, but theyseemed to hunt in packs). And so did the criminal cases, mostly for contempt of court. One of them ended in a very
- Page 3 and 4: AZADIFREEDOM. FASCISM. FICTION.
- Page 5 and 6: Published in 2020 byHaymarket Books
- Page 7 and 8: Table of ContentsIntroduction1. In
- Page 9 and 10: the police, attacked Muslims in wor
- Page 11 and 12: historian had tried to suggest; it
- Page 13 and 14: (literally) seduce Jesus at a party
- Page 15 and 16: me in ways I could never have imagi
- Page 17 and 18: He has a formidable repertoire of c
- Page 19 and 20: couplet by him—one of Mulaqat Ali
- Page 21 and 22: services. The graveyard becomes a p
- Page 23 and 24: The opposition has demanded a joint
- Page 25 and 26: CHAPTER THREEOur Captured, Wounded
- Page 27 and 28: declares that he has left the decis
- Page 29: nevertheless. Stories about the mas
- Page 33 and 34: CHAPTER FIVEThe Silence Is the Loud
- Page 35 and 36: there were any doubt earlier, it sh
- Page 37 and 38: “You must say it then,” I said.
- Page 39 and 40: India is not really a country. It i
- Page 41 and 42: —the Bahujan Samaj Party, Rashtri
- Page 43 and 44: York Times, and the Washington Post
- Page 45 and 46: and hard and intractable.The Indian
- Page 47 and 48: salaries. Once again, prejudice is
- Page 49 and 50: CHAPTER SEVENThe Graveyard Talks Ba
- Page 51 and 52: Kanhaiya Kumar, the charismatic you
- Page 53 and 54: Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India are
- Page 55 and 56: people with a profile, like me—wh
- Page 57 and 58: The Chief Minister with cold eyes a
- Page 59 and 60: the official story. Based on wisps
- Page 61 and 62: have the requisite documents—incl
- Page 63 and 64: It lost anyway. So then there was p
- Page 65 and 66: one is no different. It is a portal
- Page 67 and 68: NotesINTRODUCTION1 . Anumeha Yadav,
- Page 69 and 70: kashmir/articleshow/70583869.cms .1
- Page 71 and 72: 1 . See chapter 6.2 . Roy, Ministry
- Page 73 and 74: Azadi, 1 -2, 43BJP and, 143Kashmir
- Page 75 and 76: Daesh (ISIS), 67Dakhani, Wali, 39 -
- Page 77 and 78: Gujarat, 95 , 102 , 1642002 massacr
- Page 79 and 80: Jamia Millia Islamia University, 14
accused of being either Maoist or Islamist terrorists. These terms have been defined so broadly that they have come
to include almost anyone who disagrees with government policy. In the latest batch of pre-election arrests, teachers,
lawyers, activists, and writers have been jailed, charged with plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Modi. The plot is
so ludicrous that a six-year-old could have improved on it. The fascists need to take some good fiction-writing
courses.
Reporters Without Borders say that India is the fifth most dangerous place for journalists in the world, ranked just
below Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Mexico. Here I must pause to thank PEN for the work it does to protect
writers and journalists who are or have been imprisoned, prosecuted, censored, and worse. From one day to the next,
it could be any one of us that is in the line of fire. To know that there is an organization looking out for us is a
consolation.
In India, those who’ve been jailed are the lucky ones. The less fortunate are dead. Gauri Lankesh, Narendra
Dabholkar, M. M. Kalburgi, and Govind Pansare, all critics of the Hindu far right, have been assassinated. Theirs
were the high-profile killings. Scores of other activists using the Right to Information Act to uncover massive
corruption scandals have been killed or found dead in suspicious circumstances. Over the last five years, India has
distinguished itself as a lynching nation. Muslims and Dalits have been publicly flogged and beaten to death by
vigilante Hindu mobs in broad daylight, and the “lynch videos” then gleefully uploaded to YouTube. The violence is
flagrant, open, and certainly not spontaneous. Although the violence against Muslims is not new and the violence
against Dalits is ancient, these lynchings have a clear ideological underpinning.
The lynchers know that they have protection in the highest places. Protection not just from the government and
the prime minister but from the organization that controls them both—the far-right, proto-fascist Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the most secretive and most powerful organization in India. It was founded in 1925. Its
founding ideologues were greatly influenced by European fascism—they openly praised Hitler and Mussolini, and
compared Indian Muslims to the “Jews of Germany.” The RSS has worked ceaselessly for ninety-five years toward
having India formally declared a Hindu nation. Its declared enemies are Muslims, Christians, and Communists.
The RSS runs a shadow government that functions through tens of thousands of shakhas (branches) and other
ideologically affiliated organizations with different names—some of them astonishingly violent—spread across the
country. Traditionally controlled by a sect of west coast Brahmins known as Chitpavan Brahmins, the RSS today has
white supremacists and racists from the United States and Europe circling around it, writing in praise of Hinduism’s
age-old practice of caste. It’s more accurately known as Brahminism—a brutal system of social hierarchy they envy
for its elaborate, institutionalized cruelty, which has survived more or less intact from ancient times. Brahminism
also has admirers in the most unexpected places. One of them, you will be saddened to know, was Mohandas
Gandhi—who considered caste to be the “genius” of Hindu society. I have written at length about Gandhi’s attitude
toward caste and race in a book called The Doctor and the Saint , so I will not dwell on it now.
Let me just leave you with this: at a speech at a missionary conference in Madras in 1916, he said:
The vast organization of caste answered not only the religious wants of the community, but it answered too its political needs. The villagers
managed their internal affairs through the caste system, and through it they dealt with any oppression from the ruling power or powers. It is not
possible to deny the organizing capability of a nation that was capable of producing the caste system its wonderful power of organization. 1
India is fighting for her soul. Even if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) loses the elections—which, despite having
more money than all the other political parties put together, despite its more or less complete control of the
mainstream media, it well might—it will not mean that we are out of danger. The RSS is chameleon-like, and
millipede-like, too, for it moves on a million legs. Capturing power with an absolute majority, as it did five years
ago, put motors on those legs. But merely losing an election will not prevent it from continuing its long walk to hell.
It can change color when it has to, wear a mask of reason and inclusiveness when it needs to. It has proved its ability
to function as an underground organization as well as an overground one. It is a patient, hardworking beast that has
burrowed its way into every institution in the country—courts, universities, media outlets, security forces,
intelligence services.
If a new, non-BJP government is sworn in—most likely a fragile coalition—it is likely to be met by a ferocious
onslaught of manufactured communal violence and false-flag attacks to which we have become accustomed. There
will be cow carcasses discovered on highways, beef found in temples, and pigs thrown into mosques. When the
country burns, the far right will once again present themselves to us as the only ones capable of running a “hard
state” and handling the problem. Will a polity that has been deeply polarized be able to see through these games?
It’s hard to say.
Much of this has been the subject of my writing, fiction as well as nonfiction, for several years.
Change language