My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  My unfaltering partners in this endeavor were N. Ram, then editor of Frontline, and the late Vinod Mehta, editor of Outlook, two of the best mass market news magazines in India at the time. Almost every essay in this book has been published by one or both of them. Regardless of what I wrote, and its content or length, Mehta never blinked. Not when I was cutting and blunt about an incumbent prime minister; not even when I expressed a proscribed opinion about that most contentious subject of all: India’s military occupation of Kashmir. Toward the end of his career as the editor, he dedicated an entire issue of Outlook to “Walking with the Comrades,” my account of the weeks I spent with Maoist guerrillas in the forests of Bastar. Our unspoken pact was that he would publish everything I wrote, and that I would never complain about the insults—pages and pages of them—that he published with glee in the letters section in the weeks that followed (the early avatar of trolling). Sometimes, the insults would appear before I wrote. In anticipation of what I might write. I learned to wear them as a badge of honor.

  The first essay in this book, “The End of Imagination,” was a response to the series of nuclear tests conducted in 1998 by the coalition government led by the BJP. The tests, the manner in which they were announced, and the enthusiasm with which they were celebrated—including by academics, editors, artists, liberals, and secular nationalists—ushered in a dangerous new public discourse of aggressive majoritarian nationalism—officially sanctioned now, by the government itself. My horror about nuclear war between India and Pakistan becoming a real possibility was matched by my sorrow over what this ugly new language would do to our imaginations, to our idea of ourselves. Looking back now, I see that the nuclear tests magnified every crack and fissure of an already fractured and divided polity. The danger of an all-out nuclear war that jeopardizes the planet cannot be minimized. Almost exactly twenty years after the nuclear tests, in February 2019, after a tragic suicide bomb attack in Kashmir, India and Pakistan became the first two nuclear powers in history to bomb each other.

  The September 11, 2001, attacks and the US-led “War on Terror” came as a gift to fascists all over the world. The rising tide of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) was quick to harness the headwind of international Islamophobia that followed in its wake. Just a few weeks after 9/11, the BJP suddenly removed its sitting chief minister and installed an unelected political novice in his place. His name was Narendra Modi. He had for years been an activist of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist cultural guild that has long demanded the dissolution of the Indian Constitution and the declaration of India as a Hindu Nation. Four months into Modi’s tenure as chief minister, in February 2002, following the mysterious burning of a railway coach in which fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims were burned to death, Gujarat witnessed a pogrom against Muslims in which 2,000 people were publicly slaughtered by Hindu vigilante mobs. Following the massacre, Modi announced state elections, which he won. He remained the chief minister of Gujarat for the next twelve years. At a formal meeting of Indian industrialists that took place in Gujarat soon after the pogrom, several major corporate heads, including Mukesh Ambani, enthusiastically endorsed Modi as a future prime ministerial candidate. In 2014, after an opulent election campaign, the like of which India had never seen, and another orchestrated massacre in Muzaffarnagar, UP, the RSS’s main man became prime minister of India, with a huge majority in parliament.

  The RSS, Hindutva’s mothership, was founded in 1924. It is the most powerful organization in India today. It has thousands of local branches and hundreds of thousands of dedicated “volunteers” all over the country. Its people are now in place in almost every institution in the country. It has penetrated the army, intelligence services, courts, high schools, universities, banks. The institutions that make up what Turks call the “deep state” are either entirely under its control or heavily influenced by it. India has become a country in which writers and intellectuals are assassinated in cold blood, and lynch mobs that regularly beat Muslims to death roam through cities and villages, assured of impunity. RSS ideology—a peculiarly Indian brand of fascism—has transcended election cycles and will continue to be an existential threat to the fabric of the country, regardless of which political party is in power.

  Writing about the coalescing of neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism in India was to run one kind of gauntlet. Writing about US imperialism in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was a quite different enterprise. When I published “The Algebra of Infinite Justice,” “War Is Peace,” and “The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire,” I fully expected a good number of the million copies of The God of Small Things that had sold in the United States to end up in bonfires on the streets. I had followed what happened to people like Susan Sontag—and indeed almost anybody else who expressed a point of view that was different from an establishment one. Yes, I did receive one copy of my book, returned with a message of quivering outrage. But there were no bonfires. When I traveled to the United States to speak at the Lensic Theater in New Mexico on the first anniversary of 9/11 (“Come September”) and at the Riverside Church soon after the invasion of Iraq (“Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free)”), I was at first terrified and later thrilled by the large crowds that showed up. They didn’t represent mainstream opinion. Of course not. But they existed. They came, despite the malignant atmosphere of aggressive nationalism we all had to contend with during those days. (Who can forget the George W. Bushism that ruled the day: “If you’re not with us, you are with the terrorists.”) It was a good lesson in seditious thinking. I learned never to lazily conflate countries, their government’s policies, and the people who live in them. I learned to think from first principles—ones that predate the existence of the nation-state.

  The longest section of this book, “The Doctor and the Saint,” is about the debate between Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and Mohandas Gandhi, India’s two most iconic figures. It was first published as an introduction to an annotated edition of Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar’s searing and legendary 1936 text. Caste, that ancient iron grid of institutionalized inequality, continues to be the engine that runs modern India, and the Ambedkar-Gandhi debate is among the most contentious subjects of the day. As Dalit movements gather momentum, Ambedkar, more than anybody else, living or dead, occupies center stage in contemporary Indian politics. He ought to be read, heard, and studied in all his complexity. As for the words and deeds of Gandhi, especially on caste, class, race, and gender—they could do with some serious scrutiny. “The Doctor and the Saint” is probably the closest thing to a densely footnoted academic text as I will ever write.

  The last two essays in this collection, “The Great Indian Rape Trick” (Parts I and II), are actually the earliest essays I published. I wrote them in 1994, years before The God of Small Things was published. We decided to put them in the appendix because they are a little different from the rest of the essays thematically. They’re about the celebrated film Bandit Queen, which claims to be the true story of Phoolan Devi, whose gang ruled the Chambal valley for years and was never caught. Phoolan Devi eventually surrendered voluntarily and served time in prison. The film incensed me because it took the story of a most extraordinary woman and portrayed her as someone who had no volition, someone whose life had been entirely shaped by men and what they had done to her. Outfitted in a noisy, rustling costume of faux feminist concern, it turned India’s most famous bandit into history’s most famous victim of rape.

  I saw Bandit Queen at a premier screening to which Phoolan Devi had not been invited. “She’s too much trouble,” one of the film’s producers said to me when I asked. I went to see her after reading the next morning’s papers, which reported that she was upset with the filmmakers, that she had not given them permission to show her being raped, and that the explicit rape scenes, screened to jeering male audiences, made her feel she had been raped all over again. In her prison diaries, which the film claimed to be b
ased on, she had alluded to rape only very elliptically. It made me wonder: Should anyone have the right to restage the rape of a living woman without her consent?

  When the real Phoolan Devi spoke up, it was extraordinary how the very same people who celebrated the film were willing to turn on her, dismissing her as an avaricious and immoral extortionist. Why should she be trusted? Was she not, after all, a bandit, a woman of loose morals—and “low-caste,” too? Twenty-five years have gone by since I wrote these essays. Not one iota of my anger has diminished.

  On July 25, 2001, masked gunmen assassinated Phoolan Devi outside her house in Delhi. It is not my case that she was killed because of the film. But she was killed the way I worried she would be. As I wrote then, “[T]he film seriously jeopardizes Phoolan Devi’s life. It passes judgments that ought to be passed in Courts of Law. Not in Cinema Halls. The threads that connect Truth to Half-Truths to Lies could very quickly tighten into a noose around Phoolan Devi’s neck. Or put a bullet through her head. Or a knife in her back.”

  Yes, #SheToo.

  This book of broken promises goes to press around the time that an era we think we understand is coming to a close. Capitalism’s gratuitous wars and sanctioned greed have jeopardized the life of the planet and filled it with refugees. It has done more damage to the earth in the last one hundred or so years than countless millennia that went before. In the last thirty years, the scale of damage has accelerated exponentially. The World Wildlife Fund reports that the population of vertebrates—mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles—has declined by 60 percent in the last forty years. We have sentenced ourselves to an era of sudden catastrophes—wild fires and strange storms, earthquakes and flash floods. To guide us through it all, we have the steady hand of new imperialists in China, white supremacists in the White House, and benevolent neo-Nazis on the streets of Europe.

  In India, Hindu fascists are marching to demand a grand temple where the mosque they demolished once stood. Farmers deep in debt are marching for their very survival. The unemployed are marching for jobs.

  More temples? Easy. But more jobs?

  As we know, the age of Artificial Intelligence is upon us. Human labor will soon become largely redundant. Humans will consume. But many will not be required to participate in (or be remunerated for) economic activity.

  So, the question before us is, who—or what—will rule the world? And what will become of so many surplus people? The next thirty years will be unlike anything that we as a species have ever encountered. To prepare us for what’s coming, to give us tools with which to think about the unthinkable, old ideas—whether they come from the left, the right, or from the spectrum somewhere in between—will not do.

  We will need algorithms that show us how to snatch the scepters from our slow, stupid, maddened kings.

  Until then, beloved reader, I leave you with…. my seditious heart.

  Arundhati Roy

  December 2018

  THE END OF IMAGINATION

  “The desert shook,” the government of India informed us (its people).

  “The whole mountain turned white,” the government of Pakistan replied.

  By afternoon the wind had fallen silent over Pokhran. At 3:45 p.m., the timer detonated the three devices. Around 200 to 300 meters deep in the earth, the heat generated was equivalent to a million degrees centigrade—as hot as temperatures on the sun. Instantly, rocks weighing around a thousand tons, a mini-mountain underground, vaporized … shock waves from the blast began to lift a mound of earth the size of a football field by several meters. One scientist on seeing it said, “I can now believe stories of Lord Krishna lifting a hill” (India Today).

  May 1998. It’ll go down in history books, provided of course we have history books to go down in. Provided, of course, we have a future. There’s nothing new or original left to be said about nuclear weapons. There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has, over the years, already been made by other people in other parts of the world, and made passionately, eloquently, and knowledgeably.

  I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. So those of you who are willing: let’s pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes, and speak our secondhand lines in this sad secondhand play. But let’s not forget that the stakes we’re playing for are huge. Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children’s children. Of everything we love. We have to reach within ourselves and find the strength to think. To fight.

  Once again we are pitifully behind the times—not just scientifically and technologically (ignore the hollow claims), but more pertinently in our ability to grasp the true nature of nuclear weapons. Our Comprehension of the Horror Department is hopelessly obsolete. Here we are, all of us in India and in Pakistan, discussing the finer points of politics, and foreign policy, behaving for all the world as though our governments have just devised a newer, bigger bomb, a sort of immense hand grenade with which they will annihilate the enemy (each other) and protect us from all harm. How desperately we want to believe that. What wonderful, willing, well-behaved, gullible subjects we have turned out to be. The rest of humanity (yes, yes, I know, I know, but let’s ignore them for the moment. They forfeited their votes a long time ago), the rest of the rest of humanity may not forgive us, but then the rest of the rest of humanity, depending on who fashions its views, may not know what a tired, dejected, heartbroken people we are. Perhaps it doesn’t realize how urgently we need a miracle. How deeply we yearn for magic.

  If only, if only, nuclear war was just another kind of war. If only it was about the usual things—nations and territories, gods and histories. If only those of us who dread it are just worthless moral cowards who are not prepared to die in defense of our beliefs. If only nuclear war was the kind of war in which countries battle countries and men battle men. But it isn’t. If there is a nuclear war, our foes will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the earth herself. The very elements—the sky, the air, the land, the wind and water—will all turn against us. Their wrath will be terrible.

  Our cities and forests, our fields and villages will burn for days. Rivers will turn to poison. The air will become fire. The wind will spread the flames. When everything there is to burn has burned and the fires die, smoke will rise and shut out the sun. The earth will be enveloped in darkness. There will be no day. Only interminable night. Temperatures will drop to far below freezing and nuclear winter will set in. Water will turn into toxic ice. Radioactive fallout will seep through the earth and contaminate groundwater. Most living things, animal and vegetable, fish and fowl, will die. Only rats and cockroaches will breed and multiply and compete with foraging, relict humans for what little food there is.

  What shall we do then, those of us who are still alive? Burned and blind and bald and ill, carrying the cancerous carcasses of our children in our arms, where shall we go? What shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we breathe?

  The head of the Health, Environment, and Safety Group of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in Bombay has a plan. He declared in an interview (Pioneer, April 24, 1998) that India could survive nuclear war. His advice is that if there is a nuclear war, we take the same safety measures as the ones that scientists have recommended in the event of accidents at nuclear plants.

  Take iodine pills, he suggests. And other steps such as remaining indoors, consuming only stored water and food and avoiding milk. Infants should be given powdered milk. “People in the danger zone should immediately go to the ground floor and if possible to the basement.”

  What do you do with these levels of lunacy? What do you do if you’re trapped in an asylum and the doctors are all dangerously deranged?

  Ignore it, it’s just a novelist’s naiveté, they’ll tell you, Doomsday Prophet hyperbole. It’ll never come to that. There will be no war. Nuclear weapons are about peace, not wa
r. “Deterrence” is the buzzword of the people who like to think of themselves as hawks. (Nice birds, those. Cool. Stylish. Predatory. Pity there won’t be many of them around after the war. “Extinction” is a word we must try and get used to.) Deterrence is an old thesis that has been resurrected and is being recycled with added local flavor. The Theory of Deterrence cornered the credit for having prevented the Cold War from turning into a Third World War. The only immutable fact about the Third World War is that if there’s going to be one, it will be fought after the Second World War. In other words, there’s no fixed schedule. In other words, we still have time. And perhaps the pun (the Third World War) is prescient. True, the Cold War is over, but let’s not be hoodwinked by the ten-year lull in nuclear posturing. It was just a cruel joke. It was only in remission. It wasn’t cured. It proves no theories. After all, what is ten years in the history of the world? Here it is again, the disease. More widespread and less amenable to any sort of treatment than ever. No, the Theory of Deterrence has some fundamental flaws.

  Flaw Number One is that it presumes a complete, sophisticated understanding of the psychology of your enemy. It assumes that what deters you (the fear of annihilation) will deter them. What about those who are not deterred by that? The suicide-bomber psyche—the “We’ll take you with us” school—is that an outlandish thought? How did Rajiv Gandhi die?

  In any case who’s the “you” and who’s the “enemy”? Both are only governments. Governments change. They wear masks within masks. They molt and reinvent themselves all the time. The one we have at the moment, for instance, does not even have enough seats to last a full term in office, but demands that we trust it to do pirouettes and party tricks with nuclear bombs even as it scrabbles around for a foothold to maintain a simple majority in Parliament.