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On Intellectual Engagement
Arundhati Roy
in conversation with Amit Sengupta
(courtesy
Tehelka.Com)
5 November 2005
"..The facts are there in the world today.
.. But what does information
mean? What are facts? There is so much information that almost
all becomes meaningless and disempowering....To
expose things is quite different from being able to effectively
resist things... I don’t agree with the term, Intellectual.
Anybody with skills and intelligence can be
intellectual. A cobbler is an intellectual... People are
constantly in search of idols, heroes, villains, sirens — in
search of individuals, in search of noise. Anybody in whom
they can invest their mediocre aspirations and muddled
thinking will do."
Amit Sengupta: I start with an old question: When
Tehelka was being cornered you had said there should be a Noam
Chomsky in India. Later you had once told me that ‘I am not an
activist’. What is this idea of Noam Chomsky in a context like
India?
Arundhati Roy: I think essentially that
whether it is an issue like Tehelka being hounded or all the
other issues that plague us, much of the critical response is an
analysis of symptoms; it’s not radical. Most of the time it does
not really question how democracy dovetails into majoritarianism
which edges towards fascism, or what the connections are between
this kind of ‘new democracy’ and corporate globalisation,
repression, militancy and war. What is the connection between
corruption and power?
At one point when the Tehelka expose happened, I
thought, thank God the BJP is corrupt, thank God someone’s taken
money, imagine if they had been incorruptible, only ideological,
it would have been so much more frightening. To me, pristine
ideological battles are really more frightening.
In India we are at the moment witnessing a sort of fusion
between corporate capitalism and feudalism — it’s a deadly
cocktail. We see it unfolding before our eyes. Sometimes it
looks as though the result of all this will be a twisted
implementation of the rural employment guarantee act. Half the
population will become Naxalites and the other half will join
the security forces and what Bush said will come true. Everyone
will have to choose whether they’re with “us” or with the
“terrorists”. We will live in an elaborately administered
tyranny.
But look at the reaction to the growing influence of the Maoists
— even by political analysts it’s being treated as a law and
order problem, not a political problem — and like militancy in
Kashmir and the Northeast, it will be dealt with by employing
brutal repression by security forces or arming local people with
weapons that will eventually lead to a sort of civil war. That
seems to be perfectly acceptable to Indian ‘civil society’.
Those who understand and disagree with the repressive machinery
of the State are more or less divided between the Gandhians and
the Maoists. Sometimes — quite often — the same people who are
capable of a radical questioning of, say, economic
neo-liberalism or the role of the state, are deeply conservative
socially — about women, marriage, sexuality, our so-called
‘family values’ — sometimes they’re so doctrinaire that you
don’t know where the establishment stops and the resistance
begins. For example, how many Gandhian/Maoist/ Marxist Brahmins
or upper caste Hindus would be happy if their children married
Dalits or Muslims, or declared themselves to be gay? Quite
often, the people whose side you’re on, politically, have
absolutely no place for a person like you in their social,
cultural or religious imagination. That’s a knotty problem…
politically radical people can come at you with the most
breathtakingly conservative social views and make nonsense of
the way in which you have ordered your world and your way of
thinking about it… and you have to find a way of accommodating
these contradictions within your worldview.
Amit Sengupta: In the Hindi heartland, the same
terrain that had Munshi Premchand, Muktibodh, Nirala, Kaifi Azmi is
still one of the most stagnating, backward, poverty-stricken
terrains of India. But in terms of the lilt of the languages here,
humour, bawdy jokes, hard politics, there is a vibrant churning
going on; there is Dalit churning. This is engagement with reality
in a very different manner. There are new theatre, literary, cinema
journals; a vibrant culture.
Arundhati Roy: There is a lot of
excitement in the air and it is actually happening here in
India, an excitement that is in a way absent in the West. If you
live in America or Europe it is almost impossible to really
believe that another world is possible. Over there, anybody who
talks about life beyond capitalism is part of a freak show,
they’re just considered nuts and weirdos, going through teenage
angst.
But here, it actually still exists, though they are being
rapidly destroyed. It is very important, the anarchy of what you
were saying, there are magazines, and little pamphlets, all over
India, which cannot be controlled by the corporate
establishment, and that’s very important, the way communication
links are kept alive. We are in a very striking phase. But how
powerful are these alternative ways of communication? You can
see these mighty structures of capitalism. Can you fight them
with these alternatives? The only way you can be optimistic is
to insist on being irrational, unreasonable, magical, stubborn,
because what you see happening is an inevitable crunching
through of these structures.
Amit Sengupta: Is it possible for anyone to stand up
against these structures, as Chomsky has done again and again, or
you, and not be hounded out by the entire apparatus?
Arundhati Roy:Until recently, we all
hoped that it was the question of getting the facts out, getting
the information out, and that once people understood what was
going on, things would change. Their consciences would kick in
and everything would be alright. We saw it, rather stupidly, as
a question of getting the information out. But getting the story
out is only one small part of the battle. For example, before
the American elections, Michael Moore’s film was in every
smalltown cinema hall everywhere; the film was an evidence-based
documentary, it was by no means a piece of radical political
thought, it was just a fact-based political scandal about the
House of Bush, but still, Bush came back with a bigger majority
than the earlier elections.
The facts are there in the world today. People like Chomsky have
made a huge contribution to that. But what does information
mean? What are facts? There is so much information that almost
all becomes meaningless and disempowering. Where has it all
gone? What does the World Social Forum mean today? They are big
questions now. Ultimately, millions of people marched against
the war in Iraq. But the war was prosecuted, the occupation is
in full stride. I do not for a moment want to undermine the fact
that unveiling the facts has meant a huge swing of public
opinion against the occupation of Iraq, it has meant that
America’s secret history is now street talk, but what next? To
expose things is quite different from being able to effectively
resist things.
I am more interested now in whether there are new strategies of
resistance. The debate between strategies of violence and
non-violence…
Amit Sengupta: One option is to keep digging, keep
digging and there is always the danger of stagnation, becoming
self-righteous, dogmatic, moralistic, losing your sense of humour,
songs, masti. You stop laughing. As if the poor or the working class
don’t laugh…
Arundhati Roy:You are absolutely right on
that one. In India particularly, self-righteousness is the bane
of activists or public thinkers. It’s also the function of a
kind of power that you begin to accumulate. Some activists have
unreasonable power over people in their ‘constituencies’, they
have adulation, gratitude, it can turn their heads. They begin
to behave like mainstream politicians. Somebody like me runs a
serious risk of thinking that I’m more important than I actually
am — because people petition me all the time, with serious
issues that they want me to intervene in… And of course an
intervention does have some momentary effect, you begin to think
that it is in your power to do something. Whereas actually is it
or is it not? It’s a difficult call.
At the end of the day, fame is also a gruesome kind of
capitalism, you can accumulate it, bank it, live off it. But it
can suffocate you, block off the blood vessels to the brain,
isolate you, make you lose touch. It pushes you up to the
surface and you forget how to keep your ear to the ground.
I think it is important to retreat sometimes. Because you can
really get caught up in fact and detail, fact and detail, and
forget how to think conceptually, and that’s a kind of prison.
Speaking for myself, I’m ready for a jail-break.
Amit Sengupta: You mean even anti-conformism can
become a conformist trap?
Arundhati Roy:There is the danger,
especially for a writer of fiction, that you can become somebody
who does what is expected of you. I could end up boring myself
to death. In India, the political anti-establishment can be
socially very conservative (Bring on the gay Gandhians!) and can
put a lot of pressure on you to become something which may not
necessarily be what you want to be: they want you to dress in a
particular way, be virtuous, be sacrificing, it’s a sort of
imaginary and quite often faulty extrapolation of what the
middle class assumes the ‘people’, the ‘masses’ want and expect.
It can be maddening, and I want to say like Bunty in Bunty aur
Babli, ‘Mujhe yeh izzat aur sharafat ki zindagi se bachao…’
There are all kinds of things that work to dull, leaden your
soul…to weigh you down…
I like Jean Paul Sartre. He used to say money
must keep circulating. He used to blow his money on taxis,
without any purpose. Blow it up on booze. Money should etherise.
That does not take away his strange involvement with histories
or literature: the Spanish civil war, Stalin. I don’t agree with
the term, Intellectual. Anybody with skills and intelligence can
be intellectual. A cobbler is an intellectual.
I don’t really want to work out the definitions. It’s just the
opposite of what novelists do. They really try to free their
thinking from such definitions.
As for money, I have tried to take it lightly. Really, I have
tried to give it away, but even that is a very difficult thing
to do. Money is like nuclear waste. What you do with it, where
you dump it, what problems it creates, what it changes, these
are incredibly complicated things. And eventually, it can all
blow up in your face. I’d have been happier with Less. Yeh Dil
Maange Less. Less money, less fame, less pressure, more
badmashi. I hate the f***ing responsibility that is sometimes
forced on me. I spent my early years making decisions that would
allow me to evade responsibility; and now…
People are constantly in search of idols, heroes, villains,
sirens — in search of individuals, in search of noise. Anybody
in whom they can invest their mediocre aspirations and muddled
thinking will do. Anyone who is conventionally and moderately
‘successful’ becomes a celebrity. It’s almost a kind of
profession now — we have professional celebrities — maybe
colleges should start offering a course.
It’s indiscriminate — it can be Miss Universe, or a writer, or
the maker of a ridiculous TV soap, the minimum requirement is
success. There’s a particular kind of person who comes up to me
with this star-struck smile — it doesn’t matter who I am — they
just know I’m famous; whether I’m the ‘BookerPrizeWinner’ or the
star of the Zee Horror Show or whatever is immaterial.
In this freak show, this celebrity parade, there’s no place for
loss, or failure. Whereas to me as a writer, failure interests
me. Success is so tinny and boring. Everyone is promoting
themselves so hard.
Amit Sengupta: You gave your Booker money to the
NBA. Your Sydney prize money to aborigine groups. Another award
money you gave to 50 organisations who are doing exemplary work. You
trusted them. You gave away your money, okay, it’s not your money,
the money came from somewhere; but you gave it away. Very few people
do that in this world. No one does that. So you can’t stop the
society to look at you in a certain way.
Arundhati Roy:Well, I haven’t given it
all away. I still have more than I need. If I gave it all away I
might turn into the kind of person that I really dread — ‘the
one who has sacrificed everything’ and will no doubt, somewhere
along the way, extract a dreadful price from everybody around
them. I’ve learned that giving money away can help, but it can
also be utterly destructive, however good your intentions may
have been. It is impossible to always know what the right thing
to do is. It can create conflict in strange and surprising
places. I am not always comfortable with what I do with my
money. I do everything. I give it away extravagantly. I blow it
up, extravagantly. I have no fix on it — it comforts me, it
bothers me, I’m constantly glad that I can afford to pay my
bills. I’m paranoid about its incredible capacity for
destruction. But the one thing I’m glad about is that it is not
inherited. I think inherited money is a curse.
Giving money away is dangerous and complicated
and in some ways against my political beliefs — I do not
subscribe to the politics of good intentions — but what do I do?
Sit on it and accumulate more? I’m uncomfortable with lots of
things that I do, but can’t see a better way — I just muddle
along. It’s a peculiar problem, this problem of excess, and it’s
embarrassing to even talk about it in a land of so much pain and
poverty. But there it is…
Amit Sengupta: Last question. There is a conflict
within oneself. There is a consistency also, of positions,
commitments, knowledge. And there are twilight zones you are
grappling with. So why can’t you jump from this realm to another:
there is no contradiction in saying, what is that, ‘mujhe izzat…’
Arundhati Roy:I think we all are just messing our way through
this life. People, ideologues who believe in a kind of
redemption, a perfect and ultimate society, are terrifying.
Hitler and Stalin believed that with a little social
engineering, with the mass murder of a few million people, they
could create a new and perfect world. The idea of perfection has
often been a precursor to genocide. John Gray writes about it at
some length. But then, on the other hand, we have the placid
acceptance of Karma which certainly suits the privileged classes
and castes very well. Some of us oscillate in the space between
these two ugly juggernauts trying to at least occasionally
locate some pinpoints of light.
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