The Ministry of Utmost Happiness : An authentic, beautiful mess

It’s untidy. Like the India in which it is set. Characters, each of whom deserves a novel himself/ herself, drift in and out. All the causes worth fighting about, in this strange, beautiful country of ours, find their space - gender, caste, religion, class, Kashmir. All the major political events in the last three decades are there in some form or the other. Like I said before, it’s a complete unholy mess. Like watching the world in Krishna’s mouth.

It works, though. Because somehow, in spite of the overwhelming political backdrop, Arundhati Roy does what she does best. Makes you care about the small people - the boy Aftab who becomes a girl Anjum, my favourite character in the book; the IB officer Biplab Dasgupta, on the wrong side of the war in Kashmir; Gulrez, the old, simple Kashmiri, who is killed and paraded as a dreaded militant; Dayachand, aka Saddam Hussein, the lower caste boy who sees his father lynched by upper caste Hindus as he clears a dead cow’s carcass; Azad Bharathiya Guru, on permanent fast in Jantar Mantar; Maoist Revathy, raped and tortured, and yet writing to the world from her grave.

The small people stand tall amongst the ruins. They make the fight worth fighting. They are the redeemers, the salvation of a world gone horribly wrong. They make the book.

My least favourite character was Tilo - an amalgamation of Rahel and Ammu from GOST and Arundhati herself. It’s a rehashed character and feels like it. But she is the conduit to another beautiful character - Kashmir.

Yes, Kashmir is a character by itself. Roy has some exquisite passages describing its beauty amongst the rubble of a self-destructive war. It’s a long death spiral we cannot look away from - and it forms some of the most powerful parts of the book.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a great read. It is also an important one as it conflates some of our country’s biggest issues into fiction. Is it great fiction? Yes, the agenda could have been better framed. The pulpit could have been better disguised. But then, would it have been an authentic Arundhati Roy? And can anyone ask for anything more than an authentic Arundhati Roy - conscience-keeper, rebel, wordsmith, a god of small things?

In Search Of Guiding Principles

The Arundhati Roy article ‘Walking with the Comrades’ in Outlook and the subsequent rants against and for it online make for interesting reading. Roy goes into Dandakaranya as the personal guest of the Maoists and comes back with what is ostensibly an inside view of the rebels who constitute according to Manmohan Singh, ‘the gravest internal security threat’ to India. What it of course turns out to be is a nice piece of writing that is unabashedly one-sided in its view – definitely not good journalism by any stretch of the imagination. We know Arundhati Roy believes the country needs a revolution and here was an opportunity to show and tell the world the romance of the on-the-run, gun-toting, Che-like revolutionary. There is no questioning of the Maoist approach (terrifying in my view), no thinking through if Gandhian ways wouldn’t be better for the tribals and for the world at large. If I was not such a fan of Roy’s writing, I would have not bothered to go beyond the first page of the 10 page article, rubbishing it as leftist propaganda.

But this is not a critique of the article. Reading it gave me pause. It was obvious which way Roy’s sympathies lay. She has in the past been critical of Indian democracy, the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate greed. She sees herself, to paraphrase her brilliant and only piece of fiction, as the god of small things – fighting for the little, unknown, defenseless people, against powerful governments and big companies. Vedanta and Chidambaram are evil; out to strip and cheat the tribals of everything they value. Just as America is an imperialistic power out to establish its hegemony in the world. And there are no two ways about it.

What does it take for someone to completely believe? In a political theory or an economic one, in god, in an after-life, in the supremacy of a race or gender. To believe that something is absolutely right and the opposite is plain wrong. Like Arundhati Roy and her anti-big dam stance…or Gandhi and his non-violence…or Bush and his war on terror…or my cousin and his ‘the free market is the answer to everything’ theory…

I think that to truly believe in something, you need to be blind to a lot else. To believe in the Maoists, you need to be blind to the historical inhumanity that political theory has engendered in the twentieth century (and possibly in Dandakaranya itself, among the children forced to become soldiers). To believe in capitalism and Adam Smith, you need to be blind to its consequences on Roy’s ‘small things’. To believe in god, you need to blind yourself to everything that disproves its existence (Dawkins excellent book, for example). To believe in the absolute rightness and strength of non-violence, you need to be blind to the existence of pure evil (wonder if satyagraha could have been a weapon against Hitler).

Because there will always be individual circumstances that can put paid to belief. Is America’s free market system conducive to India’s growth challenges? Can Dawkin’s certainty about the non-existence of god explain the solace religion can bring to desperation?

I struggle with forming strong points of view – about religion, politics, economics, even about people. And I am sometimes repulsed by others who form them easily and with such certitude. There are some personal absolutes I can live by – truth and honesty, positivity and hope, an equal world for all, compassion, an absence of hatred, a respect for life, any life. But beyond that, what could be the absolutes? Theories – political, economic, social, religious – are just thought through opinions. Not a one-size fits all answer, but frameworks which will need to be moulded to individual circumstances.

If there is one belief I think the world would be better off living with, it is this: an acknowledgement that there could be different ways to reach the same goal, and that yours is a choice you make without ever being blinded to the others on the table; that while you give your all to that choice, there is always a recognition that a course correction or a modification might be required, that your choice might prove to be the wrong one and that you should learn as you go along. And along the way, the only absolutes you adhere to are a commitment to humanity and human rights, a hatred of any kind of hatred, and a lack of cynicism.

Is it too middle-of-the-road to be interesting? Is the lack of sharp edges smacking too much of compromise? Maybe. But do I believe the world will be a better place without the kind of polarization and uncompromising stances taken today? I do. Strongly and firmly. The Arundhati Roys have a place in this world. They paint one side of the picture. An extremely important side; yet it is but one side. There has to be a recognition of the other – a choice of democracy and peaceful resistance; of activism within the boundaries of law. It is a choice we made as a nation 60 odd years back. And we keep at it, while hearing and taking into account what Roy is saying…acknowledging that there are a lot of things that need to be corrected, understanding that what we call progress might not translate well to the people most affected, that a few cannot be sacrificed for the good of the many. There are always two sides to a story.

The Shape of the Beast

Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things had a profound impact on me. I found it one of the most un-self-conscious pieces of writing I have ever read. It seemed like an unbroken rampant stream, almost torrent, of words flowing from the writer’s mind to paper. It remains to date one of my most referential books when it comes to writing style.

A lot of water has flown under the bridge since then, of course. Arundhati Roy has not written another piece of fiction. Instead she has been in the news for her political views expressed in a series of essays and speeches. It has drawn huge criticism as well as approbation, more so because she brings her own special brand of unbridled passion to her political writing. Passion is scary to a lot of people, especially to academics and political columnists who pride themselves on objectivity and detachment (witness Ramachandra Guha’s ridiculous indictment of her in his article in The Hindu).

Arundhati Roy is not detached. She is not impartial. She writes with an agenda, a purpose. As in her novel, she sees herself on the side of the underdog, the marginalized and the dispossessed. She is one of the most recognized and vocal supporters of the NBA and a vociferous critic of big dams, globalization, Narendra Modi and what she terms the resurgence of ‘empire’ in the world. For an average middle-class Indian, even a relatively liberal one, who has prospered with the opening up of the economy, her views can seem extreme, anarchic and extremely uncomfortable.

The Shadow of the Beast is a compilation of interviews she gave to various journalists between 2001 and 2008. In them she runs the gamut of her activist views - the nature of democracy and justice in India, the form resistance movements are taking, the havoc globalization and big dams wreak and the character of corporate power. Her language is as mesmerizing as ever – I can never turn away from her prose, however uncomfortable her views make me feel or however much I want to disagree with them.
On the charge that her writing style is hyperbolic and takes away from the reasoned argument she is trying to create, she says delightfully, “But I insist on the right to be emotional, to be sentimental, to be passionate. If displacement, dispossession, killing and injustice…does not enrage us, what will?...The whole framework of reason versus passion is ridiculous, because often passion is based on reason…They’re not two different things. I feel it is very important to defend that. To defend the space for feelings, for emotions, for passion…I have feelings about the things I write about – and I am going to express them.” I find it heady stuff, this zealousness that comes from the absolute certainty of the need to fight injustice.

Yet the true power of her writing comes from, not so much her ardour, as much from the rigour of her intellect. She is not a flake – her arguments sound reasoned and whether she is talking about statistics and reports on displacement due to big dams or the Enron deal with the Maharashtra Government or the dubious mining contracts in Orissa or the army presence in Kashmir, Roy is lucid, rational and consistent. Her distrust of ‘experts’ and ‘specialists’ means she has had to develop the knack of simplifying complex issues for the layman.

Yet her ability to provoke can be at times frightening. Her view that Indian democracy is not all that it is made out to be and that most times it is a sham, her contempt of judicial activism, her ambiguity about the use of violence in resistance movements and her absolute rejection of nationalist patriotism – these are some of the most incendiary of her opinions and have the effect of polarizing opinion about her. But that is her – there can be no Arundhati Roy lite.

There are parts that are re-assuring however. She is as critical of the left as she is of the mainstream political parties. She refuses to be pigeon-holed into any ‘ism’ – “Pristine ideological battles are really more frightening”, she says. There are no absolute answers in her world - “I think we are all just messing our way through this life. People, ideologues who believe in a kind of redemption, a perfect and ultimate society are terrifying….But then, on the other hand, we have the placid acceptance of karma which certainly suits the privileged classes and castes very well. Some of us oscillate in the space between these two ugly juggernauts trying to at least occasionally locate some pinpoints of life.”

For her the keystone of an alternative world “would be that nothing can justify the violation of the fundamental rights of the citizens. That comes first. 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.” That’s a simple straightforward ideology to live by, one that I can live with.

She purports to fear nationalism at any level, yet her vision of India is at once magical and inspiring. She says, “In India, we are fighting to retain a wildness that we have…There is just a space for the unpredictable here, which is life as it should be. It’s not always that the unpredictable is wonderful – most of the time it isn’t…The point is that we have to rescue democracy by being troublesome, by asking questions, by making a noise…(we) are more anarchic…we are a troublesome people, a troublesome constituency…”

Keep being troublesome Ms. Roy. You enrich the debate about how we need to develop as a nation, as a planet. And with your magical way with words, you bring the argument to people who wouldn’t otherwise give a damn, with or without the Ramachandra Guhas of the world. More power to you.