Arundhati Roy is giving us "the other side of the story" in this "Year of India" at Brown University and elsewhere. Media consumers in the US don't get it all in the TED talks, or in Nandan Nilekani's success epic, much less in Tom Friedman's relentless celebrations of the Bangalore boom in the New York Times. I sat with Ms. Roy for an hour and a half near MIT last Friday -- first time since her book tour in another life, with the Booker Prize novel, The God of Small Things in 1998. This time she was just off a remarkable journalistic coup for Outlook India -- an "embedded" report from the so-called "Maoist" uprising in the Northeastern states of India, the rebellion that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called India's greatest security threat and Arundhati Roy calls a battle for India's soul.
Listen to our conversation here:
AR: What does the boom do? It created a huge middle class -- because India is a huge country, even a small percentage is a huge number of people -- and it is completely invested in this process. So it did lift a large number of people into a different economic bracket altogether -- now more billionaires in India than in China, and so on. But it created a far larger underclass being pushed into oblivion. India is home to the largest number of malnourished children in the world. You have 180,000 small farmers who've drunk pesticide and committed suicide because they've been caught in the death trap. You have a kind of ecocide where huge infrastructural projects are causing a drop in the water table. No single river now flows to the sea. There is a disaster in the making.The way I see it, we had a feudal society decaying under the weight of its caste system, and so on. It was put into a machine and churned and some of the old discriminations were recalibrated. But what happened was that the whole separated into a thin layer of thick cream, and the rest of it is water. The cream is India's market, which consists of many millions of people who buy cellphones and televisions and cars and Valentine's Day cards; and the water is superfluous people who are non-consumers and just pawns who need to be drained away.
Those people are now rising up and fighting the system in a whole variety of ways. There's what I call a bio-diversity of resistance. There are Gandhians on the road, and there are Maoists in the forests. But all of them have the same idea: that this development model is only working for some and not for others.
CL: How do we Americans listen for a true Indian identity in this period of fantastic growth and, as you say, fantastic suffering?
AR: You know, I have stopped being able to think of things like Americans and Indians and Chinese and Africans. I don't know what those words mean anymore. Because in America, as in India and in China, what has happened is that the elites of these countries and the corporations that support their wealth and generate it form tham have seceded into outer space. They live somewhere in the sky, and they are their own country. And they look down on the bauxite in Orissa and the iron ore in Chhattisgarh and they say: 'what is our bauxite doing in their mountains?' They then justify to themselves the reasons for these wars.
If you look at what is going on now in that part of the world, from Afghanistan to the northeast frontiers of Pakistan, to Waziristan, to this so-called "red corridor" in India, what you're seeing is a tribal uprising. And it's taking the form of radical Islam in Afghanistan. It's taking the form of radical Communism in India. It's taking the form of struggles for self-determination in the northeastern states. But it's a tribal uprising, and the assault on them is coming from the same place. It's coming from free-market capitalism's desire to capture and control what it thinks of as resources. I think 'resources' is a problematic word because these things cannot be replenished once they are looted. But that is really the thing. And the people who are able to fight are those who are outside of the bar-coded, cellphone-networked, electronic age -- who cannot be tracked and who can barely be understood.
It's a clash of civilizations, but not in the way that (Samuel P.) Huntington meant, you know. It's an inability to understand that the world has to change, or there will be -- I mean, as we know, capitalism contains within itself the idea of a protracted war. But in that war... either you learn to keep the bauxite in the mountains, or you're not going to benefit from preaching morality to the victims of this war. A victory for this sort of establishment and its army and its nuclear weapons will never be a victory. Because your victory is your defeat, you know?
Arundhati Roy in conversation with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, April 2, 2010.
Arundhati Roy's new collection of essays -- for "those who have learned to divorce hope from reason -- is titled: Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers.
Follow Christopher Lydon on Twitter: www.twitter.com/radioopensource
If these admirers of Stalin and Mao were interested in winning the support of the people they could function like any other political party in India (the largest democracy in human history). India is full of leftist political parties, and many of them are quite successful in elections. In fact, however, the Naxalites have a special hatred for Indian leftists, and often target them for "annihilation" as well.
you are entirely wrong...check out the north east India and kashmir???
Even India said they are to be fought on war footing...do they even think how it will affect the local population...nope
The ideology of the Naxalites is every bit as regressive as that of the Hutarees and other extreme right-wing terrorists in the US (like the Oklahoma City bombers). The only difference is that the Naxalites are far better at what they do.
The Naxalites openly proclaim their admiration for Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao. They view democracy with complete disdain.
India is by far the largest and most vibrant democracy in human history. India's democracy is far from perfect, but since when are the failings of democracy justification for terrorism?
The Naxalites claim to represent the "oppressed", and Arundhati Roy attempts to lend credence to their claims and to give a human face to their murderous Pol-Pot-esque designs.
According to Marx history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. Our latter day Edgar Snow-lite and her Naxal idols are very much a farce.
The Maoists are going to go nowhere. All they'll achieve is to stunt the growth of the periphery. Meanwhile the South and West and Punjab & UP etc will carry on industrialising. Another 10 years of current growth levels and India will have the third largest economy in the world. That industrialisation is a necessary and good and the costs and dislocations involved are more or less unavoidable.
Every year million flock to the cities of India. Electricity and coal and minerals means progress and jobs and sewers and education. That is how hundreds of millions will be lifted out of poverty - as has happened in China, and S. Korea and Japan before.
Naxals waxing lyrical about "The Gandhian Vision" shows how laughable our Maoists are compared to their clear-eyed unsentimental Chinese forebears.
...the first time as tragedy the second as farce.
Anyone who knows India can tell you that economic growth has benefited a broad swathe of society. 20 years ago starved-to-the-bone kids in rags were common in the big towns especially in the North and North East - now you hardly ever see that.
Cell phones are becoming ubiquitous even in rural areas - they are far cheaper than a land-line. The idea that they are restricted to an elite shows how out of touch she is.
But then her primary audience has always been in the West. That's why she writes in English and not Malayalam . And that also explains why her novels are lousy - they lack authenticity. Just compare her weak gruel to the real literature of OV Vijayan or Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai.
Try reading a novel like Kayar by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai (I'm not sure it's available in English translation, but his novel Chemeen is) or OV Vijayan's Legend of Khasak (which is available in a reasonably good translation). You'll see immediately how derivative and superficial and written for a Western audience The God of small Things is by comparison.
If DH Lawrence had tried writing about Nottinghamshire mining folk in (say) Punjabi the result would have been abject failure as well.
In the 18th century there were many attempts by the Russian elite to write novels and poetry in French. Actually, even Turgenev wrote works in French. They are deservedly forgotten. Only when they started writing in their native tongue in the did they produce works of genius.