Globalizing Dissent: Essays on Arundhati Roy (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

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Globalizing Dissent

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

20. The Nature of Capital Marx after Foucault Richard Marsden

30. The Intellectual as Stranger Studies in Spokespersonship Dick Pels

21. The Age of Chance Gambling in Western Culture Gerda Reith

31. Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science A Critique of Gadamer and Habermas Austin Harrington

22. Reflexive Historical Sociology Arpad Szakolczai 23. Durkheim and Representations Edited by W. S. F. Pickering 24. The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky Alison Edgley 25. Hayek’s Liberalism and Its Origins His Idea of Spontaneous Order and the Scottish Enlightenment Christina Petsoulas 26. Metaphor and the Dynamics of Knowledge Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart 27. Living with Markets Jeremy Shearmur 28. Durkheim’s Suicide A Century of Research and Debate Edited by W.S.F. Pickering and Geoffrey Walford 29. Post-Marxism An Intellectual History Stuart Sim

32. Methodological Individualism Background, History and Meaning Lars Udehn 33. John Stuart Mill and Freedom of Expression The Genesis of a Theory K.C. O’Rourke 34. The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation From Terror to Trauma Michael Humphrey 35. Marx and Wittgenstein Knowledge, Morality, Politics Edited by Gavin Kitching and Nigel Pleasants 36. The Genesis of Modernity Arpad Szakolczai 37. Ignorance and Liberty Lorenzo Infantino 38. Deleuze, Marx and Politics Nicholas Thoburn

39. The Structure of Social Theory Anthony King

50. The Sociology of Elites Michael Hartmann

40. Adorno, Habermas and the Search for a Rational Society Deborah Cook

51. Deconstructing Habermas Lasse Thomassen

41. Tocqueville’s Moral and Political Thought New Liberalism M.R.R. Ossewaarde 42. Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy The Invisible Hand and Spontaneous Order Craig Smith 43. Social and Political Ideas of Mahatma Gandi Bidyut Chakrabarty 44. Counter-Enlightenments From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Graeme Garrard 45. The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell A Reassessment Stephen Ingle 46. Habermas Rescuing the Public Sphere Pauline Johnson 47. The Politics and Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott Stuart Isaacs 48. Pareto and Political Theory Joseph Femia 49. German Political Philosophy The Metaphysics of Law Chris Thornhill

52. Young Citizens and New Media Learning for Democractic Participation Edited by Peter Dahlgren 53. Gambling, Freedom and Democracy Peter Adams 54. The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science Amos Morris-Reich 55. Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law William E. Scheuerman 56. Hegemony Studies in Consensus and Coercion Edited by Richard Howson and Kylie Smith 57. Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life Majia Holmer Nadesan 58. Sustainability and Security within Liberal Societies Learning to Live with the Future Edited by Stephen Gough and Andrew Stables 59. Globalizing Dissent Essays on Arundhati Roy Edited by Ranjan Ghosh & Antonia Navarro-Tejero

Globalizing Dissent Essays on Arundhati Roy

Edited by Ranjan Ghosh & Antonia Navarro-Tejero

New York

London

First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2009 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Globalizing dissent : essays on Arundhati Roy / edited by Ranjan Ghosh & Antonia Navarro-Tejero. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in social and political thought ; 60) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Roy, Arundhati—Criticism and interpretation. I. Ghosh, Ranjan. II. Navarro Tejero, Antonia. PR9499.3.R59Z58 2009 809.3—dc22 2008026704 ISBN 0-203-88508-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-99559-0 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-88508-2 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-99559-7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-88508-6 (ebk)

Ranjan Ghosh’s dedication: To all the small things, for which we need no God Antonia Navarro-Tejero’s dedication: For Andrés, Nardi, and their twins, David and Sergio

Contents

Acknowledgments Prologue

xi xiii

ANTONIA NAVARRO-TEJERO

PART I The Writer, the Artist 1

The (In)fusion of Sociology and Literary Fantasy: Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Ulrich Beck, and the Reinvention of Politics

3

JESSE T. AIRAUDI

2

Where “Tomorrow”?: The God of Small Things as Derridean Ghost Story

25

CARA CILANO

3

In-Between and Elsewhere: Liminality in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

39

ANNA FROULA

4

Beyond “Anticommunism”: The Progressive Politics of The God of Small Things

47

PRANAV JANI

5

The History House: The Magic of Contained Space in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things SARA UPSTONE

71

x

Contents

6

City and Non-City: Political and Gender Issues in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones

80

JOEL KUORTTI

PART II The Writer, the Activist, the Intellectual 7

Committed Writing, Committed Writer?

93

EMILIENNE BANETH-NOUAILHETAS

8

More to the Point, Less Composed: An Essay on the Analytic Style of Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy

105

PADMAJA CHALLAKERE

9

How to Tell a Story to Change the World: Arundhati Roy, Globalization, and Environmental Feminism

118

SUSAN COMFORT

10 Home and the World: The Multiple Citizenships of Arundhati Roy

143

GURLEEN GREWAL

11 The Limits of Dissent: Arundhati Roy and the Struggle Against the Narmada Dams

157

DAVID JEFFERESS

Epilogue: Should We Leave It to the Writer?

180

RANJAN GHOSH

Appendix: Dissent Has to Be Localized: Arundhati Roy Interviewed by Antonia Navarro-Tejero Contributors Index

193 207 211

Acknowledgments

Thanks to all our contributors for being so patient with this project. We reserve special thanks for Benjamin Holtzman, our commissioning editor at Routledge, for his warm cooperation at every stage of our journey. Ranjan: Brigitte—how you have ‘booked’ your presence in support of everything I write! Chandan-da—how my text has always stretched out under the footsteps of the grammarian! Sue, my ‘intellectual pugilist’— how we are surviving the fight at every bend of our thoughts and ideas! Antonia: I would like to express my deep gratitude to Arundhati Roy for having generously answered all my questions with enthusiasm and patience, which has enhanced the quality of this project. I am also indebted to Eva González de Lucas for recording the interview and to Nitesh Gurbani for transcribing it. Julián Herranz was instrumental in helping with the list of Roy’s primary sources. Finally, I must acknowledge the care and support of my close family—my mother, my brother and his wife, and my three wonderful, big boys. Víctor has lived with this book, and with so many other projects, for which I continue being grateful to him in so many ways.

Prologue Antonia Navarro-Tejero

After the publication of Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things, in 1997, a lot of papers and books poured out from various corners of the global academy. Indeed, it is not just Roy’s novel, a landmark in world literature today, that has given her prominence: her essays and books on socio-political subjects, on environment and economic issues have won her several awards, including the highly acclaimed Lannan Award for Cultural Freedom in 2002, the 2003 Noam Chomsky Award, the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004, and the 2005 Sahitya Akademi Award, which she refused because of political disagreements with the policies of the Indian government. Roy started writing The God of Small Things in 1992 and completed it in 1996. The novel captures some of the author’s experiences during her childhood in Kerala, and her later studies at the Delhi School of Architecture. The God of Small Things touches on a variety of socio-political themes, both overtly and implicitly, with snippets of wisdom and jokes about realities in India. Topics range from the caste system, communism in Kerala, double standards, corruption, and gender violence, to the of Victorian decorum, the effects of globalization, pollution, and taboos. These complex issues, and how they work in the physics of power politics, are examined through the lenses of the historical roots that bring them profound insights into a family in Ayemenen as a microcosm of India, all narrated in an exquisite and sarcastic play with the English language. However, Roy’s social and political writings and interviews have been written and published primarily in the post-1997 phase of her professional career. For this reason, Globalizing Dissent focuses on her socio-political activism and her tremendous impact, as a writer, on the civil. Our objective in selecting these essays has been to see the unfolding theoretical–political– existential–social dimensions that try to view Roy beyond the aesthetic parameters of her fiction—with more focus on her creative activism vis á vis global politics and the sociology of change. Thus, we are trying to cover the multifaceted Roy—novelist, nonfiction writer, journalist, activist, feminist, script writer, ideologist, architect, etc.—in this book. Our book brings together for the fi rst time scholars from all across the world to debate

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Antonia Navarro-Tejero

Arundhati Roy’s importance in the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies, both through her only novel and her nonfiction writings. The present volume thus tries to offer a space for debating local and global issues of major importance, and would be of interest to an international audience for two main reasons: it provides, for anyone interested in current world affairs, a clear and direct picture of the antiglobalization movements and the stimulating dissenting views of an activist–thinker; and, it would be essential for any scholar whose research interests are premised in English-language Indian literature and Women’s Studies. Roy is the fi rst Indian woman to win the Booker Prize. As a consequence, most of the essays in this collection keep traveling to and fro between Roy’s nonfictional works—engaging activism on the streets and global forums—and its underlying roots in her novel. This book is divided into two main parts. Part I provides a fresh perspective on The God of Small Things, in which various themes have been explored in well-meaning configurations. Part II exists as a result of the paucity of material on Roy’s nonfiction, as it focuses on international politics, environment, feminism, globalization, corporatism, etc. The book ends with an epilogue by Ranjan Ghosh that tries to reverse the question that Roy puts in one of her famous essays: “Should we leave it to the experts?” It develops a critique of the circumspect of the function of the ‘expert,’ the unique role of the writer in our society in the contexts of contemporary political and economic developments. It purports to reinvest the concept of the ‘public,’ the ‘public space,’ civil society, the inevitable link between politics and writing, and the notion of the intellectual to develop a commentary on the link between activism, writing, intellectual responsibility, and educated commitment to politics, economy, and social movements. The epilogue is followed by an exclusive interview with Arundhati Roy, in which we go from the very beginnings of her writing career to her most recent views on the politics of dissent, overtly talking about current international affairs. Part I starts with Jesse T. Airaudi, who discusses how Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, and Ulrich Beck employ fantasy in their fiction to portray the spreading dystopia, and is followed by Cara Cilano’s chapter, which focuses on how the novel unfi xes the Akkara house’s identity, shifting it from colonial plantation to Heritage, the posh resort that maximizes Raj nostalgia. Anna Froula explores the liminal characteristics of the novel, applying these theories of Bhabha and Van Gennep and Mary Douglas’s work on pollution and boundaries. Pranav Jani argues that not only is there no contradiction between the ideological paradigms of Roy’s literary and political writings, but that her politics are solidly grounded within the contemporary Left movements for global justice, and has managed to avoid the pitfalls of postmodernism, in which the criticism of big narratives results in the deconstruction of all narratives. Joel Kuortti focuses on the script In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones and how it expresses social concerns

Prologue xv and critiques political and gender issues. Sara Upstone takes the subject of “history” as an avenue into The God of Small Things, which allows us to identify the postcolonial gesture of defi ning identities and modes of interconnection that work in tension to the determining effects of the colonial legacy and the current, globalized age. In Part II, Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas describes the writer–activist in all her facets. Padmaja Challakere discusses how Chomsky and Roy have a good many things in common: the unconcealed nature of their kind of political commentary, its instant recognizability as a photograph, and its reliance on readily accessible factual disclosures rather than concepts and abstractions. Susan Comfort shows how Roy complicates this paradigm and makes a contribution to environmental feminist thought by engaging in what might be called double critique: she directs a critique at forces both outside and within India—at both global capitalism and configurations of state power, ideology and capitalism within India. Gurleen Grewal’s essay assesses Roy’s work and its postcolonial feminist optic in the context of the nation and of transnational globality. She argues that Roy must be understood simultaneously at two levels, the local and the global; that her popularity is explained by her ability to be glocal in a post-World Trade Organization world. She concludes by examining the implications of this compelling voice from the global South for the politics of transnational feminism. David Jefferess examines Arundhati Roy’s representation of resistance to the Narmada Dam project in The Cost of Living and selected other essays, as well as the representation of Roy as an activist in this cause, for instance, in the documentary Drowned Out (2002), taking into account Mohandas Gandhi’s writings on nonviolence, modernity, and power, as well as postcolonial theories of power, justice, and resistance, including the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and E. San Juan, Jr. I would not like to end this introduction without acknowledging Roy’s contribution in this project in spite of her busy schedule. She found some time in between the writing of her new novel and activism for the liberation of Tibet, among other causes, to answer a few of my questions. This interview, which follows a chronological line in Roy’s activism, includes questions about her early articles, screenplays, and The God of Small Things. It also discusses many controversial cases, such as her conviction of contempt of court by the Indian Supreme Court, the Muthanga incident, the Attack on the Indian Parliament, the Hindutva project, the relationships among multinational corporations, institutions, and nongovernmental organizations, Nandigram, allegations of Justice Sabharwal’s corruption, Muslim genocide in Gujarat, and Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. This exchange, recorded in 2008 at her Delhi residence, also reveals her feelings about her experience as a Chair of Jury of Conscience at the World Tribunal on Iraq, being part of the honor calls for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions, and her getting the Booker Prize, among many other aspects of her life.

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Antonia Navarro-Tejero

Arundhati Roy has been acclaimed for both her personality—as an eloquent intellectual and brave activist—and her writings, which have such a personal voice and a style that everyone agrees are a delightful potpourri of smells, sound, and pictures. Globalizing Dissent: Essays on Arundhati Roy captures the many facets of the writer and her vast work. The pleasures and necessities of her form of seeing this globalized current world underlie the concerns of this book.

Part I

The Writer, the Artist

1

The (In)fusion of Sociology and Literary Fantasy Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Ulrich Beck, and the Reinvention of Politics Jesse T. Airaudi

HUSSERL’S CRISIS AND ITS LEGACY FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM “Pull this one thread, and the whole sweater starts to unravel” (Conversations with Ulrich Beck 21); thus does the German sociologist Ulrich Beck both echo the thought of Edmund Husserl’s call to arms in the early part of the twentieth century and epitomize the contemporary writing of Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie in sociological terms, claiming that “the heart of our social reality is dissolving and we’re acting like it’s not. Not only family sociology, but the sociology of classes, and sociology itself, rests on the household. And it doesn’t exist anymore” (Conversations with Ulrich Beck 21). If, Beck asserts, we were to wake up to the fact that our old way of thinking no longer matches reality and start acting our “age,” in both senses of the word, we could, and must, reinvent politics: And then, having opened up a new space for the imagination, a new way to think about society and politics, we color it in and fill it with life through empirical work, empirical work that this rethink has made possible. Once this process gets rolling, it will take on a dynamic of its own. It will continuously reveal the weaknesses of accepted ideas and suggest new ways to improve them. (Conversations with Ulrich Beck 21) For Beck, the individual of the future will survive as a human by living in “the rubble” of the old, accepted ideas “in ruins of values that have authority for him, if at all, only through himself. He enacts his laws—even if they are the old and prevailing ones” (Reinvention of Politics 165). Roy, with the central metaphor of Chappu Thamburan, “Lord Rubbish,” and Rushdie with his Ormus Cama and other Orpheus/Shiva characters of destruction and preservation, have proclaimed the same prophecy—Roy by stating that the individual must secede from her country (“If protesting against having a nuclear

4

Jesse T. Airaudi

bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and antinational, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag” (“The End of Imagination” 15); Rushdie by declaring that “[t]he only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame” (The Ground Beneath Her Feet 203). Roy vows to fight for the individual’s right to make her own narrative: I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. So those of you who are willing: let’s pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes, and speak our secondhand lines in this sad secondhand play. But let’s not forget that the stakes we’re playing for are huge. Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children’s children. Of everything we love. We have to reach within ourselves and fi nd the strength to think. To fight. (Harper Collins 1997) Likewise, as anyone who has read Rushdie—or has read only the celebmedia’s account of his doings—knows that he, too, fights against the “accepted” ways of thinking (for the casual reader who would get to the bottom of Rushdie’s opposition, the essay in Imaginary Homelands entitled “Is Nothing Sacred?” is perhaps the best introduction to his thought). Following Foucault’s dictum that “[a]nyone who would learn the ‘art of living’ must practice the art of doubt,” Ulrich Beck emphasizes the need to oppose the “horror visions of scepticism that have been cultivated and circulated for centuries in the culture of certainty to deter anyone from having a fling with doubt” (Reinvention of Politics 165–6). Beck further emphasizes that this particular new kind of doubt (“Doubt—reflexive modernity—will have more names for it than the Eskimos have for snow!”) must be distinguished from the “linear” and fi nal doubt of the postmodern project: For this task, postmodern thought is inadequate. It explains why the old ways of conceiving modernity are no longer valid, and then it stops short. It explains why the old ways of drawing boundaries rested on hidden and unjustifiable assumptions, and then it stops, leaving it a complete mystery how social life continues on. It seems unconcerned with that. There seem to be two obvious inferences to be drawn from this attitude. One is that the ruling ideas must not matter much, because if you destroy them, things carry on much as before. The second is that there must not be a real crisis. It must only be a confusion of ideas, because if there was a real crisis, a turning point in reality, there would be some urgency about addressing it. (Conversations with Ulrich Beck 26) The proof that Roy and Rushdie are reinventing politics lies in their depiction of the real crisis that is engulfi ng the planet, and in their terrible urgency—which itself has evinced further proof of the accuracy of Beck’s

The (In)fusion of Sociology and Literary Fantasy 5 sociological analysis: the litigious, dogmatic, and vehement reactionary attacks launched from the citadels of power upon these mere novelists. The on-again, off-again fatwa issued against Rushdie is well known, as is the wrath of Indian fundamentalist powers who sued Roy for “obscenity.” Such charges are “justified,” of course, from autonomous power’s point of view, but from the point of view of these two mere fictionalists/fantastical writers, the reaction serves to prove the validity of their protestations. As Brian Attebery writes in his essay, “The Politics (If Any) of Fantasy,” the “Ayatollah Khmenei wasn’t so far off when he condemned The Satanic Verses as heresy,” if one considers that hegemonies cannot abide any challenge to their single-view realities: “[p]utting a fantastic frame around even the most established hierarchies—like male and female, self and society, subject and object, victor and victim, man and nature—necessarily undercuts them” (25). The “fantastic frame” results in what Rushdie calls “mongrelization,” or “hybridity,” and those who write fantasy sing “a love song to our mongrel selves” (Imaginary Homelands 394). The “love song to our mongrel selves,” the call to arms to resist the “loss of meaning” for ordinary people overwhelmed by so-called experts and their formulations of Reality (which is the main subject of Husserl’s majestic, though unfi nished, Die Krisis) is the rallying cry in the fight against hegemony, which continues into the new millennium. As Fink’s addendum, “Outline for the Continuation of the Crisis,” has it, “humanity’s responsibility for itself” (400). If we act our “age” and become responsible adults, according to Beck, “the monopoly of the single reality . . . shatters and only then can one recognize the narrowness and poverty of a managed expertcontrolled ‘realism,’ which has dispossessed the senses and their realities” (The Reinvention of Politics 167). When Arundhati Roy asks—rhetorically—in her essay, “So . . . Shall We Leave it to the Experts?” (Nijhuis), the answer from this sociologist and these two novelists must be a resounding “No!” Not if we want to survive as ourselves rather than as the products of Beck’s “managed expert-controlled ‘realism,’” as we of the new millennium enter into the crisis for human meaning—“menschliches Dasein” (Crisis of European Sciences 5)—that Husserl identified for us in his lectures from the 1920s and 1930s, later collected and published as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. More explicitly, the “crisis” (as spelled out in the title of Chapter 2, this volume) is seen as “The ‘crisis’ of science as the loss of its meaning for life” (5). Developing this charge in a later chapter, Husserl strikes to the heart of the problem: the origin of the crisis was, and continues to be, “the emptying of the meaning of mathematical natural events through ‘technization’” (46) and the “lifeworld as the forgotten meaning-fundament of natural science” (48). The “crisis” of meaning continues into the new millennium. As Rushdie states, it is “one of the most crucial battles of our age: the war over the nature of reality” (Imaginary Homelands 210). Perhaps, the battle in the war for the nature of reality is being fought on a front that even Husserl

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could not have imagined, not only against the so-called experts in the socalled “objective sciences,” but against market globalization in its most (seemingly) innocuous forms. As opposed to the ideal of an enlightened, socially responsible “cosmopolitanism,” Beck writes: [m]arket choice can grow while political choice diminishes. The appearance of freedom that comes from being able to choose between 12 kinds of yogurt can silence the question of who determines our lives. The number of these apparent choices that each of us is constantly making can be increasing at the same time as our joint capacity to co-determine our destiny is shrinking. In a phrase, democracy can get replaced by consumerism. (Conversations with Ulrich Beck 195) And so, in our battle to oppose, if not overthrow, those of whatever stripe who would impose a “monopoly of meaning” on their fellow men and women, we enlist the sociological perspective of Ulrich Beck (and in the spirit of [in]fusion whereby one domain of inquiry may inform another), we can begin a new reading of Roy and Rushdie, twining their two threads while infusing their material with the tincture of Beck’s view of the emerging “second modernity,” which, he hopes—and Roy and Rushdie would agree, I think—will be the hallmark of the new millennium. His call to contemporary sociologists to be more “playful” and open—“inter-domaining” (Ghosh 12), we might say—may be our call as well: literary interpreters can join the project “where scholars bring different perspectives and evidence from various parts of the world into fruitful confrontation and collaboration” (Conversations with Ulrich Beck 27). Even more germane to our literary study, Beck himself urges a literary approach for all who grapple with this crisis of meaning in our times. To escape their “self-referentiality,” based on a false “autonomy premise . . . raised to the level of virtual autism,” and to revive a discipline “exhausted in “autonomization” (Reinvention of Politics 112), sociology must look to the arts for new directions, new horizons: Sociology, or, let us say more precisely, the (ironically) ageing sociology of modernization, must become a bit of an art, that is, a bit playful, in order to liberate itself from its own intellectual barriers. One could call this the chemistry of premises; oppose pseudo-eternal verities, rub them together, agitate them against one another and fuse them together until the intellectual test tube starts giving off sparks and smoking, smelling and sputtering. (Reinvention of Politics 111) The “art” that bridges Beck’s domain and that of the novels at hand is the art of the “vagabonds,” of the “eccentrics,” whose “effervescent liveliness, have always had over the puffed-up ego tyrants of the bourgeois world or the heroic self asserters of the post-bourgeois world—at least in literature” (Reinvention of Politics 163).

The (In)fusion of Sociology and Literary Fantasy 7 Indeed, such interdomaining anchors what otherwise would be mere personal opinion. To counter subjectivity, critics must, as John Tallmadge states in his excellent article, “The Natural History of Reading,” admit not only their own interests, which linked them to the subject at hand, but must also develop a “disciplined subjectivity” (35). Critical responsibility demands, nearly in a literal sense, that we anchor our interpretations in some discipline whose principles have been theoretically established and are, therefore, binding upon all members—authors and audience—of the critical transaction. Yet the “natural history of reading” admits—in fact invites—(in)fusion, opening up vistas into other domains, other possibilities of cross-fertilization that make the transaction more creative and attractive in the realm of scholarship and learning.

THE TRUE, HEROIC FACE OF MOUNT RUSHDIE “Behind Mount Rushdie,” the title of a review in The Nation of Amit Chaudhuri, reveals a common and unfortunate view of Salman Rushdie primarily as a curry novelist (Raychaudhuri 31–5). There are other commonly held and widely touted views of the “monumental” Rushdie—the international wag, the rebel, the “Magical Realist”—that also obscure lesser known “Indian” writers, and they, too, hide a much more important Rushdie: the writer of serious and urgent political fantasy. The same urgency underlies Arundhati Roy’s book of essays, Power Politics, in which the specter of war after the attack on the World Trade Center is seen to threaten all humanity with “a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own” (106). The God of Large Things, or big ideas and their global consequences, frightens her personally, as Roy said recently: My husband’s writing a book about trees. He has a section on how figs are pollinated, each fig by its own specialised fig wasp. There are nearly 1,000 different species of fig wasps. All the fig wasps will be nuked, and my husband and his book (“Under the Nuclear Shadow”). Roy writes in Power Politics’ prefatory essay, “The Ladies Have Feelings, So . . . Shall We Leave it to the Experts?”: “I am, apparently, what is known in twenty-fi rst-century vernacular as a ‘writer-activist.’ (Like a sofa-bed.)” (Nijhius). But, as important as her nonfiction prose is to understanding Roy as a force in the present political climate, in Indian matters and globally, to truly plumb the depth’s of her sensibility as a writer of true, tragic compassion, we must return again and again to the pages of her novel, the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things. Here, she employs the artist’s vision to vividly portray the root causes of human cruelty, but also suggests an authentic solution to the social and political problems threatening our world. Since Roy is frequently compared to Rushdie—and misjudged—for

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the same reasons, a brief analysis of “Mount Rushdie,” using the Janus Quadrafons trope, may suggest ways to direct readers back to the more important Rushdie hidden behind the monument, and to closer study of Roy’s political and literary aims. Judging from the “praise page” in the paperback edition of Rushdie’s novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the well-known author is many things to many people who flock to the monument for at least as many reasons as it has faces. The least of the four faces is that of the curry novelist who provides us with “sumptuous” (Anna Mundow, New York Daily News) fare, or, as the blurb by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (also on Ground’s paperback-edition praise page) has it, “a Vishwa Roopa of a novel.” Whatever Vishwa Roopa may be, it sounds exotic, and even a little dangerous. Order it from an Indian restaurant menu, grab it off the shelf: try something different. Just a taste (available online) of Divakaruni’s own novel, Mistress of Spices, reveals the genre: I am a Mistress of Spices [ . . . ] From amchur to zafran, they bow to my command. At a whisper they yield up to me their hidden properties, magic powers. Yes, they all hold magic [ . . . ] Each spice has a day special to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and buttercolored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck [ . . . ] I am turmeric who came after the nectar and before the poison and thus lie in between. Yes, I whisper, swaying to its rhythm. Yes. You are turmeric, shield for heart’s sorrow, anointment for death, hope for rebirth. Together we sing this song, as we have many times. (“Mistress of Spices”) This “lush and overblown” Rushdie, as Sumana Raychaudhuri characterizes him and his ilk in The Nation review quoted previously, gives us the exotic flavor and “character” of India in a neat, fragrant package. Perhaps, as Raychaudhuri claims, such “hybridization” or “pickling” (31) of Indian culture and language for Western consumption does misappropriate authentic place for the sake of tourism, and curry novelists are guilty of “orientalizing” the “other”—in the sense that Said has pointed out—for entertainment, profit, and power. Roy compares such appropriation to “the poor Indian holy man who, to survive in the new age, turns to tourism. He enters the market . . . He becomes a Regional Flavor” (The God of Small Things 218). But, as this study will show, neither Roy nor Rushdie appropriate an “Indian” culture that can be said to be “authentic” in any sense; rather, they extol the “impure” mixture of cultures, “mongrelization,” as the proper subject of their political fantasies. For readers who look for “substance” more than atmospherics in the Rushdie novel, the wisdom they fi nd is of the centrifugal sort, detachable and quotable bon mots flying off the pages. This second “face,” visited by the collector of aphorisms, does not disappoint. Rushdie consistently offers

The (In)fusion of Sociology and Literary Fantasy 9 up a generous sprinkling of observations that beg to be detached from the narrative, the phrasing tidied up and stitched into instructive samplers, as The Ground Beneath Her Feet attests. Some Rushdie wisdom from the span of just a few pages: Power, like love, most fully reveals its dimensions only when it is irrevocably lost (162); “Ameer continued to circle the living room like a spoon in a bowl, stirring up the most poisonous of all rages, the wrath churned in the body by the thrashings of dying love” (166); “Insults are mysteries. What seems to the bystander to be the cruelest, most destructive sledgehammer of an assault, whore! slut! tart!, can leave its target undamaged, while an apparently lesser jibe, thank god you’re not my child, can fatally penetrate the fi nest suits of armour” (167); “The destruction of your childhood home—a villa, a city—is like the death of a parent: an orphaning” (168); “In cases involving such very large pots if gold, a little fi rebuggery is not so very unusual” (171); “Much of what she felt about her own life was formulaic, which did not prevent the emotions from being strongly felt. (172). Within these ten pages lie many other wise bits, and within the whole novel, there are probably a hundred more. Someone surely has an ana of “The Wit and Wisdom of Salman Rushdie” well underway. The third face and a nearby fourth attract two other kinds of readers, who neither really care about history or facts, or any sort of substance in a novel, much less are interested in a “serious” sociopolitical thesis. Thoroughly convinced of the postmodern condition, one kind of reader admires pure audaciousness and linguistic derring-do; the other is not so thoroughly postmodern, a bit of a back-slider, visiting Mount Rushdie for this face’s “brilliant experiment with magical-realism”(Raychaudhuri 31); that is, as a pseudo-religious happening. This reader wants to have his Po-Mo cake and eat it too, and a loose notion of what “Magical Realism” is serves well, demanding little investment in time or thought, especially after the vacation “experience” is over. The attraction to the audacious face of Mount Rushdie is evident, again, on the blurbs pages of the paperback edition praising The Ground Beneath Her Feet, where The Wall Street Journal critic calls the novel “fabulously reckless,” while The New Republic critic sees it “beautifully truant.” The Boston Globe reviewer fi nds it “replete with the surpluses of intellect and fancy,” while Toni Morrison fi nds Rushdie at his “almost insolently global best.” Such phrasing (placed in the front of the book as it is) provides a very large trail sign for tourists looking not for substance, but performance. Rushdie’s audacity is prized by readers who seem to perceive “Magical Realism” as inventiveness in concocting the far-out, strange, and weird; a journey to the antique past of superstition and myth; an escape into parallel but not-at-all dangerous worlds of fancy. They enter without “hesitation”

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and view without “antinomy” this fanciful world of the novel. Such easy, painless acceptance serves the tourist, but not the traveler. The real Rushdie, the “hesitant” fantast, is less obliging, reticent with his consolation, and terrible and tragic in his vision. He clearly places himself apart from the fanciful crowd in his novels, as, for example, near the end of Ground where Rai, the protagonist, speaks of Vina taking Ormus down to be with her in the underworld, “where he belonged.” “That’s my opinion. Oh, that’s right, I almost forgot to add: so to speak” (Ground Beneath 571). “So to speak” is Rushdie’s mantra in his critical essays as well. Rushdie (and, as we shall see, Roy) thus fits Tolkien’s classic defi nition of a fantast as someone solidly “Grounded” in reality, and tenaciously so, while in the imaginative “secondary world” of the story: “creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it” (50). Further, the fantasy writer does not aim for any “consolation” as a Magical Realist or mystical writer would, but rather for “satisfaction,” for an emergent and self-evident truth, as opposed to wishful thinking and escape. As Tolkien writes, the world of the authentic fairy story returns us to the Real world, never to a made-up place. Unlike the Magical Realist, the fantast offers not a temporary, vacation-type escape, but rather “an echo of evangelium in the real world” (Tolkien 61) itself: Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every subcreator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on realty; hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it. (Tolkien 61–2) The fantastic story’s connection with Reality is more than the “dictionary defi nition” of an ‘inner consistency of reality’ upon which the Magical Realist constructs his readers’ assent to the strange happenings in the world of the story. In fact, the answer to the question, “Is it true?” may be “greater” than the truth of inner consistency, or as Tolkien is quoted above, it may be the “echo of evangelium in the real world.” In this sense, the fantast is an evangelist for Reality, “capable of throwing . . . illumination over the world” (26).

ROY: AN INDEPENDENT, MOBILE REPUBLIC As evangels of Reality and its gospel of Loss, Rushdie and Roy are necessarily political–protest writers. Rushdie frequently reminds us—as he does in Imaginary Homelands—that “one of the most crucial battles of our age” is “the war over the nature of reality” (210). Since Reality, and, consequently, life as lived by “ordinary people,” has historically been the victim of political

The (In)fusion of Sociology and Literary Fantasy 11 hegemonic schemes, it comes as no surprise to read that Rushdie claims the great political fantast Gogol as one of his literary “parents,” a branch of a “polyglot family tree,” he says, “against which I measure myself, and to which I would be honoured to belong,” and, further, he describes a long-standing antagonism: “Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth” (Imaginary Homelands 14, 21). Roy likewise writes in that tradition, as she states in the preface to her latest book, The Cost of Living (incidentally the title of the last chapter of The God of Small Things): Let me say at the outset that I am not a city-basher . . . I am not an antidevelopment junkie, nor a proselytizer for the eternal upholding of custom and tradition. What I am, however, is curious. Curiosity took me to the Narmada valley [dam site]. Instinct told me that this was the big one . . . The one in which it would be possible to wade through the congealed morass of hope, anger, information, disinformation, political artifice, engineering ambition, disingenuous socialism, radical activism, bureaucratic subterfuge, misinformed emotionalism, and, of course, the pervasive, invariably dubious, politics of International Aid.” (8) Yet, she is willing to fight on, and though she is speaking of nuclear destruction, she is quite clear in her many interviews that she sees the underlying cause of the unthinkably inhumane as official stupidity and hubris. Using an article from The Nation (which had appeared in Indian magazines the week before) as a global stage, Roy stepped up to likewise defend her novel and proclaim her rights as a writer; she “secedes” from all such Big, dangerous ideas, and incidentally connects with what is most radical in Rushdie’s political–fantastic writing, the paradoxical “loss” of migrants that can set them free: I’m going to step out from under the fairy lights and say what’s on my mind. It’s this: If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and antinational, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag. I’m female, but have nothing against eunuchs. My policies are simple. I’m willing to sign any nuclear nonproliferation treaty or nuclear test ban treaty that’s going. Immigrants are welcome. You can help me design our flag. (“The End of Imagination” 15) The antidote to the “Big Ideas that kill” is, in Roy’s fiction, small things and ordinary lives really lived and real life can only be attained through the loss of our illusions. “The God of Small Things” is also “The God of Loss” for both novelists. The “migrant experience,” as Rushdie puts it, is the authentic experience of our time; it is the

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Jesse T. Airaudi migrants-eye view of the world written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity (Imaginary Homelands 394).

Gogol’s time has gone, and along with it the Russian bureaucracy, as has the time of the Stalinist-era fantasy writers and the system of Socialist– Realism and its deadly utopianism. Yet, in a sense, Rushdie and Roy, too, “come from Gogol’s Overcoat,” as the saying among fantasts goes, though the “overcoat” may have changed from apparatchik style to something with a different, more costly label. There is still a need for fantasy writing’s protest and rescue: . . . we have to ask [John Berger wrote in the early 1990s] what is it that has just ended? The Berlin Wall, the one-party-system, in many countries the Communist Party, the Red Army occupation, the Cold War? Something else which was older than these and less easy to name has also ended. Voices are not lacking to tell us what it is. History! Ideology! Socialism! Such answers are unconvincing, for they are made by wishful thinkers. Nevertheless, something vast has ended. . . . Many refer to what is happening as revolution. Power has changed hands as a result of political pressure from below. States are being transformed— economically, politically, juridically, government elites are being chased from office. What more is needed to make a revolution? Nothing. Yet it is unlike any one in modern times . . . because it is being made without utopian illusions. Made step by step with an awareness that speed is necessary, yet without the dreaded classic exhortation of Forward! (Berger 229) Berger, though praised by Rushdie as “a formidable protagonist in . . . the war over the nature of reality” (Imaginary Homelands 210), seems to have got this one wrong. That “classic” cry is simply voiced by other, emerging hegemonies. As Rushdie writes, the problem is old and persistent: “Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed up human beings” (Imaginary Homelands 394), and Berger’s optimism to the contrary, other Big illusions have indeed taken the place of the dangerous State Utopias political fantasts since Gogol had fought, while another breed of political fantasy writer, the subject of our study here, has emerged to do battle. What to call these new Big, dangerous, beautiful Forward!—urging ideas that kill, or to use Milosz’s phrase, to make the individual “anonymous for good” (Notebooks 87)? The particular Total Explanation overrunning mere humans today is global and growing, and for the fi rst time in history, a fusion of several Grand Narratives. Though Rushdie and Roy protest the “totemization” of meaning by political and

The (In)fusion of Sociology and Literary Fantasy 13 religious hegemonies, their fiction reveals how intrinsic these aims are to the marketing of mass images around the globe. Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass, himself a fantast of the first order—consider the role of little Oskar in The Tin Drum, discussed the latest Big Idea in “Conversations” with French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, published simultaneously as “A Literature from Below” in Die Ziet and Le Monde (published in the United States by The Nation). Grass’s statement that since the “Communist hierarchies fell apart, capitalism has come to believe that it can do anything, that it has escaped all control” (26) should not startle anyone who has been reading such daily newspaper stories as Microsoft’s Bill Gates’ funding of various “Independent Taxpayers” associations to lobby Congress to cut the budget of the very antitrust department investigating him. However, a remark Grass makes about “the emerging world order,” the “role of intellectuals in society,” “stylistic practices in sociology and literature,” and “other topics” (25) is remarkable, and very useful for our study of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy as political fantasts opposed to Total Explanations; thus, Grass says: The rare remaining responsible capitalists who call for prudence do so because they realize that they have lost their sense of direction, that the neoliberal system is now repeating the errors of Communism by creating its own dogma, its own certificate of infallibility. (26) Bourdieu agrees, and points out that even leaders who call themselves “Socialists,” whether “it’s [Gerhard] Schrodoer or [Tony] Blair or [Lionel] Jospin . . . are people who invoke socialism in order to further neoliberalism.” Grass concludes: “It is a capitulation to economics” (26). In Roy’s novel, there are any number of “rats racing across the ruined landscape with dollar signs in their eyes” (The God of Small Things 223), and she certainly points out the price mere mixed up human beings pay in her subsequent book, The Cost of Living, but it is Rushdie who unveils what she means by the phrase “Men’s Needs”; that is, the repeated error of “certifying infallibility” underlies all Big Ideas, whether economic, political, or religious: Myth, as Roland Barth tells us, is statistically on the right. If the left seeks always to de-mystify, then in a time when people need certainties, absolutes, it often fails to offer them what they ask for. The resulting crisis of liberalism is with us everywhere, and nowhere more than in the U.S.A. History has done its best to shake America’s certainty that it was right. America reacts by burying its head in the lap of God. (Imaginary Homelands 391) Though Gunter Grass does not make the religious–patriotic connection as Rushdie does (who writes in Imaginary Homelands, “‘In God We Trust’:

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this sentiment is not from the walls of any church, but on the currency of the United States: God and Mammon, in the service of the world’s most powerful nation, united at last” [392]), the two would agree on the motive—hegemony’s justification of a total, infallible explanation. Whether the name signed on hegemony’s “certificate of authenticity” is capitalism or religion, or a combination of the two, the “repeated error” is the same: we get into trouble when we trust in Big Gods. Worshipping “Answers” rather than asking “questions” as Rushdie writes, will kill us or make us wish we were really dead. Art guru Robert Hughes said as much speaking of Brasilia and other state-built “utopian” cities in his famous book, The Shock of the New, some years ago: “it is better to recycle what exists, to avoid mortgaging a workable past to a nonexistent Future, and to think small” (211). No matter what form the Total Explanation takes—Political Foundationalism and/or Religious Fundamentalism—Roy and Rushdie oppose it with partial, impure portrayals of “mere mixed up human beings,” the disenfranchised and migrant. If the Utopian God is a God of Big Things and Big Plans, the God of mere human beings is The God of Small Things, and moreover, it is not the God of Certainties, but the God of Loss. “This novel didn’t have a title until the very last minute,” Roy states in a Harper Collins website interview: I didn’t know what to call it, there were lots of ideas and suggestions but I just remember printing out the manuscript and just printing out the title at the last minute. One of the chapters was called The God of Small Things, I don’t know how that happened, I just remember Ammu’s dream, who was the one armed man, the God of loss, The God of Small Things? When I read the book now I can’t believe the amount of references there are to small things, but it was absolutely not the case that I started with the title and built the novel around it. At the last stage they knew they had to put their faith in fragility and stick to the small things, and I just can’t believe how appropriate the title is. (Harper Collins Online) The Large Things in Roy’s novel—the message of the Christian missionaries; the schemes of the Marxist and other political parties; the capitalist makeover of the wonderful pickle (Indian, not dill) factory, for a long time family-owned and run, with its colors and smells—all the Big Ideas in the story operate at the expense of mere mixed-up people. Roy’s novel is reminiscent of Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, also redolent of spices (perhaps, though not mentioned, even the divine “turmeric” of Divakaruni). But like The Moor’s Last Sigh, its underlying purpose is to expose the destructiveness of what Rushdie calls in Imaginary Homelands “narrow certainties” (409). Like the tyrannical, representative Indian patriarch in Moor’s, who “rose to Edenic heights . . . from which, like an icy deity, he wrought havoc on the mere mortals below” (417), the males who represent the “Official

The (In)fusion of Sociology and Literary Fantasy 15 Version” of reality in The God of Small Things, appropriated under the grand fiction of “Men’s Needs,” are threatened by the unofficial version, the one that is uncertain, impure, and dirty like the unpredictable river that flows through the novel. Or as Roy puts it in that novel, it is the case of another “edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature” (The God of Small Things 272). It is the impure, “mongrelized” characters in the novel that enlist our sympathy. For instance, central to the novel’s theme of freedom, specifically of “taking freedom” as Rushdie says (because it is never given), are the “transgressive” (again, Rushdie’s term) relationships among characters, principally between the magically realistic “egg-twins,” brother and sister, Estha and Rahel, and between their mother, Ammu and her lover, Velutha. Knowing what Roy tells us about the title, we can make better sense of the ending, the climactic love scene in the dirty river, which itself has carried away (as well as toward) so many things and people in the novel. We could say that the scene is a fantastic parody of a rebirth or baptism, of the dirt aware of itself in a self-transcendent sexual act, but the religious leaders in India saw the scene as morally dirty and filed a charge of obscenity against the author. The God of Small Things is invisible to the eyes of the “Official Version” of Reality. We may assume that the system was offended not so much by the R-rated sexual content, but rather by its social–religious transgressions. The narrator says as much after the consummation: “ . . . they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.” Velutha’s punishment for the “crime” becomes “A history lesson for future offenders” (The God of Small Things 318), but for the sympathetic reader, the Untouchable’s punishment lays bare the essential danger of substituting Big Ideas for small things like human kindness, for, as Brian Attebery puts it, “fantasy shows that one form of power often used unjustly is the power to label others” (24), as Roy reveals in the novel: If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature—had been severed long ago. They were not arresting a man, they were exorcising a fear. They had no instrument to calibrate how much punishment he could take . . . that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of the Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. (The God of Small Things 293) Though they are too young to learn the lesson then, the magical children witness (as the narrator says) “history’s henchmen” who are sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feeling of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged

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Jesse T. Airaudi fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify. Men’s Needs (The God of Small Things 292).

Against “Men’s Needs” in the novel (typified and emblematized by the ice cream vendor’s assault and threatening of the young Estha, as well as by the methodical death by beating of Velutha), the narrator sets what she calls “biology.” In the case of Velutha, the shared biology of victim and cop, unfortunately long severed, and in the case of the principal adult female character, his lover Ammu, a woman’s biology: Who was he? Who could he have been? The God of Loss. The God of Small Things. The God of Goosebumps and Sudden Smiles. He could only do one thing at a time. If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave. If he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win. Ammu longed for him. Ached for him with the whole of her biology. (312). The chapters following the drowning of Sophie Mol (her body’s condition, hair wreathed with reeds and her eyelids nibbled by fish, is wonderfully described) are headed by the picture of a small fish; a small thing, I suppose, compared to the world water serpent, the ouroboros, yet in its way, suggesting a Vedic cycle of eternal renewal. “Even later,” the narrator continues in the passage quoted previously, on the thirteen nights that followed this one, instinctively they stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things (The God of Small Things 320). In their new, small world they discover many things, chiefly, and emblematically, a “minute spider” they call Chappu Thamburan, or “Lord Rubbish.” They cling to its fate, checking every night to see if it survives in its armor of garbage, continually building, frequently rejecting its construction, its “shell” standing hollow, “like an outmoded world-view. An antiquated philosophy,” the narrator notes. In their doomed and therefore heightened love, they “put their faith in his fragility” grow to love him and his shambling dignity. They chose him [the narrator continues] because they knew that they had to put their faith in his fragility. Stick to Smallness. Each time they parted, they extracted only one small promise from each other. Tomorrow? Tomorrow. They knew that things could change in a day. They were right about that. They were wrong about Chappu Thamburan, though. He outlived Velutha. He

The (In)fusion of Sociology and Literary Fantasy 17 fathered future generations. He died of natural causes. (The God of Small Things 320–21) The tensions driving Roy’s novel, the Big Things, Men’s Needs, which promise a utopian permanence, no matter the individual human cost versus the small things, instinct and human kindness, which result in mere fleeting moments seen as something more than themselves, moments of happiness, are, of course, the business of the political fantast, whose aim is to oppose the official version of reality with healthy doses of unreality. Thus, Fantasy is opposed to, and sometimes deposes, Myth, or as Roy puts it, it is the case of “Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature” (The God of Small Things 272). The title of Rushdie’s novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, thus, like Roy’s title, emphasizes the fantastic ur-theme—the reality of loss—as the narrator of Ground clearly points out: “What deflects us from our subject is loss. Of those we love, of the Orient, of hope, of our place in the book. Loss is more than love or is it. More than death or is it. More than art, or not.” The novel’s protagonist, Ormus Cama, the avatar of the Orpheus myth, is fi rmly “Grounded” in the Real World as portrayed through the medium of global rock and roll. He is his father’s child: Darius Cama’s “fourth function” added, to the tripartite system of Indo-European culture (religious sovereign, physical force, fertility), the necessary additional concept of the existential outsider, the separated man, the banished divorce, the expelled school boy, the cashiered outsider, the legal alien, the uprooted wanderer, the out-of-step marcher, the rebel, the transgressor, the outlaw, the anathematized thinker, the crucified revolutionary, the lost soul. (202) And so, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is only one in a series of Rushdie novels whose subject is loss: “The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame. If he was right, then this is the subject also. If he was wrong, then the lost are merely lost. Stepping out of the frame, they simply cease to exist” (203). This may be the case for many in our time, Ulrich Beck asserts (using the same phrase as Rushdie’s title): Atomization is now going on even in the centers of rich western societies themselves. Many middle-class people are so insecure in the basic conditions of their existence that they too have begun to experience this creeping fear of losing the ground beneath their feet. This existential anxiety has been growing behind the facades of prosperity and security. This could be a fatal development precisely because it erodes the prerequisites of experimental individualism, which is now the prerequisite of effective political freedom. (Conversations with Ulrich Beck 82)

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And yet, though the subject of his novels, as in Roy’s, is loss, the theme is, to use Tolkien’s term, “recovery” (52). “Recovery” marks Rushdie and Roy as political writers, as they struggle to resist and recoup reality, lived life, from Utopian systems. It is telling that in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie quotes (146) the title of Milan Kundera’s novel of loss and recovery, Life is Elsewhere, a story of how a young man becomes aware that the Soviet system has fabricated a “life” for him, a life-to-be in some Utopian future, which required him to mortgage a living present, a dangerous and exciting unfolding of a human and complex life. For the slim-to-none chance of arriving someday at a Utopian future, the protagonist must give up his chance of “tragedy.” Roy, too, sees the writer’s battle in our time as reclaiming the individual’s right to uncertainty, to possibility, to tragedy. In this, she is not in Rushdie’s shadows but shoulder to shoulder with him at the head of a fifth column. The weapons of the counterforce may seem puny against the Big Ideas, for as Rushdie says in his essay, “Is Nothing Sacred,” while the novel answers our need for wonderment and understanding, it brings us harsh and unpalatable news as well. It tells us there are no rules. It hands down no commandments. . . . And it tells us there are no answers; or rather, it tells us that answers are easier to come by, and less reliable than questions. If religion is an answer, if political ideology is an answer, then literature is an inquiry. (Imaginary Homelands 423). Great literature, he claims in his essay “The Location of Brazil,” not only opens the mind, but creates a place “into which the long arm of the law is unable to reach,” and assures us, as he frequently does elsewhere, that we migrants, we poor bumbling “mere humans” are not without weapons ourselves: “This idea—the opposition of imagination to reality, which is also of course the opposition of art to politics—is of great importance because it reminds us that we are not helpless, that to dream is to have power” (Imaginary Homelands 122). It is, additionally, the duty of the political fantast to subvert the “flawed and failing system,” Brian Attebery, according to who characterizes the fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien as incorporating “that sense of otherness . . . the sense that things have not always been as they are now, that our reality extends only as far as the social compact that upholds it” (17). And that idea, whether the Primary world is imposed by the East or the West, as the great fantastic writer Ursula K. Le Guin says, “isn’t reactionary, or even conservative, but simply subversive” (17). So Arundhati Roy has become one of the country-less writers who, as Rushdie says in an essay entitled “In Good Faith,” gives us a migrants-eye view of the world written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe,

The (In)fusion of Sociology and Literary Fantasy 19 can be derived a metaphor for all humanity (“Algebra of Infinite Justice” 394). Roy’s novel, like Rushdie’s fiction, has no answers. In The God of Small Things, the narrator reminds the reader that the world is not really run by Marxists, or Muslims, or Missionaries, or Coca-Cola, but by “the God of Loss.” Or, as she put it in her “succession” speech in “The End of Imagination”: My world has died. And I write to mourn its passing. Admittedly it was a flawed world. An unviable world. A scarred and wounded world. It was a world that I myself have criticized unsparingly, but only because I loved it. It didn’t deserve to die. It didn’t deserve to be dismembered. Forgive me, I realize that sentimentality is uncool—but what shall I do with my desolation? I loved it simply because it offered humanity a choice. It was a rock out at sea. It was a stubborn chink of light that insisted that there was a different way of living. It was a functioning possibility. A real option. All that’s gone now. (15) Yet, despite the tone of loss, Roy has come to see that writers who do not cave in to political and theological hegemony have strength, if not Power. Mongrelized and migratory, such writers speak for all humanity, and instead of asking questions about what it means to be this or that nationality or religion, Roy says frequently that perhaps the question we should ask is, “What does it mean to be human?” And, she reminds us, paradoxically, that our loss is our gain. In Roy’s novel, as in Rushdie’s novels, loss, fallings away from us—rather than what the “grand narratives” (Lyotard’s phrase [51], frequently invoked by Rushdie) promise—gives us our humanity. In a climate where Power uses strength to paralyze social progress by homogenization, the writer counters with “mongrelization”: Those who oppose [The Satanic Verses] most vociferously . . . are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that come of new and unexpected combinations of human being, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the [capital P] Pure. . . . The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change by conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves. (Imaginary Homelands 394) Roy says in an interview that “For me, what made writing The God of Small Things so worthwhile is that people all around the world are connecting with this book, that it’s somehow hitting some deeply human chord” (Salon). She apparently has also struck a nerve with the makers

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of “official” worlds, and may call down more than a lawsuit on her head. But that has always been the price of subversion, as Le Guin so amply demonstrates in her collection of essays, The Language of the Night. In his collection of essays, Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie reminds us, too, that throughout “human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings” (394), and that the novel was the fi rst, and remains the most powerful, weapon for the greater truth about fragmented reality. Michel Foucault (Rushdie says) argues that: texts, books and discourses really began to have authors . . . to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive . . . ; authors were named only when it was necessary to fi nd someone to blame; thus for Foucault, such discourse was historically “a gesture fraught with risks,” and Rushdie understands Foucault to mean that “literature is, of all the arts, the one best suited to challenging absolutes of all kinds; and because it is in its origin the schismatic Other of the sacred (and authorless) text, so it is also the art most likely to fi ll our god-shaped holes” (Imaginary Homelands 423–4). The god-shaped holes—that is, the voids left as the fantastic writer collapses the Big Ideas—are replaced by a realbecause-natural-god, The God of Small Things, who will of course be seen as heretical too, as it “denies what everybody knows [the Grand Narrative says] to be the truth.” And, as Attebery puts it, “if you’re lucky, the untruth shall make you free” (25). If we can agree that there is such a thing as “Post-colonial fiction,” we must admit that it is, necessarily, protest literature, assuming rightly that imperial power was oppressive in winning both bodies and minds (some, like Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible, would say “souls” as well) over to an ideology of slavery, on the part of both enslaver and slave. Contemporary protest literature assumes that the enslavement continues in some form, whether economic, political, sexual, or religious, if not in actual ownership of another human being. Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy are remarkably similar in the way they envision the recurring oppression at century’s end. Both see the seriousness of the problem, as Rushdie puts it—and it bears repeating—“one of the most crucial battles of our age: the war over the nature of reality” (Imaginary Homelands 210).

RUSHDIE, ROY, AND THE POWER OF FICTIVE TRANSGRESSION Roy’s nonfiction work, The Cost of Living (the title, as I have noted, is the same as the last chapter of The God of Small Things), is her indictment of

The (In)fusion of Sociology and Literary Fantasy 21 big political ideas that disregard the individual, her theme of themes that she says is summed up in the title of her fi rst (and still most important) book of fiction, The God of Small Things. Rushdie, who praises The Cost of Living as a “passionate” and “necessary” polemic (SAJA), has written his latest novel ostensibly about rock ‘n’ roll and American myth, but the title suggests that he, too, is continuing with his polemic against the deadly delusions fostered not only by the Indian government, but by authoritarian “fictions” worldwide. “The ground beneath her feet” implies that the reader is in for a severe shaking up of commonly held (or misheld) perceptions, and one wonders if Rushdie may have the American ayatollahs howling for his head, too. As Beck would put the case, those who will be howling and [o]bjecting to this with the old bugaboo of ‘arbitrariness,’ ‘dogmatism,’ or ‘decisionism’ betrays the fact that many still approach doubt skittishly in their inherited attachment to ‘truth,’” whereas, the message for us who wish to thrive and not just survive in the new millennium, is that “[t]hose who bet on doubt win. This is the law of the weak which pulls out the rug from under the feet of the overwhelming powers of autonomized industrial threats. (Reinvention of Politics 166–7) Certainly, we may derive legitimate pleasure from vicariously living in an exotic locale—on the order of Peter Mayle’s Provencal books or Chris Stewart’s Andalusian escapade, Driving Over Lemons, not to mention the “Regional Flavor” Indian novels—in reading Roy’s and Rushdie’s fiction set in India. But if for no other reason than they are making big trouble for themselves on a global scale, we should read Roy and Rushdie to see what their complaints are about, and to judge the seriousness of the threat they claim to expose. Roy prefaces The Cost of Living by exhorting us to continue to oppose the global threats, the stakes never being larger. Both Roy and Rushdie, in their high-stakes, dangerous careers, are descended from a long line of fantasts who have chosen, sometimes fatally, to expose why and how “generations of children would be fed inventions concocted for the most transient political purposes,” to use Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz’s words (Roadside Dog 153). “We all come from Gogol’s Overcoat,” fantastic writers say, and they have learned, too, from such tales as Gogol’s “The Nose” to dress their intentions as play, and the authorities, being serious and deficient in a sense of irony, disregard them. As brief and as simplified as this history of fantasy must necessarily be, it nevertheless provides a framework for a serious study of the global politics of fantasy in the work of what I feel certain will be two of the most important writers of our time. Salman Rushdie’s and Arundhati Roy’s imaginative fiction, overtly political or otherwise, is a collection of profoundly moral work. “Most of us nowadays are sick,” Rushdie writes, “there are so few rainbows anymore.” Yet, he concludes in the same passage, that literature (the art of

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the imaginative) is, “of all the arts, the one . . . most likely to fi ll our god-shaped holes;” that is, as an “unreality” best suited to crush false constructions of reality and reconstruct it (03: 58, 60). In Ulrich Beck’s way of thinking, this is the maturing process for people of the new millennium, a move from the earlier, universalizing “simple modernization” to a “reflexive modernization”; that is: to the extent that it disenchants and dissolves its own taken-for-granted premises. Eventually this leads to the undermining of every aspect of the modern nation-state: the welfare state; the power of the legal system; the national economy; the corporatist systems that connected one with the other; and the parliamentary democracy that governed the whole. A parallel process undermines the social institutions that buttressed this state and were supported by it in turn. The normal family, the normal career, and the normal life history are all radically called into question and subsequently have to be continually renegotiated. (Conversations with Ulrich Beck 29) Ursula Le Guin asserts that this “undermining” is best suited to imaginative writing; it can reconstruct the “Balance and the Pattern” (13) of lived life again and again and again, loss replacing gain, gain replacing loss, or, as Beck’s encomium to art has it, “[i]ts images are one great fi rework display of self-destruction. Paintings, sculptures and novels should be considered and admired as the flames and ashes of that spectacle [of “absolutism in industrial thought and action”], an “aesthetic nihilism,” however, that is positive in that it engenders “creative self-restriction and self-diminution as human form, a way of living, thinking and acting” (Reinvention of Politics 167). Because, as Beck writes, postmodernism prepared the way for a reinvention of human politics by making it “no longer possible to announce a grand program,” any new millennial “second enlightenment . . . will have to be an enlightenment that can exist without an overarching grand narrative, because that would once again set in motion an imperialist universalism” (Conversations with Ulrich Beck 200). (In)fused with Beck’s exegesis of our time and in the hope of a renewed and “reflexive modernism,” we see that the art of the Anglo-Indian-Cosmopolitan (not Globalist, of course) novelist contributes to the project begun by Husserl: singing its song of “loss,” of weakness, of mere humanity struggling to make its way the best way it can, their art teaches us in the new millennium to—in the words of W. H. Auden—“Sing of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress,” so that we may, with “the farming of a verse / Make a vineyard of the curse” (“In Memory of W.B. Yeats”). And Ulrich Beck continues his impassioned plea for a “second enlightenment” against overarching grand narratives.1 Paralleling what John Berger calls the State or Church decreed “radiance”—or optimism—that militates against the “density of lived

The (In)fusion of Sociology and Literary Fantasy 23 time” (28), Ursula Le Guin closes her critical essay, “The Stalin in the Soul,” by giving the Russian writer Zamyatin the fi nal word, and so shall this study: If there were anything fi xed in nature, if there were truths, all this, of course, would be wrong. But fortunately, all truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today’s truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number (224). NOTES 1. This is an investigation that continues. See Ulrich Beck, Power in a Global Age (2005) and Cosmopolitan Vision (2006).

WORKS CITED Attebery, Brian. “The Politics (If Any) of Fantasy,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 4.1 (1991): 7–28. Auden, W.H. “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” Poets.org . Beck, Ulrich. Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. . Power in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. .The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order. Trans. Mark A. Ritter. Cambridge: Polity, 1997. . and Johannes Willms. Conversations with Ulrich Beck. Trans. Michael Pollak. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Berger, John. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon, 1982. Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. “The Mistress of Spices” [excerpt, n.d.]. . Fink, Eugen. “Outline for the Continuation of the Crisis.” The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Ed. Edmund Husserl. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970. Ghosh, Ranjan, ed. (In)fusion Approach: Theory, Contestation, Limits. Lanham: UP of America, 2006. Grass, Gunter and Pierre Bourdieu. “A Literature From Below.” Trans. Deborah Treisman. The Nation 3 July 2000: 25–8. Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. New York: Random House, 1981. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970. Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Kundera, Milan. Life is Elsewhere. Trans. Peter Kussi. London: Faber & Faber, 1973. Le Guin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night. New York: Harper Collins, 1979. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984. Milosz, Czeslaw. The Land of Ulro. Trans. Louis Iribarne. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984. . Roadside Dog. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.

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. The Separate Notebooks. Trans. Robert Haas, Robert Pinsky, with the Author and Renata Gorcznski. New York: Ecco, 1984. Nijhuis, Michelle. “No Small Thing,” Grist 17 Jan. 2002. . Raychaudhuri, Sumana. “Behind Mount Rushdie.” The Nation 22 Jan. 2001: 31–5. Roy, Arundhati.”The Algebra of Infi nite Justice.” The Guardian 29 Sept. 2001. . . The Cost of Living. New York: Modern Library, 1999. . “The End of Imagination.” The Nation 28 Sept. 1998: 11–9. . The God of Small Things. New York: Random House, 1997. . Interview. Harper Collins Online 30 Sept. 1997. . . Power Politics. Cambridge: South End P, 2002. . Interview with Rena Jana. Salon Magazine 30 Sept. 1997 . . “Under the Nuclear Shadow.” The Observer 2 June 2002. . Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta, 1991. . The Ground Beneath Her Feet. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. . The Moor’s Last Sigh. New York: Pantheon, 1996. . The Wizard of Oz. London: The British Film Institute, 1992. SAJA. “An Evening with Arundhati Roy.” Stewart, Chris. Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia. New York: Pantheon, 2000. Tallmadge, John. “Toward a Natural History of Reading.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 7.1 (Winter 2000): 33–45. Tolkien, J.R.R. Tree and Leaf. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964.

2

Where “Tomorrow”? The God of Small Things as Derridean Ghost Story Cara Cilano

Various critics contend that the “small” aspects of Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, are histories otherwise silenced by History, an argument clearly sensitive to the power dynamics of postcolonial situations.1 What many of these interpretations have in common is an investment in some formulation of history that does not rely on metanarratives of progress and liberation, two telos the novel renders unsatisfactory through Pillai’s compromised Marxism and Baby Kochamma’s hyperindulgence in globalization via satellite TV. Of more importance to such interpretations of Roy’s novel is, however, the uncovering of hidden or marginalized histories. I propose a view of The God of Small Things that is less preoccupied with validating alternative or suppressed versions of the tragic events in the novel’s past. My sights are on the future. To look into the futures the novel opens out toward, I want to focus on two hauntings within the text. The fi rst haunting is a literal one: Kari Saipu, the Englishman who has “gone native” at a point in time even before the novel’s earlier historical plane, the 1960s, and haunts his old plantation house on the opposite side of the Meenachal River from the twins’ family’s home. The other haunting is figurative, and it manifests itself in the abiding and seemingly misplaced guilt over Velutha’s death and their family’s disintegration that Rahel and Estha feel throughout the twenty-three years covered by the novel’s two historical planes. Both hauntings mark the traces of the past on the present, as ghosts do. At the same time, both hauntings also suggest a kind of inheritance—one at a cultural and national historical level and the other at a familial one, though the distinction of these two levels does not hold very neatly due to the complexities surrounding each character’s narrative embeddedness. An inheritance by its nature looks to the future; it is a passing along of something to the next generation. Kari Saipu’s ghost, for instance, exists as a lingering manifestation of India’s colonial past. And the alterations that his house undergoes as it becomes, metaphorically, the twins’ History House and later, literally, the posh resort, Heritage, suggest the possible futures that Kari Saipu’s inheritance sets in motion. In a similar fashion, the “ghost” of Velutha and the trauma of separation, insofar as these

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events become the twins’ inheritance, open out toward possible futures. Both ghosts are cracks in the façade of certainty and power. What matters is whether any of the characters recognize the ghosts for the undecidability they ephemerally embody. When no recognition takes place, power goes unchallenged, as we see through Kari Saipu’s ghost. When recognition does take place, decision making, responsibility, and the promise of justice emerge, all impulses that surround Velutha’s ghost. As inheritances, then, these two ghosts ask us to speculate about the future—what inheritance, for instance, will Rahel and Estha leave, figuratively speaking, for the next generation?—rather than to fi xate solely on the past. In his essay, “Arundhati Roy and the House of History,” David Punter also shows an interest in the novel’s ghosts, insofar as they signal the ineluctable return of the past, wherein the “post” in “postcolonial” refers to the “aftermath” of colonial trauma (206). India, for instance, is spectral, argues Punter, on the basis of Chacko’s metaphor for history as a house from which they are locked out. India “has been excluded from the historical process, turned into a ghost on the very terrain of its own land” (194). Similarly, he argues that the toys the twins stow on the History House’s back porch, all of which become “silent witnesses to the terrible denouement of the novel”—Velutha’s beating—“represent again the impossibility of a complete telling of history and therefore signify a different kind of exclusion from the history house” (195). Kari Saipu’s ghost, again the only “real” one, illustrates, in Punter’s view, a naïve and, hence, untenable desire to deal with history so simply, so conclusively, to lay the joint ghost of empire and pedophilia in a single stroke, and thereby to allow for a coming to independence, a growth towards freedom, unimpeded by spectres of the past (195). In “Haunted Times in The God of Small Things,” Chantal Delourme also links the novel’s spectrality with the notion of trauma, particularly as the “haunted times” in which the twins’ lives play themselves out in the novel’s twenty-three-year span. Due to the trauma the twins suffer, Delourme argues, the novel’s structure enacts a “centripetal/centrifugal power of repulsion/attraction” that is “more akin to reverberations than to succession” (146). 2 My interest in The God of Small Things’ ghosts differs from Punter’s Gothic-oriented focus, with its treatment of the impossibility of narrating a complete history, and Delourme’s, with its emphasis on narrative structure, in that I view the novel’s hauntings as harbingers of possible futures. Jacques Derrida’s invocation of the spectral in Specters of Marx provides the basis for my own understanding of the ghosts in Roy’s novel. Derrida introduces the figure of the specter for its deconstructive potential. As analyzes the statement, “I want to learn how to live fi nally”

Where “Tomorrow”? 27 (xvii), posed at the outset of Specters of Marx, Derrida considers that such a learning takes place between both life and death: If it—learning to live—remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor death alone. What happens between the two, and between all ‘two’s’ one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost (xvii). As Wendy Brown points out, “[l]iving with ghosts, permitting and even exploiting their operation as a deconstructive device, means living with the permanent disruption of the usual oppositions that render our world coherent” (146). Since deconstruction challenges philosophies of full presence, epistemologies of the metaphysical and transcendent, it focuses on possibilities for signification that exist between the two poles of a binary, the “ghost” with which the binary “maintain[s] itself.” The figure of the ghost suits Derrida’s deconstructive purpose “even and especially [because it] is neither substance, nor essence, nor existence, is never present as such” (xvii). The ghost lurks between and surrounds the often-wished-for certainties and stabilities that bolster epistemologies premised upon a full presence, unsettling certainties, and destabilizing the fi xed significations by its simultaneous corporeality and ephemerality. Such detachment from epistemologies of presence provides Derrida with an opportunity to demonstrate how “talk[ing] with or about” specters leads to a conceptualization of justice. Here, the deconstructive activity of the ghost provides a way to live: The time of the “learning to live,” a time without tutelary present, would amount to this, to which the exordium [“I want to learn to live fi nally”] is leading us: to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. (Derrida xviii) Ongoing recognition of the ghost makes possible the visibility of the otherwise invisible or spectral, thereby presenting another way to live. The invisible or spectral amounts to the destabilization any recognition of the other enacts; the invisible is that which disrupts epistemologies of presence, as well as any sense of the present such epistemologies seem to guarantee. Further, this other way to live relies on the undecidability of the future and, hence, the bracketing off of any inevitable achievement of justice rather than on charged notions such as “improvement” or “progress.” Christopher Prendergast traces the conventional understanding of the link between time, as that unfolding narrative of progress, and justice:

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Cara Cilano Justice and time go together by virtue of the former’s determination by reference to a past and a future: on the one hand, an original wrong, evoking an historical-causal chain leading back to a primary transgression, and, on the other hand, a fi nal rectification of that wrong, a fi nal solution in which the historical, the political, and the ontological will come together in a fi nal moment of pure presence, realized in some form of material embodiment. This is the conception of justice that Derridean deconstruction tirelessly exposes to critique. (46)

Accordingly, one cannot be surprised that, in the next sentence, Derrida catches himself: “No, not better, but more justly” (xviii). To live “better,” to harbor that expectation of the future, establishes a linear trajectory for living, one that aligns with the narratives of progress that Enlightenment thought espouses. “Justly,” however, signals an understanding that justice will not simply come about in some inevitable unfolding of progress through time, nor will it be a moment marked by the achievement of full presence. Undecidability, along with decision and responsibility, act as key features of Derrida’s conception of justice. Not only does undecidability, or what Pheng Cheah calls “radical fi nitude” (244), disrupt the metaphysics of presence, but it also connects to decision making. In his reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Ernesto Laclau connects undecidability and decision making: “deconstruction extends undecidability—that is, that which makes the decision necessary—to deeper and larger areas of social relations. The role of deconstruction is, from this perspective, to reactivate the moment of decision that underlies any sedimented act of social relations”(Laclau 93). Peggy Kamuf adds the third term—responsibility—in her discussion of Derrida, pointing out that, if we are to understand justice as responsibility, we also have to see the decision (-as-action) as “that [which] must be taken.” However, this decision (-as-action) comes about only after “deciding and sifting among heterogeneous and confl icting legacies” and before a future that “demands a decision without certain rules” (Kamuf 277). Undecidability marks the openness or the scriptlessness in which decisions take place and wherein one recognizes the decision as a necessary action, for no script, no “sedimented act of social relations,” holds in the course of the deconstructive activity. Responsibility connects to the necessity of the decision (-as-action). In Cheah’s terms, undecidability or “radical fi nitude” “is the origin of imperativity and responsibility insofar as the impossible other, which is not the realm of presence, nevertheless enjoins us to act in the here and now (which is no longer even as we speak) [ . . . ] before it is too late” (244). In offering a concept of justice through these interconnected terms, Derrida spatializes temporality, marking the after and before Kamuf emphasizes: No justice [ . . . ] seems possible or even thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which

Where “Tomorrow”? 29 disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead (Derrida xix). Though Derrida is speaking of the past, present, and future, his use of “before” in this sentence encourages a spatial rather than a temporal understanding, hence his use of the word “disjoins.” We stand in the midst or in the face, so to speak, of the ghost; it comes neither prior to us or after us in the unfolding of history, for, if it did, Derrida would once again be implying a linear narrative akin to those he is critiquing. “Responsibility” thus takes on an element of recognition, of seeing the “invisible,” an effort Derrida suggests by stating that “responsibility” works “within that which disjoins the living present.” That is, “responsibility” detaches the present from epistemologies of presence and works to render undecidability visible. Further, “responsibility” follows from the decision one makes upon recognizing undecidability in the disjoined present. All elements are necessary for the theorization of justice: those beings who are “not present;” an acknowledgement of the disjoined present; and a taking of responsibility. Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question “where?” “where tomorrow?” “whither?” (Derrida xix) Derrida continues, “this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics [ . . . ] of inheritance, and of generations” (xix). Those who are “not present”—the specters—point in all directions from the present moment, not just forward or backward. “Inheritance” and “generations” become, then, a “politics” insofar as they highlight promise. As Cheah contends, the “rending of time [Derrida’s disjoined present] allows [for] the entirely new to emerge” (245). How? To the extent that the disruption of the present calls into question the expectation of a full presence, this disruption also, in Cheah’s words, “generates the unerasable promise of a future-to-come,” a future that “is always arriving but that never arrives fi nally”(245). For Laclau, this promise marks Derrida’s “messianism” and represents a “radical opening to the event, to the other” (87, 90, 91). As questions posed to bring about the recognition of a promise, Derrida’s “‘where?’ ‘where tomorrow?’ ‘whither?,’” echoes the fi nal line of Roy’s novel: “Tomorrow” (321). In the novel, the word is a statement, not a question, but equally a promise for the future. Immediately, it is Ammu’s promise to Velutha to meet him again the next night. We readers know, of course, that this “tomorrow,” the hope it embodies, is short-lived. We know, too, the harrowing consequences that come about due to Ammu’s keeping this promise for fourteen nights. These consequences, twisted

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around as they are with the coincidence of Sophie Mol’s drowning, include Velutha’s death, the family’s dispossession of Ammu, the twins’ separation, their psychological disintegration, and their eventual reunion twenty-three years later that culminates with an incestuous act. Hardly a desirable outcome for that promise. The novel’s structure, however, places all of these events before Ammu’s promise. Narrative time is out of joint, which means that we readers encounter all of the sadness and tragedy as anterior to the event—the beginning of Ammu and Velutha’s affair, later referred to as “the Terror”—that sets them in motion. The effect is at once temporal and spatial, just as Derrida’s positioning of responsibility for justice is: “within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead” (Derrida xix; emphasis added). To be in the midst of Ammu’s promise, which is tantamount to the twins facing Velutha’s ghost, asks for a reckoning with what could not be seen or could not be acknowledged because of its transgressive daring: the choice Ammu and Velutha made to be lovers. Thus Ammu’s promise, which turns into Velutha’s ghost, asks us as readers to consider its position as the novel’s last word as a sort of plea for justice in the future. Yet, as Derrida cautions, justice in the future is by no means guaranteed. He stresses the necessity of acknowledging the “non-contemporaneity with itself of the present” (Derrida xix), the spectral between the two poles by which a binary “maintain[s] itself” (Derrida xviii), for this justice to be possible. The double haunting in The God of Small Things offers two chances to make such an acknowledgment. Velutha’s “ghost,” the novel’s second haunting, catalyzes an acknowledgment, as we shall see below. The fi rst haunting enacted through Kari Saipu’s “real” ghost demonstrates how power alters the (material) conditions of and ultimately refuses to take responsibility for the present, thereby facilitating a future lacking justice. Like all good ghost stories do, Vellya Paapen’s story about Kari Saipu’s ghost establishes from the outset the isolated and mysterious aspect of the old rubber plantation: “Nobody went to Kari Saipu’s house anymore. Vellya Paapen claimed to be the last human being to have set eyes on it. He said that is was haunted” (Roy 189). The house’s isolation, aside from fitting into ghost story convention, also makes it iconic for the twins, who, after hearing Chacko go on about how history is a house in which the ancestors whisper, deem it the History House in their private lexicon. Its isolation also makes it iconic from an ideological perspective that views the future as an inevitable outcome of the past, an unfolding of progress that began when the likes of Kari Saipu initially arrived in Kerala as the representative of Empire. The house’s iconic status as an outpost of Empire is most relevant to my discussion of justice in the future. Yet, Kari Saipu’s actual life as a colonial presence in Kerala is not what the locals fi nd scary about his ghost; Ayemenem is not explicitly haunted by its colonial past “embodied” in the form of Kari Saipu’s ghost. Vellya

Where “Tomorrow”? 31 Paapen’s pride, as evidenced in the story of how he deals with Kari Saipu’s ghost, makes it clear what the locals do fear about this specter: It happened two years ago, [Vellya Paapen] said. He had gone across the river, hunting for a nutmeg tree [ . . . ]. Suddenly, he smelled cigar smoke [ . . . ]. Vellya Paapen whirled around and hurled his sickle at the smell. He pinned the ghost to the trunk of a rubber tree, where, according to Vellya Paapen, it still remained. [ . . . ]

[Vellya Paapen] had the satisfaction of knowing that his lightningquick reflexes [ . . . ] and his presence of mind had put an end to the bloodthirsty wanderings of a pedophile ghost. (Roy 189–90) According to local lore, Kari Saipu killed himself out of grief over the departure of his lover, a young boy removed by his parents (Roy 51). The Englishman’s sexual depravity fi xes him in Ayemenem’s collective imaginary. Kari Saipu demonstrates how the colonial project at this localized site went awry: the locals do not recall his authority, only his depravity. The Englishman’s illicit pedophilia makes of him the stuff of legends—ghost stories, to be more specific—while it also reveals the radical uncertainty lurking beneath the colonial project’s self-justifying conviction that it was bringing modernity and civilization to India. While Kari Saipu’s ghost potentially renders this uncertainty visible, this potential fails to come to fruition because there is no one there to acknowledge it, to take responsibility for the opportunities this vulnerability presents. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that those who are there choose not to acknowledge the deep meaning of Kari Saipu’s ghost. On the morning after Sophie drowns, the police seek out Velutha in the house where an old Englishman ghost, sickled to a tree, was abrogated by a pair of two-egg twins [ . . . ]. As the platoon of policemen minced past they didn’t hear him beg. In his kind-missionary voice. Excuse me, would you, umm . . . you wouldn’t happen to umm . . . I don’t suppose you’d have a cigar on you? No? . . . No, I didn’t think so.” (290) The key word in this passage is “abrogated,” and its appearance at this juncture demonstrates how what the twins are about to witness exorcises Kari Saipu’s ghost from the place. Instead of being haunted by the uncertainty of colonial power, the site is now contained, purified, put under control by police force—that “clinical demonstration in controlled conditions [ . . . ] of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly” (Roy 292–3). The steadfastness with which the police carry out their mission abolishes the uncertainty of authority that haunts power, banishes the ghost that exists between colonizer and the colonized, the

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Touchable and the Untouchable. Yet, “abrogate” also suggests the superseding of one ghost by another, so that the novel implicitly shifts our attention to Velutha’s spectrality. Before doing that, though, it is worthwhile to trace how the novel presents the consequences of Kari Saipu’s ghost’s invisibility, that failure to acknowledge undecidability. The narrative voice points out that the police’s actions are borne out of “[m]an’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify” (Roy 292). Things that motivate such an urge are “civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness” (Roy 292). With this larger context in mind, it is clear that the police are not the only ones who benefit from the failure to acknowledge Kari Saipu’s ghost. Chacko’s zamindar proclivities, KNM Pillai’s pseudo-communist aspirations, and Police Inspector Mathew’s Touchable priorities, all aim to perpetuate the illusion of seamless, invulnerable power, just as the colonial enterprise would. As those with power, none of these individuals wants to see a dismantling of the social and political structures through which they gain authority. In effect, they see themselves as rightful heirs of colonial power, though each man stakes his claim to power in different terms, be they “Men’s Needs,” “Party Unity,” or a “Touchable Future” (Roy 160, 271, 291). In Derrida’s terms, these characters feel no compulsion or compunction to learn to live “with” the spectral, to disjoin the present. The specter that maintains the dominance of these terms over the subordinate ones they imply is of no interest to the characters vested in the circumstances that spell tragedy for Velutha, Ammu, and the twins. Even on a larger scale, the novel plays out the consequences of the disinterest in the specter that Chacko, Pillai, and Mathew all make evident in their own ways. The haunted house that was Kari Saipu’s estate, the twins’ History House/safe haven, and the site of Velutha’s fatal beating becomes, in the novel’s present, a high-end resort (un)ironically named Heritage. “Heritage” obviously connects to the word “inheritance”; both terms convey what passes from one generation to the next. In a way, then, Heritage the resort appears—but only appears—to pick up on Derrida’s formulation of “being-with” ghosts, which, once again, entails “a politics [ . . . ] of inheritance, and of generations” (xix). Appearance is everything with Heritage because it instantiates a prescribed memory: Kari Saipu’s house had been renovated and painted. It had become the centerpiece of an elaborate complex, crisscrossed with artificial canals and connecting bridges. [ . . . ] The old colonial bungalow with its deep verandah and Doric columns, was surrounded by smaller, older, wooden houses—ancestral houses—that the hotel chain had bought from old families and transplanted in the Heart of Darkness. Toy Histories for rich tourists to play in. Like the sheaves of rice in Joseph’s dream, like a press of eager natives petitioning an English magistrate,

Where “Tomorrow”? 33 the old houses had been arranged around the History House in attitudes of deference. “Heritage” the hotel was called. (120) The latest incarnation of Kari Saipu’s house burnishes away the vulnerability of authority that the ghost ephemerally embodies. As Chacko, Pillai, and the police do, the hotel owners choose to perpetuate the illusion of absolute colonial authority simply because they have to power to do so. “Ancestral homes” pay “deference” to the superiority of the grander colonial bungalow through a spatial configuration that, at the same time, reifies the fiction of colonial dominance and enacts a linear movement through time; that is, the ancestral or traditional cedes way to the more modern, colonial power. Space is temporalized rather than time is spatialized or disjoined. In other words, through the placement of the “ancestral homes” around the colonial bungalow, we see the occlusion of the potential disjoining by the spatial of the temporal: the structures themselves occupy space in a manner preordained—though artificially arranged—by the version of history playing out in the entire fiction that is Heritage. In the “Toy Histories” thusly constructed, tourists experience an unproblematized unfolding of History as progress: Heritage is “God’s Own Country” and no longer some backwater outpost of Empire where a pedophiliac Englishman went native (Roy 120). From the tourists’ and the hotel owners’ perspectives, this resort marks the culmination of all the “good” of colonialism and, later, global capitalism. It is paradise. A paradisal future hardly seems like a bad thing, unless one stops to consider for whom Heritage is paradise: “rich tourists.” The wider topographical surroundings of Heritage indicate how the resort represents a future that is anything but socially just. Downstream from Heritage, the Meenachal has been reduced to “no more than a swollen drain,” thanks to the construction of a saltwater barrage meant to benefit the “influential paddy-farmer lobby” who wanted “more rice, for the price of a river” (Roy 118). The paddy-farmers’ designs have not, unfortunately, changed the other locals’ dependence on the river, though these locals are less influential than the farmers. As a result, in the same river in which children relieve themselves, “upstream, clean mothers washed clothes and pots in unadulterated factory effluents. People bathed” (119). Removed from this sordidness by virtue of its inland location, Heritage has a “beautiful” view, “but here too the water was thick and toxic” (119). The hotel owners build “a tall wall to screen off the slum and prevent it from encroaching on Kari Saipu’s estate” (119). This effort to shield the “rich tourists” from the circumstances that make their privilege possible are not wholly successful, for “there wasn’t much they could do about the smell” (119). Does the smell, the environmental and social decline of the non-paddy-farming locals disrupt the pleasures of Heritage? No: “Because they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like other peoples’ poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of discipline. Of Rigor and Air-conditioning.

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Nothing more” (120). Heritage creates and sustains a reality that follows neatly, seemingly inexorably, from the fiction—both romanticized and exoticized—of colonial authority and history. It is practically a MerchantIvory film. At this place, there is no effort to live “with the permanent disruption of the usual oppositions that render our world coherent,” to borrow again from Brown’s reading of Derrida (Brown 146). Heritage’s appropriation of the History House signals a failure to acknowledge the specter of Kari Saipu, that manifestation of the vulnerability of colonial power. All of the forces that combine to legitimate Velutha’s beating—including the circumstances, both large and small, that render him, Ammu, and the twins marginal to begin with—sustain the perception of the invulnerability of colonial power because they themselves—and here I include Chacko, Pillai, and the police (even Baby Kochamma in an indirect way)—benefit from the maintenance of such a system. At the same time, however, the History House is also the site of Velutha and Ammu’s assignations, which those in power come to view as transgressions against their authority. These transgressions, the ectoplasm of Velutha’s ghost, constitute Rahel and Estha’s inheritance. One could read Estha and Rahel’s abiding and paralyzing sense of responsibility as misplaced given the machinations—evident at the time to the reader and, arguably, in retrospect to the twins themselves—of Baby, Police Inspector Mathew, and Pillai. All of the actors are instrumental in constructing the police reports and “Official Version” of what happened to Velutha. Estha’s wordlessness and Rahel’s affectlessness appear to result from the guilt they feel for succumbing to Baby Kochamma’s coercive measures at the police station on the day after Sophie drowns. The reader even learns of Baby’s central role in the family’s dispossession of Ammu and their decision to return Estha to his father. Fearing that Ammu would reveal the lies of Baby’s false police report, Baby: knew that she had to get Ammu out of Ayemenem as soon as possible. She managed that by doing what she was best at. Irrigating her fields, nourishing her crops with other people’s passions. She gnawed like a rat into the godown of Chacko’s grief. Within its walls she planted an easy, accessible target for his insane anger. It wasn’t hard for her to portray Ammu as the person actually responsible for Sophie Mol’s death. Ammu and her two-egg twins. Chacko breaking down doors was only the sad bull thrashing at the end of Baby Kochamma’s leash. It was her idea that Ammu be made to pack her bags and leave. That Estha be Returned. (Roy 305) Given these extenuating circumstances, Rahel and Estha’s guilt is misplaced; the blame belongs on the shoulders of Baby and others. Yet, I contend that a reading of the twins’ sense of responsibility as misplaced falls into the causal trap set up by the march of History as Progress. In the immediate moment at the police station on the morning after Sophie

Where “Tomorrow”? 35 drowns, the novel teases readers into complicity with a conception of History as a narrative that unfolds linearly through time. Baby weaves a story about Sophie’s death that readers recognize as patently false and that the twins listen to attentively for it is such an engrossing story; Baby narrates: ‘I’ll have to tell them [the Police] how it was strictly against the Rules for you to go alone to the river. How you forced her [Sophie] to go with you although you knew that she couldn’t swim. How you pushed her out of the boat in the middle of the river. It wasn’t an accident, was it?’ Four saucers stared back at her. Fascinated by the story she was telling them. Then what happened? (Roy 300) Baby’s fiction neatly enacts a point about the nature of storytelling that the narrator makes at the close of the fi rst chapter: “Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story” (Roy 32). While in the lives of this family, the losses of Sophie and Velutha are not little events; they are nonetheless ordinary events whose significance nearly requires narrative and context so as to be comprehensible. These losses are, in effect, the “bleached bones” out of which most everyone in the novel makes some sort of story. In the specific instance of the story Baby constructs in her effort to coerce the twins, the narrative’s plausibility as narrative—not as “what really happened”—envelops the twins in its logic. Baby’s story culminates in the threat of imprisonment for the twins and Ammu; yet, careful as she is, Baby offers the twins an out, thanks to the police’s “‘lucky mistake’” (301). Without ever saying what that “mistake” is, Baby asks the twins, “‘You know what it is, don’t you?’” (301). The “mistake” remains unspoken—perhaps unspeakable—and where we would expect the twins’ response, we instead get description: “There were people trapped in the glass paperweight on the policeman’s desk. Estha could see them” (301). The juxtaposition of Baby’s question and the image of the figures trapped within the paperweight illustrate how the logic of Baby’s story “traps” the twins. Precisely because they are trapped by the logic of Baby’s narrative, the twins’ “decision” is not a decision in the way Derrida and others understand the term in relation to undecidability, responsibility, and, ultimately, justice. Rather, the “sedimented set of social relations” that has Baby conspiring with the police, who later conspire with Pillai, remain in place; in other words, the “moment of the [twins’] decision” is decidedly not “reactivated” (Laclau 93): At the same time, though, the twins end up feeling complicit: In the years to come they would replay this scene in their heads. As children. As teenagers. As adults. Had they been deceived into doing what they did? Had they been tricked into condemnation?

36 Cara Cilano In a way, yes. But it wasn’t as simple as that. They both knew that they had been given a choice. And how quick they had been in the choosing! (302) Yet, I argue the twins’ view of their role in the event is almost automatically predetermined. Accustomed as they are to feeling marginal, to fearing the loss of love—a recurring anxiety both Estha and Rahel struggle with as children—it is no wonder they would harbor this guilt into adulthood. In other words, the twins are burdened throughout their lives. But, it is not until Estha is re-Returned and Rahel comes back to Ayemenem to meet him that they realize they are haunted. Remarkably, this moment of return and recognition also entails an acknowledgment of the spectral by a character who would rather suppress it. And that character is Baby. As she considers whether writing to Rahel of Estha’s coming back to Ayemenem was the right thing to do, the narrative voice, momentarily adopting Baby’s point of view, comments: [a]lready she [Baby] regretted having written to her [Rahel] of Estha’s return. But then, what else could she have done? Had him on her hands for the rest of her life? Why should she? He wasn’t her responsibility? Or was he? (Roy 22). Much as Kari Saipu’s ghost potentially does, Baby’s flash of hesitation marks a crack in the certainty of her righteousness, a certainty she has laboriously sought to secure. When Rahel returns to Ayemenem, an old, embittered, and territorial Baby worries that her grandniece’s return may prompt her own dispossession, for Baby “deemed them [the twins] Capable of Anything” (9). Rife with an appropriate though unspeakable doubt over her own position, Baby worries that Rahel and Estha, now that they are reunited after twentythree years, “might steal their present back” (29). Baby even concedes that she is a “little intimidated by Rahel’s quietness” that so eerily matches the same characteristics “Estha seemed to have mastered” (29). Baby’s anxiety and feelings of intimidation signal how her present is rent by the spectral; in a sense, Baby’s response to Rahel and Estha’s reunification can be read as a response to the arbitrariness of her prevailing over them in the past and even in the present. Further, Baby fears dispossession in her future, and this fear evidences her recognition of the spectral, of undecidability. Remarkably and, with respect to her own self-interest, perhaps ill-advisedly, Baby does make a decision in the face of the ghost, so to speak. The question that remains, however, is how will she be responsible for this decision? The twins’ decision in the face of the ghost also ends in a question mark. While it is clear that they have hardly lived for twenty-three years, arguably the only decision they make in the midst of undecidability is their act of incest. Some critics read the incest as inevitable, necessary, for the act becomes a way for the twins to regain the wholeness they possessed as children.3 But,

Where “Tomorrow”? 37 wholeness seems like a wish for full presence, the achievement or arrival of seamless, integrated subjectivity. From another angle, if they have inherited their mother and Velutha’s penchant for transgressive sex, if that previous relationship goes to comprising Velutha’s ghost, then Rahel and Estha similarly call into question the Love Laws by breaking the incest taboo. Does such a neat connection—transgression matching transgression—construct, perhaps, a too predictable script between generations? As Janet Thormann contends, incest troubles the whole notion of generations: “Incest is the violation of the basics of social exchange, of generational succession in time” (304). Though Thormann goes on to argue that the twins’ incest “challenges the very possibility of social being” under oppressive circumstances and, thus, represents an act of resistance (a good thing, for Thormann), for my purposes, the disruption of generations as inevitable extensions into the future makes us think again about whether transgression matching transgression is so very predictable, so very “sedimented.”4 In a sense, though, the open-endedness of what the twins’ incest signifies suits the concept of justice Derrida envisions. As Laclau puts it, the promise of Derrida’s conceptualization of justice is “one without eschatology, without pregiven promised land, without determinate content” (Laclau 91). The novel’s time is once again out of joint immediately after the incest scene. Visually and spatially, the narrative camera pans wide, providing readers with a view of the abandoned pickle factory. Temporally, we see Sophie Mol on the day she arrives, twenty-three years earlier, still alive (Roy 311). We are before the ghost, living with it. The God of Small Things offers readers two ghost stories, both of which hold the potential to disrupt the binary that opposes life and death. Other instances of death in the novel, such as Father Mulligan’s, present Baby and the entire Ipe family with opportunities to fi x and control the meaning of the dead characters’ lives and the living characters’ relationships with them (Patchay 150–1). Velutha’s and Ammu’s deaths refuse closure, fi nality, or control. Even though by the time readers reach the novel’s last word— “Tomorrow”—they know Velutha’s and Ammu’s fates, her promise to him defies containment; it works as the promise of a future-to-come (Roy 321). Roy has said that her novel is “a book about human nature” (Abraham 91), and, through this consideration of its Derridean specters, we see that it is truly a book that teaches us “how to live fi nally” (Derrida xviii).

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

See Delourme, Nair, Patchay, and Thormann. See also Bloem. See Balvannanadhan, Chanda, Fox, Khot, and Patchay. As an additional point of contrast with my argument, Thormann sees her argument as moving toward “[a]n ethical psychoanalysis, engaged with human rights supported by analysis of the subject of desire,” an overall project

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WORKS CITED Abraham, Taisha. “An Interview with Arundhati Roy.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 29.1 (January 1998): 89–92. Balvannanadhan, Aida. “Re-Membering Personal History in The God of Small Things.” Commonwealth 25.1 (Autumn 2002): 97–106. Bloem, Rose. “Haunting Depictions of Dominance and Oppression: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples.” Memory, Haunting, Discourse. Ed. and intro. Troy Wennö and Elisabeth Maria Holmgren. Karlstad: Karlstad U, 2005: 215–28. Brown, Wendy. Politics Out of History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Chanda, Tirhankar. “Sexual/Textual Strategies in The God of Small Things.” Commonwealth 20.1 (Autumn 1997): 38–44. Cheah, Pheng. “Spectral Nationality: The Living On [sur-vie] of the Postcolonial Nation in Neocolonial Globalization.” boundary 2 26.3 (1999): 225–52. Delourme, Chantal. “Haunted Times in The God of Small Things.” Reading Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.” Ed. Carole Durix and Jean-Pierre Durix. Dijon: Editions U de Dijon, 2002. 145–62. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Fox, L. Chris. “A Martyrology of the Abject: Witnessing and Trauma in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 33.3 (July–Oct. 2002): 35–60. Kamuf, Peggy. “Violence, Identity, Self-Determination and the Question of Justice: On Specters of Marx.” Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination. Ed. Hent deVries and Samuel Weber. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. 271–83. Khot, Mohini. “The Feminist Voice in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Indian Feminisms. Ed. Jasbir Jain and Avadesh Kumar Singh. New Delhi: Creative, 2001. 213–22. Laclau, Ernesto. “The Time Is out of Joint.” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 85–96. Nair, R. Hema. “‘Remembrance of Things Past’: A Reading of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” CIEFL Bulletin 9.2 (December 1998): 49–56. Patchay, Sheena. “Pickled Histories, Bottled Stories: Recuperative Narratives in The God of Small Things.” Journal of Literary Studies/TLW 17.3–4 (December 2001): 145–60. Prendergast, Christopher. “Derrida’s Hamlet.” SubStance 34.1 (2005): 44–7. Punter, David. “Arundhati Roy and the House of History.” Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre. Ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes. New York: Palgrave, 2003. 192–207. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: HarperPerennial, 1997. Thormann, Janet. “The Ethical Subject of The God of Small Things.” JPCS: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.2 (Fall 2003): 299–307.

3

In-Between and Elsewhere Liminality in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things Anna Froula

In The God of Small Things, Ammu and her children function as subversive liminars between cultural borders that would protect difference in religion, caste, and gender. By defying caste laws, she, Rahel, and Estha “map out new territories and enter forbidden in-between spaces, thus forming relationships that defy the laws of a world where center and periphery still determine social intercourse” (Ohumani 86). According to the perspectives of Chacko, Inspector Thomas Mathew, and Baby Kochamma, Ammu’s unconventional movements across these unforgiving boundaries corrupt her “two-egg twins” and draw them into her placelessness, where the systemic Love Laws punish them for the very threat they pose to the social order. Unable to decenter patriarchal hegemony in 1960s Kerala to foster the growth of a new global society in her time, Ammu and the twins occupy and embody the interloping sites of cultural impurity, the virtual dirt that the system must eliminate to function in an orderly fashion. We may investigate these problematic boundaries through the critical lenses of Arnold Van Gennep’s and Victor Turner’s work on liminality and by connecting their theories with Mary Douglas’s work on purity and filth, Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, and René Girard’s contributions to the theory of communal sacrifice. Integrating these conceptual paradigms allows us to read beyond the postcolonial framework of Roy’s novel and unearth more textual ambiguities and possibilities. Van Gennep reminds us that passage from one state to another is a “dangerous,” “indefi nable” (qtd. in Douglas 96) state in which the person in transition emanates danger to others. Anthropologist Victor Turner describes such dangerous passages as “liminal,” from the Latin limen (“threshold”), the site where a liminar moves “through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state. Liminars are betwixt and between.”1 Homi Bhabha calls liminal pathways “interstitial passages,” or channels “between fi xed identifications [that open] up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (4). He argues, “exceeding the barrier or boundary—the very act of going beyond—[is] unknowable, unrepresentable” (4). Thus,

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Ammu’s liminality, her “Unmixable Mix—the infi nite tenderness of motherhood, the reckless rage of a suicide bomber” (Roy 304), situates her beyond the sanctioned reach of her family and endangers those who uphold the Love Laws. 2 Although Chacko engages in sexual dalliances with lower caste factory workers, for Ammu, both gender and her realizing of illicit desire eclipse the risk he might pose to Ayemenem’s social order. Furthermore, as Therese Saliba maintains: with the hybridization of culture resultant from colonialism, indigenous women’s bodies have come to signify, within indigenous male ideology, sites of cultural impurity, bodies polluted or sickened by “diseases” of Western influence (138). This premise reconfigures Ammu’s body as a contact zone where the West’s sexual revolution of the 1960s penetrates Indian patriarchy even before her involvement with Velutha; however, her rebellious body “refus[es] to carry the burden of postcolonial corruption” (Saliba 132), since she uses it to express of freedom and sexual pleasure. Even so, because she has no legal standing, Ammu’s sexual involvement with Velutha presents an affront to her family and a corruption of “generations of breeding” (Roy 244). Thus, “History’s Henchman”—the “Touchable Policemen”—victimize Untouchable Velutha because his love affair with Brahmin-born Ammu revolts against the Indian social order that privileges its protectors. Accordingly, after pursuing Baby Kochamma’s false allegations of kidnapping and sexual abuse against the carpenter, the policemen must inoculate themselves and their Touchable world against the Untouchable infection he embodies. As René Girard writes, “[a]s long as purity and impurity remain distinct, even the worst pollution can be washed away; but once they are allowed to mingle, purification is no longer possible” (38). Ammu and Velutha’s violation of the caste laws thus situates them in a metaliminal state—inside the in-between space between place and placelessness—and within the edges of the caste laws that are hazardous because, as Douglas argues, “any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins” (121). Whereas India’s longstanding caste laws both establish a permanent place for each individual in society and protect the power of the ruling class, Ammu’s transgression stresses the exponential threat of dangerous pollution to permeable social barriers. Unchecked, this cultural possibility has the potential to subvert the social order, rendering everyone’s place—whether privileged, dispossessed, or in between—as changeable within unstable dominant power structures. When Velutha’s “untouchable tongue touched the innermost parts of her” (Roy 319), Ammu’s body rendered the social fabric that prevents such cultural contamination porous and subject to infiltration. Her sexual encounter with Velutha at the river, then, threatens to marginalize the mainstream.

In-Between and Elsewhere

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However, long before her affair with Velutha, Ammu passed into a liminal state. After the failure of her controversial intercommunity marriage to an abusive Calcutta Hindu, she and her twins return to Ayemenem, though they lack any official position in her parents’ home: “according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all” (Roy 45). In Homi Bhabha’s terms, Ammu functions as “the liminal figure of the nation-space [that] would ensure that no political ideologies could claim transcendent or metaphysical authority for themselves” (148). Her family fears her betweenness, “sens[ing] somehow that she lived in the penumbral shadows between two worlds, just beyond the grasp of their power . . . and could therefore be dangerous” (Roy 44). Thus, her affair establishes her own usurped authority over her own body despite India’s caste and gender traditions—authority, that is, that denies Ammu its cultural privilege. From within her margins, then, Ammu criticizes and threatens the social order; her placelessness renders her voiceless, despite the dangerous power that her marginality wields. If allowed to speak, i.e., to invest herself freely and publicly in sexual liaisons of her own choosing, her transgression would adulterate the Love Laws “that lay down who should be loved, and how much” (Roy 33) and, therefore, pollute Ayemenem’s social structure. Unpunished, Ammu’s potential to initiate a transcaste sexual revolution endangers men whom the system and its gender hierarchy privilege. As Kristeva explains, “within the highly hierarchical society of India . . . the attempt to establish a male, phallic power is vigorously threatened by the no less virulent power of the other sex, which is oppressed” (70). Ammu’s capacity to infect the boundaries that separate and mandate sex rights reconfigures the caste system itself as a liminal zone where women pose the danger of exercising sexual freedom. Recognizing the threat that Ammu embodies, Inspector Thomas Mathew taps her breasts with his police baton to return her to her place—or below it: “It was a premeditated gesture, calculated to humiliate and terrorise her. An attempt to instill order into a world gone wrong” (Roy 246). Treating Ammu like a veshya, that is, a prostitute, diminishes her potential sexual power and eliminates the threat of her sexual allure toward Mathew’s Touchable world. For Chacko, both Ammu’s affair and the twins’ implication in Sophie Mol’s death not only emasculate him with the loss of his Westernized daughter, but also call into question the masculinist constructs that have elevated the Oxford-educated Chacko to his position of power. In short, Ammu’s affair subverts Chacko’s sexual power and the social institutions that traditionally protect it. Ammu’s oppositional feminism surfaces after she dreams of her future haggard self, perhaps envisioning how living by society’s restrictions will only drain her vitality—hence her decision “to walk out on the mapped, touchable world, and venture into the heart of darkness across the swamp, into the unmapped, untouchable world” (Chanda 41). Consequently, her insubordination to Chacko, and, thereby, the patriarchal social caste system, endanger his social position and authority to the extent that he cannot

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allow her out of the liminal margin she inhabits. Therefore, he banishes her to a state of subalternity drained of its former potential for power—she dies alone, cast out of the system, after years of betweenness—between jobs and between mothering and orphanhood. By extension, Ammu’s outlaw twins must also face expulsion as potential infection. Notes Girard: “twins are [symbolically] impure in the same way that a warrior steeped in carnage is impure, or an incestuous couple, or a menstruating woman” (58). Because they both expose Baby Kochamma’s violation of her abusive father’s laws and bear the cultural hybridity that “engender[s] the primal fear that unleashes violence against Velutha” (Oumnani 85), the matriarch labels them “Half-Hindu Hybrids, whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry” (Roy 44). The twins are the physical manifestation of Ammu’s transgression: “Littledemons [who] were mudbrown . . . with forehead bumps that might turn into horns. With Fountains in Love-in-Tokyos. . . . And if you cared to look, you could see Satan in their eyes” (Roy 170). As hybrids, Rahel’s and Estha’s colonized bodies also “inhabit borderlines” (Gairola par. 8) by abandoning yet underscoring the traditions of India that incorporate the caste system and relegate them to the margins of their home and society. Roy contrasts the demonized twins to the gleaming white Englishness of Sophie Mol, also a hybrid child of divorced parents but “Loved from the Beginning,” one of the “[l]ittleangels [who] were beach-colored and wore bell-bottoms” (170). Sophie Mol stars in the racialized Play that, according to Chacko, was scripted long ago: “Our minds have been invaded by a war . . . that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves. . . . We belong nowhere” (Roy 52). From this circumscribed status of living within national borders already blurred by colonial history, Chacko’s diatribe situates the entire Indian family in an abject position to British Margaret and Sophie Mol as the “Other who settles in place and stead” (Kristeva 10) of them. Tellingly, Rahel is marginal to and Estha disappears entirely from the Play—“doomed to remain offstage” (Oumnani 88) and outside the center that Sophie Mol inhabits, and from which her whiteness emanates. Rather than embrace the Imperial conqueror—as Chacko does in his marriage to Margaret and Baby Kochamma does in her adulation of Sophie Mol—Ammu and the twins attempt to reject the colonial “re-dreamer of dreams” that the History House metonymically represents. Ammu literally dreams of Velutha’s embrace before seeking it, and the twins exclude Sophie Mol from their river adventures until she insists on joining them. However, their escapist fantasies transform into their eventual downfall within the perilous threshold of the river. As Douglas observes, natural borders are especially powerful because they create order by separating worlds, states, and the sacred from the profane. Sexual intercourse that results in both the intermingling of natural bodily fluids and the hybridization of children and caste carries the strongest threat.

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Also threatening because water obscures boundaries, the Meenachal runs through the novel as a prominent natural barrier the river becomes an interstitial passage from Sophie to Paravan, Marxist lord to voiceless worker, Syrian Christian to Hindu, and Untouchable Velutha to Touchable Ammu.3 When the novel begins, this river separates Ammu’s colonized family from the colonizer’s History House, the Heart of Darkness with its own Kurtz scythed to a nutmeg tree. As the novel’s most potent liminal metaphor, the river jeopardizes the characters because “she isn’t always what she pretends to be”; fear can sink to the deep and then “rise and murk things up at a moment’s notice” (Roy 201–2). Functioning as its own transitory zone, the river becomes polluted—from excrement, World Bank pesticides, and factory offal, as well as the border-crossing of Velutha to Ammu, Rahel to the Heart of Darkness and her subsequent exile, Estha to his perjured confession and silent abjection, and Sophie Mol from life to death. Furthermore, on the December day that the river claims Sophie, “it rained as though it was June,” a month when “the countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom” (3), this seasonal change turning the world upside down and symbolizing the unnatural merging of castes that results from Ammu’s and Velutha’s violation at the river’s edge. The river itself is in a state of transition: “Once it had the power to evoke fear, to change lives. But now its teeth were drawn, its spirit spent. It was just a slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea” (Roy 119). When Rahel returns to the river, twenty-three years after the Terror, she observes that the fence erected to block the riverside slums from the wealthy tourists fails to separate them from the Meenachal’s stink, suggesting that such sanitizing efforts are futile: “On warm days the smell of [lower-caste-produced] shit lifted off the river and hovered over Ayemenem like a hat” (119). Once a site of both childhood and adult fantasy and escape, the river has declined into a poisoned contact zone that cannot cleanse away the corruption of its history. After Vellya Paapen discovers and reveals Ammu and Velutha’s sexual misconduct, Velutha wanders along the Meenachal to the Heart of Darkness, his plans of escape soon to be thwarted by History’s Henchmen. The Horror of the History House in the Heart of Darkness consumes Velutha, Rahel, and Estha, while the policemen brutally exterminate both childhood and the Untouchable in the name of protecting their own Touchability. As Chanda points out, “this house symbolizing both white authority and alienation becomes in the course of Roy’s narration the privileged arena where the police restores patriarchal authority by capturing the transgressor of caste taboo” (42). As liminal figures, the twins cannot escape the events of that night when they crossed the river and trespassed not only into Velutha’s hut, but also into “a house they couldn’t enter” (Roy 53). For these sins, they bear the full weight not only of its colonial history, but also of the ruling class hegemony that protects itself at all costs, unmindful of those who collapse under the pressure of “civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women,

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power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify” (292). Or in Girard’s terms, the Touchables sacrifice Velutha to “deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a ‘sacrificeable’ victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect” (4). Via this inoculation against the epidemic that would collapse the Love Laws and everyone they benefit, Velutha’s violent death draws Ammu through the Velutha-shaped “Hole in the Universe through which darkness poured like liquid tar” (Roy 182). Purifying itself through the enactment of violence against Velutha—who operates between the irreconcilable terms of Untouchability and superior Touchable talent—the Touchable society cleanses and resets the boundaries that protect it as it expels the solvent that increased the permeability of its borders.4 Placeless before, Ammu subsequently has nowhere to be, no place to heal, and no resources to protect her from the consuming madness that results from her punishment. Placeless forever, Rahel and Estha are left with “no face to put on this Other Thing that they held in their sticky Other Hands. . . . [Ammu] left them behind, spinning in the dark, with no moorings, in a place with no foundation” (182). They will forever bear the burden of their marginal status because, along with Ammu, they “were the worst transgressors. But it wasn’t just them. . . . They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory” (31). Their powerful violation makes scapegoats and exiles of Ammu, Rahel, and Estha, and sends them forever past the boundaries of society—boundaries strengthened by the ritual of sacrifice. Rahel and Estha, in effect, become outcasts, cultural hybrids who belong neither in their home culture nor anywhere else. Until they reunite years later, Rahel wanders aimlessly, shuffl ing between the here and elsewhere of convent schools, marriage, jobs, and nations, yet fi nding her place in none of them. After Estha is “Returned,” Rahel’s separation from the brother, with whom she shares a “single Siamese soul,” leaves her disembodied from the connection that formerly elided their physical boundaries of flesh and blood: “Estappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us” (4–5). Thus their painful separation—the rupture in the liminal passages between their physical bodies—and its damage empties Rahel of her identity and mutes Estha. 5 Until they reunite, “it had been quiet in Estha’s head. . . . But with her she had brought the sound. . . . A dam had burst and savage water swept everything up in a swirling” clamor that Rahel can hear in his head (Roy 16). Cruelly manipulated into betraying Velutha with his own voice and by his fierce love for Ammu, Estha, too, disappears into the silent subaltern margin. His liminal status between the Touchable and Untouchable realms—and the violence his trespassing instigated—has corrupted him beyond what he can repair. Khubchand, his dog, sticking his head out the dog door but urinating in the house, symbolizes his stalled reincorporation into India’s well-ordered society (13).

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Although the violence against Velutha cleanses the ruling establishment of Ayemenem, Estha remains in “a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered. . . . The clean and proper . . . becomes fi lthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame” (Kristeva 8). Uttering the one word that exiled him to silence leads Estha through his interstitial pathway into silent abjection. Velutha’s corpse, “the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything” (3), and has indeed violated Estha’s entire world. Not all pollution can be cleansed in the reassertion of social order; thus Estha’s childhood wounds fester despite his ritualistic scrubbing at the interminable shame, cultural fi lth, and pollution in his clothes. Both Estha and Rahel remain trapped in a state of abjection via their former community’s “unshakable adherence to Prohibition and Law [that is] necessary if that perverse interspace of abjection is to be hemmed in and thrust aside” (Kristeva 16). They return to Ayemenem in the monsoon season of indistinct limits; however, “Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons” (Roy 5). These confi nes represent the barricades between Rahel and Estha, just as the shrunken and polluted Meenachal signifies “the loss of this interstitial passage where people could be brought together beyond any existing laws” (Oumhani 90; emphasis added). Furthermore, “fi lth had laid siege to the Ayemenem House like a medieval army advancing on an empty castle. It clotted every crevice and clung to the windowpanes” (Roy 84), suggesting that, rather than ushering in a new social order, rupturing former barriers has drained the former meaning from the system that they were meant to protect. Therefore, when the twins, “Quietness and Emptiness,” return to Ayemenem and have nothing left to lose and nowhere else to go, they fi nally share “their hideous grief,” and “once again, they broke the Love Laws” (Roy 311). As Kristeva indicates, “the erotization of abjection, and perhaps any abjection to the extent that it is already eroticized, is an attempt at stopping the hemorrhage: a threshold before death, a halt or respite” (55). Rahel’s and Estha’s shared grief, however, lies beyond the reach of healing. In their victimization, the only place they have is within each other—marginally healing in a marginal way. Rahel and Estha, otherwise and elsewhere, fit in the periphery of this new society, still entrenched within boundaries that designate only where they do not belong.

NOTES 1. Liminality also implies “namelessness, absence of property, nakedness or uniform clothing . . . minimized distinctions of sex, rank and wealth, humility, disregard for personal appearance, obedience, silence . . . [and] suspended kinship rights and obligations (Turner and Turner 249). See also Linda Woodbridge and Roland Anderson’s “Liminality” (578).

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Anna Froula 2. Julia Kristeva writes, “the danger of fi lth represents for the subject the risk to which the very symbolic order is permanently exposed, to the extent that it is a device of discriminations, of differences,” which threatens “the frailty of the symbolic order itself” (69). 3. Van Gennep reminds us that thresholds symbolize the beginning of new statuses and identity (Douglas 114). 4. See Kristeva 82, 95. 5. For a Kristevan analysis of Estha’s abjection, see Antonia Navarro-Tejero’s “Memory and Incest as Liberation from Trauma: Abjection in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things” (2003).

WORKS CITED Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2001. Chanda, Tirhankar. “Sexual/Textual Strategies in The God of Small Things.” Commonwealth 20.1 (1997): 38–44. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Harmondworth: Penguin, 1970. Gairola, Rahul Krishna. “Western Experiences: Education and ‘Third World Women’ in the Fictions of Tsitsi Dangarembga and Meena Alexander.” Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.2 (2000): 28 Jan. 2002. . Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror—An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Navarro-Tejero, Antonia. “Memory and Incest as Liberation from Trauma: Abjection in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” The Atlantic Literary Review 4.2 (2003): 121–32. Oumhani, Cecile. “Hybridity and Transgression in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Commonwealth 22.2 (2000): 85–91. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: Harper Collins, 1997. Saliba, Therese. “On the Bodies of Third World Women: Cultural Impurity, Prostitution, and Other Nervous Conditions.” College Literature 22.1 (1995): 131–47. Turner, Victor and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia UP, 1978. Woodbridge, Linda and Roland Anderson. “Liminality.” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms. Ed. Irena R. Makaryk. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. 578–80.

4

Beyond “Anticommunism” The Progressive Politics of The God of Small Things 1

Pranav Jani

Given Arundhati Roy’s stature within today’s international movements against corporate globalization and naked imperialism, it is shocking to remember that her Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things (1997), was initially met with a wave of criticism and even hostility from prominent sections of the Indian Left, particularly those associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]). Indian communists emphatically and publicly denounced the novel for explicitly mocking E.M.S. Namboodiripad, the late CPI(M) leader, for depicting communists as being unmindful of caste oppression, and for peddling “bourgeois decadence” through its representations of “sexual anarchy” (“EMS Attacks”).2 Leading the charge against Roy, E.M.S. himself declared that the novel’s critique of communism was central to why it was “welcomed by the captains of the industry of bourgeois literature in the world” (Jose). Similarly, thenKerala Chief Minister, E.K. Nayanar, attributed the novel’s winning of the Booker Prize to its Western-oriented, “anti-Communist venom” (“Nayanar Pours Scorn”). Indeed, Aijaz Ahmad’s article in the August 1997 issue of the CPI(M)-friendly Frontline magazine, by far the most nuanced of such critiques, had already taken Roy to task for reproducing the “hostility toward the Communist movement [that] is now fairly common among radical sections of the intelligentsia, in India and abroad” (103).3 Specifically, Ahmad criticized what he regarded as the conservative implications of the novel’s representation of sexuality “as the final realm of both Pleasure and of Truth” (104) and “a sufficient mode for overcoming real social oppressions” (107). However, the post-Booker Prize recognition of Roy’s political writing— beginning with “The Greater Common Good”—and her incessant defense of villagers and activists opposing the Narmada Valley Development Project, disrupted any assimilation of Roy into the category of the disengaged postcolonial writer.4 To their credit, the CPI(M) and the editors and columnists of Frontline quickly recognized the radicalism and power of Roy’s political essays despite their earlier criticisms of her novel; “The Greater Common Good,” in fact, first appeared in Frontline.5 The rest of the story is, I imagine, quite familiar to those following global leftist political discourse since the late 1990s. Fiercely critical of Western nations for corporate globalization and

48 Pranav Jani imperialist wars—but also of postcolonial states for their own complicity in the neoliberal project—Roy has developed a unique perspective and emerged as one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the international Left in the first decade of the twenty-first century. What is perhaps most appealing about Roy’s political essays—besides their lyrical and confident style—is a theoretical and political framework flexible enough to allow her to comment insightfully on any range of issues, including women’s rights, environmentalism, globalization, war and resistance to occupation, caste and racial oppression, and democratic rights. This chapter asserts that Roy’s novel and her essays, far from moving in divergent directions, are bound together by a political paradigm that is unmistakably progressive and leftist. While the genre of the essay itself allows this leftist voice to emerge more explicitly and directly in those texts than in the novel, The God of Small Things allows for a criticism of the status quo that is as devastating as that of the essays—despite either the CPI(M)’s censure or the valorization and appropriation of the novel by the mainstream publishing and academic markets in the West.6 The God of Small Things, simply put, is an antiauthoritarian, antipatriarchal novel, construing a narrative of subaltern struggle and survival in postcolonial India.7 Like Roy’s political essays, the novel approaches the world from a perspective that illuminates the role that ordinary people and “small” lives play in history and society, fighting against the attempts of official, “big” histories to suppress their voices. The CPI(M)-affiliated criticism—mired in a nondialectical critical methodology—cannot see this, as it assigns, a priori, a negative political value to Roy’s location (as an English-language writer), the novel’s reception (its popularity in the West), its explicit statements (criticism of the CPI[M]), and/or its themes (e.g., the liberatory potential of sexuality and desire). The subsequent celebration of Roy’s essays, indeed, implicitly employs the same method, though with a different result: since the editors broadly agree with the explicit statements in the essays, they champion the texts and, once again, fail to analyze the political paradigms underlying them. Establishing a link between the leftist, committed politics of Roy’s essays and her novel, therefore, means thinking critically about the methods of Marxist and/or political criticism—and refusing to reduce them to tautological exercises of making sure that writers have the “right” passport and home address, the “right” political affiliations, and the “right” level of skepticism about postmodern aesthetics. Ahmad’s essay, widely cited and circulated, regularly stands in as an example of a Marxist and political reading of The God of Small Things. The title of the piece, “Reading Arundhati Roy Politically,” in fact, asks that it be recognized as such. However, I suggest that Kalpana Wilson’s “Arundhati Roy and the Left: Reclaiming ‘Small Things’” presents a much better example of what Marxist literary criticism ought to do.8 Drawing out the methodological lessons of Wilson’s analysis, coupled with my own readings of the novel’s narrative structure and its representations of communism, I suggest that Marxists and political critics in

Beyond “Anticommunism” 49 postcolonial literary studies need to resist the urge to simply praise or reject writings that represent resistance and power in ways that mirror our own ideas. Rather, we need to develop a nuanced understanding of the relationship between location, ideology, and aesthetics, one in which the three categories are not conflated and the meaning of a given text is not automatically overdetermined by one of the categories. In terms of Roy, for instance, this means recognizing some complexities, including the fact that: (1) the essays, widely recognized as leftist, were produced from the same elite location as the novel itself; (2) the appropriation of postcolonial novels in English into the global marketplace does not necessarily mean that each of these novels exhibits the values of that marketplace; and (3) not all writers who employ postmodern aesthetics (multivocal texts, nonlinear narratives, magical realism) necessarily replicate the antihistoricist values of postmodern epistemology.9 If we allow the narrative to breathe and speak its mind, as it were, it becomes clear that far from being a sign of a cosmopolitan–elite anticommunism, the criticism of the CPI(M) in the universe constructed by The God of Small Things is actually a marker of its leftist politics. The Marxist literary critic ought to recognize this and hold back from allowing her or his own position on the CPI(M) to overdetermine the analysis. I am not, therefore, discouraging questions about political ideology, such as “What do we make of Roy’s criticism of Indian communism?,” but rather arguing that they should not be allowed to overwhelm an analysis of the novel as a literary work.10 Indeed, the schizophrenic and unsatisfactory treatment of Roy’s different writings by CPI(M)-affiliated figures and publications can be understood in a broader context: their uncertainty in relating to the growing prominence of leftist intellectuals and leaders in the post-Cold War period who are actively engaged in radical politics and skeptical of postmodernist/ new-Left paradigms even as they remain unaffiliated with parties like the CPI(M). Undoubtedly, characterizing the global Left that has been forming since the mid-1990s has been a challenging task. Broadly speaking, it has included forces and ideas that are antistate (Zapatistas), prostate (Chavez), and oriented toward radical movements that demand reforms in the here and now (Bolivia). It has included theorists who have emphasized the continuation of imperialist aggression in the context of a hierarchy of nationstates (Gilbert Achcar), and those who have predicted—unconvincingly, in my view—the end of centralized empires in a “post-capitalist” economy no longer dominated by a handful of nation-states (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri).11 As I shall suggest, too, while Roy has been quite clear in her opposition to imperialism and capitalism and her defense of resistance to these ideas, her overall paradigm can come across as eclectic. The ambiguities in Roy’s representations of modernity in The God of Small Things parallel those of the post-Cold War Left in its approach to globalization, especially as reflected in the mass antiglobalization protests that spread rapidly from the late 1990s to September 2001.

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It is beyond the scope of this essay, ultimately focused on literary analysis, to conduct a full-fledged assessment of Roy’s position in relation to these multidisciplinary approaches to questions of antistatism, reform and revolution, postcapitalism, etc. Nevertheless, it is worth saying that the CPI(M) enters these debates about the shape of the post-Cold War Left from a distinctly poor position: as a party that has actively aided and abetted the growth of neoliberal capitalism in India. Indeed, recent events in Nandigram, West Bengal—where villagers and antiglobalization activists met with deadly force while opposing the ruling CPI(M) and its neoliberal policies—have become a flashpoint for a global debate and reassessment about the state of the Indian Left itself and the CPI(M)’s place within it.12 Roy’s active condemnation of the CPI(M)’s actions in Nandigram re-enacts, as it were, the ways in which the implied author of The God of Small Things also speaks out against what she sees as the Indian communists’ disregard of ordinary people’s lives. In the fi rst section, I discuss how the radicalism and leftism of The God of Small Things lies not only in its content or themes or its relationship to Roy’s political essays—all of which are quite tangible—but is embedded in the narrative structure itself. Centered around the tragedy of Velutha, a Dalit carpenter/engineer and card-carrying communist, the novel is truly an attempt at what Njabulo Ndebele calls “the rediscovery of the ordinary” in his 1991 book of the same name. We might call this a “literature from below” that—like the practice of “history from below”—exposes and conducts an all-out struggle against oppression, whether in terms of caste, class, gender, religion, or nation. Roy’s foregrounding of Velutha within the narrative structure of the novel opens new, radical spaces within the postcolonial Indian English novel. Roy’s critique of communism, seen in this context, emerges not from the apolitical or liberal perspective typically held by cosmopolitan elites since the 1980s, but from “subaltern-centered” politics that challenge official, ruling class narratives and histories, including those couched in leftist discourse. In the second section, I elaborate on how Roy’s radical paradigm retains conceptual difficulties that, in the novel, are reflected in paradoxes on the aesthetic level. Roy rejects Marxism along with the CPI(M), and her immensely powerful exercises in a critical, negative dialectics allow for struggle and resistance, but do not open a space for the revolutionary transformation of society. In the novel, this negative dialectics is expressed as a containment of Velutha’s agency and that of all potential threats to the power structure it condemns—and resistance is often, quite paradoxically, expressed in the language and symbols of communism itself. Roy’s radical paradigm, in other words, occupies a space between postmodernist rejections of agency and Marxist paradigms of transformation, producing a progressive critique of communism that, nevertheless, clothes its protagonists in deep red. Still, I claim, The God of Small Things begins to demonstrate what a materialist representation of subalternity might look like,

Beyond “Anticommunism” 51 recalling the work of earlier Indian English novelists like Mulk Raj Anand and Kamala Markandaya (especially in The Coffer Dams)—often forgotten amidst the postmodernist redefi nition of the field of postcolonial studies. By rooting her essays and her novel in and alongside the struggles of the oppressed, Roy has been able to avoid the pitfalls of postmodernism, in which the criticism of big narratives results in the deconstruction of all narratives, rendering the oppressed as being always already locked into the condition of subalternity.13 As the Left seeks to re-emerge from the ashes of Stalinism, from decolonization projects whose radicalisms have long dissipated, and from the fragmentation brought on by identity politics, it would be a missed opportunity for it to “relinquish—or banish—the concerns which dominate Roy’s book, all of which are essentially issues of power, to the domain of the NGOs” (Wilson).

VELUTHA AND SMALL THINGS At the very core of The God of Small Things is the story of Velutha, who is killed sometime in the late 1960s after his love affair with Ammu—a member of the upper-caste family who employs him—becomes public knowledge.14 It is important to emphasize at the very beginning that, by placing Velutha’s story at “the core” of the novel, I am not making a value judgment about class and caste oppression against the other oppressions described by the novel, most prominently the gender oppression of female characters. Rather, I am suggesting that since Velutha’s tale of oppression underpins all of the other major narrative streams, the novel itself places class and caste oppression at the center of the intricate web of power it describes, in which oppressions overlap and reinforce one another. The fact that the centrality of Velutha’s story is not immediately apparent is due to the novel’s narrative strategies, oriented toward an implied audience of English-speaking readers whose identity is presumably non-Dalit and elite. The narrative constructs an audience that is unable to approach Velutha’s story except from a distance, slowly working through the trauma of Ammu’s family and discerning the site of violence and brutality. Let’s examine this apparent paradox. Much of the tale is focalized through the perspective of Rahel, the adult daughter of the now-deceased Ammu, who returns to her childhood home in Ayemenam, Kerala, sometime in the 1990s. This strategy grants a certain priority to the perspective of the elite employers of Velutha and his father and allows a careful consideration of women’s oppression. Ammu’s travails as the divorced mother of a cross-regional, crosscaste, and cross-religious marriage are apparently given center stage, as are, for instance, her mother’s experiences of domestic violence and her daughter Rahel’s experiences of ethnic marginalization and divorce in the United States. But all of these stories are linked together by the way in which they relate to Velutha’s, for the adult Rahel’s great trauma of emptiness—which

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her twin brother Estha experiences as extreme quietness—is that she and her family were complicit in Velutha’s death. The implied audience’s knowledge of Rahel—our growing understanding of the dark cloud that hangs over her head—is ultimately grounded upon discovering her guilt over Velutha, thus driving the narrative toward an unveiling of the events of the late 1960s. From Rahel’s perspective, one that the text does not contradict, Velutha’s secret affair is betrayed not only by those who have an interest in keeping him down—his bosses, the police—but also by intimates and allies like Comrade Pillai (the local communist leader), his father (who thought Velutha was getting too “uppity” for a Dalit), and Estha (who was told he had to choose between saving Velutha and saving his mother). Velutha’s brilliant smile is smashed and inverted by six free-swinging cops in thick, hob-nailed boots —but it is friendly elits who lead the police to their target. The murder is repeatedly represented as the result of the collusion between history, the state, tradition, and ruling elites of all sorts. A complex hierarchy of perpetrators and victims is constructed, with Velutha positioned at the extreme end of powerlessness by virtue of his caste and class. And yet the narrative does not allow one to minimize the other oppressions. The impact of what is called the Terror continues into the lives the characters: Ammu is driven out of her home and dies within four years; Estha never sees Ammu again and goes dumb for twenty-four years; and Rahel, herself divorced and distraught, looks like she will share her mother’s fate. Taken as a whole, The God of Small Things provides a complex picture of how power operates in the postcolonial world and how it impacts ordinary lives, identified metaphorically throughout the text as “small.” Let’s step back for a moment from the literary analysis and investigate the paradigm of power that The God of Small Things constructs as it relates to Roy’s first prominent essay, “The Greater Common Good.” The metaphor of small things and big things, in fact, is referenced across the spectrum of Roy’s writings, especially the ones immediately following the novel. “The Greater Common Good” describes its project as “the dismantling of the big,” a task that is taken up through what we might call “the recovery of the small.” A passage from the essay gives a sense as to how the paradigm works: It’s possible that as a nation we’ve exhausted our quota of heroes for this century, but while we wait for the 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-fi rst 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 fi nger-licking good to me. (The Cost of Living 12)

Beyond “Anticommunism” 53 A clear opposition is delineated here, with “the big” standing for the industrial, military, and political devastation of the twentieth century, the result of the failed, monolithic utopias of heroes with grandiose dreams, while “the small, no less heroic, stands for multiplicity and specificity, for real solutions to real problems. The small is also associated with femininity and playful excess. “Finger-licking good” can be read as both a euphemism for “fucking good” and an ironic invocation of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s motto, representing the big of monopoly capital. In response, a small shegod is invoked in lieu of the predictable, masculine, serious God. The “dismantling of the big,” then, appears as both an exhortation (“[w]e have to limit the damage”) and a possibility (what the new century may have “in store” for us).15 Against the histories and actions of states and ruling elites, Roy seeks to recover the stories of those who, like Velutha, are forced to wipe away even the traces of their own footprints. For instance, The God of Small Things explicitly narrates the story of Velutha as an allegory for the working of history (the big) in relation to histories (the small). When Ammu and Velutha see one another as sexual beings for the first time, the intense personal moment is described as a historiographical act, allowing mere individuals to rewrite the past and future: “Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard” (God of Small Things 167). But such agency is always delimited in Roy’s novel: “History’s fiends returned to claim them. To re-wrap them in its old, scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much” (168). Ultimately, the loopholes of history through which this cross-caste love has escaped are closed: the beating of Velutha takes place in the History House with the seven-year-old twins as a live audience. They witness: a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions [ . . . ] of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience [ . . . ] History in live performance. (292–3). The staccato produced by short, one-word sentences provides a soundtrack to the passage’s content. History gets the last word. Period. Is this, then, a Foucauldian or Althusserian model of the impossibility of agency and resistance in a world fully dominated by the powerful? Not quite. An important aspect of Roy’s paradigm is that despite its construction of history as a suffocating tale that only serves the interests of the powerful, it does not sit easily with postmodernist rejections of historicity. The novel’s epigraph, quoting John Berger, reads, “[n]ever again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one”; certainly, this seems to simply repeat the Lyotardian mantra of being suspicious of all metanarratives. But, like Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)—the Rushdie novel I

54 Pranav Jani consider to be least influenced by a postmodernist rejection of narrativity and truth claims—this novel is not simply about the power of storytelling in the abstract, but the power of telling the stories of the small, the oppressed subalterns. The novel has a defi nite truth that it seeks to divulge. refusal to discount narrativity itself opens the possibility for a subaltern-centered history. What postmodernism sometimes does not realize is that there are many ways to skin a metanarrative; Roy writes more in the tradition of Howard Zinn than of Jean Baudrilliard. While Roy certainly exhibits what might be called a postmodernist style (highlighting disjointed narrative streams, fragmented subjects, and hybrid literary forms) this needs to be distinguished from her fundamentally anti-postmodernist practice, expressed in the centrality of Velutha to the novel, of recentering the world around the small, all those dispossessed of an identity or a speaking voice” (Singh 133). Using the metaphor of footprints, for instance, The God of Small Things provides a history of caste oppression in Kerala, maintained across the Hindu/Christian divide. The novel describes how the big institutions of caste, church, and state joined hands to render Dalits invisible and untouchable. Employing a third-person narrator that freely substitutes itself for Rahel’s consciousness throughout, the text explains that Dalits “were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defi le themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan’s footprint” (God of Small Things 71). The narrative, however, does not end at the point of history’s annihilation of Dalit identity, symbolically carried out by the Dalit’s own hand (and replicated, in Velutha’s story, by his own father’s betrayal). Much like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who declares, “[I] did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility” (7), the novel attempts to subvert the silencing of the subaltern by inscribing the small with the power of omniscience and omnipresence. The God of Small Things can now be read as a text that sets as its political and aesthetic task the retracing of Dalits’ footsteps by exposing how they were wiped away. The role of the narrator and historian, therefore, becomes like that of an archaeologist: to put together “[l]ittle events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story” (God of Small Things 32). And the complex narrative pattern demands that the reader participate in a similar project when putting together the story of Velutha as refracted through Rahel and other narrators. Indeed, the novel ultimately places Velutha himself at the center of this narrative project, as he is rewritten as a storyteller and a nurturer of Small tales whose task of recovery mirrors and completes the novel’s own. From the descendant of backward-walking, footprint-sweeping Dalits, he becomes symbolically associated with the one-armed man of Ammu’s dream world who “left no footprints on the shore” (God of

Beyond “Anticommunism” 55 Small Things 208), who is the God of Small Things and the Keeper of Dreams. In reflecting on how well Velutha would play with her and the other children, Rahel says that Velutha: [i]nstinctively colluded in the conspiracy of [ . . . ] fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness [ . . . ]. It is after all so easy to shatter a story. [ . . . ] To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do (181). In this manner, Velutha is represented as the antithesis of the state and of history, the artist and storyteller who produces and provides shelter for alternative stories and histories. The key is that Roy does not simply describe the opposition of big and small things in a static way but offers a clear dynamic: while small stories can and should be recovered, they are not sufficiently strong to withstand and magically overcome the extreme violence of the big. At its best, the subaltern testimony that is produced by The God of Small Things achieves, as I have mentioned previously, what Ndebele calls the “rediscovery of the ordinary.” Ndebele puts forth a representational strategy that— like Gayatri C. Spivak’s criticism of the search for “authentic” subaltern voices—avoids the “literature of the spectacle,” but calls for representing the “dialectic of suffering and redemption” that makes up the everyday life of oppressed groups (54). Ndebele, however, wrestles with a question that is different than the one posed by postmodernists like Spivak: he is more concerned with gauging the paradigm of agency and structure through which a given writer seeks to represent the subaltern, not whether such a representation is ever possible. Keeping the extratextual subaltern referent and the struggle in which s/he participates clearly in view, Ndebele calls for making the “ordinary daily lives of people” the direct focus of representation because the ordinary “constitutes the active social consciousness of people” and is the basis on which a new consciousness can grow (55). In Velutha’s love for his carpentry amidst his exploitation by his boss, we see a perfect correspondence with the character of the miner in South African writer Joel Matlou’s “Man Against Himself,” in whom, according to Ndebele, “[t]he necessary vilification of exploitation [is] separated from the human triumph associated with work . . . which constitutes a positive value for the future” (54). Recovering the radical political paradigm of The God of Small Things ought to be distinguished from whether or not the Marxist or political critic agrees with that paradigm. Demanding that literary texts provide a clear political agenda for emancipation, as Frederick Aldama has convincingly argued, both overestimates what literature can do in the realm of society and underestimates what it actually accomplishes in the realm of the imagination. In this light, I now enter into a critique of Roy’s paradigm not to dismiss it, but to demonstrate that one can discover the political

56 Pranav Jani frameworks that a text has to offer and then raise questions about them separately, keeping the two stages of analysis relatively independent from one another. From a historical–materialist point of view, for instance, Roy’s big/small paradigm is ultimately nondialectical, in the same way that Thompsonian “histories from below” often are. The perspective “from below” affi rms the possibility of representation (one can be “a voice for the voiceless”) and, thus, alternative historiographies (that history can be rewritten from the perspective of the oppressed). This is certainly an advance on the pronouncements of postmodernism, which in the context of today’s revitalizing of the Left through the movements against war and neoliberalism, seem to increasingly betray their origins in the bleak period that followed the end of the movements of the 1960s. But despite this clear break from postmodernist epistemology and historiography, Roy’s paradigm runs the risk of delinking the oppression of the subaltern from the structures that create that oppression. While Roy’s writings offer a devastating and powerful critique of modernity and help to rally the forces of the Left whenever they appear, they can imagine no alternative to that modernity, locked as they are into a model that sees all big institutions as being so powerful that nothing remains beyond fi ghting the good fight to the best of one’s ability: mobilizing marches, calling for boycotts, and being a public intellectual. I say “beyond” as if what Roy is doing is commonplace; in fact, she stands at the forefront of leftist intellectuals who have made agitation, rather than careerism, their goal. Still, the view that “power” is a diffuse, omnipresent phenomenon that cannot be explained, and that big answers that attempt to grasp the totality are totalitarian, is ultimately at a remove from Marxist paradigms that place a critique of capitalism at the center of their analysis of oppression. Even though Roy’s “narrative from below” model is quite different from the postmodernist rejection of historicity itself—see Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe for a text that makes its aims quite explicit in this regard—it shares the limitation of only being able to describe differential locations of power struggles without imagining their transcendence. Roy’s essay, “The End of Imagination,” a critique of India’s nuclear tests in the late 1990s, is a case in point. Roy attempts to bridge the gap between struggle and transcendence with an imaginative yet uncritical individualism, escaping from the authoritarianism of the nation-state and its institutions by declaring herself an “independent mobile republic”: If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag. [ . . . ] Immigrants are welcome. You can help me design our flag. (The Cost of Living 109)

Beyond “Anticommunism” 57 Roy constructs a paradoxical utopia that is at once highly individualist (“I secede”) but not solipsistic (“Immigrants are welcome”). While the image is clearly progressive in its opposition to national chauvinism, it smacks of the sort of anarchistic individualism that has been common in Indian political thought, even in Gandhi’s model of village republics. This discourse has left Roy open to criticism from activists and scholars who have labeled her solutions as utopian, unscientific, and elitist. For instance, Gail Omvedt has accused Roy of representing “the voice of the eco-romanticists of the world, not that of the Adivasis, Dalits, and Bahujan farmers of the [Narmada] valley” (“Dams and Bombs-II”). Similarly, in critiquing celebrities who talk about the environment without having “any scientific training to speak of,” Jawaharlal Nehru University professor, Manoj Pant, deliberately twists the quotation from Roy above to attack her elite status: “I wish I too could declare myself ‘A republic of one with my cell phone in my hand.’ (Unfortunately, I don’t own a cell phone).” (“NGOs, Activism, and Economic Development”). Though I regard these criticisms as a bit unfair, one can see where they gain a foothold. The metaphor that had once represented the harmless escapism of a child in The God of Small Things—Estha is described as “A Mobile Republic” when he prepares to run away from Ammu’s anger (192)—now travels over to the essay and serves as a utopian alternative to the chaos of modernity. In Roy’s defense, it is not that she advocates such individualist declarations of freedom as an activist tactic or even indulges in a cult of individualism; quite the contrary. With her involvement in collective struggle, Roy is hardly taking a hands-off approach in which one preaches about how to change things without actually engaging in making that change. Yet, the sort of individualist impulse I have described emerges, I argue, because of a big/small paradigm in which the collective overcoming and transcendence of capitalism cannot be imagined. Like postmodernism, “history from below” offers no theory of revolution.16 Nevertheless, as I have emphasized, Marxist and political criticism cannot dismiss a novel because of disagreements with its underlying idea of social change. The strength of Roy’s aesthetic choices lies in that they consistently underline her theoretical paradigm. As if remaining faithful to Theodor Adorno’s exhortations against “the glorification of splendid underdogs” (28), the gap between the power of the big and the resistance of the small in Roy is depicted as an unbridgeable abyss that can never be filled by simple exhortations and romanticized visions of subaltern struggle. Every act of subaltern agency is circumscribed within a system of domination such that Roy is able to avoid the pitfalls of uncritical valorization and/ or victimization of the subaltern. Consider, for instance, the way in which the novel’s double ending constructs the culminating scene of Velutha and Ammu’s love-making. The words that end the novel—“Naaley. Tomorrow” (God of Small Things 321)—intimate a future that will bring emancipatory sexual fulfillment but actually point, simultaneously and inexorably,

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to a future of destruction and suffering. The narrative structure, by providing Velutha’s death in an earlier chapter and saving the lush and minutely detailed sexual encounter for the end, makes the implied reader a full participant in the paradox of this ending. S/he feels the elation of the promise of “tomorrow”—that the intense communion will continue—despite her/ his knowledge that, according to the linear narrative, “tomorrow” will never come.17 While Roy’s rejection of totalities points to a conceptual weakness—like the Subaltern Studies theorists, she is unable to imagine circumstances within which subalterns overcome their subalternity—her novel functions like a “history from below” that understands the limits of resistance even as it consistently rages against social oppression. Roy’s novel, therefore, needs to be seen in light of what the big/small paradigm accomplishes, and what it does not. As a rejection of the idea that representation, being impossible, is a site of violence, the big/small paradigm allows for the building of a counter-narrative centered on Velutha. While that narrative is not one in which the oppressed become victorious, its power lies in the process by which it reads against the grain of history, exposing the processes of erasure that it employs, and reconstructing an alternative. However, as all big things are always already marked as threats, Roy’s paradigm forecloses any moments of revolution and transcendence. The absence of a dialectic in the big/small paradigm leads to some contradictory symbolism around communism itself.

REPRESENTATIONS OF COMMUNISM Ahmad claims that Roy’s rejection of communism makes her “representative of the social fraction whose particular kind of radicalism she represents” (108). But while Ahmad disparages this “kind of radicalism,” I am arguing that in the context of the new configurations of the post-Cold War Left, carefully distinguishing between various non-Marxist radicalisms for the purpose of clarity and dialogue remains quite important for critics of postcolonial writing. In terms of The God of Small Things, this means analyzing the novel’s representations of communism in light of its own ideological paradigm, not against the grid of the critic’s own political views. In terms of the broader question of Roy’s “kind of radicalism,” it means engaging more honestly with the fact that an Indian and global Left exists with serious criticisms of Indian communism and its visions. These two different kinds of analyses—of the novel’s representations of communism and of the CPI(M) itself—need to be pursued and brought together, but not conflated. Regardless of how we ultimately understand the novel with regard to its real-world political affiliations, a close reading forces us to concede that its criticism of communism stands as a marker of its progressive and leftist politics—the rejection of a big idea that masquerades as the redeemer of the small but actually helps to crush it. Indeed, as becomes

Beyond “Anticommunism” 59 evident, the critique is forceful but nuanced: it emerges from a perspective that understands the important role communists have played but feels deeply betrayed by it. This is not the same as the anticommunism prevalent among post-Cold War elites. On the surface, the basic sense that The God of Small Things is anticommunist in the usual way seems to be true. Roy treats E.M.S. Namhoodiripad irreverently in the text (“with spite,” Ahmad says [104]), and pokes fun at the ruling party whenever it can. For instance, one passage points out that the greater part of the damage to the garden of Baby Kochamma—Ammu’s vindictive spinster aunt—had been done by the weed that people called the Communist Patcha, “because it flourished in Kerala like Communism” (God of Small Things 27). Toward the end of the novel, Comrade Pillai’s moral and political bankruptcy suggests that communists are corrupt and use whatever political rhetoric they need to get ahead. Described as a “professional omeleteer” (15)—someone who knows that making omeletes requires cracking some eggs—Comrade Pillai opportunistically shifts his position on caste as needed and secures his social status in the community at whatever cost.18 Comrade Pillai and the leaders of workers’ unions in a communist-led state are portrayed, cynically, as “mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine” (248). There is no effective difference, in this portrayal, between communist leaders of struggles and police officers. But the text itself offers up complexities around the issue of communism that the third-person narrator—effusive on so many other issues—does not necessarily explain or gloss in any way. For instance, when describing the communist-led march that swarms around the family car on the way to see The Sound of Music, the narrator dismisses some common theories used to explain the deep roots of communism in Kerala. Some say, the narrator reports, that the relative preponderance of Christians in southwestern India allowed for an easy replacement of “God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, and the Church with the Party”—but, the omniscient voice notes, most Syrian Christians were landlords and factory owners who opposed and did not encourage the communists (God of Small Things 64). Others say that Kerala’s high literacy rate may have attracted people to communism—but the high literacy level, the novel explains, “was largely because of the Communist movement” (64, original emphasis). Given that the attack on Roy precedes from a reading that conflates the flesh-and-blood author’s opinion with that of the implied author and thirdperson narrator of the text, let me also emphasize that the third-person narrator’s recognition of the good that the CPI(M) has done in Kerala is an opinion that the real author herself shares. A comment to interviewer Maya Jaggi illustrates this. After moving to Delhi and seeing how elites treated servants and workers, Roy says: “Kerala is a much more egalitarian society. Marxism gave the poor man dignity, if nothing else. It did a lot of good”

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(Jaggi). That Roy sharply critiques communism despite her approval of the reforms it brought calls for a more serious reading of her position, as well as that of the novel, with regard to the CPI(M). It is when the narrator divulges the “real secret” of communism’s growth in Kerala that we comprehend the depth of the novel’s stinging critique: Communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy. (God of Small Things 64) The passage contains the roots of the text’s main criticisms of the communists: that they were tied to upper castes and did not fight either against caste or communal divides, and that they ultimately never challenged the system itself. The narrator almost sneers when describing how, after E.M.S., “the flamboyant Brahmin high priest of Marxism in Kerala,” became Chief Minister of Kerala in 1957, the communists “found themselves in the extraordinary—critics said absurd—position of having to govern a people and foment revolution simultaneously” (God of Small Things 64–5). Clearly, despite the objectivist veneer of the description, the third-person voice is among the “critics,” for this representation of the origins of communism and its compliance with caste hierarchies, established early in the novel, sets the stage for Comrade Pillai’s betrayal of Velutha. When Velutha comes to Pillai for help after his intercaste affair is exposed, the latter gravely informs Velutha that the Party would not support him against his employer since it “was not constituted to support workers’ indiscipline in their private life” (God of Small Things 271). These are the passages that spark the ire of the CPI(M), and we can safely call the narrator’s severe criticism of the communists as being that of the implied author, too, as no contrary opinion that might validate the communists is really given voice in the novel. By this point, though, it has become clear that whatever else may be said of the novel’s representation of the CPI(M), its criticism emerges from a leftist perspective, which argues that Indian communism counterposes class to caste and disregards the long oppression of Dalits. Regardless of what one think about this position, in the universe and logic of the novel, Comrade Pillai has become a functionary of the big, one of “history’s henchmen” (God of Small Things 292). To dismiss this position as reactionary or to patronize it as “petty bourgeois radicalism” without recognizing the perspective from which it emanates is, in fact, to risk proving the point: narratives of caste and gender oppression matter less than defending the party. From outside of the literary–critical analysis, one can ask a different question: Why is it that a progressive and leftist novel that is not dismis-

Beyond “Anticommunism” 61 sive of struggle and resistance is nevertheless hostile to Indian communism? The fact is that the novel’s position on Indian communism is shared by many on the Indian Left, including Indian Marxists. The history of Indian communism, according to these perspectives, is the history of a largely reformist movement that has become part of the status quo in the states in which it has power. Radical splits from the original CPI, such as the CPI(M) in 1964 and the CPI(ML) in 1967, were either brought into the fold of reformist (mostly electoral) politics, annihilated by repression, or reduced to isolated terrorist groups. As Ross Mallick argues in Indian Communism, the success of Indian communists in a capitalist democracy dominated by middle and upper classes meant their interests were often opposed to the radical actions of poorer sections of society. The landed peasantry—inherently conservative and reformist—became the basis for communist votes, for it could deliver lower class votes through its traditional structures of power and have its interests met by a party that no longer needed radical, mass actions to remain in power (Mallick 14). The narrator’s contention in The God of Small Things that the Party survived in Kerala by ignoring backward social ideas in practice while rhetorically fighting them—“never challenging them, never appearing not to” (God of Small Things 64)—reflects Mallick’s analysis almost word-for-word by arguing that “the CPM abandoned the lower classes in practical terms even while claiming they represent them in rhetoric” (Mallick 14). Indeed, the contradiction between the CPI(M)’s interests as a ruling party and those of lower class militants often came to a head; in the most extreme case in West Bengal (where the CPI[M] has ruled longest), Mallick contends that “hundreds of untouchables and tribal peoples have been killed by Communist policemen trying to control the radical movements” (16). Achin Vanaik writes further that when the leftist parties have participated in the “new social movements” around caste and gender egalitarianism, they have too often behaved as if the economic is the only reality or invariably the most important one [ . . . ]. Thus the legitimacy of autonomous organization by Dalits or women is often denied and the approach of leftists towards such movements essentially manipulative and paternalistic, focusing on giving them the “correct class line” which, of course, they are best able to provide as a result of their “superior” analysis of Indian reality. No wonder participants in such movements look upon traditional left organizations with suspicion. (200) Those who defend the CPI(M) need to come to terms with how real political disagreements around fighting social oppression have laid the ground for the “anticommunism” of left-wing intellectuals. The charges that Roy, through the narrator, lays at the door of the CPI(M) cannot

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be simply dismissed by asserting, for instance, that “it is quite implausible that a Communist trade union leader would actively conspire in a murderous assault on a well-respected member of his own union so as to uphold caste purity” (Ahmad 105). Wilson argues, in fact, that: [t]he failure of some on the left to grasp the significance of [Roy’s progressive politics] springs partly from narrow sectarianism, but also partly from an inability to grasp the importance of patriarchy, the main focus of Roy’s attack, to the reproduction of capitalism.19 These are undoubtedly ideological questions and are open to debate and discussion. The problem is that, rather than engaging the debate that the novel foregrounds, the CPI(M)-affi liated critique dismisses it out of hand. In fact, for a political or Marxist critic to see red when reading the novel ultimately means that they are reading it inadequately. For instance, perusing the entire gamut of representations of communism in The God of Small Things reveals that the representation of Indian communism in the novel is quite paradoxical. Despite being vilified by the third-person narrator, communism also emerges as the marker of freedom in the novel, e.g., Velutha participates in the Party’s rallies, Estha uses Velutha’s “Marxist” flag to mark his independence (answering affi rmatively to Rahel’s question, “Are we going to have to become a Communist?” [God of Small Things 191]), and communism is key to the critique of Baby Kochamma’s class position. The march—the centerpiece of the novel’s discussion of communism—exemplifies the ambiguities of Roy’s representation of it. From the outset, the representation of the march is mixed, alternating between an ironic tone consistent with the reading of the novel as “anticommunist” and one that bears a real sympathy for the communistaffi liated marchers’ plight. The family car—with Chacko driving, Ammu in the front seat, and Baby Kochamma sitting between Rahel and Estha in the back—is held up on its trip to Abhilash Talkies by a march led by the Travancore-Cochin Marxist Labour Union. Although the march is dismissed as cheap theater—“part of [the] process” of “harnessing anger for parliamentary purposes” with the Communist “orchestra . . . petitioning its conductor [the Communist government]”—the paddy workers’ demands for lunch breaks, raises, and for a stop to caste discrimination in the workplace are represented as genuine (God of Small Things 66–7). As vehicles on the road become transformed into “islands in a sea of people” and the march engulfs them, the atmosphere in the family car gathers like a tense fi st. The contradictory portrayal of communism continues. First, we have a continuation of Ammu’s mockery of her brother Chacko’s pretensions at being a Marxist despite his exploitation of workers (multiplied for women workers through sexual harassment) as a factory boss. When Chacko advises everyone to roll up the windows, Ammu asks, “Why not join them, comrade?” (62); when her

Beyond “Anticommunism” 63 Cambridge-educated brother gets angry at a protester who punches the hood, Ammu says, “How could he possibly know that in this old car there beats a truly Marxist heart?” (68). And yet, the narrator does not dismiss the march, but recognizes “an edge to [the] anger that was Naxalite, and new” (67). 20 The march is described in glowing terms as a site for utopian solidarity and change: it brings together male and female paddy workers, “party workers, students, and the laborers themselves. Touchables and Untouchables” (67). The residual irony in this last statement, if any, is more about foreshadowing the demise of this unity rather than any “anticommunism.” At this moment, two events happen, apparently unrelated, but which the narrative (via Baby Kochamma) ties together neatly. First, Rahel sees Velutha in the march, hoisting a red fl ag and with “angry veins in his neck” (God of Small Things 68). Excited, she rolls down the window, sticks her body out, and calls to him; Velutha, surprised, quickly disappears into the mass of people. As her mother fiercely hauls her into the car, Rahel, also surprised, wonders why everyone doubts her claim to have seen Velutha (68); it is only after catching Estha’s thought signals that she pretends not to have seen him (77). The car and the march act as the symbols and guardians of class boundaries in the scene, forbidding cross-class alliances between friends when the lines are drawn so sharply. Ammu whisks Rahel into the car; Velutha steps away and tries to avoid recognition. In describing the second incident involving the march, however, the novel achieves its most brilliant depiction of ruling-class interests and fear. As marchers swarm the car and red fl ags fi ll the air—and the possibility emerges that the workers might breach the elite space of the vehicle—Baby Kochamma becomes uncontrollably nervous. “Terror, sweat, and talcum powder [blend] into a mauve paste between Baby Kochamma’s rings of neckfat” as she fantasizes about the possibility of meeting the violent Naxalites who were featured in recent newspaper reports (God of Small Things 76). Soon enough, the marchers open Rahel’s unlocked door and crowd in to take a look at the family. Drawn to Baby Kochamma’s frightened look, they name her Modadali Mariakutty (“Landlord Maria”) and make her wave a red fl ag (later to become Estha’s) saying Inquilab Zindabad, “Long Live the Revolution!” (76–7). Humiliated, Baby Kochamma focuses all her fury on Velutha; in her imagination, it was he who had handed her the fl ag, who had named her Modadali Mariakutty, and who had laughed at her (78). This animosity ultimately seals Velutha’s fate. But Ammu’s political feelings are about the march are different, and they emerge only later, as we witness the beginning of her attraction to Velutha. Seeing Velutha play with Rahel in the woods on the side of the house—just as history is getting caught off-guard, as I described earlier—we are told that Ammu

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The march and the characters’ different reactions to it correspond to the very different representations of communism in the text, including those that are not explicitly portrayed as part of the text’s debate with communism. On the one hand, the march is run by the CPI(M), the rulers of the state and the representatives of the big, and the text does not hesitate to suggest, ironically, that the entire event is orchestrated. On the other hand, the narrator aligns Velutha, Ammu, and the children together with the march, and employs the march and the marchers themselves as tools to disrupt the ancient class hatreds of Baby Kochamma— the representative of the vilified ruling elite. Furthermore, the passage in which Ammu hopes that Velutha was in the march (perhaps explaining her abruptness to Rahel in the car) also aligns Ammu and Velutha politically, not simply physically, contradicting Ahmad’s claim that Ammu and Velutha “become pure embodiments of desire and [ . . . ] not a word of intelligent conversation passes between them” (105). As Brinda Bose suggests, the moment in which Ammu hopes that Velutha was in the march highlights her recognition of a “shared rage” that, indeed, makes it possible for her to “desire the Untouchable Velutha” (64). It is worth drawing out. The scene pairs the march’s class anger with Ammu’s rebellion against her marginalization for (1) choosing a husband; (2) choosing one of the “wrong” religion; caste, and ethnicity; and (3) divorcing him. The economic, social, and personal are linked here in a productive way, operating in contrast to communism, but also in a scenario created by communist agitators. Wilson’s reading of the politics of the march episode is superb, as she argues that Roy’s originality lies in the way she manages to show us the interconnections between the deep contradictions within this family and those between the social class they belong to and the working people, as she gradually lays bare the tensions beneath the idyllic and nostalgic vision of a 1960s family outing to that clean, white cinematic fantasy, “The Sound of Music.” Significantly, the narrative itself does not explicitly highlight these links as an uncovering of class relations, which would require recognition of the centrality of class to the novel and, in turn, would problematize its representation of Marxism (which, for Roy, equals communism) and its paradigm of big things and small things. Roy’s conceptual framework

Beyond “Anticommunism” 65 does not allow the paradox she presents to be examined. Still, there can be no greater example than the march to show how strongly Velutha and the marginal voices of the novel are symbolically connected with communism, problematizing, then, a simple reading of the novel as “anticommunist.”

CONCLUSION: BEYOND SMALL THINGS The political contributions of The God of Small Things are important to understand the place of the postcolonial Indian English author today. By drawing out the real economic and social relations between the different characters in the novel and, in effect, the “truth” of social oppression, Roy “comes down squarely—if perhaps unconsciously—in favor of a materialist” reading of the questions of gender and caste, as opposed to a postmodernist rejection of structured hierarchies, subjectivities, and material relations (Wilson). 21 As I have attempted to show, this develops on the narrative level around Velutha, as well as on the ideological level around the questioning of communism. From this perspective, it becomes clear that the text’s political paradigm is more complicated and progressive than its CPI(M)-affi liated critics have supposed. One aspect of the novel’s “anticommunism,” for instance, is an excitement about rank-and-fi le workers, a fi rm support of their struggle against bureaucracy, and a critique of narrow class politics that is inattentive to gender, sexual, and caste oppression. In particular, the development of the Dalit protagonist is superb and groundbreaking in the genre of the postcolonial Indian English novel. 22 While the novel’s position, to some extent, does represent the “particular kind of radicalism” of the contemporary cosmopolitan elite (Ahmad 108), the content of that radicalism is rapidly changing in light of a resurgence of activism around the environment, globalization, and war. Roy’s early essays translated the political paradigm of big things and small things across genres, from the space of literature to that of nonfiction and political engagement. But her recent essays, on Iraq and Kashmir, for instance, have pushed beyond those limits, giving voice to a new, “shared rage” against the violent conditions and deteriorating living standards of people all over the globe. The “fruits of development,” as ironically described with regard to the Narmada Dam in “The Greater Common Good,” have continued to spread, engendering displacement, rising prices, hunger, brutal wars, and death for millions—along with tougher laws allowing greater surveillance by “history’s henchmen” (The Cost of Living 41). At the same time, a new radicalization oriented around mass actions in some places and small struggles in others is laboring to come into being. A central aspect of this new moment, not-yet-fully-emerged, is a confidence in subaltern agency and in the representation of that agency. Roy has

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been able to articulate the new radicalism of this moment in her political essays. I contend that this perspective is, in fact, rooted in The God of Small Things. In the meantime, literary and political critics who consider themselves Marxists need to work hard to establish Marxism as a set of ideas not only intimately linked with the struggles of the small, but also a theoretical and practical guide for dismantling the big. Without understanding that progressive and even class-oriented political and artistic projects often reject Marxism in the aftermath of Stalinism, Marxist theorists and activists risk cutting themselves off from the new movements sweeping the entire world. But when they—we—look beyond the apparent or real “anti-Marxism” of such leftist voices, we can see that they share many common perspectives in battling that new imperialism, as Roy and Ahmad undoubtedly do.

NOTES 1. I would like to thank the following colleagues for their critical comments at different stages of this article: Bill Keach and Neil Lazarus; Chad Allen, Frederick Aldama, and Jim Phelan; Nagesh Rao and Helen Scott; Maurice Stevens and the participants of the Ethnic Studies Workshop at Ohio State, where I presented this material in 2007; and the graduate students in my Postcolonial Studies seminar, Spring 2008. 2. Cited in “EMS Attacks Literary Content of Arundhati Roy’s Novel.” The Rediff piece reports on, and presumably translates, an article that E.M.S. published in Deshabhimani, the CPI(M)’s Malayali newspaper. The audience for the article, in other words, would be a CPI(M)-friendly one that (1) has a direct interest in Roy’s portrayals (The God of Small Things is set in a town in Kerala); and that (2) is susceptible to cultural–nationalist critiques of “the West” and English-language texts given the politics of language and location in postcolonial India. 3. I call Frontline “CPI(M)-friendly” not only because it has regularly articles and columns by CPI(M) leaders and intellectuals, but also because even its journalistic articles—usually very critical and hard-hitting—rarely interrogate CPI(M) policies and positions. 4. For more information on Roy’s involvement with anti-dam activism, see the webpage of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) at www.narmada.org. Roy has self-consciously used her marketability as a prize-winning novelist to draw the attention of international media circuits to the fight against the dam. She has lectured around the world, written lyrical and polemical essays on the human and environmental impact of the Project, donated all of her Booker Prize money to the anti-dam movement, and marched alongside affected villagers and activists, even getting arrested along with five hundred others at a protest on January 11, 2000. 5. Frontline favorably covered Roy’s work with Dalit literacy and writing workshops in the late 1990s and has continued to produce articles by and about Roy. For instance, see both R. Madhavan Nair’s article on Roy’s solidarity with Dalit literary programs, and “A Novel Gesture.” 6. In an article on Roy and the politics of genre, Nagesh Rao examines how the Western multiculturalist academy has constructed The God of Small Things

Beyond “Anticommunism” 67

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

as a “safe” text, transmuting a stereotypically lush, postcolonial femininity, while Roy’s hard-hitting essays are largely avoided. I am using “the subaltern” in the same broad, descriptive way that “the people” has been used, as a reference to those who are oppressed and marginalized in various societies. I am not, however, giving the term the theoretical value attributed to it by Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, and others. Rather, following the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, I recognize the fundamental class and social divisions that bifurcate even those groups that might be considered “subaltern” in a given situation. The article appeared in Liberation, a publication of CPI (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation, a party that is critical of the CPI(M). While this political context is important to consider, the paper is so deeply engaged with the novel on a textual level that it deserves consideration on literary–critical grounds. Cf. Bishnupriya Ghosh, When Bourne Across. Ghosh suggests that the meaning and work of Anglophone postcolonial literary texts—including The God of Small Things—are not necessarily overdetermined by the structures of the market that they inhabit. Ahmad seeks to differentiate between his critique of the novel’s political ideology and his reading of the novel as fiction, but the distinction between the two is lost through the essay. The current global fi nancial crisis, centered in the bursting of the housing bubble in the United States, offers an insight into how crucial the US economy has been to the rapid expansion of markets in China, India, Brazil, and Russia since 2002. See, for instance, the debate between Prabhat Patnaik and Sumit and Tanika Sarkar. See my review of Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial in Historical Materialism for a discussion of how “subalternity” was transformed from Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist usage to its postmodernist application in Subaltern Studies today. “Dalit,” meaning “the oppressed,” is how politically conscious members of the group often known as “untouchables” and “harijans” have referred to themselves since the 1960s and 1970s. And yet, Roy is quite critical of “Third-Worldism.” The big and small divide does not correspond to what antiglobalization protestors and theorists have often called the global North and the global South. Thus, she writes in “The Greater Common Good”: “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 forest, its fish, its meat, its eggs, its air—and redistributed them to a favored few” (Cost of Living 23). Of course, the CPI(M) may have a theory of revolution, but how does it bear on reality? As reported by The Hindu newspaper, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya himself emphasized in January 2008: “We have to accept capitalism [ . . . ] This is being realistic in a situation where there is no alternative” (“No Alternative to Capitalism”). The phrase, “There is no alternative,” of course, resonates in global political discourse from the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher era of the 1980s. Whereas Ahmad attributes the novel’s representation of sexuality as a mode of agency and hope to a bourgeois–individualist paradigm of understanding oppression and resistance, as described in a previous note, E.M.S. offers a reading that is positively reactionary. In the November 29, 1997 Deshabhimani article, as translated and summarized by Rediff on the Net, E.M.S. argues that the “deviant sexuality” found in The God of Small Things is an

68

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

Pranav Jani “inseparable part of bourgeois aesthetics” that reflects “the cultural decadence of bourgeois society.” One instance of “deviant” and “illicit” sexuality that this is the cross-caste sexual encounter between Ammu and Velutha— precisely the event, in other words, that the novel employs to draw the reader toward a critical rejection of gender and caste oppression. Through the essay, E.M.S.’s discourse on sexuality is indistinguishable from that of Sabu Thomas, the right-wing, Syrian Christian lawyer who tried to sue Roy because “the sexual deeds described in the book [would] corrupt readers’ minds” (Sreedharan). As Kalpana Wilson points out, Comrade Pillai’s ideas about fi ghting gender oppression are as slippery as his posturing against caste oppression. This is best expressed in his relations with his wife and mother, whom he simply ignores when he comes home, except to toss his sweaty shirt to his wife to wash. The scene in which Comrade Pillai’s wife, upon her husband’s prodding, “coyly acknowledg[es] her bigotry” is simply brilliant in displaying how caste and gender oppression are intertwined (God of Small Things 264). Ahmad’s comment about Roy—“[a]bout caste she writes with devastating precision; about class she seems not to be particularly concerned with those aspects which are not tied to caste” (108)—not only mirrors the artifi cial separation of caste and class that Vanaik talks about, but also dismisses the way in which class analysis is actually central to the novel. Besides Velutha, the novel highlights labor conditions at the pickle factory and describes the intersections of class and gender when describing the assault on Ammu by her ex-husband’s boss, the English owner of a postcolonial tea plantation. Ahmad remarks, that “Naxalite” becomes “somewhat of an all-purpose term in Roy’s fi ction,” the mark of the “truly revolutionary” (104). But the fl eeting reference to Naxalism does not constitute an endorsement of the position; rather, it stands in for a leftist voice that challenged, and was brutally suppressed, by the CPI(M) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like Bose and others, Omvedt also misreads Roy’s work as an expression of the postmodernist rejection of development: from “an Enlightenment faith in progress and rational human planning, we have come to a postmodernist questioning of development itself” (“Dams and Bombs-I”). But while Omvedt makes useful observations about Roy’s paradigm, she offers a leftist championing of development that is not sufficiently critical of it as a capitalist development. In contrast, Alice Truax suggests in her 1997 review—as many others have since—that the portrayal of Velutha as a faultless martyr is a result of an undeveloped political correctness, and perhaps even an exoticization of the Other. However, the way in which Velutha’s interiority is developed in the fi nal chapters of the novel reveals a much more complex representation.

WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Refl ections from a Damaged Life. London: New Left Books, 1974. Ahmad, Aijaz. “Reading Arundhati Roy Politically.” Rev. of The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. Frontline 14.15 (26 July–8 Aug. 1997): 103–8. Aldama, Frederick Luis. Postethnic Narrative Criticism. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003.

Beyond “Anticommunism” 69 Bose, Brinda. “In Desire and Death: Eroticism as Politics in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Ariel 29.2 (April 1998): 59–72. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. “EMS Attacks Literary Content of Arundhati Roy’s Novel.” Rediff On The Net 29 Nov. 1997. 25 Aug. 2008 . Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1995. Ghosh, Bishnupriya. When Bourne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. Jaggi, Maya. “An Unsuitable Girl.” Rev. of The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. Electronic Mail and Guardian: Review of Books 13 Aug. 1997. 30 Apr. 2000 Jani, Pranav. Rev. of Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi. Historical Materialism 11.3 (2003): 271–88. Jose, D. “Now, It Is EMS’s Turn to Slam Arundhati Roy!” Rediff On the Net 30 Aug. 1997. 25 Aug. 2008 . Mallick, Ross. Indian Communism: Opposition, Collaboration, and Institutionalization. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1994. Nair, R. Madhavan. “In Solidarity: Novelist Arundhati Roy Expresses Solidarity with the Cause of Dalits and Dalit Literature.” Frontline 16.3 (30 Jan.–12 Feb. 1999). 30 Apr. 2000 . “Nayanar Pours Scorn on God of Small Things.” Rediff On the Net 3 Nov. 1997. 25 Aug. 2008 . Ndebele, Njabulo S. The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1991. “No Alternative to Capitalism.” The Hindu 4 Jan. 2008. 25 Aug. 2008 . “A Novel Gesture.” Frontline 16.14 (3–16 July 1999). 30 Aug. 2008 . Omvedt, Gail. “Dams and Bombs-I.” The Hindu 4 Aug. 1999. 30 Aug. 2008 . . “Dams and Bombs-II.” The Hindu 5 Aug. 1999. . Pant, Manoj. “NGOs, Activism, and Economic Development.” Economic Times 28 Aug. 1999. 30 Aug. 2008 . Patnaik, Prabhat. “The Left and Its ‘Intellectual Detractors.’” Macroscan 12 Dec. 2007. 25 Aug. 2008 . Rao, Nagesh. “The Politics of Genre and the Rhetoric of Radical Cosmopolitanism; or, Who’s Afraid of Arundhati Roy?,” Prose Studies 30.2 (August 2008). 159–76. Roy, Arundhati. The Cost of Living. New York: Modern Library, 1999. . The God of Small Things. New York: Random House, 1997. Sarkar, Sumit and Tanika Sarkar. “Who is the Left?” Hardnews December 2007. 25 Aug. 2008 . Singh, Anita. “Margin at the Center: Reading of The God of Small Things.” The Fictional World of Arundhati Roy. Ed. R.S. Pathak. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2001. 132–6. Spivak, Gayatri C. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Sreedharan, Chindu. “Booker or Not, Arundhati’s Still In the Dock.” Rediff On the Net 15 Oct. 1997. 25 Aug. 2008 .

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Truax, Alice. “A Silver Thimble in Her Fist.” Rev. of The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. New York Times 25 May 1997. 25 Aug. 2008 . Vanaik, Achin. The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India. London: Verso, 1990. Wilson, Kalpana. “Arundhati Roy and the Left: For Reclaiming ‘Small Things.’” Rev. of The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. Liberation Jan. 1998. 25 Aug. 2008 .

5

The History House The Magic of Contained Space in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things Sara Upstone

Arundhati Roy’s own answer to the question, “What is the god of small things?” raises questions as to the importance of what may be termed “the small” in her celebrated and controversial novel: To me the god of small things is the inversion of God. God’s a big thing and God’s in control. The god of small things [ . . . ] whether it’s the way the children see things or whether it’s the insect life in the book, or the fish or the stars—there is a not accepting of what we think of as adult boundaries. This small activity that goes on is the under life of the book. All sorts of boundaries are transgressed upon. At the end of the fi rst chapter I say little events and ordinary things are just smashed and reconstituted, imbued with new meaning to become the bleached bones of the story. It’s a story that examines things very closely but also from a very, very distant point, almost from geological time and you look at it and see a pattern there. A pattern [ . . . ] of how in these small events and in these small lives the world intrudes. And because of this, because of people being unprotected, the world and the social machine intrudes into the smallest, deepest core of their being and changes their life. (WordsWorth Interview)1 Roy has been accused of apoliticism at times, writing “another narrative of postmodern immorality, perversity and irresponsibility” (Kumar 17). 2 Yet, what her answer illustrates is something very different: not a rejection of considerating of larger political issues, but rather a situation of these debates on the small scale. Such an approach, rather than diluting the political elements of the text, may in fact be seen to concentrate them, as they are seen to penetrate into the very heart of the lives of the individuals that Roy presents to us; as small things are “imbued with new meaning,” they provide a perfect example of Bhabha’s advocating of “a shift of attention from the political as a pedagogical, ideological practice to politics as the stressed necessity of everyday life—politics as a performativity” (15).3

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While God, “a big thing” that may be seen as a metaphor for official discourses, enters—“intrudes”—into the private lives of the inhabitants of Ayemenem, so the presence of a god of small things provides a counterpoint, a marginal voice of those disadvantaged as a result of age, race, gender, or class. The “small things” can be seen as more than the natural world over which man presides, or man in relation to God, as O.P. Mathur suggests (216). They also open up a far more political reading in which they become both the marginalized—the novel’s “liminal figures,” women, children, and untouchables—and the unseen (Nayar 237; Shukla 118–9). In engaging with such representation, Roy seems to refuse the obsession with large-scale geographies that preoccupies recent spatial studies, instead connecting to an alternative tradition that has reasserted the notability of more personal spaces.4 At the center of this argument are works such as Bryden and Floyd’s collection Domestic Space, which identifies sites of resistance in nineteenth-century homes, and Susan Stewart’s On Longing, which argues for the power of the miniature to transform. Such action evokes important theoretical positions ranging from alternative theories of space, such as those presented in Marcus Doel’s Poststructuralist Geographies, to Derridean “possibilities of overturning” and fluid concepts of inside and outside.5 Yet, Roy also shares here an affinity with postcolonial theory, for which small spaces have been at the center of the critique of colonial and neocolonial power structures, created at the level of the state or nation, but often felt at more personal levels. For bell hooks, reclaiming these sites is an important act of personal resistance, where the margin may become a space of “radical openness” (145) and the home a place with a “radical political dimension” (42). This calls into question the assertion by various critics that The God of Small Things is an entirely bleak novel, without hope or possibility, where the past is too “overwhelming” to allow resistance with any long-term impact (Barnabas 299).6 For the deference to small scales indicates a realm of oppression, certainly, but also a space that accommodates a new arena of resistance, overlooked by established authority. In the novel, Roy exhibits anger at the neglect of this intimate experience, the fact that: personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation (19). Such an anger may seem to be directed at those who fail to see the individual suffering that exists underneath all large-scale events, in particular, this is a criticism that may be applied to foreign governments’ handling of issues in the developing world. It is to challenge this imbalance, perhaps, that Roy has abandoned fiction in favor of more direct activism, exposing the

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personal stories behind the public event; in “The End of the Imagination,” she argues that: “Adivasis doesn’t really matter. Their histories, their customs, their deities are dispensible. They must learn to sacrifice these things for the greater good of the nation (that has snatched from them everything they ever had),” exposing how the god of “big” things has overshadowed the “small” (157). As the physical embodiment of this smallness, Roy presents us with various personal and contained spaces that come to represent the marginal position of those who inhabit or use them. Most notably, the houses that dominate her novel may be seen as metonymic of wider oppressions, but also suggestive of new sites of possibility. Personified, the Ayemenem House has an identity of its own that gives it significant status, a house that “wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat” (God of Small Things 1). Central to this is its ability to hold memories and a personal history at odds with official accounts—a small-scale, personal reflection of public life—with a garden that “was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives” that are not only animals, but also the marginal, unheard voices that it contains (1), where the loss of Sophie Mol “stepped softly around, (15)” a building that keeps Estha’s secrets for him. In their negative representation, the novel’s houses present an anticolonial, gendered, and caste-refl ective critique. In colonial discourse, a cult of domesticity represented the home as an ideal structure, its political role ironically being a denial of any political status, a space that would be carried into the twentieth century by Bachelard’s idealistic presentation of the home as “large cradle [ . . . ] enclosed, protected” (7).7 In contrast to this, Roy’s presentation of domesticity—centered upon the experience of Ammu at Ayemenem House—suggests a space where the oppressions of the outside are magnifi ed; the colonial ideal of the home is undercut. Such a house is clearly “not a home,” and what is hidden in colonial discourse—the fact that the division of public and private is an artifi cial divide in the service of particular groups—is exposed here through the house’s architecture, made tangible (Barnabas 300). Baby Kochamma, in “fear,” (God of Small Things 70) must keep the windows and doors locked in order to try and keep the world out; Mammachi has the back verandah closed in so that the river can no longer be seen from the windows; yet despite this, the house has a “river-sense” (God of Small Things 30) and, in defi ance of Baby Kochamma, “swollen cupboards creaked. Locked windows burst open” (God of Small Things 9). Here, gender, race, and caste issues are particularly prominent, and in conflict with Bachelard’s ahistorical representation, the politics of Kerala, its cultural specificities, its complex caste system, and an “exceptionally strict” social hierarchy, are built into the house’s foundations (Barnabas 302). Racism against cross-cultural relationships cannot be escaped from in the Ayemenem House, but rather, it is magnified, as Baby Kochamma

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proclaims Estha and Rahel “Half-Hindu Hybrids whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry,” denied belonging, as she reminds them that they live in the house “on sufferance [ . . . ] where they really had no right to be” (God of Small Things 45). Similarly, according to Filippo and Caroline Osella, the house indicates that the community has not benefited from supposed Communist reform (8). Vellya Paapen must go to the back entrance because “Pappachi would not allow Paravans into the house. Nobody would” (73). The Paapen’s Christianity unable to remove the stigma of their birth, in fact, makes them doubly denied, “casteless” so without their heritage, yet treated as if still belonging to their caste (74). A patriarchal space, Mammachi is “used to being beaten from time to time” (50) in the house and Ammu is “locked into her bedroom” (252). Indeed, in terms of gender, the house is no refuge for a woman who has no claim to it under property law, and Ammu is continually undermined by the authority that her brother Chako’s ownership allows him to exercise, as he declares, “‘what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is also mine’” (57). It is not this more obvious construction of the home as a place of danger—so prominent in the novel—that I would like to focus on here, however. For despite the novel’s recognition of the fallacy of an idealized home space, it is the positive potential of the invasion of politics into the home that has been overlooked in previous discussions of the novel. Roy is not nostalgic and she does not suggest that an ideal home would in any way have helped Ammu; indeed, the fact that such ideals so often serve caste, colony, or patriarchy means that they are inherently bound to the home’s oppressions. Instead, the novel’s oscillation between the two extremes of domestic space—safety and imprisonment—is what may be seen to preserve the space as a potential site of spiritual transformation and resistance, overturning its patriarchal connotations without reducing it to an idealized structure. The God of Small Things gives the small significance that means it is empowered, but recognizes that the political nature of such empowerment would be lost were it to eliminate all tensions. By the conclusion of events, the Ayemenem House is fi lled with dirt, a sign of its decay but also of its movement away from the colonial ideals its inhabitants once strove to conform to. In this way, such dirt is not simply a mark of degeneration, but also an acknowledgment of the true and subversive function of the house, a space of abjection that “disturbs identity, systems, order,” so that marginality offers previously denied potential (Kristeva 4). Such complexity echoes the construction of home as a personal but political site in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, in which the house is an equally prominent but equally ambiguous magical–realist structure. The shared strategy goes beyond this, and it is an approach to spatial representation that is often overlooked in commentaries that highlight the similarities between the two authors.8 In both cases, the house is re-visioned as a space larger that its architectural boundaries. In both cases, it is not only

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the house itself, but also the spaces within it, the even smaller and seemingly even less significant, that come to be subverted and privileged. Whereas in Midnight’s Children the properties of the nation are deferred into the house and then on to even smaller scales, so in The God of Small Things, “inanimate objects dominate” (Nayar 234). Rushdie’s influence here cannot be denied: the scene between Estha and Rahel in the pickle factory, Paradise Pickles and Preserves, in which problems are reduced to a culinary concoction, is a metafictional use of Rushdie’s own magic jars of chutney, leaking beyond their glass walls and resisting defi nition as banana jam is banned for being “ambiguous, unclassifiable” (Gods of Small Things 30). Yet undoubtedly the epitome of this kind of spatial interaction in The God of Small Things is the history house, a space that is yearned for throughout the novel and stands as ever-present but predominantly unseen background to its events. Like Toni Morrison’s slave-ship house in Beloved, the history house extends beyond both its physical and temporal boundaries in order to encapsulate far more significance in terms of memory and history than its limited structure seemingly allows. On the one hand, it is, like the Ayemenem House, a space that signifies oppression. It is in these terms that the history house has been commonly interpreted as a place that represents “moral corruption and spiritual degeneration,” (Barnabas 299). It is explicitly imperial, a “symbol of colonial authority” as the “Heart of Darkness” and the house of an “Englishman” with “map-breath’d ancestors” (Chanda 42). It is also reflective of India’s “communal divisions and conflicts,” where organized power in the form of the police force utilizes both neocolonial authority and patriarchal male physical strength (Ramraj 155). And yet, the way in which various characters interact with the house, and the use to which it is put, suggests an interruption of its official status, and, at times, a direct confrontation with the values it represents. In this way, the house is reclaimed from its colonial signification in the service of the margin, an entering of the center from the outside that, like Gibreel and Chamcha’s fall to London in The Satanic Verses, disrupts the official history and gives voice to the marginal. Cecile Oumhani has referred to this trend in the novel as an entering of “in-between spaces,” of which the History House, I feel, must be an exemplary example (85).9 The inhabitants of Ayemenem House are “trapped outside their own history [ . . . ] unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away” (God of Small Things 52) by colonial assimilation that has made them “adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.” (God of Small Things 53) Reclaiming the History House and uncovering the secrets that it, like all buildings, holds, when “history was like an old house at night,” (God of Small Things 52) means reclaiming fragments of that lost past, replacing History—the capitalized, official form—with history (52, 53, 52). This is an important distinction: Roy does not suggest a wholesale forgetting of the past; it is not that in all cases, history is an “awful burden,” but rather that an official large-scale history denies the significance of small-scale, intimate alternatives (Pathak 15).

76 Sara Upstone Chacko says that the house is locked, that the past is no longer available to the autochthonous citizens who would try and enter. But Estha, Rahel, Ammu, and Velutha do enter, giving Chako’s metaphor physical form. As Simon Barnabas notes, it is outside the History House, in defi ance of its offi cial connotations, that Velutha and Ammu fi nd “some of the most precious moments of their togetherness” (den Uyl 86): the linkage between caste development and increased control over sexual relations, so present in the Ayemenem House, becomes unraveled in this alternative domestic space (Barnabas 299). There is an element of successful resistance, as the couple reclaim the space for their own marginal positions. Such subversion is undoubtedly temporary, and the novel’s ending, in which the house returns to its negative signifi cation—further entrenched, as it is bought by a “five-star hotel chain”—suggests a limited impact (God of Small Things 125). After its purchase, the house moves further toward a false, offi cial history—here actually capitalized in the text—than ever before, made “real” by investment and the imagined histories of tourists. Once again, the marginal is denied in favor of a resurrection of the idealization of home, and even of colonialism: Toy Histories for rich tourists to play in. Like the sheaves of rice in Joseph’s dream, like a press of eager natives petitioning an English magistrate, the old houses had been arranged around the History House in attitudes of deference. “Heritage,” the hotel was called (126).10 And yet, the fact that such an interruption does take place suggests the hope of further disruptions, and asserts the power of individuals to make changes to their circumstances, however limited. Indeed, even in the wake of the fi nal regression back toward colonialism, Roy’s narrative reminds us that the power remains, that the marginal is not entirely lost or silenced: “Something lay buried in the ground. Under grass. Under twenty-three years of June rain. A small forgotten thing. Nothing that the world would miss. A child’s plastic watch with the time painted on it” (God of Small Things 127). A watch: marking a different measure of time than that captured offi cially, either by the Ayemenem authorities or the hotel management. Moreover, the subversion of the History House is not without a longterm impact; the lesson of the History House inspires other spatial transgressions. While Estha and Rahel may mark their defi ance of the caste laws by entering Velutha’s house even though “they were forbidden,” he cannot enact a reciprocal movement (God of Small Things 78). Instead, Velutha did not just make love with Ammu, he ‘Entered’ her, reclaiming the right to space so denied his father at the back door of the Ayemenem House, penetrating a space even more intimate, and, as the punishment of Velutha’s substantiates, more subject to social hierarchies

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(78). Moreover, it is within the context of these small-scale changes that Rahel and Estha ultimately make the greatest subversion by breaking the incest taboo—as Ammu and Velutha break the Love Laws—and asserting their identity on the most intimate spatial scale. The body, where spatial boundaries are forever broken as they are united as one entity, individual figures of the past, a “Them” that can no longer be connected to the present (3). Such bodily transformations are always present. In what is again a Rushdiesque strategy reminiscent of Saleem’s escape in the “basket of invisibility” (Midnight’s Children 385), Estha manages to fold the space around him, to shrink his body until he “occupied very little space in the world,” (God of Small Things 11) “to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye” (10). To manipulate space in such a way is to fi nd a refuge from the harshness of the world when there is no physical structure that will hide you; a resistance that can always be enacted because it relies only upon control of the self. Here, Roy presents us not with idealism, but with a real-world strategy. Osella and Osella, for example, in their study, Social Mobility in Kerala, note the ways in which change has frequently been developed at the level of “everyday reality” in which, in contemporary Kerala, caste distinctions may be “challenged, reversed, discarded or openly toyed with” (221). They identify this as a “micropolitics,” “the political in the personal,” the beginnings of which may be registered in the characters’ tentative, but powerful, fi rst steps. The breaking of spatial liminalities that occur in the novel are echoed in the structure that Roy employs; her wandering, nonlinear narrative proclaims the importance of disrupting continuities and expectations at the level of the text, itself a space of subversion. In re-visioning what are traditionally seen as small, intimate, and contained spaces and sites of political and large-scale negotiations, The God of Small Things does not reject the importance of such structures; we still have a sacred memory space, but one that no longer denies the oppressions evident in domesticity that are obscured in readings of the home, such as those relied upon by colonial discourse and epitomized in the writings of Bachelard. Presenting a history that “would lurk forever in ordinary things,” small spaces are, for Roy, the important beginnings of communal resistance; a coming together that can only begin in the experiences of individuals (God of Small Things 55). Thus, while we may be inclined to see The God of Small Things as a hopeless novel, there is optimism in the fact that while characters may be unable to re-vision their lives at national level, their deferral of such subversions to seemingly “smaller” spaces offers some opportunity for the marginal to assert its voice. Ultimately, the relative size of spaces in terms of their signifi cance is inversely proportional to their physical size: a use of space that situates The God of Small Things within an important movement in postcolonial literature and postmodern spatial theory.

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NOTES 1. I am indebted to Jon Simmons for providing me with this quotation and its source via his website, www.arundhatiroy.org.uk. 2. Cf. A.N. Dwivedi’s “Setting the Scale Straight: Socio-Political Concerns in Arundhati Roy’s Fiction” 130–140, and R.S. Pathak’s “The Fictional World of Arundhati Roy” 17. 3. This has begun to be partly recognized: see, for example, Kumar 67, Pathak 18, and Shukla 109. 4. Beyond the extensive focus on the nation that continues to dominate much geographical and cultural theory, see, for example, the works of Edward Soja—Postmodern Geographies (1989); Thirdspace (1996); and Postmetropolis (2000)—which note neither the home nor the body. Also, the current interest in the city as reflected in Richard Lehan (1998), Sallie Westwood and John Williams (1997), and Malcolm Miles et al. (2000). 5. See Marcus Doel (1999), Jacques Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy 49, and Of Grammatology 27–73. 6. See also Kumar, who argues that “small things do not create waves, they cause apples” (69). 7. See, for example, Janice N. Brownfoot, “Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya: A Study of European Wives in a British Colony and Protectorate 1900–1940” (1984); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987); and Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (1999). 8. Ramraj, for example, does not emphasize the spatial, or note at all the very obvious reference in Roy’s use of the pickle factory (151–60). 9. See also Nayar 238. 10. There is historical truth in such a representation: Kerala has been “aggressively marketed” as a tourist destination (Osella and Osella 17).

WORKS CITED Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Barnabas, Simon G. “Ayemenem and the Ayemenem House: A Study of the Setting of The God of Small Things.” Arundhati Roy. The Novelist Extraordinary. Ed. R.K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige, 1999. 296–306. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brownfoot, Janice N. “Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya: A Study of European Wives in a British Colony and Protectorate 1900–1940.” The Incorporated Wife. Ed. Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener. London: Croom Helm, 1984. 186–210. Bryden, Inga, and Janet Floyd, eds. Domestic Space. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999. den Uyl, Marion. Invisible Barriers: Gender, Caste and Kinship in a Southern Indian Village. Trans. Aileen Stronge. Utrecht: International Books, 1992. Chanda, Tirthankar. “Sexual/Texutal Strategies in The God of Small Things.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 20.1 (1997): 38–48. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester P, 1982.

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. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Doel, Marcus. Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. Dwivedi, A.N. “Setting the Scale Straight: Socio-Political Concerns in Arundhati Roy’s Fiction.” Arundhati Roy’s Fictional World. Ed. A.N. Dwivedi. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 2001. 130–40. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End P, 1990. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Kumar, Akshaya. “Arundhati Roy’s Creative Dynamics: Prettifying the Small.” The Fictional World of Arundhati Roy. Ed. R.S. Pathak. New Delhi: Creation, 2001. 60–9. Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature. An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories. City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Mathur, O.M. “Arundhati Roy’s Paradoxical Celebration of Smallness.” Arundhati Roy. The Novelist Extraordinary. Ed. R.K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige, 1999. 215–21. Miles, Malcolm, Tim Hall, and Iain Borden, eds. The City Cultures Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: Vintage, 1997. Nayar, Pramod K. “Troping Silence: Oversignification and Liminality in The God of Small Things.” Arundhati Roy. The Novelist Extraordinary. Ed. R.K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige, 1999. 234–40. Osella, Filippo, and Caroline Osella. Social Mobility in Kerala: Modernity and Identity in Conflict. London: Pluto Press, 2000. Oumhani, Cecile. “Hybridity and Transgression in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 22.2 (2000): 85–91. Pathak, R.S. “The Fictional World of Arundhati Roy.” The Fictional World of Arundhati Roy. Ed. R.S. Pathak. New Delhi: Creation, 2001. 9–28. Ramraj, Victor J. “Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie’s Postmodern India.” Arundhati Roy. The Novelist Extraordinary. Ed. R.K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige, 1999. 151–60. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo, 1997. . “The End of Imagination.” The Cost of Living. London: Flamingo, 1999. 117–62. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Picador, 1982. . The Satanic Verses. London: Vintage, 1998. Shukla, Sheobhushan. “The Big and the Small: An Interpretation of The God of Small Things.” Arundhati Roy’s Fictional World. Ed. A.N. Dwivedi. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 2001. 109–20. Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies. London: Verso, 1989. . Thirdspace. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. . Postmetropolis. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Stewart, Susan. On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Westwood, Sallie, and John Williams, eds. Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory. London: Routledge, 1997. WordsWorth Interview with Arundhati Roy. WordsWorth 15 June 1997. 1 Aug. 2002. .

6

City and Non-City Political and Gender Issues in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones Joel Kuortti

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones emerged in the cinematic field at a time when the fi rst major Indian TV hit had just begun to air: Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan TV serial (1987), with its seventy-eight episodes (Ganti 217) and an “estimated astounding 80 to 100 million viewers” (Desai 114), was an unsurmountable success.1 Arundhati Roy wrote the script of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones in 1988 based on her own experiences at the School of Architecture and Planning in Delhi. It was shot the same year and screened on Indian national television, the Doordarshan, only once. Roy comments on the response: “It was screened late one night on TV (Doordarshan) when most decent folks were fast asleep. The earth didn’t move. The world didn’t stop and take notice. Film festivals ignored it. Reviews were mixed” (“Foreword” v). So, unlike Ramayan, the film did not reach audiences, and similarity Roy had previously tried her hand at script writing without much luck, the film did not get a follow-up, either. 2 In this chapter, I give a textual analysis of the script on which Suchitra Behal comments that “it aptly conveyed the frustrations and idealistic dreams of a generation” (par. 11). The recently published screenplay has not merited much discussion, so it is worthwhile to see how it conveys these dreams. However marginal the film may have been, it marked one phase in Roy’s career. She does not see her career as a steadily developing path, but as different ways of expressing how she sees the world: “An architectural thesis, a film script, a novel, a political essay—these are diverse ways of expressing an evolving political vision” (“Foreword” x). There is also an interesting foreboding at the end of the film when, after the film itself has ended, there are still photographs of the major characters, and their further careers are outlined. This is said about Radha (played by Arundhati Roy herself): “Gave up architecture to become a writer. Before she fi nished her fi rst novel she was drowned swimming off the coast of Gopalpur-on-Sea on 24 November 1983” (Annie 108). Here we have another autobiographical clue, as the date of Radha’s death falls on Roy’s own birthday, 24 November (Brians 166).

City and Non-City 81 Even if the fi lm may not have been a pet for fi lm festivals, as Roy reports, it did win two prizes at the Indian National Film Festival in 1989: Best Screenplay and the Best Film in Languages Other Than Those Specified in Schedule VIII of the Indian Constitution. Of the latter, Roy makes the following comment, with an ironic reference to her 1997 Booker Prize: “Way more fun, wouldn’t you say, than the boring old Booker?” (“Foreword” xii).3 Language is indeed one of the most prominent features of the screenplay, and I will make passing comments on it. But as both the film and the screenplay are not well known, it is worthwhile fi rst to outline the main features of the plot of this comic film.

THE SCREENPLAY The film was directed by Roy’s partner, Pradip Krishen, and is set in the year 1974. It depicts the life of architecture students preparing to submit their architectural theses in their (presumably) final year. The Annie of the title is one Anand Grover (played by Arjun Raina), who has studied at the National Institute of Architecture (a fictional institution based on the actual School of Architecture and Planning in Delhi) for eight years, and is repeating the fi nal year for the fourth time. The cryptic expression “giving it those ones” in the title of the film refers to Annie’s desire to submit to the fi nal thesis panel his idealistic plan to grow fruit orchards next to the vast Indian railway-line system so that the feces distributed in the vicinity of the railway tracks would fertilize the crops (Annie 14, 32). But when the principal of the school, Y. D. Billimoria (played by Roshan Seth), once more harasses Annie in front of the class, calling the hippie-like, hairy, perennial student ironically by the name “Animal Farm,” he decides to drop idealism and submit and work “topo some purana thesis” (Annie 33). The character of Principal Y. D. Billimoria, whom the students call Yamdoot, acts as the sounding board of action and criticism in the text. While the focus is on Annie and Radha, Yamdoot is the axis that gives their actions and words a necessary ironic echo, as in the classical Puranas, Yamdoot (or Yamadoot) appears as a messenger of Yama Raj, the God of death. The other main character is Radha, who is also a conscientious student. Her idealistic ire is directed at the architects, whom she regards as privileged exploiters of the poor. She comments: “this shows the disparity between the per capita earnings of the architect and the construction labourer—on the same building” (Annie 34). When she expresses these thoughts to Yamdoot, he tries gently to persuade her to be realistic with her thesis: “Far from being a monster you’ve portrayed, the architect poor fellow is actually generating employment for them” (Annie 35). He argues further on a practical note: “A design thesis . . . is a design thesis. [ . . . ] The jury wants results” (Annie 36). But this does not convince Radha, as she wants “to try and see why what’s happening is happening” (Annie 37).

82 Joel Kuortti This desire to get to the root of the problems—the why—is the defi ning characteristic of both Radha and Annie. Also making his debut in the fi lm was Shah Rukh Khan, who, since the film’s release, has become the “top star of the Hindi cinema” (Ganti 123). Khan plays an anonymous senior student whose task is to explain why Yamdoot and Annie have a strained relationship: “when Annie was in Third Year, someone defied him to go and piddle next to Yamdoot in the staff bogs. Not only piddle, but look over the side at Yamdoot’s . . .” (Annie 19).4 When Annie is fi nally able to muster up enough courage to apologize to Yamdoot for this playfully homosexualized event, Yamdoot acts as if he does not even remember it. The narrative gathers momentum for its critique of polarization through such brief humorous encounters. These events fi nally lead to the evaluation of the students’ theses and, eventually, both Annie and Radha pass. Their architecture studies are over, and in his fi nal line, Annie, smiling for the fi rst time in the fi lm, says: “I’m studying law. I’ve decided to sue Yamdoot” (Annie 105). Once more, Yamdoot’s character functions as a sounding board, providing motivation for Annie to act upon. It is not even the last time, for when the fi nal stillphotos are shown at the end of the film, the very last image is of Annie, with the accompanying text: “Is now Associate Professor of Design at the National Institute of Architecture. He never married Bijli after all” (Annie 108). Tables are turned in an ironic manner, and Annie replaces Yamdoot. If Radha’s idealism died with her when she drowned, Annie’s becomes subdued through institutionalization.

URBAN/RURAL POLARIZATION OF INDIA Here, I will analyze how the script—especially through the main characters of Annie and Radha—expresses social concerns and critiques political issues. The script gives a humorous and ironic look at the many ways in which Indian society is polarized. The conscientious Radha expresses the social concern in her own words: “Every Indian city consists of a ‘City’ and a ‘Non-city.’ And they are at war with one another” (Annie 91). Annie also comments on these issues when he describes his project: “It’s bloody revolutionary . . . It could reverse the whole process of urbanization” (Annie 13). From the plot outline it is already clear that the fi lm highlights the contrast between different spheres of society: wealthy and poor, rural and urban. The issue of polarization is brought forth in the opening scene, as one of the minor characters, Bigshit (played by another architecture student, Itu Chaudhuri), tells Radha about Annie’s plans in mixed Hindi-English: “Voi apne usual ones about rural urban nexus and fruit orchards” (Annie 3). Bigshit admits he does not have a clue what Annie’s plan stands for, and later on Annie tries to explain it in more detail to Arjun (played by Rituraj), Radha’s boyfriend:

City and Non-City 83 [T]he government plants fruit trees on either side of the railway track. Fine? All over India. General janta [public] craps around the railway tracks anyway, right? So the soil is bloody fertile, haina? Now all you have to do is on every passenger train na, you attach a water carriage with two fountains that spray water on either side. What do you get? One hundred and twenty thousand running kilometres of fruit trees, man! (Annie 14)5 This plan is supposed to work so that rural people do not have to move to cities when their livelihood has been enhanced. In Annie’s mind, this would be beneficial both for people in the cities and the villages. The approach is a (perhaps somewhat mocking) variant of the Gandhian idea of Sarvodaya (“welfare of all”). Similarly, it plays with Gandhi’s oft-repeated belief that “India lives in its villages,” true even in the twenty-fi rst century, according to the 2001 census.6 It is because of such idealistic, revolutionary plans that Annie’s studies have taken so long, and Arjun advises him to tone down the idealism and “just give them what they want[.] A five-star beach resort in Goa, a multi-storeyed office complex in CP [Connaught Place, Delhi], how does it matter? It’s just a bloody joke anyway” (Annie 15). But just like Radha, it is difficult for Annie to give up on his dreams. He goes on and presents the thesis topic to Yamdoot for comments by explaining: “So then, sir, once the influx into urban areas is contained, we have an urban, semi-urban rural hierarchy, with mandi towns [rural market towns] for marketing of fruit and cash crops” (Annie 32). When Yamdoot then harasses him, he decides to change his topic. He tries the idealistic topic once more on his girlfriend Bijli (played by Hemani Shivpuri), trying to explain the benefits of the scheme in his Hinglish (Hindi mixed with English): Angrezi mein ‘pull-push factors’ kahte hain. Lekin urban planning aur development ka yeh sabse bada problem hai . . . Urban migration ki direction ko reverse kiss turrah se kiya jaye, logon ko shahr se vaapis gaon kaise bheja jaye [In English this is called ‘the pull-push factor’ but the greatest problem in urban planning or development is to reverse the direction of urban migration, how to send the people back to the villages from the cities]. (Annie 44) But Bijli is not convinced either, and she retorts in her rural Hindi: “Tu kaun hota hai mujhe gaon vaapis bhejne vaala? Tu khud jaa apne gaon, doosron ko kyon bhej raha hai! [Who the hell are you to send me back to my village? You go back to your village. Why are you sending the others?]” (Annie 44). The fi nal turning point for Annie is when the police arrest him

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and—fi nding a letter on him addressed to the Prime Minister, suggesting the project to the government—report him to Yamdoot. In the end, Yamdoot gets Annie out of jail (obviously in order to avoid political scandal), but he does not return to the plan anymore—he is not going to give it those ones again. With the help and cunning of the other students, he manages to present an acceptable, old “purana” thesis for “a beach resort in Joshimath” (a Hill Station in Uttaranchal) (Annie 97).

CLASS STRUGGLE? In Radha’s case, the polarization she singles out is not the urban/rural one that Annie concentrates on. Her focus, as we have seen previously, is on the urban population itself, and the imbalance between the architect and the laborer on the same construction site. She cannot see herself taking part in the money-making industry of architecture. This is portrayed when Yamdoot cites her topic as he evaluates it: The Architect as a professional, as a money-making institution, has no commitment to community space in an urban area. His primary commitment is to ‘his’ building and ‘his’ building is usually designed as a means for those who already have money to make more money. This is not architecture—it’s construction. These are not buildings, they’re piggy-banks. (Annie 36) Radha’s view is that the architect has “no commitment to community,” and she does not want to advance such an irresponsible attitude to society. In the fi nal panel, one of the jurors, Goyal (played by Dilip Sirkar), confronts Radha with a question about solving the problem of being an architect and satisfying one’s client. Her response encapsulates the ambiguous situation: “Not to want to be an architect, maybe. [ . . . ] I don’t know if every problem has to have a solution . . .” (Annie 95). The situation remains a dilemma that needs to be resolved differently in each context. Although Radha in her conscientiousness is not overtly political, she does occasionally refer (ironically) to dialectical materialism—“dvandaatmak bhautikvaad” (Annie 60)—when she explains the ridiculous “sculpture” she is going to present as her art thesis. When her work is being evaluated, then, it does not result in interpretations along class categories from the teacher, C. K. Pathak (played by Cecil Qadir) and his chamcha, or lackey, Keshav (played by Hemant Mishra). C. K. sees in it “an earthly tribal appeal,” an opinion seconded by the lackey: “Bahut tribal sa lagta hai, sir. [Sir, it looks very tribal]” (Annie 63). Thus the simplistic polarizations and their explanations are ironically twisted around within the multilayered Indian social reality. That the idea of dialectical materialism is treated irreverently becomes clear in the scene where Arjun, Radha, and Annie are cooking meat in a frying pan with a book

City and Non-City 85 on structural mechanics on top of its cover as a weight. When Arjun adds two more books—Collected Works of Lenin—Radha comments: “Dvandaatmak bhautikvaad!” (Annie 70). With her novel, The God of Small Things (1997), Roy made another ironic visit to communist ideology in her representation of the 1960’s Keralan communist leader, E. M. S. Namboodiripad (God of Small Things 65), and even more in the caricatures of Comrade K. N. M. Pillai (God of Small Things 114) and Chacko (God of Small Things 62). One of the reviewers of The God of Small Things was the Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad, who criticized Roy for not understanding communist politics in what he saw as her otherwise laudably realistic novel (103–8).7 Whatever the case, certainly Roy’s writings—be they “an architectural thesis, a film script, a novel, a political essay” (“Foreword” x)—manifest a critical attitude toward social reality and a critical distance from established explanations as well: “Roy does not stop with writing about these problems, she is an activist who has been leading demonstrations against the Sardar Sardovar Project” (Naik and Narayan 236). Roy herself does not want to separate her work between writing and activism, although she understands that, in the view of many people, she is seen, “apparently, what is known in twenty-fi rst century vernacular as a ‘writer-activist.’ (Like a sofa-bed.)” (“The Ladies” 10). Linking these two aspects more profoundly than mere “sofa-bed functionality” allows, Roy describes her writing once more: “True, The God of Small Things is a work of fiction, but it’s not less political than any of my essays. True, the essays are works of nonfiction, but since when did writers forgo the right to write nonfiction?” (“The Ladies” 11). Whether or not Radha’s (or Roy’s for that matter) approach can be classified as Communist/Socialist class struggle is beyond the point. The script does not present enough material to decide on that, and on par with Radha’s comment, there does not necessarily have to be a “solution” for “every problem.” The social criticism of the implicit class and/or caste hierarchies is there, no matter what name we may give it. The best attestation to Roy’s social criticism in the script can be found in the scenes from the final jury, when Radha’s thesis is being reviewed. The students had secretly organized things so that the last works to be evaluated would be Radha’s and Annie’s, as the jury would be weary and hungry by then, and the students know that “[i]n the last seven years, nobody who’s had their jury after eight p.m. has plugged! And nobody’s jury after eight p.m. has lasted more than fifteen minutes, max!” (Annie 90). The plan works, and the last reviews of the jury show absurd scenes of evaluation. Unlike Annie, who fi nally decided to drop his idealistic plan in favor of a presentable thesis, Radha does not flinch from her critical view. In front of the jury, she explains her thesis at length: This thesis examines the role of architects and their architecture in a third world city with Delhi as a specific case study. [ . . . ] Every Indian

86 Joel Kuortti city consists of a ‘City’ and a ‘Non-city.’ And they are at war with one another. The city consists of a number of institutions, houses, offices, shops, roads, sewage systems . . . These institutions are designed by the architect-engineer. The non-citizen has no institutions. He lives and works in the gaps between institutions, he shits on top of the sewage system. [ . . . ] So in the way he designs these institutions . . . these symbols, the architect-engineer is telling the non-citizen ‘keep out,’ ‘stay out of here,’ ‘this does not belong to you’ . . . It’s a way of establishing territory . . . like animals . . . Bears leave scratch marks on trees, tigers have a spray, a mixture of urine and scent gland which says ‘This is my territory.’ In human beings this urine and scent gland is replaced by the architect, who establishes territory by manipulating the built environment . . . [ . . . ] So I’ve categorized these institutions into symbols of political and administrative power, symbols of commercial power and symbols of individual status—the private house. [ . . . ] So here’s another example. Once the piggy-bank is ready, it’s just a question of designing a façade to hide the air conditioners. (Annie 91–95) Toward the end of the review, in an intervening scene, the other students are amazed at the extensive time Radha is taking with her thesis review, and Rashid (played by Benoy Thomas) says admiringly: “Thirty-one minutes, ya . . . Thirty-one. She’s a boss yaar” (Annie 95). Radha doubles the previous record, but does not convince the jury right away. When she leaves, the reviewers discuss her thesis: Goyal All bunkum. I don’t think we should encourage this sort of a thing. Behl You want to fail her? She has twenty-six drawings. Most number. Khanna Lo yaar, kabab nehi khana hai? [Take it—don’t you want to have some kebab?] (Annie 96) In the end, though, Radha gets a pass (with fifty percent against Annie’s sixty-five percent), but the fi nal irony lies in the way the decision is made. It does not depend on Radha’s thesis or her presentation; not on the topic nor the profundity of its contents, but rather the sheer volume of her drawings—“Most number”—and the fact that the panel is hungry. Gita Dewan Verma, a professional planner and former student in the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture, is another activist, who consults citizens’ groups on planning. In her book, Slumming India: A Chronicle of Slums and Their Saviours, Verma traces ways that the lives of the “slumwalas” and the “kothi-walas”—slum-dwellers and house-dwellers—as well

City and Non-City 87 as the development-walas and the “others,” differ fundamentally (xvi–xvii). Verma points out the same problems of inequality as Roy’s script but she does this on a grander scale, talking about land acquisition and local and national slum-development projects. Verma sees problems in planning and she vouches for a responsible approach to it: “Competing interests in urban resources make planned development a fundamental need of urbanites, calling for a high degree of responsibility on the part of those in charge of urban governance” (148; emphasis original). Furthermore, she concludes her sharp commentary in a voice resembling that of Radha’s: “Isn’t it obvious that we must make urban development a vocation instead of a business and get down to it in earnest?” (158). The social problems both Annie and Radha take up, the polarization, even a war, between urban and rural areas and people, as well as the unequal division of wealth and power within the city, are real burning issues for Indian society. The journalist Kalpana Sharma, in her discussion of Dharavi, comments that: Dharavi, like other slums or slum-like areas, is an inescapable reality in Mumbai. There are practically no areas in the city where you can avoid the sight of a slum because the urban poor, or people forced to live in informal settlements, are half-the city’s population (31). Thus, even though it is not proposing an action-plan or a program for development, Roy’s script does bring forth an important topic for discussion. Roy comments that it was in the School of Architecture that she: began to think about how colonialism had affected our relationship to ourselves, our sense of design, of colour, of space. . . . I began to see that in India we have citizens and ‘non-citizens,’ those who matter and those who don’t. Those who are visible and those who are not. Those who are included in our planners’ plans and those who are reflexively excluded from them. (“Foreword” xi) This is the ultimate vision of the script: to make the invisible visible. Like The God of Small Things, it “may reveal the writer’s concern for the social injustice meted out to the downtrodden and exploited” (Kumar 159).

CONCLUSION: THE POSTCOLONIAL FRAMEWORK Finally, in a way of conclusion, I would like to consider briefly how the text reads in a postcolonial framework. The globalizing, neocolonial world of today delights in various forms of intercultural expression, despite all counter-attempts at maintaining homogeneity, tradition, and purity. This is manifest in Roy’s script as well, for example, in its use of different musical

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genres: classical (Joseph “Papa” Haydn’s “Surprise” [Annie 1]), folk rock (Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe” [Annie 17]), Hindi fi lm music (“Haye Re Haye” from Humjoli [Annie 57]), and rock ‘n’ roll (The Rolling Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” [Annie 69, 97]; The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” [Annie 70]; and Chuck Berry’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” [Annie 101]). The most recent one would have been “Haye Re Haye,” as Humjoli was released in 1970.8 This musical mixture lends the fi lm a noticeable hybrid character.9 Such amalgamation of Indian and non-Indian (namely Western) popular cultural sources is a common feature in Indian diasporic literature and film. In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones was not, however, intended for diasporic or Western(ized) audiences, but rather the Indian, Doordarshan viewers. Therefore, it can be regarded more as an actual representation of student life of the time. The hybrid character of the fi lm is even more pronounced in its language. Mostly in English, it nevertheless incorporates so much Hindi and Punjabi as to be incomprehensible to most people. Roy reports having wanted to portray the students’ “English as an alloy” correctly: “It was an enterprise that deliberately and almost by defi nition excluded most people and most of the ‘market.’ (Never mind the masses.)” (“Foreword” viii). The alloy English (and alloy Hindi, too) is the most characteristic feature of the fi lm, and, not without reason, it was awarded the prize for “Best Film in Languages Other Than Those Specified in Schedule VIII of the Indian Constitution,”10 even though the supposed target for the prize language was proper English, not such a hybrid variation. When The God of Small Things was published, Roy was accused of both selling out to the West (Mandal 23–4) and for misrepresenting India in her “presentation of ugly reality” (Srivastava 131).11 In the asymmetrical neocolonial world, such criticism may be justified, but on the other hand, it too easily ignores issues of agency and assumes a (more or less) homogeneous understanding of (national) identity. It is not possible to discuss such aspects here, but it is my contention that Roy’s approach to cultural representation is critical and responsible rather than ignorant and predatory.12 Thus, her novel—especially the way in which it engages with the issue of the status of English in India, “Anglophilia”—reads more like postcolonial critique than neocolonial exploitation (God of Small Things 36, 50–51).13 The script of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones is a delightful picture of student life in Delhi in the mid-1970s. However, with all its complications, it is also an uneasy piece that requires the reader to take an angle to it. Watching the film more than ten years after its release, Roy did indeed like the film, contrary to her misgivings. The idea to publish the script then was not her own, and she admits that she had suspicions as to how the text would work without the film. The inherent irony and irreverence of her position is marked in her comment on the publication of the script: “ . . . but Penguin wants to publish it, and hey, Penguin’s an honourable man” (“Foreword” vii). The script does not contradict Roy’s other writings, but

City and Non-City 89 it does offer a supplementary way to read her work. While In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones presents a discussion of critical themes, it does it in an ironic postmodern idiom.

NOTES 1. For the politicization of Indian television after the Ramayan series, see Rajgopal. 2. The difficult, cryptic title has, however, been adopted in modified forms by others; for example, Rajan reported on the historian Ramachandra Guha’s vitriolic critique of Roy in “In which Lord Ram gave it those ones,” and Bhusnurmath wrote about information technology in Marxist-led West Bengal in “In which Marxists give IT those ones.” 3. With regard to prizes, Roy refused to accept the 2005 Sahitya Akademi Award for her essay collection Algebra of Infi nite Injustice (2001) on political grounds, commenting that “to register my protest and re-affi rm my disagreement—indeed my absolute disgust—with these policies of the Indian Government, I must refuse to accept the 2005 Sahitya Akademi Award” (“Arundhati Roy” par. 13). 4. In the fi lm’s more or less general heteronormativity, it is noticeable, as Roy points out, that the senior student is a homosexual (“Foreword” xiii). The gender aspects of the fi lm would be interesting in general but as they are not overtly politicized, they are not discussed in this context. 5. My warmest thanks to Monika Gupta for her help with the Hindi and Punjabi sections. The bracketed translations are based on her renditions. 6. According to the 2001 Census, more than seventy-two percent of Indians live in villages (par.). Furthermore, Johnson comments that the arrival of television in rural India “changed Indian villages forever” (15). 7. See also Passos. 8. It is interesting to note that none of the other pieces of music were very recent in 1974: Haydn’s piece was composed in 1792, Dylan’s in 1964, The Rolling Stones’ in 1965, The Beatles’ in 1966, and Berry’s in 1957. 9. For the critical use of the notion of hybridity, see Kuortti and Nyman. 10. English still holds a constitutional position for “all the official purposes of the Union,” which position was originally intended for fi fteen years (Article 343.2). Thus, English is not among the twenty-two languages listed in Schedule VIII (see Constitution of India). 11. For more sources on criticism, see Kuortti (Indian Women’s Writing 308–13). 12. See Kuortti (“Interrogating Change” 177–82). 13. See also Toor 77–9, 87–90.

WORKS CITED Ahmad, Aijaz. “Reading Arundhati Roy Politically.” Frontline 14.15 (26 July–8 Aug. 1997): 103–08. “Arundhati Roy to Stick to Her Decision.” The Hindu 16 Jan. 2006. 3 Mar. 2008. . Behal, Suchitra. “First Impressions.” The Hindu 28 Sept. 2003. 3 Mar. 2008. .

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Bhusnurmath, Mythili. “In Which Marxists Give IT Those Ones.” Financial Express 6 Apr. 2005. 3 Mar. 2008. . Brians, Paul. Modern South Asian Literature in English. Westport: Greenwood P, 2003. Constitution of India. Government of India, Ministry of Law and Justice. 2nd Pocket ed. June 2004. 3 Mar. 2008. . Desai, Jigna. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ganti, Tejaswini. Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004. India. Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India. 2001 Census. 20 May 2008. . Johnson, Kirk. Television and Social Change in Rural India. New Delhi: Sage, 2000. Kumar, Sanjay. “The Poetry of the Unsaid in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Indian Writing in English: The Last Decade. Ed. Rajul Bhargava. Jaipur: Rawat, 2002. 146–61. Kuortti, Joel. Indian Women’s Writing: A Bibliography. Jaipur: Rawat, 2002. . “Interrogating Change: Arundhati Roy.” Arundhati Roy: The Novelist Extraordinary. Ed. R. K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1999. 177–82. . and Jopi Nyman. “Introdoction: Hybridity Today.” Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-colonial Studies in Transition. Ed. Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 1–18. Mandal, Somdatta. “From Periphery to the Mainstream: The Making, Marketing and Media Response to Arundhati Roy.” Arundhati Roy: The Novelist Extraordinary. Ed. R. K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1999. 23–37. Naik, M. K. and Shyamala A. Narayan. Indian English Literature 1980–2000: A Critical Survey. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2001. Passos, Joana Filipa da Silva de Melo Vilela. “Micro-Universes and Situated Critical Theory: Postcolonial and Feminist Dialogues in a Comparative Study of Indo-English and Lusophone Women Writers.” Diss. U Utrecht, 2003. 3 Mar. 2008. . Rajan, S. Ravi. “In Which Lord Ram Gave it Those Ones.” Tehelka.com 21 Dec. 2000. 3 Mar. 2008. . Rajgopal, Arvind. Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. Roy, Arundhati. Foreword. In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones: The Original Screenplay. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003. v–xiii. . The God of Small Things. New York: Random House, 1997. . In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones: The Original Screenplay. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003. . “The Ladies Have Feelings, so . . . Shall We Leave It to the Experts?” Power Politics. By Arundhati Roy. Cambridge: South End P, 2001. 1–33. Sharma, Kalpana. Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2000. Srivastava, Ramesh K. “Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: A Study.” Indian Writing in English: The Last Decade. Ed. Rajul Bhargava. Jaipur: Rawat, 2002. 87–145. Toor, Saadia. “Indo-Chic: The Cultural Politics of Consumption in Post-Liberalization India.” Soas Literary Review 2 (Summer 2000). 3 Mar. 2008. . Verma, Gita Dewan. Slumming India: A Chronicle of Slums and Their Saviours. New Delhi: Penguin, 2002.

Part II

The Writer, the Activist, the Intellectual

7

Committed Writing, Committed Writer? Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas

In one of her numerous lectures delivered after the publication of the bestselling The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy expresses her surprise and disgust at the portmanteau term increasingly used to describe her: writer– activist. Why, she argues, should the writer be in any way distinguished from the activist, thus implying that these two identities can be parasitical toward each other but somehow not blend? She writes: Why am I called a ‘writer-activist’ and why—even when it’s used approvingly, admiringly—does that term make me flinch? I’m called a writer-activist because after writing The God of Small Things I wrote three political essays: ‘The End of Imagination,’ about India’s nuclear tests, ‘The Greater Common Good,’ about Big Dams and the ‘development’ debate, and ‘Power Politics: the Reincarnation of Rumpelstilskin,’ about the privatization and corporatization of essential infrastructure like water and electricity. . . . Now, I’ve been wondering why it should be that the person who wrote The God of Small Things is called a writer, and the person who wrote the political essays is called an activist?” (Power Politics 10–1) Indeed, the ex-pression points out the ambiguity of the writer’s position in a society where value has shifted away from the poetic; it interrogates the status of fiction and of action, as well as the relation of fiction to history. Does the distinction between ‘simple’ writer and ‘writer-activist’ imply that in certain political contexts or situations of emergency, writing is not an activity per se, and should be supported by more visible modes of action? That language fails, as it were, and needs to be relayed by other forms of (presumably more effective) ex-pression? Does “engagement” with contemporary issues necessarily have to go through channels of expression distinct from those usually associated with artistic creation: political essays instead of poetry, caricatures instead of landscape paintings? They interrogate the value of art, but also they force us to consider alternative forms of history— that there are moments of crisis in an individual existence when immediate action has to be taken cannot be a matter of debate. Finding a way out of

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a house on fire or rescuing a child from drowning are reactions to extreme circumstances, and there seems to be very little choice as to what constitutes effective action in such situations. It is more difficult to define the effectiveness of action in collective and moral terms, however, simply because the very nature of an event and of the immediate are modified by historical perspective, which also modifies the nature and value of necessity. The analogy that some leaders exploit, drawing a parallel between political action and individual imperatives, is misleading at best since it erases the distinction between the individual and the collective; between the significance of history and the significance of the affect. Many questions revolve around the understanding of engagement or commitment as the relation of a subject to history and the present: 1. Is “engagement” simply the gesture of awareness on the subject’s part that he or she is already seized within a situation, and that there is no possibility of “getting out” of it, politically speaking? That indifference or silence or the apparent absence of reaction are as political as their opposites? 2. Is “engagement” the identification of a moment of crisis in history, in which the actual rightness or wrongness of certain forms of action or opinion have to be intuited rather than demonstrated because there is no “time” for demonstration? Such a defi nition suggests a vision of history structured through crises, breaks, and breakthroughs; this conception connects with a vision of art as suspended beyond the time of history, beyond the necessities and imperatives of events. 3. Art can also be viewed as the space of a permanent crisis in the continuum of human history: not as the suspension of historical time, but as its rhythm. From such a perspective, art is continuously engaged both with its time and with history, committed to history, by history, in history. 4. Is engagement, then, the physical committment of an individual to a cause, as opposed to an exclusively intellectual pledge? This leads to the important distinction between committed literature and a committed writer, the latter having supposedly engaged the subjective individual as well as his or her professional activity for the cause he or she wishes to promote. There is no doubt that these issues are at the center of Arundhati Roy’s own preoccupations, as she explicitly and regularly addresses them, and sketches the basis of her positions. She writes: In circumstances like these, the term “writer-activist” as a professional description of what I do makes me fl inch doubly. First, because it is strategically positioned to diminish both writers and activists. It seeks to reduce the scope, the range, the sweep of what a writer is and can be. . . . And conversely, it suggests that the activist occupies

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the coarser, cruder end of the intellectual spectrum. . . . But the more fundamental problem I have with the term is that professionalizing the whole business of protest, putting a label on it, has the effect of containing the problem and suggesting that it’s up to the professionals—activists and writer-activists—to deal with. . . . One is involved because one is a human being. Writing about it just happens to be the most effective thing I can do. (Power Politics 23–4) In the novel The God of Small Things, the narrator makes repeated references to history and its course—the word here covers multiple concepts that range from the succession of events as they occur to the accumulated narratives of the past—mostly the imposed, “grand narratives” of the colonizing forces. Although the theoretical grounds for the novelist’s various attacks on “the West,” on patriarchal society, or on the World Bank are not particularly clear in The God of Small Things, they are explicit enough for it to be obvious that there is no ideological break between the novel and Roy’s subsequent writings. Why, then, should the latter earn her the title of “activist”? There are other cases of exceptionally successful novels being a single beacon in a career after their authors fail to follow up their promise with a second work. There are other cases of writers sidetracking their own careers to put their talent at the service of a militant cause: George Orwell’s own judgment on his writing after World War II was that circumstances had forced him to become a producer of pamphlets rather than a writer (although one can disagree with him on this point as on others . . . ). Such cases—although not, on the whole, so frequent—are not impossible to isolate. But Arundhati Roy’s work and life truly stand out in their surprising combination: here is a young novelist whose fi rst work, The God of Small Things, elevated its author to worldwide fame, and presumably, a considerable fortune. That writer then proceeds to stand up in defense of an important Indian issue, that of the Narmada Valley dams, lending her fame to the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a local association for the protection of the valley and its residents. In a string of articles and conferences, the young author has become exceptional in her profession for her willingness to take sides on contemporary issues, offer her analysis of various events, and widen the scope of her remarks and critiques. However, one cannot but be struck by the remarkable ideological continuity that draws her single work of fiction, and her essays, together. Is there also a poetic connection, or are the essays—because of their political aim and content—merely rhetorical? Are the essays, in fact, the vehicles of a literary “added” value that might better serve the cause under discussion?—a question that goes hand in hand with the identification of commitment. The question of value cannot be determined without an analysis of the issues broached by Arundhati Roy: although it is not our role here to verify

96 Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas the accuracy of the facts cited by her in her articles, we cannot dispense with an examination of the ideological points she attacks and, conversely, of the ideological position she consciously adopts. The coherence of Roy’s vision of the world is the fi rst striking feature of it: although the bridges between the “small” tragedy mapped out in her novel, for instance, and the bigger tragedies the narrator denounces—the disappearance of the river, the destruction of cultural values, the condition of women in India—are not self-evident, the narrative succeeds in weaving a web of common responsibility around apparently very different agents. The association in the narrative of these forces as destructive principles, similar in their violence and self-interestedness, hints at an undecided yet potent collusion of powers: the Communist Party, the tourist industry, planters in the club. The empty words borrowed from the party book by the local communist dignitary, “Comrade Pillai”—“Progress of the Revolution./ Annihilation of the Class Enemy./ Comprador capitalist./ Springthunder” (The God of Small Things 287)—fi nd their counterparts in the hollow marketing-speak of the flourishing tourist trade: “Traditional Kerala Umbrella and Traditional Bridal Dowry Box.” Here, the invocation of “tradition” becomes a fetish, a simulacrum under the shadow of which no value is in fact preserved, but the pretense of it is. This process also echoes the fashion in which “Cardamom Kings, Coffee Counts and Rubber Barons” (God of Small Things 287) dubiously borrow from Shakespeare to justify their caste prejudices: “A rose by any other name . . .” (God of Small Things 69). The link between these various utterances or statements is the situation of domination that they implicitly tend to justify and defend: political power, the market, and social and caste power. But these systems are all implicitly associated in a form of coalition of oppression throughout the narrative of The God of Small Things; this is not an oversight or aesthetic whim of the author’s, who a few years later resumes this nonargumentative mode of attack, this method of associating systems of oppression in order that one victory or offensive on the “small” scale might appear to be linked to much wider stakes. Thus, the association of oppressive discourses and causes is not so much demonstrated as stated, or suggested as self-evident through the exploitation of linguistic similarities, situational coincidences, and analogy. These techniques of association are more “impressionistic” than scientific, but it is precisely such a position that Roy defends as necessary to political awareness and involvement: 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-fi rst century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big

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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. (Cost of Living 12) The link between Roy’s aesthetics of the small and minute in her novel and contemporary events is therefore political, at least in this early essay, “The Greater Common Good.” Reacting to the obvious failure of institutional communism on the one hand, and the breaking down of traditional economic structures in the face of a vaguely (un)defi ned globalization on the other, this invocation of smallness as a last recourse may seem excessively fearful or reactionary. But the preceding paragraph makes it clear that smallness also means the “specific,” which the author puts forward as a means of empowerment or a means for action. Smallness, rather than an ideological substitute, is presented here as a way out of ideology—equated with bigness—and a path into a form of truth, of historical righteousness or rightfulness, opposed to the “contradictions,” “wars,” and “heroes.” The question remains, however, whether this recourse to the small is not again an ideological funnel, which the author refuses to identify as such. In the articles and essays produced after The God of Small Things, although the subjects vary, from the defense of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (“The Cost of Living”), to a withering condemnation of India’s proud entrance in the nuclear club (“The End of Imagination”), to America’s war in Iraq (“The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire”), the author targets the same representatives of power, both economic and political, and groups them, apparently, under the blanket term of “globalization.” The sense of a collusion of interests, of a plot of power and violence, which leads her to associate the terrorists’ aims and those of global capitalism, for instance, has increased in time: It’s not war, it’s not genocide, it’s not ethnic cleansing, it’s not a famine or an epidemic. On the face of it, it’s just ordinary, day-to-day business. It lacks the drama, the large-format, epic magnificence of war or genocide or famine. It’s dull in comparison. It makes bad TV. It has to do with boring things like jobs, money, water supply, electricity, irrigation. But it also has to do with a process of barbaric dispossession on a scale that has few parallels in history. You may have guessed by now that I’m talking about the modern version of globalisation. (Power Politics 13) Ideology, as evoked by Roy in the preceding essay, seems to be identified with the faceless dimension of nations or societies, and to be opposed to the personal, subjective value of “us” and “we.” “We” of course includes the writer–subject in the projects and discourse being propounded by the text, but also implies a common identity shared by writer and destinators, as well as a common vision of the world—in other words, perhaps, a common

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ideology. It is, in fact, an almost constant characteristic of contemporary antagonistic political writing that it accuses the opponents of being guided by ideology of whatever nature: the opposition is not admitted to be between ideologies, but is given as the tension between the ideological and the nonideological. If ideology is defined as the quality in language that frames thought and predetermines a given society’s vision of the world, obviously it is all but impossible to recognize one’s involvement in its discourse: the upholding of freedom as a necessity for the world is in itself an ideological requisite, but that says nothing of its value in moral terms. If ideology is so vilified, it is of course a direct consequence of the “end” of communism, but perhaps also of the rise of various hegemonic and teleological projects in this new century, presented by some and perceived by many as the age of terrorism. What, then, can the author propose in lieu of this simultaneous link to the past and to the future that can be incarnated by ideology? What Roy proposes implicitly—to replace ideology understood as communal “errors” and historical errors—is a recentering on the individual and on a subjective, small-scale time, as opposed to the “bigness” of history. With noticeable coherence and continuity, this idea straddles her fiction and her militant articles, although it is never actually theorized as such. It becomes an angle through which most issues can be viewed, and therefore creates a unity both of a rhetorical and political nature in all of Arundhati Roy’s productions: what we witness, from article to article, is a fictionalization of the world and an active hermeneutical construction of history, with the aim of countering the narratives of power. But it is disturbing to note that the very violence that Arundhati Roy is rebelling against—the violence of “globalization” mostly, but also of many tyrannical systems—relies on a similar rhetorical rejection of ideology (ideology is always the blindness of the opponent) and on similar valorizations of the individual, and of intimate, subject to subject, affective rapports: The last person I met in the valley was Bhaiji Bhai. He is a Tadvi Advisi from Undava, one of the first villages where the government began to acquire land for the Wonder Canal and its 75000 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. [ . . . ] 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. (Cost of Living 97–8) The alleged breakdown of collective values is illustrated through the portrait of the patient, trusting, and uncomprehending victim of the Narmada dam project: the same concern is developed in the story of Velutha the

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untouchable in The God of Small Things. From these individual portraits rises a structural opposition: the victim is an individual, the perpetrator of violence is an institution. The question, however, that the militant articles have to address and that a novel does not explicitly deal with is that of the destinator’s status within the dichotomy mapped out by the text. Because the characteristic of committed writing is that it will demand some form of commitment—or rejection—from the reader it addresses. And just as the author constructs the portrait of the victim in order to defend the general point, so does she construct the figure of the destinator as a reflection of the authorial persona. The author stretches the text as a link of affect and accountability between these two parties, in effect reconstructing the social body, which has malfunctioned in the errors or tragedies she denounces, along shifted lines. The relation with the victim on the one hand and the projected reader on the other , is central to Roy’s rhetorics: at the same time, it weaves the canvas of her political convictions: thus the importance of her use of interpellation, the vocative form, and a selective but potentially all-encompassing “we,” the corollary of her button-holing the projected reader as “you”: 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. Be there. (Cost of Living 102) In this essay, published in May 1999, a brief time after the success of her one and only novel, Roy sets up what is going to become both her trademark and the constant justification for the propounding of her views on subjects that are apparently diverse (the nuclear bomb in India and Pakistan, the United States’ war on Iraq, “globalization”): individual responsibility in the face of contemporary events, however distant, and the value of knowledge that she sets out to spread. The destinator is directly summoned to look at the picture of the world being framed for him or her and to act upon it: the text functions as an ultimatum, for once it has been read it cannot be annulled, and neither can knowledge be erased. The aim of such a rhetoric is to cancel critical distance or the possibility of objection through the forging of a chain of affect between portrayed victim and reader or, occasionally, between the prophetic “I” and her interlocutor: In this process, the text takes on the imperativeness of immediate action, it is given as a “truth”

100 Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas speaking only through the writer as through an organ. The militant text is presented in the same vein as Romantic poetry, as practically unmediated, a truth guaranteed by the urgency of the situation, but more particularly and intriguingly, by the erasure of the writer’s will: Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative—they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of storytelling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning. (The Ordinary Person’s Guide: 3) Commitment, then, is contradictorily validated by the quasi-imposition of an object and a task on the writer, by what strangely resembles a disengagement of the subject from the process of choice and analysis. It is selfevident because it bypasses intellection and takes over the writer and the text through the imposition of “events” as emergency–urgency, demanding immediate reaction. The connection between fiction and nonfiction established by the writer seems to confi rm simultaneously the intrinsically committed relation of art to the world, and the reciprocal relation of political reflection to art. But it could also ambiguously blur the difference between literature and speech, implying that “storytelling” is somehow the aim of all literature, erasing the role of language in favor of “meaning.” Clearly, Roy’s concern is to depict writing as an action that is not only self-evident, but self-controlled: an action that transits through the writer only for “technical” reasons— “fiction dances,” “non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world.” In this structure, the writer is not so much a creator as a medium, a tool for the translation of essential facts—facts whose essence is meaning—into language: “Often I don’t want to see or understand. But I can’t, because the story clamors to be told and then I’m just the go-between that sits down and tells it, in some way” (The Checkbook: 105). Such imagery sketches out a relation to language that relies on the essential pre-existence of meaning as structure and of history: the stories are constituted not through the writer’s agency, but are simply transformed, revealed by her action. This evinces a belief in literature as the repetition of utterances rather than the action of uttering, of enunciation; in literature as “stories,” perhaps, as the dressing that accompanies a pre-existing tale: I don’t see a great difference between The God of Small Things and my nonfiction. In fact, I keep saying, fiction is the truest thing there ever was. Today’s world of specialisation is bizarre. Specialists and

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experts end up severing the links between things, isolating them, actually creating barriers that prevent ordinary people from understanding what’s happening to them. I try to do the opposite: to create links, to join the dots, to tell politics like a story, to communicate it, to make it real. (The Checkbook 10) Such a conception is consistent with Roy’s approach of history as repetition, structure, and the recurrence of emergencies to be met fi rst and foremost through the gesture of recognition, of identification. Such a vision of history implies a uniformization of the manifestations of power. In Roy’s interviews and articles, she regularly denounces a synchronic and diachronic collusion of power formations the world, and time, over. It is from this demonstration that the overarching meaning of her committed essays emerges. The risk of oversimplification is deliberately taken by the author, as she unhesitatingly links the activities of the World Bank to the “crusade” initiated by George W. Bush, unidentified “corporate” interests, and the motivations of terrorists: David Barsamian: There’s a lot of talk about terrorism. In fact it’s become almost an obsession for the media in the United States. But it’s a very narrow defi nition of terrorism. A. Roy: Yes. It completely ignores the economic terrorism unleashed by neoliberalism, which devastates the lives of millions of people, depriving them of water, food, electricity. Denying them medicine. Denying them education. Terrorism is the logical extension of this business of the free market. Terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketers of war—people who believe that it isn’t only the state that can wage war, but private parties as well. [ . . . ] Osama bin Laden and George Bush are both terrorists. They are both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people’s lives. Bush with the Pentagon, the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. Bin Laden with Al Qaeda. (The Chequebook 74) The permanent depiction of the exercise of power as a plot makes it possible to erase both synchronic and diachronic differences and distinctions through the use of such stereotypical identifications: Bush with Bin Laden and the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank with Al Qaeda. Such a deliberate confusion, under the blanket term “international networks,” is a clear remapping of history and geopolitical structures, which in itself seems to earn the writer an “activist” badge. But how “committed” is such a risqué parallel, which in many ways adopts the rhetoric of the indicted parties themselves, and their reliance on nondistinction, on flamboyant rhetoric and fear? Beyond the striking associations, do these essays and answers clarify the situation, for instance, by proposing incisive, investigative research or action?

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On the contrary, Roy’s reliance on the impact of stereotypes and of “plot structures” suggests that her aims are more impressionistic than demonstrative: in passing, she explicitly criticizes the specialist outlook, which, according to her, impedes the wider understanding of the world. Consistent with her aim of producing stories which create links and uncover the meanings of events, Roy also creates stock characters, in easily recognizable shapes and costumes, to inhabit these stories. The “men in suits” are thus obviously cast as neocolonial oppressors representing the collusion of interests between global corporations and Indian nationalists: Those men in pin-striped suits addressing the peasants of India and other poor countries all over again—assuring them that they’re being robbed for their own good, like long ago they were colonized for their own good—what’s the difference? What’s changed? (The Checkbook 14) The revealing expression “all over again” is both the lever and the obstacle to the writer’s political involvement. The question that Roy’s understanding of history poses is clearly the very question she wishes to address: that of individual freedom and of the subject’s agency. What is left of these, if all historical events are predetermined by structure, as she repeatedly seems to suggest, and if the writer’s sole function is to “reveal” that structure, to be “spoken by” physically redetermined stories and histories?: I am interested in the physics of history. Historically, we know that every empire overreaches itself and eventually implodes. Then another one rises to take its place [ . . . ] Yet, just as inevitable as the journey that the powerful undertake is the journey undertaken by those who are engaged in the business of resisting power. Just as power has a physics, those of us who are opposed to power also have a physics. Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power. (The Checkbook 45–6) The concept of a “physics” of power implies that no practice of it can be innocent of the failings and failures previously denounced by the author; that commitment, in fact, is only a matter of fi nding one’s “side” of the world, but that it has little to do with actually altering the physically, “naturally” established balance. If one follows the reasoning developed as previously shown by Arundhati Roy, commitment can be equated with the expression, by the elocutionary subject, of his or her “naturally adversarial relationship” with power. This divests language of the possibility of affecting power, and literature of the possibilityof proposing novelty, narratives and images that might escape. In such a vision of the world and of humanity, commitment is less a question of making history than of reasserting the permanent divide; of demonstrating where the watershed is situated,

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contemporaneously, between obeisance to indistinguishable “power” and protest against it. It is necessary to this form of commitment that it ignores the possibility that power is constructed linguistically, that it is precisely not a “physics” but a discourse, with which the committed discourse may also fi nd common points or points of collusion. Just as it finds its justification in its relationship to the contemporary, to the imperious necessities of the moment and context, this form of committed writing sets up a corresponding vision of history as a chain of emergencies, a chain of hic et nunc, of repetitive, imperious necessities. A similar sense of urgency, which the author does not hesitate to denounce as a political tactic of manipulation, is used in the very discourses that Roy targets in some of her articles, including the one cited above. It is referred to, and used as, evidence for the prosecution in her attack on American leadership in “Come September.” In this as in other instances, Roy’s rhetoric relies on what could be perceived as theoretical inconsistencies, for she adopts populist or manipulative techniques frequently used in the power discourses she attacks for political obfuscation. These tactics are as powerful as they are recognizably populist in form and tradition: they rely on the manipulation of affect as moral leverage, or the focus on the individual isolated from social or collective functions in order to dramatize a “story.” Here, the bottom-line question is linked to the case of commitment and activism: Can rhetorical manipulation be justified by the efficiency of writing as action? Roy’s activist writing is indeed characterized by its anchorage in the here and now, the forced involvement of her chosen interlocutors through the emphasis on simultaneity, on coincidence: as we read, as we speak, as I write, events are occurring. It is through the temporal connection, used to counteract the effect of geographical distance, that Roy exercises the moral pressure characteristic of her articles: “now” becomes the destinator’s “here,” and spells out the imperiousness of awareness, the value of the story as knowledge of the world, and as political involvement: What is happening to the world lies at the moment just outside the realm of common human understanding. It is the writers, the poets, the artists, the singers, the filmmakers who can make the connections, who can find ways of bringing it into the realm of common understanding. Who can translate cash-flow charts and scintillating boardroom speeches into real stories about real people with real lives. Stories about what it’s like to lose your home, your land, your job, your dignity, your past, and your future to an invisible force. To someone or something you can’t see. You can’t hate. You can’t even imagine. (Power Politics 32) In fi ne, in her committed writing—i.e., all of her writing—Roy is seeking out the last nuggets of value in what she sees as a fundamentally endangered world: “globalization” and “the World Bank” have become, in her lexicon,

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synonymous with the destruction of tradition as value. Perhaps, however, the diagnosis of the role of the intellectual as Roy sketches it above misses one fundamental point: quite significantly, Roy sees the artist and intellectual as “connectors,” as those who reveal the meaning of things. This implies the inherent existence of meaning, and denies the possibility that value might not be intrinsic to the world, but is created. In Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, as in these statements relating to her intellectual engagement, value appears to be essentialized to such an extent that the intellectual’s only role can be to “unveil” it, not make it. This deliberate blind spot in the determination of the role of the intellectual is remarkable both for its utopian quality and because it reveals what one might be tempted to name the author’s modesty, for lack of a better word. But perhaps the unwillingness to recognize that value is created by the artist, and not only revealed, can explain Roy’s reluctance to produce another work of fiction after her first success and her involvement with specific militant actions. In such a system as hers, the pre-existing must gain priority over creation, since value is seen as intrinsically “already there”: such a perception of her role leaves little room for art over militant writing, unfortunately for the reading public, and, more generally, for the emergence of critical values, which remain, in my view, the best vehicle to counter the “propaganda machine” Arundhati Roy is so rightly concerned with.

WORKS CITED Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo, 1997. . The Cost of Living. London: Flamingo, 1999. . Power Politics. Cambridge: South End P, 2001. . An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. London: Flamingo, 2004. . The Checkbook and the Cruise-Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. Int. David Bersamian. Hammersmith: HarperCollins, 2004.

8

More to the Point, Less Composed An Essay on the Analytic Style of Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy Padmaja Challakere

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son? And what did you hear, my darling young one? I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin,’ Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world, Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin,’ Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’ Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin,’ Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter, Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley, And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.1 —Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (emphasis added)

If the university had its own version of the Hamurabi’s Code of Law, it is fairly certain that our clay tablets would say that truth must be whispered, if at all; that arguments must not be louder than a whisper. Politically speaking, of course, this does not make sense. But this is exactly where its smartness lies. Since this Hamurabi’s Code, unlike its ancient counterpart, is not about social justice or the protection of “orphans and widows,” but rather about the protection of vanguardism, it works beautifully. In the writings of Chomsky and Roy, writers of very different kind, the whisper can be gauged only by its absence. If what divides them is the style of their outspokenness, Roy’s style, built from emotion and Chomsky’s from analysis, Chomsky and Roy still have a good many things in common. The most obvious is, of course, their great political courage. Many other affi nities link these scholar activists and dissenters: the undoctrinal nature of their kind of political commentary, its sweep, its heft of information, and its depth of argument. What also links them is their insistence on linking current events—the war in Iraq, for example, to the larger pattern of US foreign policy and the still larger realities of historical precedent. Such a link marks a divergence from journalism as we know it; a divergence all the more disturbing because the interlocking connections that are revealed are unspeakable, especially in the noncombative regions of academic professional discourse.

106 Padmaja Challakere In the January 8, 2005 issue of the online newsletter CounterPunch, John H. Summers, 2 writing about the academic status of Chomsky’s political writings, has this to say: “Chomsky is one of most widely read political intellectuals in the world. Academic history pretends he does not exist.” As Summers points out in the opening line of essay, “Chomsky and Academic History,” “Chomsky’s books are not reviewed in academic journals, not in Journal of American History, nor the American Historical Review, nor Reviews in American History”. The excerpt below is drawn from Summer’s perplexed wondering about what is involved in the academia’s refusal to engage Chomskys’ work: His books contain arresting arguments about the history of the Cold War, genocide, terrorism, democracy, international affairs, nationalism, social policy, public opinion, health care, and militarism, and this merely begins the list. In addressing these subjects, he ranges across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, paying special attention to the emergence of the United States. Two of his major themes, namely, the “rise of the West” in the context of comparative “global history” are also major areas of interest for professional historians, never more so than today. Could it be that Chomsky is left out because he does not qualify as a professional historian? The journals have reviewed such non-historians as Robert Bellah, Randall Collins, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Richard Rorty, Edward Said, Garry Wills, and John Updike because the books in question show a strong historical component, or contain implications for historiography. (1) It is not through denouncing Chomsky’s work, but through a ruthless silence about it that US academia manages to insulate itself against (what one friend casually described as) Chomsky’s “treacherously long-winded disclosures.” Presumably, Chomsky’s disclosures are so threateningly “treacherous” that the university does not even flirt with them, not even to show its contempt. This is where the learned culture of the university reveals its ideological limits. As John Guillory argues in his book Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, an equivalence is assumed between the university curriculum and “cultural capital” and this supposition functions to “unify a caste” (42). The university’s commitment, according to Guillory, is primarily to “preserve the rights and privileges of this caste” and to “inscribe a boundary.”3 The existence of this boundary is not surprising, but what is surprising is how sharply this boundary screens out Chomsky’s work as a historian of US policies. While the university erases Chomsky’s work by not reading it, mainstream mass media trivializes it by representing it as a ‘collection of conspiracy theories’ or representing Chomsky ‘as a defender of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge’ and as ‘a Holocaust denier.’4 If Chomsky is the outsider, and does the duty

More to the Point, Less Composed 107 of the outsider, the University, one would think, would at least narrate his outsiderness loquaciously. But neither Chomsky’s work, nor his outsiderness function as subjects of inquiry in the institutions of higher learning. At a time when Chomsky’s analysis of US foreign policy is of most relevance, the academic neglect of Chomsky seems to be at its most active. At fi rst sight, this neglect is very surprising. After all, Chomsky’s political arguments are intellectual in origin; he is an outstanding scholar of American political history—an expert in this field—and abides by scholarly protocols of intellectual responsibility and verifiability. But even in Terry Eagleton’s magisterial collection, Figures of Dissent, which proceeds from Oscar Wilde and moves through the work of Georg Lukacs, Paul de Man, Ludwig Wittgenstien, Jonathan Dollimore, Gayatri Spivak, Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, David Harvey, and Slavoj Zizek to end with Roy Strong, there is not a single paragraph, let alone a chapter, on Noam Chomsky, the most well-known dissident scholar in the US and in the world. Chomsky must be deemed quite beyond the pale. Is this because Chomsky, like Howard Zinn, Alexander Cockburn, and John Pilger, is a nonacademic dissident? While Chomsky’s extraordinary achievements in linguistics are willingly invoked in the US academia and Chomsky is invited to give convocation addresses, his intellectual legacy, contained in the scope of his political writings, is resolutely ignored. But outside the university, Chomsky’s talks, which are framed as dialogues, render his work with humor and irony and draw a large well-informed audience. They are charged with the energy of affi rmation and provide their own take on his work. Chomsky’s talks engage a kind of thinking that shows clearly that the labelings that are bandied about his work—“anti-American” etc—arise from not reading his work. Chomsky’s intellectual legacy is primarily political, and if that part of his intellectual legacy (an elephantine scholarship of several books, essays, interviews, and talks) is not engaged with, what does this say about the place of the intellectual in our society? Chomsky’s characterization of intelligentsia, whom he names “the secular priesthood,” gets uncomfortably close to truth when we consider the degree of academia’s insulation against his political writings. In an interview with James Peck in The Chomsky Reader, Chomsky observes that intellectuals have always “looked to the state as avenues to power and prestige “and have tended to be obedient to “the managerial role assigned to them by the state capitalist or the state socialist system” (The Chomsky Reader 19). Chomsky stresses that in order for this to change; the intellectual must refuse the role of an “ideological manager” but rather see herself as “an intellectual worker”: . . . an intellectual worker—a person whose work happens to be more with the mind than with the hands. This perspective has some affinities with the role of the intellectual as it is conceived within anarchist thought where the people whose professional concern is knowledge and application of knowledge have no opportunity to manage the society,

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Padmaja Challakere or to gain any position of power and prestige by virtue of this special training and talent . . . . And in fact, it would tend to blur the distinction between the intellectual and worker so that workers should take a direct, active role in the mental aspects of whatever work they’re doing, its organization, its doing, its planning, the formation of its purposes and so on” (The Chomsky Reader 21).

Chomsky’s conception of “the intellectual worker” is derived from, what he describes, as the “anarcho-libertarian tradition”5 outlined by anarchists like Rudolph Rocker and Mikhail Bakunin. This should not be mistaken for the conventional idea of anarchism as chaos or as being individualistic in character. This is rather an anarchism of collectivization, an anarchism that one can align with participatory democracy. In an interview with Pablo Ortellado titled “Anarchism, Intellectuals, and the State,” Chomsky warns that this anarchism is also not to be mistaken with libertarianism as it is understood in popular parlance, that rather, it is its opposite. As he puts it: “I mean people may be seduced by the words ‘minimize the state’ and sort of trapped in them but think what it means. It’s minimizing the state and increasing an even worse power. That is not an anarchist goal” (Chomsky on Anarchism 214). Given our culture of celebrity experts and pundits, the ground of overlap between ‘the intelligentsia’ and ‘the intellectual worker,’ as we can see, is very, very limited. The circuit of relation between ‘the academic’ and the ‘intellectual worker’ has also been damaged by the professionalization of intellectual inquiry in the academy. When intellectual commitment is transformed into a commodity form, it is inevitable that it becomes staged and selfconscious even when it offends. Chomsky’s insubordination, it seems to me, comes from a different place; from a moral commitment to truth and an active concern for transforming reality through critique. That explains why he gets accused of ‘anti-Americanism,’ ‘anti-Semitism,’and ‘patron of neo-Nazism” by the kind of right-wing McCarthyism manifested in the Anti-Chomsky Reader edited by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. But his reception by the liberal intelligentsia is not very different in so far there is no representation of his actual statements in the reviews written in New York Times and the Washington Post. While Chomsky’s arguments are trenchant and risk offending people, they partake of a real optimism about participatory democracy. It is instructive that while there is no anxiety about “lack of scholarliness” with regard to the work of Thomas Friedman whose work on corporate globalization is taught at universities, Chomsky’s work is regarded as “unscholarly.” This was the claim made by Tom Nichols who spoke in a panel entitled “Noam Chomsky: Academic Insider or Outsider” organized by David Horowitz’s FrontPage magazine to rebut John Summer’s argument about the scandal of academic silence about Chomsky. These attacks notwithstanding, Chomsky’s reading of his sources is very careful and attentive, and his research and footnotes are

More to the Point, Less Composed 109 verifiable and impeccable. Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now is one of the well-known public networks that allows Chomsky’s political interventions and arguments to be heard for what they are: centrally relevant to democracy in the United States. Ever since I saw on Amy Goodman’s Democracynow.org a promotional promising the double power of Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy on one DVD, I found myself interested in the nature of this pairing. Chomsky has praised Arundhati Roy handsomely for the “sharp scalpel”-like quality of her analysis and for her “beautiful one-liners.” Arundhati Roy has passionately acknowledged her own debt to Chomsky. In an essay, “The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky” written to be the Introduction to Chomsky’s For Reasons of State, and also published in the Indian newspaper, The Hindu, Roy has this to say about the power of Chomsky’s political writing on her: As someone who grew up on the cusp of both American and Soviet propaganda (which more or less neutralised each other), when I first read Noam Chomsky, it occurred to me that his marshalling of evidence, the volume of it, the relentlessness of it, was a little—how shall I put it?—insane. Even a quarter of the evidence he had compiled would have been enough to convince me. I used to wonder why he needed to do so much work. But now I understand that the magnitude and intensity of Chomsky’s work is a barometer of the magnitude, scope, and relentlessness of the propaganda machine that he’s up against. He’s like the wood-borer who lives inside the third rack of my bookshelf. Day and night, I hear his jaws crunching through the wood, grinding it to a fine dust (Introduction, For Reasons of State, xviii, emphasis mine). If a persistent, patient marshalling of data is what characterizes Chomsky’s style, Roy inflects facts with stories. Roy’s style is ebullient, in contrast to Chomsky’s direct straightforward style. What they have in common is a moral commitment of the same kind. Can Chomsky’s prodigious work be charged at a different voltage, heard at a different frequency when read alongside Roy’s? It is worth wondering what we might gain or lose by reading Roy and Chomsky in juxtaposition? Chomsky is perceived to be nonliterary, and Roy’s effects are perceived as being too literary. It is worth wondering what Chomsky sounds like when read in Roy’s voice? It is worth imagining whether the emotional depth charge that reading Roy gives us can allow a different kind of return to Chomsky’s strict spare diction? Or, perhaps we can keep an ear out for Chomsky’s voice when we are reading Roy’s richly metaphorical prose. Such a doubling may counter the canonical reading of both Chomsky and Roy. This essay suggests that Roy draws from, extends, and productively disturbs Chomsky’s level tone. Chomsky’s language, unmistakably his, is paced for testimony—its aim being to expose lies in the age of misinformation and “engineering of consent.” This is not a defect. But again and

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again, what Chomsky says is consistently evaded in favor attention to how he says it. The tone of a review of Chomsky’s latest book, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance in the Antioch Review, one of America’s oldest literary journals, illustrates this well, and is quoted here in its entirety: To read his book-length diatribe regarding the intentions of U.S. foreign policy from George Washington to George W. Bush, a reader would have to agree already with Chomsky, because otherwise his writing style is a monumental turnoff. However, as much as Chomsky puts two and two together and computes minus six, his condemnation of American world dominance is attractive. For those who are not fond of George W. Bush, this unique piece of work is a gem, regardless of its convoluted message. But to decode his conspiracy theories, we might need the help of a beautiful mind. Reading more like a transcript of a college lecture in political science, Chomsky’s prose jumps from idea to idea, using sarcasm to glue it all together. He has compiled an impressive amount of information about the past and present questionable actions of twentieth-century presidential administrations that have set agendas bent on achieving a level of world power detrimental to the peace and prosperity of most third-world countries. He moves with ease from Nicaragua to Kuwait to Vietnam to Japan and to Canada in his examples of where the U.S. has stuck its thumb in the world pie, with no respect for treaties and promises, all for control of the world’s most limited resources. He condemns U.S. leaders for systematically coercing the public’s consent for going to war, from Woodrow Wilson’s Committee of Public Information in 1917 to Bush’s Department of Homeland Security, and squarely lays all blame for any future failures for world peace on the shoulders of the man from Crawford, Texas.6 Short on summary, illustration, or analysis, this review brushes off the content of Chomsky’s work with one phrase that recognizes its impact: “has compiled an impressive amount of information,” and one that resists this recognition: “convoluted message.” The real burden of this review is contained in an anxiety about the fact-packed content which is replaced by a complaint about Chomsky’s style: “monumental turn-off,” “jumping from idea to idea,” and “no glue that holds it all together.” But the glue that holds Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance together is visible even in this truncated review—the permanent war economy, to which our consent is manufactured, and the link between corporate might and US foreign policy. The review is estranged from the text it reviews because Chomsky’s arguments run askew of the reviewer’s doctrinal assumptions. This kind of speed-reading which overlooks the logical connections in Chomsky’s work tends to only to see a list of accusations and a profusion of

More to the Point, Less Composed 111 referents. Such break-neck speed-reading is really an abdication of reading, and distorts the very special effect of Chomsky’s writing, its metaphorical quality, so to speak. Until now, we have only seen political speed-readings or non-readings of Chomsky’s work. That is why it is important to give way to the temptation of a literary reading, even if a metaphorical reading is something that Chomsky himself avoids. While Chomsky believes that “literature can heighten your imagination and insight and understanding, it surely does not provide the evidence that you need to draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions” (The Chomsky Reader 4). His implicit argument is that political decisions provide better case-studies than do unverifiable instances in literature. In response to this, I can only cite Ezra Pound’s valuable defi nition of what characterizes literature: “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to its utmost possible degree” (ABC of Reading 36). Literature is self-reflexive narration, but this narration even at its most allegorical or metaphorical, is never entirely free from its referential function. A similar narrative quality is linked to the referential level of Chomsky’s writing also. The conclusions that reading of literature allows are ethically and politically productive because they are based on a relation to truth rather than on the authority of the verifiable. However, at fi rst glance, the surprise of the “literary way” is what marks Arundhati Roy’s stylistic difference from Chomsky. While Chomsky, in the rationalist ‘science’ tradition, is suspicious of feelings, for Roy, every word is rife with feeling, and she sees stories as the dramatic point of focus for narrating political policy facts. This is not to suggest that the transparency of Chomsky’s style of reporting is unrhetorical but rather that it is motivated by the urgency to prove the truth with information. In order to examine the kind of political awareness that Chomsky’s analysis produces, let us examine one of the many specific claims Chomsky has made about the Vietnam War, namely the domino theory argument invoked by the US administration to justify the bombing of Vietnam. At the heart of Chomsky’s analysis is a philological imperative; a will to unveil or decode the pattern of political explanations and communication; a commitment to sharp analysis of data. We see a vivid instance of this when Chomsky takes on a close reading of the US administration’s invocation of “the domino theory.” The “domino theory,” Chomsky argues, worked its power through two rhetorical codes: a public or universal code conventionalized through use and “a restricted” or “implicit code”. The purpose of the public version of the domino-theory was to terrify ordinary people but the “internal version” of the domino theory, as Chomsky observes in “The Remaking of History” in Towards a New Cold War, “is what should cause us real concern” (135): If America’s Vietnam “intervention” is understood, as it properly must be, as a major crime against peace, then an ideological barrier will be erected against the future use of U.S force for global management.

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Padmaja Challakere Hence those who are committed to the founding principles of American imperialism must ensure that these questions are never raised. They may concede the stupidity of American policy, and even its savagery, but not the illegitimacy inherent in the entire enterprise, the fact that it was a war of aggression waged by the United States, fi rst against South Vietnam, and then the rest of Indochina. . . . It was feared that . . . Communist social and economic success in Indochina might cause “the rot to spread” to the rest of mainland South east Asia and perhaps beyond, to Indonesia and South Asia as well. In internal policy documents, the war planners wasted little time on the lurid variants of the domino theory served up to terrorize the public. What concerned them was the demonstration effect, what was sometimes characterized as “ideological successes” ( Towards a New Cold War 136)

It is here that Chomsky’s style of argument becomes as important as the claims he makes. His argument style—moving deductively from available public data to elucidate the implicit—is logically such that when the reader fi nds one part of the proposition estranging, the reader tends to reject the entire argument. Chomsky shows through evidence that America’s use of force to subvert popular national self-determination movements elsewhere is dictated by US transnational companies which want the state to maintain an international order that is investment-friendly and protects their privileges. Such use of force and violence, Chomsky shows, runs like a seam in postwar American history, and this strain, with slightly different mutations, is as intensely at work now in Iraq and Afghanisthan as it was then, in the situation of US aggression in Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti, Guatemala, Cambodia, and Lebanon. Reading the fact-heavy revelations that Chomsky brings forth can replace the reality that the speed-reader expects as completely as reading Kafka’s account of Gregor Samsa turning into a beetle in his richly metaphorical “Metamorphosis” can. Chomsky, like Kafka, has the same horror of abuse of power, and analyses present institutions from their past behavior, but far from being darkly pessimistic, his descriptive, data-rich mode of analysis carves out pockets of hope and concrete possibilities for exercise of human rights and democratic change. Chomsky has always kept faith with America’s potential for democracy even as he has, again and again, relentlessly exposed America’s relation to national self-determination (other than its own) through consolidation of world power. Robert F. Barsky, in his biography, Noam Chomsky: Life of a Dissident, writes that when the smear campaign against Chomsky turned most vitriolic during the “Faurisson affair,” where Chomsky’s argument was linguistically, ideologically, and contextually mangled to make it seem that he was in sympathy with Faurisson because he himself was a Holocaust denier, Chomsky was dogged in his assertion that “the smear campaign was a side-issue; that the larger concern was the intellectual apologists

More to the Point, Less Composed 113 ability to forgo reasonable analysis”; that his job consisted only of “stating the facts again as before” ( Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent 190). When I read this, I was profoundly moved by Chomsky’s complete faith in this thin-seeming “just the facts” principle. What it conveyed to me was a confirmation of Chomsky’s moral seriousness, a tenacious sense of what is most important; a sense of the kernel. So, Chomsky’s significance and influence cannot be measured in relation to his invisibility in the academia. But an understanding of this academic silence is funda mental to a deeper sense of Chomsky’s position as an activist scholar. Chomsky’s real ire is reserved for architects of the US foreign policy such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, Richard Pearle and advocates and founders of right wing think-tanks7 like David Horowitz, William Bennett, Peter Collier, David Frum, Michael Ledeen, Daniel Pipes, Robert Kagan and William Kristol. However, Chomsky has also debunked “postmodern French critics” like Lyotard and Bourdieu, stating that “there may be certain grains of truth hidden in the vast structure of verbiage, but those are simple indeed” (Cited in Barsky’s Noam Chomsky : A Life of Dissent 198). He reserves praise for Foucault who, he claims, he fi nds “really interesting” but difficult to get a gist of. When pressed on the subject, Chomsky claims—rather disingenuously—that while he can understand the most abstract arguments in quantum physics when “it is explained by colleagues and friends or serious popularizations,” in these [postmodernist] areas, no one can explain anything to me, and I have no idea how to proceed (Cited in Barsky’s Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent 198). French postmodernism is not a figure for literary studies. I would argue that this turning away from the richness of literary contributions is politically unproductive. While Chomsky has engaged with and promoted the work of scholars and critics in the fields of politics, law, and economics—scholars such as Edward S. Herman, Howard Friel, Richard Falk, Gabriel Kolko, Mamdani, Naomi Klein, and recently, Tanya Reinhardt—he has not engaged with the work of contemporary scholars like Gayatri Spivak, Alan Badiou, and Georgio Agamben, to name a few. The work of these scholars supplement Chomsky’s own political–philosophical project. The readership for Chomsky’s prodigious scholarship is primarily nonacademic. Chomsky, it would seem, is fundamentally a mainstream moralist and dissident. As Barksy observes, within the general populace, Chomsky’s talks today are as packed with young people as his weekend teach-ins at Rowe, Massachusetts, used to be in the 1960s. Chomsky’s book sales are also doing very well, and he is busier than ever with his scholarship and speaking tours. Maybe it is time to acknowledge that Chomsky is a problem mainly for the US academia, but not for young people or scholar activists outside the university system. Also, within the circuit of radical journalism in the United States—in the pages of Nation, CounterPunch, Index, The

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Liberal, Progressive, Mother Jones, and of course, on the airwaves of Amy Goodman’s radio show, DemocracyNow—Chomsky gets some airtime. While Chomsky’s threat exists in his refusal of the role of the intellectual in a culture that loves to brand intellectuals, Arundhati Roy’s threat consists in putting to good use what the celebrity artist can be in political movements, what intellectuality can be in activist movements. Roy’s playing with the idea of the celebrity writer as both figure and function in a culture has helped mesh the connection between intellectual and activist in the many struggles against globalization in India. Despite the danger available to her of getting walled inside a personality cult, Roy is a stylistically a different kind of political activist—a lyrical political activist. We can hear Roy romancing the language, playing with words, and using a rich metaphorical style that is both extravagant and incisive. Roy is a charismatic speaker, who mixes seriousness and wit with powerful effect. The resonance of this can been is seen in Roy’s talk entitled “Instant Mix Democracy” collected in An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, where she narrates the technological and fi nancial support that US gave to Saddam Hussein towards its eight war against Iran in the 1980s: Way back in 1988, on July 3, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said quite subtly, “I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are. I don’t care what the facts are.” What a perfect maxim for the New American Empire. Perhaps a slight variation on the theme would be more apposite: The facts can be whatever we want them to be. When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that forty two percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that fifty-five percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported Al Qaeda. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because there isn’t any). All of it is based on insinuation, auto-suggestion, and outright lies circulated by the US corporate media, otherwise known as the Free Press, that hollow pillar on which American democracy rests. . . . Public support in the United States against Iraq was founded on a multi-tiered edifice of falsehood and deceit coordinated by the US government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media (An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire 42–43) What begins as a referent—U.S.S Vincennes—becomes a metaphor, both of war and unapologetic lies. The narrative accelerates to reveal the distortion after distortion orchestrated by the state and “amplified by the corporate

More to the Point, Less Composed 115 media”. Roy’s argumentative style is intense, beginning with a scene which lends itself to close reading and emotional analysis, which is soon followed by instigation. For example, in “Instant Mix Imperial Democracy,” we see these vibrations move across a narrative system that tells the story of the overlap between ‘America the Empire’ and ‘America the Nation.’ Roy contends that while the ordinary person in America is presented with distortions that make him/her feel extremely insecure and dependent entirely on its government for support, thus securing the consent of the people for “a war against evil,” the United States government makes profound changes to international laws to wage war and secure oil and economic resources. Given the bearing that American business interests have on war, especially since 9/11, Roy’s solution is to boycott of US companies and their products: Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair assures us, is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals. Like Shell, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot here? Perhaps Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps U.S Vice-president, Dick Cheney (who was a former Director of Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi? As the rift between Europe and America deepens, there are signs that the world could be entering a new era of economic boycotts. . . . The thing is that if the fallout of the war takes this turn, it is the United States who will suffer the most. Its homeland may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable to attack in every direction. Already the internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. . . . Suddenly the “inevitability” of the project of corporate globalization is beginning to seem more than a little evitable (An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire 33) In Roy’s style, spirited and inspiring, perceptions radiate and refract in many directions while Chomsky speaks with an unblinking carefulness, each assertion tied to the next with evidence, each time stripping more and more away so that the gist of his communication is clearly elucidated. In each case, the form and function of their writing is tied to the vastly different contexts that they occupy, but their unified aim is to the expose the lies that underwrite the conjunction of war and investment-friendly climate. Roy’s sharp critique of the structural adjustment program through which India has privatized every public asset and laid it at the mercy of the corporate elite and multinational corporations, and her expose of the devastating effect that “development” and “deregulation” have had on the poor is salient and deeply informed. But, like Chomsky, Roy too, is a target of widespread misconception. While the apolitical new middle-class Indian is predictably hostile to her, as is the government and the business class,

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a section of the left intelligensia in India is also critical of her because of her iconic status in the West. Because of the exclusive focus on this iconicity, the significance of her analysis of India’s aggressive neo-liberalism is effaced. Also, Roy’s fame as the author of The God of Small Things is used to erode her power as a credible, clear-eyed political commentator so that the Roy of The God of Small Things is separated from the Roy of Power Politics. In her essay, “The Ladies Have Feelings . . . So Shall we Leave it to the Experts,?” Roy responds to the labeling “writer-activist” that is used to describe her: Now I have been wondering why it should be that the person who wrote The God of Small Things is called a writer, and the person who wrote the political essay is called an activist? True, The God of Small Things is a work of fiction, but it’s no less political than any of my essays. True, the essays are works of nonfiction, but since when did writers forgo the right to write nonfiction? My thesis . . . is that I’ve been saddled with double-barreled appellation, this awful professional label, not because my work is political, but because in my essays, which are about very contentious issues, I take sides. I take a position. I have a point of view. What’s worse I make it clear that it’s right and moral to take that position. Now, for a writer of the twenty-fi rst century, that’s considered a pretty uncool, unsophisticated thing to do ( Power Politics 10–11). The literary and the political are in dialogue with each other, and the shaping of her fiction and non-fiction call forth the same labor of imagination and accountability. What can be gained from placing the rhetorical styles of Chomsky and Roy in a structure of relay? Perhaps we can see Arundhati Roy’s work as a continuation of Chomsky’s? Or perhaps, we can read Chomsky’s writing as resonated by Roy. A cross-current of Chomsky’s and Roy’s political writing might provide a model for a different kind of intellectual practice than the kind that is prized in academia currently. In an interview, Roy speculates that maybe one of the reasons some people get so angry with her is because she has had the space that a lot of others who think like her do not. The Roy of the novel and the Roy of political journalism are made to seem contrary. And so she makes the intriguing suggestion: “It was a mistake maybe for so many people to have opened their hearts to The God of Small Things. Because a lot of dams and bombs slipped in along with it.” While Chomsky’s political commentary has been dogged by sensational controversy as he assiduously rejects the cult of personality, Roy’s popularity is hemmed in ways that make it difficult to grasp whose Roy is being produced and circulated? But this much is clear, as both Chomsky and Roy position themselves to make the next point about neoliberalism, the one thing that they would both say in, doubtlessly, the most effective way, is this: “The only thing worth globalizing is dissent” (Power Politics, 33)

More to the Point, Less Composed 117 NOTES I would like to express my thanks to Dylan Hunt whose conversations about Chomsky’s work have made this essay possible. I would also like to give particular thanks to Ranjan Ghosh for his editorial assistance and support. 1. See Hinton, Brian. Bob Dylan: Complete Discography. New York, Universe, 2006. 2. Counterpunch , John H. Summers, “Chomsky and Academic History” CounterPunch 8 Jan. 2005. 3. See John Guillory 42; see also Thomas Reinert’s Rev. of Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, by John Guillory. 1996. 221–4; and Jan Gorak’s Rev. of Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon For mation, by John Guillory. 1996. 286–90. 4. See Pateman, Barry. Chomsky on Anarchism. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2005. 5. See Chomsky’s response to these charges in an interview given on 6th Oct 1981 entitled “ The treachery of the Intelligensia: A French Travesty” collected in Otero, C. (ed.) Language and Politics, 1988. 6. See Armbrust, Carol. “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance.” Antioch Review 63.3 (Summer 2005) 7. The American Enterprise Institute, Hudson Institute, Center for Security Policy, and the Project for the New American Century are only a few examples of very well-funded and powerful right-wing think-tanks.

WORKS CITED Armbrust, Carol. “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance.” Antioch Review 63.3 (Summer 2005). Barsky, Robert F. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997. Chomsky, Noam. Deterring Democracy. London: Verso, 1991. . Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There . New York: Random House, 1982. .The Chomsky Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. Coller, Peter, and David Horowitz. Anti-Chomsky Reader. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004. Eagleton, Terry. Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others. London: Verso, 2003. Hinton, Brian. Bob Dylan: Discography. New York, NY:, Bob Dylan: Complete Universe, 2006. Kafka, Franz. Metamorphosis and Other Stories. UK: Vintage, 1999 Pateman, Barry. Chomsky on Anarchism. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2005 Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: Random House, 1997. .“The Ladies Have Feelings, So . . . Shall We Leave It to the Experts?.”Power Politics. Cambridge MA: South End Press, 1999. . “Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy.” An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Cambridge, Massachussetts: South End P, 2004: 42–43 “The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky.” Introduction to Chomsky’s For Reasons of State. New York: The New Press, 2003; Also published in The Hindu 24 Aug. 2003.

9

How to Tell a Story to Change the World Arundhati Roy, Globalization, and Environmental Feminism Susan Comfort

Arundhati Roy is among the most ardent and widely recognized critics of globalization and the “war on terrorism” today. In her recent research and writing, she engages in a polemical exposé to reveal the invisible costs and consequences of global capitalism, as she tallies its devastating impact on the environment and India’s rural poor. There are those who wish to silence her, if not through legal wrangling and intimidation, then by attempts at dismissing her as a hack who, as a fiction writer, lacks the technical expertise to write about big dams or nuclear bombs.1 Even those who admire her work may inadvertently romanticize it or diminish its impact through a cult of celebrity that exalts the singularity of her voice, thus discouraging any analysis that might contextualize it within contemporary global justice thought. This chapter examines her work, paying special attention to her articles and speeches, within those contexts, specifically making the argument that her work should be read for its participation in a vitally important body of postcolonial environmentalism. Some argue that inasmuch as her work draws from multiple paradigms of critique—including unacknowledged Marxist, postcolonial, and environmental feminist ones—it verges toward incoherence and muddle. 2 I argue, on the contrary, that Roy enlivens these paradigms as she brings them together in a dynamic, complex tension, one that coheres around a mode of critique that might be identified with postcolonial environmental feminism. Most significant about Roy’s work in this regard is its postcolonial critique of environmental degradation and injustice; that is, one that looks at forces both outside and within India—at both global capitalism and configurations of state power, ideology, and capitalism within India. This postcolonial critique is important because many of the critics of globalization are focused exclusively on a global configuration of forces, indeed so much so that remedies are often limited to a call for the reform of global fi nancial institutions. Thus they not only lack a critique of transnational capitalism but also an analysis of the deeply felt, intertwined ideologies of gender, caste, communalism, and nationalism within contexts of development politics at local and state

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levels. Here, I analyze the tensions and possibilities that open up as Roy develops this critique—as she, in her words, attempts to “translate cashflow charts . . . into real stories” (Power Politics 32). Since publishing the widely acclaimed novel, The God of Small Things (1997), for which she received a record-breaking advance and later a Booker Prize, Roy has directed her energies to writing articles and speaking out about neoliberal globalization, militarism, and environmental injustice. Her essays and speeches have been published in several collections, including The Cost of Living (1999), which contains two essays, one on the planned series of mega-dams in the Narmada River Valley, and the other on the 1998 India–Pakistan nuclear tests. A collection that followed, aptly entitled Power Politics (2001), ranges over similar topics, from the corruption associated with an attempt by Enron to build generating stations in Maharashtra to the contempt charges brought against her by the Indian Supreme Court; more recent collections include War Talk (2003) and An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2004), and primarily consist of Roy’s commentary on the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Throughout her writing, she refers to herself as a storyteller and an artist whose role is to expose the machinations of transnational corporations as well as the cruelties of privatization and development politics. As she sees it, the imperative of the storyteller, as opposed to the specialist or expert who severs facts and ideas from any meaningful context, is “to create links, to join the dots, to tell politics like a story, to communicate it, to make it real” (The Checkbook 10). As a storyteller who attempts “to make it real,” she also relies on dynamic images that disrupt a sense of complacency by calling attention to the contradictions in hegemonic logic. In the fi rst essay of Power Politics, for example, Roy opens with such an image: “In the lane behind my house, every night I walk past road gangs of emaciated labourers digging a trench to lay fiber-optic cables to speed up our digital revolution. In the bitter winter cold, they work by the light of a few candles” (2). Some have argued that her literary style of postmodern pastiche and playfulness undercuts her reporting style, but I argue that it strikes at the core of ideological mystification. Roy has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception from a wide variety of organizations, having been a featured speaker at universities, forums, and meetings around the world, including the 2003 and 2004 World Social Forums in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Mumbai, India, respectively; at the Aligarh Muslim University in Aligarh, India; and at the Riverside Church in New York City, to name just a few. Similarly, reviews by numerous publications have praised her sharp, perceptive critiques of globalization. A writer for the New Internationalist, for example, calls her essays “pithy and elegant” (Whittaker 31), while another in Booklist praises her incisive prose and insight: So fluent is her prose, so keen her understanding of global politics, and so resonant her objections to nuclear weapons, assaults against the

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But Roy is just as often dismissed, and her story prejudged, on the grounds that her position represents an arrogant rant of antinationalist hyperbole and starry-eyed environmentalism. For example, even as it acknowledges the substance of her arguments, The National Review calls The Cost of Living “a verbal mishmash of mystical environmentalism, anti-development rhetoric, and small-is-beautiful musings” (Limaye 2). The New Republic calls her a “mad evangelist” whose writing essentially consists of self-indulgent and vain ravings (Buruma 25). In an otherwise favorable review, a writer in World Literature Today acknowledges, and arguably reinforces, these labels even as he praises her argument, as he urges readers to “set aside prejudgments, follow her arguments, and try to empathize with what it would be like to lose one’s land, village, job, income, way of life, and perhaps life itself to the imperative of globalization” (Gerein 79). Her version of globalization, the reviewer continues, is “not some bleedingheart fantasy but a largely unreported consequence of big business pounding the voiceless down to compost level” (79). Reviewers who participate in the process of commodifying and packaging Roy trivialize, or worse, distort her analysis. Roy is herself aware of how her argument may be co-opted, as indicated by her remarks on the whitewashing of the legacies of Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi: “It’s interesting how icons, when their times have passed, are commodified and appropriated (some voluntarily, others involuntarily) to promote the prejudice, bigotry, and inequity they battled against” (An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire 69). In an analysis of what she calls “cosmopolitical” writers (including Roy), literary critic Bishnupriya Ghosh writes that inasmuch as “commodity production effectively empties out vast postcolonial social worlds into simulacra,” writers like Roy engage in self-reflexive strategies in anticipation of commodification (35), which may explain, I will suggest, why Roy consistently interrupts her political critique and reporting with what some consider inappropriately playful or detracting phrases and images. Notably, it is not just the mainstream media that may misconstrue her analysis. Ecofeminist critic Noel Sturgeon has written about the essentializing tendencies in US ecofeminism that position non-white, Third-World women as “natural environmentalists”: The frequent use of Third World and National American women’s environmental activism as examples of ‘ecofeminist’ practice in writing by U.S. white ecofeminists gives an overall impression that peasants, women, and especially nonwhite, non-Western women, are essentially closer to nature and inherently environmentalists. (117) There are several negative consequences of ascribing an idealized relationship with nature to non-Western women: First, as Sturgeon notes, there has

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been a tendency by development planners to assign women conservation tasks, such as planting trees or caring for livestock, without altering the routines or needs of women in the development project (118). In an historical study of feminist critiques of development, Rosi Braidotti and her colleagues have also observed a similar outcome: “Often, such projects, geared at recovering the environment, are inappropriate to serve women’s needs. For example, involving women in tree planting may mean increasing already overburdened rural women’s workload” (88). What is more, such approaches often presume that the practices or knowledge of peasant or indigenous women is the sole source of environmental solutions. But perhaps more problematic is how this assumption reinforces an underlying belief in a binary between the instrumental rationalism of the West on the one hand, and the traditional ecological wisdom of the non-Western world on the other. Indeed, Sturgeon points out that this troublesome binary is “ironically a form of anti-racist discourse that ends up, despite good intentions, reconstituting white privilege” (118). What is erased in the essentialized approaches to peasants, women, and the environment are not only the specific material conditions; social relations of class, caste, and community; and divisions of labor and property that shape relationships to the natural world in local contexts, but also the larger global forces at work. This reception history is why it is imperative that Roy’s work be carefully analyzed and contextualized. Accordingly, I examine her arguments opposing mega-dam construction, especially in the essay “The Greater Common Good” included in her collection The Cost of Living, and I argue that her work does not represent the ravings of a “misty-eyed” environmental feminist, but an astute, complex intervention that advances an incisive postcolonial environmentalist critique. Furthermore, while there may indeed be instances of essentialized concepts and a cultural strategy of tactical dualities, her storytelling, more importantly, evokes a dialogical image of the ordinary and the contingent that encourages a complex vision of place and of struggles for environmental justice.

COLONIAL HISTORIES, DEVELOPMENT IMPERATIVES, AND NEOLIBERAL CATASTROPHES Before analyzing Roy’s work, let me first provide some broad background on the historical context of her battle against destructive development and neoliberal globalization. When India achieved independence in 1947, the country was confronted with a colonial legacy of economic and environmental exploitation. Under the British, India had essentially become an agricultural capitalist colony; during the era of colonial rule, the British established a system of land use designed to extract as much revenue as possible. As economist Samir Amin observes, “[t]he British systematically established forms of private ownership of agricultural land that denied the majority of the

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peasantry access to it” (“India, A Great Power” 1). In the North and East of the country, they collected land rents from property controlled by landlords who extracted surplus from sharecropping peasants; in the South and West, the surplus demanded of cultivators drove many to sell their parcels to moneylenders. Needless to say, nonsustainable practices of agricultural production and forestry were instituted. Formerly, land whose soil and irrigation had been managed by communities engaged in subsistence agriculture was turned into cash-cropping tracts producing indigo, jute, or cotton to supply the British textile industry, while once diverse forests so important to peasant-based agroforestry were destroyed and replaced with single-crop forests of sal, teak, or deodar. In the process, community-based systems of subsistence were destroyed as well, often violently, as historians Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal emphasize in their overview of the repression of tribals by the East India Company in the nineteenth century: The company, with the assistance of Indian moneylenders and traders, subdued India’s newly redefi ned, internal tribal frontiers. For instance, the Bhils of western India were ‘pacified’ during military expeditions in the 1820s. The attack on forests was accompanied by an invasion of the nomadic and pastoral economy. In northern and central India groups engaged in cattle-raising and horse-breeding, such as Gujars, Bhattis, Rangar Rajputs and Mewatis, were subjected to the stern discipline and immobility of agricultural commodity production. (79–80) In addition, as the British built an infrastructure to facilitate the cultivation and outward flow of commodities, the traditional network of traders, cultivators, and artisans was also wiped out, and, consequently, argue environmental researchers Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha: a large population . . . came to depend on cultivation of land and agricultural labour for subsistence, a populace that began to grow rapidly after the First World War, following the stagnation caused by serious famines and epidemics that characterized the period between 1860 and 1920. (Ecology and Equality 12) Indeed, environmental historian Mike Davis, in his study of the political ecology of famine and climate change in the nineteenth century, has recently argued that the vulnerability and “ecological poverty” of colonized areas resulted from the restructuring of their rural economies by the British: “the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and fi nancial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security” (289). Politically, as a result, a system of colonial rule developed that was managed by a centralized state structure and by indirect rule through authoritarian rural structures that relied on the collaboration and participation of native tax collectors, civil servants, and the military.

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Upon its independence, India adopted an economic policy designed to intensify industrialization and agricultural production. The goal was to transform India’s economic base from agriculture to industry, “from underdevelopment to development,” and the means adopted were a series of government-led initiatives managed from the top down, including such enterprises as steel mills, hydroelectric power, fertilizer and pesticide production, as well as the supervision of railroads and air travel. Political scientist Sunil Khilnani explains that Nehru’s ambitions to create democratic political institutions geared toward economic growth and social equity were thwarted by a system of unequal land distribution that was enforced by a powerful rural elite, and so Nehru had to initiate development policies through a centralized state bureaucracy (78). Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha remark that what he created was “an apparatus fashioned to better organize the drain of resources from the Indian countryside” (Ecology and Equity 15), and this intensive drive toward urban industrialization was paid for by the centerpiece of development policy, the Green Revolution, which emphasized the cultivation in specific sites of high-yield crops that required heavy inputs of pesticides and fertilizers. Gadgil and Guha point out that another option that emphasized more equitable land redistribution and more productive sustainable agriculture could have been chosen, indeed, an option that might have truly revolutionized the socio-economic structures of ecological impoverishment. Instead, the country followed a course that has led to, and some argue, exacerbated, inequalities and wrecked havoc on the environment. According to Gadgil and Guha, the devastation to the environment extends from the coastal areas where traditional fishing practices have been replaced by industrial-style trawling, which has resulted in overfishing; to inland waterways that have been dammed or polluted with industrial waste, untreated sewage, and agrochemicals; to forests where rampant deforestation has caused flooding and the loss of species diversity; to farmlands, where once a tremendous variety of legumes and grains were cultivated, that have been converted to monocultural fields of cash crop and heavily treated with pesticides and fertilizers. Waterlogging, salination, and nitrate pollution have become serious problems, as might be expected, and the system of mixing animal husbandry with cultivation, which for thousands of years maintained healthy soils with manure from grazing animals, has been disrupted by the introduction of synthetic fertilizers. Ecofeminist Vandana Shiva argues that the process of development in general might be more aptly called “maldevelopment” because it has destroyed sustainable practices of cultivation, and replaced them with a destructive pattern of extraction (Staying Alive 5). Development practices associated with the Green Revolution have also impoverished people. Environmental researchers, notably Shiva, Gadgil and Guha, as well as Bina Agarwal, have indeed stressed the interconnections between developmental initiatives and environmental destruction, impoverishment and dispossession. To call attention to those interconnections, Gadgil and Guha, for example, using terms coined by environmentalist Raymond

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Dasmann, describe how “ecosystem people” who subsist near local sources of natural resources are being driven out and turned into “ecological refugees” by “omnivores,” a privileged class of absentee, disconnected owners, who capture, privatize and exploit distant resources: The ecological refugees [ . . . ] live on the margins of islands of prosperity, as sugarcane harvesters in western Maharashtra or farm labourers in Punjab, as hawkers and domestic servants of Patna or Hyderabad. As many as one-third of the Indian population probably live today such a life as displacees, with little that they can freely pick up from the natural world, but [with] not much money to buy the commodities that the shops are brimming with either. (Ecology and Equity 4) An iron triangle of bureaucrats, industrialists, and politicians, as Gadgil and Guha go on to explain, operates to direct resources to omnivores. Vandana Shiva has also documented the impoverishment caused by the destruction of the natural commons by development capitalism, and has shown the impact on women, in particular, to be devastating, as I will discuss. None of these negative transformations has gone uncontested. Sociologist Gail Omvedt has tirelessly documented the emergence of “new social movements,” beginning with the Naxalite uprisings of the 1960s, which she claims were an early precursor to the mass-based movements of the 1970s that were organized around caste, gender, and environmental issues. In 1972, a watershed year for the New Left in India, significant mass-based movements were born, notably the Dalit Panthers, who organized against caste, and three significant subsistence–environmental movements: the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, Chipko, and the Kerala Fishworker’s Struggle. The 1970s also witnessed the birth of numerous antidevelopment struggles against large dam and irrigation projects. Many of these movements forged connections among environmental, class/caste, and gender issues into an antistatist perspective. For example, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha gathered force in South Bihar after many jobs in area coal mines were lost to North Biharis, who immigrated to the region when the coal mines were nationalized and wages increased. Another significant movement, the Chipko uprising, sprung from the organizing efforts of Gandhians working to develop village-based technology using local forests to provide meaningful, sustainable employment for poor villages in the Himalayan foothills. The initial conflict blew up against the state forest department when it denied local villages permission to cut trees, instead contracting with a sporting goods merchant. People gathered, especially women, and protected the trees by hugging them. According to Omvedt, it was Gandhian activist Sunderlal Bahuguna who defined the movement as an environmental one. His perspective, which Omvedt identifies as deep ecology, advocated the rejection of nearly all forestry practices, including production for local development. He believed passionately that the success of the movement was crucial for the maintenance of the soil structure in the

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Himalayas, the prevention of devastating flooding, and the ecological balance of the Gangetic plains. Vandana Shiva, an associate of Bahuguna’s, has argued that Chipko is an environmental movement as well as a women’s movement, whereas environmental researcher Ramachandra Guha has held to the view that the movement as it developed in the Kumaun area by the Uttarakhand Sangharsh Vahini be understood as an autonomy movement with a predominantly Marxist persuasion (Guha 181). Omvedt argues that the Uttarakhand Sangharsh Vahini later abandoned the ecological perspective of many of the Chipko activists when it became part of the Indian People’s Front, a Naxalite organization, in 1984 (134). A third movement that combined the formation of institutional structures of alternative development, such as cooperatives and welfare organizations, was the Kerala Fishworker’s Struggle, which sprung up to organize against destructive fish trawling off the Kerala coast. The trawling operations, owned and managed by urban merchants and contractors, exhausted the supply of fish on which local fishermen depended. The movement also introduced issues of gender and ecology not included in the prevailing leftist perspective in Kerala. As Omvedt observes, “the feminism, democratizing impulse, and ecological perspective that were to become prominent in the Kerala fishworkers movement came from the people themselves,” and might be considered part of “mass-based Indian environmentalism” that was responding to drought, deforestation, and environmental degradation in the 1970s and 1980s (137). The shift in economic policy in the era of neoliberal globalization has only intensified impoverishment and environmental degradation. Though some economists argue that the shift to economic liberalization began earlier, India’s economic policies shifted quite dramatically in 1991 when, as a result of a balance-of-payments crisis, it sought an International Monetary Fund loan and agreed to a Structural Adjustment Program that required the country to orient its economy toward export-led growth. Since then, a whole host of policies— including labor reforms, deregulation of foreign capital investment, lower corporate tax rates, privatization of state-run industries, and the elimination or restructuring of public expenditures on health and education—have favored corporate control of resources. Contrary to the glowing reports of “India Shining” by right-wing Hindu organizations, the gap between the wealthy and the poor continues to widen: Achin Vanaik reports that from 1997 to 2002: consumption expenditures of the urban top two deciles [rose] by a historically unprecedented 30 percent. . . . By contrast, the rural top two deciles had a consumption rise of 10 percent but the remaining rural population—the vast majority of Indians—witnessed a consumption decline. (53–4) Vandana Shiva reports, for example, that the World Bank demanded “a total deregulation of agricultural trade,” and “the corporatization of agriculture and an abrupt shift from a state-centered food system to a corporate-centered

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food system” (India Divided 104). As a result, corporations such as Cargill are receiving government subsidies for cash crops grown for export, while subsidies have been withdrawn or reduced for food aid to the poor: The government exported 5.5 million tons of wheat and just over 3 million tons of rice in 2001. That year, the general public paid $140 per ton for wheat, though exporters bought it at $86 per ton. The difference amounted to a subsidy of nearly $300 million for exporters in 2001. (India Divided 105) In addition, peasant cultivators have also been threatened by attempts through the World Trade Organization to patent varieties of seeds, and thus appropriate through privatization what has been a shared natural resource among India’s farmers. Meanwhile, employment by call centers, often touted by advocates of liberalization, is negligible, with just one hundred thousand people staffing four hundred call centers in 2003 (Vanaik 54).

DAMS AND THE DAMMED: THE STRUGGLE OVER THE NARMADA RIVER VALLEY PROJECT At the center of debates about neoliberal globalization and development has been, and continues to be, the building of dams. As Nehru’s proclamation that dams are “the temples of modern India” suggests (qtd. in The Cost of Living 12), 3 dams were a crucial component of postindependent development initiatives in that they provide hydroelectric power to industry and also coordinate large-scale irrigation capacity to areas of concentrated agricultural production. Since independence, fifteen hundred large dams and thirty-six hundred medium dams have been built, and India now ranks third in the world in large dam construction (Fisher 9). Despite the dismal environmental record of big dams and the disappointments of the Green Revolution, dam building continues, as another thousand are under construction in India alone (9). But dams have always been controversial, and the struggles over dam construction have been a flashpoint for dramatic confrontations and confl icts over resources. The series of dams planned for the Narmada River in central India has been at the center of the struggle over development and the environment for some years. The Narmada River, the largest westward-flowing river in India, is eight hundred miles long and runs through a diverse social and physical terrain in central India across three states: Madya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat. In the East, the river flows over alluvial plains populated with farming and fishing villages, which are socially riven by caste and class. As it moves west, the river flows between hilly forests inhabited by Adivasis—Kols, Gonds, Korkus, Bhils, and Bhilalas. The dams planned for the Narmada River Valley number some thirty-two hundred, including

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three mega-dams—the Sardar Sarovar Dam in Gujarat, as well as the Narmada Sagar and Maheswar Dams in Madhya Pradesh—thirty major dams, another one hundred thirty-five medium-sized ones, and three thousand minor ones. The Sardar Sarovar Dam complex, in particular, is designed to irrigate large swaths of Gujarat, as well as two districts in Rajasthan, and it will hopefully deliver drinking water to northern and central Gujarat, to the districts of Kutch and Saurashtra. Its main canal will run four hundred fifty kilometers to the Rajastani border. Plans for the Narmada River Valley began as early as 1946, but because the river crosses three states, there was no progress made until after an initial project site was established in Kevadia, Gujarat, in 1961, and until a government study was completed in 1965. From 1969 until the completion of an agreement in 1979, the Water Disputes Tribunal deliberated on dam water allocations among the three states. In 1985, fi nancing was secured from the World Bank, and in 1989, large-scale construction began. It was initially estimated that twenty-five to forty million people would be affected by the dam, and at least one hundred thousand people—many of them Adivasis without recognized title to the land—living in two hundred forty-five villages would be dispossessed (Fisher 13). The struggle over the construction of Sardar Sarovar Dam in Gujarat began in the 1980s. Proponents of the dam, consisting of government planners, contractors, and politicians—which Roy, after Gadgil and Guha, calls “the iron triangle” (The Cost of Living 30)—argue that the delivery of drinking water to over 40 million people, along with the promise of providing irrigation to over 1.8 million hectares, far outweighs the displacement of villages surrounding the dam site. Opposition to the project has taken various complex forms, ranging from criticism of the project’s implementation and feasibility, to more radical rejections of it on ideological and political grounds.4 The more radical opponents of the project are made up of several nonprofit organizations, some of which have joined together in the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA). They argue that the social, economic, and environmental costs have been misunderstood, underestimated, or sometimes simply ignored. Some of the main points made by critics include the lack of sufficient knowledge about the numbers of people affected; the profound disruptions, both environmental and cultural, that will be caused by the dam; and the difficulties involved in making arrangements for just compensation and resettlement of displaced people. Fisher sums it up as follows: In the Narmada case, as elsewhere, displacement is bound to affect people differently. Those with clear title to the land are entitled to be compensated for that land, while marginal groups are fi nding it difficult to be recognized as groups deserving attention in the resettlement and rehabilitation process. People are also not compensated for assets more intangible than land: local markets, community resources, and social networks are undervalued. Land itself is treated as a fungible

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Environmental issues, such as the spread of malaria, damage or destruction to fisheries, deforestation, soil erosion, watershed destruction, waterlogging, and salination, are also not addressed adequately in the project’s design. Opposition to the project heated up in 1988 when it became clear that people in Madya Pradesh and Maharashtra would not be resettled as promised by their state governments. Also, as government agencies attempted to meet deadlines set by the terms of the World Bank loan for data, surveys, and evacuations, repression in the Valley increased. According to Chittaroopa Palit, an NBA activist, the state governments: translated this timetable into a series of brutal assaults, with police opening fi re on NBA protesters, making numerous arrests and even attacking pregnant women. Every time a World Bank deadline loomed, we knew repression in the Valley would intensify. (87) In the years that followed, there were major protests: in 1990 at Manibeli, Maharashtra, one of the fi rst villages to be submerged, and, notably, a mass trek, or “sangharsh yatra,” in 1991 to Gujarat, during which protesters staged hunger strikes that would eventually get international attention. Shortly afterward, the World Bank conducted an independent review, headed by a former US Congressman, Bradford Morse, and thus known as the Morse Report, which concluded that planners had not adequately studied the dam project’s impact or recognized the complex patterns of habitation and subsistence in the Valley that would be disrupted: [The villages in the Valley] depend on a wide range of resources, including forest and river products, and extensive grazing. Much of the forest is harvested and grazed on a communal basis, while many agricultural plots are encroached. As is typical of tribal communities in the Narmada valley, the disparity between government administration of land and the people’s way of owning and using resources is profound. (qtd. in Fisher 32) While state planners attempted to rectify the shortcomings identified by the Morse Report, repression escalated again in the Valley, with mass arrests, beatings, and destruction of village homes and fields (Palit 88). In the wake of this repression—though after another, less exacting report by the Pamela Cox Committee was commissioned—the World Bank withdrew from the project in 1993, but activists continued to mount satyagrahas and direct action campaigns, staging sit-ins, hunger strikes, and annual monsoon

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satyagrahas, in which they refused to move away from villages and fields being submerged by monsoon waters. The campaigns have also included protests against other dams along the Narmada, notably the Maheshwar Dam in Madya Pradesh, a hydroelectric project that is a joint private–public venture with primary investment from S. Kumars, a textile manufacturer, underwritten by the Indian government. It is estimated that its construction will submerge sixty-one villages, displacing fifty thousand people. In the late 1990s, the protestors engaged in direct action by forming human barricades to the dam site and occupying the site itself eleven times. They also organized and successfully blocked efforts by S. Kumars to form partnerships with German and American corporations, including Enron, by staging protests at embassies in New Delhi and coordinating opposition with activist groups abroad. It is worth noting as well that women were among the main organizers, as Palit observes: “Peasant women were to Maheshwar struggle what tribals were to Sardar Sarovar” (92). In contrast to the recent successes in the Maheshwar battle, the protestors lost the fight to stop the Sardar Sarovar Dam when the Indian Supreme Court lifted a stay on construction in 2000.

“THE WHOLE SORRY BUSINESS”: CRITIQUE AND RESISTANCE In her essays and speeches, Arundhati Roy’s analysis of the Narmada Valley Project engages in a line of criticism that echoes many of the issues raised by movement actors. But what is pertinent here is that her mode of critique brings together multiple perspectives in a dynamic, complex tension. Some critics argue that this is a weakness of Roy’s argument. Literary critic Graham Huggan, in an otherwise insightful article on Roy as a postcolonial environmentalist, argues that it is unclear on whose behalf Roy is speaking: [Roy’s argument] raises the question of whom Roy believes herself to be speaking for (Adivasi “oustees”? The Narmada Bachao Andolan? International environmental activists and “eco-warriors”? The Indian people?)—an open question that blurs the boundaries between the underclass victims of ecological disaster and their privileged supporters, and that makes Roy vulnerable to the criticism that she is silencing those on whose behalf she wishes to speak. Roy’s tirade against the state seems to want to claim a victory for the people. But which people? (7) I will argue that, on the contrary, this complexity is the strength of her position. In the mixture, what emerges is an environmentalist critique that operates on several levels simultaneously. One puts emphasis on the loss of a sustainable way of life and ecological poverty on a local level, while

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another critiques the development state as an agent of capitalist expansion and bourgeois appropriation at the national level as well as in a neoliberal global context. Like many opponents of the Narmada Dam, Roy focuses part of her analysis on the technical flaws of the project, specifically the contradictions inherent in the multiuse function of dams, the likelihood of cost overruns, and the rapid obsolescence of big dams. In her investigation of government estimates of the amount of power expected to be generated by the Sardar Sarovar Project, for example, she questions the government figure of 1450 megawatts and argues that only 3% of that, or 50 megawatts, will be generated, given that power generation is one of many conflicting purposes for a dam, which include irrigation and flood control, both of which would use water intended to produce power. Moreover, based on data from actual costs of completed dams compared to estimates, the cost of the Sardar Sarovar Dam is expected to significantly exceed estimates. For instance, one of the first dams completed, the Bargi dam near Jabalpur, was ten times more costly than was expected and flooded three times more land than expected (The Cost of Living 35). Furthermore, she makes clear that the environmental costs of dam building in India and worldwide have been great. Even during the hiatus in its construction when the Supreme Court stopped it for several years in the 1990s, environmental destruction continued around the Sardar Sarovar Dam site in the form of deadly malaria outbreaks and massive silt deposits that all but blocked access to the river for Adivasis in the area who depended on it for subsistence. For completed dams, the record of environment destruction includes the typical outcomes of salination, waterlogging, the loss of forests and their rich biodiversity, and the destruction of fisheries. Roy cites the examples of two Indus River dams in Pakistan, the Tarbela (1977) and the Mangla (1967). Their command areas waterlogged, the Pakistani government has requested a $785 million loan from the World Bank for drainage projects. Furthermore, the Indian government has spent an estimated 87,000 crores on irrigation since 1947, but there are more drought-prone and floodprone areas now than before independence.5 In Roy’s argument, the failure to calculate environmental damage in the dominant logic of development is matched by the disastrous response to needs of rehabilitation and resettlement. In many cases, those displaced by dam construction are assigned land that belongs to others, setting off a chain reaction of hardship and dispossession. For example, displacees from Jalud, among the fi rst villages to be flooded by the Maheswar Dam, were assigned grazing land that was already in use by herders who were then forced to sell their cows and goats and relocate (The Cost of Living 56–7). But she goes beyond these “tactical” problems by making the broad argument that the Narmada Valley Project represents a profound failure of vision that is indicative of the dominant development model and also of a neoliberal agenda. In this regard, Roy shares with countless other critics, notably Shiva, Gadgil, and Guha, a fundamental disagreement with the

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assumptions, goals, and practices of a development apparatus that has prevailed since Indian independence. In her essays, she attacks the ideological underpinnings of this apparatus, its institutional workings, and political ecology. In a sober, sometimes playful, dismantling of its claims that reveals its invisible human and environmental costs, she undermines development’s sustaining ideologies, which ultimately fail to account for the loss of indigenous knowledge and the destruction of a sustainable way of life. As part of a flawed development agenda, the Narmada Valley Project, she argues, will impoverish more people than it helps, as it destroys the environmental commons on which so many depend. The project, she contends, is tied up with a logic of development that contributes to the concentration of corporate and state power that is veiled behind an ideology of right-wing nationalism. But her critique does not stop here: it is not only forces within India that she targets; she also emphasizes how neoliberal forces within India are part of a transnational alliance, a “neo-colonial iron triangle.” Her argument is thus a double intervention, and thereby avoids the flawed analysis of so much global justice thought that reinforces a perceived duality between indigenous, traditional, non-Western people (especially women) as natural environmentalists on the one hand, and a modernizing West on the other. As a postcolonial critique that emphasizes transnational perspectives of place, her work may also offer solutions out of the parochial frameworks of much environmental discourse. Let me, then, examine the various dimensions of her critique in more detail. The fi rst line of critique is her attack on the ideology of development within India, especially the technocratic approach that seeks to quantify development. Indeed, much of her literary panache targets the mystifications of official cost–benefit studies. Even as she mocks it, she tests official calculations to tease out how they often come up short. For example, even with so many big dams, safe drinking water is not available to one-fi fth of the population, or some two hundred million people, and basic sanitation is nonexistent for two-thirds, or some six hundred million people (The Cost of Living 14). In addition, Roy looks at the claims of increased food production since independence, and concedes that it has increased from fifty million tons of grain in 1950 to two hundred million tons today, but points out that even so, thirty million tons of that was not sold, while forty percent of people—approximately three hundred fi fity million—were living in poverty, more than the total population of India in 1947 (22). Moreover, she fi nds in a report from The World Commission on Big Dams that big dams are responsible for the production of less than ten percent of India’s food grain, which is less than the amount stored yearly in government warehouses, where it typically rots or is eaten by rats (Power Politics 66). But what is especially stunning is the failure to calculate the number of people who have been displaced by dam projects since Indian independence. Unable to fi nd an official figure, Roy calculates it to be around thirty-three million people, based on data provided by the Indian Institute

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of Public Administration (The Cost of Living 17). Another estimate puts the number at fi fty million displaced as a result of dams and development projects in general, a disproportionate percentage of which are Adivasis (about 57.6 percent compared to 7 percent of the entire population), Roy points out (17). Even as she offers her own unofficial calculations to disclose official accounting failures, she exposes the thinking behind them as instrumental, linear, and short-sighted development logic. Adopting an environmental perspective developed by movement actors and scholars such as Gadgil, Guha, and Vandana Shiva, Roy argues that abstract calculations serve to depersonalize, objectify, and distance the people involved. The government, in fact, applies a form of rationality that reduces the people living in complex rural environments into objects of exchange and control. For example, on the government’s attempt to measure the costs of resettlement against the benefits of delivering drinking water, her bitter irony points to the magnitude of what is repressed in this formula: 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 math. It strangles stories. Bludgeons details. And manages to blind perfectly reasonable people with its spurious, shining vision. (58, original italics) She also points to the absurdity of exchange logic applied by the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal in dividing the waters of the river among the three states: it calculated that 27.22 million acre feet of water flowed down the river, but years later it was determined that there was a flow of only 22.69 million acre feet of water (The Cost of Living 26–7). Nonetheless, the government refuses to recognize the new figures; as she caustically remarks, “Never mind the data—The Narmada is legally bound by human decree to produce as much water as the government of India commands” (27). Philosophically, Roy’s critique of the reductive form of rationality recalls ecofeminist Vandana Shiva’s broad attack on reductionist science as an instrument of colonial and neocolonial capitalism in Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. In contrast to a holistic understanding of the interconnected and reciprocal processes of nature, this “reductionist” view understands nature as a collection of separable and manipulatable “things,” and thus converges with the commodified view of nature implicit in capitalist economic logic. As an ecofeminist critic of the reductionist science of capitalism, Shiva goes further and posits that the domination of nature is linked conceptually with the domination of women and capitalist exploitation. According to Shiva, the practices of commercial forestry and water management, as well as the scientific applications associated with the Green Revolution, are rooted in this legacy of reductionist science. For example, the main objective of commercial forestry is simply the extraction

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of wood stock, not the sustainable regeneration of the forest for fuel, food, water, and fodder that characterizes an Adivasi or peasant way of life. In her words, “reductionism has been characteristic of [commercial] forestry because it sunders forestry from water management, from agriculture and from animal husbandry” (Staying Alive 63). Commercial forestry usually emphasizes the production of a single species, such as eucalyptus, which when cultivated as a monoculture, depletes soil nutrients and provides little excess wood, branches, or leaves for fuel or animal fodder. In the Kolar district of Karnataka, for example, monocultural production of the eucalyptus has displaced the cultivation of staple foods such as the millet and ragi, and, according to Shiva, Kolar now experiences periodic drought and food scarcity (80). Indeed, Shiva reports that the Tumkur district of Karnataka has historically witnessed widespread peasant resistance to eucalyptus cultivation: “On 10 August 1983, the women and small peasants of Barha and Holahalli villages . . . marched en masse to the forest nursery and pulled out millions of eucalyptus seedlings, planting tamarind and mango seeds in their place” (82). Shiva contrasts the production of the eucalyptus with the cultivation of the honge, whose rapid growth of leaves and branches makes it ideal for provisioning peasants with fuel and fodder, and also for the generation of humus. Shiva observes that: it is little wonder that Garhwal women of the Himalayas call a tree ‘dali’ or branch, because they see the productivity of the tree in terms of its non-woody biomass which functions critically in hydrological and nutrient cycles within the forest, and through green fertilizer and fodder in cropland. (80) Furthermore, the reductionist sciences of forestry, agriculture, and water management often involve the conversion of a “commons,” or usufructuary area for local people, into monoculture plantations that benefit only a few. This conversion also involves the loss of indigenous knowledge and a shift of control from women, peasants, and Adivasis to corporations and government bureaucracies. According to Shiva, poor women fi nd that they have less status in their communities as the value of their work, and control over it, diminishes, whereas men’s increasing involvement in the cash economy enhances their power and status. Roy’s reporting on the Adivasis battling the Maheswar Dam, where many women are involved in organizing the protests, confi rms Shiva’s argument: If displaced, it is the men who receive cash compensation, if any, from the government, while the women are “reduced to offering themselves as daily laborers on construction sites” (The Checkbook 44). Another major line of argument that Roy develops is her critique of ideologies and institutions associated with the development state. The government typically projects a benevolent image, Roy argues, when the development contest is cast as a confl ict between different development

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paradigms associated with Nehru and “the paternal, protective morality of the Soviet-style centralized state” on the one hand, and with Gandhi and “the nurturing, maternal morality of romanticized village republics” on the other (The Cost of Living 11). As an ideological ploy, the Nehruversus-Gandhi argument implies that both options have “the Greater Good of the Nation” as an end but simply differ on the means, and thus, in her words, the ploy “lifts the whole sorry business out of the bog of deceit, lies, false promises . . . confers on it a false legitimacy” (11). The portrayal of the struggle as a conflict between modernity and tradition works in much the same way. Indeed, if anyone represents the position of modernity, Roy argues, it is the opponents to the dam projects, not the banks, contractors, and international lending agencies. According to Roy, it is those who speak against dam building who have put values associated with development into practice, values such as critical awareness and democratic debate, while those in favor of the dam voice only empty slogans. Roy is exposing, one might say, the ideology of the development state for what it is: an alibi for capitalist expansion, and she focuses in particular on the role of the state as a facilitator in this process. In this regard, the influence of Marxist critique is palpable. In Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, Samir Amin observes that capitalism is often mistaken for development and that the two concepts are sometimes used interchangeably, when, in fact, capitalism is always guided by the search for profits, not by the goals of, for example, equality, literacy, access to medical care, full employment, or what Amartya Sen would call “the expansion of human capabilities” (qtd. in Capitalism 15). Roy suggests this as she makes it clear that dam building in the Narmada Valley is not about development, but dispossession and repression: For twenty years in most areas there has been no sign of ‘development’—no roads, no schools, no wells, no medical help. [ . . . ] The ‘fruits of modern development,’ when they fi nally 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. (The Cost of Living 41) Furthermore, contrary to the myth of the concept of a failed state, Roy argues that the state has, in fact, succeeded in its main task of facilitating uneven development, which imposes a pattern of domination and exploitation that produces devastating consequences. First, economically, a pattern is set up whereby “India’s poorest people [subsidize] the lifestyles of her richest” (The Cost of Living 19), and by which “Indian villages live only to serve her cities” (24) in a system, she implies, of internal conquest and colonialism:

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In the French-Canadian war of the 1770s, Lord Amherst exterminated most of Canada’s Native Indians by offering them blankets infested with the smallpox virus. Two centuries on, we of the Real India have found less obvious ways of achieving similar ends (20–1). Environmentally, this pattern of development, of which the Narmada Valley Project is an example, subordinates and, in the process, destroys the natural ecology of a river system: building large dam projects disrupts decentralized subsistence patterns, just as complex natural drainage networks of a river system are destroyed and replaced by a centralized authority. Furthermore, as people lose access to a commons, they are forced into the most marginalized circumstances among the laboring poor in urban areas. Essentially, what is established is a political ecology that facilitates the concentration of state and corporate power, thus eroding democracy and accountability. As the state, in its role of agent of development, attempts to reshape the natural environment, it imposes greater control over its citizenry. What is more, Roy links the decline of democracy to the increasing manipulation of religious communalism in an ideology of nationalism that legitimizes the state’s authority. Here [are] the two arms of government work[ing] in synergy. How they have evolved and pretty near perfected an extraordinary pincer action—while one arm is busy selling the nation off in chunks, the other, to divert attention, is orchestrating a baying, howling, deranged chorus of cultural nationalism. (85) As Roy attacks the patterns of uneven development within India and the state as an agent of this process, she also argues that these patterns are established in a transnational context as well. In a moment of biting cynicism, Roy observes: “The relationship between [India and the World Bank] is exactly like the relationship between a landless laborer steeped in debt and the village moneylender [ . . . ]. It’s not for nothing that we call the world a global village” (The Cost of Living 29). In this image of a historically familiar form of exploitation and impoverishment with roots in the colonial era, Roy renders tangible the economic reality of uneven global development, whereby the core extracts wealth from the periphery. In 1998 alone, according to Roy, India paid the World Bank $478 million more than it borrowed (29). The international dam industry, she observes, is worth over $20 billion, with the majority of that funding being recycled back to the global North in the form of equipment costs or consultants’ fees or loan agency staff salaries (31). This strand of Roy’s critique echoes the work of postcolonial environmentalists, environmental feminists, and Marxist ecologists, who have argued that capitalism as a world system has a geography: capitalist accumulation tends to create core areas of wealth and consumption by instituting peripheral areas of extraction and production. Marxist ecologist John Bellamy Foster, for example, reveals that this system of global colonization has:

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Ecofeminist Maria Mies also demonstrates that global colonization depends on an international division of labor and environment, but especially on the nonwage labor of women of the global South: “With the rise of capitalism as a world system, based on large-scale conquest and colonial plunder, it becomes possible to externalize or exterritorialise those whom patriarchs wanted to exploit” (76). Under this system, the core areas are transformed into islands of vast consumer choice, while peripheral areas undergo the destruction of commons—which also typically involves the disappearance of attendant structures of collective provisioning together with sustainable practices and knowledge—as these areas become commodity-based economies ruled by a centralized authority, often a private corporate one. Through practices of cash-cropping and large-scale irrigation, the commons is transformed into commodity, the result of which is habitat destruction and the loss of biodiversity, pollution from insecticides and fossil fuel fertilizers, disruption of the soil and water cycles, as erosion leads to silting of rivers and streams, and so on. Peasant producers are impoverished, as they are driven to less productive or degraded areas or off the land entirely in migrations to urban areas and beyond. Nearly always responsible for family subsistence, such as food gathering, cooking, and washing, Shiva argues that women especially bear more of the costs of privatization and environmental degradation: they must often walk farther and spend more hours searching for wood, water, and food. Thus, Shiva argues that development as a profit-driven enterprise is: bereft of the feminine, the conservation, the ecological principle. . . . The neglect of nature’s work in renewing herself, and women’s work in producing sustenance in the form of basic, vital needs is an essential part of [what Shiva calls a] paradigm of maldevelopment, which sees all work that does not produce profits and capital as . . . unproductive. (Staying Alive 4) There are thus crucial links among feminized poverty, environmental degradation, and historical patterns of inequities.

HOW TO TELL A STORY TO CHANGE THE WORLD: STORYTELLING AND RESISTANCE As we have seen, Roy’s critical analysis of the logic of hegemonic development and neoliberal globalization can be contextualized within multiple

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paradigms of critique, and I have tried to demonstrate how she extends and enriches these. At the same time, her critique is enlivened by several narrative techniques that are enlisted to resist what might be called the “imaginary of privatization” that underlies contemporary hegemonic ideologies of neoliberal capitalism. One might say that what her storytelling does is resist the reductive commodifying logic that constantly disconnects consumption from production, dichotomizes spheres of wealth from areas of poverty, and shrinks awareness of the complex interdependencies of culture, history, and nature. As with her method of critical analysis, her narrative strategies are also complex. An examination of Roy’s strategies must begin with her tendency toward constant self-reflexivity and self-questioning. As she considers the relationship between culture and politics and the attempts to silence her, she often reflects on “how to tell a story.” In the essay, “The Ladies Have Feelings, So . . . Shall We Leave it to the Experts?” in Power Politics, she astutely compares media efforts to confi ne her role to that of a creative writer of the private imagination to those efforts that threaten legal action against her: Both aim to limit her activity to a private space, which, as the title of the essay suggests, is profoundly gendered. Much has been written on the gendered division of social space in colonial India, and even more has been written on the subjugation of women in a private sphere by imperatives of capitalist modernity, but not enough emphasis has been put on the ongoing violence implicit in a neoliberal imaginary of privatization that supports an ever-intensifying expropriation of women’s labor, the commons of the rural poor, and the environment.6 In Roy’s work, and in this essay specifically, the significance of that repression is a constant theme. In one sentence, Roy speaks of the repression of her voice; in the next, the active repression of social movements striving to challenge privatization and expropriation. But how to speak—how to articulate a counterhegemonic position—is an issue in Roy’s writing that requires nuanced analysis: on the one hand, she proclaims her determination to portray contemporary confl icts in stark terms if need be, but, on the other hand, she often adopts a narrative practice that could be identified with postmodernism as it spins free of polemics into ironic playfulness. Literary critic Bishnupriya Ghosh, in reference to Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, explains Roy’s self-reflexivity as an attempt to anticipate the reductive appropriation of her work into a commodity of fashionable exoticism (9). “Cosmopolitical” writers such as Roy, according to Ghosh, “are considerably self-reflexive about the nature of print culture and circulation in the information age” (9). Perhaps some of Roy’s irony may be explained as an effort to undercut those appropriations, but it may also be that Roy is searching for an appropriate story telling technique to address what are emerging as new conditions of hegemony and counterhegemony in a neoliberal capitalist era that is fast becoming a new imperial age, and the shifts in her work indicate a writer navigating rough seas. It is her narrative strategy that attempts to reconnect the “ordinary”

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depravation and ecological impoverishment of daily life to capitalist forms of accumulation on larger scales that should be highlighted. To portray the conflicts surrounding the Narmada Valley Project, Roy relies, in part, on imagery and tropes that conjure up an epic language of opposing forces: “Instinct told me that this was the big one. The one in which the battle lines were clearly drawn, the warring armies massed along them” (The Cost of Living 8). With reference to this image, she identifies those displaced by the forces of development and globalization as “refugees in an undeclared war” (21). And those whose life worlds are destroyed by development-related projects are portrayed as literally eaten by a machine, “a development mill” that consumes the “wretched” and spits out “air conditioners and popcorn and rayon suits” (24). With images like these in mind, some critics, even sympathetic ones, have dismissed her storytelling as melodramatic and sensational, as I have noted. But it may just be that such images are required to raise awareness of the brutality of ongoing accumulation that is so often masked by images of development and globalization as generated by the magic of markets. Privatization itself is a term that evokes the rational preference for technological efficiencies of an anonymous market. Her image of Rumpelstiltskin, or “King Rumpel” to embody the rapacious advances unleashed by unregulated global capital might be thought of as her attempt to mock the image of an invisible and benign wizard of globalization: What kind of potentate is Rumpelstilskin? Powerful, pitiless, and armed to the teeth. His realm is raw capital, his conquests emerging markets, his prayers profits, his borders limits, his weapons nuclear. . . . He has a bank account heart. He has television eyes and a newspaper nose in which you see only what he wants you to see and read only what he wants you to read. (Power Politics 36) Furthermore, Roy uses the language of fable here, with its moral undertones of child-like innocence confronted with the dark grown-up machinations, to frame her reporting of the private schemes of S. Kumars and Enron in the construction of the Maheswar Dam. One also thinks of her image of the people of India divided between two trucks moving in opposite directions or her snapshot of laborers laying fiberoptic cable by candlelight, which I referred to at the beginning. What is immediately evoked is a fundamental contradiction, a stark portrayal of opposing forces. However, I also want to suggest that there is something else implied, especially in such evocative images of contingency as the candlelit nights of digging ditches, something that reveals the dialogical complexity of the contingent and local. In her picture of the battle of the Narmada Valley Project, then, Roy also evinces a narrative practice that rejects simplified dualities and instead develops images and stories of subtle complexity that evoke inner contradictions and slow, miniature accretions of history. In An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, for example, she criticizes what she calls “crisis reportage” that

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“isolates the crisis, unmoors it from the particularities of the history, the geography, and the culture that produced it” (6). This sort of hegemonic narrative—the “big ideologies,” as Roy terms them in “The Greater Common Good”—renders events such as the struggle over the Narmada River Project, with historical roots in colonialism and complex variations of support and opposition, into cartoon-like confrontations (12). For example, in a move that attempts to reverse the typical focus on the extraordinary and the precipitating event as the entire story in crisis reporting, Roy calls for a focus on the mundane and ongoing processes of expropriation: We have to lose our terror of the mundane. We have to use our skills and imagination and our art, to re-create the rhythms of the endless crisis of normality, and in doing so, expose the policies and processes that make ordinary things—food, water, shelter, and dignity—such a distant dream for ordinary people. (An Ordinary Person’s 16) She cites the example of reporting in the Indian Express, which portrayed the police firing on Adivasis because they had “encroached” on a haven for wildlife in Muthanga, Kerala (An Ordinary Person’s 19). She argues that as a consequence of the article and the attitudes it generated, environmentalists identified the Adivasis as the enemy of nature, when, in reality, the sanctuary—a monocultural forest of eucalyptus—was created by a rayon manufacturer who had devastated the area by clear-cutting an old-growth forest of bamboo and contaminated a local river. The company, Birla’s Grasim Rayon Factory, had essentially destroyed a sustainable pattern of subsistence practiced by Adivasis and imposed a destructive, extractive one. The genesis of the story of the factory’s founding in 1958 is lost in crisis reporting. Such reporting is also not attentive to the layered histories of place, ecology, and expropriation, while Roy’s reporting attempts to capture that complexity in a passing allusion or vignette: in one instance, she delineates the consequences of exporting frog legs, which renders India even more dependent on World Bank loans because the dwindling population of frogs has led to an explosive infestation of insects, and in turn, to a greater dependence on pesticides and, hence, greater pollution; in another aside, she refers to displaced Adivasi children who eat candy instead of the forty-eight different kinds of fruit they had eaten when they lived in the Narmada River Valley; in still another, she alludes to small peasant plots of “rice, melons, cucumbers, and gourds” (The Cost of Living 49) grown in river silt destroyed by waters from the sluices of a dam opened by careless engineers; in another reference, she refers to women having to carry pots that much farther because of silt build-ups in a choked river. What she documents are the rhythms of cultivation and subsistence sustained over years and years of accumulated local knowledge by rural people that are now lost. Yet, what she documents are not idealized or naturalized relations to the land, but contingent and provisional arrangements borne out of necessity and indepth knowledge of local ecology. Much of this storytelling is thus engaged in

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reconnecting the processes at work with a chain of consequences, and in raising awareness of the interconnections of conflicts of class, caste, and gender with ecological exploitation and impoverishment. In contrast to those stories that only pay attention to the large currents, the details in Roy’s storytelling attend to deep eddies, swirls, and networks of crisscrossing streams. By drawing the connections and deepening the awareness of consequences of development and globalization, tangible Roy is making what postcolonial environmental feminist theorists such as Shiva, Mies, and Agarwal have articulated in their theory. In sometimes distinct ways, these theorists instruct us on how the isolation, poverty, and environmental devastation experienced by some communities are the result of uneven development, privatization, and gendered divisions of labor that shift the burdens of production onto the many, especially women, while the few flourish and benefit from their exploitation. More broadly, Roy’s work also points to a whole host of writers articulating a postcolonial environmentalist position. In a recent article, postcolonial critic Rob Nixon argues that postcolonial studies have generally not been drawn to environmental concerns primarily because ecocriticism has developed within a North American paradigm, with a focus on a wilderness tradition and a preservationist discourse of purity that pursues “timeless, solitary moments of communion,” and a “romantic primordialism” that represses the brutal historical record of displacement and genocide (235). Furthermore, ecocriticism remains wedded to bioregional frameworks that celebrate the “spiritual geography” and an “imperative of the local [that] opens not into specificities of the international but into transcendental abstraction” (236). In contrast, postcolonial writers and critics work to recuperate historical and transnational consciousness of the violence and repression that have characterized colonial appropriations of land and resources. He argues that postcolonial environmental writers, such as the late African writer and activist Ken SaroWiwa or the Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid, may offer solutions out of the parochial frameworks in their emphasis on transnational perspectives on place. In A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid, for example, grounds her critique of globalization in an intimate portrait of local flora and fauna, but, as Nixon argues, “[t]his place where Kincaid stands, the place where knowledge must begin, is inextricably local and transnational” (24). Among the productive starting points for theorizing postcolonial environmentalism Nixon mentions are the writings of advocates for indigenous land rights, community displacement and toxicity, and international oil literature; the literature and theory of Black Atlantic Studies and African Studies are also potentially fruitful areas. One might add to this list the essays and literature of Roy, as well as the postcolonial environmental feminist theory I have discussed. Roy’s work, then, has brought attention to emerging new perspectives that are powerful challenges to the destructive forces of development politics and neoliberal capitalism within India and beyond. As a dual critique, her intervention connects the machinations of the political right within India with ones of neoliberal globalization. Her analysis is also crucial because

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it broadens and deepens the classic Marxist analysis of capitalist exploitation, as we have seen, to include the exploitation of rural peoples, women, and the environment; and simultaneously because it deepens and revises dominant ideas about what constitutes the environment that should be protected as the site where people “live, work and play”; and also because there is an insistence on telling a different story, one with “new kinds of heroes,” in her words, who value the wilderness not as an empty place, but a place where creativity, diversity, sustainable growth, and democracy can thrive. As Roy says of the struggle: “We were not just fighting against a dam. We were fighting for a worldview” (Power Politics 82). NOTES 1. Roy has had some serious charges brought against her. After the publication of The God of Small Things, she was charged with “corrupting public morality” in a case in Kerala. And the publication of The Cost of Living spurred a charge against her by the Indian Supreme Court, which claimed that her writings “lowered the dignity of the court.” When this case came to trial in 2002, she was convicted and paid a fine after serving one day in jail. For more on the latter case, see the documentary, DAM/AGE, and also her own analysis of the cases in “On Citizens’ Rights to Express Dissent” in Power Politics. 2. See, in particular, Kanchan Limaye’s “Gandhi Lite” (2000). 3. This often-quoted pronouncement by Nehru, which he repeated on many occasions, is taken from his 1954 speech dedicating the Bhakra-Nangal dam in Punjab. For the full text of the speech, see Jawaharlal Nehru. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, Vol. 3, 1953–57. New Delhi: Government of India, 1958. 4. In his study of the project, William F. Fisher divides the opponents into three camps: 1) those who object to the project’s implementation; 2) those who argue that the project is technically flawed; and 3) those who, for ideological reasons, reject the entire model of development adopted by India after independence. See William F. Fisher. Toward Sustainable Development: Struggling Over India’s Narmada River. Armonk, NY: ME. Sharpe, 1995. 12–5. 5. An Indian crore is a unit of measurement that is numerically equivalent to ten million units. 6. For an historical analysis of gendered private and public spheres under colonialism, see especially Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid’s Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History 10–4.

WORKS CITED Agarwal, Bina. “The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India.” Feminist Studies 18.1 (Spring 1992): 119–54. Amin, Samir. Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society. London: Zed, 1997. . “India, A Great Power?” Monthly Review 56.9 (Feb. 2005): 1–13. Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. New York: Routledge, 1998. Braidotti, Rosi, et al. Women, The Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis. London: Zed, 1994.

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Buruma, Ian. “The Anti-American.” New Republic 29 Apr. 2002: 25–8. DAM/AGE. Dir. Aradhana Seth. First Run/Icarus Films, 2002. Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. New York: Verso, 2001. Fisher, William F., ed. Toward Sustainable Development: Struggling Over India’s Narmada River. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995. Foster, John Bellamy. Ecology Against Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review, 2002. Gadgil, Madhav, and Ramachandra Guha. Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India. London: Routledge, 1995. Gerein, James. “Review of Power Politics,” by Arundhati Roy. World Literature Today (Summer 2002): 79. Ghosh, Bishnupriya. When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. Guha, Ramachandra. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Huggan, Graham. “Greening Postcolonialism: Ecocrtical Perspectives.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (2004): 701–33. Khilnani, Sunil. The Idea of India. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1997. Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: Penguin, 1988. Limaye, Kanchan. “Gandhi Lite.” National Review 52.2 (7 Feb. 2000): 50–2. Mies, Maria. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed, 1986. Nixon, Rob. “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism.” Postcolonialism and Beyond. Eds. Ania Loomba, et al. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. 233–251. Omvedt, Gail. Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. Palit, Chittaroopa. “Monsoon Risings: Mega-Dam Resistance in the Narmada Valley.” New Left Review 21 (May/June 2003): 81–100. Roy, Arundhati. The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. Cambridge: South End P, 2004. . The Cost of Living. Cambridge: South End P, 1999. . The God of Small Things. New York: Random House, 1997. . An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Cambridge: South End P, 2004. . Power Politics. Cambridge: South End P, 2001. . War Talk. Cambridge: South End P, 2002. Sangari, Kumkum, and Sudesh Vaid, eds. Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. Seaman, Donna. “Review of War Talk,” by Arundhati Roy. Booklist 15 Apr. 2003: 1433. Shiva, Vandana. India Divided: Diversity and Democracy Under Attack. New York: Seven Stories, 2005. . Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed, 1989. Sturgeon, Noel. “Ecofeminist Appropriations and Transnational Environmentalisms.” Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives. Eds. Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim. New York: Routledge, 2003. 113–125. Vanaik, Achin. “Rendezvous at Mumbai.” New Left Review 26 (Mar./Apr. 2004): 53–65. Whittaker, Peter. “Book Review of Power Politics,” by Arundhati Roy. New Internationalist 350 (Oct. 2002): 31.

10 Home and the World The Multiple Citizenships of Arundhati Roy Gurleen Grewal . . . [I]t would be a great mistake to see globalization primarily as a feature of imperialism. It is a much bigger—and immensely greater— process than that. . . . There is a world to be won on behalf of humanity, and global voices can help us to achieve this. —Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny

Contested and upheld, denounced and defended, global change wrought by the globalization of neoliberal economic doctrine has come to mean different things in different contexts—the promotion of world integration and opportunity for growth, as well as the reproduction of inequalities old and new. The latter has provoked local–global activism from players with varying agendas, which in turn has enabled spirited debate in university classrooms and academic journals, international board rooms, and local communities, raising deep questions of human agency, social justice, and equity. I situate Arundhati Roy’s work as part of the wider response of civil society, at local, state, and global levels, whose aim is to “mediate between government and the power of capital” in order to “claim and retain the rights and entitlements of state and global citizenship” (Mathie and Cunningham 6, 1). Arundhati Roy’s is a voice from the global South purposefully undoing sanctioned ignorances, crossing borders of gender, caste, and class, of the nation state, of the South/North divide. Breaking taboos against coimplicating the lives of the haves and the have-nots—breaking the decorum of the institutionalized academy—Roy’s writing lays bare the workings of power without permission from “the experts.” A feminist, but no bourgeois feminist, she gives herself to the cause of the people while expressing her wariness of the “traditional, mainstream” and “strangely unbending” Left with its rigid ideology (An Ordinary Person’s Guide 115). No wonder Roy ruffles so many feathers. What makes Roy compelling is that she stakes her claim in multiple citizenships and in the accountability or responsibility that attends them—Indian citizenship; global capitalist citizenship (or as a “subject of Empire”); and a democratic feminist–humanitarian people’s citizenship of the world. Few have publicly claimed multiple citizenships so flamboyantly, claiming all of her citizens’ “rights to express dissent” (Power Politics 87). It is

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no surprise that she is the acclaimed writer of the growing global justice movement: she has staged herself as a global citizen voicing the discourse of human rights in a bold, lyrical, and impassioned way. How did the author of The God of Small Things become the advocate of big things like democracy and justice? By continuing to do in the public sphere what she had done with the private sphere of home and family in her novel. Uma Narayan’s defi nition of the feminist daughter’s political enterprise, to “retell the story of a mother-culture in feminist terms,” is highly appropriate for understanding Roy’s work as a whole: It is a political attempt to tell a counter-story that contests dominant narratives that would claim the entire edifice of ‘our Culture’ and ‘our Nation’ for themselves, converting them into a peculiar form of property, and excluding the voices, concerns, and contributions of many who are members of the national and political community (10). Before The God of Small Things, this feminist daughter and filmmaker wrote two consecutive articles for a weekly, “The Great Indian Rape-Trick I” and “The Great Indian Rape-Trick II,” contesting the veracity and rhetoric of Bollywood director Shekhar Kapur’s sensational fi lm Bandit Queen, based on a biography of the dacoit, Phoolan Devi. In Roy’s fi rst essay, the battle lines are drawn in the very opening sentences: “At the premiere screening of Bandit Queen in Delhi, Shekhar Kapur introduced the fi lm with these words: ‘I had a choice between Truth and Aesthetics. I chose Truth, because Truth is Pure.’ Roy follows up with this commentary so characteristic of her subsequent political essays: Again and again, we are assured, in interviews, in reviews, and eventually in writing on the screen before the film begins, ‘This is a True Story.’ Whether or not it is the Truth is no longer relevant. The point is that it will (if it hasn’t already) become the Truth. . . . But is it? The True Story? How does one decide? Who decides? (“The Great Indian Rape Trick.” 1) In a devastating retelling, Roy recasts the much-acclaimed Kapur as someone who mutes the agency of an illiterate and raped low-caste woman. In the fi rst essay, she chastises with withering scorn his voyeuristic preoccupation with rape: “Rape is the main dish. Caste is the sauce that it swims in” (“The Great Indian Rape Trick, I”). In the second essay, she questions the integrity of the project: They [director and producer] never meet her once. Not even to sign the contracts. They re-invent her life. Her loves. Her rapes. They implicate her in the murder of twenty-two men that she denies having

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committed. Then they try to slither out of showing her the fi lm! ‘Cut, alter and adapt’?—is that what it’s called? (“The Great Indian Rape Trick, II”) In these lesser-known 1994 essays, Roy signals the themes and preoccupations of all the writing to come, revealing the attunement of her psychic radar to “the Big Questions. Of Truth. Of Justice. Of Liberty” especially as they govern the small things (“The Great Indian Rape Trick, II”). In all her work to date, Roy has been consistent in pursuing and framing the local/global unaccountability of power: in the fictionalized village community of Kerala (The God of Small Things); in the post-1991 “liberalized” nation-state of India (Power Politics, War Talk); and in her essays pre- and post-9/11, sketching the US-led global North’s imperialist relationship with the South (War Talk, Power Politics, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire). Straddling commercial publishing houses and the noncommercial voice-of-the-people South End Press, she leverages her privilege with skill. As we know, North or South, the “dividing line is not just the poverty line but the fiber-optic and high-speed digital lines. The key is the keyboard. Those who do not have one risk marginalization; their imagination does not cross borders” (Tharoor 88). Roy has strategically taken her writer’s ability and prerogative of crossing borders to another level, making it her vocation to speak with the disfranchised. Apart from charisma and literary talent, her popularity is explained by her ability to be glocal in a post-1989, World Trade Organization-world whose zeitgeist demands just that. Her voice is very much a voice of our times, of a globalized world economy with a global media network and a globalized reading public. From the Cold War fought and won in Afghanistan, to terrorism and the US-led invasion of Iraq; from India’s nuclear policy and building of dams, to the rise of Hindutva, and corporate globalization—Roy does the work of connecting disparate events and making sense of the pervasive unease, if not outrage, felt by many across the globe. Roy’s local/global point of view allows her to scope the issues that belong to the nation and those that are intelligible only in the sphere beyond the nation. Movements of people and global capital have ensured that the category of the nation no longer remains an adequate unit of analysis. Her analysis of global class issues is compelling. Roy astutely illuminates how locally and globally, neglecting the class dimension of sectarian violence has fanned the fi res of divisive communal identities that in turn have provided a smoke-screen for the swift privatization of the commons and increasing corporate control. Addressing trade unionists in Raipur, India, Roy explains: “It is of utmost importance that we understand that the American occupation of Iraq and the snatching away of our fields, homes, rivers, jobs, infrastructure, and resources are products of the very same process” (An Ordinary Person’s Guide 80).

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Roy is the latest among an increasing number of global feminist voices that have interrogated the neoliberal policies of economic globalization (Moghadam; Mohanty; Naples and Desai; Signs). For Roy, the questions are basic and important: who benefits? Who pays the cost? “What is it [globalization] going to do to a country like India, in which social inequality has been institutionalized in the caste system for centuries? In which three hundred million people are illiterate” (Power Politics 13–4). Roy’s analysis of the predicament of the poor in India has been preceded by that of feminist scholars who have worked in the areas of development for over two decades: the work of Gita Sen and Peggy Antrobus (founders of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), Rajni Kothari (founder and director of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies), Bina Agarwal, Vandana Shiva, and others. Assessing the International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies of structural adjustments in the 1980s, Sen and Grown conclude that: indeed, the recent history of “development” processes is replete with the struggles of the poor against policies that reduce their access to resources, destroy and pollute their environment, or mortgage their jobs and food consumption to the requirements of debt repayments (27). Vandana Shiva has written extensively about the World Trade Organization regulations and their effects on the peasants of India and of the world: The “rules of free trade allow corporations to use the machinery of the nationstate to appropriate resources from the people, and prevent people from asserting and exercising their rights” (“The World on the Edge” 114). As early as 1988, eminent Indian political scientist, Rajni Kothari, had cautioned that: It is only by bringing the as yet disparate perceptions and struggles of gender, ecology, ethnicity, class and human rights in a shared conception of restructuring the human enterprise that there is a future for the feminist movement. Not otherwise (xiii). In fact, Kothari’s call for a different approach, for a “spirit of democratic resistance,” is astute and prophetic and worth citing in full, if we are to appreciate Roy’s contribution to democratic processes: Feminists ought indeed to be involved in the economic struggles of the oppressed poor, the growing ranks of the impoverished (to no small extent because of the development project) and the still further growing ranks of pauperized, marginalized and dispensable peoples for whom the State and the modern economy have no use. . . . Such a large spectrum of womanhood . . . is exploited by the capitalist mode of production. But it is not just a question of women. It is a much larger issue of

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a new technological basis of economic and cultural exploitation which is crying for a spirit of democratic resistance against what is undoubtedly a considerably changed (transnationalized, corporate, computerized, militarized and televised) model of capitalist growth and integration. (xii) Galvanizing the “spirit of democratic resistance,” Roy’s work to date attempts to meet the challenges Kothari lays out so well. Roy’s location in the South and outside the academy gives her an edge of her own. It becomes a ‘people’s voice,’ a public intellectual’s voice. Global capitalism with its drive for cheaper resources, labor, and markets has been several hundred years in the making. The twentieth-century nationalist movements of the Third World had put a check on the colonizing powers’ ability to exploit at will, but Third-World debt to the same powers rendered them vulnerable and powerless in a world economic system. It took someone of the caliber and stamina of Noam Chomsky to consistently chronicle his nation’s covert and bloody operations abroad (the violent suppression of democratic people’s alternatives to free enterprise), while exposing its use of the media to manufacture consent at home (Manufacturing Consent). In the current globalization era, as Roy notes, the neoliberal takeover is accomplished by national governments that, between “the IMF checkbook and the American cruise missile” have had little choice in the matter (An Ordinary Person’s Guide 70). Poor nation-states that had built up public assets are now delivering them into private hands. However, not all agree that this is a bad thing for the developing nations. The global economy, like everything else under the sun, has its cycles. And this time around, the nonaltruistic rules of free trade are actually helping countries like China, India, and Brazil to shift the global balance of power. In a recent issue of Newsweek, an excerpt of Fareed Zakaria’s The Post American World hails “the End of Pax Americana” and “the rise of the rest—the rest of the world,” cheerfully anticipating “[i]n terms of war and peace, economics and business, ideas and art . . . a landscape quite different from the one we have lived in until now—one defined and directed from many places and by many peoples” (27). The lens of empire that Roy uses is one that well-meaning economists, politicians, and entrepreneurs in India who were freed from the ‘license raj’ would rather leave behind in order to avail themselves of the newly leveled playing fields alluded to by Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat). Viewing the globe from the postcolonial optic of empire, Roy’s writings insist on questioning the flat-world thesis: International instruments of trade and fi nance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and fi nancial agreements that keep the poor in their bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalize inequity. Why else would it be that the US taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer twenty times more than a garment made in

148 Gurleen Grewal Britain? Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa beans, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try to turn it into chocolate? . . . Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidized electricity? Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonizing regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes and repay them some $382 billion a year? (“The New American Century,” paragraph 18) These complaints would count among the “momentous omissions” and “injurious commissions” that economics Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen enumerates in his assessment of the global “institutional failures” to ensure “elementary global justice” (Identity and Violence 139). Roy’s argument outlined previously also recalls the work of Noam Chomsky, who made it his business to track the footprints of power in the making of global inequality: Putting the details aside, it seems fairly clear that one reason for the sharp divide between today’s fi rst and third worlds is that much of the latter was subjected to “experiments” that rammed free market doctrine down their throats, whereas today’s developed countries were able to resist such measures (“Free Trade and Free Market” 361). However, not everyone will agree with Roy’s dichotomous portrayal of the current situation: “Is globalization about ‘eradication of poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?” At either end, the situation has been simplified, so an acceptable answer could be neither. Roy is polemical, and purposely so. As she herself notes, “These are huge, contentious questions [italics added].” (Power Politics 14). And since Roy approaches her material as a playwright would, identifying protagonists and antagonists, identifying conflict or crisis and theatrically amplifying it, we lose some objectivity in favor of affect and memorable turn of phrase. But, reminiscent of feminist scholar Donna Harraway’s argument about “situated knowledges” (575), Roy also challenges the so-called objectivity underlying economic and ethical choices when she points out that: [t]he answers vary depending on whether they come from the villages and fields of rural India, from the slums and shantytowns of urban India, from the living rooms of the burgeoning middle class, or from the boardrooms of the big business houses (Power Politics 14). Roy is clear about her answer, made explicit in the rhetorical question: “Or is it [neoliberal globalization] going to give those who already have a centuries-old head start a friendly helping hand?” (14).

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Although the postcolonial Nehruvian state had an avowed socialist commitment to the eradication of poverty, we know that equality in terms of gender, caste, and class eluded too many five-year plans. Handicapped by debt and a bureaucracy-heavy, centralized government that dampened capitalist initiative, India was compelled by a foreign exchange crisis to enter the globalization era; in its radical and, many would argue, liberating break with the past, it hastened from being a state whose mission was to be the avowed patron of the poor (no matter how ineffective) to being a state whose mission is to enter the global fast lane (no matter what happens to the poor). There are those in the government, economists among them, who believe that increasing the rate of production and maintaining the growth rate will eventually do more for the poor in the long run than any poverty reduction scheme that well-meaning activists can imagine. Such is the predicament facing bureaucrats in the South, many of whom are neither venal nor callous: the very forces of productivity that promise eventual liberation from poverty also take precedence over human lives in the present. Roy’s involvement with the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; Save the Narmada River Movement), led by Medha Patkar, was a protest against the forced conversion of an economy and ecology of subsistence and sustainability into one of commodification (Marx’s use-values converting into exchangevalues) without compensation of those who are displaced. Roy rightly points out that globalization and its benefits have not only passed them by, but have shown them how expendable they are. In the United States and Canada, native people of various tribes have been subject to displacement by land usurpation, water and land contamination, and erosion. The fate of the Adivasis along the Narmada River was foretold by Canada’s hydroelectric power plant, HydroQuebec, damming the Churchill River in Newfoundland and the James Bay river systems in the 1970s. It provided subsidized electricity to corporations at great expense to the environment and lifestyle of the Cree, Inuit, and Innu peoples. Winona La Duke describes the “ecological disaster” in Nitassinan for which the company took no responsibility: “10,000 caribou” dead, the “black spruce forest . . . drowned in the flooding,” “elevated mercury levels” among the Innu and the fish they ate, their “hunting, harvesting, and burial grounds flooded” (60–1). As Chandra Mohanty remarks, “[i]nstead of people governing, markets govern—it is not citizens who make decisions, it is consumers. So those who lack economic capacities are noncitizens” (184). This is the fact that Roy shouts from the rooftops [shouts from the rooftops?], and that Amartya Sen confi rms in his moderate voice: There is disturbing evidence that the battle against class divisions has very substantially weakened in India. In fact, there are clear indications that at different levels of economic, social and political policy, the debilitating role of class inequality now receives remarkably little attention (The Argumentative Indian 204).

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And this is where and why global voices arising from civil society have become so significant. Roy astutely argues: [a]s neoliberalism drives its wedge between the rich and the poor, between India Shining and India, it becomes increasingly absurd for any mainstream political party to pretend to represent the interests of both the rich and the poor, because the interests of one can only be represented at the cost of the other (An Ordinary Person’s Guide 113–4). She reminds us that seventy percent of the population of India is rural. She shows how the consumption and profit-expansion of middle and upper classes and corporations collides with community rights to natural resources. When the lives of seven hundred million people depend on access to natural resources, privatization of these resources amounts to what Roy names as “the dispossession on a scale that has no parallel in history” (Power Politics 43). Thus, we may acquiesce to Roy when she transforms Rumpelstiltskin, the gnome who turns straw into gold, into a “transnational multi-gnome”: His realm is raw capital, his conquests emerging markets, his prayers profits, his borders limitless, his weapons nuclear . . . He has a bank account heart. He has television eyes and a newspaper nose in which you see only what he wants you to see and read only what he wants you to read (Power Politics 42). Economist Jagdish Bhagwati takes pains to point out that globalization has “a human face” and that “it is generally a benign force for social agendas” (6). Does it matter, then, Roy would have us ask, that small farmers go out of business and commit suicide by the masses; that seeds are genetically modified; that drinking water is privatized; that forests are cut and rivers dammed; that the displaced people with no sustainable livelihoods have no place to go; that rural women turn to brothels in the city? How does one absorb these numbing facts or the dismissals of the daily news (Rumpelstiltskin’s “television eyes and newspaper nose”) that relegates these facts to unintelligibility? Roy shows them to be stories that make more sense when they are connected to other stories, stories across the world, stories that demand we take them in. In her retelling, Roy does the work of making common sense and common cause for a fragmented world. Clearly, the solutions to these questions must come from both national and transnational arenas. If we have entered a new era of global capitalist enterprise, we have also entered a new era of social justice movements across the world. Both are two sides of the coin of globalization. In his essay “Globalization and the Human Imagination,” Indian writer and UN diplomat Shashi Tharoor addresses similar issues, and concludes that

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“[g]lobalization . . . cannot just be a set of figures on GNP tables, a subject for economists and businessmen rather than a matter of people” (89). In an interview, responding to the charge of not providing alternatives to the bleak status quo describes in her writings, Roy speaks of the primacy of democratic principles: The keystone of the alternative world would be that nothing can justify the violation of the fundamental rights of citizens. That comes fi rst. The growth rate comes second. Otherwise democracy has no meaning. You cannot resort to algebra: You cannot say I’m taking away the livelihood of 200,000 to enhance the livelihood of 2 million. Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India’s richest people and redistribute it amongst 2 million of India’s poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development? (“A Fury Building Up” par. 24) This discourse of “an alternative world” is an emergent discourse aided by the same forces of globalization. A new understanding can develop if we step back and purvey consider the myriad players and their seemingly irreconcilable points of view in the global field today. It is interesting and instructive to compare the viewpoints of Arundhati Roy with those of economist Amartya Sen. Both are equally concerned with the issues of poverty, global inequality, and injustice. However, while Roy’s project of dissent tends to be cast as antiglobalization, Sen’s concern for social justice does not make him hostile to the processes of globalization: “There is, in fact, no real confl ict between being determined to resist global inequality and injustice and at the same time understanding and facilitating the positive contributions of globalized economic, social and cultural relations across the world” (The Argumentative Indian 342). While Sen would not disagree with the “critique[s] of equity-neglecting global capitalism,” he urges us to fi nd “a constructive search for the ways and means of reducing global injustice” and steer away “from the confrontation of sharply divisive identities” (Identity and Violence 148). In a world of increasingly polarized identities and interests, Sen’s caution is well taken, for “[t]he very diagnosis that, in one perspective, motivates a search for global equity can also, in another light, be good material to be twisted, narrowed, and harshened to feed the cause of global vengeance” (146). Roy does need to rethink the “antiglobalization” slogan, for, as Sen argues, it does not serve the perspective of transnational exchange: A whole sale rejection of globalization would not only go against global business, it would also cut out movements of ideas, understanding, and

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Gurleen Grewal knowledge that can help all the people of the world, including the most disadvantaged members of the world population (124).

Whether or not we agree with her, listening to Roy sharpens our own clarity, since she is especially good at making connections between the lives we live and the lives we do not live. Her writings enable an understanding of a set of unequal relationships among people resulting from economic, political, and historical processes and decisions rather than a set of traits embodied in poor citizens of the world. Tharoor, like Roy, also makes a plea for “the ordinary human beings who are ultimately the objects of all public policy” and affi rms that “[t]hese concerns are real. If they are addressed, if the case for overcoming them is absorbed and applied, the twenty-fi rst century could yet become a time of mutual understanding such as we have never seen before” (88).

REFLECTIONS ON AHIMSA, OPPOSITIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS, AND GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP While circumstances of history require Arundhati Roy to be an “argumentative Indian”—to borrow from Sen—defending multiple citizenships, global transnational understanding and cooperation requires more than the discourse and practice of dissent. In the epigraph to The God of Small Things, Roy quotes John Berger: “Never again will a single story be told as though it is the only one.” In a sense, Roy’s novel is about the ecology of being, showing how everything and everyone is interconnected, and how each life is shaped by what happens to others. The novel is moving because it gives nearly all the characters, even the oppressive ones, a vulnerability and humanity: a character may be twisted, but not inherently evil. And it is precisely this multidimensional portrayal that is missing in Roy’s political writings, in which there are good people (victims, the oppressed) and bad people (perpetrators, oppressors). In the face of the cumulative force of unrelenting oppositional consciousness, questions arise: Is the underlying oppositional structure of us versus them sustainable? Is the discourse of the enemy an enabling one? Or is it a conceptual gnome indeed, a figment of belief, made real through organizing patterns of identification, of victimization? Is it not true that the postcolonial lens of empire also tends to privilege a certain narrative of victimization? Multinational corporations are not terrible monsters or abstractions. North or South, they are comprised of people like us. But if we suspect from the actions of Rumpelstiltskin that he has “a bank-account heart,” we would do well to probe the causes for this apparent dehumanization. (Power Politics 42) Greed and fear—the motives for accumulation and defense—stem from a condition of separate selfhood and insecurity. But

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neither greed and fear nor insecurity are unique to Rumpelstiltskin—in fact, they are part of the human condition, collective and individual. The annals of fear and defense and greed are millennia old. So, what is new? Their reach and scope perhaps? That we can see and talk about them now, thanks to the media and technology that have exponentially expanded both global reach and communication. If there is something new and enabling, it is that the various world players are now being compelled to come to terms with each other. The nature of the crisis is such: terrorism and nuclear weapons; the global climate change; the scarcity of oil, highlighting old and unsustainable patterns of consumption; the sense of entitlement on the part of the elite, colliding with the discourse of rights from the grassroots below; and instant virtual communication. We are now, more than ever before, poised for greater cooperation, for our mutual well-being depends on it. Perhaps our species will mutate yet, but we will not do so by dissent alone. We will need to alter the terms in which we think and act. This perhaps is the true calling of globalization. How may we bear witness to the global stories of suffering and victimization without ceding to the scenario of the good/right (victim) versus the bad/wrong (perpetrator), which is an inevitable stage of grievance, but one in which no one can live for long without being poisoned or stunted? Perhaps the problem of the human condition lies in our not seeing ourselves implicated in the very structures we are critiquing. To recognize the self in “the other” is to be humbled and to have compassion for oneself and the world. But we must look within, whence the world arises. Victimization is real and terrible, but until we are willing to recognize the limits of the narrative of victimization, we shall not experience the power of love, and we will remain part of the problem we attempt to resolve. Describing the hunger strikes by four NBA activists in Tin Shed, Bhopal, Roy goes on to make the claim that: the NBA is not just fighting big dams. It’s fighting for the survival of India’s greatest gift to the world: non-violent resistance. You could call it the Ahimsa Bachao Andolan (ahimsa means “non-violent resistance”), or the Save Nonviolence Movement (War Talk 14). Roy uses the word ahimsa (nonviolence) interchangeably with satyagraha, Gandhi’s term for nonviolent resistance. However, satyagraha does not mean simply abstaining from violence. It is action stemming from the recognition of the oneness of life; action demonstrating the power of love. Such action may or may not disarm or affect those who, ignorant of the oneness, commit gross or subtle acts of violence. But without being anchored in the stance of love, nonviolence can all too often be aggression or frustration masquerading as peace. In Gandhi’s conception of the term, truth-force (satya, meaning “truth”; agraha, meaning “force”), was also “love-force”:

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Gurleen Grewal Its root meaning is holding onto truth, hence truth-force. I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means selfsuffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself. (206)

In activist circles of the global justice movement, Gandhi’s ideal of peaceful resistance is not always understood for what it is, let alone interrogated for its limits as an ideal. The fact that it allows outrage to be cloaked in the garb of nonviolence makes it attractive to global youth who can protest ‘peacefully.’ However, Sri Aurobindo, Gandhi’s contemporary, recognized that such a movement of what Gandhi called “self-suffering” was not suitable for most people: Peace is a part of the highest ideal, but it must be spiritual or at the very least psychological in its basis; without a change in human nature it cannot come with any fi nality. If it is attempted on any other basis (moral principle or gospel of Ahimsa or any other), it will fail and even may leave things worse than before (246). Sri Aurobindo was skeptical of the idea that such suffering purified or transformed the pacifist agitator or had lasting influence on the opponent, a view Roy partially confi rms when she reports the dark point of the struggle of four NBA activists, fasting longer than Gandhi himself ever did, in the face of an unresponsive administration in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh: “Let me tell you a secret—it’s not all unwavering resolve and steely determination . . . There are tears of anger and frustration. There is trepidation and real fear” (War Talk 12). Aurobindo also calls the principle of nonviolence “one-sided” because it cannot acknowledge that sometimes violence may be necessary (167); to hold fast to nonviolence as a belief to be adhered to in all circumstances is a liability, as is made clear by Gandhi’s unrealistic plea to the British to surrender arms before Hitler: I want you to fight Nazism without arms . . . or with non-violent arms. I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. . . . Invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions (229, fn). Gandhi subsequently modified his view. Throughout his career as a freedom fighter, Gandhi was, of course, inspirational in not demonizing his

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opponent and in providing alternative modes of negotiating confl ict. Although not directly alluding to the concept of ahimsa, Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa has keen insights into the limits of conventional oppositional consciousness that Gandhi questioned: A counter stance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both reduced to a common denominator of violence. All reactions are limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counter stance stems from a problem with authority—outer as well as inner—it’s a step toward liberation. . . . But it is not a way of life. (78) I do not think there is a formula for the way the force of truth/love acts in the world, except to say that we all recognize it when we see it. Global citizenship is, fi nally, more than a matter of rights; it is a condition of belonging, a relationship not of embattlement, but of affi liation. How such a stance of belonging might alter the mode of exchange we have with each other is for all of us to see.

WORKS CITED Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007. Aurobindo, Sri. India’s Rebirth: A Selection from Sri Aurobindo’s Writings, Talks and Speeches. Mysore: Mira Aditi, 1997. 943–1336. Basu, Amrita, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Liisa Makki, eds. Signs. Spec. issue of Globalization and Gender 26.4 (Summer 2001). Bhagwati, Jagdish. In Defense of Globalization. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Chomsky, Noam. “Free Trade and Free Market: Pretense and Practice.” The Cultures of Globalization. Eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 356–70. . Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 2002. Friedman, Thomas L. The World is Flat: A History of the Twenty-fi rst Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Gandhi, Mohandas K. “Statement to Disorders Inquiry Committee.” The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Vol. 19. New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 5 Jan. 1920. 206. 12 Mar. 2008. . Harraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575–99. Kothari, Rajni. Foreword. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. By Vandana Shiva. London: Zed Books, 1989. ix–xiii. LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Boston: South End P, 1999. Mathie, Alison, and Gord Cunningham. “From Clients to Citizens: Asset-Based Community Development as a Strategy for Community-Driven Development.” Occasional Papers of the Coady International Institute. St. Francis Xavier U,

156 Gurleen Grewal Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada January 2002. 18 pp. 10 Mar. 2008. . Moghadam, Valentine M. “Globalization and Transnational Feminist Networks (or How Neoliberalism and Fundamentalism Riled the World’s Women).” Critical Globalization Studies. Eds. Richard Appelbaum and William I. Robinson. New York: Routledge, 2005. 349–58. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Naples, Nancy A., and Manisha Desai, eds. Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics. New York: Routledge, 2002. Narayan, Uma. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1997. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: Random House, 1997. . “The Great Indian Rape Trick.” 22 Aug. 1994. 5 Oct. 2007. . .“The Great Indian Rape Trick, II.” 3 Sept. 1994. 5 Oct. 2007. . . An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Cambridge: South End P, 2004. . Power Politics. Cambridge: South End P, 2001. . War Talk. Cambridge: South End P, 2003. . “The New American Century,” The Nation. 9 Feb. 2004. 10 Nov. 2007. . . Interview with Shoma Chaudhuri. “A Fury Building Up Across India.” The Hindu. 29 Apr. 2006. 5 Oct. 2007. . Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. . The Argumentative Indian. London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. . Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf, 1999. Sen, Gita, and Caren Grown. Development, Crises, and Alternate Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives. New York: Monthly Review P, 1987. Shiva, Vandana. “The World on the Edge.” Global Capitalism. Eds. Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens. New York: The New P, 2000. 112–29. . Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Cambridge: South End P, 1997. Tharoor, Shashi. “Globalization and the Human Imagination,” World Policy Journal 21.2 (Summer 2004): 85–91. Zakaria, Fareed. “The Rise of the Rest.” Newsweek. 12 May 2008: 24–31.

11 The Limits of Dissent Arundhati Roy and the Struggle Against the Narmada Dams 1

David Jefferess

Arundhati Roy is widely regarded as having reinvigorated the movement to prevent the further construction of the massive Narmada dams project, particularly the Sardar Sarovar Dam. With the publication of “The Greater Common Good,” fi rst in the Indian magazines Outlook and Frontline in June 1999, and then to a global audience in The Cost of Living later that year, Roy the novelist became an activist. For some, Roy’s emergence as a political writer is both refreshing and necessary for the emerging global justice movement. For instance, in an interview with Roy, Paul Kingsnorth describes her this way: [Roy] has done what few other novelists, in these louche, post-modern times, have dared, or even been inclined to do. She has nailed her colours to the mast. Arundhati Roy is that most unusual, and welcome, of animals: a writer who takes sides. (par. 4) Roy’s dissent against the Narmada dams or India’s nuclear program, of course, were not universally welcomed. In response to her criticism of the Narmada dam project, dam supporters in Gujarat burned her novel, The God of Small Things (1998), while other critics condemned her, a novelist, for daring to write on political issues. By analyzing Roy’s writings on the Narmada struggle, as well as representations of Roy as a “writer-activist,” in this chapter I examine the limitations of dissent as a political concept within the context of notions of (anti)globalization. In part, at least, Roy’s popularity or her apparent threat may be attributed not simply to the “side” she has taken—with the Adivasi, against India’s nuclear weapons program, against Hindu nationalism, against US military aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq—but to the way in which she articulates her critique. Reception of Roy’s political writings and responses to her dissent have been shaped by varying notions of how to “authentically” represent an object, issue, or argument. For Roy’s critics, her representation of the Narmada issue is biased—because she draws upon her own personal reactions and produces a nonjournalistic or nonacademic narrative, she is unable to provide an “objective” portrayal of the issue;

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according to her critics, poetic devices and moralizing rhetoric stand in for “facts” in her writing. For her admirers, however, it is precisely this manipulation of normative narratives of political reasoning that make her writings so powerful; her attention to emotion and her consciousness of “story” allows her to represent the Narmada issue in a more full or authentic way than the form and structure of academic reason allows. There can be little debate about whether or not Roy’s participation in, and writings on, the struggle against the Narmada dam projects have had a significant political effect; awareness of the confl ict, and controversy regarding the ecological and social impacts of large dams more broadly, has been raised both inside and outside India due to her writings. As such dissent is apt to do, her role in raising the visibility of the campaign has also provoked “even greater organization, mobilization and violence by pro dam actors” (Khagram 247, fn. 98). However, Roy’s dissent figures as a form of representation in another way, as well. She represents opposition to the project, if not those affected by it, in a political sense. Constructed as the “Third-World” voice of the global justice movement, due to her style of writing and argumentation, as well as her gendered, raced, and “Third-Worlded” subjectivity, Roy is positioned as a representative of the concerns she writes about in a way that white critics based in the “North,” like Noam Chomsky or Naomi Klein, are not. These dual, but related, notions of “representation”—representation in the artistic or philosophical sense, and representation in the political sense—shape my analysis. In this chapter, I examine three specific, but related, aspects of Arundhati Roy’s dissent in order to identify what I consider to be limitations of dissent as a mode of politics. To begin, I briefly examine Roy’s own assertions about the nature and necessity of dissent; for instance, her claim that “real” globalization is the globalization of dissent. I am particularly concerned with examining the way in which dissent is informed by assumptions about the nature of social and political change, the state, and knowledge. In the following two sections, I examine Roy’s representation of the Narmada conflict, and the way in which Roy has been positioned as the voice (and “face”) of “Third-World” dissent against the spread of neoliberalism, as practices of economic organization and governance as well as an ideology of value. By looking at the way Roy figures as a representative of opposition to the dam in the documentary Drowned Out (2002), I suggest that Roy’s role in raising awareness of the Narmada issue simultaneously marginalizes both the work of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), as well as the diversity of interests and communities adversely affected by the project; however, this is not to argue that her activity in the movement has not, in general, helped further its ends. I am primarily concerned with the way in which Roy’s dissent—her stories of the confl ict and her place within the story of the confl ict—limits the confl ict to dissent; in other words, the narrative framework of dissent limits the conflict, and the NBA movement, to

The Limits of Dissent 159 analyses of the flaws of the plan and the illumination of the tragedy of its implementation. This chapter, then, does not provide a critique of Arundhati Roy’s role in the Narmada issue so much as it examines Roy’s role—as a writer and as a figure of dissent—in order to identify some limitations of dissent as a rhetoric and rallying point of the struggle for “global justice.” Dissent most certainly is being globalized. However, can the rhetorical structure and ideological assumptions of the idea of dissent provide a way of articulating the sorts of social and political transformation Roy, among others, demands?

SPEAKING OUT, TAKING SIDES Roy’s account of the Narmada confl ict in “The Greater Common Good” and Power Politics (2001) presents an Indian state that is perpetrating violence upon its citizens. The project itself is a form of structural violence; economic and social policies produce suffering for those who will be displaced (“oustees” are marginalized from community, family, and sacred land; lose their self-sufficiency; and are impoverished in urban slums). This violence, Roy contends, is legitimized by an ideology of the Indian nation that is based on a notion of technological progress or development and the expectation that the individual must be prepared to suffer for the “greater common good.” As Roy records, to question the economic or ideological premises of the Narmada project, or to openly challenge it by refusing to cooperate with evictions, has been met by state repression. In a sense, it is the state’s need to dispatch police to Adivasi villages to cut down forests, intimidate villagers, or arrest Medha Patkar over and over again that marks dissent as dissent. Dissent becomes visible when the state reacts to it. It is only necessary because the state does not provide the processes for citizens to effectively participate in decisions that affect their lives; hence, attempts to put forth or realize alternative visions of community, the nation, or development must be suppressed. What does Roy mean, however, when she demands the globalization of dissent? She claims that: [i]t is the writers, the poets, the artists, the singers, the filmmakers who can make the connections, who can fi nd ways of bringing [what is happening in the world] into the realm of common understanding. Who can translate cash-flow charts and scintillating boardroom speeches into real stories about real people with real lives. (“The Ladies” 32) Dissent in this formulation is a matter of expression and representation. The importance of telling alternate stories to those that “we” are being “brainwashed to believe” as a mode of “laying siege to empire” (“Confronting” 112) is a recurring demand in Roy’s writings. Yet, she also recognizes that

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speaking out is not enough. In her more recent writings, where the general concept of oppression, “Empire,” has replaced her specific critique of the Indian nation from The Cost of Living, Roy has also demanded resistance, a notion of political action that is linked to, but distinct from, dissent: “By resist I don’t mean only to express dissent, but to effectively force change” (Public 27, original emphasis). I will return to Roy’s advocacy for the tactics of nonviolent noncooperation in the fi nal section of this chapter. First, I wish to examine the way in which dissent is linked to the ideas of expression, representation, the state, and power. The sort of dissent Roy seems to be describing is similar to Edward Said’s notion of “speaking truth to power.” Indeed, the scene in Drowned Out in which Roy debates the Narmada issue with Gujarat’s Minister for Narmada Irrigation, Jay Narayan Vyas, at the Second World Water Forum at the Hague in 2000, presents a literal example of the idea; Roy concludes the exchange by exclaiming: “I just came here to see what power smells like— let me tell you, it stinks.” For Said, “the challenge of intellectual life is to be found in dissent against the status quo at a time when the struggle on behalf of under-represented and disadvantaged groups seems so unfairly weighted against them.” (“Introduction” xvii) Dissent, in this sense, is the work of a privileged member of society who can speak on behalf of a disenfranchised group. The intellectual is somehow separate both from the oppressor and oppressed, with the responsibility not just of taking sides, but critiquing the ideological frameworks within which power is understood. The work of the intellectual is to raise questions and represent perspectives that are contrary, unpleasant, and embarrassing (“Representations” 12). Dissenting, then, becomes an ethical responsibility for those who have access to information and the ability to express that information. For intellectual activists in states in which democratic practices are only emerging or are not existent at all, the consequences of speaking out and taking a side can be dire. The executions of writers Ken Saro Wiwa or Stephen Biko are but two examples of the risk of speaking truth to power, as it were, though it should be remembered that both Saro Wiwa and Biko not only wrote against policies of the state, but also organized communities to resist and undermine policies and structures of the state. In contrast, in a state with an established functioning rights-based democracy, the utterance of claims that make an audience uncomfortable are made with little personal risk. The dissenting intellectual in Europe or North America, for instance, may be ridiculed or condemned, in the corporate media, for instance, but more likely they will be ignored. In the United States, Chomsky argues, dissent, whether it be in the form of “speaking out” or organized protest (Chomsky uses the term dissent in relation to the Vietnam War-era United States to refer to practices of representation, education, and protest against US policy) is not (or is no longer) suppressed; it simply does not have the space to be heard. The mainstream media is structured in a way that forecloses opportunities for dissent. For instance,

The Limits of Dissent 161 the sound bite does not allow for the development of the stories that are required for expressing unconventional positions, and the narrative of perpetual breaking news evacuates background and context (“Substitutions” 180). In contrast, Chomsky claims that in Canada or Europe, dissident opinion has much easier access to mainstream or state-funded media than it does in the United States (“State Power” 97). Indeed, in much political theory, one of the attributes of a democratic state is what I would call its “tolerance” for dissent.2 A democratic state ensures the freedom of its citizens to have and share dissenting opinions from the dominant or official, if this dissent is expressed “responsibly” (as an utterance, for instance, rather than as a violent attack). Indeed, the openness to dissenting opinions is a function of democracy. While it may be true that points of view that veer from the dominant may have greater opportunity to be heard in countries like Canada, in some ways, the tolerance of certain kinds of dissent allows for the silencing of other critical viewpoints or, indeed, serves to depoliticize this dissent by “accepting” dissenting perspectives as part of the liberal approach to difference.3 In the tale the “Emperor’s New Clothes,” it is not so much what the boy says but the fact that he says it at all that disrupts hegemony, or the Emperor’s respected authority. Democratically protected dissent in some ways becomes a function of power, managed or accepted in a way that is more complex than Chomsky’s analysis allows. Roy’s response to state suppression of her voice reveals the way in which the concept of dissent is problematically bound up with that of the state. In response to the charge of criminal contempt of court for taking part in a protest against the Supreme Court’s judgment allowing construction on the Sardar Sarovar Dam (and her vocal criticism of the decision), Roy writes in her affidavit: I wish to reaffi rm that as a writer I have the right to state my opinions and beliefs. As a free citizen of India, I have the right to be part of any peaceful dharna, demonstration, or protest march. I have the right to criticize any judgment of any court that I believe to be unjust. I have the right to make common cause with those I agree with. I hope that each time I exercise these rights I will not be dragged to court on false charges and forced to explain my actions. (“On Citizens’ Rights” 103) Roy appears to complain about the inconvenience, if not indignity, that she suffers as a result of the charge. Her affront at the Indian Court and state’s lack of commitment to its own democratic principles appears misplaced, since she speaks on behalf of a movement that arises due to the failure of Indian democracy and with the aim of promoting an alternative, more genuine, democratic culture.4 Precisely because the democracy of the Indian state is so tenuous, Roy’s criticism of the court’s decision, as primarily a spoken/written expression, had much greater political impact than similar criticism of a Supreme Court decision in a state like Canada would have.

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Roy’s demand for protection from the state contrasts greatly with the way she constructs dissent in relation to the state in “The Greater Common Good.” In that essay, written, Roy claims, out of her curiosity to learn more about the confl ict and work in solidarity with those adversely affected— rather than as the spokesperson or figure for the movement she has since been constructed as—Roy writes that the people of India do not sufficiently question the policies of their government, or the ethical and ideological bases of those policies (23). She criticizes the government’s assertion that its tolerance of an organization like the NBA reveals its commitment to democratic principles: [i]t would like us to be grateful for not crushing the movement completely, for allowing it to exist. . . . We don’t need to be grateful for 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. (40) Here, the state is not the protector of the rights of the people. Rather the people have agency; their actions, in a sense, comprise the state. Such a viewpoint is consistent with the idea that the Narmada struggle is more a movement for participatory democracy than simply a movement for adequate resettlement of the “oustees.” Roy’s “observation” that “power stinks” serves to situate herself outside of, and in opposition to power. The people are separate from the state. Yet, the state is neither a tangible foe within the conflict narrative of two opposing actors nor an abstraction.

ARUNDHATI ROY REPRESENTS THE STRUGGLE—PART I Arundhati Roy’s representation of arguments against the Narmada dam projects is an act of dissent. By critiquing the facts and figures of the project designers and government policy makers, as well as ideological narratives that inform the project, Roy “speaks truth to power,” representing the conflict from the perspective of those who oppose the dams. As others have noted—both critics of Roy and her admirers—the value of her celebrity status as a recent Booker Prize winner certainly contributed to the mass distribution and consumption of her essays, both in India and in Europe and North America. This status is likely one reason why Roy’s essays have found a much wider audience than the writings of prominent NBA activist Medha Patkar or other critical analyses of the project. The historical moment of the production of “The Greater Common Good” is certainly also a factor in the widespread distribution of the essay. The Cost of Living was published in 1999, a time when the experience of global poverty began receiving greater attention both in the media and in government discourses in the North. In part, the renewed receptivity in Euro-American media and publishing,

The Limits of Dissent 163 for instance, to questions of poverty, political repression, and democracy may be attributed to the emergence of G7 (now G8) or Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD hegemony following the “Cold War,” and the subsequent linking of foreign development aid to democratization. Also, the book was published in the same year as the Seattle World Trade Organization meetings, in which mass demonstrations by labor, environmental, and social justice activists from around the world drew unprecedented media attention to the role of international economic institutions. 5 As a result, unlike the NBA’s early work in the 1980s, or its success in forcing the World Bank to reassess its participation in the Sardar Sarovar Dam project in the early 1990s, “The Greater Common Good” appeared at a moment when there was a new openness to questions of democracy and development, and particularly, perspectives from “the South.” Recognizing the context of the reception of “The Greater Common Good,” I now turn to the form and style of Roy’s writing on the Narmada conflict. For the most part, Roy’s essays on the Narmada dam projects do not provide new information; much of the facts and technological arguments she uses to critique the project are drawn from the work of others. So, these essays are not—nor were they purported to be—the product of “new” research by a journalist or academic. Yet, the way in which Roy restates these arguments works in a way to create, or reshape, knowledge. As narrative theorist Shari Stone-Mediatore argues, Roy expresses her dissent in “The Greater Common Good” in a way that provides a variety of perspectives on the conflict—or a more holistic approach—and in a way that challenges the expected form and style of “reasoned” argument. For instance, Stone-Mediatore claims that Roy “combines well-documented historical research with engaged and poetic stories in order to help readers appreciate the experiences of people who have been displaced by dams” (8).6 Roy not only constructs a narrative that departs from evidence-based “objective” writing by placing data in the context of their social production (i.e., political decisions), but she challenges the ideological presuppositions that shape the collection and reporting of that data: Roy interrupts the discourse of the greater common good in a way perhaps more powerful than discourse analysis, for she heightens our sensitivity to value that confounds monetary measurement, identity that exceeds people’s role in the market economy, and community that cannot be duplicated by socially engineered “rehabilitation.” (119) Roy contextualizes the critique of government estimates on drinking water or rehabilitation programs within concerns about democracy, culture, and community. Further, she links the experience of the Narmada confl ict to global structures of power and inequality. She places the struggle of the Adivasi within the context of global struggles for “justice.”

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For her critics, Roy’s style of writing sacrifices “truth” and “accuracy.” Indeed, much of the criticism of Roy’s stand on the Narmada issue challenges the legitimacy of the form and style Roy utilizes to express her arguments. Salil Tripathi, for instance, asks: “What happens when [novelists] use techniques accepted in fiction—where emotion and leaps of logic are permitted precisely because they let our imagination soar—and create a tract that masquerades as an essay” (par. 6)? Similarly, historian Ramachandra Guha suggests that Roy should confi ne herself to writing fiction. Referring to “The Greater Common Good,” Guha criticizes what he regards as Roy’s self-indulgence and hyperbole, and he contends that “[i]n her stream-of-consciousness style, the arguments were served up in a jumble of images and exclamations with the odd number thrown in” (par. 8).7 While Roy’s repeated allusions to the tactics of the Nazis often seem out of place, Guha’s contention that Roy presents a jumble of images, assertions, and facts reveals more about his indebtedness to a certain form of writing and thinking than it provides an apt description of the essay. In contrast to Stone-Mediatore, I would argue that the significance of Roy’s approach is not her ability to provide “stories” of those affected. Indeed, as I will argue below, she generalizes the experience of the “oustees” in a way that reinforces a discourse of charity and protection, to some degree at least. I am interested in how Roy’s conscious play with the essay form emphasizes the way in which her contribution is an act of dissent, not just to the project itself, but to the “structures of attitude and reference”—to borrow from Said—within which arguments both for and against the project have been situated. Significantly, Roy’s “stories” of the Narmada seem to be just as much about the audience she is approaching as they are about the Adivasi villagers. Her middle-class, literate audience in India and abroad suffers, or will suffer, though she claims they are not aware of it: “I’ve been warned several times ‘How can you write about irrigation? Who the hell is interested?’ . . . Be interested, if you want to snatch your future back from the sweaty palms of the Iron Triangle” (“The Greater Common Good” 67, original emphasis). Roy is self-conscious in her writing about the limits of academic discourse and objective reason; for instance, it can be boring and dehumanizing. A pattern emerges in “The Greater Common Good” in which reasoned, scholarly sourced argument flows into reflections, stories, and rants on governance, development, and Indian nationalism. Roy repeatedly ends these diversions by getting back to “the story”: the specific argument about the dam. Often, the audience is addressed directly and personally, and therefore reflected in the story in a way that cannot occur in more traditional academic writing. For instance, she writes: Allow me to shake your faith. Put your hand in mine and let me lead you through the maze. Do this, because it is important for you to understand. If you fi nd 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

The Limits of Dissent 165 tell. It’s full of numbers and explanations. Numbers used to make my eyes glaze over. Not anymore. Not since I began to follow the direction in which they point. (“The Greater Common Good” 21) Roy does not discard the tenets of “rational” argument, however. Rather, she creates a narrative in which argument, fact, and detail are consciously constructed as stories, which allows for the introduction of alternative perspectives and ideas that may be otherwise elided or seen as separate; for instance, she places stories of people refusing to leave jail in the critique of government claims regarding irrigation juxtaposition to the way in which Adivasi culture is recognized by the state only in so far as it can be presented in a museum. The debates about Roy’s fitness to write on political issues reflect the tensions that her approach reveals. Roy has challenged not just a project, or spoken on behalf of a disenfranchised group—things that would be acceptable to Guha—but she has challenged the dominant way of thinking, representing, and imagining experience. Yet, there are limits to the extent to which the stories Roy tells in “The Greater Common Good” depart from the dominant narrative structure of what I would call the “global injustice story.” Roy begins the essay with a description of her fi rst visit to the Narmada Valley: “I knew I was looking at a civilization older than Hinduism,” she writes (7). She qualifies this description of the Adivasi, however, by making clear her position in relation to them: “Let me say at the outset that I’m not a city-basher. I’ve done my time in a village. I’ve had fi rsthand experience of the isolation, the inequity, and the potential savagery of it” (8). Roy positions the Adivasi hilldwelling villagers as the primary group affected by the rising waters of the dam projects. She illuminates, for instance, their marginalized place within the Indian nation. Despite claims of being a “democracy,” the Indian state has not only failed to involve the villagers of the Narmada Valley in the decisions that will affect their lives, but in many cases, they have failed even to adequately inform them. So, Roy identifies the disjuncture between the state, its means of decision making and communication, and the Adivasis. She also illuminates the ways in which government policies of relocation, compensation, or simply eviction radically alter the lives of the Adivasi villagers. For instance, in order to survive, these villagers must give up a subsistence and communal lifestyle for one governed by wage labor: For the people who’ve been resettled, everything has to be relearned. 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. (54) Roy’s primary concern is ostensibly the barriers to Adivasi agency and the failures of Indian democracy; however, she nonetheless constructs

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“oustees” as (only) Adivasis, and constructs their culture as singular, ancient, and timeless. As a result, I believe that Roy positions the Adivasi “oustees” in a way that is typical of Euro-American narratives of injustice in the Third-World, and, I believe, in a way that suggests some limitations to the politics of dissent. Rey Chow, in “Where Have All the Natives Gone?,” asks: Why are we so fascinated with “history” and with the “native” in “modern” times? What do we gain from our labor on these “endangered authenticities” which are presumed to be from a different time and a different place? What can be said about the juxtaposition of “us” (our discourse) and “them” (133). Writing about the figure of the “tribal” in contemporary Indian writing, Rashmi Varma argues that Roy uses the figure of the Adivasi to construct a space for “cosmopolitans” like herself to form bonds of solidarity with the oppressed. Varma notes that Roy presents a narrative of her voyage from the city to the village, which, “much like the classic anthropological gesture . . . [,] displaces the time of the Other onto some prehistoric moment, to something older than the present” (226). According to Varma, Roy’s construction of the Narmada River as a symbol of the tribal and of a timeless civilization, against the modern, does not romanticize the Adivasis, however. Rather, she contends that by characterizing Adivasis as “warriors” rather than “victims,” Roy allows the cosmopolitan “warriors”—the doctors, lawyers, and teachers Roy specifically names (“The Greater Common Good” 43)—to enter the battle on the side, rather than on behalf, of the “oustees”: Roy’s articulation of a tribal politics in an unacknowledged war that incorporates every kind of warrior, including cosmopolitan actors, and her attention to the tribal as the symbolic focus of anti-dam politics, provide a resolution of the traditional-and-modernity dichotomy by identifying the need for a ‘rag-tag’ army of warriors of all stripes such that new alliances can be forged in the struggle for social justice. (Varma 228) If the struggle is one for social justice or democracy, rather than simply adequate rehabilitation and fair treatment by the state, and if such a struggle requires alliances, what does it mean for Roy to “produce” the Adivasis as figures (victims or warriors) or use them as symbols to further a particular justification or demand for the involvement of “cosmopolitans” in the struggle? As Roy acknowledges, about half of those displaced by the Narmada dam project are Adivasi or “tribals.”8 The production of the Adivasi as the “symbolic focus” of the Narmada conflict, therefore, elides the thousands of others who will be displaced by the dams. The Hindu Patidar farmers and Adivasi

The Limits of Dissent 167 of the Nimar plains—who account for about two-thirds of those displaced in Madhya Pradesh—are doubly displaced—they are displaced by the dams and within Roy’s narrative, as well. To be fair, this is not Roy’s narrative, per se; rather, it shows that, as much as her writing is creative or innovative, it also not only rehearses earlier critiques of the dams, but it renews the narrative strategy of opposition to the Narmada project: [The Andolan] has showcased the hill Adivasis, truly the worst hit by the project, and downplayed the presence of the Patidars. Thus even though two thirds of the population displaced by the dam lives in the plains, the plight of the hill Adivasis which personifies the theoretical arguments of the Andolan is placed in the limelight. (Baviskar 220) The relatively wealthy Patidar landowners who benefited from the Green Revolution, and the ecologically unsustainable practices of these farmers, peasants, and “tribals” in the Valley, do not fit within the critique of development and the modernity–tradition dichotomy that Roy reaffi rms. Yet, the Patidars and other people that live in Nimar are just as much victims of the undemocratic process of Indian dam-building and the ethic of the greater common good that forecloses spaces for participation and opposition by those from whom sacrifice is demanded. Varma’s analysis accepts Roy’s narrative structure, which limits the actors in the confl ict to the state versus “tribal” victim/warriors and their cosmopolitan allies. If Indian democracy is a paramount issue in the struggle, what ends are furthered by limiting the narrative in this way, hence eliding the heterogeneity of the communities affected and struggling for justice?9 Resistance and dissent in Roy’s writing on the conflict conforms to a particular narrative structure: resistance is constructed as discreet acts and historical moments rather than, for instance, a movement, with ebbs and flows of activity. For instance, according to Roy, the World Bank reassessed its involvement in the project because of the efforts of a “ragtag army of the poorest people” (“Greater Common Good” 46). By confi ning her recognition of the struggle to specific acts of civil disobedience by Medha Patkar and others members of the NBA, she constructs a story of a singular event, which ignores the NBA’s history of putting pressure on the World Bank, as well as the role of the Andolan’s nongovernmental organization allies in Japan, Europe, or the United States. Such a narrative also elides the involvement of the Patidar landowners. According to Baviskar, this community has played a disproportional role in organizing the NBA and has provided the movement its material base (220). Rhetorically, Roy may position the “tribals” as warriors, but the tales she tells are primarily of their suffering and their victimization by an unjust system. While she refers to acts of civil disobedience and police repression—dharnas, marches, fasts, sit-ins—in “The Greater Common Good” and her essays in Power Politics, the narrative of dissent she utilizes leaves

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little space for the representation of an organized movement. By writing an essay that dissents against the government’s dam-building policies, Roy represents the arguments against the dams—the suffering of the “tribals”—and she challenges those with privilege to question the ideology of development and their role in it. This dissent, however, has no means of representing a movement that not only opposes the government, but has produced alternative forms of governance, decision making, and education (for instance, the Sangath); a movement that is unified and cogent, but must contend with the confl icts produced by the differences in class and culture of the communities that comprise it. An alternative participatory culture is, at the very least, a fledgling reality in the Narmada struggle. The NBA not only protests the state, but its structures and practices also usurp the state. The rhetoric of dissent has no way of articulating such alternatives; rather, it relegates a new, more participatory and just political culture to a demand directed at the state.

ARUNDHATI ROY REPRESENTS THE STRUGGLE—PART II Roy expresses discomfort with the labels she has been given, from writer/ activist (“The Ladies” 10), to “crusader” (“I wish”), to the voice of the “Third World” (Burma 25). The way in which the image and name of Roy is used by her allies (and detractors, too) in the North to stand in for the movements and struggles she writes about reveals some of the limitations of dissent. I use the term figured, specifically, because I want to foreground the way in which Roy’s racialized and gendered positioning—and just as significantly, her geographical positioning—are used to produce her as an expert or “authentic” voice of global justice struggles. Unlike other Indian intellectuals who have achieved a measure of status and celebrity in EuroAmerican culture—specifically intellectual culture—such as Salman Rushdie or Gayatri Spivak, Roy is not a “migrant.” Rather, Roy is positioned specifically within India: she was educated in India, works in India, and writes primarily about issues and concerns pertaining to India, primarily to an Indian audience in Indian journals. Yet, Roy is able to speak to a Euro-American audience in a way that someone like Medha Patkar cannot. Roy is “authentically” Indian, yet she is modern in appearance, her accent is accessible, and, more importantly, she utilizes a narrative framework of struggle and conflict that reaffi rms the place of the privileged (as helpers), rather than disrupts the position of the privileged, as in Said’s arguments on the role of the dissenting academic. Whether Roy is comfortable with her position or not, she has been represented as the pre-eminent “Third-World” voice of the emerging global justice movement. The way she figures in the documentary Drowned Out provides an example of the way in which she is produced as a figure of dissent. When British documentary fi lmmaker Franny Armstrong approached

The Limits of Dissent 169 production companies to fund Drowned Out, she was told—she says in the director’s commentary version of the fi lm—that she would only get funding if she made a fi lm about Arundhati Roy’s involvement in the struggle, with some background on the conflict. Armstrong refused to compromise her commitment to telling the broader story of the confl ict through the particular story of one family in one village. After the BBC rejected her documentary, Armstrong claims, it funded the documentary, DAM/AGE (2002). The promotional information for DAM/AGE from University of California at Berkeley’s “Women of Color Film Festival” describes that film this way: DAM/AGE traces celebrated Indian writer Arundhati Roy’s bold and controversial campaign against the Narmada dam project in India that will displace hundreds of thousands of people. The fi lm shows how Roy chose to use her fame to stand up to powerful interests backed by both multinational corporate capital and the state (“Women”). The Narmada struggle becomes Roy’s campaign, the story of an individual woman of color resisting “power,” for instance, through her opposition to the Supreme Court decision and her fight against the charges brought against her. As Guha warned, Roy’s status as a celebrity overshadows the struggle with which she has aligned herself. Rather than analyze the figure of Roy in this film, however, I want to focus on the representation of Roy in Armstrong’s Drowned Out, a film the director characterizes as the “real story” of the villagers “with a little bit of Arundhati Roy” (“Commentary”). Though Roy is not the focus of Drowned Out, and indeed she appears just a few times, her positioning in the film and Franny Armstrong’s self-conscious recognition of Roy as a figure or character in the particular story she wants to tell, reveals much about Roy as a figure of dissent. Roy’s physical presence, and her voice as the voice of those struggling in solidarity with Luhariya and other Adivasi villagers, is nonetheless prominent in the film. Her first appearance in the film occurs during the opening scenes, when her voice is heard over images of the villagers of Jalsindhi standing in the rising waters of the Narmada River. Then, her speaking image, seated comfortably far from the confrontation, proclaims that, as a writer, she was drawn to the conflict because it is “at the heart of politics” and it is “the story of modern India.” Following this utterance, the viewer is shown Indian police arresting the villagers. Roy’s perspective on the conflict, therefore, is used to make sense of the scene, in broad ideological terms, for what Armstrong acknowledges is a specifically non-Indian intended audience. Before the viewer is introduced to Luhariya and his family, or provided any context for why these Indian villagers are standing in a river, or why they are being arrested for doing so, Armstrong uses Roy’s image and voice to define the conflict. After providing some context to the project and developing the story of Luhariya and his family, Roy next enters the film standing at a microphone,

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following Luhariya’s lament that the government can do whatever they want to the Adivasis, for they know that the Adivisas have no one to fight for them. The juxtaposition of the two scenes would suggest that Roy is the savior for whom the villagers wait. The following scenes place Roy as a voice of the confl ict, but not necessarily the heroine of the Adivasi struggle. These scenes include the narrator’s description of Roy’s prominence in bringing the Narmada struggle to international attention, Roy at the World Water Forum, Luhariya and his neighbors being turned away from a government office, an extended interview with Roy, and images of a “ritual” drowning of a demon symbolizing the dam. In these scenes, Roy becomes both the voice (shouting at Vyas) and the face of those struggling on behalf of the villagers. Significantly, while the documentary appears to provide a historical background to the confl ict, Armstrong’s manipulation of the chronology of events of the conflict within the fi lm at once represents the history of the Narmada project while also collapsing the historical time—both the project’s development and the movement to oppose it—into a contemporary moment of oppression and uncertainty. For instance, the description of Roy’s prominence in the struggle and her fi rst interview scene are placed, in the chronology of the film, prior to the NBA’s campaign to have the World Bank divest from the project, which occurred in the early 1990s. It is Roy’s dissent—her ability to draw the world’s attention to the struggle— that provides meaning or awareness to an event that happened nearly ten years earlier and without her involvement. Beyond the presentation of Roy’s participation in the struggle, Roy’s physical presence is also manipulated by Armstrong, seemingly to appeal to her intended Euro-American audience. Armstrong, for instance, positions Roy as a silent observer during a community “ceremony” in which Luhariya wades into the river with a demon representing the Sardar Sarovar Dam and lets it go to be consumed by the waters. Roy appears to be present at the event, but is not its primary focus, a positioning that would seem to reinforce Varma’s arguments for the way in which Roy creates a space for “cosmopolitans” to work in solidarity with “tribals.” Yet, Roy’s image, seated on a chair in an audience, is not simply part of the scene of Luhariya performing the rite. As Armstrong notes in her commentary to the fi lm, Roy, in fact, was not in Jalsindhi on the day of the ceremony. Armstrong states that she used footage of Roy at another event, and that she considers the addition of Roy into the ceremony as a “tweaking of the truth” rather than a lie. Roy’s place in the fi lm is different than that of the typical “expert” in the documentary genre. She is used in the fi lm not simply to provide information, analysis, or opinion; her physical figure, her image, her face, becomes central to the story Armstrong tells. Roy’s advocacy for the Adivasi, as the narrator describes, has brought the confl ict to the attention of an international audience. Her presence in a fi lm purportedly concentrating on the perspective of an otherwise silenced

The Limits of Dissent 171 actor in the confl ict, an Adivasi villager who refuses to leave his land, serves to perform the role of an ideological translator for Armstrong’s intended audience, not simply in the sense of what she says, but in her actual physical presence. In Roy’s fi nal extended interview clips late in the fi lm, she appears seated on a floor, crosslegged, in clothing that is identifi ably “Indian,” with her hair cut short. According to Madeleine Bunting, Roy is “canny” enough to know that part of her allure for the Western media is, what Bunting calls, her “exotic beauty”: “artlessly, she looks both traditional Indian—the Gandhi-esque homespun scarves—and modern gamine with her short cropped hair” (par. 5). Though Armstrong claims that Drowned Out does not focus on the story of Arundhati Roy, she utilizes and reinforces the way Roy’s physical presence has been part of her allure in the “North.” Robert Marquand, for instance, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, characterizes Roy as photogenic, and notes that she has been included on several lists of the world’s most beautiful women. He goes on to describe her as “emitting a whiff of the bohemian, a whiff of Marin County, Calif.” (Marquand, par. 18). To be photogenic, or to be included in such lists, is to fit into a particularly Euro-American—or, in Bunting’s terms, “modern”—notion of beauty and the feminine. At the same time, part of Roy’s allure is the “exotic” aspect of this beauty at a time when Indian actress Aishwarya Rai has been characterized as the most beautiful woman in the world (“The Most”). Her posture in these fi nal scenes of Drowned Out is reminiscent of a practitioner of yoga, an image that is distinctly “Eastern” at the same time that it is “bohemian” or “Marin County”; it is “different” while also being familiar or comfortable to a Euro-American audience. Roy, then, is appealing in a culturally specific way, in the sense that for the Euro-American audience, she resembles “us” at the same time that she is alluring or “exotic” in a way that has been “consumable” in the North. Roy exudes both the modern (that which is familiar) and the authentic, or “other,” positioning her as the most appropriate spokesperson for the struggle for Armstrong’s intended audience. Ostensibly, the documentary provides a space for the voice of the “tribal” to be heard in the North. Yet, while Armstrong focuses on the story of Luhariya, she is able to control his positioning as a character in the fi lm, she says, by only including those statements that further the story she wants to tell, and by only translating certain phrases and sentences, knowing that the fi lm’s audience, and indeed everyone but Adivasis in that area, will be unable to understand his dialect. Each speaker plays a specific role, Armstrong explains in the commentary to the film. Vyas allows the Indian government to “dig its own grave.” World Bank review team member, Hugh Brody, provides a critique of the dam that has a greater political legitimacy than that of British antidam campaigner, Patrick McCully, whose interview was cut from the film. Medha Patkar, who has been the most prominent organizer and

172 David Jefferess spokesperson for the NBA since its inception, is pictured often in the fi lm, but has little room to speak. Armstrong explains: Now if you notice here on this interview with Medha, in fact any interview with Medha, she’s only on screen for a very short period of time, and that’s because she talks in this very circular kind of way which is extremely difficult to edit. And she also uses . . . the jargon so freely it’s very hard for lay people to understand what she is talking about. So you have to edit her very very hard in order to make something that the normal viewer can understand. Which is why she is not on screen very much. (“Commentary”) Medha Patkar is presented in confrontations with the police and with politicians, but what she says is not necessary for the story Armstrong has to tell. In a way, Armstrong is simply conforming to the character placement of Roy’s own narrative of the Narmada struggle. Patkar is the leader and representative of the people in the valley, Roy writes, while she herself is one of those who must share the story of the Andolan with the outside world (“On Citizens” 96). Armstrong’s reinforcement of this narrative, however, is problematic. In the fi lm, Patkar is the professional activist, while Roy is the citizen of conscience in a way, I think, that further strengthens the production of relations of affinity with Armstrong’s “normal viewer.” Roy is more like “us,” and hence is an important figure for translating the conflict into terms that “we” can understand. One problem with positioning Roy this way, however, is that, despite Armstrong’s efforts to “give voice” to those silenced, Armstrong affi rms individualism over collective struggle, the story of the Narmada still problematically becoming the story of a persevering “Third World woman of colour” (like earlier “Third-World” men like Gandhi or Mandela), who becomes a metonym for struggle that erases the particular struggle and leaves only the figure. Roy concludes her introduction to “The Greater Common Good” by suggesting that India has exhausted its “quota of heroes” for the twentieth century, and that Indians must support their great many small heroes while they wait for the “shiny new ones to come along” (12). Through her involvement in the Narmada struggle, Roy has become, it would seem, just such a “shiny new hero.” Sought after to speak at the World Social Forum and on US college campuses, Roy has become a Noam Chomsky for the “Third-World.” Through her, the injustice of the Narmada dams, and more recently, the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, can be articulated.

THE LIMITS OF DISSENT Is the creation of dissident heroes a success of the articulation of dissent? In her more recent writings, Roy has argued that the expression of dissent, and

The Limits of Dissent 173 indeed symbolic acts of disobedience—like the February 2003 antiwar demonstrations that drew millions into the streets of cities around the world—is not sufficient for creating the sort of social change that this dissent, at least implicitly, demands. Roy invokes Gandhi, and particularly his notion of ahimsa, or nonviolence, as a means of arguing for a more confrontational mode of resistance. For instance, in An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2004), a collection of essays directed toward both Indian and international readers and focused on how the “war on terror” in its various guises reinforces a neoliberal imperial project, Roy argues that nonviolence, as simply political theater, is ineffectual: What we need to discuss urgently are strategies of resistance. We need to aim at real targets, wage real battles, and inflict real damage. Gandhi’s Salt March was not just political theatre . . . [Nonviolence] is a very precious weapon that needs to be constantly honed and reimagined. It cannot be allowed to become a mere spectacle, a photo opportunity for the media. (“Do Turkeys” 91–2) Do Roy’s written dissent, the structures of reception for such dissent, and the idea of the hero dissenter allow the space for such an imagining to take place? I want to conclude, then, by examining a few aspects of the way Roy’s dissent, and Roy as dissenter, conform to, rather than challenge, those “structures of attitude and reference” that shape the understanding of power and hence limit the ability to imagine otherwise. As I have discussed earlier in this chapter, the political concept of dissent is imbedded within the ideology of the state. The democratic state should allow “acceptable” forms of dissent, for instance. Dissent is a means of “speaking truth to power,” and provoking change in government policy. In Roy’s writings on nonviolence, she condemns the “state”—India specifically, but the states of Europe or North America, as well—for suppressing nonviolent civil disobedience. She writes: Any government’s condemnation of terrorism is only credible if it shows itself to be responsive to persistent, reasonable, closely argued, nonviolent dissent. And yet, what is happening is just the opposite. The world over, nonviolent resistance movements are being crushed and broken. If we do not respect and honor them, by default we privilege those who turn to violent means. (“Ahimsa” 13) On the one hand, Roy contends that nonviolence should not be reserved to symbolic acts or utterances that do not genuinely challenge the structures and values that maintain relationships of inequality. At the same time, she expects that those with privilege should not resist strategies to transform those relationships. There is a disjuncture in her rhetoric between the call for dissenters to move beyond the symbolic and become a “collective pain

174 David Jefferess in the ass” (“Confronting” 112), and her frustration with the state for not being willing to change. It should be remembered that while the ethic of nonviolence formulated by Gandhi relies upon the desire to persuade rather than compel the adversary, neither the British government nor upper-caste Hindu nationalists were particularly open to change. Satyagrahi received beatings and terms of imprisonment for making salt, and attempts to open temples to untouchables were often met with violent repression. Indeed, the practice of satyagraha was designed to make the violence of the state more clearly visible. While Roy condemns the state for suppressing the nonviolent action of the NBA, Gandhi’s satyagrahi were trained to anticipate suffering; indeed, such suffering was understood as a requirement of such attempts to illuminate and challenge injustice. Roy promotes nonviolence in her speeches and essays; yet, in none of her essays, even “Ahimsa,” does she devote the same sort of attention to research, history, or argument development as she does in the essays of The Cost of Living. Ahimsa, as theorized by Gandhi, involved much more than the use of tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience; rather, ahimsa was a way of understanding power and struggle that illuminated injustice while performing an alternative to it. Roy’s call for a renewed devotion to nonviolent resistance does not include a self-conscious analysis of power. Instead, Roy relies upon, and reinforces, the sarkar–public dichotomy. For instance, the state is an independent entity, separate from the people who rely upon its protection. In her essays on American imperialism, Roy carefully distinguishes between the United States government and the American people. Defending herself against the label of “anti-American,” Roy argues that antiAmericanism shows an “absurd inability to separate governments from people” (“The Ordinary” 36). Such a distinction makes sense. To equate “America” with Americans is to homogenize the immense diversity of that community, as well as elide dissenting opinion and organized opposition within the United States. In a more practical sense, to condemn the Bush administration rather than the American people makes her analysis much more palatable to an (already dissenting) American audience. Yet, Roy’s demand that “we” expose George W. Bush and Tony Blair as “baby-killers” (“Confronting” 111) seems just as much a misrepresentation of power and responsibility. Roy’s rhetoric of dissent is inconsistent with the values and ideological presumptions of ashimsa; for instance, the idea that there is no room for an “enemy” in the doctrine and political practice of ahimsa (“Satyagraha” 138). If, as Said contends, the purpose of dissent is to make your audience uncomfortable; or as Gandhi contends, the purpose of nonviolence is to illuminate injustice; or, indeed, if Roy does seek to motivate and activate “warriors” around the world, what are the political implications of separating the government from the people or imagining power in this way?

The Limits of Dissent 175 One of the recurring themes in Gandhi’s writings is the conceptualization of power as a structure of inequality in which all participate. Indian Swaraj, or liberation, therefore, would not result from the defeat of the British colonial rulers: “some Englishmen state that they took, and they hold, India by the sword . . . these statements are wrong. The sword is entirely useless for holding India. We alone keep them” (Hind Swaraj 41). For Gandhi, colonialism needed to be understood culturally, as well as materially. For instance, the Indian intelligentsia believed in the modern ideals of capitalism and the state. Further, the fear produced by government repression of dissent and resistance had to be overcome. Rather than recognizing the state as the wielder of a sword that shaped the behavior of the people, Gandhi conceptualized power in terms of cooperation and complicity. In this sense, the “People” and the “State” are illuminated as abstractions. If individuals and groups fail to perform their roles within the structure of the state, the state ceases to exist. To conceive of power in this way problematizes the good–evil, us–them binaries of both Indian state discourses of development and antidevelopment, as well as those of dissent or struggle. For instance, Franny Armstrong uses Vyas as a means of allowing the government to “dig its own grave.” Yet, at the same time, Vyas, I would argue, does not appear as a ruthless oppressor who wants to harm the Adivasi. Rather, his interviews reveal how indebted he is to notions of development, the nation, and culture (as the Adivasi artifact collection with which he decorates his house). If we, as Roy’s audience, are to imagine new and more productive ways of challenging and transforming structures of inequality, we must figure out how to transform such a mindset. In Empire (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri identify the place of dissent within anticolonial politics (such as that of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X). The negativity of dissent, they argue, is “merely the healthy expression of a real antagonism, a direct relation of force.” Yet, the negative moment of opposition—in the form of anticolonial violence, for instance—is not politics in itself, but a means of opening a space for a politics of transformation: “The real political process of constitution will have to take place on this open terrain of forces with a positive logic” (132). The rhetoric of dissent that structures Roy’s arguments about the Narmada struggle, and the new imperialism as well, provides little room for the sorts of imagining she demands, or such a “positive logic,” beyond undeveloped calls for a commitment to noncooperation. Her contention that the NBA has become a movement to save nonviolence (“Ahimsa” 14), for instance, seems to demean the desire for progressive social change (adequate rehabilitation and compensation, environmentally sustainable forms of energy production, and participatory and local forms of governance) and replace it with the desire to have safe, nonviolent modes of perpetual opposition to the state. Roy contends that the:

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David Jefferess real crisis—the dispossession, the disempowerment, the daily violation of the democratic rights and the dignity of not thousands but millions of people, which has been set into motion not by accident by deliberate design—does not fit into the predetermined format of crisis reporting. (“Peace is War” 20)

Because of the narrative framework of crisis reporting, and the emphasis on crises as “world news,” the dailyness of poverty and injustice is largely invisible. Dissent, therefore, as a means of illuminating such forms of injustice is most certainly necessary. However, the practice of dissent cannot be mistaken for the hope that infuses it. My aim in this chapter has not been to criticize Roy so much as to argue that her critique and analysis is confined by the rhetoric of dissent. I agree with much of Stone-Mediatore’s assessment of Roy’s dissent, particularly with respect to her writings on the Narmada Dam Projects, and specifically the contention that Roy disrupts the narrative form of reason to expand the terrain of knowledge and experience that such projects, and struggles against them, comprise. However, Roy’s approach in her writings on the Narmada, and probably more so in her more recent writings on “imperialism,” is nonetheless limited by the narrative framework of dissent; hence, it is much more aligned to the narrative of the crisis than it is to a radical intervention. For instance: by constructing the Adivasi as (all) “oustees,” Roy reduces the actors and interests in the conflict; her rhetoric of inflicting “real damage” relies upon a Manichean model.10 Dissent relies upon a binary logic and a premise of antagonism. Further, it reaffirms the state as normative form of governance and communal identity. Roy recognizes the barriers that exist for illuminating the dailyness of injustice and oppression; the facts and figures of hydroelectric projects are “boring.” Her storytelling marks an intervention, in a way, that illuminates and disrupts the aura of objectivity and reason, and that humanizes abstract statistics. However, the framework of dissent utilized in the struggle against elite-centerd and environmentally unsustainable development projects, against American imperialism, or against Hindu nationalism provides little room for imagining otherwise, which Roy recognizes as necessary. Further, it forecloses the recognition that much of this imagining otherwise does not require new models and practices, but alternative perspectives on struggle. In “The Greater Common Good” and her other essays on the Narmada conflict, Roy illuminates “injustice”—the pain and hardship suffered by Adivasi “oustees,” for instance—but only hints at the complexity and “positive logic,” to use Hardt and Negri’s term, of the struggle against the Narmada dams. The tradition of dissent within which Roy writes limits the sort of stories she can tell. Perhaps “dissent” is an easier story to tell, or a more evocative one for Roy’s audience, than the story of Medha Patkar, the NBA, the mundane and tiring dailiness of struggle, and the production of alternative systems of education, decision making, and responsibility, and the attendant alternative world view this entails.

The Limits of Dissent 177 NOTES 1. Research for this paper was conducted with the support of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship. 2. See, for instance, Hackett, Franks, Platt, and Sunstein. 3. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s various prime-time documentary series’ on its cable news network, NewsWorld, are a case in point. Documentaries screened in the period from 2003 through 2005, for instance, include critiques of the United States’ invasion of Iraq or stories of the oppression of Canada’s aboriginal peoples. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation, however, provides no space for critical perspectives on Canada’s involvement in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, participation in the OECD or G8, or Canadian corporate violence in Central America or Sudan. In part, the relative lack of documentary investigations into Canadian state, corporate, and consumer complicity with programs of structural adjustment or megaprojects (like dams and mining) may be attributed to the interests of the state-funded agencies, which provide funding and support to documentary fi lmmakers. 4. See Baviskar and Khagram. 5. Arguably, at the same time that these demonstrations drew attention to the World Trade Organization, they also overshadowed awareness of the solidarity Third-World states” particularly African states, to block the proposed agreement. 6. Roy’s essay on the Narmada struggle is not the fi rst to depart from “objective” argument or utilize “poetic” devices to present a story. See, for instance, Baba Amte’s Cry, the Beloved Narmada (1989). 7. See also Verghese and Burma. 8. In “The Greater Common Good,” Roy claims that sixty percent of those displaced will be Dalit or Adivasi (18), while in “Power Politics,” she claims that almost half of the displaced are Dalit or Adivasi (68). 9. See Bavikar. 10. See Brand-Jacobsen for a more detailed description of what he calls a “war culture” approach to confl ict (22).

WORKS CITED Baviskar, Amita. In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts Over Development in the Narmada Valley. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995. Brand-Jacobsen, Kai Frithjof. “Peace: The Goal and the Way.” Searching for Peace: The Road to Transcend. London: Pluto, 2000. 16–24. Bunting, Madeleine. “Arundhati Roy is a Thrilling Political Icon Who Represents the Coming of Age of Feminism.” Guardian of London 7 Mar. 2002. 18 Aug. 2005. . Burma, Ian. “The Anti-American, a Review of Power Politics and The Algebra of Infi nite Justice.” The New Republic. 29 Apr. 2002: 25–8. Chomsky, Noam. “State Power and the Domestic Enemy.” Interview with David Barsamian. Chronicles of Dissent. Vancouver: New Star, 1992. 77–103. . “Substitutions for the ‘Evil Empire.’” Interview with David Barsamian. Chronicles of Dissent. Vancouver: New Star, 1992. 160–86. Chow, Rey. “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Padmini Mongia. London: Arnold, 1997. 122–46. “Commentary.” Drowned Out. Dir. Franny Armstrong. Spanner Films. DVD, 2004.

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DAM/AGE. Dir. Aradhana Seth. First Run Icarus Films, 2002. Drowned Out. Dir. Franny Armstrong. 2002. Spanner Films, 2004. DVD. Franks, CES. Introduction. Dissent and the State. Ed. CES Franks. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. [pp?] Gandhi, Mohandas K. Hind Swaraj and other Writings. Ed. Anthony J. Parel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 1–126. . “The Satyagraha Ashram.” The Gandhi Reader: A Sourcebook of His Life and Writings. Ed. Homer A. Jack. New York: Grove, 1956. 136–44. Guha, Ramachandra. “The Arun Shourie of the left.” The Hindu 26 Nov. 2000. 22 Aug. 2005. . Hackett, Robert A. News and Dissent: the Press and Politics and Peace in Canada. Norwood: Ablex, 1991. . “Dissent May Not Need to Be Disciplined: Corporate Influence in the New Media.” Disciplining Dissent. Eds. William Bruneau and James L. Turk. Toronto: J. Lorimer, 2004. 143–62. Khagram, Sanjeev. Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water And Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Kingsnorth, Paul. “I Wish I Had the Guts to Shut Up: An Interview with Booker Prize-Winning Writer Arundhati Roy.” The Ecologist Sept. 2000. 22 Aug. 2005. . “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World?” CBS News 2 Jan. 2005. 22 Aug. 2005. . Platt, Thomas W. “The Concept of Responsible Dissent.” Social Theory and Practice 1.4 (1971): 41–52. Roy, Arundhati. “Ahimsa (Nonviolent Resistance).” War Talk. Cambridge: South End P, 2003. 9–16. .“The Greater Common Good.” The Cost of Living. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1999. 1–90. . “The Ladies Have Feelings, So . . . Shall We Leave It to the Experts?” Power Politics. Cambridge: South End P, 2001. 1–34. . “On Citizens’ Rights to Express Dissent.” Power Politics. Cambridge: South End P, 2001. 87–104. . An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Cambridge: South End P, 2004. . “Peace is War.” An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Cambridge: South End P, 2004. 1–40. . “The Ladies Have Feelings So . . . Shall We Leave it to the Expert?” Power Politics. Cambridge: South End P, 2001. 1–34. . “Power Politics: The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin.” Power Politics. Cambridge: South End P, 2001. 35–86. . “Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?” An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Cambridge: South End P, 2004. 83–94. Said, Edward. Introduction. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. 1994. New York: Vintage, 1996. ix–xix. . “Representations of the Intellectual.” Representations of the Intellectual. 1994. New York: Vintage, 1996. 3–24. Stone-Mediatore, Shari. Reading Across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges Of Resistance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Sunstein, Cass R. Why Societies Need Dissent. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. Tripathi, Salil. “Culture Clash: The Limits of Imagination—America Haters Are Blaming the Victim.” The Asian Wall Street Journal 5 Oct. 2001. 15 Aug.2005. . Varma, Rashmi. “Developing Fictions: The ‘Tribal’ in the New Indian Writing In English.” World Bank Literature. Ed. Amitava Kumar. Minneapolis: UP Minnesota, 2003. 216–33.

The Limits of Dissent 179 Verghese, B.G. “A Poetic License.” Outlook Magazine 5 July 1999. 15 Aug. 2005. . “Women of Color Film Festival.” 22 Aug. 2005. .

Epilogue Should We Leave It to the Writer? Ranjan Ghosh I write because I was meant to write, I was called to write, I was told to write. I write because that’s who I am.1 I continue to write what I believe. Not to do so would undermine the dignity of writers, their art, their very purpose. 2 The writer is the man who discovers the use of suffering in the economy of art—as saints discovered the utility and necessity of suffering in the economy of salvation. 3

When asked by a Dutch documentary fi lmmaker what India can teach the world, the writer proposed to take him to a “call center college,” then a training center of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and finally to the whirling currents of the Narmada valley. Why not show him the way to the wondrous Taj Mahal, the exquisite backwaters of Kerala, and the sublime snowy peaks of Kanchanjunga, which team up majestically with the aromatic tea gardens of Darjeeling? Can writing at once become self-conscious and independent of institutional bullying, became a vocation that inspires one to realize a dream, turn into an act that helps us to rationalize the fringes of our existential and social insanity, and develop into a mechanism that alerts us to our conditions of citizenry and responsibilities within the compelling and impinging frameworks of democracy? Amidst the increasing provocations and compulsions to degrade and denude the quality and conditions of our existence, how does the writer creatively mediate to extend the life of the imagination, help deepen the dignity of his or her art, and become the persuasive and fecund power that empowers the poor with a belief about their ability to think and act? Stories build upon the writer in myriad ways and reveal themselves in narratives that “insist on being told.” Fiction dances out of Roy, but nonfiction is “wrenched out by the aching, broken world” (Roy The Ordinary Person’s Guide 13). Anguish and anxiety commission her for responsible revelation; she is as much culled by the world as the world stands revealed in compelling alternatives before her. The dynamics of power that the writer negotiates with the world make her aware of the inability to be faced with a single story, “one absolutist ideology,” on a subject or a scheme. It results in a sort of deference to disparate radixes of knowledge accumulation: an ex-centricity of

Epilogue

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being thrown about with ideas and things, a molecular cohesion with an everchanging world, and with it, the protean matrices of emotion and power. Does the writer then have a defi nable role to play? “Can it be fi xed, described, characterized in any defi nite way? Should it be?” (Power Politics 4). For Arundhati Roy, the ways of the writer cannot be strictly fi xed. Pushing the frontiers of knowledge, worrying the edges of imagination, conjuring “beauty from the most unexpected of things,” looking at territories of meaning that others have never dared to tread, the writer must give herself the freedom to take a flight, winging away from the withholding powers of “society’s existing notions of morality and responsibility” (Power Politics, 5) and the intractable forbiddance to think outside the boxes of preconceived values and time-worn and convention-buttressed acts. Production of art, whether good (“the strong, bright bird of the imagination”) or bad (“synthetic noisy bauble”), does not always need the instructive ferule of rules. But the writer is wary of the borders separating the two continents. The writer has her own rules for producing art as much as the outside world inspires the writer to correspond with the fenestration and furniture of the world within, urging along a synthesis that expires in a compelling piece of art. This, dividing, line complex, contradictious, and exacting; it leads the writer to the “strangest, wildest places,” and makes her a person who, in the midst of a bloody military coup, could be fascinated “by the mating rituals of a purple sunbird, or the secret life of captive goldfish, or an old aunt’s descent into madness” (Power Politics 65). There is truth and beauty in such serendipity and epiphany, a seeing and revelatory power that only the writer has, and when bereft of which, she faces trivialization. Writing is an act both poetic and political, one where the imagination speaks as much to the writer in uncharted ways as the world speaks to her in no innocent terms. Art and writing impose an intricate web of morality, rigor and responsibility on the writer. Such imposition and consequent disposition is specific and singular. The writer is because she speaks; she becomes accountable while speaking and responsible while silent. The ‘gift’ in the writer determines her ways of emergence and articulation. Roy is not ‘clerky’ in the sense that her “kingdom is not of this world” (Benda 29–30). As a writer, she would not fall on a conscious segmentization that sees the clerk’s passion in a frame distinct from political passions—speculative examination of politics thrown in with engagement in political battles—and the humanist reason that is realist, empirical, intelligible, and sensible. It is humanist reason that would perhaps enable her to comprehend the passion that made Humphrey Davy dance in his laboratory after the discovery of potassium, or understand the cause behind the violently beating heart of Malebranche after reading Descartes’ treatise; it is humanist reason that makes her correspond with the layman’s ‘realities’ and the socio-political realities that engage us. The writer is not merely a ‘pure thinker’ who is indifferent to passions other than those of the mind and the intellect: she is materialist, moralist, and idealist.

182 Ranjan Ghosh The knowledge that the writer generates, the passion that she whips up, the ‘thinking’ that she inscribes and interpolates in society lead her to define and help function the ‘public space.’ This segues to the role of the “expert” in this domain; the expert as specialist: the quadrant of the technical and the scientific. But circumspect of the function of the “expert,” Roy looks into deprofessionalizing the public debate on matters that affect the lives of ordinary people. The writer makes people aware of their right to be informed about issues impinging their lives. Roy feels that it is the experts who “colonize knowledge, build four walls around it, and use it to your advantage” (Power Politics 25). With an axe to grind, they can be Brahminical. More than a tussle between knowledge and ignorance, or the expert and the layperson, Roy sees in it “the pitting of one value system against another, one kind of political instinct against another.” Immured in a snug eyrie of ideas, experts tuck knowledge away to an inaccessible provenance, away from an “unauthorized gaze or the curiosity or understanding of passers-by,” making it strategically evident that all knowledge is not for common consumption, not for all to understand: “My expertise is vital to your life, so let me make the decisions” (Roy The Checkbook, 69). It comes in a sloganeeringly reductive style, too, notes Edward Said, which is “to-the-point, fast, formulaic, pragmatic in appearance” (29). It lays claim to straight-faced, machine-tooled precision. But this cannot avoid resulting in ‘disconnection’: the disjunctures that yank open the lines of separation between ordinary people and the things that happen to them. The saving ‘gift’ in the writer credits her to create links, to join dots, to tell politics like a story, to communicate it, to make it real. To make the connection between a man with his child telling you about life in the village he lived in before it was submerged by a reservoir, and the WTO, the IPMF, and the World Bank (Roy The Checkbook 10–1).5 Without being spangly and intricate, the writer demonstrates these connections among things; she is gifted with the ability to make knowledge less classified and discriminatory—worthily endowed to disempower the specialists who would segmentize knowledge for sectarian use and make people unaware of their “real conditions of existence” unless explained and made available. Neither fevered nor plod, the writer carpets knowledge out sans the weave of strategic colonization and censorship. The writer implores, explores, questions, and pries. She dissects, argues, dissents, and develops. Never close to being a utopian intellectual, she is, in the words of Vaclav Havel, “mindful of the ties that link everything in this world together, who approach the world with humility, but also with an increased sense of responsibility, who wage a struggle for every good thing.” Havel writes: After all, who is better equipped to decide about the fate of this globally interconnected civilization than people who are most keenly aware

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of these interconnections, who pay the greatest regard to them, who take the most responsible attitude toward the world as a whole? (“The Responsibility” 37). In an assertion of knowledge-based authority, experts discourage participation and self-determination, manipulating control over means of social reproduction. It evolves into a matter of serious debate as to the dialectic between what constitutes broad public import and attenuated technical interest. But expert knowledge can languish on the margins under the vested pressures of political lobbyists who zealously guard their interests over expertise that disfavors their intent and moves. The possibilities of their capitulating to political applause as indicators of the rationality of their ideas are high. That said, it still becomes difficult to make the mandates of the experts work amidst the ‘disconnections.’ Opacity brings with it the suspicion of elitism and dubiety over intent. Brint notes that a large part of the reputation of experts for narrowness and purely instrumental interests comes from experts’ characteristic weakness in appreciating the broader social and historical context in which they work. The expert on alcoholism, for example, may know all of the demographic, psychological, and biological correlates of alcoholism, but have no appreciation whatsoever of the extent to which alcoholism as a social problem was itself constructed by an ironic twist of early industrialism, which simultaneously introduced new demands for greater regularity among workers and increasing supplies of spirits to reduce that regularity. Experts, who are not so broadly knowledgeable, are leading contemporary example of “bounded rationality” at work. (145) Brint has Roy in close company when he points out that the narrowness of the experts gives rise to “criticisms of unfinished rationality of experts” where “the strength of social problem solving by scientific means” should not, in all fairness, be its only logic. In such circumstances, “its weakness is a tendency to ignore the feelings and sentiments of real people” for not “every social or political problem,” explains Brint: is best approached through the lens of professional inquiry and expertise. Some alternatives to the scientific style of social problem solving include the application of ordinary, nonscientific knowledge and values, the learning of new behaviors by groups connected to a problem, and mutual adjustment through discussion or bargaining. These modes of social problem solving are sometimes more in keeping with democratic values and are also more effective. (146) But ignoring the experts with an omissive flourish does not help either; it can often be incendiary and stultifying working with lay knowledge. The

184 Ranjan Ghosh writer must know her lines of communication, the bounds of familiarity, and the politics of appropriation involving expertise and experts. From the perspective of those who wield political and economic power, experts as intellectuals possess crucial specialized knowledge, as well as the important ideological capacity to legitimate (or in some cases, delegitimate) the prevailing order. They are closely connected with the political and the economic elites who, in their command over power and resources, become the producers of culture. Shils is right to point out that “there must therefore be a body of persons capable of reproducing and transmitting this pattern of technical and specialized knowledge and skill.” They are different “in the substantive content of their intellectual culture,” but have “parallel functions” that are necessary for providing the education required for public discussion (Shils 175–76). For critical–oppositional intellectuals like Roy, the choice should not be between the experts and the writers. But Roy cannot deny how quickly with the changing circumstances she has had to change batons between the traditional functional intellectual and what Foucault would call these specific intellectual. The success or failure of her story as an intellectual depends heavily on how she moves between roles and prevents her biases from beclouding the vocation she is obligated to as a writer. Without being bluntly dismissive, Roy needs to be more thoughtfully patient toward the specialization and identity of technocrats in the public sphere; she ought to be more mindful of the character of the debate that specialized knowledge can generate. Her writer’s agency, her indomitable stir to write and alert the laity depends on how she understands the nuances and particularities of such specialist knowledge, because to ignore this vast field of information and knowledge defeats the purpose with which she took to writing; it makes her addressee a sorry victim of her biases. The public sphere is disabled and hobbled by such snarling discrimination and starts suffering from ‘deliberation deficit.’6 Walter Lippmann has argued in favor of disinterested “technocratic faith,” investing his confidence in what he terms as “intelligence work.” The problems of democracy stand to be reduced through the interposition of some “forms of expertness between the private citizen and the vast environment in which he is entangled.” It can bring down the flip side of public opinion, which, at times, can be poorly informed, frivolous, and prejudiced (Lippmann 184). From the other end of the lens, Roy does not seem to see the incapaciation that the lack of some kinds of expert knowledge can bring to individuals. However, it is not incompetence that enforces subordination to an elitist and commandeering class of experts, but the radiant necessity of knowledge to improve “the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion.” The problem facing the public are occlusion and obfuscation of knowledge; it is complicit in the order that draws lines of discrimination on the basis of information. The connected menaces of misrepresentation, ignorance, snap judgments, and imaginative propaganda emerge from the deficit in inquiry and publicity. Some expert knowledge brings intelligence to the masses and

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more sense to the order of the public sphere (Dewey 208). Individuals become more equipped to self-rule. Experts cannot always be distasteful adjuncts to the writer’s understanding. They are not exactly shambling figures impeding the writer’s sense of things, society, and the world. But it is also for the writer to let us know that the world cannot be run merely by specialist knowledge, and it is not what should command our only respect. As rationer of explanation, the writer would show us the respect for a knowledge that marks out a balance between “curiosity, grace, humility, and letting things be” (The Checkbook 19). The writer would know, unlike the experts, that everything need not be “poked at and prodded and intervened in and understood” (19). It is telling the story that matters most; it is mining the seams of struggles and anxieties and not the mere digging up of facts. The writer’s ability to connect and confect is built on the pleasure that she takes in telling the story in a way that ordinary people can understand; in no embattled tone, it is the pleasure in decolonizing knowledge, of speaking truth to the powerless, in being at once the conservative and the radical intellectual. Where experts fail, the writer triumphs. It is in dissent that the writer triumphs: the “persistent, reasonable, closely argued, non-violent dissent” (The Ordinary Person’s Guide 6–7). It is dissent against acts of cultivated violence—emerging from the discursive pressures of democracy, corporatization, religion, and state—that snatch freedom away from people with a frightening regularity. In the context of state repression in Iran, Mehrzad Boroujerdi sees a division among literary ranks in the literary community into “engage literati” and “literary neutrals.” The engage artists, poets, translators, and writers were advocating Adabiyyat-e mota’ahhed (committed or engage literature) that would operate as the mouthpiece of the poor and the underprivileged. The literary neutrals, on the other hand, wanted to pursue: in letters a beauty or an understanding quite outside politics. The government’s patronage of the literary neutrals only exacerbated the already developing rift between the two competing groups. The engage literati described the neutrals with such adjectives as government puppets, alienated from the masses, superficial, absurdists, escapists, nihilist, decadent, imported, artificial, illegitimate, lifeless and unethical. They perceived their own art as attentive, loyal, dutiful, ethical and authentic (Boroujerdi 43). Close to being an “engage literati,” Roy believes that the public space would become disabled if she ceased to question authorities. Participant in a ‘deliberative democracy,’ she favors ‘talk’; it is ‘talk’ that cuts down on the ‘deliberation deficit’ and wakes democracy up, in the way Nussbaum sees Socrates doing it.7 It is Hannah Arendt’s natality where people amidst the circles of deliberation need to ensure their abilities to act: through this belief that one prepares to be free.

186

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Roy, as the dissentient—l’auteur de dissident—wrote her own stories about the undemocratic ways of governance; she wrote about the judiciary, the behemoth that ordinary people are terrified about; she wrote her own critique of the judgments of the Supreme Court, which did not turn out to be pleasant. But this demonstration of ‘dissent’ landed her in jail and dragged her into a protracted criminal trial. This is one way of silencing the writers, muzzling the press, and the democratic freedom of articulation. If the judiciary cannot be questioned about its anomalies and its seemingly insuperable authority, if dissent is ‘criminalized,’ and if the middle class cannot think of any other institution except the judiciary as proper, just, and unprejudiced, there is something seriously wrong with the democracy we swear and live by. Roy has shown us how free speech in the free market has become a commodity like everything else. The writer is committed to be noisy and ‘troublesome’ (“we are not dead yet!”), and in this lies the power to retain freedom: the freedom to express oneself, the freedom to live life without the fear of being instructed and bullied all the time, the freedom that unleashes one’s individuality and identity, the freedom to be treated as humans, the freedom to harmonize with nature and the world. Said has argued that this freedom must include: the right to a whole range of choices affording cultural, political, intellectual, and economic development ipso facto will lead one to a desire for articulation as opposed to silence. This is the functional idiom of the intellectual vocation. The intellectual therefore stands in a position to make possible and to further the formulation of these expectations and wishes (31). There is no harm if the writer remains connected with a great number of activist communities, and avails herself of the opportunities that come with the “lecture platform, the pamphlet, radio, alternative journals, the interview form, the rally, church pulpit, and the Internet to name only a few” (29). The public space is superbly alerted and activated by such moves— “We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar” (Roy The Ordinary Person’s Guide 76). Roy is the writer–intellectual. The last years of the twentieth century have seen writers picking up the intellectual’s adversarial attributes and gliding into roles where they speak ‘the truth to power,’ by being a “witness to persecution and suffering, supplying a dissenting voice in conflict with authority.” “The easiest way of demonstrating that is simply to list the names of some (but by no means all) recent Nobel Prize winners,” observes Said: then to allow each name to trigger in the mind an emblematized region, which in turn can be seen as a sort of platform or jumping-off point for that writer’s subsequent activity as an intervention in debates taking place very far from the world of literature. Nadine Gordimer, Kenzaburo Oe,

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Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Elie Wiesel, Bertrand Russel, Gunter Grass, Rigoberta Menchu, among others (25). The writer–intellectual has the right to disturb ‘authority’ and can afford to create ‘noise’ by being in opposition to and critical of institutional discourses. Vaclav Havel sees the writer–intellectual’s authenticity in her ability to ‘constantly disturb,’ in bearing “witness to the misery of the world”; she “should be provocative by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and open pressure and manipulations, should be the chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations, should be a witness to their mendacity” (Disturbing the Peace 167). Roy is for ‘disturbing the peace.’ This creation of disturbance is a vindication of the power that the writer is supposed to hold, and the power that the polity would prefer to subvert, for the state would want to have its own band of intellectuals with differing accents on order, discipline, and conformity. Well anchored in a persistent refusal to see the unenlightened masses as the ‘other,’ and conscious of not turning into a limp victim of the fundamental opposition that grounds the intelligentsia and the people, Roy is among those writers whose aesthetic would combine the life of the mind and of society, making us aware of the inscape of the ‘gift’ that survives on the co-ownership of the world within and the persuasions of the world without. “Loss, grief, brokenness, failure, the ability to find happiness in the saddest things” engage her; the silenced, the excluded, the oppressed make compelling claims on her. She is the ‘critical intellectual’ with a secular vocation, who, being plugged “directly into the world,” exposes the beauty of delicate moments of life and living and exposes us to the “absolute, relentless, endless, habitual unfairness of the world” (Roy The Ordinary Person’s Guide, 20). There is a sense of “loss and losing” that troubles her; the anguish in being alerted to the “death of feeling and the death of dreaming in our lives.” Her literature of praxis, as opposed to one of hexis, historializes by directing attention to her neighbors, upon the community plagued by loss, and upon a certain emasculation, which prevents fellowship with happiness (Sartre 190). The writer–intellectual is expected, notes Said, to: invent . . . goals abductively, that is, hypothesizing a better situation from the known historical and social facts. So, in effect, this enables intellectual performances on many fronts, in many places, many styles that keep in play both the sense of opposition and the sense of engaged participation . . . all arts of writing, can be aspects of this activity. The writer–intellectual discerns “the possibilities for active intervention”; her agency to struggle, to articulate in fearlessness and function dialectically, will not allow conscience to look away or fall asleep (‘Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals, 36–7). The writer–intellectual carves out the

188 Ranjan Ghosh space to form and transmit discourses, making knowledge and value claims, and writing out a space that functions in the duality of recognition and participation. Dialectically, the writer–intellectual is disposed to uncover the silence, the unmarked, to unconceal the ‘contest’ in our existence and what Said called the “the normalized quiet of unseen power” (31).8 Roy is the creative intellectual, playing the “gatekeeper role.”9 Through her writing, she has been able to walk down to the other side of humanity, which does not have the checkbook to ‘pay’ for her concerns; rather, it has huge love and affection for her, feelings that Cornel West would ascribe as the nonmarket values; they are the people who will her to speak, open her to the universe of conflict, pain, and suffering. And she, as the writer, would battle it out with the fierce urge to ‘help’: I just continue to do what I’ve always done, which is to write, to think about these things. I’m searching for an understanding. Not for my readers, for myself. It’s a process of exploration. It has to further my understanding of the way things work. So in a way it’s a selfish journey too. It’s is way of pushing myself further and deeper into looking at the society in which I live. If I were to be doing it not as an exploratory thing, but just as a politician might, with some fi xed agenda, and then trying to convince people of my point of view, I think I’d become jaded. Curiosity takes me where it takes me. It leads me deep into the heart of the world (Roy The Checkbook 65). It is an active, introspective curiosity that makes the writer a legislator and interpreter at the same time. The writer–intellectual has the creative role wherein she produces ideas and interprets the world with different meanings for others—acting as depositories of sociocultural values. The legitimacy of her position is owed to her skills as a writer—the writer drinking deep at the sources of our human stories—and not to being a mere participant in the political marketplace. But the writer is not a “gun for hire”; she need not be seen merely as the representative of the voiceless; she is not the agent who, sopped by checkbooks, works to wax glorious on cruise missiles; she writes with fury, passion, conviction, responsibility, and fearlessness; she forms her own spaces, and is irresistibly drawn to inhabit other spaces. She is the ordinary person’s alert guide to the world, its injustices, pain, suffering, glory, and happiness. She understands how hard it gets for the ordinary people to make an effort to know what their government is doing and how tired they must be by the end of a long, hard day to think of what they should be doing to appraise the decisions and actions of the government. A writer informs the system, informs the people who are made to be a part of the system, and questions the validity of information, its source, its defi nition, its consequence. The writer cannot allow the ‘academic’ to grow on her, for Roy believes that an academic would not walk across disciplines to understand the world.

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Roy would perhaps agree with Bourdieu’s description of intellectuals as “a dominant fraction of the dominant class” (145); academicians and “balanced critics” belong to the dominant fraction. Resiling from such a position, the writer–intellectual invests in and presides over a cultural domain without being feathered in rank elitism or gross populism (no “palace entertainer”), networking and workshopping her ideas among different institutional frameworks. Given the nature of the heat and light borne out of the combustion of passion and curiosity in the authorial intent, she may mistakenly be considered as inveterately ‘oppositional.’ There is a humanist reason for counterweighing opposing claims to superiority and authenticity—the reason that prevents strategic privileging of one position over and against the other, the reason that allows a vibrant public space to thrive, augmenting the flow of information into it, embedding the stir of discussion in it. The writer need not consort with the equations of a “balanced critic.” It also ill-serves the writerly vocation to be seen in a mutually gratifying truck with power and institution. The deeply intertwining positions of academics and their employers grant a vantage ground to both—“the shapeless virgin expanse to be cultivated and given form.” “They perceive themselves,” observes Bauman: in similar terms: as form-givers, designers, legislators, gardeners. Each is incomplete without the other; only together they may view themselves as spokesmen and guardians of society as a whole, as carriers/practitioners of society’s supreme values and destiny. There is little room for friction. And if there is no friction, one would expect little chance for either side stand aside and ‘objectify’ itself as a separate entity (83–4). The writer knows the art of eluding all kinds of entrapments in this game. Without cozying up to an uncritical acceptance of things, it is left to her to keep the nuances and frictions alive. It is an act to avoid being part of the “herd of independent minds,” keeping alive intellectual discussion as a process that disallows suiting “everybody up in a team jersey so we know who should be cheered and who booed.” It is this normalization that the writer–intellectual must resist “even at the risk of making lots of people uncomfortable” (Elshtain 2001). She realizes, much in the same way as Bourdieu does, that there cannot be one writer–intellectual, a ‘master thinker’ to carry on the work of reconstruction and ‘demasking.’ There is, admittedly, the role of the ‘collective intellectual.’ Roy and Said come companionably close on the impossibility of devising a master plan, a blueprint for the writer–intellectual that is underpinned by utopian teleology. Writing is at once a private and a political act: it is a process where one thinks aloud; it is pitting the writer’s mind against another person; it is about thinking together with people. It is the insistence to build on the right to be “emotional,” “sentimental,” and “passionate,” with no pretense of being a “neutral academic” (“I’m a writer. I have a point of view. I have

190 Ranjan Ghosh feelings about the things I write about—and I’m going to express them” [The Checkbook 103–4]). Inscribed in a democratic power structure, housed in a particular cultural space, and riding fierce intellectual passion, she takes a call on her situatedness, whose very nature demands the emergence of a collective intellectual. In a force-field deeply informed with certain specificities, she sees a well-meaning surrender to the beauty of feelings and the rigor of the intellect. She is an explicator, an interpreter, a producer, and a mediator in the ‘information society,’ proposing and performing in a problematic space hung between intense extremes of elitism and populism, both forms of which pare down what the writer and writing essentially stand for. This space is difficult to hold and command; it requires the legitimation of deeply involving forces in intellect and passion. As a space, it stretches out through production, acknowledgement, and dissemination of ideas, a space that is invested in innovation and dynamism. Without being a philosopher king—a function that seriously limits the ability of the writer to perform—she shuffles among contesting and constitutive identities in her dealings with the world, in living through some contradictions, some universals, and some levels of transcendence. It is a position that loses its relevance once it becomes frigid, for the writer is a creature who has her right to passion and anger and is not always universal, but is certainly ‘specific’; rather, it is a position internally riven with uncertainties and unrest, which help her to unhinge and formulate alternatives in dealing with the world. The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will get worse and then better. Perhaps there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing (Roy The Ordinary Person’s Guide 40). An “inhaler of existence,”10 the writer’s ‘active’ breadth of dissent and disposition leaves the sound of the small god’s breathing heavier: the footsteps of the second coming are too pronounced to elude us; it is for us to leave it to the writer, the gregarious loner, who would welcome the birth of a new power for the people, provoke a dream for the world, and inspire a strength in our existence. Can we leave it to the writer, then?

NOTES 1. Elizabeth George, quoted from Jim Fisher, The Writer’s Quotebook: 500 Authors on Creativity, Craft, And the Writing Life, 21. 2. Arundhati Roy, Power Politics 99. 3. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 42. 4. Roy writes: “take for example the international dam industry. It’s worth thirty-two to forty-six billion US dollars a year. It is bursting with experts

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6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

191

and consultants. Given the number of studies, reports, books, PhDs, grants, loans, consultancies, EIAs—it’s odd, wouldn’t you say, that there is no really reliable estimate of how people have been displaced by Big Dams in India? That there is no estimate for exactly what the contribution of Big Dams has been to overall food production in India? [ . . . ] you’ll fi nd that a lot of dubious politics lurks inside the stables of ‘expertise.’” (Power Politics 26–7) Roy writes: “You ask, ‘Why do you have it? How has it come there? What does it mean? What are you thinking about today? Are you happy? Why has your body produced this?’ You can’t just be a skin expert. You must understand the human body and the human mind.” (The Checkbook 11) For an extensive elaboration of this point, see Douglas Kellner (174–6). See Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity: A Classic Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997). By citing Socrates, she wants to bring home the virtues of an alert democracy where “business” could be conducted in a more “reflective and reasonable way.” She writes: “We need Socratic teaching to fulfi ll the promise of democratic citizenship” (10). Roy writes: “We put our ears to the ground and look for other ways of making sense of the world. We search for the untold story, the mentionedin-passing military coup, the unreported genocide, the civil war in an African country written up in a one-column-inch story next to a full-page advertisement for lace underwear.” See Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire 46. For more on this notion of the gatekeeper, moralist, and the caretaker role of the intellectual, see Seymour Martin Lipset and Asoke Basu’s “The Roles of the Intellectual and Political Roles” (1976: 124–43). I have borrowed this phrase from Shireen K. Lewis, Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolité, 103.

WORKS CITED Bauman, Zygmunt. “Love in Adversity: On the State and the Intellectuals, and the State of the Intellectuals.” Thesis Eleven 31 (1992): 81–104. Benda, Julien. The Betrayal of the Intellectuals. Boston: Beacon P, 1955. Boroujerdi, Mehrzad. Iranian Intellectuals and the West. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1996. Bourdieu, P. “The Intellectual Field: A World Apart.” In Other Words: Essays towards a Refl exive Sociology (Polity Press, 1990), 140–149. Brint, Steven. In an Age of Experts, the Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Dewey, John. Public and Its Problems. Chicago: Swallow P, 1980. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. “The Future of the Public Intellectual: A Forum.” The Nation. 12 Feb. 2001. . Fisher, Jim. The Writer’s Quotebook: 500 Authors on Creativity, Craft, And the Writing Life. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2006. Havel, Vaclav. Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. . “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” New York Review of Books XLII. No. 11 (22 June 1995). Kellner, Douglas. “Intellectuals, the New Public Spheres and Techno-Politics.” New Political Science 41/42 (1997): 169–88.

192 Ranjan Ghosh Lewis, Shireen K. Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolité. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Free P, 1965. Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity: A Classic Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Roy, Arundhati. The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile. Cambridge: South End P, 2004. . An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. London: Flamingo, 2004. . Power Politics. Cambridge: South End P, 2001. Said, Edward. “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” The Public Intellectual. Ed. Helen Small. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 19–39. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What is Literature? And Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. Shils, Edward. The Intellectuals and the Powers and other Essays. Chicago: U Chicago Pr, 1972. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

Appendix Dissent Has to Be Localized: Arundhati Roy Interviewed by Antonia Navarro-Tejero

ANT: Your essays “The Great Indian Rape Trick: Part I and II” and “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane,” which charged Shekhar Kapur with exploting Phoolan Devi in his Bandit Queen, attracted a lot of attention. Actually, Devi herself fiercely disputed its accuracy and fought to get it banned in India. Why the controversy then? AR: The film was based on a book written by Mala Sen. It was said that the book was based on the diaries of Phoolan Devi, which she dictated to some one while in jail. Phoolan, as you know, was illiterate. The book presents several versions of the same event, including Phoolan’s own version, making it clear that the story is far from clear. Phoolan herself never mentions rape. The fi lm however, claimed to tell the ‘truth.’ It showed Phoolan Devi being raped and raped and raped again . . . It turned India’s most famous bandit into history’s most famous victim of rape. The enthusiasm to depict rape in the garb of self-righteous feminist politics repulsed me. It distorted the story of a woman who was simply not a victim. You know, she was a bandit whom the police never caught. She was tricked into surrendering on false pretexts. When Phoolan Devi fi rst protested about the fi lm and the court ordered a stay, Shekhar Kapur, the director of the fi lm, tried to say that it was ‘banned’ because upper-caste people were plotting against it. Then, he tried to divert it into an issue of freedom of speech, whereas the legal was whether or not anybody should have the right to restage the rape of a woman without her consent. The court did fi nally order in Phoolan’s favor, but the fi lm by then was already out and it had been seen. So, fi nally, she came to a compromise with them. When she did, those people called her a whore and said she had only protested in order to extract some more money . . . I thought that even that would

194 Appendix have been fi ne. The fi lmmakers had paid her a pittance. At least she ought to have agency over her own rapes (if that is indeed what happened to her). But it was an important issue. If tomorrow, say, you or me is raped and somebody makes a fi lm and charges tickets for the world to come and watch . . . who has to right to do that? My articles were about more than just that. They were really about how you choose to distort the life of a woman like Phoolan, how the men who told her story needed so desperately to turn her into a victim . . . how they were so awestruck by the havoc they imagine their wee willies could wreak. In Phoolan’s own version of the story, her reasons for becoming a bandit had nothing to do with being raped. It had to do with land and her father’s brother having taken over her father’s land. And she, as a little girl, actually going to fight for it. So, in order to get her out of the way, they got her married to somebody. That man mistreated her by basically marrying someone else, saying “you are just a little girl, what can I do with you.” In the film, she becomes a bandit because she is raped by her husband. In her version, she is furious because her husband and his new wife treat her badly, like a little servant—and eventually she is returned to her family . . . The gratuitous addition of imaginary rapes goes on and on. Worst of all, if you watch the film carefully you’ll see that this famous bandit never takes a decision by herself. Men are always ordering her around, telling her what to do. ANT: You wrote the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones (1989), Electric Moon (1992), the television serial The Banyan Tree, and the documentary DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002). Moreover, you fi rst played in Massey Sabih (1985). How different were these experiences with the seventh art? In which way did Pradip Krishen influence your interest in filmmaking? AR: The screenplays belong to different era and different kinds of filmmaking in my life. Massey Sabih was the fi rst film that I had anything to do with. I acted in it. At that time, I had just fi nished from architecture school and was quite curious about cinema, but I did not know much about it. I met Pradip accidentally. Acting was not something in which I was interested at that point. But it was a good way to see how films are made. Even though I was very young, I was already politically pretty uncomfortable with the script of Massey Sabih, based on a book called Mister Johnson by Joyce Carey. I saw it as a white man’s view of the native land. Still, I went ahead and did it because I wanted to see how

Appendix 195 films were made. After that, I did Annie and Electric Moon. The Banyan Tree never got made. At that time, for me, writing those scripts was a preparation for something else. I was preparaing my craft, but I was not dealing with big themes. They still have a place in my heart—particularly Annie. DAM/AGE, of course, is a documentary film recently made, and it is about all the political issues that I have been involved in. It was just at the time I was sent to prison for the contempt of court. That comes in a different category of film. I see DAM/AGE as something apart from film. It was just that I was going through this trial and I was not very sure what was going to happen, whether they were going to sentence me for a long time or short time. So I just thought I’d do the film, so that if I were in prison for a while, at least my point of view would be out in the world. Pradip was the director of the first feature film that I ever worked on [and] we got on really well, even though I disagreed with the politics of Massey Sabih. It was a charming and a very successful fi lm. Then, we worked together on other projects. I think Pradip taught me a lot. But eventually, we have very different political instincts, so we work on different things. But the way we worked together before was lovely. ANT: On March 7, 2002, the Guardian of London published the news of your being convicted of contempt of court by the Supreme Court for accusing it of attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam Project with the headline “Arundhati Roy is a Thrilling Political Icon Who Represents the Coming of Age of Feminism.” I did not really take the point, since there have been tons of powerful women in the history of India, and ordinary women who are fighting back for their rights. I guess your mother’s (Mary Roy) activism for women’s rights influenced you, too. However, your view is not one-dimensional; that is, a world divided between abused women and evil men, in spite of the efforts of many global feminists who tend to speak for the disposed through the lenses of Western feminism’s agenda. What is your position regarding gender activism? AR: The mass media’s icons must not be taken very seriously. I am very suspicious of these kinds of icons. You always have to wonder why these people are so attractive, so safe. Being an icon makes you receptacle of many people’s mediocre aspirations, something I don’t want to fulfill. It freezes you in time . . . it makes you conservative (even if you have a rasta hairdo or a rock star swagger) . . . That’s about icons . . . about the coming of age of feminism in India. In today’s India, at the heart of many major political struggles, there are women. I am just one of them. One in a long line of women

196 Appendix who have fought the most extraordinary battles, some far braver and far more extraordinary than me . . . It is important to remember that the rights and freedoms that we enjoy are not the product of our own amazing intellect and charisma, but because of battles others have waged for us. So I really have no time for the ‘new woman’ who says she’s not a feminist, but insists on all her freedoms. Feminism is a broad and beautiful space. Having said that, this business of world being divided between evil men and abused women is absurd. We can’t forget that so often women have colluded in that project of their own oppression. For example, when the genocide war against Muslims happened in Gujarat, when Muslim women were being publicly gang-raped and put to death, of course there were Hindu women who were egging their men on. So we can’t look at things that simply. When people come here and ask me condescending generic questions about “Indian women” I always wonder which particular women they mean. There are some women who are amongst the freest women in the world. But then, there are women who live in medieval times here in India. Then, there are the professional feminists, many of whom are very uncomfortable with women who are not victims. It’s a vast topic. Sometimes I feel it’s important for some of us—those of us who can, who have made the space for ourselves—to just go out and live our lives, fight the fight, write the book, do what we have to without theorizing about it too much, though that is important, too. I do feel, however, that it’s important for women to see how wonderful and exhilarating freedom can be. Few of us have it. Now and again some of us do have a responsibility to dance on the table from time to time. ANT: Looking back at 1997, how did you feel after receiving half a million pounds as an advance for your fi rst novel? AR: That was a long time ago and at that time I did not actually know how to feel about it. Then, even ten thousand pounds would have been huge; it would have been a lot of money. So half a million pounds was something that I could not even imagine. Of all the things that have happened, I think the most difficult for me to believe is that the novel has sold millions and millions of copies. I feel as though the pipe that circulates money between rich people burst while I was walking past and it spewed money all over me. This kind of money being showered on an individual, irrespective of what he or she has done, to me it is a manifestation of a world which has something very wrong with it. And for a person who is as political as I am, to be given that kind of money is really difficult.

Appendix 197 ANT: There is still a lot of work being done on your only novel. How do you react to criticism and reviews, if you ever read them? AR: I don’t want to become someone who is always second guessing herself, who ends up analyzing myself before I write something. I am still a kind of instinctive writer. I just stay away from that kind of analysis because that will make me looking at my own image in the mirror and destroy the pleasure of writing for me. ANT: Why was your opposition to the Narmada Dam project criticized as “anti-Gujarat?” AR: The Gujarat government had made Sardar Sarovar Dam into yet another of its kind of fascist schemes, where it made out that the people of Gujarat had a right to have the water of Narmada. It was almost as if their birth-right was to displace certain people, divert the river, and bring water to Gujarat. And if it was not done, it was projected as anti-Gujarat. It was quite a clever kind of imaging of issues. ANT: What about the Muthanga incident, has it ever happened again? AR: It is a group of four thousand tribal people in Kerala who had been promised land by the government, but after many years of agitation, the land was not given to them. So four thousand of them moved into a national park and said that until they gave them land, they would stay there. And the police moved in and shot them and . . . Just now, before I came here, I was talking about something else that is happening in Kerala, that some about fi fteen to twenty thousand Dalit people have moved in and taken over a corporate rubber estate in a place called Chengara. They have been there for the last nine months. There is a huge build up of tension because to evict sixteen thousand people means a lot of bloodshed. They say that each has a 5-liter petrol can and that they will burn themselves if they are evicted. I don’t know what will happen. It is a very, very radical moment. These are not just poor people, they are poor Dalits (who have no place in the Communist Manifesto) and they are not protecting their lands, they are taking over corporate land. It’s an aggressive and radical move. Thrilling in many ways . . . ANT: You have also written the introduction to 13 December: A Reader. The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament, in which fi fteen essays by lawyers, academics, journalists, and

198

Appendix writers look at the facts and raise questions about the investigations and the trial of the Indian Parliament being attacked by five people on 13 December 2001. How did the POTA law affect Indian people?

AR: POTA, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, is only marginally part of the attack on the Parliament. When the BJP government was in power, they passed this law in the Parliament. POTA is just the Indian version of the Patriot Act in America. It was soon after September 11. Obviously, in this communally charged atmosphere, the Act was used to incarcerate Muslims without charge and terrorize the Muslim community. In Gujarat, after the genocide in 2002, in which almost two thousand Muslims were massacred, we fi nd about two hundred fifty cases of POTA, in which two hundred forty-nine are against Muslims, most of whom are still in jail. The case of the attack on the Parliament is a scandal. After this so-called attack, the police arrested four people. Almost all of the evidence was spurious and proved to be so in court. Finally, they released three of the accused and pretty arbitrarily sentenced one of them, Mohammed Afzal, to death. In its judgement, the Supreme Court literally said: “we have no evidence to prove that Mohammed Afzal is a member of a terrorist group, but in order to satisfy the collective conscience of society, we are sentencing him to death.” Shameful. And based on this very shady ‘attack,’ the governmet of the time sent half a million troops to the Pakistan border and almost started a nuclear war. When the current government came to power, it campaigned that it would repeal this act, and in fact when it came to power, it did repeal POTA, but then it did something worse, which is that it took almost all the worst provisions and put it in a law called Unlawful Activities Act. And now, what is happening in India is that every state is passing its own security act, some of which are so outrageous that you can’t imagine that this country has the nerve to call itself a democracy. If you look at the Chattisgarh special security act, it says that any sign of disagreement with the government by word, by picture, by writing, is a criminal offence. And you could go to jail for seven years. So POTA has been withdrawn, but the people who were arrested under POTA are still in jail. In the North East and in Kashmir there is the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which allows noncommissioned army officers to kill on suspicion. The Public Security Act . . . hundreds of people have been incarcerated in this great democracy. There are Guantanamo Bay’s and Abu Ghraib’s dotted across our landscape.

Appendix 199 ANT: You have stated that world democracy is under siege. Can you bring this topic to our discussion? AR: If you go to any international organization, like the United Nations, they say that India is a democracy, so India is a model nation for them. All of what I write interrogates this notion. It is one of the more successful public relations scams of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. ANT: What do the multinational corporations, the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank have in common with the Hindutva project? AR: It is a very long, complicated question to answer. I would just say that, for example, in India, in 1990 when the Finance Minister, who is now the Prime Minister, liberalized the economy, exactly at the same time, the BJP embarked on the Hindutva project. Since then, Hindutva and the neoliberal project have moved together, complementing each other in a strange way. I can’t answer this question in an interview format, I have written a lot about it. Any answer in ten sentences will be crude. ANT: It has been decided that now it is time to focus on climate change and the importance of water. However, you, along with Vandana Shiva, have been talking about it from a long time ago. What do you think of Al Gore sharing the Nobel Peace Prize? AR: I think that climate change is an issue that has been on the cards for many years. I think now the real trouble is that people in countries like China and India feel that the Western countries are using the issues of climate change to contain India and China, and there is an element of truth in that. But the fact is that that there is climate change and everyone will have to do something about it. The poor countries say that we need to develop like the rich countries have done all these years. But in fact, they are using their poor to bring down their carbon emission averages. To make the rich richer without being subject to any environmental controls . . . this insane profit-driven capitalistic society. ANT: What do you mean with the “NGO-ization of resistance” when referring to the governments that block nonviolent dissent? AR: The NGO-ization of dissent is when organizations, funded by the same systems that perpetuate injustice in the fi rst place, masquerade as radial or revolutionary peoples’ movements. When they infiltrate genuine movements and tame them from within. When they turn

200 Appendix revolution into a day job with a travel allowance. When they convert peoples’ rights into charity handouts. It’s a clever covert operation to contain the fallout of what’s really going on. ANT: How was your experience when serving as a Chair of Jury of Conscience at the World Tribunal on Iraq? AR: Fascinating. But again, there is a publication with all the testimonies of all the people of jury, including myself, as well as all the people who deposed. It gives a penetrating and comprehensive view of what happened in Iraq and why it happened. ANT: Correct me if I am wrong, [but] you signed an open letter to honor calls for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions. Can you tell us more about it? AR: I think the attempt was really to raise the flag on what is happening in Palestine in order to mobilize the international community in the way it was mobilized against apartheid South Africa. To say that what Israel is doing in the Occuppied Territories is really unacceptable. ANT: George W. Bush and the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed an agreement regarding nucelar weapons. What is your opinion about it? AR: If it is signed, it will tie India to the US apron strings, not just on nuclear energy, but in all sorts of ways. The idea is to make a sort of India–Israel–US axis. Our decision makers don’t seem to have studied the fate of all of the US’s former allies. ANT: We all know you have tons of fans and friends, I am sure you are aware of the documentary video WE, which visualizes your words, specifically taken from your “Come September” speech. But do you have enemies? AR: Of course I do. Otherwise, I couldn’t write the kind of things I write, which are against the most powerful people as enemies. But they are so powerful that they do not really see someone like me as a threat, in terms of physically harming me. They just do with insults and so on. In India, obviously the upper-class elite who is enjoying the party, the Hindutva brigade, as well as people who believe that India has the right to do in Kashmir a version of what Israel is doing in Palestine . . . my writing does not go down well with any of these people . . .

Appendix 201 ANT: There are retractors who argue that India needs development in the way only corporate globalization does (building of masive call centers, malls, and sillicon valleys . . . ) Does Hindu nationalism have anything to do with it? AR: Yes . . . that’s the crux of the problem—development for whom? Who pays who profits? ANT: Why did you decline to accept the Sahitya Akademi Award for “The Algebra of Infinite Justice?” AR: Because it’s ridiculous to accept an award from a government whose policies I criticize in the book they wanted to give me the award for. ANT: Do you feel overwhelmed when people ask you big questions about how to solve the world as if you were a politician running for power? AR: No, I don’t fell overwhelmed. I do not take those questions seriously. ANT: Is it possible to globalize dissent? How do you measure the repercusions of your activism? AR: I think that depends on what we mean by globalization. I was the one who said that that only thing that is globalizing is dissent. I think dissent is as global as ever. But now, I really believe dissent has to be localized. The people who are winning battles right are those fighting on the ground. Those people need to be supported. The globalization of dissent has morphed into the NGO-ization of dissent. ANT: Your whole production can be read as an interlocking network of ideas, attitudes, and ideologies that emerge from the contemporary social and the political world. Your intense international engagement and your role as an important member in the global forum have given you the label of writer–activist. Are you comfortable with that designation? AR: I have written a whole essay on this term writer–activist and how it reminds me of a sofa bed. ANT: Your being called anti-American is just one of the many falacies told about you, right? AR: Well, it is the obvious, lazy way out for those who want to create a din and drown the argument. Pretty effective I have to say.

202 Appendix ANT: In spite of everything, you still live in India. Why didn’t you exile like most of the intellectuals? AR: It is not true that most intellectuals have gone away. The most exciting people live here, in the thick of it. I live here because this where I can be a hooligan. ANT: You said that the twenty-fi rst century might be the time for “the big” to be dismantled, that it might be “the century of the small things.” Is the distance between power and powerlessness narrower now in the twenty-fi rst century? AR: I don’t think so. I think we are poised on the edge of very big battles and I do not know what the outcome will be. And also, I really do think that, eventually, the crisis of food and water and dying rivers will cause serious unrest. ANT: In your article, “Scandal in the Palace,” when discussing Y.K. Sabharwal, former Chief Minister of the Supreme Court, you talk about the difference between the Rule of Law and the principle of justice. Isn’t the Right to Information Act contradictory to the Contempt of Court Act? You even state that we live in a sort of judicial dictatorship, as people on the streets accused the court of being an outpost of the New Corporate Empire, and freedom of speech is doubted, especially since employees of Mid Day were charged and found criminals with contempt of court for publishing allegations of Justice [Sabharwal’s] corruption. AR: The courts are trying to say that the Right to Information Act should not be applied to them. The courts are basically trying to protect themselves from public scrutiny, criticism. They are trying to become the real rulers, the ones who take the decisions. We do live in a judicial dictatorship. A corrupt, scam-ridden, judicial dictatorship. ANT: You talk about Muslim genocide in Gujarat in your recent article, “Listening to Grasshopper: Genocide, Denial and Celebration,” coinciding with Hrant Dink’s murder. You state that the epitome of Gujarati pride is Hindu-ness. But isn’t it the same in the rest of India? Though a secular country, it seems that Indian-ness is equal to Hindu-ness; do you agree? AR: Well, that is the project. And to a large extent, especially since the BJP came to power, it has been quite successful in communalizing the climate.

Appendix 203 ANT: Tibet’s exile government, based in India, says it has received unconfi rmed reports that Chinese police killed up to one hundred Tibetans during the demonstrations to mark the forty-ninth anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. And still, Hu Jia, a leading activist on behalf of dissidents, human-rights lawyers, and abused farmers is reporting human-rights abuses in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Have you visited the country recently to work along with Hu Jia? AR: No, I was in China briefly just to see what is happening. It was interesting to see how two countries like India and China with totally different histories are implementing the same economic policies. As far as Tibet is concerned, I sometimes feel that the people of Tibet need to be saved from China and from [the] CIA and from Hollywood. ANT: Finally, have your views on dissent changed at all? AR: Yes. I think more and more layers have been added to it. But I think what began several years ago as a sort of exhilaration and as a huge embracing of movements like the Narmada Valley has now thrown up quite a lot of questions about how effective they have been, what [mistakes] were made. I think there is much less conversation about our own tactics, much less internal questioning of ourselves than there should be. People are busy being icons and being heroes and are not interrogating themselves very seriously, not taking account [of] our strengths and weaknesses, our shortcomings and our failures. Without that, we are in trouble. But a whole new militant wave has displaced the old Gandhian movements . . . Let’s see what happens.

LIST OF PRIMARY SOURCES:

Novel The God of Small Things. Flamingo, 1997.

Screenplays DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy. Aradhana Seth, dir. 2002. English; 50 mins. Drowned Out. Franny Armstrong, dir. 2002. English; 75 mins. Electric Moon. Pradip Krishen, dir. 1992. English; 103 mins. In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones: The Original Screenplay. Penguin India, 2003. Pradip Krishen, dir. 1989. English; 110 mins.

204

Appendix

Non-fiction books An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Penguin India, 2005. “Ahimsa,” “Come September,” “The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky,” “Confronting Empire,” “Peace is War,” “An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire,” “Intant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free),” “When the Saints Go Marching Out,” “In Memory of Shankar Guha Niyogi,” “Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?,” “How Deep Shall We Dig?,” “The Road to Harsud,” “Public Power in the Age of Empire,” and “Peace and the New Corporate Liberation Theology.” Public Power in the Age of Empire. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004. War Talk. South End Press, 2003. “War Talk,” “Ahimsa,” “Democracy,” “Come September,” “The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky,” and “Confronting Empire.” The Algebra of Infi nite Justice. Flamingo, 2002. First published in 2001 “The End of Imagination,” “The Greater Common Good,” “Power Politics,” “The Ladies Have Feelings, so...,” “The Algebra of Justice,” “War is Peace.” The revised paperback edition includes two new essays, written in early 2002: “Democracy: Who’s She When She’s at Home,” and “War Talk: Summer Games with Nuclear Bombs.” Power Politics. South End Press, 2002. “The Ladies Have Feelings, So … Shall We Leave It to the Experts?,” “Power Politics: The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin,” “On Citizens’ Rights to Express Dissent,” “The Algebra of Infi nite Justice,” and “War is Peace.” The Cost of Living. Flamingo, 1999. “The Greater Common Good” and “The End of Imagination.” Et al. 13 December—A Reader: The Strange Case Of The Attack On The Indian Parliament. Penguin India, 2006.

Collections of interviews: The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. Penguin, 2008. The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. South End Press, 2004.

Articles, speeches and others: “Taslima Nasrin & ‘Free Speech’” Z Net. February 26, 2008. “Listening to Grasshoppers” Outlook India. February 04, 2008 and Z Net. January 27, 2008. “Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy: Buy One, Get One Free” Z Net. October 23, 2007; Outlook India. May 26, 2003; Z Net. May 19, 2003 and Common Dreams NewsCenter. May 13, 2003. “Palestinian / Israeli Confl ict” Z Net. October 23, 2007. “Seattle Town Hall” Z Video. October 23, 2007. “World Tribunal on Iraq” Z Video. October 23, 2007. “George Bush Go Home” The Hindu. March 21, 2007. “Breaking the News” Z Net. December 20, 2006 and Outlook India. December 18, 2006. “And His Life Should Become Extinct: The Very Strange Story of the Attack on the Indian Parliament” Outlook India. October 30, 2006 and Z Net. October 29, 2006. “Scandal in the Palace” Outlook India. October 1, 2007 and Z Net. September 26, 2007. “War Crimes and Lebanon” The Guardian. August 3, 2006.

Appendix 205 “India and the US” Z Net. May 25, 2006. “Baby Bush Go Home” Outlook India. March 04, 2006 and The Guardian. March 1, 2006. “A Fury Building up across India” Z Net. April 29, 2006. “Who Pulled the Trigger…Didn’t We All?” Outlook India. February 28, 2005. “Bush in India: Just Not Welcome” Z Net. February 28, 2006. “Peace?...” Outlook India. November 08, 2004 and Z Net. November 07, 2004. “Finding Justice with Arundhati Roy” Alternet. September 21, 2004. “Tide or Ivory Snow?” Outlook India. September 15, 2004 and Z Net. August 24, 2004. “The Road to Harsud” Outlook India. July 26, 2004 and Z Net. July 19, 2004. “Indian Elections and Resistance” Z Net. May 19, 2004. “Darkess Passed…” Outlook India. May 14, 2004 and Z Net. May 14, 2004. “How Deep Shall We Dig?” Outlook India. May 06, 2004 and Z Net. May 01, 2004. “Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?” Outlook India. January 24, 2004; Z Net. January 24, 2004 and The Hindu. January 18, 2004. “Women Against Wars, Wars Against Women” Z Video. January 2004. “The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky” Outlook India. September 02, 2003; Z Net. 01 September, 2003 and War Talk. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003. “When the Saints Go Marching out” Outlook India. September 02, 2003 and Z Net. September 02, 2003. “The Day of the Jackals” Outlook India. June 02, 2003 and Z Net. June 02, 2003. “War Talk” Z Net. May 24, 2003 and War Talk. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002. “The Failure of Non-Violence Bothers Me” Outlook India. September 19, 2003. “The Outline of the Beast” Z Net. April 08, 2003. “Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates” Outlook India. April 2, 2003; The Guardian. April 2, 2003 and Z Net. April 02, 2003. Foreword. For Reasons of State by Noam Chomsky. New York: New Press, 2003. “You have Blood on your Hands: Arundhati Roy to Kerala Chief Minister Antony” Frontline 20.6 (March 15–28–2003), countercurrents.org. March 05, 2003 and Outlook India (Magazine). March 05, 2003. “Confronting Empire” Outlook India. January 30, 2003, Z Net. January 28, 2003; www.ratical.org. January 27, 2003 and War Talk. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003. “Ahimsa” War Talk. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003; Outlook India. June 13, 2002 and Z Net. June 12, 2002. “Come September” War Talk. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003; Outlook India. September 30, 2002 and Z Net. September 29, 2002. “Democracy” War Talk. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003; Outlook India. May 06, 2002 and Z Net. April 28, 2002. “Print Excerpt / Lannan Speech” Z Net. September 29, 2002. “From Arundhati Roy to Digvijay Singh” Outlook India. June 17, 2002. “Summer Games with Nuclear Bombs” Outlook India. June 05, 2002. “Under the Nuclear Shadow” Outlook India. June 03, 2002. “To the Jaffri Family, An Apology” Outlook India. May 27, 2002. “I Stand by What I Have Said” Outlook India. May 07, 2002. “Statement by Arundhati Roy” www.narmada.org. March 21, 2002; Z Net. March 08, 2002 and www.hindu.org. March 7, 2002. “Contempt of Court?” Outlook India. January 21, 2002. “Shall We Leave It to the Experts?” Z Net. February 12, 2002 and Outlook India. January 14, 2002.

206

Appendix

“Power Politics: The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin” Power Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002;The Algebra of Infi nite Justice. London: Flamingo, 2002 and Outlook India. November 27, 2000. “The Algebra of Infi nite Justice” Power Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002; Outlook India. October 08, 2001 and The Guardian. September 29, 2001. “The End of Imagination” The Algebra of Infi nite Justice. London: Flamingo, 2002; The Cost of Living. London: Flamingo, 1999 and Outlook India. August 03, 1998. “War Is Peace” The Algebra of Infi nite Justice. London: Flamingo, 2002; Power Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002 and Outlook India. October 29, 2001. “Brutality Smeared in Peanut Butter. Why America Must Stop the War Now” guardian.co.uk. October 23, 2001. “Insult and Injury in Afghanistan” MSNBC (TV Channel). October 20, 2001 and www.911review.org. October 20, 2001. “Defence of Dissent” Outlook India. April 30, 2001. “A Venal, Dangerous Lie” Outlook India. May 08, 2000. “The Greater Common Good II” Outlook India. July 12, 1999. “The Greater Common Good” Frontline 16.11 (June 04, 1999); Outlook India. May 24, 1999 and The Cost of Living. London: Flamingo, 1999. “The Great Indian Rape-Trick I” www.sawnet.org. August 22, 1994. “The Great Indian Rape-Trick II” www.umiacs.umd.edu. September 3, 1994. “The Art of Spinning: How Uncle Sam Turns Indian Gold into Straw” www. tehelka.com. 1999.

Contributors

Jesse T. Airaudi, PhD, teaches in the English Department at Baylor University. His research interests seek connections among twentieth century/contemporary Western and Eastern European, as well as Indian subcontinental, writers. He has published articles on Czeslaw Milosz and T.S. Eliot in Twentieth Century Literature, Kundera and DeLillo in Neohelicon, and Pound and Wang Yangming in Analecta Husserliana, among others. Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas is a professor of English Literature at Rennes 2 University, France. She is head of the IndeA Research Centre (India and the Anglophone world), and works on colonial and postcolonial literature in India. She has published a book (Armand Colin, 2001) on Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, as well as a number of articles on A. Roy. Padmaja Challakere is an Adjunct professor of English at College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, MN. Her scholarship addresses modernism, cosmopolitanism, and urban space. She has written articles on Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Mukul Kesavan, and Pankaj Mishra. At present, she is working on two projects—one on Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith, and another on Kazuo Ishiguro. Cara Cilano is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She has published in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, and Kunapipi, among other publications. Currently, she is working on English- and Urdu-language fictions on the 1971 Pakistani Civil War. Susan Comfort is an associate professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches postcolonial literature and feminist theory. Her research interests include global feminism and environmental justice. She is currently the guest editor of a special

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Contributors

issue of the journal Works & Days, focusing on feminist responses to contemporary militarism. Anna Froula is an assistant professor of Film Studies at East Carolina University. She has published on media representations of female veterans of the Iraq War. Her current projects include an anthology on post-9/11 popular culture, an anthology on the work of Terry Gilliam, and a manuscript on popular representations of America’s women in uniform. Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English at the University of North Bengal. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Germany. He is published in journals such as the Oxford Literary Review, History and Theory, Nineteenth Century Prose, Rethinking History, and Angelaki. His books include (In)fusion Approach: Theory, Contestation, Limits (2006) and Edward Said, the Literary, Social and the Political World (Routledge, 2009). Gurleen Grewal, an associate professor in deparment of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa, specializes in feminist literary criticism and postcolonial studies. Her book, Circles of Sorrow/Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison (LSU Press, 1998) won the Toni Morrison Society Book Award. She will soon be publishing Oxbow Lakes, a work of creative nonfiction. Pranav Jani is an assistant professor of English at The Ohio State University in Columbus. His current project, Decentering Rushdie, draws out the multiple cosmopolitanisms of the postcolonial Indian English novel. His work has appeared in Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, Historical Materialism, and Callaloo. David Jefferess is an assistant professor of English and Cultural Studies at University of British Columbia Okanagan, in Kelowna, Canada. He has published widely on issues of development and human rights from a postcolonial perspective, and his book, Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation, was published in 2008. Joel Kuortti is an adjunct professor and lecturer at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. He works on postcolonial theory and Indian writing in English. His most recent books are the co-edited anthologies Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-colonial Studies in Transition (co-edited with Jopi Nyman; 2007) and Indian Feminist Short Fiction (co-edited with Rajeshwar Mittapalli; 2007). Antonia Navarro-Tejero, PhD, teaches at Universidad de Córdoba in Spain, and is Founder–President of the Spanish Association for India Studies.

Contributors 209 Her publications include Gender and Caste in the Anglophone-Indian Novels of Arundhati Roy and Githa Hariharan: Feminist Issues in Cross-Cultural Perspectives (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005) and Talks on Feminism: Indian Women Activists Speak for Themselves (Sarup & Sons, 2008). Sara Upstone is a lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University in England. Her research interests include postcolonial, black British, and British Asian literature, and she has published a number of articles in these areas. She is currently working on two projects—a study of postcolonial spatial politics, and a study of contemporary British Asian fiction.

Index

A Activist, xvi, 7, 72, 85–6, 114, 124, 195 adivasis, 73, 126–27, 129–30, 132–33, 139, 149, 157, 159, 163–67, 169–71, 175–76, 177n8 Adorno, Theodor, 57 Agamben, Georgio, 113 Ahmad, Aijaz, 47–8, 58–9, 62, 65–6 Aldama, Frederick, 55 Althusser, Louis, 53 Amin, Samir, 121, 134 Anand, Mulk Raj, 51 anarchism, 107–08 Arendt, Hannah, 185 Attebery, Brian, 5, 15, 18, 20 Auden, W. H., 22 Aurobindo, Sri, 154 authenticity, 14, 55

B Bachelard, Gaston, 73, 77 Barnabas, Simon, 75–6 Barsamian, David, 101 Baudrillard, Jean, 54 Beck, Ulrich, 3–4, 6, 17, 21, 22 Berger, John, 12, 22, 53, 152 Bhabha, Homi, xiv, 39, 41, 71 Bloom, Harold, 107 Booker Prize, xiv, 47, 81, 119, 162 Bourdieu, Pierre, 13, 189 Brown, Wendy, 27

C Capitalism, 96–7, 107, 118, 121, 124, 130, 132, 134–38, 140–41, 143, 146–47, 149–51, 175, 199 caste: 64–5, 73–4, 85, 96, 106, 118, 121, 124, 126, 140, 143–44,

146, 149, 174, 193; and dalits, 98, 124, 177n8, 197 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 56 Chaudhuri, Amit, 7 Cheah, Pheng, 28–9 Checkbook and the Cruise-Missile, The, 100–02, 119, 133, 182, 185, 188, 190, 191n5 Chomsky, Noam, xiii, 105–116, 147–48, 158, 160–61, 172 Chow, Rey, 166 climate change, 122, 153, 199 communalism, 118, 135 communism, 47–8, 50, 58, 60–1, 64, 96–8, 112, 197 corporations, 93, 101–02, 110, 114–15, 119, 125–26, 129, 131, 133, 135–36, 145–47, 149–50, 152, 160, 169, 177n3, 185, 197, 199, 202 cosmopolitanism, 6, 49 Cost of Living, The, 11, 13, 20–1, 52, 65, 97–9, 109, 119–21, 126–27, 130–32, 134–35, 138, 141n1, 157, 160, 162, 174

D Dams: 93, 96, 99, 116, 118, 121, 124, 138, 141, 141n3, 145, 172, 190n4; and the Narmada Valley Project, 65, 95, 98, 119, 126–135, 157, 162–167, 176, 197; and the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), 127–28, 149, 153–54, 158, 162–63, 168, 170, 174–75; and Medha Patkar, 149, 159, 162, 167–68, 171–72, 176; Drowned Out, 158, 160, 168–69, 171; DAM/AGE,

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141n1, 169, 194–195; in Gujarat, 126–28, 157, 160, 197 Davis, Mike, 122 Delourme, Chantal, 26 democracy, 106, 108–09, 112, 114, 135, 141, 144, 151, 160–63, 165–67, 180, 184–86, 191n7, 198–99 Derrida, Jacques: 26–30, 32, 34–5, 37, 72; Specters of Marx, 26–8 dialectical materialism, 84 discourse, 96–8, 103, 105, 121, 131, 140, 144, 151–53, 162–64, 166, 175, 187–88 dissent, 105, 107, 113, 116, 143, 151–53, 157–164, 166–170, 172–176, 182, 185–86, 190, 193, 199, 201, 203 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, 8, 14 Doel, Marcus, 72 Dollimore, Jonathan, 107 Douglas, Mary, xiv, 39–40, 42 Dylan, Bob, 88, 105

E Eagleton, Terry, 107 ecology: 121–24, 129, 131, 135–36, 138–40, 146, 149, 152, 158, 167; and feminism, 118, 120–21, 123, 125, 132, 135–36, 140; and Vandana Shiva, 123–24, 125, 130, 132–33, 136, 140, 146, 199 Ellison, Ralph, 54 “End of Imagination, The,” 56, 73, 93, 97 exoticism, 137, 171

F Fanon, Frantz, 175 feminism, 41, 121, 143–44, 146, 148, 193, 195–96 Fish, Stanley, 107 Foster, John Bellamy, 135 Foucault, Michel, 20, 53, 106, 113, 184 Friedman, Thomas, 147

G Gadgil, Madhav, 122–24, 130, 132 Gandhi, Mohandas, xv, 57, 83, 120, 124, 134, 141n2, 153–55, 171–75, 203 Ghosh, Ranjan: xiv, 6; (in)fusion approach, 6, 7, 12, 22

genocide, 97, 106, 140, 191n8, 196, 198, 202 Girard, Rene, 39–40, 42, 44 globalization: xiii, xiv, 6, 47–9, 65, 87, 97–9, 103, 108, 115, 118, 120–21, 131, 135, 138, 140, 143–50, 153, 158–59, 201; anti-, 114, 119, 151, 157; neoliberal, 119, 125-26, 130, 136 God of Small Things, The, xiii-v, 8, 11, 13–7, 19–21, 85, 87–8, 93, 95–7, 99, 104, 116, 144–45 Grass, Gunter, 13 Greater Common Good, The, 47, 52, 65, 93, 97, 121, 139, 157, 159, 162–167, 172, 176, 177n8 “Great Indian Rape-Trick, The”, 144–45, 193 Ground Beneath Her Feet, The, 4, 8–9, 17–8 Guantanamo Bay, 198 Guha, Ramachandra, 122–25, 130, 132,164–65, 169 Guillory, John, 106

H Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 53 Harraway, Donna, 148 Harvey, David, 107 Havel, Vaclav, 182, 187 hegemony, 14, 98, 110, 119, 136–37, 139, 161, 163 Hindutva, 145, 199–200 history, 12, 15, 34–5, 57, 73, 93–95, 98, 100–03, 106–07, 111, 138–39, 166 hooks, bell, 72 Huggan, Graham, 129 Hughes, Robert, 14 Husserl, Edmund, 3, 5, 22 hybridization, 8, 19, 40, 42

I Ideology, 12, 97–98, 118, 131, 134–35, 143, 158–59, 168, 173, 180 Imaginary Homelands, 5, 10–14, 18, 20 Indian Supreme Court, xv, 119, 129–30, 141n1, 161, 169, 186, 195, 198, 202 intellectual, xiv, xvi, 48, 94–5, 104, 106–08, 112, 114, 116, 147, 160, 184–90, 191n9, 202

Index International Monetary Fund (IMF), 101, 125, 146–47, 199 In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones, xiv, 80–89, 194–95

K Kafka, Franz, 112 Kamuf, Peggy, 28 Khilnani, Sunil, 123 Kincaid, Jamaica, 140 Krishen, Pradip, 81 Kristeva, Julia, 39, 41–2, 45, 74

L Laclau, Ernesto, 28–9, 35, 37 “Ladies Have Feelings . . . So Shall We Leave It to the Experts? (The),” 116, 137, 159, 168 Le Guin, Ursula, 18, 20, 22–3 Lippmann, Walter, 184 Lukacs, Georg, 107 Lyotard, J. F., 19

M Magical realism, 7, 9–10, 15, 49, 74 Mallick, Ross, 61 Mandela, Nelson, 120 Markandaya, Kamala, 51 Marxism, 25, 60, 64, 66 Matlou, Joel, 55 Midnight’s Children, 74, 77 Mies, Maria, 136, 140 Milosz, Czeslaw, 21 Mistress of Spices, 8 mongrelisation, 8, 15, 19 Moor’s Last Sigh, The, 14 Morrison, Toni, 9, 75 Muthanga, xv, 139, 197

N Namboodiripad, E. M., S. 47, 59, 85 negative dialectics, 50 Njabulo, Ndebele, 50, 55 nuclear: 97, 145, 198, 200; -test, 93, 119; -bomb, 99, 115, 118, 138, 150, 153, 157

O Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, An, 97, 100, 114–15, 119–20, 138–39, 143, 145, 147, 150, 173–74, 180, 185, 187, 190 Oumhani, Cecile, 75

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P Power: 9, 16, 96–8, 101–02, 107–08, 110–12, 118, 131, 133, 135, 143, 145, 147–48, 160–63, 169, 173–75, 180, 184, 186–87, 190, 202; hydroelectric -, 123, 126, 130, 149;—Politics, 29, 32, 73–4, 93, 95, 97, 103, 116, 119, 131, 137–38, 141, 143, 145–46, 148, 150, 152, 159, 167, 177n8, 181–82 Power Politics, 7, 97, 116, 119, 131, 137, 141, 143, 145, 148, 150, 152, 159, 167, 181-82 Pound, Ezra, 111 Prendergast, Christopher, 27 privatization, 93, 101, 119, 125–26, 136–38, 140, 145, 150 Punter, David, 26

R Resistance, 129, 133, 136, 146–47, 153–54, 160, 167, 173–75, 199 Rushdie, Salman, xiv, 3–21, 74, 77, 168

S Said, Edward, xv, 8, 160, 164, 182, 186–87, 189 San Juan, E., xv Sen, Amartya, 134, 143, 148–49, 151 Spivak, Gayatri, xv, 55, 107, 113, 168 Stewart, Susan, 72 Sturgeon, Noel, 120 subaltern, 48, 50, 54–7

T Tallmadge, John, 7 terrorism: 97–8, 101, 106, 145, 153, 173, 198; and war on terror, 115, 118, 173; and 9/11, 114–15, 145, 198; and Come September speech, 103, 200 Tharoor, S., 150, 152 The Satanic Verses, 75 Thormann, Janet, 37 Tolkien, J. R. R., 10, 18 totemization, 12 Turner, Victor, 39

U United Nations, 166, 199

V Van Gennep, Arnold, 39

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Vanaik, Achin, 61, 125–26

W War: 95–7, 101, 106, 110, 122, 135, 138, 145, 147, 163, 166, 173, 176, 177n10, 191n8; and Vietnam, 111–12, 160; and Iraq, 97, 99, 105, 112, 115, 119; and Iran, 114, 185; and Afghanistan, 145, 157, 172, 177n3; and Gujarat, 196, 198, 200; and Kashmir, 198, 200; and War Talk, 119, 145, 153–54 Water: 93, 97, 101, 127, 129, 130–33, 136, 139, 149–50, 163, 197, 202; and World–Forum, 160,

170; Disputes Tribunal, 127, 132 Wilson, Kalpana, 48, 51, 62, 64–5 Wittgenstien, Ludwig, 107 World Bank (WB), 43, 95, 101, 103, 125, 127–28, 130, 135, 139, 146, 163, 167, 170–71, 182 World Social Forum, 119, 172 World Trade Organization (WTO), 101, 126, 145–46, 163, 177n5, 182, 199 Writer, 7, 85, 93–100, 103, 116, 157, 160, 168, 201

Z Zizek, Slavoj, 107