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February 26, 2021.

Arundhati Roy: “We Live in an Age of Mini-Massacres”

The man booker prize-winning author of “the god of small things” on the state of india’s democracy, violence against women and minorities, the role of the media, and more.

Internationally acclaimed author and activist Arundhati Roy speaks during a press conference, where the panel condemned the criminalization of the right to peaceful public protest in a democracy, in New Delhi in October 2020 Mayank Makhija/NurPhoto via AP

Arundhati Roy’s first novel, “The God of Small Things,” won the Man Booker Prize in 1997. Her second, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” was shortlisted for it. These books, written two decades apart, capture how India has changed. In addition to her fiction, though, Roy’s political essays taught a generation of young Indian writers to think incendiary thoughts. Her recent New Yorker profile says her essays on India ’ s nuclear policies are not so much written as breathed out in a stream of fire.

Years of increasing repression towards journalists from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government have come to a head in recent weeks , as the country is roiled by the ongoing farmers’ protest against three farm bills passed in September 2020. Numerous journalists reporting on the protests have faced criminal charges and, in early February, some 100 journalists, publications, and activists were temporarily blocked by Twitter at the request of India’s Ministry and Electronics and Information Technology.   

Related Reading

In India, Journalists “Are Fighting For Whether Truth is Meaningful or Not” By Madeleine Schwartz

At a time when democratic values are under siege in her home country of India, as they are elsewhere around the world, including in the U.S., Roy’s analysis of issues like nuclear weapons, industrialization, nationalism, and more is essential to this moment. She is unapologetic about the stakes. Once, when a historian criticized her for passionate rhetoric, she responded, “I am hysterical. I’m screaming from the bloody rooftops … I want to wake the neighbors. That ’ s my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes.”

Roy’s work has been translated into more than 45 languages and, in 2019, her nonfiction was collected in a single volume, “ My Seditious Heart .” A new collection of essays, “ Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. ” was published last year. Roy spoke with the Nieman Foundation and shared her thoughts with Nieman Reports in February. Edited excerpts:

On whether India can still be called a democracy

Of course not. Apart from the laws that exist, like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act [1967 anti-terrorism legislation to prevent unlawful activities and associations and “maintain the sovereignty and integrity of India”], under which you have hundreds of people now just being picked up and put into jail every day, apart from that fact, every institution that is meant to work as a check against unaccountable power is seriously compromised.

Also, the elections are compromised. I don’t think we have free and fair elections because you have a system now of secret electoral bonds, which allows business corporations to secretly fund political parties. We have today a party that is the richest political party in the world, the BJP. Elections in India have become a spectator sport — it’s like watching a Ferrari racing a few old bicycles.

In any case, a democracy doesn’t mean just elections. First of all, India hasn’t been a democracy in Kashmir. It hasn’t been a democracy in Bastar [a district in the state of Chhattisgarh in central India]. It hasn’t been a democracy for the poorest of the poor who have no access to institutions of justice, who live completely under the boot of police and the justice system that crushes them with violence and indifference.

Now the oxygen is being taken away, sucked out of the lungs of even the middle class and even the big farmers, the agricultural elite.

On violence against women and Dalit and Muslim citizens, including lynchings of minorities by Hindu nationalist mobs

The thing is that when it comes to women, the fact that the caste system exists has meant that dominant castes in many many villages in India still feel that they have the right to oppressed caste woman’s body. That is how it has been traditionally.

This is why in India only certain rapes create outrage, whereas others are accepted as part of how things go. Look at what has happens to women in the northeastern states—Manipur for example, or women in Kashmir. Places that are literally administered by the security forces. You can imagine what goes on with that kind of imbalance of power. But the outrage doesn’t manifest itself on India’s streets. So you ’ re left wondering which rapes are considered outrageous in a society like this, and which are not.

When people feel that they have a license to lynch — permission from the top, then the reasons for lynching are not just to keep a community in fear. A whole ecosystem of fear kicks in, and not just fear, bullying, avarice — how one set of people can gain advantage over another — by frightening them , chasing them away from their land, from their villages. There’s a kind of lynching economy also that establishes itself through all this. We live in an age of mini-massacres. Very atomized, localized. You don’t need the old-style mega massacres like Gujarat 2002 or Mumbai 1993 any more.

The most dangerous thing that has happened is that, [as] the last few elections have shown, the BJP has proved that it can win elections without the Muslim vote. That creates a situation, where you have a minority which actually is made up of millions of people who are virtually disenfranchised. That’s a very, very dangerous situation.

On the role the media has played in the decline of India’s democracy

None of this could have happened if it wasn’t the media. Here you see the confluence of corporate money, corporate advertisement, and this vicious nationalism. You can’t even call them media or journalists anymore. It would be wrong.

The only [legitimate] media that there is now is a few people who are online who are managing very bravely to carry on and a few magazines like Caravan. I was recently listening to a very moving talk by this young journalist called Mandeep Punia who had just been arrested and beaten up. He was talking about how so many of his fellow journalists cannot be called journalists any more.

They’re just people who act out a script every day. If you look at the media, the police — I’m sorry to say this, but it’s almost diseased. I keep joking that I can’t put on the TV in my house because it feels like that girl in “The Exorcist,” this green bile pouring forth from the TV screen and spilling onto the floor. I feel like I need to clean it up. I don’t put it on anymore.

On the role of the writer or the artist in democracies in crisis

I often think that writers are no different from plumbers or carpenters. Some service the fascists. Some service the others. It’s not that writers are in any way politically better people. You see plenty of writers completely being part of this Hindu fascist project.

It’s been a question that’s very interesting to me for as long as I’ve ever been a writer. During the Freedom struggle against the British it was easy to delineate the battle., “The colonizer’s bad and they’re white. The freedom fighters are local, and they’re brown.” There’s a way in which passions could be comparatively at least, clear. Now, it’s all so murky. The river’s full of mud and silt.

To me, it’s always been the case that I feel like you need to have eyes around your head. For example, if you look at what’s happening with the farm protests now, how do you understand it, as a writer or as a human being? The government is under pressure because it’s the first time they’re faced with people who have not necessarily always been their ideological opponent. It’s hard to portray farmers as terrorists and anti-nationals, though God knows they’ve tried.

The agriculture crisis is a real crisis. It wasn’t created by Hindu fundamentalism. It was created by the Green Revolution when capital-intensive farming was introduced. It was created by the over‑mining of water, by the over-use of pesticides, by hybrid seeds, by putting in massive irrigation projects and not thinking about how to drain the water. So how do I make literature out of irrigation problems, or drainage, or electricity?

It’s been something that I’ve been pretty obsessed with, understanding things which are not normally considered a fiction writer’s business. To me, I can’t write fiction unless I make it my business.You have to know how all these things intersect with each other. How does caste, or race, or class, or irrigation, or bore-wells affect what might seem like a clash between two communities?  How does the harnessing of rivers in Kashmir affect that conflict?

On the writing process

I am a structure nerd myself. A lot of it does have to do with the fact that I studied architecture, the fact that I am very and always have been very interested in cities and how they are structured and how they work, and how institutions in the city are built for citizens, and the non‑citizens live in the cracks.

To me, if you look at my fiction or the non‑fiction, even almost every non‑fiction essay, it is a story. It seems to be the only way I can explain things to myself. There is a mathematics to the way the structure works. In fiction, to me, the structure and the language is as important as the story or the characters.

I don’t think I’m capable of writing something from A to B. It has to take a walk around the park, and then come back to certain places, and then have these reference points. Whether it’s “The God of Small Things” or “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” structure’s everything.

On the dangers to journalists, intellectuals, and activists in India

The thing is, what we first have to understand is how ordinary people — ordinary villagers, indigenous people, women guerillas who’ve been fighting mining corporations, people whose names we don’t know — have been dragged into prison, have been humiliated, even sexually humiliated. Those who have humiliated them have been given bravery awards. Look at the number who have been imprisoned, executed, buried in mass graves in Kashmir. All that violence that many Indians have accepted quite comfortably, even approved of, has now arrived at their doorsteps.

When you’re a journalist, a writer, anybody whose head is above the water, you’re already privileged in terms of someone’s looking out for you. You have a lawyer. Meanwhile, we have thousands of people who are in prison who don’t have any access to legal help, nothing.

Then you have a situation where, I’d say, the best of the best — I mean journalists, trade unionists, lawyers who defend them — are in jail. We know a lot of them are in jail for entirely made‑up reasons. There are students in jail. The latest police trick is to make a charge-sheet that is 17,000 pages, 30,000 pages. You’d need a whole bloody library shelf in your prison cell to accommodate your own charge-sheet.

A lawyer or a judge can’t even read it, let alone adjudicate upon it, for years maybe. They are continuously arresting people, or threatening people with arrest. The harassment, even if you are not actually in prison is unbelievable. Your life comes to a standstill. And once people are jailed then the ones who aren’t spend all their time running to lawyers, attending court hearings…The other trick is to have non-internet trolls file cases against you in many cities and towns. Then you spend your time running around. Who can afford it? Who can hold a job if they have to worry about court appearances?

This kinds of harassment flourishes because  institutions in India are dominated by Hindutva apparatchiks, it’s really, really worrying. Of course, now, there seems to be a pretty focused attack on women, young women, women activists.

The Chief Justice recently said, “Why are women being kept in the protests?” He’s talking about women who are the backbone of the farming world. Why are they being “kept” in protests?

On the role of tech platforms

Initially, when the 2002 Gujarat pogrom [in which a Godhra train burning that killed nearly 60 Hindu pilgrims incited three days of inter-communal violence in the western state of Gujarat, resulting in more than 1,000 deaths] happened, in fact, for a whole set of reasons, Narendra Modi was banned from travelling to the U.S. A lot of activist groups had successfully campaigned to have him banned. When he became prime minister, that ban was removed.

As I said, at that time, India was at the time a very attractive finance destination. Today, that’s less true but then India is seen as the region that is going to be the bulwark against China and Chinese expansionism. So it’s going to be given a broad pass for these strategic reasons.

The role of big tech is interesting because from 2014 and pre‑2014, let’s say a few years before that, right up to now, the Hindu nationalists had figured out how to use social media to their advantage. You have these things called WhatsApp farms. You have trolls. You have disinformation and lies. All of it spreading like a bushfire.

But recently, you see that the other side has begun to gear up and fight back. Now, there’s a lot of tension on social media and the fact is that, in Kashmir, when 370 was abrogated [revoking the limited autonomy, or “special status,” of the Jammu and Kashmir region], you had an Internet ban that lasted for months and months. The Internet has been banned on the borders of Delhi. The Internet has been banned all over the place.

It should be considered a human rights violation, legally and properly. A crime against humanity actually — if you look closely at the consequences of an almost year-long ban. You cannot, on the one hand, push the entire country into digital transactions, unique IDs, Aadhar cards, iris scans, and then ban the Internet.

You have that situation right now where all of us are being pushed into some form of radical digital transparency, while the only thing that’s opaque is how elections are funded and how political parties make their money and keep their money secret.

On what gives hope

I’m not that  fairy princess who’s going to hold out this false hope. I have days of utter desolation and hopelessness, of course I do, like millions of others here. But the fact is that when we develop a way of thinking and a way of seeing, we end up, many of us, certainly me, being people who know that we’ve got to do what we have to do. Whether we win or lose, we’re going to do it because we’re never going to go over to the other side.

You’ve got to keep holding on to that,  because that is what puts the oxygen in our lungs, that way of thinking, that way of writing, that way of not aggrandizing yourself to an extent where you think you can solve all the world’s problems. You can’t, but you can do something. And so you just keep doing that something.

In the most stressful situations, whether it’s in the forest where I spent some time with the armed guerrillas in Bastar, or whether it’s friends in Kashmir, or whether it’s in the deepest, darkest places, there’s always humanity. There’s always humor. There’s always literature. There’s always music. There’s always something beautiful.

That’s life. There isn’t ever going to be an end to the chaos. Everything is never going to work out just fine. It’s not going to happen. But we have to be able to accommodate that chaos in our minds and be part of it, swim with it, absorb it, influence it, turn it to our purpose. The wind will change direction at some point, won’t it?

Further Reading

In india, journalists “are fighting for whether truth is meaningful or not”, by madeleine schwartz, international reporting must distinguish hindu nationalism from hinduism, by kalpana jain, amidst crackdowns, kashmiri journalists struggle to report, by toufiq rashid.

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Arundhati Roy, the Not-So-Reluctant Renegade

By Siddhartha Deb

• March 5, 2014

“I’ve always been slightly short with people who say, ‘You haven’t written anything again,’ as if all the nonfiction I’ve written is not writing,” Arundhati Roy said.

It was July, and we were sitting in Roy’s living room, the windows closed against the heat of the Delhi summer. Delhi might be roiled over a slowing economy, rising crimes against women and the coming elections, but in Jor Bagh, an upscale residential area across from the 16th-century tombs of the Lodi Gardens, things were quiet. Roy’s dog, Filthy, a stray, slept on the floor, her belly rising and falling rhythmically. The melancholy cry of a bird pierced the air. “That’s a hornbill,” Roy said, looking reflective.

Roy, perhaps best known for “The God of Small Things,” her novel about relationships that cross lines of caste, class and religion, one of which leads to murder while another culminates in incest, had only recently turned again to fiction. It was another novel, but she was keeping the subject secret for now. She was still trying to shake herself free of her nearly two-decade-long role as an activist and public intellectual and spoke, with some reluctance, of one “last commitment.” It was more daring than her attacks on India’s occupation of Kashmir, the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or crony capitalism. This time, she had taken on Mahatma Gandhi.

She’d been asked by a small Indian press, Navayana, to write an introduction to a new edition of “The Annihilation of Caste.” Written in 1936 by B. R. Ambedkar, the progressive leader who drafted the Indian Constitution and converted to Buddhism, the essay is perhaps the most famous modern-day attack on India’s caste system. It includes a rebuke of Gandhi, who wanted to abolish untouchability but not caste. Ambedkar saw the entire caste system as morally wrong and undemocratic. Reading Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s arguments with each other, Roy became increasingly dismayed with what she saw as Gandhi’s regressive position. Her small introductory essay grew larger in her mind, “almost a little book in itself.” It would not pull its punches when it came to Gandhi and therefore would likely prove controversial. Even Ambedkar ran into difficulties. His views were considered so provocative that he was forced to self-publish. The more she spoke of it, the more mired in complications this last commitment of hers seemed.

Roy led me into the next room, where books and journals were scattered around the kitchen table that serves as her desk. The collected writings of Ambedkar and Gandhi, voluminous and in combat with each other, sat in towering stacks, bookmarks tucked between the pages. The notebook in which Roy had been jotting down her thoughts in small, precise handwriting lay open on the table, a fragile intermediary in a nearly century-old debate between giants.

“I got into trouble in the past for my nonfiction,” Roy said, “and I swore, ‘I’m never going to write anything with a footnote again.’ ” It’s a promise she has so far been unable to keep. “I’ve been gathering the thoughts for months, struggling with the questions, shocked by what I’ve been reading,” she said, when I asked if she had begun the essay. “I know that when it comes out, a lot is going to happen. But it’s something I need to do.”

In her late 30s , Roy was perhaps India’s most famous writer. The publication of “The God of Small Things” in 1997 coincided with the 50th anniversary of India’s independence. It was the beginning of an aggressively nationalist, consumerist phase, and Roy was seen as representative of Brand India. The novel, her first, appeared on the New York Times best-seller list and won the Booker Prize. It went on to sell more than six million copies. British tabloids published bewildering profiles (“A 500,000-pound book from the pickle-factory outcast”), while magazines photographed her — all cascading waves of hair and high cheekbones — against the pristine waterways and lush foliage of Kerala, where the novel was set and which was just beginning to take off as a tourist destination.

Roy’s tenure as a national icon came to an abrupt end when, a year later, the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) government carried out a series of nuclear tests. These were widely applauded by Indians who identified with Hindu nationalism, many of them members of the rising middle class. In an essay titled, “The End of Imagination,” Roy accused supporters of the tests of reveling in displays of military power — embracing the jingoism that had brought the B.J.P. to power for only the second time since independence — instead of addressing the abysmal conditions in which a majority of Indians lived. Published simultaneously in the English-language magazines Outlook and Frontline, the essay marked her beginning as an overtly political writer.

Roy’s political turn angered many in her upper-caste, urban, English-speaking audience, even as it attracted another. Most of her new fans had never heard of her novel; they often spoke languages other than English and felt marginalized because of their religion, caste or ethnicity, left behind by India’s economic rise. They devoured the essays Roy began writing, which were distributed in unauthorized translations, and flocked to rallies to hear her speak. “There was all this resentment, quite understandable, about ‘The God of Small Things,’ that here was this person writing in English winning all this money,” Roy said. “So when ‘The End of Imagination’ came out, there was a reversal, an anger among the English-speaking people, but also an embrace from everyone else.”

The vehemence of the response surprised her. “There is nothing in ‘The God of Small Things’ that is at odds with what I went on to write politically over 15 years,” Roy said. “It’s instinctive territory.” It is true that her novel also explored questions of social justice. But without the armature of character and plot, her essays seemed didactic — or just plain wrong — to her detractors, easy stabs at an India full of energy and purpose. Even those who sympathized with her views were often suspicious of her celebrity, regarding her as a dilettante. But for Roy, remaining on the sidelines was never an option. “If I had not said anything about the nuclear tests, it would have been as if I was celebrating it,” Roy said. “I was on the covers of all these magazines all the time. Not saying anything became as political as saying something.”

Roy turned next to a series of mega-dams to be built on the Narmada River. Villagers likely to be displaced by the project had been staging protests, even as India’s Supreme Court allowed construction to go forward. Roy traveled through the region, joining in the protests and writing essays criticizing the court’s decision. In 2001, a group of men accused her and other activists of attacking them at a rally outside the Supreme Court. Roy petitioned for the charges to be dismissed. The court agreed but was so offended by the language of her petition (she accused the court of attempting to “muzzle dissent, to harass and intimidate those who disagree with it”) that it held her in contempt. “Showing the magnanimity of law by keeping in mind that the respondent is a woman,” the judgment read, “and hoping that better sense and wisdom shall dawn upon the respondent in the future to serve the cause of art and literature,” Roy was to be sentenced to “simple imprisonment for one day” and a fine of 2,000 rupees.

The 2002 BBC documentary “Dam/Age” captures some of the drama around Roy’s imprisonment at the fortresslike Tihar Jail. When she emerged the next day, her transformation from Indian icon to harsh national critic was complete. Her hair, which she had shorn into a severe cut, evoked, uneasily, both ostracized woman and feisty feminist. The English-language Indian media mocked Roy for criticizing the dams, which they saw as further evidence of India’s rise. Attacks followed each of her subsequent works: her anguished denunciations of the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the plans for bauxite mining in Orissa (now Odisha) by a London-based corporation called Vedanta Resources, the paramilitary operations in central India against indigenous tribal populations and ultraleft guerrillas known as Naxalites; and India’s military presence in Kashmir, where more than a half million troops hold in check a majority Muslim population that wants to secede from India.

Kashmir, over which India has fought three of its four wars against Pakistan, would become one of Roy’s defining issues. In 2010, after a series of massive protests during which teenage boys faced off against soldiers, Roy publicly remarked that “Kashmir was never an integral part of India.” In suggesting that the state of India was a mere construct, a product of partition like Pakistan, she had crossed a line. Most progressives in India haven’t gone that far. Roy soon found herself the center of a nationwide storm. A stone-throwing mob, trailed by television vans, showed up at her front door. The conservative TV channel Times Now ran slow-motion clips of her visiting Kashmir in which she looked as if she were sashaying down a catwalk, refusing to answer a reporter’s questions. Back in Delhi, Times Now convened a panel moderated by its immensely popular host, Arnab Goswami, to discuss — squeezed between headlines and a news crawl in which “anger” and “Arundhati” were the most common words — whether Roy should be arrested for sedition. When the sole Kashmiri Muslim panelist, Hameeda Nayeem, pointed out that Roy had said nothing not already believed by a majority of Kashmiris, she was cut off by Goswami. Cases were filed against Roy in courts in Bangalore and Chandigarh, accusing her of being “antinational,” “anti-human” and supposedly writing in one of her essays that “Kashmir should get freedom from naked, starving Indians.”

The apartment where I met Roy in July occupies the topmost floor of a three-story house and has all the trappings of an upper-class home — a sprawl of surrounding lawn, a high fence and a small elevator. There are few signs of her dissenter status: the stickers on her door (“We have to be very careful these days because . . .”); the books in the living room (Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano); and, particularly unusual in the Indian context, the absence of servants (Roy lives entirely alone). Perhaps what is most telling is how Roy ended up in this house, which she used to ride past every day on her way to work, on a bicycle rented for a rupee.

Roy was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in 1959 in Shillong, a small hill town in the northeastern fringes of India. Her mother, Mary, was from a close-knit community of Syrian Christians in Kerala. Her father, Rajib, was a Bengali Hindu from Calcutta, a manager of a tea plantation near Shillong and an alcoholic. The marriage didn’t last long, and when Roy was 2, she and her brother, Lalith, a year and a half older, returned to Kerala with their mother. Unwelcome at the family home, they moved into a cottage owned by Roy’s maternal grandfather in Ooty, in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu.

“Then there are a lot of horrible stories,” Roy said and began to laugh. “My mother was very ill, a severe asthmatic. We thought she was dying. She would send us into town with a basket, and the shopkeepers would put food in the basket, mostly just rice with green chilies.” The family remained there until Roy was 5, defying attempts by her grandmother and uncle to turn them out of the house (inheritance laws among Syrian Christians heavily favored sons). Eventually, Roy’s mother moved back to Kerala and started a school on the premises of the local Rotary Club.

As the child of a single mother, Roy was ill at ease in the conservative Syrian Christian community. She felt more at home among the so-called lower castes or Dalits, who were kept at a distance by both Christians and upper-caste Hindus.

“Much of the way I think is by default,” she said. “Nobody paid enough attention to me to indoctrinate me.” By the time she was sent to Lawrence, a boarding school founded by a British Army officer (motto: “Never Give In”), it was perhaps too late for indoctrination. Roy, who was 10, says the only thing she remembers about Lawrence was becoming obsessed with running. Her brother, who heads a seafood-export business in Kerala, recalls her time there differently. “When she was in middle school, she was quite popular among the senior boys,” he told me, laughing. “She was also a prefect and a tremendous debater.”

Roy concedes that boarding school had its uses. “It made it easier to light out when I did,” she said. The child of what was considered a disreputable marriage and an even more disgraceful divorce, Roy was expected to have suitably modest ambitions. Her future prospects were summed up by the first college she was placed in; it was run by nuns and offered secretarial training. At 16, Roy instead moved to Delhi to study at the School of Planning and Architecture.

Roy chose architecture because it would allow her to start earning money in her second year, but also out of idealism. In Kerala, she met the British-born Indian architect Laurie Baker, known for his sustainable, low-cost buildings, and was taken with the idea of doing similar work. But she soon realized she wouldn’t learn about such things at school. “They just wanted you to be like a contractor,” Roy said, still indignant. She was grappling, she said, with questions to which her professors didn’t seem to have answers: “What is your sense of aesthetic? Whom are you designing for? Even if you’re designing a home, what is the relationship between men and women assumed in that? It just became bigger and bigger. How are cities organized? Who are laws for? Who is considered a citizen? This coalesced into something very political for me by the end of it.”

For her final project, Roy refused to design a building and instead wrote a thesis, “Postcolonial Urban Development in Delhi.” “I said: ‘Now I want to tell you what I’ve learned here. I don’t want you to tell me what I’ve learned here.’ ” Roy drew sustenance from the counterculture that existed among her fellow students, which she would represent years later in the film “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones” (1989). She wrote, designed and appeared in it — an elfin figure with a giant Afro playing the character of Radha, who gives up architecture to become a writer but drowns before completing her first novel.

By this time, Roy had broken off contact with her family. Without money to stay in the student hostel, she moved into a nearby slum with her boyfriend, Gerard da Cunha. (They pretended to be married in deference to the slum’s conservative mores.) “It’s one thing to be a young person who decides to slum it,” Roy said. “For me, it wasn’t like that. There was nobody. There was no cuteness about it. That was my university, that period when you think from the point of view of absolute vulnerability. And that hasn’t left me.”

After graduation, she briefly lived with Da Cunha, in Goa, where he was from, but they broke up, and she returned to Delhi. She got a job at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, and met Pradip Krishen, an independent filmmaker who offered Roy the female lead in “Massey Sahib” (1985), a film set in colonial India in which Roy played a goatherd. Roy and Krishen, who later married, collaborated on subsequent projects, including “Bargad,” a 26-part television series on India’s independence movement that was never completed, as well as two feature films, “Annie” and “Electric Moon” (1992).

Krishen’s background could not have been more different from Roy’s. A Balliol scholar and former history professor, Krishen, a widower, lived with his parents and two children in a sprawling house in the posh Chanakyapuri neighborhood. When Roy joined him, they moved to a separate apartment upstairs. Roy immersed herself in Delhi’s independent-filmmaking world. The movies’ progressive themes appealed to her, but it was a world dominated by the scions of elite families, and it soon came to seem out of touch and insular to her. She spent more and more time teaching aerobics, to earn her own money, and hanging out with artists she met in school.

She had already begun work on her novel when “The Bandit Queen,” a film, based on the life of the female bandit Phoolan Devi, was released. Devi was a low-caste woman who became a famous gang leader and endured gang rape and imprisonment. Roy was incensed by the way the film portrayed her as a victim whose life was defined by rape instead of rebellion. “When I saw the film, I was infuriated, partly because I had grown up in Kerala, being taken to these Malayalam films, where in every film — every film — a woman got raped,” Roy said. “For many years, I believed that all women got raped. Then I read in the papers how Phoolan Devi said it was like being raped again. I read the book the film was based on and realized that these guys had added their own rapes. . . . I thought, You’ve changed India’s most famous bandit into history’s most famous rape victim.” Roy’s essay on the film, “The Great Indian Rape Trick,” published in the now-defunct Sunday magazine, eviscerated the makers of “Bandit Queen,” pointing out that they never even bothered to meet Phoolan Devi or to invite her to a screening.

The piece alienated many of the people Roy worked with. Krishen, who gives the impression of a flinty loyalty toward Roy even though the couple split up, says it was seen as a betrayal in the tightknit film circles of Delhi. For Roy, it was a lesson in how the media worked. “I watched very carefully what happened to Phoolan Devi,” she said. “I saw how the media can just excavate you and leave a shell behind. And I was lucky to learn from that. So when my turn came, the barricades were up.”

When I met Roy at the New Delhi airport a few days after we first talked, she hung back from the crowd, ignoring the stares coming her way. She had turned down a request to address a public gathering in Kashmir, but there still seemed something political about traveling there just a week after eight Indian soldiers were killed in an ambush. The passengers on the flight Roy and I took, Hindu pilgrims visiting the Amarnath shrine, certainly thought so. Periodically, they filled the small aircraft with cries of “Bom Bhole,” or “Hail Shiva,” their right fists rising in unison. Once in Srinagar, the capital, Roy was stopped often by Kashmiris who wanted to thank her for speaking up against the Indian state. They also hoped she would agree to have her picture taken with them. She usually did.

But for the most part, she kept out of the public eye. Roy was staying at the house of a journalist friend, and as he and another journalist talked on their mobile phones, following a story about a fight that had broken out between Amarnath pilgrims and Kashmiri porters, she distributed packs of Lavazza coffee brought from Delhi, only half listening. Later, she declined to attend the screening of a new documentary about the Naxalite guerrillas, preferring to work on her novel.

Roy had come to Kashmir mainly to see friends, but it was hard to escape the strife altogether. A few days later, we drove through the countryside, a landscape of streams sparkling through green fields and over cobblestones, punctuated by camouflaged, gun-toting figures. Sometimes they were a detachment of the Central Reserve Police Force, sometimes the local police and, every now and then, distinctive in their flat headgear, soldiers of the counterinsurgency Rashtriya Rifles. “There were bunkers all over Srinagar when I first began coming here,” Roy said. “Now they use electronic surveillance for the city. The overt policing is for the countryside.”

In Srinagar earlier that week, the policing had seemed overt enough. Roy had been invited to speak at a gathering organized by Khurram Parvez, who works for the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, an organization that has produced extensive reports on mass graves and extrajudicial killings in Kashmir. As 40 or so people sat cross-legged on the floor — activists, lawyers, journalists and students — Parvez asked that cellphones be turned off and placed in “thighland” in order to prevent surreptitious recordings that could be passed on to authorities.

Roy put on reading glasses, and these, along with the stack of books in front of her, a selection of the nonfiction she has written over the past 15 years (just brought out by Penguin India as a box set of five candy-colored volumes), gave the gathering the air of an impromptu seminar. Roy began by asking audience members to discuss what was on their minds. A young lawyer who grew up in a village about 30 miles from Srinagar told a story of two women, who, after being raped by soldiers, spent the night shivering in separate bathing cabins, too ashamed to go home, hearing only each other’s weeping. Roy listened carefully to this and similar accounts, occasionally nudging the conversation beyond Kashmir, to the rifts and fractures within India itself, including the forests of central India, where she spent more than two weeks in 2010 with ultraleft guerrillas and their tribal allies for her last book, “Broken Republic” (2011).

“I feel sad, you know, when I’m traveling in India and see Kashmiris who’ve been recruited into the Border Security Force,” she said. “It’s what this state does, hiring from one part of the country and sending them to fight in other parts, against people who on the surface might seem different but who are actually facing the same kind of oppression, and this is why perhaps it’s important to be able to talk to each other.”

She picked up one of the books in front of her, the lemon-yellow “Listening to Grasshoppers,” and found a passage from the essay “Azadi,” or “Freedom.” In it, she describes attending a 2008 rally in Srinagar demanding independence from India. “The slogan that cut through me like a knife,” she read in a quiet, clear voice, “was this one: Nanga bhooka Hindustan, jaan se pyaara Pakistan ” — India is a naked, starving country; Pakistan is more precious to us than life itself. “In that slogan,” she said, “I saw the seeds of how easily victims can become perpetrators.”

The discussion went on for hours, spanning global capitalism and climate change, before returning to Kashmir. Did Kashmiris identify with Pakistan? Some did, some emphatically did not. What about the role of women in the struggle for Kashmiri self-determination? How could they make themselves heard when they found it so difficult to make themselves heard in this room? In the fierce summer heat, the group, splintered into factions, growing tired and agitated. Roy decided to bring the proceedings to a close with a joke from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.”

“In the movie, this man, Brian, asks a band of guerrilla fighters, ‘Are you the Judean Peoples’ Front?’ ” Roy said, mimicking a British accent. “And the reply he gets from this really offended group is: No, absolutely not. ‘We’re the Peoples’ Front of Judea.’ ” The joke, an elaborate parody of radical factionalism, made Roy laugh heartily. It also changed the emotional temperature of the room. As we came out of the house and milled around in the alley, the various groups seemed easier with each other. Later, a young man who had just completed a degree in fiction would express to me his disappointment that the conversation had never turned to writing at all.

Beyond the Gandhi book , there has been much to pull Roy away from fiction. In May, when Naxalite guerrillas killed at least 24 people, including a Congress politician who had formed a brutal right-wing militia and whom Roy criticized in her last book, she was immediately asked for a comment but declined to talk. “So they just republished an old interview I had given and tried to pretend it was a new interview,” she said.

“The things I’ve needed to say directly, I’ve said already,” she said. “Now I feel like I would be repeating myself with different details.” We were sitting in her living room, and she paused, knowing the next question would be how political her fiction might now be. “I’m not a person who likes to use fiction as a means. I think it’s an irreducible thing, fiction. It’s itself. It’s not a movie, it’s not a political tract, it’s not a slogan. The ways in which I have thought politically, the proteins of that have to be broken down and forgotten about, until it comes out as the sweat on your skin.”

But publishing is a risky venture in India these days; court orders are used to prevent books from coming out or to remove them from circulation, even when they are not explicitly political. Most recently, Penguin India pulped all existing copies of “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” by Wendy Doniger, after a conservative Hindu pressure group initiated a case against the book. Penguin also publishes Roy, and she felt compelled to protest.

Although Roy won’t divulge, even to her closest friends, what her new novel is about, she is adamant that it represents a break from both her nonfiction and her first novel. “I’m not trying to write ‘The God of Small Things’ again,” she said. “There’s much more grappling conceptually with the new novel. It is much easier for a book about a family — which is what ‘The God of Small Things’ was — to have a clear emotional heart.” Before she became caught up in her essay on Ambedkar and Gandhi, she was working on the novel by drawing, as she tends to do in the early stages, trying to figure out the structure. She then writes longhand. What she calls the “sandpapering” takes place on a laptop, at her kitchen table.

“I’m not attached to any particular space,” she said when I asked her how important the routine was to her writing. “I just don’t need to feel that someone’s breathing over me.”

After “The God of Small Things” was published, she began to give some of the money she made from it away. She sent her father, who resurfaced after she appeared in “Massey Sahib” and was not above trying to extort money from her, to a rehab center. (He died in 2007.) In 2002, when Roy received a Lannan Foundation award, she donated the $350,000 prize money to 50 small organizations around India. Finally, in 2006, she and her friends set up a trust into which she began putting all her nonfiction earnings to support progressive causes around the country.

“I was never interested in just being a professional writer where you wrote one book that did very well, you wrote another book, and so on,” Roy said, thinking of the ways in which “The God of Small Things” trapped her and freed her. “There’s a fear that I have, that because you’re famous, or because you’ve done something, everybody wants you to keep on doing the same thing, be the same person, freeze you in time.” Roy was talking of the point in her life when, tired of the images she saw of herself — the glamorous Indian icon turned glamorous Indian dissenter — she cut off her hair. But you could see how she might say the same of the position in which she now finds herself. The essay on Gandhi and Ambedkar was meant to complete one set of expectations before she could turn to something new. “I don’t want that enormous baggage,” Roy said. “I want to travel light.”

• Aijaz Hussain

Arundhati Roy

• Non-Fiction
• Hamish Hamilton Ltd
• David Godwin Associates

Arundhati Roy was born in 1960 in Kerala, India. She studied architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture and worked as a production designer. She has written two screenplays, including Electric Moon (1992), commissioned by Channel 4 television. She lives in Delhi with her husband, the film-maker Pradip Krishen. The God of Small Things , her first novel, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and has sold over six million copies worldwide. An immediate bestseller, the novel was published simultaneously in 16 languages and 19 countries, but caused controversy in India for the description of a love affair between a Syrian Christian and a Hindu 'untouchable'. Set in Ayemenem in Kerala, a rural province in southern India, it is the story of two twins, Estha and Rahel, their reunion after 23 years apart and their shared memories of the events surrounding the accidental death of their English cousin, Sophie Mol, in 1969. She is also the author of several non-fiction books,including: The Cost of Living (1999), a highly critical attack on the Indian government for its handling of the controversial Narmada Valley dam project and for its nuclear testing programme; Power Politics (2001), a book of essays; and The Algebra of Infinite Justice , a collection of journalism. The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire was published in 2004. She has since published a further collection of essays examining the dark side of democracy in contemporary India,  Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy  (2009). Arundhati Roy was awarded the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2003. Her latest book is The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), her second novel. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and, in the US, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Critical perspective

Following in the footsteps of salman rushdie's midnight's children (1981) and vikram seth's a suitable boy (1993), arundhati roy's the god of small things (1997) has been hailed as the latest literary 'discovery' from india..

Earning advances in the region of one million dollars, translated into thirty languages, snatching the prestigious Booker prize award in 1997 and selling over six million copies, the publicity surrounding this novel has been phenomenal. Its high profile has been fuelled by the controversial life of its author. Roy is a politically active writer, passionately committed to environmental politics (notably the flooding of the Narmada Valley in North Western India). In March 2002 her jail sentence attracted substantial international press attention and Roy's powerful political essays are now widely available in collections like Power Politics , The Algebra of Infinite Justice and The Cost of Living . While many contemporary writers are clearly envious of the amount of media attention Roy and her first novel have managed to attract (there has been a critical backlash following Roy's meteoric rise to fame), the unfortunate outcome has been a conspicuous lack of debate about the text itself. This is a pity, because The God of Small Things is text that rewards serious critical scrutiny. One of the most repeated and misleading criticisms of the novel is that it merely exoticises the East for a cosmopolitan Western readership. Certainly the novel's unprecedented success in Europe and North America, at a time when Asian-chic is all the rage, should not be viewed innocently. However, what such criticisms have tended to neglect is the extent to which The God of Small Things is a self-reflexive text that both reproduces and parodies representations of India as the exotic. Take the opening paragraph of the novel: 'May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.' These highly wrought, beautifully poetic lines (typical of the novel as a whole) have clearly contributed to the overall success of The God of Small Things . They are part of what make it such a seductive narrative. However there is a sense in which these sentences are also overwrought. The richly figurative, conspicuously decorative prose of the novel also ultimately has the effect of foregrounding its fictional status, its status as representation. As if to accentuate this fact, the opening flirts with some of the central figures and tropes of high modernist literature, including T.S. Eliot, for whom 'April is the cruellest month', and Joseph Conrad, for whom the 'heart of darkness' is a pregnant, landscape of (seductive) fecundity and (repulsive) terror. These opening lines also self-consciously allude to some of the dominant images of Indo-Anglian fiction, including the 'heat and dust' (immortalised in Ruth Prawer Jhabwala's novel of the same name) and the reference to pickles and preserves in the chapter's title (the structuring metaphor of Rushdie's Midnight's Children ). The epigraph to Roy's novel, a quotation from John Berger, is crucial to an understanding of what follows: 'Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one'. To say that The God of Small Things makes itself available for a kind of readerly tourism is to neglect the way in which this text also offers a critique of tourism in the form of the 'History House'. The History House, at the heart of Ayemenem, has been transformed into a five-star hotel: 'In the evenings (for Regional Flavour) the tourists were treated to truncated kathakali performances ('Small attention spans,' the Hotel People explained to the dancers). So ancient stories were collapsed and amputated. Six-hour classics were slashed to twenty-minute cameos.' Such accounts politicise, rather than reinforce the construction of India as the exotic. Of course, The God of Small Things is more than a metafictional story about storytelling. The novel is also driven be a compelling plot which moves deftly between the generations of a single family in Kerala; between grandmother Mammachi and her bitter, brooding sister Baby Kochama; between Ammu, her brother Chako, and their children Estha, Rahel and Baby Sol. The narrative centres on the consequences of Ammu's forbidden relationship (one of many in the novel) with Velutha. An 'untouchable' who is, ironically, gifted with his hands, Velutha works for the family business, Paradise Pickles. His transgressive relationship with Ammu, violates the laws of caste, class and culture with tragic consequences for the whole family. The God of Small Things is a skilfully structured novel that shuttles almost imperceptibly between past and present. As the tale moves from the energy and laughter of youth, to the more resigned, melancholy world of adulthood, a series of correspondences are established across the generations. These include Rahel's taboo relationship with her twin brother, a sexual encounter that establishes an intricate pattern of repetitions across the narrative, repetitions that haunt both the characters and readers of the novel alike.

Dr. James Procter, 2002

Bibliography

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Arundhati Roy

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Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs? 

Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science? 

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept  over a million . More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the  New York governor ’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is  America !”

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered. 

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.

The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists? 

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim  citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier  Jair Bolsonaro , had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of  physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed. 

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser.

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”. 

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers. 

He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under  lockdown . Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed. 

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering. 

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual. 

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a  long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.

Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love. 

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray. 

A few days later, worried that the  fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said. 

“Us” means approximately 460m people.

State governments in India  (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear. 

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

As the lockdown enters its second week,  supply chains have broken , medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting. 

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place. 

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.

India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now. 

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus 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 stitch 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 the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

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.

Arundhati Roy ’s latest novel is ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ 

Copyright © Arundhati Roy 2020

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Indian government must support the apparel sector / From Rajendra Aneja, Aneja Management Consultants, Mumbai, India

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Flashback: arundhati roy’s classic essay on the narmada resistance.

Archival photo of a boat rally in protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam

25th August 2016

The Narmada Bachao Andolan began 31 years ago as a protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river, and went on to raise questions about the very development model India has embraced. Today, with the NBA reviving their landmark struggle for justice, we are re-publishing author Arundhati Roy ’s landmark 1999 essay on the topic.

Arundhati Roy, Outlook Magazine

“If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country.” – Jawaharlal Nehru, speaking to villagers who were to be displaced by the Hirakud Dam, 1948.

I stood on a hill and laughed out loud.

I had crossed the Narmada by boat from Jalsindhi and climbed the headland on the opposite bank from where I could see, ranged across the crowns of low, bald hills, the tribal hamlets of Sikka, Surung, Neemgavan and Domkhedi. I could see their airy, fragile, homes. I could see their fields and the forests behind them. I could see little children with littler goats scuttling across the landscape like motorised peanuts. I knew I was looking at a civilisation older than Hinduism, slated – sanctioned (by the highest court in the land) – to be drowned this monsoon when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir will rise to submerge it.

Why did I laugh?

Because I suddenly remembered the tender concern with which the Supreme Court judges in Delhi (before vacating the legal stay on further construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam) had enquired whether tribal children in the resettlement colonies would have children’s parks to play in. The lawyers representing the Government had hastened to assure them that indeed they would, and, what’s more, that there were seesaws and slides and swings in every park. I looked up at the endless sky and down at the river rushing past and for a brief, brief moment the absurdity of it all reversed my rage and I laughed. I meant no disrespect.

Instinct led me to set aside Joyce and Nabokov, to postpone reading Don DeLillo’s big book and substitute it with reports on drainage and irrigation, with journals and books and documentary films about dams and why they’re built and what they do.

My first tentative questions revealed that few people know what is really going on in the Narmada Valley. Those who know, know a lot. Most know nothing at all. And yet, almost everyone has a passionate opinion. Nobody’s neutral. I realised very quickly that I was straying into mined territory.

In India over the last ten years the fight against the Sardar Sarovar Dam has come to represent far more than the fight for one river. This has been its strength as well as its weakness. Some years ago, it became a debate that captured the popular imagination. That’s what raised the stakes and changed the complexion of the battle. From being a fight over the fate of a river valley it began to raise doubts about an entire political system. What is at issue now is the very nature of our democracy. Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers? Its forests? Its fish? These are huge questions. They are being taken hugely seriously by the State. They are being answered in one voice by every institution at its command – the army, the police, the bureaucracy, the courts. And not just answered, but answered unambiguously, in bitter, brutal ways.

For the people of the valley, the fact that the stakes were raised to this degree has meant that their most effective weapon – specific facts about specific issues in this specific valley – has been blunted by the debate on the big issues. The basic premise of the argument has been inflated until it has burst into bits that have, over time, bobbed away. Occasionally a disconnected piece of the puzzle floats by – an emotionally charged account of the Government’s callous treatment of displaced people; an outburst at how the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), ‘a handful of activists’, is holding the nation to ransom; a legal correspondent reporting on the progress of the NBA’s writ petition in the Supreme Court.

Though there has been a fair amount of writing on the subject, most of it is for a ‘special interest’ readership. News reports tend to be about isolated aspects of the project. Government documents are classified as ‘Secret’. I think it’s fair to say that public perception of the issue is pretty crude and is divided crudely, into two categories:

On the one hand, it is seen as a war between modern, rational, progressive forces of ‘Development’ versus a sort of neo-Luddite impulse – an irrational, emotional ‘Anti-Development’ resistance, fuelled by an arcadian, pre-industrial dream.

On the other, as a Nehru vs Gandhi contest. This lifts the whole sorry business out of the bog of deceit, lies, false promises and increasingly successful propaganda (which is what it’s really about) and confers on it a false legitimacy. It makes out that both sides have the Greater Good of the Nation in mind – but merely disagree about the means by which to achieve it.

Both interpretations put a tired spin on the dispute. Both stir up emotions that cloud the particular facts of this particular story. Both are indications of how urgently we need new heroes, new kinds of heroes, and how we’ve overused our old ones (like we overbowl our bowlers).

The Nehru vs Gandhi argument pushes this very contemporary issue back into an old bottle. Nehru and Gandhi were generous men. Their paradigms for development are based on assumptions of inherent morality. Nehru’s on the paternal, protective morality of the Soviet-style Centralised State. Gandhi’s on the nurturing, maternal morality of romanticised village Republics. Both would work perfectly, if only we were better human beings. If only we all wore khadi and suppressed our base urges – sex, shopping, dodging spinning lessons and being unkind to the less fortunate. Fifty years down the line, it’s safe to say that we haven’t made the grade. We haven’t even come close. We need an updated insurance plan against our own basic natures.

It’s possible that as a nation we’ve exhausted our quota of heroes for this century, but while we wait for shiny new ones to come along, we have to limit the damage. We have to support our small heroes. (Of these we have many. Many.) We have to fight specific wars in specific ways. Who knows, perhaps that’s what the twenty-first century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Could it be? Could it possibly be? It sounds finger-licking good to me.

I was drawn to the valley because I sensed that the fight for the Narmada had entered a newer, sadder phase. I went because writers are drawn to stories the way vultures are drawn to kills. My motive was not compassion. It was sheer greed. I was right. I found a story there.

And what a story it is.

“People say that the Sardar Sarovar Dam is an expensive project. But it is bringing drinking water to millions. This is our lifeline. Can you put a price on this? Does the air we breathe have a price? We will live. We will drink. We will bring glory to the state of Gujarat.”

– Urmilaben Patel, wife of Gujarat Chief Minister Chimanbhai Patel, speaking at a public rally in Delhi in 1993.

“We will request you to move from your houses after the dam comes up. If you move it will be good. Otherwise we shall release the waters and drown you all.”

– Morarji Desai, speaking at a public meeting in the submergence zone of the Pong Dam in 1961.

“Why didn’t they just poison us? Then we wouldn’t have to live in this shit-hole and the Government could have survived alone with its precious dam all to itself.”

– Ram Bai, whose village was submerged when the Bargi Dam was built on the Narmada. She now lives in a slum in Jabalpur.

In the fifty years since Independence, after Nehru’s famous “Dams are the Temples of Modern India” speech (one that he grew to regret in his own lifetime), his footsoldiers threw themselves into the business of building dams with unnatural fervour. Dam-building grew to be equated with Nation-building. Their enthusiasm alone should have been reason enough to make one suspicious. Not only did they build new dams and new irrigation systems, they took control of small, traditional systems that had been managed by village communities for thousands of years, and allowed them to atrophy. To compensate the loss, the Government built more and more dams. Big ones, little ones, tall ones, short ones. The result of its exertions is that India now boasts of being the world’s third largest dam builder. According to the Central Water Commission, we have three thousand six hundred dams that qualify as Big Dams, three thousand three hundred of them built after Independence. One thousand more are under construction. Yet one-fifth of our population – 200 million people – does not have safe drinking water and two-thirds – 600 million – lack basic sanitation.

Big Dams started well, but have ended badly. There was a time when everybody loved them, everybody had them – the Communists, Capitalists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. There was a time when Big Dams moved men to poetry. Not any longer. All over the world there is a movement growing against Big Dams. In the First World they’re being de-commissioned, blown up. The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just conjecture. Big Dams are obsolete. They’re uncool. They’re undemocratic. They’re a Government’s way of accumulating authority (deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where). They’re a guaranteed way of taking a farmer’s wisdom away from him. They’re a brazen means of taking water, land and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs displace huge populations of people, leaving them homeless and destitute. Ecologically, they’re in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, water-logging, salinity, they spread disease. There is mounting evidence that links Big Dams to earthquakes.

Big Dams haven’t really lived up to their role as the monuments of Modern Civilisation, emblems of Man’s ascendancy over Nature. Monuments are supposed to be timeless, but dams have an all-too-finite lifetime. They last only as long as it takes Nature to fill them with silt. It’s common knowledge now that Big Dams do the opposite of what their Publicity People say they do – the Local Pain for National Gain myth has been blown wide open.

For all these reasons, the dam-building industry in the First World is in trouble and out of work. So it’s exported to the Third World in the name of Development Aid, along with their other waste like old weapons, superannuated aircraft carriers and banned pesticides.

On the one hand, the Indian Government, every Indian Government, rails self-righteously against the First World, and on the other, actually pays to receive their gift-wrapped garbage. Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise. Like Colonialism was. It has destroyed most of Africa. Bangladesh is reeling from its ministrations. We know all this, in numbing detail. Yet in India our leaders welcome it with slavish smiles (and make nuclear bombs to shore up their flagging self-esteem).

Over the last fifty years India has spent Rs.80,000 crores on the irrigation sector alone. Yet there are more drought-prone areas and more flood-prone areas today than there were in 1947. Despite the disturbing evidence of irrigation disasters, dam-induced floods and rapid disenchantment with the Green Revolution (declining yields, degraded land), the government has not commissioned a post-project evaluation of a single one of its 3,600 dams to gauge whether or not it has achieved what it set out to achieve, whether or not the (always phenomenal) costs were justified, or even what the costs actually were.

The Government of India has detailed figures for how many million tonnes of foodgrain or edible oils the country produces and how much more we produce now than we did in 1947. It can tell you how much bauxite is mined in a year or what the total surface area of the National Highways adds up to. It’s possible to access minute-to-minute information about the stock exchange or the value of the rupee in the world market. We know how many cricket matches we’ve lost on a Friday in Sharjah. It’s not hard to find out how many graduates India produced, or how many men had vasectomies in any given year. But the Government of India does not have a figure for the number of people that have been displaced by dams or sacrificed in other ways at the altars of ‘National Progress’. Isn’t this astounding ? How can you measure Progress if you don’t know what it costs and who paid for it? How can the ‘market’ put a price on things – food, clothes, electricity, running water – when it doesn’t take into account the real cost of production?

According to a detailed study of 54 Large Dams done by the Indian Institute of Public Administration, the average number of people displaced by a Large Dam is 44,182. Admittedly, 54 dams out of 3,300 is not a big enough sample. But since it’s all we have, let’s try and do some rough arithmetic. A first draft. To err on the side of caution, let’s halve the number of people. Or, let’s err on the side of abundant caution and take an average of just 10,000 people per Large Dam. It’s an improbably low figure, I know, but …never mind. Whip out your calculators. 3,300 x 10,000 =

33 million. That’s what it works out to. Thirty-three million people. Displaced by big dams alone in the last fifty years What about those that have been displaced by the thousands of other Development Projects? At a private lecture, N.C. Saxena, Secretary to the Planning Commission, said he thought the number was in the region of 50 million (of which 40 million were displaced by dams). We daren’t say so, because it isn’t official. It isn’t official because we daren’t say so. You have to murmur it for fear of being accused of hyperbole. You have to whisper it to yourself, because it really does sound unbelievable. It can’t be , I’ve been telling myself. I must have got the zeroes muddled. It can’t be true . I barely have the courage to say it aloud. To run the risk of sounding like a ‘sixties hippie dropping acid (“It’s the System, man!”), or a paranoid schizophrenic with a persecution complex. But it is the System, man. What else can it be?

Fifty million people.

Go on, Government, quibble. Bargain. Beat it down. Say something .

I feel like someone who’s just stumbled on a mass grave.

Fifty million is more than the population of Gujarat. Almost three times the population of Australia. More than three times the number of refugees that Partition created in India. Ten times the number of Palestinian refugees. The Western world today is convulsed over the future of one million people who have fled from Kosovo.

A huge percentage of the displaced are tribal people (57.6 per cent in the case of the Sardar Sarovar Dam). Include Dalits and the figure becomes obscene. According to the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, it’s about 60 per cent. If you consider that tribal people account for only eight per cent, and Dalits fifteen per cent, of India’s population, it opens up a whole other dimension to the story. The ethnic ‘otherness’ of their victims takes some of the pressure off the Nation Builders. It’s like having an expense account. Someone else pays the bills. People from another country. Another world. India’s poorest people are subsidising the lifestyles of her richest.

Did I hear someone say something about the world’s biggest democracy?

What has happened to all these millions of people? Where are they now? How do they earn a living? Nobody really knows. (Last month’s papers had an account of how tribal people displaced by the Nagarjunasagar Dam Project are selling their babies to foreign adoption agencies. The Government intervened and put the babies in two public hospitals where six babies died of neglect.) When it comes to Rehabilitation, the Government’s priorities are clear. India does not have a National Rehabilitation Policy. According to the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (amended in 1984), the Government is not legally bound to provide a displaced person anything but a cash compensation. Imagine that. A cash compensation, to be paid by an Indian government official to an illiterate tribal man (the women get nothing) in a land where even the postman demands a tip for a delivery! Most tribal people have no formal title to their land and therefore cannot claim compensation anyway. Most tribal people, or let’s say most small farmers, have as much use for money as a Supreme Court judge has for a bag of fertilizer.

The millions of displaced people don’t exist anymore. When history is written they won’t be in it. Not even as statistics. Some of them have subsequently been displaced three and four times – a dam, an artillery proof range, another dam, a uranium mine, a power project. Once they start rolling, there’s no resting place. The great majority is eventually absorbed into slums on the periphery of our great cities, where it coalesces into an immense pool of cheap construction labour (that builds more projects that displace more people). True, they’re not being annihilated or taken to gas chambers, but I can warrant that the quality of their accommodation is worse than in any concentration camp of the Third Reich. They’re not captive, but they re-define the meaning of liberty.

And still the nightmare doesn’t end. They continue to be uprooted even from their hellish hovels by government bulldozers that fan out on clean-up missions whenever elections are comfortingly far away and the urban rich get twitchy about hygiene. In cities like Delhi, they run the risk of being shot by the police for shitting in public places – like three slum-dwellers were, not more than two years ago.

In the French Canadian wars of the 1770s, Lord Amherst exterminated most of Canada’s Native Indians by offering them blankets infested with the small-pox virus. Two centuries on, we of the Real India have found less obvious ways of achieving similar ends.

The millions of displaced people in India are nothing but refugees of an unacknowledged war. And we, like the citizens of White America and French Canada and Hitler’s Germany, are condoning it by looking away. Why? Because we’re told that it’s being done for the sake of the Greater Common Good. That it’s being done in the name of Progress, in the name of National Interest (which, of course, is paramount). Therefore gladly, unquestioningly, almost gratefully, we believe what we’re told. We believe that it benefits us to believe.

Allow me to shake your faith. Put your hand in mine and let me lead you through the maze. Do this, because it’s important that you understand. If you find reason to disagree, by all means take the other side. But please don’t ignore it, don’t look away.

It isn’t an easy tale to tell. It’s full of numbers and explanations. Numbers used to make my eyes glaze over. Not any more. Not since I began to follow the direction in which they point.

Trust me. There’s a story here.

It’s true that India has progressed. It’s true that in 1947, when Colonialism formally ended, India was food-deficit. In 1950 we produced 51 million tonnes of foodgrain. Today we produce close to 200 million tonnes.

It’s true that in 1995 the state granaries were overflowing with 30 million tonnes of unsold grain. It’s also true that at the same time, 40 per cent of India’s population – more than 350 million people – were living below the poverty line. That’s more than the country’s population in 1947.

Indians are too poor to buy the food their country produces. Indians are being forced to grow the kinds of food they can’t afford to eat themselves. Look at what happened in Kalahandi District in Western Orissa, best known for its starvation deaths. In the drought of ’96, people died of starvation (16 according to the Government, over a 100 according to the press). Yet that same year rice production in Kalahandi was higher than the national average! Rice was exported from Kalahandi District to the Centre.

Certainly India has progressed but most of its people haven’t.

Our leaders say that we must have nuclear missiles to protect us from the threat of China and Pakistan. But who will protect us from ourselves?

What kind of country is this? Who owns it? Who runs it? What’s going on?

It’s time to spill a few State Secrets. To puncture the myth about the inefficient, bumbling, corrupt, but ultimately genial, essentially democratic, Indian State. Carelessness cannot account for fifty million disappeared people. Nor can Karma. Let’s not delude ourselves. There is method here, precise, relentless and one hundred per cent man-made.

The Indian State is not a State that has failed. It is a State that has succeeded impressively in what it set out to do. It has been ruthlessly efficient in the way it has appropriated India’s resources – its land, its water, its forests, its fish, its meat, its eggs, its air – and re-distributed it to a favoured few (in return, no doubt, for a few favours). It is superbly accomplished in the art of protecting its cadres of paid-up elite. Consummate in its methods of pulverising those who inconvenience its intentions. But its finest feat of all is the way it achieves all this and emerges smelling nice. The way it manages to keep its secrets, to contain information that vitally concerns the daily lives of one billion people, in government files, accessible only to the keepers of the flame – Ministers, bureaucrats, state engineers, defence strategists. Of course, we make it easy for them, we, its beneficiaries. We take care not to dig too deep. We don’t really want to know the grisly details.

Thanks to us, Independence came (and went), elections come and go, but there has been no shuffling of the deck. On the contrary, the old order has been consecrated, the rift fortified. We, the Rulers, won’t pause to look up from our heaving table. We don’t seem to know that the resources we’re feasting on are finite and rapidly depleting. There’s cash in the bank, but soon there’ll be nothing left to buy with it. The food’s running out in the kitchen. And the servants haven’t eaten yet. Actually, the servants stopped eating a long time ago.

India lives in her villages, we’re told, in every other sanctimonious public speech. That’s bullshit. It’s just another fig leaf from the Government’s bulging wardrobe. India doesn’t live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India’s villages live only to serve her cities. Her villagers are her citizens’ vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just.

This impression we have of an overstretched State, struggling to cope with the sheer weight and scale of its problems, is a dangerous one. The fact is that it’s creating the problem. It’s a giant poverty-producing machine, masterful in its methods of pitting the poor against the very poor, of flinging crumbs to the wretched, so that they dissipate their energies fighting each other, while peace (and advertising) reigns in the Master’s Lodgings.

Until this process is recognised for what it is, until it is addressed and attacked, elections – however fiercely they’re contested – will continue to be mock battles that serve only to further entrench unspeakable inequity. Democracy (our version of it) will continue to be the benevolent mask behind which a pestilence flourishes unchallenged. On a scale that will make old wars and past misfortunes look like controlled laboratory experiments. Already fifty million people have been fed into the Development Mill and have emerged as air-conditioners and popcorn and rayon suits – subsidised air-conditioners and popcorn and rayon suits (if we must have these nice things, and they are nice, at least we should be made to pay for them).

There’s a hole in the flag that needs mending.

It’s a sad thing to have to say, but as long as we have faith – we have no hope. To hope, we have to break the faith. We have to fight specific wars in specific ways and we have to fight to win.

Listen then, to the story of the Narmada Valley. Understand it. And, if you wish, enlist. Who knows, it may lead to magic.

The Narmada wells up on the plateau of Amarkantak in the Shahdol district of Madhya Pradesh, then winds its way through 1,300 kilometres of beautiful broad-leaved forest and perhaps the most fertile agricultural land in India. Twenty-five million people live in the river valley, linked to the ecosystem and to each other by an ancient, intricate web of interdependence (and, no doubt, exploitation). Though the Narmada has been targeted for “water resource development” for more than fifty years now, the reason it has, until recently, evaded being captured and dismembered is because it flows through three states – Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. (Ninety per cent of the river flows through Madhya Pradesh; it merely skirts the northern border of Maharashtra, then flows through Gujarat for about 180 km before emptying into the Arabian sea at Bharuch.)

As early as 1946, plans had been afoot to dam the river at Gora in Gujarat. In 1961, Nehru laid the foundation stone for a 49.8-metre-high dam – the midget progenitor of the Sardar Sarovar. Around the same time, the Survey of India drew up new, modernised topographical maps of the river basin. The dam planners in Gujarat studied the new maps and decided that it would be more profitable to build a much bigger dam. But this meant hammering out an agreement first with neighbouring states.

The three states bickered and balked but failed to agree on a water-sharing formula. Eventually, in 1969, the Central Government set up the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal. It took the Tribunal ten years to announce its Award. The people whose lives were going to be devastated were neither informed nor consulted nor heard .

To apportion shares in the waters, the first, most basic thing the Tribunal had to do was to find out how much water there was in the river. Usually this can only be estimated accurately if there is at least forty years of recorded data on the volume of actual flow in the river. Since this was not available, they decided to extrapolate from rainfall data. They arrived at a figure of 27.22 MAF (million acre feet). This figure is the statistical bedrock of the Narmada Valley Projects. We are still living with its legacy. It more or less determines the overall design of the Projects – the height, location and number of dams. By inference, it determines the cost of the Projects, how much area will be submerged, how many people will be displaced and what the benefits will be. In 1992 actual observed flow data for the Narmada which was now available for 44 years (1948 -1992) showed that the yield from the river was only 22.69 MAF – eighteen per cent less! The Central Water Commission admits that there is less water in the Narmada than had previously been assumed. The Government of India says: It may be noted that clause II (of the Decision of the Tribunal) relating to determination of dependable flow as 28 MAF is non-reviewable.(!)

In other words, the Narmada is legally bound by human decree to produce as much water as the Government of India commands it to produce.

Its proponents boast that the Narmada Valley Project is the most ambitious river valley project ever conceived in human history. They plan to build 3,200 dams that will reconstitute the Narmada and her 41 tributaries into a series of step reservoirs – an immense staircase of amenable water. Of these, 30 will be major dams, 135 medium and the rest small. Two of the major dams will be multi-purpose mega dams. The Sardar Sarovar in Gujarat and the Narmada Sagar in Madhya Pradesh will, between them, hold more water than any other reservoir on the Indian sub-continent.

Whichever way you look at it, the Narmada Valley Development Project is Big. It will alter the ecology of the entire river basin of one of India’s biggest rivers. For better or for worse, it will affect the lives of twenty-five million people who live in the valley. Yet, even before the Ministry of Environment cleared the project, the World Bank offered to finance the lynch-pin of the project – the Sardar Sarovar Dam (whose reservoir displaces people in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, but whose benefits go to Gujarat). The Bank was ready with its cheque-book before any costs were computed, before any studies had been done, before anybody had any idea of what the human cost or the environmental impact of the dam would be!

The 450-million-dollar loan for the Sardar Sarovar Projects was sanctioned and in place in 1985. Ministry of Environment clearance for the project came only in 1987! Talk about enthusiasm. It fairly borders on evangelism. Can anybody care so much?

Why were they so keen?

Between 1947 and 1994 the Bank received 6,000 applications for loans from around the world. They didn’t turn down a single one. Not a single one . Terms like ‘Moving money’ and ‘Meeting loan targets’ suddenly begin to make sense.

Today, India is in a situation where it pays back more money to the Bank in interest and repayments of principal than it receives from it. We are forced to incur new debts in order to be able to repay our old ones. According to the World Bank Annual Report, last year (1998), after the arithmetic, India paid the Bank 478 million dollars more than it received. Over the last five years (’93 to ’98) India paid the Bank 1.475 billion dollars more than it received. The relationship between us is exactly like the relationship between a landless labourer steeped in debt and the local Bania – it is an affectionate relationship, the poor man loves his Bania because he’s always there when he’s needed. It’s not for nothing that we call the world a Global Village. The only difference between the landless labourer and the Government of India is that one uses the money to survive. The other just funnels it into the private coffers of its officers and agents, pushing the country into an economic bondage that it may never overcome.

The international Dam Industry is worth 20 billion dollars a year. If you follow the trails of big dams the world over, wherever you go – China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, Guatemala – you’ll rub up against the same story, encounter the same actors: the Iron Triangle (dam-jargon for the nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and dam construction companies), the racketeers who call themselves International Environmental Consultants (who are usually directly employed by or subsidiaries of dam-builders), and, more often than not, the friendly, neighbourhood World Bank. You’ll grow to recognise the same inflated rhetoric, the same noble ‘Peoples’ Dam’ slogans, the same swift, brutal repression that follows the first sign of civil insubordination. (Of late, especially after its experience in the Narmada Valley, The Bank is more cautious about choosing the countries in which it finances projects that involve mass displacement. At present, China is their Most Favoured client. It’s the great irony of our times – American citizens protest the massacre in Tiananmen Square, but the Bank will use their money to fund the Three Gorges Dam in China which is going to displace 1.3 million people.)

It’s a skilful circus and the acrobats know each other well. Occasionally they’ll swap parts – a bureaucrat will join The Bank, a Banker will surface as a Project Consultant. At the end of play, a huge percentage of what’s called ‘Development Aid’ is re-channelled back to the countries it came from, masquerading as equipment cost or consultants’ fees or salaries to the agencies’ own staff. Often ‘Aid’ is openly ‘tied’. (As in the case of the Japanese loan for the Sardar Sarovar Dam, tied to a contract for purchasing turbines from Sumitomo Corporation.) Sometimes the connections are more sleazy. In 1993 Britain financed the Pergau Dam in Malaysia with a subsidised loan of 234 million pounds, despite an Overseas Development Administration report that said that the dam would be a ‘bad buy’ for Malaysia. It later emerged that the loan was offered to ‘encourage’ Malaysia to sign a 1.3- billion -pound contract to buy British Arms.

In 1994, U.K. consultants earned 2.5 billion dollars on overseas contracts. The second biggest sector of the market after Project Management was writing what are called EIAs (Environmental Impact Assessments). In the Development racket, the rules are pretty simple. If you get invited by a Government to write an EIA for a big dam project and you point out a problem (say, for instance, you quibble about the amount of water available in a river, or, God forbid, you suggest that perhaps the human costs are too high), then you’re history. You’re an OOWC. An Out Of Work Consultant. And Oops! There goes your Range Rover. There goes your holiday in Tuscany. There goes your children’s private boarding school. There’s good money in poverty. Plus Perks.

In keeping with Big Dam tradition, concurrent with the construction of the 138.68-metre-high Sardar Sarovar Dam began the elaborate Government pantomime of conducting studies to estimate the actual project costs and the impact it would have on people and the environment. The World Bank participated whole-heartedly in the charade – occasionally they knitted their brows and raised feeble requests for more information on issues like the resettlement and rehabilitation of what they call PAPs – Project Affected Persons. (They help, these acronyms, they manage to mutate muscle and blood into cold statistics. PAPs soon cease to be people.)

The merest crumbs of information satisfied The Bank and they proceeded with the project. The implicit, unwritten but fairly obvious understanding between the concerned agencies was that whatever the costs – economic, environmental or human – the project would go ahead. They would justify it as they went along. They knew full well that eventually, in a courtroom or to a committee, no argument works as well as a Fait Accompli. ( Mi’ lord, the country is losing two crores a day due to the delay .) The Government refers to the Sardar Sarovar Projects as the ‘Most Studied Project in India’, yet the game goes something like this:

When the Tribunal first announced its Award, and the Gujarat Government announced its plan of how it was going to use its share of water, there was no mention of drinking water for villages in Kutch and Saurashtra , the arid areas of Gujarat. When the project ran into political trouble, the Government suddenly discovered the emotive power of Thirst. Suddenly, quenching the thirst of parched throats in Kutch and Saurashtra became the whole point of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (Never mind that water from two rivers – the Sabarmati and the Mahi, both of which are miles closer to Kutch and Saurashtra than the Narmada, have been dammed and diverted to Ahmedabad, Mehsana and Kheda. Neither Kutch nor Saurashtra has seen a drop of it.) Officially the number of people who will be provided drinking water by the Sardar Sarovar Canal fluctuates from 28 million (1983) to 32.5 million (1989) – nice touch, the decimal point! – to 40 million (1992) and down to 25 million (1993).

The number of villages that would receive drinking water was zero in 1979, 4,719 in the early eighties, 7,234 in 1990 and 8,215 in 1991. When challenged, the Government admitted that these figures for 1991 included 236 uninhabited villages!

Every aspect of the project is approached in this almost cavalier manner, as if it’s a family board game. Even when it concerns the lives and futures of vast numbers of people.

In 1979 the number of families that would be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar reservoir was estimated to be a little over 6,000. In 1987 it grew to 12,000. In 1991 it surged to 27,000. In 1992 the Government declared that 40,000 families would be affected. Today, it hovers between 40,000 and 41,500. (Of course, even this is an absurd figure, because the reservoir isn’t the only thing that displaces people. According to the NBA the actual figure is 85,000 families – about half a million people.)

The estimated cost of the project bounced up from Rs.6,000 crores to Rs.20,000 crores (officially). The NBA says that it will cost Rs.40,000 crores. ( Half the entire irrigation budget of the whole country over the last fifty years .)

The Government claims the Sardar Sarovar Projects will produce 1450 Mega Watts of power. The thing about multi-purpose dams like the Sardar Sarovar is that their ‘purposes’ (irrigation, power production and flood-control) conflict with each other. Irrigation uses up the water you need to produce power. Flood control requires you to keep the reservoir empty during the monsoon months to deal with an anticipated surfeit of water. And if there’s no surfeit, you’re left with an empty dam. And this defeats the purpose of irrigation, which is to store the monsoon water. It’s like the riddle of trying to ford a river with a fox, a chicken and a bag of grain. The result of these mutually conflicting aims, studies say, is that when the Sardar Sarovar Projects are completed, and the scheme is fully functional, it will end up producing only 3 per cent of the power that its planners say it will. 50 Mega Watts.

In an old war, everybody has an axe to grind. So how do you pick your way through these claims and counter-claims? How do you decide whose estimate is more reliable? One way is to take a look at the track record of Indian Dams.

The Bargi Dam near Jabalpur was the first dam on the Narmada to be completed (1990). It cost ten times more than was budgeted and submerged three times more land than the engineers said it would. About 70,000 people from 101 villages were supposed to be displaced, but when they filled the reservoir (without warning anybody), 162 villages were submerged. Some of the resettlement sites built by the Government were submerged as well. People were flushed out like rats from the land they had lived on for centuries. They salvaged what they could, and watched their houses being washed away. 114,000 people were displaced. There was no rehabilitation policy. Some were given meagre cash compensations. Many got absolutely nothing. A few were moved to government rehabilitation sites. The site at Gorakhpur is, according to Government publicity, an ‘ideal village’. Between 1990 and 1992, five people died of starvation there. The rest either returned to live illegally in the forests near the reservoir, or moved to slums in Jabalpur. The Bargi Dam irrigates only as much land as it submerged in the first place – and only 5 per cent of the area that its planners claimed it would irrigate . Even that is water-logged.

Time and again, it’s the same story – the Andhra Pradesh Irrigation II scheme claimed it would displace 63,000 people. When completed, it displaced 150,000 people. The Gujarat Medium Irrigation II scheme displaced 140,000 people instead of 63,600. The revised estimate of the number of people to be displaced by the Upper Krishna irrigation project in Karnataka is 240,000 against its initial claims of displacing only 20,000.

These are World Bank figures. Not the NBA’s. Imagine what this does to our conservative estimate of thirty-three million.

Construction work on the Sardar Sarovar Dam site, which had continued sporadically since 1961, began in earnest in 1988. At the time, nobody, not the Government, nor the World Bank were aware that a woman called Medha Patkar had been wandering through the villages slated to be submerged, asking people whether they had any idea of the plans the Government had in store for them. When she arrived in the valley all those years ago, opposing the construction of the dam was the furthest thing from her mind. Her chief concern was that displaced villagers should be resettled in an equitable, humane way. It gradually became clear to her that the Government’s intentions towards them were far from honourable. By 1986 word had spread and each state had a peoples’ organisation that questioned the promises about resettlement and rehabilitation that were being bandied about by Government officials. It was only some years later that the full extent of the horror – the impact that the dams would have, both on the people who were to be displaced and the people who were supposed to benefit – began to surface. The Narmada Valley Development Project came to be known as India’s Greatest Planned Environmental Disaster. The various peoples’ organisations massed into a single organisation and the Narmada Bachao Andolan – the extraordinary NBA – was born.

In 1988 the NBA formally called for all work on the Narmada Valley Development Projects to be stopped. People declared that they would drown if they had to, but would not move from their homes. Within two years, the struggle had burgeoned and had support from other resistance movements. In September 1989, some 50,000 people gathered in the Valley at Harsud from all over India to pledge to fight Destructive Development. The dam site and its adjacent areas, already under the Indian Official Secrets Act, was clamped under Section 144 which prohibits the gathering of groups of more than five people. The whole area was turned into a police camp. Despite the barricades, one year later, on the 28 th of September 1990, thousands of villagers made their way on foot and by boat to a little town called Badwani, in Madhya Pradesh, to reiterate their pledge to drown rather than agree to move from their homes. News of the people’s opposition to the Projects spread to other countries. The Japanese arm of Friends of the Earth mounted a campaign in Japan that succeeded in getting the Government of Japan to withdraw its 27-billion-yen loan to finance the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (The contract for the turbines still holds.) Once the Japanese withdrew, international pressure from various Environmental Activist groups who supported the struggle began to mount on the World Bank.

This, of course, led to an escalation of repression in the valley. Government policy, described by a particularly articulate Minister, was to ‘flood the valley with khakhi’.

On Christmas Day in 1990, some 6,000 men and women walked over a hundred kilometres, carrying their provisions and their bedding, accompanying a seven-member sacrificial squad who had resolved to lay down their lives for the river. They were stopped at Ferkuwa on the Gujarat border by battalions of armed police and crowds of people from the city of Baroda, many of whom were hired, some of whom perhaps genuinely believed that the Sardar Sarovar was ‘Gujarat’s lifeline’. It was an interesting confrontation. Middle Class Urban India versus a Rural, predominantly Tribal Army. The marching people demanded they be allowed to cross the border and walk to the dam site. The police refused them passage. To stress their commitment to non-violence, each villager had his or her hands bound together. One by one, they defied the battalions of police. They were beaten, arrested and dragged into waiting trucks in which they were driven off and dumped some miles away, in the wilderness. They just walked back and began all over again.

The confrontation continued for almost two weeks. Finally, on the 7th of January 1991, the seven members of the sacrificial squad announced that they were going on an indefinite hunger strike. Tension rose to dangerous levels. The Indian and International Press, TV camera crews and documentary film-makers, were present in force. Reports appeared in the papers almost every day. Environmental Activists stepped up the pressure in Washington. Eventually, acutely embarrassed by the glare of unfavourable media coverage, the World Bank announced that it would institute an Independent Review of the Sardar Sarovar Projects – unprecedented in the history of Bank Behaviour.

When the news reached the valley, it was received with distrust and uncertainty. The people had no reason to trust the World Bank. But still, it was a victory of sorts. The villagers, understandably upset by the frightening deterioration in the condition of their comrades who had not eaten for 22 days, pleaded with them to call off the fast. On the 28th of January, the fast at Ferkuwa was called off, and the brave, ragged army returned to their homes shouting “ Hamara Gaon Mein Hamara Raj !” (Our Rule in Our Villages).

There has been no army quite like this one, anywhere else in the world. In other countries – China (Chairman Mao got a Big Dam for his 77 th birthday), Brazil, Malaysia, Guatemala, Paraguay – every sign of revolt has been snuffed out almost before it began. Here in India, it goes on and on. Of course, the State would like to take credit for this too. It would like us to be grateful to it for not crushing the movement completely, for allowing it to exist. After all what is all this, if not a sign of a healthy functioning democracy in which the State has to intervene when its people have differences of opinion?

I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. (Is this my cue to cringe and say ‘Thankyou, thankyou, for allowing me to write the things I write?’)

We don’t need to be grateful to the State for permitting us to protest. We can thank ourselves for that. It is we who have insisted on these rights. It is we who have refused to surrender them. If we have anything to be truly proud of as a people, it is this.

The struggle in the Narmada Valley lives, despite the State.

The Indian State makes war in devious ways. Apart from its apparent benevolence, its other big weapon is its ability to wait. To roll with the punches. To wear out the opposition. The State never tires, never ages, never needs a rest. It runs an endless relay.

But fighting people tire. They fall ill, they grow old. Even the young age prematurely. For twenty years now, since the Tribunal’s award, the ragged army in the valley has lived with the fear of eviction. For twenty years, in most areas there has been no sign of ‘development’ – no roads, no schools, no wells, no medical help. For twenty years, it has borne the stigma ‘slated for submergence’ – so it’s isolated from the rest of society (no marriage proposals, no land transactions). They’re a bit like the Hibakushas in Japan (the victims and their descendants of the bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The ‘fruits of modern development’, when they finally came, brought only horror. Roads brought surveyors. Surveyors brought trucks. Trucks brought policemen. Policemen brought bullets and beatings and rape and arrest and, in one case, murder. The only genuine ‘fruit’ of modern development that reached them, reached them inadvertently – the right to raise their voices, the right to be heard. But they have fought for twenty years now. How much longer will they last?

The struggle in the valley is tiring. It’s no longer as fashionable as it used to be. The international camera crews and the radical reporters have moved (like the World Bank) to newer pastures. The documentary films have been screened and appreciated. Everybody’s sympathy is all used up. But the dam goes on. It’s getting higher and higher…

Now, more than ever before, the ragged army needs reinforcements. If we let it die, if we allow the struggle to be crushed, if we allow the people to be punished, we will lose the most precious thing we have: Our spirit, or what’s left of it.

“India will go on,” they’ll tell you, the sage philosophers who don’t want to be troubled by piddling Current Affairs. As though ‘India’ is somehow more valuable than her people.

Old Nazis probably soothe themselves in similar ways.

The war for the Narmada Valley is not just some exotic tribal war or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. It’s a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlist, will be honoured and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers… The borders are open, folks! Come on in.

Anyway, back to the story.

In June 1991, the World Bank appointed Bradford Morse, a former head of the United Nations Development Program, as Chairman of the Independent Review. His brief was to make a thorough assessment of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. He was guaranteed free access to all secret Bank documents relating to the Projects.

In September 1991, Bradford Morse and his team arrived in India. The NBA, convinced that this was yet another set-up, at first refused to meet them. The Gujarat Government welcomed the team with a red carpet (and a nod and a wink) as covert allies.

A year later, in June 1992, the historic Independent Review (known also as the Morse Report) was published.

It unpeels the project delicately, layer by layer, like an onion. Nothing was too big, and nothing too small for them to enquire into. They met Ministers and bureaucrats, they met NGOs working in the area, went from village to village, from resettlement site to resettlement site. They visited the good ones. The bad ones. The temporary ones, the permanent ones. They spoke to hundreds of people. They travelled extensively in the submergence area and the command area. They went to Kutch and other drought-hit areas in Gujarat. They commissioned their own studies. They examined every aspect of the project: hydrology and water management, the upstream environment, sedimentation, catchment area treatment, the downstream environment, the anticipation of likely problems in the command area – water-logging, salinity, drainage, health, the impact on wildlife.

What the Morse Report reveals, in temperate, measured tones (which I admire, but cannot achieve) is scandalous. It is the most balanced, un-biased, yet damning indictment of the relationship between the Indian State and the World Bank. Without appearing to, perhaps even without intending to, the report cuts through to the cosy core, to the space where they live together and love each other (somewhere between what they say and what they do).

The core recommendation of the 357-page Independent Review was unequivocal and wholly unexpected:

“We think the Sardar Sarovar Projects as they stand are flawed, that resettlement and rehabilitation of all those displaced by the Projects is not possible under prevailing circumstances, and that environmental impacts of the Projects have not been properly considered or adequately addressed. Moreover we believe that the Bank shares responsibility with the borrower for the situation that has developed… it seems clear that engineering and economic imperatives have driven the Projects to the exclusion of human and environmental concerns… India and the states involved… have spent a great deal of money. No one wants to see this money wasted. But we caution that it may be more wasteful to proceed without full knowledge of the human and environmental costs. We have decided that it would be irresponsible for us to patch together a series of recommendations on implementation when the flaws in the Projects are as obvious as they seem to us. As a result, we think that the wisest course would be for the Bank to step back from the Projects and consider them afresh. The failure of the bank’s incremental strategy should be acknowledged.”

Four committed, knowledgeable, truly independent men – they do a lot to make up for faith eroded by hundreds of other venal ones who are paid to do similar jobs.

The Bank, however, was still not prepared to give up. It continued to fund the project. Two months after the Independent Review, it sent out the Pamela Cox Committee which did exactly what the Morse Review had cautioned the Bank against. It suggested a sort of patchwork remedy to try and salvage the operation. In October 1992, on the recommendation of the Pamela Cox Committee, the Bank asked the Indian Government to meet some minimum, primary conditions within a period of six months. Even that much the Government couldn’t do. Finally, on the 30 th of March 1993, the World Bank pulled out of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (Actually, technically, on the 29 th of March, one day before the deadline they’d been given, the Indian Government asked the World Bank to withdraw.) Details. Details.

No one has ever managed to make the World Bank step back from a project before. Least of all a rag-tag army of the poorest people in one of the world’s poorest countries. A group of people whom Lewis Preston, then President of The Bank, never managed to fit into his busy schedule when he visited India. Sacking The Bank was and is a huge moral victory for the people in the valley.

The euphoria didn’t last. The Government of Gujarat announced that it was going to raise the 200-million-dollar shortfall on its own and continue with the project. During the period of the Review, and after it was published, confrontation between people and the Authorities continued unabated in the valley – humiliation, arrests, lathi charges. Indefinite fasts terminated by temporary promises and permanent betrayals. People who had agreed to leave the valley and be resettled had begun returning to their villages from their resettlement sites. In Manibeli, a village in Maharashtra and one of the nerve-centres of the resistance, hundreds of villagers participated in a Monsoon Satyagraha. In 1993, families in Manibeli remained in their homes as the waters rose. They clung to wooden posts with their children in their arms and refused to move. Eventually policemen prised them loose and dragged them away. The NBA declared that if the Government did not agree to review the project, on the 6th of August 1993 a band of activists would drown themselves in the rising waters of the reservoir. On the 5th of August, the Union Government constituted yet another committee called the Five Member Group (FMG) to review the Sardar Sarovar Projects.

The Government of Gujarat refused them entry into Gujarat. The FMG report (a “desk report”) was submitted the following year. It tacitly endorsed the grave concerns of the Independent Review. But it made no difference. Nothing changed. This is another of the State’s tested strategies. It kills you with committees.

In February 1994, the Government of Gujarat ordered the permanent closure of the sluice gates of the dam.

In May 1994, the NBA filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court questioning the whole basis of the Sardar Sarovar Dam and seeking a stay on the construction.

That monsoon, when the water level in the reservoir rose and smashed down on the other side of the dam, 65,000 cubic metres of concrete and 35,000 cubic metres of rock were torn out of a stilling basin, leaving a 65-metre crater. The riverbed powerhouse was flooded. The damage was kept secret for months. Reports started appearing about it in the press only in January of 1995.

In early 1995, on the grounds that the rehabilitation of displaced people had not been adequate, the Supreme Court ordered work on the dam to be suspended until further notice. The height of the dam was 80 metres above Mean Sea Level.

Meanwhile, work had begun on two more dams in Madhya Pradesh: the Narmada Sagar (without which the Sardar Sarovar loses 17-30 per cent of its efficiency) and the Maheshwar Dam. The Maheshwar Dam is next in line, upstream from the Sardar Sarovar. The Government of Madhya Pradesh has signed a Power Purchase Agreement with a private company – S.Kumars – one of India’s leading textile magnates.

Tension in the Sardar Sarovar area abated temporarily and the battle moved upstream, to Maheshwar, in the fertile plains of Nimad.

The case pending in the Supreme Court led to a palpable easing of repression in the valley. Construction work had stopped on the dam, but the rehabilitation charade continued. Forests (slated for submergence) continued to be cut and carted away in trucks, forcing people who depended on them for a livelihood to move out.

Even though the dam is nowhere near its eventual, projected height, its impact on the environment and the people living along the river is already severe.

Around the dam site and the nearby villages, the number of cases of malaria has increased six-fold.

Several kilometres upstream from the Sardar Sarovar Dam, huge deposits of silt, hip-deep and over two hundred metres wide, have cut off access to the river. Women carrying water pots now have to walk miles, literally miles , to find a negotiable entry point. Cows and goats get stranded in it and die. The little single-log boats that tribal people use have become unsafe on the irrational circular currents caused by the barricade downstream.

Further upstream, where the silt deposits have not yet become a problem, there’s another problem. Landless people (predominantly tribal people and Dalits) have traditionally cultivated rice, fruit and vegetables on the rich, shallow silt banks the river leaves when it recedes in the dry months. Every now and then, the engineers manning the Bargi Dam (way upstream, near Jabalpur) release water from the reservoir without warning. Downstream, the water level in the river suddenly rises. Hundreds of families have had their crops washed away several times, leaving them with no livelihood.

Suddenly they can’t trust their river anymore. It’s like a loved one who has developed symptoms of psychosis. Anyone who has loved a river can tell you that the loss of a river is a terrible, aching thing. But I’ll be rapped on the knuckles if I continue in this vein. When we’re discussing the Greater Common Good there’s no place for sentiment. One must stick to facts. Forgive me for letting my heart wander.

The State Governments of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra continue to be completely cavalier in their dealings with displaced people. The Government of Gujarat has a rehabilitation policy (on paper) that makes the other two states look medieval. It boasts of being the best rehabilitation package in the world. It offers land for land to displaced people from Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh and recognises the claims of ‘encroachers’ (usually tribal people with no papers). The deception, however, lies in its definition of who qualifies as ‘Project Affected’.

In point of fact, the Government of Gujarat hasn’t even managed to rehabilitate people from its own 19 villages slated for submergence, let alone the rest of the 226 in the other two states. The inhabitants of these 19 villages have been scattered to 175 separate rehabilitation sites. Social links have been smashed, communities broken up.

In practice, the resettlement story (with a few ‘ideal village’ exceptions) continues to be one of callousness and broken promises. Some people have been given land, others haven’t. Some have land that is stony and uncultivable. Some have land that is irredeemably water-logged. Some have been driven out by landowners who sold land to the Government but haven’t been paid yet.

Some who were resettled on the peripheries of other villages have been robbed, beaten and chased away by their host villagers. There have been occasions when displaced people from two different dam projects have been allotted contiguous lands. In one case, displaced people from three dams – the Ukai Dam, the Sardar Sarovar Dam and the Karjan Dam – were resettled in the same area. In addition to fighting amongst themselves for resources – water, grazing land, jobs – they had to fight a group of landless labourers who had been sharecropping the land for absentee landlords who had subsequently sold it to the Government.

There’s another category of displaced people – people whose lands have been acquired by the Government for Resettlement Sites. There’s a pecking order even amongst the wretched – Sardar Sarovar ‘oustees’ are more glamorous than other ‘oustees’ because they’re occasionally in the news and have a case in court. (In other Development Projects where there’s no press, no NBA, no court case, there are no records. The displaced leave no trail at all.)

In several resettlement sites, people have been dumped in rows of corrugated tin sheds which are furnaces in summer and ‘fridges in winter. Some of them are located in dry river beds which, during the monsoon, turn into fast-flowing drifts. I’ve been to some of these ‘sites’. I’ve seen film footage of others: shivering children, perched like birds on the edges of charpais, while swirling waters enter their tin homes. Frightened, fevered eyes watch pots and pans carried through the doorway by the current, floating out into the flooded fields, thin fathers swimming after them to retrieve what they can.

When the waters recede they leave ruin. Malaria, diarrhoea, sick cattle stranded in the slush. The ancient teak beams dismantled from their previous homes, carefully stacked away like postponed dreams, now spongy, rotten and unusable.

Forty households were moved from Manibeli to a resettlement site in Maharashtra. In the first year, thirty-eight children died.

In today’s papers ( The Indian Express , 26 th April ’99) there’s a report about nine deaths in a single rehabilitation site in Gujarat. In the course of a week. That’s 1.2875 PAPs a day, if you’re counting.

Many of those who have been resettled are people who have lived all their lives deep in the forest with virtually no contact with money and the modern world. Suddenly they find themselves left with the option of starving to death or walking several kilometres to the nearest town, sitting in the marketplace (both men and women), offering themselves as wage labour, like goods on sale.

Instead of a forest from which they gathered everything they needed – food, fuel, fodder, rope, gum, tobacco, tooth powder, medicinal herbs, housing material – they earn between ten and twenty rupees a day with which to feed and keep their families. Instead of a river, they have a hand pump. In their old villages, they had no money, but they were insured. If the rains failed, they had the forests to turn to. The river to fish in. Their livestock was their fixed deposit. Without all this, they’re a heartbeat away from destitution.

In Vadaj, a resettlement site I visited near Baroda, the man who was talking to me rocked his sick baby in his arms, clumps of flies gathered on its sleeping eyelids. Children collected around us, taking care not to burn their bare skin on the scorching tin walls of the shed they call a home. The man’s mind was far away from the troubles of his sick baby. He was making me a list of the fruit he used to pick in the forest. He counted forty-eight kinds. He told me that he didn’t think he or his children would ever be able to afford to eat any fruit again. Not unless he stole it. I asked him what was wrong with his baby. He said it would be better for the baby to die than to have to live like this. I asked what the baby’s mother thought about that. She didn’t reply. She just stared.

For the people who’ve been resettled, everything has to be re-learned. Every little thing, every big thing: from shitting and pissing (where d’you do it when there’s no jungle to hide you?) to buying a bus ticket, to learning a new language, to understanding money. And worst of all, learning to be supplicants. Learning to take orders. Learning to have Masters. Learning to answer only when you’re addressed.

In addition to all this, they have to learn how to make written representations (in triplicate) to the Grievance Redressal Committee or the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam for any particular problems they might have. Recently, 3,000 people came to Delhi to protest their situation – travelling overnight by train, living on the blazing streets. The President wouldn’t meet them because he had an eye infection. Maneka Gandhi, the Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, wouldn’t meet them but asked for a written representation ( Dear Maneka, Please don’t build the dam, Love, The People ). When the representation was handed to her, she scolded the little delegation for not having written it in English.

From being self-sufficient and free, to being impoverished and yoked to the whims of a world you know nothing, nothing about – what d’you suppose it must feel like? Would you like to trade your beach house in Goa for a hovel in Paharganj? No? Not even for the sake of the Nation?

Truly, it is just not possible for a State Administration, any State Administration, to carry out the rehabilitation of a people as fragile as this, on such an immense scale. It’s like using a pair of hedge-shears to trim an infant’s finger nails. You can’t do it without shearing its fingers off. Land for land sounds like a reasonable swap, but how do you implement it? How do you uproot 200,000 people (the official blinkered estimate) of which 117,000 are tribal people, and relocate them in a humane fashion? How do you keep their communities intact, in a country where every inch of land is fought over, where almost all litigation pending in courts has to do with land disputes?

Where is all this fine, unoccupied but arable land that is waiting to receive these intact communities?

The simple answer is that there isn’t any. Not even for the ‘officially’ displaced of this one dam.

What about the rest of the three thousand two hundred and ninety-nine dams?

What about the remaining thousands of ‘PAPs’ earmarked for annihilation? Shall we just put the Star of David on their doors and get it over with?

Jalud, in the Nimad plains of Madhya Pradesh, is the first of sixty villages that will be submerged by the reservoir of the Maheshwar Dam. Jalud is not a tribal village, and is therefore riven with the shameful caste divisions that are the scourge of every ordinary Hindu village. A majority of the land-owning farmers (the ones who qualify as PAPs) are Rajputs. They farm some of the most fertile soil in India. Their houses are piled with sacks of wheat and daal and rice. They boast so much about the things they grow on their land that if it weren’t so tragic, it could get on your nerves. Their houses have already begun to crack with the impact of the dynamiting on the dam site.

Twelve families, mostly Dalits, who had small holdings in the vicinity of the dam site had their land acquired. They told me how when they objected, cement was poured into their water pipes, their standing crops were bulldozed, and the police occupied the land by force. All 12 families are now landless and work as wage labour.

The area that the people of Jalud are going to be moved to is a few kilometres inland, away from the river, adjoining a predominantly Dalit and tribal village called Samraj. I saw the huge tract of land that had been marked off for them. It was a hard, stony hillock with stubbly grass and scrub, on which truckloads of silt were being unloaded and spread out in a thin layer to make it look like rich, black cotton soil. The story goes like this: at the instance of the S. Kumars (Textile Tycoons turned Nation Builders), the District Magistrate acquired the hillock, which was actually village common grazing land that belonged to the people of Samraj. In addition to this, the land of 10 Dalit villagers was acquired. No compensation was paid.

The villagers, whose main source of income was their livestock, had to sell their goats and buffaloes because they no longer had anywhere to graze them. Their only remaining source of income lies (lay) on the banks of a small lake on the edge of the village. In summer, when the water level recedes, it leaves a shallow ring of rich silt on which the villagers grow (grew) rice, melons and cucumber.

The S. Kumars have excavated this silt to cosmetically cover the stony grazing ground (that the people of Jalud don’t want). The banks of the lake are now steep and uncultivable.

The already impoverished people of Samraj have been left to starve, while this photo-opportunity is being readied for German funders and Indian courts and anybody else who cares to pass that way.

This is how India works. This is the genesis of the Maheshwar Dam. The story of the first village. What will happen to the other fifty-nine? May bad luck pursue this dam. May bulldozers turn upon the Textile Tycoons.

Nothing can justify this kind of behaviour.

In circumstances like these, even to entertain a debate about Rehabilitation is to take the first step towards setting aside the Principles of Justice. Resettling 200,000 people in order to take (or pretend to take) drinking water to 40 million – there’s something very wrong with the scale of operations here. This is Fascist Maths. It strangles stories. Bludgeons detail. And manages to blind perfectly reasonable people with its spurious, shining vision.

When I arrived on the banks of the Narmada in late March (1999), it was a month after the Supreme Court suddenly vacated the stay on construction work of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. I had read pretty much everything I could lay my hands on (all those ‘secret’ Government documents). I had a clear idea of the lay of the land – of what had happened where and when and to whom. The story played itself out before my eyes like a tragic film whose actors I’d already met. Had I not known its history, nothing would have made sense. Because in the valley there are stories within stories and it’s easy to lose the clarity of rage in the sludge of other peoples’ sorrow.

I ended my journey in Kevadia Colony, where it all began. Thirty-eight years ago, this is where the Government of Gujarat decided to locate the infrastructure it would need for starting work on the dam: guest houses, office blocks, accommodation for engineers and their staff, roads leading to the dam site, warehouses for construction material.

It is located on the cusp of what is now the Sardar Sarovar reservoir and the Wonder Canal, Gujarat’s ‘lifeline’ , which is going to quench the thirst of millions.

Nobody knows this, but Kevadia Colony is the key to the World. Go there, and secrets will be revealed to you.

In the winter of 1961, a government officer arrived in a village called Kothie and informed the villagers that some of their land would be needed to construct a helipad. In a few days a bulldozer arrived and flattened standing crops. The villagers were made to sign papers and were paid a sum of money, which they assumed was payment for their destroyed crops. When the helipad was ready, a helicopter landed on it, and out came Prime Minister Nehru. Most of the villagers couldn’t see him because he was surrounded by policemen. Nehru made a speech. Then he pressed a button and there was an explosion on the other side of the river. After the explosion he flew away. That was the inauguration of the earliest avatar of the Sardar Sarovar Dam.

Could Nehru have known when he pressed that button that he had unleashed an incubus?

After Nehru left, the Government of Gujarat arrived in strength. It acquired 1,600 acres of land from 950 families from six villages. The people were Tadvi tribals, but because of their proximity to the city of Baroda, not entirely unversed in the ways of a market economy. They were sent notices and told that they would be paid cash compensation and given jobs on the dam site. Then the nightmare began. Trucks and bulldozers rolled in. Forests were felled, standing crops destroyed. Everything turned into a whirl of jeeps and engineers and cement and steel. Mohan Bhai Tadvi watched eight acres of his land with standing crops of jowar, toovar and cotton being levelled. Overnight he became a landless labourer. Three years later he received his cash compensation of 250 rupees an acre in three instalments.

Dersukh Bhai Vesa Bhai’s father was given 3,500 rupees for his house and five acres of land with its standing crops and all the trees on it. He remembers walking all the way to Rajpipla (the district headquarters) as a little boy, holding his father’s hand. He remembers how terrified they were when they were called in to the Tehsildar’s office. They were made to surrender their compensation notices and sign a receipt. They were illiterate, so they didn’t know how much the receipt was made out for.

Everybody had to go to Rajpipla but they were always summoned on different days, one by one. So they couldn’t exchange information or compare amounts.

Gradually, out of the dust and bulldozers, an offensive, diffuse configuration emerged. Kevadia Colony. Row upon row of ugly cement flats, offices, guest houses, roads. All the graceless infrastructure of Big Dam construction. The villagers’ houses were dismantled and moved to the periphery of the colony, where they remain today, squatters on their own land. Those that created trouble were intimidated by the police and the construction company. The villagers told me that in the contractor’s headquarters they have a ‘lock-up’ like a police lock-up, where recalcitrant villagers are incarcerated and beaten.

The people who were evicted to build Kevadia Colony do not qualify as ‘Project-Affected’ in Gujarat’s Rehabilitation package.

Some of them work as servants in the officers’ bungalows and waiters in the guest house built on the land where their own houses once stood. Can there be anything more poignant?

Those who had some land left tried to cultivate it, but the Kevadia municipality introduced a scheme in which they brought in pigs to eat uncollected refuse on the streets. The pigs stray into the villagers’ fields and destroy their crops.

In 1992, after thirty years, each family has been offered a sum of 12,000 rupees per hectare, up to a maximum of 36,000 rupees, provided they agree to leave their homes and go away! Yet 40 per cent of the land that was acquired is lying unused. The government refuses to return it. Eleven acres acquired from Deviben, who is a widow now, have been given over to the Swami Narayan Trust (a big religious sect). On a small portion of it, the Trust runs a little school. The rest it cultivates, while Deviben watches through the barbed wire fence. On the 200 acres acquired in the village of Gora, villagers were evicted and blocks of flats were built. They lay empty for years. Eventually the Government hired it for a nominal fee to Jai Prakash Associates, the dam contractors, who, the villagers say, sub-let it privately for 32,000 rupees a month. (Jai Prakash Associates, the biggest dam contractors in the country, the real nation-builders, own the Siddharth Continental and the Vasant Continental in Delhi.)

On an area of about 30 acres there is an absurd cement PWD ‘replica’ of the ancient Shoolpaneshwar temple that was submerged in the reservoir. The same political formation that plunged a whole nation into a bloody, medieval nightmare because it insisted on destroying an old mosque to dig up a non-existent temple thinks nothing of submerging a hallowed pilgrimage route and hundreds of temples that have been worshipped in for centuries.

It thinks nothing of destroying the sacred hills and groves, the places of worship, the ancient homes of the gods and demons of tribal people.

It thinks nothing of submerging a valley that has yielded fossils, microliths and rock paintings, the only valley in India, according to archaeologists, that contains an uninterrupted record of human occupation from the Old Stone Age.

What can one say?

In Kevadia Colony, the most barbaric joke of all is the wildlife museum. The Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary Interpretation Centre gives you a quick, comprehensive picture of the Government’s commitment to Conservation.

The Sardar Sarovar reservoir, when the dam is at its full height, is going to submerge about 13,000 hectares of prime forest land. (In anticipation of submergence, the forest began to be felled many greedy years ago.) Environmentalists and conservationists were quite rightly alarmed at the extent of loss of biodiversity and wildlife habitat that the submergence would cause. To mitigate this loss, the Government decided to expand the Shoolpaneshwar Wildlife Sanctuary that straddles the dam on the south side of the river. There is a hare-brained scheme that envisages drowning animals from the submerged forests swimming their way to ‘wild-life corridors’ that will be created for them, and setting up home in the New! Improved! Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary. Presumably wildlife and biodiversity can be protected and maintained only if human activity is restricted and traditional rights to use forest resources curtailed. Forty thousand tribal people from 101 villages within the boundaries of the Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary depend on the forest for a livelihood. They will be ‘persuaded’ to leave. They are not included in the definition of Project Affected.

Where will they go? I imagine you know by now.

Whatever their troubles in the real world, in the Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary Interpretation Centre (where an old stuffed leopard and a mouldy sloth bear have to make do with a shared corner) the tribal people have a whole room to themselves. On the walls there are clumsy wooden carvings – Government-approved tribal art, with signs that say ‘Tribal Art’. In the centre, there is a life-sized thatched hut with the door open. The pot’s on the fire, the dog is asleep on the floor and all’s well with the world. Outside, to welcome you, are Mr. and Mrs. Tribal. A lumpy, papier mache couple, smiling.

Smiling . They’re not even permitted the grace of rage. That’s what I can’t get over.

Oh, but have I got it wrong? What if they’re smiling voluntarily, bursting with National Pride? Brimming with the joy of having sacrificed their lives to bring drinking water to thirsty millions in Gujarat?

For twenty years now, the people of Gujarat have waited for the water they believe the Wonder Canal will bring them. For years the Government of Gujarat has invested 85 per cent of the State’s irrigation budget into the Sardar Sarovar Projects. Every smaller, quicker, local, more feasible scheme has been set aside for the sake of this. Election after election has been contested and won on the ‘water ticket’. Everyone’s hopes are pinned to the Wonder Canal. Will she fulfil Gujarat’s dreams?

From the Sardar Sarovar Dam, the Narmada flows through 180 km of rich lowland into the Arabian Sea in Bharuch. What the Wonder Canal does, more or less, is to re-route most of the river, turning it almost 90 degrees northward. It’s a pretty drastic thing to do to a river. The Narmada estuary in Bharuch is one of the last known breeding places of the Hilsa, probably the hottest contender for India’s favourite fish. The Stanley Dam wiped out Hilsa from the Cauvery River in South India, and Pakistan’s Ghulam Mohammed Dam destroyed its spawning area on the Indus. Hilsa, like the salmon, is an anadromous fish – born in freshwater, migrating to the ocean as a smolt and returning to the river to spawn. The drastic reduction in water flow, the change in the chemistry of the water because of all the sediment trapped behind the dam, will radically alter the ecology of the estuary and modify the delicate balance of fresh water and sea water which is bound to affect the spawning. At present, the Narmada estuary produces 13,000 tonnes of Hilsa and freshwater prawn (which also breed in brackish water). Ten thousand fisher families depend on it for a living.

The Morse Committee was appalled to discover that no studies had been done of the downstream environment – no documentation of the riverine ecosystem, its seasonal changes, biological species or the pattern of how its resources are used. The dam-builders had no idea what the impact of the dam would be on the people and the environment downstream, let alone any ideas on what steps to take to mitigate it.

The government simply says that it will alleviate the loss of Hilsa fisheries by stocking the reservoir with hatchery-bred fish. (Who’ll control the reservoir? Who’ll grant the commercial fishing to its favourite paying customers?) The only hitch is that so far, scientists have not managed to breed Hilsa artificially. The rearing of Hilsa depends on getting spawn from wild adults, which will, in all likelihood be eliminated by the dam. Dams have either eliminated or endangered one-fifth of the world’s freshwater fish.

So! Quiz question – where will the 40,000 fisher folk go?

E-mail your answers to the government_that_cares.com

At the risk of losing readers (I’ve been warned several times – ‘How can you write about irrigation ? Who the hell is interested?’), let me tell you what the Wonder Canal is – and what she’s meant to achieve. Be interested, if you want to snatch your future back from the sweaty palms of the Iron Triangle.

Most rivers in India are monsoon-fed. About 80-85 per cent of the flow takes place during the rainy months – usually between June and September. The purpose of a dam, an irrigation dam, is to store monsoon water in its reservoir and then use it judiciously for the rest of the year, distributing it across dry land through a system of canals. The area of land irrigated by the canal network is called the command area. How will the command area, accustomed only to seasonal irrigation, its entire ecology designed for that single pulse of monsoon rain, react to being irrigated the whole year round? Perennial canal irrigation does to soil roughly what anabolic steroids do to the human body. Steroids can turn an ordinary athlete into an Olympic medal-winner, perennial irrigation can convert soil which produced only a single crop a year into soil that yields several crops a year. Lands on which farmers traditionally grew crops that don’t need a great deal of water (maize, millet, barley, and a whole range of pulses) suddenly yield water-guzzling cash crops – cotton, rice, soya bean, and the biggest guzzler of all (like those finned ‘fifties cars), sugar-cane. This completely alters traditional crop-patterns in the command area. People stop growing things that they can afford to eat, and start growing things that they can only afford to sell. By linking themselves to the ‘market’ they lose control over their lives.

Unfortunately, ecologically, this is a poisonous payoff. Even if the markets hold out, the soil doesn’t. Over time it becomes too poor to support the extra demands made on it. Gradually, in the way the steroid-using athlete becomes an invalid, the soil becomes depleted and degraded, the agricultural yields begin to wind down. In India, land irrigated by well water is now almost twice as productive as land irrigated by canals. Certain kinds of soil are less suitable for perennial irrigation than others. Perennial canal irrigation raises the level of the water-table. As the water moves up through the soil, it absorbs salts. Saline water is drawn to the surface by capillary action, and the land becomes water-logged. The ‘logged’ water (to coin a phrase) is then breathed into the atmosphere by plants, causing an even greater concentration of salts in the soil. When the concentration of salts in the soil reaches one per cent, that soil becomes toxic to plant life. This is what’s called salinization.

A study by the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University says that one-fifth of the world’s irrigated land is salt-affected.

By the mid-80s, 25 million of the 37 million hectares under irrigation in Pakistan were estimated to be either salinized or water-logged or both. In India the estimates vary between 6 and 10 million hectares. According to ‘secret’ government studies, more than 52 per cent of the Sardar Sarovar command area is prone to water-logging and salinization.

And that’s not the end of the bad news.

The 460-kilometre-long, concrete-lined Sardar Sarovar Wonder Canal and its 75,000-kilometre network of branch canals and sub-branch canals is designed to irrigate a total of two million hectares of land spread over 12 districts. The districts of Kutch and Saurashtra (the billboards of Gujarat’s Thirst campaign) are at the very tail end of this network.

The system of canals superimposes an arbitrary concrete grid on the existing pattern of natural drainage in the command area. It’s a little like re-organising the pattern of reticulate veins on the surface of a leaf. When a canal cuts across the path of a natural drain, it blocks the natural flow of the seasonal water and leads to water-logging. The engineering solution to this is to map the pattern of natural drainage in the area and replace it with an alternate, artificial drainage system that is built in conjunction with the canals. The problem, as you can imagine, is that doing this is enormously expensive. The cost of drainage is not included as part of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. It usually isn’t, in most irrigation projects.

David Hopper, the World Bank’s vice-president for South Asia, has admitted that the Bank does not usually include the cost of drainage in its irrigation projects in South Asia because irrigation projects with adequate drainage are not economically viable. It costs five times as much to provide adequate drainage as it does to irrigate the same amount of land . The Bank’s solution to the problem is to put in the irrigation system and wait for salinity and water-logging to set in. When all the money’s spent, and the land is devastated, and the people are in despair, who should pop by? Why, the friendly neighbourhood Banker! And what’s that bulge in his pocket? Could it be a loan for a Drainage Project?

In Pakistan the World Bank financed the Tarbela (1977) and Mangla Dam (1967) Projects on the Indus. The command areas are water-logged. Now The Bank has given Pakistan a 785-million-dollar loan for a drainage project. In India, in Punjab and Haryana it’s doing the same.

Irrigation without drainage is like having a system of arteries and no veins. Pretty damn pointless.

Since the World Bank stepped back from the Sardar Sarovar Projects, it’s a little unclear where the money for the drainage is going to come from. This hasn’t deterred the Government from going ahead with the Canal work. The result is that even before the dam is ready, before the Wonder Canal has been commissioned, before a single drop of irrigation water has been delivered, water-logging has set in. Among the worst affected areas are the resettlement colonies.

There is a difference between the planners of the Sardar Sarovar irrigation scheme and the planners of previous projects. At least they acknowledge that water-logging and salinization are real problems and need to be addressed.

Their solutions, however, are corny enough to send a Hoolock Gibbon to a hooting hospital.

They plan to have a series of electronic groundwater sensors placed in every 100 square kilometres of the command area. (That works out to about 1,800 ground sensors.) These will be linked to a central computer which will analyse the data and send out commands to the canal heads to stop water flowing into areas that show signs of water-logging. A network of ‘Only-irrigation’, ‘Only-drainage’ and ‘Irrigation-cum drainage’ tube-wells will be sunk, and electronically synchronised by the central computer. The saline water will be pumped out, mixed with mathematically computed quantities of freshwater and re-circulated into a network of surface and sub-surface drains (for which more land will be acquired). To achieve the irrigation efficiency that they claim they’ll achieve, according to a study done by Dr. Rahul Ram for Kalpavriksh, 82 per cent of the water that goes into the Wonder Canal network will have to be pumped out again!

They’ve never implemented an electronic irrigation scheme before, not even as a pilot project. It hasn’t occurred to them to experiment with some already degraded land, just to see if it works. No, they’ll use our money to install it over the whole of the two million hectares and then see if it works. What if it doesn’t? If it doesn’t, it won’t matter to the planners. They’ll still draw the same salaries. They’ll still get their pension and their gratuity and whatever else you get when you retire from a career of inflicting mayhem on a people.

How can it possibly work? It’s like sending in a rocket scientist to milk a troublesome cow. How can they manage a gigantic electronic irrigation system when they can’t even line the walls of the canals without having them collapse and cause untold damage to crops and people?

When they can’t even prevent the Big Dam itself from breaking off in bits when it rains?

To quote from one of their own studies, “ The design, the implementation and management of the integration of groundwater and surface water in the above circumstance is complex .”

Agreed. To say the least. Their recommendation of how to deal with the complexity:

“It will only be possible to implement such a system if all groundwater and surface water supplies are managed by a single authority.”

It’s beginning to make sense now. Who will own the water? The Single Authority. Who will sell the water? The Single Authority. Who will profit from the sales? The Single Authority. The Single Authority has a scheme whereby it will sell water by the litre, not to individuals but to farmers’ co-operatives (which don’t exist just yet, but no doubt the Single Authority can create co-operatives and force farmers to co-operate?) Computer water, unlike ordinary river water, is expensive. Only those who can afford it will get it.

Gradually, small farmers will get edged out by big farmers, and the whole cycle of uprootment will begin all over again.

The Single Authority, because it owns the computer water, will also decide who will grow what. It says that farmers getting computer water will not be allowed to grow sugarcane because they’ll use up the share of the thirsty millions at the tail end of the canal. But the Single Authority has already given licences to ten large sugar mills right near the head of the canal. On an earlier occasion, the Single Authority said that only 30 per cent of the command area of the Ukai Dam would be used for sugarcane. But sugarcane grows on 75 per cent of it (and 30 per cent is water-logged). In Maharashtra, thanks to a different branch of the Single Authority, the politically powerful sugar-lobby that occupies one-tenth of the state’s irrigated land uses half the state’s irrigation water.

In addition to the sugar growers, the Single Authority has recently announced a scheme that envisages a series of five-star hotels, golf-courses and water parks that will come up along the Wonder Canal. What earthly reason could possibly justify this?

The Single Authority says it’s the only way to raise money to complete the project!

I really worry about those millions of good people in Kutch and Saurashtra.

Will the water ever reach them?

First of all, we know that there’s a lot less water in the river than the Single Authority claims there is.

Second of all, in the absence of the Narmada Sagar Dam, the irrigation benefits of the Sardar Sarovar drop by a further 17-30 per cent.

Third of all, the irrigation efficiency of the Wonder Canal (the actual amount of water delivered by the system) has been arbitrarily fixed at 60 per cent. The highest irrigation efficiency in India, taking into account system leaks and surface evaporation, is 35 per cent. This means it’s likely that only half of the Command Area will be irrigated. Which half? The first half.

Fourth, to get to Kutch and Saurashtra, the Wonder Canal has to negotiate its way past the ten sugar mills, the golf-courses, the five-star hotels, the water parks and the cash-crop growing, politically powerful, Patel-rich districts of Baroda, Kheda, Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Mehsana. (Already, in complete contravention of its own directives, the Single Authority has allotted the city of Baroda a sizeable quantity of water. When Baroda gets, can Ahmedabad be left behind? The political clout of powerful urban centres in Gujarat will ensure that they get their share.)

Fifth, even in the (one hundred per cent) unlikely event that water gets there, it has to be piped and distributed to those eight thousand waiting villages.

It’s worth knowing that of the one billion people in the world who have no access to safe drinking water, 855 million live in rural areas. This is because the cost of installing an energy-intensive network of thousands of kilometres of pipelines, aqueducts, pumps and treatment plants that would be needed to provide drinking water to scattered rural populations is prohibitive. Nobody builds Big Dams to provide drinking water to rural people. Nobody can afford to.

When the Morse Committee first arrived in Gujarat they were impressed by the Gujarat Government’s commitment to taking drinking water to such distant, rural outposts. They asked to see the detailed drinking water plans.

There weren’t any. (There still aren’t any.)

They asked if any costs had been worked out. “A few thousand crores,” was the breezy answer. A billion dollars is an expert’s calculated guess. It’s not included as part of the project cost. So where is the money going to come from?

Never mind. Jus’ askin’.

It’s interesting that the Farakka Barrage that diverts water from the Ganga to Calcutta Port has reduced the drinking water availability for 40 million people who live downstream in Bangladesh.

At times there’s something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.

Build a dam to take water away from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to bring water to 40 million people.

Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?

The last person I met in the valley was Bhaiji Bhai. He is a Tadvi tribal from Undava, one of the first villages where the government began to acquire land for the Wonder Canal and its 75,000 kilometre network. Bhaiji Bhai lost seventeen of his nineteen acres to the Wonder Canal. It crashes through his land, 700 feet wide including its walkways and steep, sloping embankments, like a velodrome for giant bicyclists.

The Canal network affects more than two hundred thousand families. People have lost wells and trees, people have had their houses separated from their farms by the canal, forcing them to walk two or three kilometres to the nearest bridge and then two or three kilometres back along the other side. Twenty-three thousand families, let’s say a hundred thousand people, will be, like Bhaiji Bhai, seriously affected. They don’t count as ‘Project-affected’ and are not entitled to rehabilitation.

Like his neighbours in Kevadia Colony, Bhaiji Bhai became a pauper overnight.

Bhaiji Bhai and his people, forced to smile for photographs on government calendars. Bhaiji Bhai and his people, denied the grace of rage. Bhaiji Bhai and his people, squashed like bugs by this country they’re supposed to call their own.

It was late evening when I arrived at his house. We sat down on the floor and drank over-sweet tea in the dying light. As he spoke, a memory stirred in me, a sense of deja vu . I couldn’t imagine why. I knew I hadn’t met him before. Then I realised what it was. I didn’t recognise him, but I remembered his story. I’d seen him in an old documentary film, shot more than ten years ago, in the valley. He was frailer now, his beard softened with age. But his story hadn’t aged. It was still young and full of passion. It broke my heart, the patience with which he told it. I could tell he had told it over and over and over again, hoping, praying, that one day, one of the strangers passing through Undava would turn out to be Good Luck. Or God.

Bhaiji Bhai, Bhaiji Bhai, when will you get angry? When will you stop waiting? When will you say `That’s enough!’ and reach for your weapons, whatever they may be> When will you show us the whole of your resonant, terrifying, invincible strength?

When will you break the faith? Will you break the faith? Or will you let it break you?

* * * To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers who doesn’t. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easliy you can do it. How easily you could press a button and annihilate the earth. How you can start a war, or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewher else. You use caprice to fracture a people’s faith in the ancient things – earth, forest, water, air. Once that’s done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you, because you’re all they have. They will love you even while they despise you. They will trust you even though they know you well. They will vote for you even as squeeze the very breath from their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe. They will live where you dump their belongings. They have to. What else can they do? There’s no higher court of redress. You are their mother and their father. You are the judge and the jury. You are the World. You are God. Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And Powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.

This cold, contemporary cast of power is couched between the lines of noble-sounding clauses in democratic-sounding constitutions. It’s wielded by the elected representatives of an ostensibly free people. Yet no monarch, no despot, no dictator in any other century in the history of human civilisation has had access to weapons like these.

Day by day, river by river, forest by forest, mountain by mountain, missile by missile, bomb by bomb – almost without our knowing it, we are being broken.

Big Dams are to a Nation’s ‘Development’ what Nuclear Bombs are to its Military Arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons Governments use to control their own people. Both Twentieth Century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They’re both malignant indications of civilisation turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link – the understanding – between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.

Can we unscramble it?

Maybe. Inch by inch. Bomb by bomb. Dam by dam. Maybe by fighting specific wars in specific ways. We could begin in the Narmada Valley.

This July will bring the last monsoon of the Twentieth Century. The ragged army in the Narmada Valley has declared that it will not move when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir rise to claim its lands and homes. Whether you love the dam or hate it, whether you want it or you don’t, it is in the fitness of things that you understand the price that’s being paid for it. That you have the courage to watch while the dues are cleared and the books are squared.

Our dues. Our books. Not theirs.

ARUNDHATI ROY April 1999

Biography of Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy was born in 1961 in the Northeastern Indian region of Bengal, to a Christian mother and Hindu father. She spent her childhood in Aymanam in Kerala, which serves as the setting for her first novel, The God of Small Things (under the name "Ayemenem"). Roy's mother, Mary Roy, homeschooled her until the age of ten, when she began attending regular classes. She has been reluctant to discuss her father publicly, having spent very little time with him during her lifetime; Roy instead focuses on her mother's influence in her life. Mary Roy, a political activist, won an unprecedented victory for women's rights in Kerala. Through her persistence, the Supreme Court granted Christian women in Kerala the right to have an inheritance.

She spent her teenage years at boarding school in Southern India, after which she earned her degree from the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi. After graduating, Roy supported herself by teaching aerobics while honing her writing skills. She eventually wrote several film scripts, which are recognized for their complex structure and biting social commentary. Roy wrote and starred in the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones , and she wrote the script for Electric Moon , directed by her second husband, Pradip Krishen. (Her first husband was Gerard Da Cunha, whom she met while in college. Their marriage lasted approximately four years.) Both films garnered a cult following, setting the stage for the fiction-writing side of Roy's career. Penguin published the script for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones as a book in 2004.

Even when she was a low-profile writer, Roy began to assert her political opinions loudly. She rallied media support for Phoolan Devi, a politician and former criminal of Robin-Hood fame, whom she felt was being misrepresented by the film Bandit Queen (directed by Shekhar Kapur). After the controversy surrounding Bandit Queen subsided, Roy took time to write her first and only novel to date, The God of Small Things . She received an extraordinary advance of half a million pounds on the book, making its release high-profile well ahead of time. After the novel's publication in 1997, the book won the prestigious Booker Prize, making Roy its first Indian woman and non-expatriate Indian recipient.

In addition to her novelistic skills, Roy is widely known for political activism (perhaps along the lines of a Noam Chomsky). She has published many works of nonfiction including several essays as well as The End of Imagination (1998), The Greater Common Good (1999), The Cost of Living (1999), Power Politics (2002), War Talk (2003), The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile (2004, with David Barsamian), and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (2004). She also took part in the June 2005 World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, The Algebra of Infinite Justice , but she declined to accept it.

Roy has faced accusations of being anti-American and was convicted of contempt of court by the New Delhi Supreme Court for her political activism. She remains relentless. For instance, she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004 for her efforts toward social justice and peaceful conflict resolution. Roy continues to write, engage in advocacy, and live with her husband in New Delhi.

Study Guides on Works by Arundhati Roy

The god of small things arundhati roy.

The God of Small Things is Arundhati Roy's first and only novel to date. It is semi-autobiographical in that it incorporates, embellishes, and greatly supplements events from her family's history. When asked why she chose Ayemenem as the setting...

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The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Arundhati Roy

Published in 2017 by Indian author Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a novel that conveys some of the worst events in the history of modern India. One of these events, a new land reform, puts people in the book into extreme...

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The Prescient Anger of Arundhati Roy

By Samanth Subramanian

Nine months can make a person, or remake her. In October, 1997, Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her first novel, “ The God of Small Things .” India had just turned fifty, and the country needed symbols to celebrate itself. Roy became one of them. Then, in July of 1998, she published an essay about another such symbol: a series of five nuclear-bomb tests conducted by the government in the sands of Rajasthan. The essay, which eviscerated India’s nuclear policy for placing the lives of millions in danger, wasn’t so much written as breathed out in a stream of fire. Roy’s fall from darling to dissident was swift, and her landing rough. In India, she never attained the heights of adulation again.

Not that she sought them. Through the decades since, Roy has continued to produce incendiary essays, and a new book, “ My Seditious Heart ,” collects them in a volume that spans nearly nine hundred pages. The book opens with her piece from 1998, “The End of Imagination,” but India’s nuclear tests were not Roy’s first infuriation. In fact, in 1994—after she had graduated from architecture school, and around the time that she was acting in indie films, teaching aerobics, and working on her novel—she wrote two livid articles about a Bollywood movie’s unscrupulous depiction of the rape of a real, living woman. That tone has never faltered. Every one of the essays in “My Seditious Heart” was composed in the key of rage.

Roy is often asked why she turned her back on fiction. (Her second novel, “ The Ministry of Utmost Happiness ,” wasn’t published until 2017.) “Another book? Right now?” she once told a journalist. “This talk of nuclear war displays such contempt for music, art, literature and everything else that defines civilization. So what kind of book should I write?” The more interesting question, of course, is why Roy clung to nonfiction, and how she engages within it—the timbre of her reaction to demagoguery, inequality, corporate malfeasance, and the spoliation of the environment. The West’s liberal citizens are beginning to think afresh about how they ought to respond to such provocations: about whether there is virtue in cool balance, or dishonor in uninhibited anger, or utility in mustering a radical Left to counter a hostile Right. They could look to Roy for some answers. She has been ploughing this field for twenty-five years.

In “My Seditious Heart,” Roy rides to battle against a host of troubles. Most frequently, she criticizes India’s fondness for big dams, and its cruelty to the people displaced by them. She lambasts the American imperium and its souped-up capitalism, multinational institutions like the World Bank, and corporate greed. She flays the Hindu supremacists in India , who have sparked pogroms, divided communities, and tightened their hold on power, and she writes with sympathy about Maoists, the militant insurgents in central India who are fighting a state that is plundering the earth of ore and coal. Roy’s preoccupation with these topics has been so absolute that her second novel, when she finally produced it, was stocked with characters personifying her causes. One has a name, Azad Bhartiya, that translates as “Free Indian.” Bhartiya has been fasting for eleven years against assorted evils, and at the site of his protest he lists some of them on a laminated cardboard sign:

I am against the Capitalist Empire, plus against US Capitalism, Indian and American State Terrorism / All Kinds of Nuclear Weapons and Crime, plus against the Bad Education System / Corruption / Violence / Environmental Degradation and All Other Evils. Also I am against Unemployment. I am also fasting for the complete obliteration of the entire Bourgeois class.

If Roy ever begins a hunger strike, one feels that she will place herself behind just such a placard.

When Roy’s essays appeared individually, in magazines or newspapers, they functioned as little jabs of electricity, shocking us into reaction. Collectively, in “My Seditious Heart,” they remind us that many of the flaws in her nonfiction recur and persist. Her instinct to condemn becomes wearisome, and she gives us only the vaguest prescriptions for the systems she wishes would replace market-driven democracy, or dams, or globalization. She is prone to romanticizing the pre-modern, prompting us to wonder if she speaks too glibly for others. (“In their old villages,” she writes of displaced tribes, “they had no money, but they were insured. If the rains failed, they had the forests to turn to. The river to fish in. Their livestock was their fixed deposit.”) In stretches, the text is burdened by rhetorical questions and metaphors. (An essay titled “Democracy: Who is She When She’s at Home?” features three images in two successive sentences to describe how political parties treat Indian democracy: they till its marrow, mine it for electoral advantage, and tunnel under it like “termites excavating a mound.”) And her presentation of data can be self-serving. Repeatedly, she writes that around eight hundred million Indians live on less than twenty rupees (about thirty cents) a day. That statistic, from a 2005 government report, changed with time; by 2011 , when she was still using the figure, the government estimated that nearly two hundred and seventy million people lived on less than thirty rupees a day. Admitting to that reduction would have complicated her arguments, which may explain why she never updated her numbers.

When the dial isn’t tuned to high fulmination, Roy is easier and more moving to read. To form her opinions, or perhaps to confirm them, she travels widely across India. Her narrations of her encounters with people are tender, and her prose becomes marked by rare stillness. In Kashmir, in 2010, it was apple-packing season: “I worried that a couple of the little red-cheeked children who looked so much like apples themselves might be crated by mistake.” In Undava, a village pauperized by a dam and canal project, Roy meets Bhaiji Bhai, from whom the government had snatched seventeen of his nineteen acres. She recalls his story from an old documentary. “It broke my heart, the patience with which he told it,” she writes. “I could tell he had told it over and over again, hoping, praying, that one day, one of the strangers passing through Undava would turn out to be Good Luck.” Of the town of Harsud, in 2004, soon to be drowned by a reservoir: “A town turned inside out, its privacy ravaged, its innards exposed. Personal belongings, beds, cupboards, clothes, photographs, pots and pans lie on the street. . . . The people of Harsud are razing their town to the ground. Themselves.” That final word conveys the absurd tragedy of it all—of the poor hurrying to dismantle their lives, preferring that to having their lives dismantled for them.

The prototypical Roy essay is “Walking with the Comrades,” which holds both a fluid sense of discovery and a stubbornness of moral purpose. When it was first published, in 2010, it occupied most of an issue of Outlook , an Indian newsweekly. In it, Roy is invited to travel for a few weeks with a squad of Maoists through the forests of central India. The Prime Minister has called Maoists the greatest internal threat to the country’s security, but Roy finds men and women who have been repeatedly dispossessed, and who are trying to organize villagers and local tribes into some form of struggle. The government, for its part, has assembled a militia that wounds or kills those it suspects of supporting the Maoists, so that corporations may better mow down their forests and mine their land.

These are real, grievous cruelties. But, when Roy considers the Maoists’ own use of force, she adopts a gentler perspective. She describes the People’s Courts, where insurgents stage show trials before executing police officers. “How can we accept them? Or approve this form of rude justice?” she writes. Then she does approve it, by invoking the state’s own shoddy trials and executions. At least, in the case of a People’s Court, she writes, “the collective was physically present to make its own decision. It wasn’t made by judges who had lost touch with ordinary life a long time ago, presuming to speak on behalf of an absent collective.” This is a strange way to regard the judiciary, a pillar of the representative democracy she wants so much to restore to health.

Many of Roy’s positions have this kind of hard moral clarity. She declares that the free market undermines democracy, allowing for no complexity in the relationship between them. Grant-making institutions funded by companies are automatically suspect, their agendas serving only as tools to pry open markets and convert people into consumers. She has harsh words for the Ford Foundation—and then, through guilt by association, for any Indian nonprofit that has accepted a Ford grant, without weighing for us, on the page, the work that nonprofit may have done. (She did not, it should be noted, turn down her Booker purse, when it was still being sponsored by a British company that grew rich by using indentured labor in its Guyanese sugarcane plantations.) All big dams are ruinous, she insists, before comparing them to nukes: “They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons governments use to control their own people.”

Her essays tend to close on a call to action. “The borders are open. Come on in,” she writes, summoning us to protest at the site of India’s most controversial dam. In a piece titled “Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?,” she writes, “Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the US occupation of Iraq.” Go after the companies that benefit from the occupation; refuse to fight this immoral fight. She finds herself almost bewildered that those who suffer most stay silent. It strikes her—as it has struck me and no doubt many others who have lived in India—as something of a wonder that the country, ridden with injustices, has not witnessed a revolution. “Bhaiji Bhai, Bhaiji Bhai, when will you get angry?” she writes. “When will you stop waiting? When will you say ‘That’s enough!’ and reach for your weapons, whatever they may be?”

In their bare-knuckle approach, these essays descend directly from those of William Hazlitt, who advised his fellow-progressives to pull no punches. Like Roy, Hazlitt reflexively distrusted power, “the grim idol that the world adore.” In a polemic titled “On the Connexion between Toad-Eaters and Tyrants,” published in 1817, he offered a template for writerly resistance. First, “be a good hater.” Keep your memory long and your will strong. For the true lover of liberty, a hatred of wrongdoing “deprives him of his rest. It stagnates in his blood. It loads his heart with aspics’ tongues.” (“Aspic,” as he used it, was another word for “asp.”) All his life, Hazlitt railed against the formal dullness of political prose. The language of progressives must be inflamed, he thought, and their imaginations whipped by anger. “Abstract reason, unassisted by passion,” he wrote, “is no match for power and prejudice.”

These qualities, though, have earned Roy the disapproval of her own teammates. She was always certain to rile the nationalists, corporate India, and the state. (In 2002, she paid a fine and spent a day in prison after India’s Supreme Court classified her criticisms of the judiciary as criminal contempt.) But within the Indian left, too, you could detect a lack of warmth for her methods, and doubts that are now familiar. Roy’s brush was too broad, some said. She made convenient moral elisions, as with the Maoists’ violence. Her equation of big dams and nuclear bombs—couldn’t she have been more nuanced about that? Her habit of decrying capitalism, even as some market reforms lifted Indian people out of poverty—didn’t that paint the left as unempirical? Roy spared very few people, and very few institutions, at a time when the left needed everyone it could attract.

Then, while these worries were being nursed, the world made itself more deserving of Roy’s anger. Large companies, particularly in finance and technology, were exposed to be so corrupt that they deformed the nature of democracy. States placed their citizens under surveillance. Economic inequality grew, and the environmental crisis spiked. Nativists and right-wing ideologues lied their way into office, exploiting and widening the divisions of class and race. Reading “My Seditious Heart,” you feel as if Roy has been hollering as extravagantly as possible for years, trying to grab our attention, and we’ve kept motoring on toward the edge of the cliff.

The book emerges into an especially disheartening time in India. In its titular essay, published in 2016, Roy permitted herself a faint glow of hope about the resistance to the “manifesto of hate” enacted by the Hindu right. “Little by little, people have begun to stand up to it,” she wrote. But, in May, the Bharatiya Janata Party returned to power with an even greater mandate, its campaign a multibillion-dollar production of minority-baiting and sabre-rattling. This triumph doesn’t redeem Roy’s elisions and reductions, but it does make her anger the most indispensable part of her writing. Her fury is suited to these horrible and therefore simpler times; it’s more tuned to the reality on the ground than restraint and statistics. Roy started writing nonfiction when the world felt better. “My Seditious Heart” arrives to tell us not that the world has deteriorated but that it was never as fine as we once believed.

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Writer Arundhati Roy wins prestigious essay prize for lifetime achievement

According to the charles veillon foundation, the institution behind the 45th prix européen de l’essai, ‘arundhati roy uses the essay as a form of combat’.

Arundhati Roy has won the 45th Prix Européen de l’Essai for Lifetime Achievement award for her essays.

Apart from her fiction works, the Booker-winning author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has been a prolific writer of non-fiction on nuclear power, international conflicts and challenges faced by democracies. She has often drawn flak for commenting on matters usually confined to scholarly or academic circles, often getting the appellation ‘writer-activist’.

Roy has often responded to that criticism, saying in a 2002 essay: “I’ve been saddled with this double-barrelled appellation… not because my work is political, but because in my essays, I take sides. I take a position. I have a point of view. What’s worse, I make it clear that I think it’s right and moral to take that position and what’s even worse, use everything in my power to flagrantly solicit support for that position. For a writer of the 21st century, that’s considered a pretty uncool, unsophisticated thing to do.”

The Charles Veillon Foundation, the institution behind the award, said in a statement, “Arundhati Roy uses the essay as a form of combat.”

“It would be presumptuous, arrogant, and even a little stupid of a writer to believe that she could change the world with her writing,” shared Roy in a statement after the announcement. “But it would be pitiful if she didn’t even try.”

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Arundhati Roy: Biography, Works and Books Review

Arundhati Roy is a renowned author who has many published works and has gained many recognitions throughout her career. This essay will be focusing on her life as an author and the many works of hers. I will also seek to examine her contributions to the field of literature and society as a whole.

Introduction

Arundhati Roy, born in 1960 in Kerala, India, was an architecture student at the Delhi School of Architecture. Although she was trained in architecture , her interest was not in that field; she envisioned herself in growing as a writer. Her first work, ‘The God of Small Things’ (1997) kickstarted her career as an author. This work led to her winning the Booker Prize for Fiction and was published in 19 countries in 16 languages, selling around 6 million copies. Her general style of literary output was composed of political nonfiction, capitalism, and struggles related to her homeland. She was often met with conflict with Indian authorities because of her active role in numerous human rights and environmental causes. She faced criticism because she vocally supported Naxalite insurgency groups. She voiced out her concerns and thoughts about various issues such as, the need for inclusion of Afghan women in the peace talks between the Untied States and Taliban, against the arrest of a professor who was arrested for alleged Maoist links, Kashmiri independence, prevention of the construction of dams in Narmada etc. Hence, in recognition of her involvement in her advocacy of human rights, in 2002, she was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award, the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004 and also the Sahitya Akademi Award from the Indian Academy of Letters in 2006 (Tikkanen, 2020).

Arundhati Roy: Works and Contributions

Arundhati Roy’s books include, The God of Small Things (1997), The Cost of Living: The Greater Common Good and the End of Imagination (1999), Power Politics (2001), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002), War Talk (2003), In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (2003), Come September (2004), Public Power in the Age of Empire (2004), An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2006), 13 December: A Reader, the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament (2006), Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy (2009), Shape Of the Beast, The – Pb (2009), Dictionary of Commerce (2010), Broken Republic: Three Essays (2011), Walking with the Comrades (2011), Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014), The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). I will now go into some of her most seminal works among them in detail.

The God of Small Things (1997)

The theme of the book revolves around the marginal characters who had to bear the weight of oppressive traditions in the Ayemenem society. The novel covers concepts of untouchability, caste segregation, power conflicts and feminism. The book seeks to venture into the caste system prevalent in south India, communism in Kerala and the roles played by Syrian Christians situated there.  This work is often studied in the post-colonial point of view, analyze her perspectives in trying to highlight the dehumanizing social taboos and the struggles underwent by the marginalized ‘untouchables’ and women. The book does a good job at illustrating the struggles faced by women in the creation of their identities in a primarily male dominated society. The book pushes the readers to think, reflect on the unhealthy and cruel nature of traditions and mentalities in the society and understand the need for social reform. “Roy is keenly aware of the exploitation and oppression of have-nots (including women) by the upper classes. The novel encompasses the poor exploited and socially rejected people of the Kerala society. They are misfits, out casts, factory workers and low caste people, Roy clearly points out the fatal effects of massive industrialization” (Krishnnaveni, 2014, p. 8).

The Cost of Living: The Greater Common Good and the End of Imagination (1999)

The Cost of Living was her first non-fiction work through which Arundhati Roy exposes the authoritarian paternalism of the Indian state. The volume consists of 2 essays that consist of the country’s major projects such as the bomb detonation and the dam and irrigation ones. The first essay, ‘The Greater Common Good’, focuses primarily on the Narmada project and the potential flooding of the valley upon the building of huge dams on the river. In this essay, she calls out the Indian government and promotes resistance against the issue till justice is served. The second essay, ‘The End of Imagination’, covers the detonation of the nuclear bomb, and through this essay she sought to reveal the foolishness and arrogance of the state, and the plight of the people having to deal with the consequences of these actions. Through this article, she questions the government on why it would choose to test the bomb when majority of the citizens of India are living in poverty and struggling to make ends meet.

War Talk (2003)

War Talk is a collection of 6 short political essays that cover the problems of globalization and militarization. She talks about the imminent threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan and how the helpless citizens are often left to deal with the negative consequences of the tensions between the two states. In all 6 essays, Roy is highly critical about the usage of power by the ones in charge and the consequent vilification of those who dare to showcase opposition against this unequal reign of power, wealth and privilege.

An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2006)

Through this book, Arundhati Roy managed to highlight the importance of resistance yet again. It consists of 14 well-constructed political articles through which Arundhati Roy aimed to deconstruct the notions of state terrorism, imperialism, empire, globalization of the corporate, neoliberal capitalism and brutality. She starts off by defending the Narmada Bachao Andolan and spoke in favor of the Dalits and Adivasis who became victims during the process of protecting their own lands from developmental projects. She talks about how the genocide of people is tolerated under the pretense of ‘nationalism’ or ‘freedom’. She calls out the cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam ad Korean Wars, the unwavering support for Israel causing even more havoc in Palestine and other such war crimes committed by the US government. She continues to highlight how the United States has learnt nothing and shows no signs of remorse after the happenings of the Vietnam War and continues to engage in these harmful actions at the cost of millions of Iraqi lives. Roy believes that the rise of corporate globalization can be hindered if people as a whole refuse to and accept their ideas, products, weapons and versions of history. Through this book, she did a commendable job in exposing the government’s arrogance and its tendency to divide and exploit citizens for the benefits of multinational corporations and government interests alone.

Walking with the Comrades (2011)

Through ‘Walking with the Comrades’, Arundhati Roy carefully illustrates the conflicts between the Indian State and the Naxalites or Maoists. The Maoists are a revolutionary guerilla force whose battle ranges over land, rights, power, ecology, minerals etc. against the exploitative nature of the Indian government. Through the rise of big business in India, the state has ruthlessly focused on the displacement of tribal people and the eradication of the Naxalite insurgence in the area, to allowing smooth mining processes. The government even hired insiders among the tribal people to snitch on the Maoists. Roy explains how the Gandhian ideals of nonviolence and satyagraha do not work in situations like this. In her view, the Operation Green Hunt, the military campaign against the Maoists is in reality a ploy to enable the destruction of the lives and livelihoods of the people that reside there. While acknowledging the violent nature of the Maoists’ methods, she also talks about how their resistance was the reason why multiple mining processes and dam constructions were halted, things that no nonviolent movement could achieve.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017)

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a Novel that people looked forward to for 20 years. It is a story that consists of two main sides, the perspective of Anjum, a trans woman and her struggles in Delhi and the other perspective is Tilo, an architect (who just like Arundhati Roy herself) turned into an activist. This novel has the characters’ lives intersect and commemorates the various struggles of the orphans, Muslims, queer people, addicts and other victims who fall prey to the various nationalistic projects that ensue. Through Anjum’s story, this work goes into great detail about the plight of transgender individuals and the struggle for acceptance even after the right to vote was established as of 1994. In the second section of the book, is the life of Tilo who was born an ‘illegitimate’ child of a Syrian Christian woman and an Untouchable man, the story then progressing into her quaky love life and how it leads to Anjum’s and Tilo’s lives intersecting. Anjum’s divided relationship with her identity and Tilo’s complicated romantic life depiction could stand to represent the various divisions and conflicts over religion and shared histories.

Also Read: 3 famous Ambedkar Books

As explored in the essay, Arundhati Roy’s contributions to the field of literature as well as politics is huge, and accepted by many. She is someone who utilized the immense fame she received for her first book in ways that could benefit the gesneral public. Although she received numerous backlashes for her works that challenged the functioning of the Indian government, her supporters and herself continued to push through. Her works, both fiction and non-fiction played a vital role in instilling important thoughts in the minds of readers about the way our country is moving and aided in nurturing the readers to use their voices and other forms of expression to speak out about these concerns.

Krishnaveni, R. (2014). A Brief Study of “The God of Small Things.” International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities , 420–428. https://ijellh.com/papers/2014/August/38-420-428-August-2014.pdf.

Tikkanen, A. (2020). Arundhati Roy . Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Arundhati-Roy.

Angela Roy is currently pursuing her majors in Sociology and minors in International Relations and History, as a part of her BA Liberal Arts Honors degree in SSLA, Pune. She has always been driven to play a part in changing and correcting the social evils that exist in society. With a driving passion for breaking down harmful societal norms and social injustices, she seeks to learn and understand the different social institutions that exist in society like family, marriage, religion and kinship, and how they influence the workings and functioning of various concepts like gender, sexuality and various types of socializations in an individual’s life. She envisions herself to play a vital role in building safe places for today’s marginalized communities and creating a world that is characterized by equity and inclusiveness, free of discrimination and exploitative behaviors.

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Arundhati Roy: How a novel symbolises freedom and essay ‘a form of combat’

To arundhati roy, winner of the 2023 european essay prize, a novel is ‘real, unfettered azadi’. and essay a tool to fight against fascism and injustice..

When Arundhati Roy was thinking of the title of her 2020 collection of essays, AZADI: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction (Penguin India), which recently earned her the 2023 European Essay Prize, her publisher in the UK, Simon Prosser, asked her what she thought of when she thought of azadi (freedom). “I surprised myself by answering, without a moment’s hesitation, ‘A novel.’ Because a novel gives a writer the freedom to be as complicated as she wants — to move through worlds, languages, and time, through societies, communities, and politics,” she writes in the introduction to the book, a compilation of her lectures and essays written between 2018 and 2020, described by the publisher as “a pressing dispatch from the heart of the crowd and the solitude of a writer’s desk.”

In analysing the essence of a novel, Roy (61) posits that its complexity and intricacy should not be confused with it being ‘loose, baggy, or random’. “A novel, to me, is freedom with responsibility. Real, unfettered azadi” , she writes, pointing out how azadi , the slogan of the ‘freedom struggle’ in Kashmir, has also become a chant of millions against the project of Hindu nationalism. While some essays in the volume have been written through the lens of a novelist delving into the very universe of her novels, others explore the symbiotic relationship between fiction and reality, shining light on how fiction seamlessly integrates into the world and, in many ways, becomes the world itself. Like it does in her two novels: the lyrical and exquisitely written The God of Small Things (1997), for which she received the Booker Prize, and her long-awaited second work of fiction, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) .

Charles Veillon Foundation, the instituting body that confers the prize, said in a statement, ‘Roy uses the essay as a form of combat.’ The publication of The God of Small Things coincided with the 50th anniversary of India’s independence from British colonialism. This period marked India’s pivot toward the global stage, during which the country aligned itself with the United States, embracing corporate capitalism, privatisation, and structural adjustments. However, a shift occurred the Indian political landscape in 1998 with the ascent of a BJP-led Hindu nationalist government, which conducted nuclear tests, altering the public discourse dramatically.

Roy, who had just won the Booker Prize, found herself thrust into the role of a cultural ambassador for the emerging New India. She began her journey of speaking out through her writing lest her silence was seen as complicity. Her powerful essay, ‘The End of Imagination’, which rails against the nuclear weapons as an affirmation of statehood, identity and defence, led to her being labelled ‘a traitor and anti-national’. However, she took these insults as badges of honour, realising well that speaking out was a political act in itself. In her subsequent essays, she wrote about dams, rivers, displacement, caste, mining, and civil war.

Literature and freedom

In her acceptance speech, Roy articulated her perspective on the notion of freedom. She made it clear that her happiness, as a writer, stems from the world of literature and the craft of writing. Over the past 25 years, she has penned essays that serve as a warning about the direction the country has been headed. Yet, these warnings have often fell on deaf ears, with liberals and self-proclaimed progressives often dismissing her writing. “But now the time for warning is over. We are in a different phase of history. As a writer, I can only hope that my writing will bear witness to this very dark chapter that is unfolding in my country’s life. And hopefully, the work of others like myself lives on, it will be known that not all of us agreed with what was happening,” she said.

Ahead of the 2024 General elections, Roy fears that if Narendra Modi comes back to power, there might be a new Constitution which will only curtail her ability to speak candidly. The irony lies in the fact that she receives the prize for her work, which essentially forewarned the country about its current trajectory. Much of her first essay, written for the W. G. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation which she delivered in the British Library in London in June 2018, is about the divisive partitioning of Hindustani into Hindi and Urdu, a schism that eerily foreshadowed the rise of Hindu Nationalism in India by more than a century. She delves into the historical roots of a project that would later reshape India’s political landscape. Scathing and incisive and trenchant and courageous and piercing and perspicacious — words that have come to define her style — these essays reflect the collective hopes, fears and despair of the people of India, minus the saffron brigade.

The early essays reflect the hope that many of us had in 2018: that Modi's reign would come to an end. “As the 2019 general election approached, polls showed Modi and his party’s popularity dropping dramatically. We knew this was a dangerous moment. Many of us anticipated a false-flag attack or even a war that would be sure to change the mood of the country,” she writes. In one of the essays, “Election Season in a Dangerous Democracy” (2018) she also underscores this fear: “We held our collective breath. In February 2019, weeks before the general election, the attack came. A suicide bomber blew himself up in Kashmir, killing forty security personnel. False flag or not, the timing was perfect. Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept back to power.”

As she was writing the introduction to the book in February 2020, then US President Donald Trump was on an official visit to India, and the first case of COVID-19 had been reported. It was a time when India was grappling with the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, widespread protests against an anti-Muslim citizenship law, and the horrifying communal violence in Delhi. “In a public speech to a crowd wearing Modi and Trump masks, Donald Trump informed Indians that they play cricket, celebrate Diwali, and make Bollywood films. We were grateful to learn that about ourselves. Between the lines he sold us MH-60 helicopters worth $3 billion. Rarely has India publicly humiliated herself thus,” she writes.

Literature in the Dark Times

Roy uses her words as both a shield and a sword in the face of an increasingly polarised world. In an essay titled ‘The Language of Literature,’ she grapples with the state of the world, dissecting the impact of capitalism, war, and government policies on our planet and its people. She doesn’t mince words when pointing out that much of the blame for the global chaos rests on the shoulders of the United States. She writes how after 17 years of the US invasion of Afghanistan, the conflict led to negotiations with the very Taliban they sought to overthrow. In the interim, Iraq, Libya, and Syria fell victim to the chaos of war, causing countless casualties and turning ancient cities into ruins. The rise of groups like Daesh (ISIS) further added to the turmoil. In her characteristic candour, she describes the US as ‘a rogue state’ that flouts international treaties and engages in aggressive rhetoric.

Roy believes that the place for literature is not predefined but rather built by writers and readers. It’s a fragile yet indestructible sanctuary that provides shelter in the face of chaos. She values the idea of literature that is necessary, literature that offers refuge: “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.” Her own journey as a writer has seen her straddle the worlds of fiction and nonfiction, with no clear boundary between the two.

She rejects the notion that fiction and nonfiction are at odds, stating that both are equally true, equally real, and equally significant: “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.”

Acknowledging the risks that writers face today, she speaks of the perilous position of journalists in India, where threats to free expression have led to the country’s ranking just below conflict zones like Afghanistan and Syria. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , she navigates a complex map of languages, reflecting the linguistic diversity and complexity of India. She delves into the stories of characters who speak different tongues, showing how language can be both a bridge and a barrier. Her characters’ experiences demonstrate the challenges of living in a multilingual society, where slogans and chants may be in languages that people neither speak nor understand. Yet, they become tools of both resistance and assimilation.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , she writes, can be read as a conversation between two graveyards: “One is a graveyard where a hijra, Anjum — raised as a boy by a Muslim family in the walled city of Delhi — makes her home and gradually builds a guest house, the Jannat (Paradise) Guest House, and where a range of people come to seek shelter. The other is the ethereally beautiful valley of Kashmir, which is now, after thirty years of war, covered with graveyards, and in this way has become, literally, almost a graveyard itself. So, a graveyard covered by the Jannat Guest House, and a Jannat covered with graveyards. This conversation, this chatter between two graveyards, is and always has been strictly prohibited in India. In the real world, all conversation about Kashmir with the exception of Indian Government propaganda, is considered a high crime — treasonous even. Fortunately, in fiction, different rules apply.”

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India: The Place I Love, the Place I Know and Live In, the Place That Breaks My Heart Every Day. And Mends It, Too

• Now Week Month

• The following is from speech given at the Swedish Academy on March 22, 2023, at a conference called “Thought and Truth Under Pressure.”

I thank the Swedish Academy for inviting me to speak at this conference and for affording me the privilege of listening to the other speakers. It was planned more than two years ago, before the coronavirus pandemic unleashed the full scale of the horror it had in store for us and before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But those two cataclysmic events have only intensified the predicament that we have gathered here to think about—the phenomenon of democracies transmuting into something unrecognizable but with unnervingly recognizable resonances. And the escalating policing of speech in ways that are very old, as well as very new, to the point where the air itself has turned into a sort of punitive heresy-hunting machine. We seem to be fast approaching what feels like intellectual gridlock.

I will reverse the sequence suggested by the title of this talk and begin with the phenomenon of failing democracy.

The last time I came to Sweden was in 2017, for the Gothenburg Book Fair. Several activists asked me to boycott the fair because, in the name of Free Speech, it had allowed the far-right newspaper Nye Tider to put up its stall. At the time I explained that it would be absurd for me to do that because Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of my country, who was (and is) warmly welcomed on the world’s stage, is a life-time member of the RSS, a far-right Hindu Supremacist organization founded in 1925, and constituted in the image of the Blackshirts, the “all volunteer” paramilitary wing of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party.

In Gothenburg I watched the Nordic Resistance Movement march. The first Nazi march in Europe since the second world war. It was countered on the street by young anti-fascists.

But today a far-right party, even if not openly Nazi, is part of the ruling coalition in the Swedish Government. And Narendra Modi is serving his ninth year as India’s Prime Minister.

When I speak of failing democracy, I will speak mainly about India, not because it is known as the world’s largest democracy, but because it is the place I love, the place I know and live in, the place that breaks my heart every day. And mends it, too.

Remember what I say is not a call for help, because we in India know very well that no help will come. No help can come. I speak to tell you about a country that, although flawed, was once so full of singular possibilities, one that offered a radically different understanding of the meaning of happiness, fulfillment, tolerance, diversity and sustainability than that of the western world. All that is being extinguished, spiritually stubbed out.

India’s democracy is being systematically disassembled. Only the rituals remain. Next year you will surely hear a lot about our noisy, colorful elections. What will not be apparent is that the level playing field—fundamental to a fair election—is actually a steep rockface in which virtually all the money, the data, the media, the election management and security apparatus is in the hands of the ruling party. Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, with its detailed, comprehensive data set that measures the health of democracies, has categorized India as an “electoral autocracy” along with El Salvador, Turkey and Hungary, and predicts that things are likely to get worse. We are talking about 1.4 billion people falling out of democracy and into autocracy. Or worse.

The process of dismantling democracy began long before Modi and the RSS came to power. Fifteen years ago, I wrote an essay called Democracy’s Failing Light . At the time, the Congress Party, a party of old, feudal elites and technocrats newly and enthusiastically wedded to the free market, was in power. I’ll read a short passage from the essay—not to prove how right I was—but to chart for you how much has changed since then.

India for all practical purposes has become a corporate, theocratic Hindu state, a highly policed state, a fearsome state.

WHILE WE’RE still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be?

So the question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the Free Market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be?

That was 2009. Five years later, in 2014, Modi was elected Prime Minister of India. In the nine years since, India has changed beyond recognition. The “secular, socialist republic” mandated by the Indian Constitution has almost ceased to exist. The great struggles for social justice and the dogged, visionary environmental movements have been crushed. Now we rarely speak about dying rivers, falling water tables, disappearing forests or melting glaciers. Because those worries have been replaced by a more immediate dread. Or euphoria, depending on which side of the ideological line you are on.

India for all practical purposes has become a corporate, theocratic Hindu state, a highly policed state, a fearsome state. The institutions that were hollowed-out by the previous regime, particularly the mainstream media, now seethe with Hindu supremacist fervor. Simultaneously, the free market has done what the free market does. Briefly, according to Oxfam’s 2023 report, the top 1 percent of India’s population owns more than forty per cent of total wealth, while the bottom 50 percent of the population (700 million people) has around 3 percent of total wealth. We are a very rich country of very poor people.

But instead of being directed at those who might be responsible for some of these things, the anger and resentment that this inequality generates has been harvested and directed against India’s minorities. The 170 million Muslims who make up 14 percent of the population are on the frontline. Majoritarian thinking however, cuts across class and caste barriers and has a huge constituency in the diaspora as well.

In January this year the BBC broadcast a two-part documentary called “India: The Modi Question.” It traced Modi’s political journey from his debut in 2001 as Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat to his years as India’s Prime Minister. The film made public for the first time an internal report commissioned by the British Foreign Office in April 2002 about the anti-Muslim pogrom that took place in Gujarat under Modi’s watch in February and March 2002, just before elections to the State Assembly.

That fact-finding report, embargoed for all these years, only corroborates what Indian activists, journalists, lawyers, two senior police officers and eyewitnesses to the mass rape and slaughter have been saying for years. It estimates that “at least 2,000” people had been murdered. It calls the massacre a pre-planned pogrom that bore “all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing.” It says reliable sources had informed them that when the murdering began the police were ordered to stand down. The report lays the blame for the pogrom squarely at Modi’s door.

The film has been banned in India. Twitter and YouTube were ordered to take down all links to it. They obeyed immediately. On February 21st the BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai were surrounded by the police and raided by Income Tax officials. As Oxfam’s offices have been. As Amnesty International’s offices have been. As many major opposition politicians’ homes and offices have been. As almost every NGO that isn’t completely aligned with the government has been. While Modi has been legally absolved by the Supreme Court in the 2002 pogrom, the activists and police officers who dared to accuse him of complicity, based on a tower of evidence and witness testimonies are either in prison or facing criminal trials.

Meanwhile, many of the convicted killers are out on bail or parole. Last August, on the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, eleven convicts walked out of prison. They had been serving life-sentences for gang-raping a nineteen-year-old Muslim woman, Bilkis Bano during the 2002 pogrom and murdering fourteen members of her family, including her one-day-old niece and her three-year-old daughter, Saleha, by smashing her head on a rock. They were given special amnesty. Outside the prison walls, the murderer-rapists were greeted as heroes, garlanded with flowers. Once again, there was a state election around the corner. The special amnesty was part of our democratic process.

Earlier today Professor Timothy Snyder asked, “What is Free Speech?” Let none of what I have just said make you conclude that there isn’t free speech in India. There is freedom in speech and deed. Plenty of it.

Mainstream TV anchors can freely lie about, demonize and dehumanize minorities in ways that lead to actual physical harm or incarceration. Hindu godmen and sword-wielding mobs can call for the genocide and mass rape of Muslims. Dalits and Muslims can be publicly flogged and lynched in broad daylight and the videos can be uploaded on YouTube. Churches can be freely attacked, priests and nuns beaten and humiliated.

In Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority region, where people have fought for self-determination for almost three decades, where India runs the densest military administration in the world, and where no foreign journalists are allowed to go, the government has allowed itself to freely shut down virtually all speech—online and otherwise—and freely incarcerate local journalists.

In that beautiful valley covered with graveyards, the valley from which no news comes, the people say, “In Kashmir the dead are alive, and the living are only dead people pretending.” They often refer to India’s democracy as “demon-crazy.”

There is freedom in speech and deed. Plenty of it. Mainstream TV anchors can freely lie about, demonize and dehumanize minorities in ways that lead to actual physical harm or incarceration.

In 2019, weeks after Modi and his party won a second term, the State of Jammu and Kashmir was unilaterally stripped of its statehood and the semi-autonomous status guaranteed to it by the Indian Constitution. Soon after that Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). This new Act manifestly discriminates against Muslims. Under it, people, mostly Muslims, now fear losing their citizenship.

The CAA will complement the process of creating a National Register of Citizens (NRC). To be included in the National Register of Citizens people are expected to produce a set of state approved “legacy documents”—a process not dissimilar to what the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany required of German people. Already two million people in the State of Assam have been struck from the National Register of Citizens and stand to lose all their rights. Huge detention centers are being constructed, with the hard labor often done by future inmates—those who have been designated “declared foreigners” or “doubtful voters.”

Our new India is an India of costume and spectacle. Picture a cricket stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. It’s called the Narendra Modi Stadium and has a seating capacity of 132,000. In January 2020 it was packed to capacity for the Namastey Trump rally when Modi felicitated then U.S. President Donald Trump. Standing up and waving to the crowd, in the city where during the 2002 pogrom Muslims had been slaughtered in broad daylight and tens of thousands driven from their homes, and where Muslims still live in ghettos, Trump praised India for being tolerant and diverse. Modi called down a round of applause.

A day later Trump arrived in Delhi. His arrival in the capital coincided with yet another massacre. A tiny one this time, a mini-massacre by Gujarat’s standards. In a working-class neighborhood only kilometers away from Trump’s fine hotel and not far from where I live. Hindu vigilantes, once again turned on Muslims. Once again the police stood by. The provocation was that the area had seen protests against the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act. Fifty-three people, mostly Muslim, were killed. Hundreds of businesses, homes and mosques were burnt. Trump said nothing.

Burned into some of our minds from those terrible days is a different kind of spectacle: a young Muslim man is lying grievously injured, close to death, on a street in India’s capital city. He is being prodded and beaten and forced by policemen to sing the Indian national anthem. He died a few days later. His name was Faizan. He was 23 years old. No action has been taken against those policemen.

None of this should matter much to the provosts of the democratic world. Actually none of it does. Because there is after all business to attend to. Because India is currently the West’s bulwark against a rising China (or so it hopes), and because in the free market you can trade a little mass-rape and lynching or a spot of ethnic cleansing or some serious financial corruption for a generous purchase order for fighter jets or commercial aircraft. Or crude oil purchased from Russia, refined, stripped of the stigma of US sanctions and sold to Europe and, yes, or so our newspapers report, to the United States, too. Everybody’s happy. And why not?

For Ukrainians, Ukraine is their country. For Russia, it’s a colony, and for Western Europe and the U.S., it’s a frontier. (Like Vietnam was. Like Afghanistan was.) But for Modi, it’s merely yet another stage on which to perform. This time to play the role of statesman-peacemaker and offer homilies such as “This is not the time for war.”

Inside what is increasingly feeling like a cult, there is sophisticated jurisdiction. But there is no equality before law. Laws are applied selectively depending on caste, religion, gender and class. For example, a Muslim cannot say what Hindus can. A Kashmiri cannot say what everybody else can. It makes solidarity, speaking up for one another, more important than ever. But that, too, has become a perilous activity, and this is what I mean by the title of my lecture—Approaching Gridlock.

Unfortunately, at just such a moment, the list of things that cannot be said and words that must not be uttered is lengthening by the minute. Time was when governments and mainstream media houses controlled the platforms that controlled the narrative. In the west that would, for the most part, be white folks. In India, brahmin folks. And then of course there are fatwa folks for whom censorship and assassination mean the same thing.

But today censorship has turned into a battle of all against all. The fine art of taking offense has become a global industry. The question is how does one negotiate this hydra-headed, multi-limbed, hawkeyed, forever-awake, ever-vigilant, heresy-hunting machine? Is it even possible, or is it a tide that must ebb before we can even discuss it?

In India, like in other countries, the weaponization of identity as a form of resistance has become the dominant response to the weaponization of identity as a form of oppression. Those who have historically been oppressed, enslaved, colonized, stereotyped, erased, unheard and unseen precisely because of our identities—our race, caste, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference—are now defiantly doubling down on those very identities to face off against that oppression.

Laws are applied selectively depending on caste, religion, gender and class. For example, a Muslim cannot say what Hindus can. A Kashmiri cannot say what everybody else can.

It is a powerful, explosive moment in history in which, enabled by social media, wild, incandescent anger is battering down old ideas, old patterns of behavior, entitled assumptions that have never been questioned, loaded words, and language that is coded with prejudice and bigotry. The intensity and suddenness of it has shocked a complacent world into re-thinking, re-imagining and trying to find a better way of doing and saying things. Ironically, almost uncannily, this phenomenon, this fine-tuning, seems to be moving in step with our lurch into fascism.

This explosion has profound, revolutionary aspects to it, as well as absurd and destructive ones. It’s easy to swoop down on its more extreme aspects and use these to tar and dismiss the whole debate. (For example: should women now be called ‘people who menstruate’? Should an art professor in the U.S. teaching the rich diversity of Islam be summarily sacked for showing her students a 14th-century painting of Prophet Mohammed after announcing that she was going to do so and excusing from her class all students who might be offended or upset by it? Should there be an established, immutable hierarchy of historical suffering that everybody must accept?)

That is the fuel which the far-right uses to consolidate itself. But to buckle under it, fearfully and unquestioningly as many who think of themselves as liberal and left-wing do, is to disrespect this transformation, too. Because in the politics of identity there is all too often an important pivot, a hinge, which when it turns upon itself begins to reinforce as well as replicate the very thing it wishes to resist. That happens when identity is disaggregated and atomized into micro-categories.

Even these micro-identities then develop a power hierarchy and a micro-elite, usually located in big cities, big universities, with social media capital, which inevitably mimics the same kind of exclusion, erasure and hierarchy that is being challenged in the first place.

If we lock ourselves into the prison cells of the very labels and identities that we have been given by those who have always had power over us, we can at best stage a prison revolt. Not a revolution. And the prison guards will appear soon enough to restore order. In fact, they’re already on their way. When we buy into a culture of proscription and censorship, eventually it is always the Right, and usually the status quo, that benefits disproportionately.

Sealing ourselves into communities, religious and caste groups, ethnicities and genders, reducing and flattening our identities and pressing them into silos precludes solidarity. Ironically, that was and is the ultimate goal of the Hindu caste system in India. Divide a people into a hierarchy of unbreachable compartments, and no one community will be able to feel the pain of another, because they are in constant conflict.

It works like a self-operating, intricate administrative/surveillance machine in which society administers/surveils itself, and in the process ensures that the overarching structures of oppression remain in place. Everyone except those at the very top and the very bottom—and these categories are minutely graded, too—is oppressed by someone and has someone to be oppressed by.

Once this maze of tripwires has been laid, almost nobody can pass the test of purity and correctness. Certainly, almost nothing that was once thought of as good or great literature. Not Shakespeare, for sure. Not Tolstoy. Leave aside his Russian imperialism, imagine presuming he could understand the mind of a woman called Anna Karenina. Not Dostoevsky, who only refers to older women as “crones.” By his standards I’d qualify as a crone for sure. But I’d still like people to read him.

Or, if you like, try reading the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi . I can guarantee you that you’ll be appalled on every count; race, sex, caste, class. Does that mean he should be banned? Or re-written? Even Jane Austen wouldn’t make the cut. It goes without saying that by these standards every sacred book of every religion would not pass muster.

Amidst the apparent noise in public discourse, we are swiftly approaching a sort of intellectual gridlock. Solidarity can never be pristine. It should be challenged, analyzed, argued about, calibrated. By precluding it, we reinforce the very thing we claim to be fighting against.

The question is how does one negotiate this hydra-headed, multi-limbed, hawkeyed, forever-awake, ever-vigilant, heresy-hunting machine?

What does all this do to literature? As a fiction writer few things perturb me more than the word “appropriation,” which is one of the rallying calls of the new censorship. In this context, appropriation, crudely put, is about predators, even contrite predators attempting to write, or represent, speak over, or actually tell the stories of their prey on their behalf. It’s pretty skanky, and a useful principle to keep in mind while critiquing something.

But it’s not a good reason to ban or censor things. Yes, the mic has been hogged. Yes, we’ve heard too much from one kind of people and too little from others. But the web of life is dense and intricate, its creatures and their deeds cannot be essentialized and so easily and unintelligently cataloged.

Coming specifically to fiction, there can be no fiction without appropriation. Because we fiction writers are predators too. If serial killers are merciless sociopaths, novelists are merciless appropriators. To construct our fictional worlds, we appropriate everything that crosses our path and we put it all in play. That is what makes great novels dangerous and revelatory things.

Speaking for myself, I have tried to learn my craft not only from politically irreproachable writers like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, but also from imperialists like Kipling, and from bigots, racists, troublemakers and rascals who write beautifully. Should they now be rewritten to march to the beat of some narrow manifesto?

The recent decision to re-edit the work of Roald Dahl—my God, who next? Nabokov? Shall Lolita vanish from our shelves? Or shall she be recast as an undercover pre-teen activist? Shall old masterpieces be repainted? Shorn of the male gaze? It’s so sad to even have to say all this. Where will it leave us? On a shore without footprints? In a world without history?

If literature is going to be immobilized by this web of a thousand snarling threads, it will turn into some sort of rigid, leaden manifesto. And sadly, those who are so enthusiastically involved in the policing, aren’t just petrifying others, they are petrifying themselves as well. They are laying landmines that they know they themselves will inevitably step on. In cagey, wary minds there can be no dancing. Only the heavy, cautious tread of this new language. Newspeak.

In any case, driving things underground won’t make them go away. If these debates could take place without the bullying and vindictiveness that accompany them, then most definitely, along with the usual mess of bigotry, racism and sexism there will be glorious new voices telling stories that have never been told before, putting much of the past to shame.

Having said this, it is never a bad idea to pay close attention to words. Because sometimes a word can signify a universe.

For example, when I first became a published novelist, on the occasions when I would speak outside India I would, more often than not, be introduced on stage as an “Indian Woman Writer.” (In India it would be “the first Indian woman to win the Booker Prize.”) Each time it happened I would wince inwardly and wonder at this way of labeling someone.

Was it necessary or was it a way of limiting and circumscribing them? After all, it was literature we were talking about, not a visa application. I winced because I was constantly being lectured, by privileged and entitled men, not just privately, but on the front pages of newspapers about how to write, what to write, what tone to take, what topics would be suitable for a (woman) writer like me. Children’s stories was the suggestion that came up most frequently. The fiction didn’t seem to bother them as much as the non-fiction, even if they agreed in principle with what I was saying.

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On one occasion I was hauled up by the Supreme Court of India for contempt of court for my writing on big dams. During the trial, their Lordships, the brother judges on the bench would refer to me as ‘that woman’ as they threw my essay around in exasperation. As if I wasn’t standing right there, in front of them. I’d refer to myself privately as the Hooker that won the Booker. When I refused to apologize to the Court, I was told that I wasn’t behaving like “a reasonable man” and sent to prison for a day.

Things have changed since then. Each of those words in that card-index introduction of me—Indian, Woman and Writer—is, these days, the subject heading of some anxious and difficult interrogation and almost irreconcilable conflict. Who is a woman? Or, indeed, who is a human? What is a country? Who is a citizen? And, in the era of Open AI and ChatGPT, who or what is a writer?

We know now, even if many won’t accept it, that the border between male and female is a fluid one and not what convention has assumed it to be. But what about the border between human being and machine, between art and coding, between artificial intelligence and human consciousness? Are those as hard-wired as we thought they were?

The era of ChatBots is here, and some are calling Artificial Intelligence the fourth industrial revolution. Will writers, journalists, artists and composers now be phased out in the same way that weavers, craftsmen, factory workers and old-world farmers have been? (Maybe like “hand-crafted” and “hand-woven” garments and artifacts, novels will return to being “hand-written” and sold in limited editions as works of art and not literature). Will literature be better produced by ChatGPT or Sydney or Bing.

The great linguist Noam Chomsky thinks not. If I understand him correctly, he holds that a machine learning program can produce faux-science or faux-art by processing an almost infinite volume of data at high speed, but it can never replace the complex abilities of human instinct.

There is a great deal of anxiety around what might happen if Open AI finds its way into the world without regulations and guardrails. As there should be.

In the digital era, are we heading for a new kind of state? The Electronic State, or what is being called a State in a Smartphone. An Avatar State, if you like.

When it comes to literature, my worry is less about whether Chatbots will replace writers. (Perhaps I’m a little too old and a little too vain for that. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t view literature as a “product.” The pain, the pleasure and the sheer insanity of the process is the only reason that I write.) My worry is that, given the amount of data and information that human writers—see, I said it, I said “human writers”—have to process these days, and given the maze of tripwires we have to negotiate to be error free and politically perfect, the danger is that writers may lose their instincts and turn into Chatbots. Maybe then there will be a transfer of souls. Then Chatbots will appear to be Real Souls and Real Souls will be Chatbots pretending.

In the midst of all this fluidity and porousness, the only borders that seem to be hardening are the borders between nation-states. Those continue to be hard-wired, patrolled. When they are breached by armies, we call it war. When they are breached by people, we call it a refugee crisis. When they are breached by the unregulated movement of capital, we call it the free market. The modern nation-state is right up there with God as an idea worth killing or dying for. But now, in the digital era, are we heading for a new kind of state? The Electronic State, or what is being called a State in a Smartphone. An Avatar State, if you like.

Funded by USAID and backed by Big Tech—Amazon, Apple, Google, Oracle—the Avatar State is almost upon us. In 2019, the Government of Ukraine launched DIIA, a digital identification app for smartphones. In addition to providing more than a hundred government services, DIIA can house passports, vaccine certificates and other ID. DIIA city is its extraterritorial financial capital—a sort of venture capital hub where citizens can register and conduct business.

After the Russian invasion began, DIIA, initially conceived as a bureaucratic tool to ensure “transparency and efficiency,” was, in the words of Samantha Power, Administrator of USAID, “re-purposed for war.” From all accounts DIIA has done a tremendous service to the brave people of Ukraine. It now has a 24/7 government news channel for citizens to update themselves on the war. Refugees can use it to register themselves, and file compensation claims. Citizens can reportedly use it to upload information on collaborators and photographs of Russian troop movement. A sort of real-time public intelligence and surveillance network operated by ordinary citizens.

The digital revolution in India is a perfect example of how the interests of big business and Hindu Supremacy coincide perfectly.

When the war began, Ukrainian citizens’ private data on DIIA was transferred for safekeeping onto Amazon’s military grade hard drives called AWS snowballs, the terrestrial equivalent of the Cloud, and transported out of Ukraine and uploaded to Cloud. In a war as devastating as the one Ukrainians are fighting and enduring, if a people are completely aligned behind their government, then having your State in a Smartphone surely has incredible advantages. But do those advantages accrue in peace time, too? Because as we know from Edward Snowden, surveillance is a two-way street. Our phones are our intimate enemies, they spy on us too.

In order to “protect the democratic world,” USAID plans to take DIIA or its equivalent to other states. Countries like Ecuador, Zambia, the Dominican Republic are at the head of the queue. The worry is that once an app like DIIA has been “re-purposed for war,” can it be “un-purposed” or “de-purposed” for peace? Can a weaponized citizenry be un-weaponized? Can privatized data be un-privatized?

India is quite far down this path, too. During Modi’s first term as Prime Minister, Reliance Industries, then India’s largest corporation, launched JIO, a free wireless data network that came bundled together with a dirt-cheap smartphone. Once it had successfully muscled the competition out of the market, it began to charge a small fee. JIO has turned India into the largest consumer of wireless data in the world—more than China and the U.S. put together.

By 2019 there were 300 million smartphone users. Along with all the undeniable benefits of being connected to the internet, these millions of people have become a ready-made audience for hateful, socially radioactive messaging and endless fake news that flows relentlessly into their phones through social media. It is here that you will see India unadorned.

It’s here that those calls for the genocide and mass rape of Muslims are amplified. Where videos of avenging Hindu warriors massacring Muslims, fake videos of Muslims murdering Hindus, and of Muslim fruit sellers secretly spitting on fruit to spread Covid (like Jews in Nazi Germany were accused of spreading typhus) are sent around to drive people into a frenzy of rage and hate. The Hindu Supremacists’ social media channels are to the mainstream media, what a vigilante militia is to a conventional army. Militias can do things that are illegal for a conventional army to do.

The digital revolution in India is a perfect example of how the interests of big business and Hindu Supremacy coincide perfectly. As Indian citizens are ushered into the digital arena in their millions, entire lives are lived online, education, medical care, businesses, banking, the distribution of food rations to the poor. Social media corporations have to be more and more attentive to the government that controls this mind-boggling market-share.

Because when that government is unhappy, as it often is, it can simply shut everything down. We await the draconian new 2023 Digital India Act which will give the government unthinkable powers over the internet. Already India imposes more internet shutdowns than any country in the world.

After passing a new citizenship law Country X manufactures millions of “refugees” out of its own citizenry. It can’t deport them, it doesn’t have the money to build prisons for all of them. But Country X won’t need a Gulag or concentration camps. It can just switch them off. 

In 2019 the seven million inhabitants of the Kashmir valley were put under a blanket telecommunication and internet siege that lasted for months. No phone calls, no texts, no messages, no OTPs, no internet. None. And nobody was around to drop a Starlink satellite for them.

Today as I speak, the state of Punjab, population 27 million, is enduring its fourth consecutive day of internet shut down because the police are hunting for a political fugitive and worry about him rallying support.

By 2026 India is projected to have one billion smartphone users. Imagine that volume of data in an India-bespoke DIIA app. Imagine all that data in the hands of private corporations. Or, on the other hand, imagine it in the hands of a fascist state and its indoctrinated, weaponized supporters.

For example, say after passing a new citizenship law Country X manufactures millions of “refugees” out of its own citizenry. It can’t deport them, it doesn’t have the money to build prisons for all of them. But Country X won’t need a Gulag or concentration camps. It can just switch them off. It can switch the State off in their Smartphones. It could then have a vast service population, virtually a subclass of labor without rights, without minimum wages, voting rights, healthcare or food rations.

They wouldn’t need to appear in the books. It would improve Country X’s statistical markers enormously. It could be quite an efficient and transparent operation. It could even look like a great democracy.

What would a State like that smell like? Or taste like? Something unrecognizable? Or something very recognizable?

Thank you for your patience. For now, let me leave you with these thoughts. What is a country? What is a State? What is a human? And who or what is a writer?

(This story was first published in lithub.com.)

Arundhati Roy is the author of “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness ” and “The God of Small Things,” which won the Booker Prize and has been translated into more than 40 languages. She also has published several books of nonfiction including “The End of Imagination, Capitalism: A Ghost Story ” and “The Doctor and the Saint.” She lives in New Delhi.

What's Your Reaction?

Nice rant against India and Hindus. Now, what about Pakistan, Kashmiri Islamists, Afghanistan, Bangladesh…and Hindus in all these places? Has she forgotten them? Most people would praise the growth of cell phones, and satellite TV. But all Roy sees is negativity. That’s not how Indians see it.

Very maudlin, self righteous, one sided, self indulgent tripe.

All doom and gloom, the sky is falling. Ridiculous. And she even has to bring in cell phones and their growth in India. Sheesh!

Democracy requires free speech and freedom from discrimination. Be careful to keep your minds open and learn to live and let live. Embracing far right or far left principles will only destroy free spirits and love for all humanity.

True, but at there is no real ‘far right’ in India. They are nationalists, nativists, Hindu consciousness advocates and purveyors. And even much of this is a response to years/decades of neglect, dismissiveness and denigration of Dharmic consciousness. This is in no way comparable to the far right in Europe and the US.

Now, the far left, there is such a thing in India. These are the Naxalites and their supporters. They have indulged in unprovoked extreme violence. Including against people in whose name they purport to be acting in.

Susan Herr, are you lecturing India, or hinting that there is no free speech in India? You are wrong if you are. There are so many media outlets in India, on TV, newspapers, magazines, journals, radio and the internet, to make such a remark very silly. If you need to lecture, try it with China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan. Don’t drag India into this club of free speech suppressers.

What a rant from a disgruntled, megalomaniac, and frustrated individual. Ms. Roy has nothing to offer but bad mouth India and Hindus. Her hatred is not for Hindutva but for Hindus. She never had a single good thing to say about India. She lies when she says ” I speak to tell you about a country that, although flawed, was once so full of singular possibilities, one that offered a radically different understanding of the meaning of happiness, fulfillment, tolerance, diversity and sustainability than that of the western world. All that is being extinguished, spiritually stubbed out.”

She does not love India, she loves Jihadists like Yasin Malik and Shah Gilani. She only speaks and writes prejudiced, jaundiced and hateful views about Hindus, and is popular only in some western leftist outlets. What a poisonous person.

She is an amazing woman who writes the truth. I would compare these hindutvas to NAZIs

What a refreshing, thought-provoking writeup! Reading it felt like an unexpected burst of fresh air while navigating the otherwise violently corrosive ideological space we are living in today…

Some influenced comments are calling it a rant but it is an excellent and true to facts write-up on where India is trending towards – a ghost democracy, or Modi’s autocracy! She is worthy of all the praise for being brave enough to stand up and speak in the face of a ruling goon government of BJP.

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Visual Stories

The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus . For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.

So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.

At the New York Review of Books, Ali Bhutto writes that in Karachi, Pakistan, the government-imposed curfew due to the virus is “eerily reminiscent of past military clampdowns”:

Beneath the quiet calm lies a sense that society has been unhinged and that the usual rules no longer apply. Small groups of pedestrians look on from the shadows, like an audience watching a spectacle slowly unfolding. People pause on street corners and in the shade of trees, under the watchful gaze of the paramilitary forces and the police.

His essay concludes with the sobering note that “in the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.”

Writing from Chattanooga, novelist Jamie Quatro documents the mixed ways her neighbors have been responding to the threat, and the frustration of conflicting direction, or no direction at all, from local, state, and federal leaders:

Whiplash, trying to keep up with who’s ordering what. We’re already experiencing enough chaos without this back-and-forth. Why didn’t the federal government issue a nationwide shelter-in-place at the get-go, the way other countries did? What happens when one state’s shelter-in-place ends, while others continue? Do states still under quarantine close their borders? We are still one nation, not fifty individual countries. Right?

Award-winning photojournalist Alessio Mamo, quarantined with his partner Marta in Sicily after she tested positive for the virus, accompanies his photographs in the Guardian of their confinement with a reflection on being confined :

The doctors asked me to take a second test, but again I tested negative. Perhaps I’m immune? The days dragged on in my apartment, in black and white, like my photos. Sometimes we tried to smile, imagining that I was asymptomatic, because I was the virus. Our smiles seemed to bring good news. My mother left hospital, but I won’t be able to see her for weeks. Marta started breathing well again, and so did I. I would have liked to photograph my country in the midst of this emergency, the battles that the doctors wage on the frontline, the hospitals pushed to their limits, Italy on its knees fighting an invisible enemy. That enemy, a day in March, knocked on my door instead.

In the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig writes with devastating clarity about her family’s life in Brooklyn while her husband battled the virus, weeks before most people began taking the threat seriously:

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Essayist Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Review of Books about being shut away alone in her New York City apartment with her 2-year-old daughter since she became sick:

The virus. Its sinewy, intimate name. What does it feel like in my body today? Shivering under blankets. A hot itch behind the eyes. Three sweatshirts in the middle of the day. My daughter trying to pull another blanket over my body with her tiny arms. An ache in the muscles that somehow makes it hard to lie still. This loss of taste has become a kind of sensory quarantine. It’s as if the quarantine keeps inching closer and closer to my insides. First I lost the touch of other bodies; then I lost the air; now I’ve lost the taste of bananas. Nothing about any of these losses is particularly unique. I’ve made a schedule so I won’t go insane with the toddler. Five days ago, I wrote Walk/Adventure! on it, next to a cut-out illustration of a tiger—as if we’d see tigers on our walks. It was good to keep possibility alive.

At Literary Hub, novelist Heidi Pitlor writes about the elastic nature of time during her family’s quarantine in Massachusetts:

During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.” ... Giving shape to time is especially important now, when the future is so shapeless. We do not know whether the virus will continue to rage for weeks or months or, lord help us, on and off for years. We do not know when we will feel safe again. And so many of us, minus those who are gifted at compartmentalization or denial, remain largely captive to fear. We may stay this way if we do not create at least the illusion of movement in our lives, our long days spent with ourselves or partners or families.

Novelist Lauren Groff writes at the New York Review of Books about trying to escape the prison of her fears while sequestered at home in Gainesville, Florida:

Some people have imaginations sparked only by what they can see; I blame this blinkered empiricism for the parks overwhelmed with people, the bars, until a few nights ago, thickly thronged. My imagination is the opposite. I fear everything invisible to me. From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way. I fear we won’t sufficiently punish the right. I fear leaving the house and spreading the disease. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my children, their imaginations, and their souls.

At ArtForum , Berlin-based critic and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen reflects on martinis, melancholia, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo’s 2018 graphic novel Retreat , in which three young people exile themselves in the woods:

In melancholia, the shape of what is ending, and its temporality, is sprawling and incomprehensible. The ambivalence makes it hard to bear. The world of Retreat is rendered in lush pink and purple watercolors, which dissolve into wild and messy abstractions. In apocalypse, the divisions established in genesis bleed back out. My own Corona-retreat is similarly soft, color-field like, each day a blurred succession of quarantinis, YouTube–yoga, and televized press conferences. As restrictions mount, so does abstraction. For now, I’m still rooting for love to save the world.

At the Paris Review , Matt Levin writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves during quarantine:

A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand. It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption.

In an essay for the Financial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy writes with anger about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anemic response to the threat, but also offers a glimmer of hope for the future:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. 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.

From Boston, Nora Caplan-Bricker writes in The Point about the strange contraction of space under quarantine, in which a friend in Beirut is as close as the one around the corner in the same city:

It’s a nice illusion—nice to feel like we’re in it together, even if my real world has shrunk to one person, my husband, who sits with his laptop in the other room. It’s nice in the same way as reading those essays that reframe social distancing as solidarity. “We must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love,” the poet Anne Boyer wrote on March 10th, the day that Massachusetts declared a state of emergency. If you squint, you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. And in moments this month, I have loved strangers with an intensity that is new to me. On March 14th, the Saturday night after the end of life as we knew it, I went out with my dog and found the street silent: no lines for restaurants, no children on bicycles, no couples strolling with little cups of ice cream. It had taken the combined will of thousands of people to deliver such a sudden and complete emptiness. I felt so grateful, and so bereft.

And on his own website, musician and artist David Byrne writes about rediscovering the value of working for collective good , saying that “what is happening now is an opportunity to learn how to change our behavior”:

In emergencies, citizens can suddenly cooperate and collaborate. Change can happen. We’re going to need to work together as the effects of climate change ramp up. In order for capitalism to survive in any form, we will have to be a little more socialist. Here is an opportunity for us to see things differently — to see that we really are all connected — and adjust our behavior accordingly. Are we willing to do this? Is this moment an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we all are? To live in a world that is different and better than the one we live in now? We might be too far down the road to test every asymptomatic person, but a change in our mindsets, in how we view our neighbors, could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.

The portrait these writers paint of a world under quarantine is multifaceted. Our worlds have contracted to the confines of our homes, and yet in some ways we’re more connected than ever to one another. We feel fear and boredom, anger and gratitude, frustration and strange peace. Uncertainty drives us to find metaphors and images that will let us wrap our minds around what is happening.

Yet there’s no single “what” that is happening. Everyone is contending with the pandemic and its effects from different places and in different ways. Reading others’ experiences — even the most frightening ones — can help alleviate the loneliness and dread, a little, and remind us that what we’re going through is both unique and shared by all.

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Gandhi, but with guns: Part One

The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India's Gravest Internal Security Threat. I'd been waiting for months to hear from them.

I had to be at the Maa Danteshwari mandir in Dantewara, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to take care of bad weather, punctures, blockades, transport strikes and sheer bad luck. The note said: "Writer should have camera, tika and coconut. Meeter will have cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and bananas. Password: Namashkar Guruji."

Namashkar Guruji. I wondered whether the Meeter and Greeter would be expecting a man. And whether I should get myself a moustache.

There are many ways to describe Dantewara. It's an oxymoron. It's a border town smack in the heart of India. It's the epicentre of a war. It's an upside down, inside out town.

In Dantewara the police wear plain clothes and the rebels wear uniforms. The jail-superintendent is in jail. The prisoners are free (300 of them escaped from the old town jail two years ago). Women who have been raped are in police custody. The rapists give speeches in the bazaar.

Across the Indravati river, in the area controlled by the Maoists, is the place the police call 'Pakistan'. There the villages are empty, but the forest is full of people. Children who ought to be in school run wild. In the lovely forest villages, the concrete school buildings have either been blown up and lie in a heap, or they're full of policemen. The deadly war that's unfolding in the jungle is a war that the government of India is both proud and shy of. Operation Green Hunt has been proclaimed as well as denied. P. Chidambaram, India's home minister (and CEO of the war) says it does not exist, that it's a media creation. And yet substantial funds have been allocated to it and tens of thousands of troops are being mobilised. Though the theatre of war is in the jungles of Central India, it will have serious consequences for us all.

If ghosts are the lingering spirits of someone, or something that has ceased to exist, then perhaps the National Mineral Development Corporation's new four-lane highway crashing through the forest is the opposite of a ghost. Perhaps it is the harbinger of what is still to come.

The antagonists in the forest are disparate and unequal in almost every way. On one side is a massive paramilitary force armed with the money, the firepower, the media, and the hubris of an emerging superpower. On the other, ordinary villagers armed with traditional weapons, backed by a superbly organised, hugely motivated Maoist guerilla fighting force with an extraordinary and violent history of armed rebellion. The Maoists and the paramilitary are old adversaries and have fought older avatars of each other several times before: Telengana in the 1950s, West Bengal, Bihar, Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh in the late 60s and 70s, and then again in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra from the 80s all the way through to the present. They are familiar with each other's tactics, and have studied each other's combat manuals closely. Each time, it seemed as though the Maoists (or their previous avatars) had been not just defeated, but literally, physically exterminated. Each time, they have re-emerged, more organised, more determined and more influential than ever. Today once again the insurrection has spread through the mineral-rich forests of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal— homeland to millions of India's tribal people, dreamland to the corporate world.

It's easier on the liberal conscience to believe that the war in the forests is a war between the government of India and the Maoists, who call elections a sham, parliament a pigsty and who have openly declared their intention to overthrow the Indian state. It's convenient to forget that tribal people in Central India have a history of resistance that pre-dates Mao by centuries. (That's a truism of course. If they didn't, they wouldn't exist.) The Ho, the Oraon, the Kols, the Santhals, the Mundas and the Gonds have all rebelled several times – against the British, against zamindars and against moneylenders. The rebellions were cruelly crushed, many thousands killed, but the people were never conquered. Even after independence, tribal people were at the heart of the first uprising that could be described as Maoist, in Naxalbari village in West Bengal (where the word Naxalite – now used interchangeably with "Maoist" – originates). Since then Naxalite politics has been inextricably entwined with tribal uprisings, which says as much about the tribals as it does about Naxalites.

This legacy of rebellion has left behind a furious people who have been deliberately isolated and marginalised by the Indian government. The Indian constitution, the moral underpinning of Indian democracy, was adopted by parliament in 1950. It was a tragic day for tribal people. The constitution ratified colonial policy and made the state custodian of tribal homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land. It denied them their traditional rights to forest produce. It criminalised a whole way of life. In exchange for the right to vote, it snatched away their right to livelihood and dignity.

Having dispossessed them and pushed them into a downward spiral of indigence, in a cruel sleight of hand the government began to use their own penury against them. Each time it needed to displace a large population – for dams, irrigation projects, mines – it talked of "bringing tribals into the mainstream" or of giving them "the fruits of modern development". Of the tens of millions of internally displaced people (more than 30 million by big dams alone) – refugees of India's "progress" – the great majority are tribal people. When the government begins to talk of tribal welfare, it's time to worry.

The most recent expression of concern has come from the home minister, who says he does not want tribal people living in "museum cultures". The well-being of tribal people didn't seem to be such a priority during his career as a corporate lawyer, representing the interests of several major mining companies. So it might be an idea to enquire into the basis for his new anxiety.

Over the past five years or so, the governments of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal have signed hundreds of memorandums of understanding – all of them secret – with corporate houses worth several billion dollars, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminum refineries, dams and mines. In order for the MOUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved.

Therefore, this war.

When a country that calls itself a democracy openly declares war within its borders, what does that war look like? Does the resistance stand a chance? Should it? Who are the Maoists? Are they just violent nihilists foisting an outdated ideology on tribal people, goading them into a hopeless insurrection? What lessons have they learned from their past experience? Is armed struggle intrinsically undemocratic? Is the Sandwich Theory – of "ordinary" tribals being caught in the crossfire between the state and the Maoists – an accurate one? Are "Maoists" and "tribals" two entirely discrete categories, as is being made out? Do their interests converge? Have they learned anything from each other? Have they changed each other?

The day before I left, my mother called sounding sleepy. "I've been thinking," she said, with a mother's weird instinct. "What this country needs is revolution."

An article on the internet says that Israel's Mossad is training 30 high-ranking Indian police officers in the techniques of targeted assassinations, to render the Maoist organisation "headless". There's talk in the press about the new hardware that has been bought from Israel: laser range finders, thermal imaging equipment and the unmanned drones so popular with the US army. Perfect weapons to use against the poor.

The drive from Raipur to Dantewara takes about ten hours through areas known to be Maoist-infested. These are not careless words. "Infest/infestation" implies disease/pests. Diseases must be cured. Pests must be exterminated. Maoists must be wiped out. In these creeping, innocuous ways the language of genocide has entered our vocabulary.

To protect the highway security forces have "secured" a narrow bandwidth of forest on either side. Further in, it's the raj of the "Dada log". The Brothers. The Comrades.

On the outskirts of Raipur, a massive billboard advertises Vedanta (the company our home minister once worked with) cancer hospital. In Orissa, where it is mining bauxite, Vedanta is financing a university. In these creeping ways, mining corporations enter our imaginations: the gentle giants who really care. It's called CSR: corporate social responsibility. It allows mining companies to be like the legendary actor and former chief minister, Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, who liked to play all the parts in Telugu mythologicals – the good guys and the bad guys, all at once, in the same movie. This CSR masks the outrageous economics that underpins the mining sector in India. For example, according to the recent Lokayukta Report for Karnataka, for every tonne of iron ore mined by a private company the government gets a royalty of Rs27 (40p) and the mining company makes Rs5,000. In the bauxite and aluminum sector the figures are even worse. We're talking daylight robbery to the tune of billions of dollars. Enough to buy elections, governments, judges, newspapers, TV channels, NGOs and aid agencies. What's the occasional cancer hospital here or there?

I don't remember seeing Vedanta's name on the long list of MOUs signed by the Chhattisgarh government. But I'm twisted enough to suspect that if there's a cancer hospital, there must be a flat-topped bauxite mountain somewhere.

We pass Kanker, famous for its counter-terrorism and jungle warfare training school run by Brigadier B K Ponwar, Rumpelstiltskin of this war. He is charged with the task of turning corrupt, sloppy policemen (straw) into jungle commandos (gold). "Fight a guerilla like a guerilla", the motto of the warfare training school, is painted on the rocks. The men are taught to run, slither, jump on and off airborne helicopters, ride horses (for some reason), eat snakes and live off the jungle. The brigadier takes great pride in training street dogs to fight "terrorists". Eight hundred policemen graduate from the school every six weeks. Twenty similar schools are being planned all over India. The police force is gradually being turned into an army. (In Kashmir it's the other way around. The army is being turned into a bloated, administrative, police force.) Upside down. Inside out. Either way, the Enemy is the People.

It's late. Jagdalpur is asleep, except for the many hoardings of Rahul Gandhi asking people to join the youth congress. He's been to Bastar twice in recent months but hasn't said anything much about the war. It's probably too messy for the Peoples' Prince to meddle in at this point. His media managers must have put their foot down. The fact that the Salwa Judum (Purification Hunt) – the dreaded, government-sponsored vigilante group responsible for rapes, killings, burning down villages and driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes – is led by Mahendra Karma, a congress MLA, doesn't get much play in the carefully orchestrated publicity around Rahul Gandhi.

I arrived at the Maa Danteshwari mandir well in time for my appointment (first day, first show). I had my camera, my small coconut and a powdery red tika on my forehead. I wondered if someone was watching me and having a laugh. Within minutes a young boy approached me. He had a cap and a backpack schoolbag. Chipped red nail-polish on his fingernails. No Hindi Outlook, no bananas. "Are you the one who's going in?" he asked me. No Namashkar Guruji. I didn't know what to say. He took out a soggy note from his pocket and handed it to me. It said "Outlook nahi mila." (Couldn't find Outlook)

"And the bananas?"

"I ate them," he said. "I got hungry."

He really was a security threat.

His backpack said Charlie Brown – Not your ordinary blockhead. He said his name was Mangtu. I soon learned that Dandakaranya the forest I was about to enter was full of people who had many names and fluid identities. It was like balm to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with yourself, to become someone else for a while.

We walked to the bus stand, only a few minutes away from the temple. It was already crowded. Things happened quickly. There were two men on motorbikes. There was no conversation – just a glance of acknowledgment, a shifting of body weight, the revving of engines. I had no idea where we were going. We passed the house of the superintendent of police (SP), which I recognised from my last visit. He was a candid man, the SP: "See Ma'am, frankly speaking this problem can't be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don't understand greed. Unless they become greedy there's no hope for us. I have told my boss: remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out."

In no time at all we were riding out of town. No tail. It was a long ride, three hours by my watch. It ended abruptly in the middle of nowhere, on an empty road with forest on either side. Mangtu got off. I did too. The bikes left, and I picked up my backpack and followed the small internal security threat into the forest. It was a beautiful day. The forest floor was a carpet of gold.

In a while we emerged on the white, sandy banks of a broad flat river. It was obviously monsoon fed, so now it was more or less a sand flat, at the centre a stream, ankle deep, easy to wade across. Across was 'Pakistan'. "Out there, ma'am" the candid SP had said to me, "my boys shoot to kill." I remembered that as we began to cross. I saw us in a policeman's rifle-sights – tiny figures in a landscape, easy to pick off. But Mangtu seemed quite unconcerned, and I took my cue from him.

Waiting for us on the other bank, in a lime green shirt that said Horlicks!, was Chandu. A slightly older security threat. Maybe 20. He had a lovely smile, a cycle, a jerry can with boiled water and many packets of glucose biscuits for me, from the Party. We caught our breath and began to walk again. The cycle, it turned out, was a red herring. The route was almost entirely un-cycleable. We climbed steep hills and clambered down rocky paths along some pretty precarious ledges. When he couldn't wheel it, Chandu lifted the cycle and carried it over his head as though it weighed nothing. I began to wonder about his bemused village-boy air. I discovered (much later) that he could handle every kind of weapon, "except for an LMG", he informed me cheerfully.

Three beautiful, sozzled men with flowers in their turbans walked with us for about half an hour, before our paths diverged. At sunset, their shoulder bags began to crow. They had roosters in them, which they had taken to market but hadn't managed to sell.

Chandu seems to be able to see in the dark. I have to use my torch. The crickets start up and soon there's an orchestra, a dome of sound over us. I long to look up at the night sky, but I dare not. I have to keep my eyes on the ground. One step at a time. Concentrate.

I hear dogs. But I can't tell how far away they are. The terrain flattens out. I steal a look at the sky. It makes me ecstatic. I hope we're going to stop soon. "Soon." Chandu says. It turns out to be more than an hour. I see silhouettes of enormous trees. We arrive.

The village seems spacious, the houses far away from each other. The house we enter is beautiful. There's a fire, some people sitting around. More people outside, in the dark. I can't tell how many. I can just about make them out. A murmur goes around: "Lal salaam, kaamraid." (Red Salute, Comrade) "Lal salaam," I say. I'm beyond tired. The lady of the house calls me inside and gives me chicken curry cooked in green beans and some red rice. Fabulous. Her baby is asleep next to me. Her silver anklets gleam in the firelight.

After dinner I unzip my sleeping bag. It's a strange intrusive sound, the big zip. Someone puts on the radio. BBC Hindi service. The Church of England has withdrawn its funds from Vedanta's Niyamgiri project, citing environmental degradation and rights' violations of the Dongria Kondh tribe. I can hear cowbells, snuffling, shuffling, cattle-farting. All's well with the world. My eyes close.

We're up at five. On the move by six. In another couple of hours, we cross another river. Every village we walk through has a family of tamarind trees watching over it, like a clutch of huge, benevolent gods. Sweet, Bastar tamarind. By 11am the sun is high, and walking is less fun. We stop at a village for lunch. Chandu seems to know the people in the house. A lovely young girl flirts with him. He looks a little shy, maybe because I'm around. Lunch is raw papaya with masoor dal, and red rice. And red chilli powder. We're going to wait for the sun to lose some of its vehemence before we start walking again. We take a nap in the gazebo. There is a spare beauty about the place. Everything is clean and necessary. No clutter. A black hen parades up and down the low mud wall. A bamboo grid stabilises the rafters of the thatched roof and doubles as a storage rack. There's a grass broom, two drums, a woven reed basket, a broken umbrella and a whole stack of flattened, empty, corrugated cardboard boxes. Something catches my eye. I need my spectacles. Here's what's printed on the cardboard: Ideal Power 90 High Energy Emulsion Explosive (Class-2) SD CAT ZZ.

We start walking again at about two. In the village we are going to we will meet a Didi (Sister, Comrade) who knows what the next step of the journey will be. Chandu doesn't. There is an economy of information too. Nobody is supposed to know everything. But when we reach the village, Didi isn't there. There's no news of her. For the first time I see a little cloud of worry settling over Chandu. A big one settles over me. I don't know what the systems of communication are, but what if they've gone wrong?

We're parked outside a deserted school building, a little way out of the village. Why are all the government village schools built like concrete bastions, with steel shutters for windows and sliding folding steel doors? Why not like the village houses, with mud and thatch? Because they double up as barracks and bunkers. "In the villages in Abhujmad," Chandu says, "schools are like this…" He scratches a building plan with a twig in the earth. Three octagons attached to each other like a honeycomb. "So they can fire in all directions." He draws arrows to illustrate his point, like a cricket graphic – a batsman's wagon wheel. There are no teachers in any of the schools, Chandu says. They've all run away. Or have you chased them away? No, we only chase police. But why should teachers come here, to the jungle, when they get their salaries sitting at home? Good point.

He informs me that this is a "new area". The Party has entered only recently.

About 20 young people arrive, girls and boys. In their teens and early twenties. Chandu explains that this is the village-level militia, the lowest rung of the Maoists' military hierarchy. I have never seen anyone like them before. They are dressed in saris and lungis, some in frayed olive green fatigues. The boys wear jewelry, headgear. Every one of them has a muzzle-loading rifle, what's called a bharmaar. Some also have knives, axes, a bow and arrow. One boy carries a crude mortar fashioned out of a heavy three-foot GI pipe. It's filled with gunpowder and shrapnel and ready to be fired. It makes a big noise, but can only be used once. Still, it scares the police, they say, and giggle. War doesn't seem to be uppermost on their minds. Perhaps because their area is outside the home range of the Salwa Judum. They have just finished a days' work, helping to build fencing around some village houses to keep the goats out of the fields. They're full of fun and curiosity. The girls are confident and easy with the boys. I have a sensor for this sort of thing, and I am impressed. Their job, Chandu says, is to patrol and protect a group of four or five villages and to help in the fields, clean wells or repair houses – doing whatever's needed.

Still no Didi. What to do? Nothing. Wait. Help out with some chopping and peeling.

After dinner, without much talk, everybody falls in line. Clearly we're moving. Everything moves with us; the rice, vegetables, pots and pans. We leave the school compound and walk single file into the forest. In less than half an hour we arrive in a glade where we are going to sleep. There's absolutely no noise. Within minutes everyone has spread their blue plastic sheets, the ubiquitous "jhilli", (without which there will be no Revolution). Chandu and Mangtu share one and spread one out for me. They find me the best place, by the best grey rock. Chandu says he has sent a message to Didi. If she gets it she will be here first thing in the morning. If she gets it.

It's the most beautiful room I have slept in in a long time. My private suite in a thousand-star hotel. I'm surrounded by these strange, beautiful children with their curious arsenal. They're all Maoists for sure. Are they all going to die? Is the jungle warfare training school for them? And the helicopter gunships, the thermal imaging and the laser range finders?

Why must they die? What for? To turn all of this into a mine? I remember my visit to the opencast iron-ore mines in Keonjhar, Orissa. There was forest there once. And children like these. Now the land is like a raw, red wound. Red dust fills your nostrils and lungs. The water is red, the air is red, the people are red, their lungs and hair are red. All day and all night trucks rumble through their villages, bumper to bumper, thousands and thousands of trucks, taking ore to Paradip port from where it will go to China. There it will turn into cars and smoke and sudden cities that spring up overnight. Into a "growth rate" that leaves economists breathless. Into weapons to make war.

Everyone's asleep except for the sentries who take one-and-a-half hour shifts. Finally I can look at the stars. When I was a child growing up on the banks of the Meenachal river, I used to think the sound of crickets – which always started up at twilight – was the sound of stars revving up, getting ready to shine. I'm surprised at how much I love being here. There is nowhere else in the world that I would rather be. Who should I be tonight? Kamraid Rahel, under the stars? Maybe Didi will come tomorrow.

They arrive in the early afternoon. I can see them from a distance. About 15 of them, all in olive green uniforms, running towards us. Even from a distance, from the way they run, I can tell they are the heavy hitters. The People's Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA). For whom the thermal imaging and laser guided rifles. For whom the jungle warfare training school.

End of Part One. Read Part Two here

• Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy wins the 2023 European Essay Prize for lifetime achievement

She received the award for the french translation of her collection of essays titled ‘azadi: freedom, fascism, fiction’ in english..

Writer Arundhati Roy has been awarded the 45th European Essay Prize for lifetime achievement for the French translation of her compilation of essays titled Azadi: Liberté, Fascisme, Fiction ( Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction in English) . Roy will receive a cash prize of CHF 20,000 (about Rs 18 lakh), at a ceremony on September 12, 2023 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The jury of the Prix Europeen de l’Essai said that Roy uses the essay as a form of “combat, analysing fascism and the way it is being structured.” The jury also acknowledged Roy’s “commitment to political action”. In Azadi , she tackles issues of language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations of the present times.

Since its inception in 1975, the award has honoured a book or the work of an author “who, through their writings, contributes to nourishing and spreading the evolution of thought”.