The following is taken from the introduction to Arundhati Roy’s Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction., which was published earlier this month by Haymarket Books.
While we were discussing the title of my latest book, my publisher in the United Kingdom, Simon Prosser, asked me what I thought of when I thought of Azadi. I surprised myself by answering, without a moment’s hesitation, “A novel.” Because a novel gives a writer the freedom to be as complicated as she wants—to move through worlds, languages, and time, through societies, communities, and politics. A novel can be endlessly complicated, layered, but that is not the same as being loose, baggy, or random. A novel, to me, is freedom with responsibility. Real, unfettered azadi—freedom. Some of the essays in Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. were written through the eyes of a novelist and the universe of her novels. Some of them are about how fiction joins the world and becomes the world. All were written between 2018 and 2020, two years that in India have felt like two hundred. In this time, as the coronavirus pandemic burns through us, our world is passing through a portal. We have journeyed to a place from which it looks unlikely that we can return, at least not without some kind of serious rupture with the past—social, political, economic, and ideological.
Coronavirus has brought with it another, more terrible understanding of azadi. The Free Virus that has made nonsense of international borders, incarcerated whole populations, and brought the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could. It casts a different light on the lives we have lived so far. It forces us to question the values we have built modern societies on—what we have chosen to worship and what to cast aside. As we pass through this portal into another kind of world, we will have to ask ourselves what we want to take with us and what we will leave behind. We may not always have a choice—but not thinking about it will not be an option. And in order to think about it, we need an even deeper understanding of the world gone by, of the devastation we have caused to our planet and the deep injustice between fellow human beings that we have come to accept. Hopefully, some of these essays, written before the pandemic came upon us, will go some small way toward helping us negotiate the rupture. Or, if nothing else, a moment in history that was recorded by a writer, like a metaphorical runway before the aircraft we’re all in took off for an unknown destination. A matter of academic interest for future historians.
The first essay in Azadi is the W. G. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation, which I delivered in the British Library in London in June 2018. Much of it is about how the messy partitioning of the language we knew as Hindustani into two separate languages with two separate scripts—now sadly and somewhat arbitrarily called Hindi and Urdu (in which erroneously Hindi is associated with Hindus and Urdu with Muslims)—presaged the current project of Hindu nationalism by more than a century.
Many of us hoped that 2018 would be the last year of the reign of Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party. As the 2019 general election approached, polls showed Modi and his party’s popularity dropping dramatically. We knew this was a dangerous moment. Many of us anticipated a false-flag attack or even a war that would be sure to change the mood of the country. One of the essays—“Election Season in a Dangerous Democracy”—is, among other things, about this fear. We held our collective breath. In February 2019, weeks before the general election, the attack came. A suicide bomber blew himself up in Kashmir, killing forty security personnel. False flag or not, the timing was perfect. Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party swept back to power.
And now, only a year into his second term, through a series of horrifying moves, Modi has changed India beyond recognition. The infrastructure of fascism is staring us in the face, the pandemic is speeding up that process in unimaginable ways, and yet we hesitate to call it by its name.
I started to write this while U.S. president Donald Trump and his family were on an official visit to India in the last week of February 2020. So it, too, has had to pass through the rupture, the pandemic portal. The first case of coronavirus in India had been reported on January 30. Nobody, least of all the government, paid any attention. It had been more than two hundred days since the state of Jammu and Kashmir had been stripped of its special status and placed under an information siege, and more than two months since a new anti-Muslim, unconstitutional citizenship law had brought millions of protesters onto the streets of India. In a public speech to a crowd wearing Modi and Trump masks, Donald Trump informed Indians that they play cricket, celebrate Diwali, and make Bollywood films. We were grateful to learn that about ourselves. Between the lines he sold us MH-60 helicopters worth three billion dollars. Rarely has India publicly humiliated herself thus.
Not far from the Grand Presidential Suite of the Delhi hotel where Trump spent the night, and Hyderabad House, where he held trade talks with Modi, Delhi was burning. Armed Hindu vigilante mobs in northeast Delhi, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in working-class neighborhoods. Violence had been in the air for a while, with politicians belonging to the ruling party delivering open threats to Muslim women conducting peaceful sit-in protests against the new citizenship law. When the attack began, police were seen either standing aside or backing up the mob. Muslims fought back. Houses, shops, vehicles were burned. Many, including a policeman, were killed. Many more were hospitalized with gunshot wounds. Horrifying videos flew around the internet. In one of them, grievously wounded young Muslim men, laid out on the street, some piled against each other by uniformed policemen, are being forced to sing the National Anthem. (Subsequently one of them, Faizan, died from having a policeman’s baton pushed down his throat.)
Trump made no comment on the horror swirling around him. Instead he conferred on Narendra Modi, the most divisive, hateful political figure in modern India, the title “Father of the Nation.” Until recently, this was Gandhi’s title. I am no fan of Gandhi, but surely, even he did not deserve this.
After Trump left, the violence went on for days. More than fifty people lost their lives. About three hundred were admitted into hospital with grievous wounds. Thousands of people moved into refugee camps. In Parliament, the home minister praised himself and the police. Members of the ruling party gave speeches to their smirking supporters in which they more or less blamed Muslims for provoking the violence, for attacking themselves, burning their own shops and homes, and throwing their own bodies into the open sewage canals that crisscross their neighborhood. Every effort was made by the ruling party, its social media trolls, and the electronic media it controls to portray the violence as a Hindu–Muslim “riot.” It was not a riot. It was an attempted pogrom against Muslims, led by an armed, fascist mob.
And while the dead bodies were still surfacing in the filth, Indian government officials held their first meeting about the virus. When Modi announced the nationwide lockdown on March 24, India spilled out her terrible secrets for all the world to see.
What lies ahead?
Reimagining the world. Only that.
Arundhati Roy studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. A collection of her essays from the past twenty years, My Seditious Heart, was recently published by Haymarket Books.
In her Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, published here, Arundhati Roy asks what it means to be a writer in a world that is rapidly hardening
I am truly honored to have been invited by PEN America to deliver this year’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture. What better time than this to think together about a place for literature, at this moment when an era that we think we understand – at least vaguely, if not well – is coming to a close.
As the ice caps melt, as oceans heat up, and water tables plunge, as we rip through the delicate web of interdependence that sustains life on earth, as our formidable intelligence leads us to breach the boundaries between humans and machines, and our even more formidable hubris undermines our ability to connect the survival of our planet to our survival as a species, as we replace art with algorithms and stare into a future in which most human beings may not be needed to participate in (or be remunerated for) economic activity – at just such a time we have the steady hands of white supremacists in the White House, new imperialists in China, neo-Nazis once again massing on the streets of Europe, Hindu nationalists in India, and a host of butcher-princes and lesser dictators in other countries to guide us into the Unknown.
While many of us dreamt that “Another world is possible”, these folks were dreaming that too. And it is their dream – our nightmare – that is perilously close to being realized.
Capitalism’s gratuitous wars and sanctioned greed have jeopardized the planet and filled it with refugees. Much of the blame for this rests squarely on the shoulders of the government of the United States. Seventeen years after invading Afghanistan, after bombing it into the ‘stone age’ with the sole aim of toppling the Taliban, the US government is back in talks with the very same Taliban. In the interim it has destroyed Iraq, Libya and Syria. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives to war and sanctions, a whole region has descended into chaos, ancient cities—pounded into dust. Amidst the desolation and the rubble, a monstrosity called Daesh (Isis) has been spawned. It has spread across the world, indiscriminately murdering ordinary people who had absolutely nothing to do with America’s wars. Over these last few years, given the wars it has waged, and the international treaties it has arbitrarily reneged on, the US government perfectly fits its own definition of a rogue state. And now, resorting to the same old scare tactics, the same tired falsehoods and the same old fake news about nuclear weapons, it is gearing up to bomb Iran. That will be the biggest mistake it has ever made.
So, as we lurch into the future, in this blitzkrieg of idiocy, Facebook “likes,” fascist marches, fake-news coups, and what looks like a race toward extinction—what is literature’s place? What counts as literature? Who decides? Obviously, there is no single, edifying answer to these questions. So, if you will forgive me, I’m going to talk about my own experience of being a writer during these times—of grappling with the question of how to be a writer during these times, in particular in a country like India, a country that lives in several centuries simultaneously.
A few years ago, I was in a railway station, reading the papers while I waited for my train. On an inside page, I spotted a small news report about two men who had been arrested and charged with being couriers for the banned, underground Communist Party of India (Maoist). Among the “items” recovered from the men, the report said, were “some books by Arundhati Roy.” Not long after that, I met a college lecturer who spent much of her time organizing legal defence for jailed activists, many of them young students and villagers in prison for “anti-national activities”. For the most part this meant protesting corporate mining and infrastructure projects that were displacing tens of thousands from their lands and homes. She told me that in several of the prisoners’ “confessions” – usually extracted under coercion – my writing often merited a reference as a factor that led them down what the police call “the wrong path.”
“They’re laying a trail – building a case against you,” she said.
‘The place for literature is built by writers and readers.’ Photograph: Mayank Austen Soofi
The books in question were not my novels (at that point I had written only one – The God of Small Things). These were books of nonfiction – although in a sense they were stories, too, different kinds of stories, but stories nevertheless. Stories about the massive corporate attack on forests, rivers, crops, seeds, on land, on farmers, labour laws, on policy making itself. And yes, on the post 9/11 US and Nato attacks on country after country. Most were stories about people who have fought against these attacks – specific stories, about specific rivers, specific mountains, specific corporations, specific peoples’ movements, all of them being specifically crushed in specific ways. These were the real climate warriors, local people with a global message, who had understood the crisis before it was recognized as one. And yet, they were consistently portrayed as villains—the anti-national impediments to progress and development. The former Prime Minister of India, a free-market evangelist, called the guerrillas, mostly indigenous people, adivasis, fighting corporate mining projects in the forests of central India the “Single Largest Internal Security Challenge”. A war called “Operation Green Hunt” was declared on them. The forests were flooded with soldiers whose enemies were the poorest people in the world. It’s been no different elsewhere – in Africa, Australia, Latin America.
And now, irony of ironies, a consensus is building that climate change is the world’s single largest security challenge. Increasingly the vocabulary around it is being militarized. And no doubt very soon its victims will become the ‘enemies’ in the new war without end. Calls for a climate ‘emergency’, although well meaning, could hasten the process that has already begun. The pressure is already on to move the debate from the UNFCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) to the United Nations Security Council, in other words, to exclude most of the world and place decision making straight back into the den of the same old suspects. Once again, the Global North, the creators of the problem, will see to it that they profit from the solution that they propose. A solution whose genius will, no doubt, lie deep in the heart of the ‘Market’ and involve more selling and buying, more consuming, and more profiteering by fewer and fewer people. In other words, more capitalism.
When the essays were first published (first in mass-circulation magazines, then on the Internet, and finally as books), they were viewed with baleful suspicion, at least in some quarters, often by those who didn’t necessarily even disagree with the politics. The writing sat at an angle to what is conventionally thought of as literature. Balefulness was an understandable reaction, particularly among the taxonomy-inclined—because they couldn’t decide exactly what this was—pamphlet or polemic, academic or journalistic writing, travelogue, or just plain literary adventurism? To some, it simply did not count as writing: “Oh, why have you stopped writing? We’re waiting for your next book.” Others imagined that I was just a pen for hire. All manner of offers came my way: “Darling I loved that piece you wrote on the dams, could you do one for me on child abuse?” (This actually happened.) I was sternly lectured, (mostly by upper-caste men) about how to write, the subjects I should write about, and the tone I should take.
But in other places, let’s call them places off the highway, the essays were quickly translated into other Indian languages, printed as pamphlets, distributed for free in forests and river valleys, in villages that were under attack, on university campuses where students were fed up of being lied to. Because these readers, out there on the frontlines, already being singed by the spreading fire, had an entirely different idea of what literature is or should be.
I mention this because it taught me that the place for literature is built by writers and readers. It’s a fragile place in some ways, but an indestructible one. When its broken, we rebuild it. Because we need shelter. I very much like the idea of literature that is needed. Literature that provides shelter. Shelter of all kinds.
Over time, an unspoken compromise was arrived at. I began to be called a “writer-activist.” Implicit in this categorization was that the fiction was not political and the essays were not literary.
I remember sitting in a lecture hall in a college in Hyderabad in front of an audience of five or six hundred students. On my left, chairing the event, was the vice-chancellor of the university. On my right, a professor of poetry. The vice-chancellor whispered in my ear, “You shouldn’t spend any more time on fiction. Your political writing is the thing to concentrate on.” The professor of poetry whispered, “When will you get back to writing fiction? That is your true calling. This other stuff you do is just ephemeral.”
I have never felt that my fiction and nonfiction were warring factions battling for suzerainty. They aren’t the same certainly, but trying to pin down the difference between them is actually harder than I imagined. Fact and fiction are not converse. One is not necessarily truer than the other, more factual than the other, or more real than the other. Or even, in my case, more widely read than the other. All I can say is that I feel the difference in my body when I’m writing.
Sitting between the two professors, I enjoyed their contradictory advice. I sat there smiling, thinking of the first message I received from John Berger. It was a beautiful handwritten letter, from a writer who had been my hero for years: “Your fiction and nonfiction—they walk you around the world like your two legs.” That settled it for me.
Whatever the case that was being built against me was, it didn’t – or at least hasn’t yet – come to fruition. I’m still here, standing on my two writing legs, speaking to you. But my lecturer friend is in jail, charged with participating in anti-national activity. India’s prisons are packed tight with political prisoners—most of them accused of being either Maoist or Islamist terrorists. These terms have been defined so broadly that they have come to include almost anyone who disagrees with government policy. In the latest batch of pre-election arrests, teachers, lawyers, activists, and writers have been jailed, charged with plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Modi. The plot is so ludicrous that a six-year old could have improved on it. The fascists need to take some good fiction-writing courses.
Reporters Without Borders say that India is the fifth most dangerous place for journalists in the world, ranked just above Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Mexico. Here I must pause to thank PEN for the work it does to protect writers and journalists who are have been imprisoned, prosecuted, censored and worse. From one day to the next, it could be any one of us that is in the line of fire. To know that there is an organization looking out for us is a consolation.
In India, those who’ve been jailed are the lucky ones. The less fortunate are dead. Gauri Lankesh, Narendra Dabholkar, MM Kalburgi, and Govind Pansare, all critics of the Hindu far right, have been assassinated. Theirs were the high-profile killings. Scores of other activists working with the Right to Information Act to uncover massive corruption scandals have been killed or found dead in suspicious circumstances. Over the last five years, India has distinguished itself as a lynching nation. Muslims and Dalits have been publicly flogged and beaten to death by vigilante Hindu mobs in broad daylight, and the “lynch videos” then gleefully uploaded to YouTube. The violence is flagrant, open and certainly not spontaneous. Although the violence against Muslims is not new and the violence against Dalits is ancient – these lynchings have a clear ideological underpinning.
The lynchers know that they have protection in the highest places. Protection not just from the government and the prime minister, but from the organization that controls them both—the far-right, proto-fascist Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), the most secretive and most powerful organization in India. It was founded in 1925, its founding ideologues were greatly influenced by European fascism. They openly praised Hitler and Mussolini, and compared Indian Muslims to the “Jews of Germany”. It has worked ceaselessly for 95 years toward having India formally declared a Hindu Nation. Its declared enemies are Muslims, Christians, and Communists.
The RSS runs a shadow government that functions through tens of thousands of shakhas (branches) and other ideologically affiliated organizations with different names – some of them astonishingly violent – spread across the country. Traditionally controlled by a sect of west coast Brahmins. known as Chitpavan Brahmins, the RSS today has white supremacists and racists from the United States and Europe circling around it, writing in praise of Hinduism’s age-old practice of caste. It’s what is more accurately known as Brahminism – a brutal system of social hierarchy they envy for its elaborate, institutionalized cruelty, which has survived more or less intact from ancient times. Brahminism also has admirers in the most unexpected places. One of them, you will be saddened to know, was Mohandas Gandhi – who considered caste to be the “genius” of Hindu society. I have written at length about Gandhi’s attitude toward caste and race in a book called The Doctor and The Saint, so I will not dwell on it now.
Let me just leave you with this: at a speech at a missionary conference in Madras in 1916, he said: “The vast organisation of caste answered not only the religious wants of the community, but it answered too its political needs. The villagers managed their internal affairs through the caste system, and through it they dealt with any oppression from the ruling power or powers. It is not possible to deny the organising capability of a nation that was capable of producing the caste system its wonderful power of organisation.”
Today the RSS boasts of having a trained militia of six hundred thousand members who proudly call themselves swayam-sevaks (volunteers), whose numbers include the prime minister and most of his cabinet. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) functions as the parliamentary political department of the RSS. Ram Madhav, its secretary is a member of the RSS. By insisting on viewing the BJP as an independent entity, as an ordinary, right wing, conservative political party, by inadvertently or deliberately minimizing its organic connection to the RSS, many in the Indian and the international media, as well as many who claim to be secular and liberal, have eased its path to political power.
Modi’s mainstream political career was launched, coincidentally, (or maybe not) just weeks after 9/11, when, he was appointed as the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, although he was not an elected member of the Legislative Assembly. Within months of that appointment, under Modi’s watch, a pogrom against Muslims took place in Gujarat, in which two thousand people were killed in broad daylight. Within months he called elections and won. At a grand convention of businessmen and industrialists in Gujarat, CEOs of several of India’s major corporations openly endorsed him as their future candidate for prime minister. Fascism and capitalism exchanged marriage vows in a not-so-quiet ceremony and moved in together. After three terms as Gujarat’s chief minister, Modi was elected prime minister of India in 2014. He was given a hero’s welcome by the liberal commentariat and he has traveled the world embracing and being embraced by world leaders, including Barack Obama and Emmanuel Macron. And Donald Trump of course, but that is no surprise. None of them is ignorant about who Modi really is, but all of them have something to sell to this “market” of more than a billion people. Now after five years in office and a vicious communal campaign, he and his cohorts, are seeking re-election. The candidates include a saffron robed Sadhvi Pragya, who is standing trial for being part of a terrorist strike that killed six people and is currently out on bail.
In what marks a dangerous turn of events, newspapers reported a public speech by Maneka Gandhi, a union minister in Modi’s cabinet in which she said that villages would be graded according to which ones voted for the BJP in the greatest numbers and they would be rewarded or punished by the award or withholding of ‘development’ proportionate to their loyalty. She is by no means the only one speaking this language, by no means the only one who has openly suggested that the Party knows who has voted for it and who has not. And that retribution will follow. And by no means the first to hint that political parties have access to data from what is supposed to be a secret ballot—data they can use to their advantage in dangerous ways that completely undermine elections and democracy itself.
In the era of surveillance capitalism, a few people will know everything about us, and will use this information to control us.
India is fighting for her soul. Even if the BJP loses the elections, which, despite having more money than all the other political parties put together, despite its more or less complete control of the mainstream media, it well might—it will not mean that we are out of danger. The RSS is chameleon-like, and moves on a million legs. Capturing power with an absolute majority, as it did five years ago, put motors on those legs. But merely losing an election will not prevent it from continuing its long walk to hell. It can change colour when it has to, wear a mask of reason and inclusiveness when it needs to. It has proved its ability to function as an underground organization as well as an over ground one. It is a patient, hardworking beast that has burrowed its way into every institution in the country – courts, universities, media outlets, security forces, intelligence services.
If a new, non-BJP government is sworn in – most likely a fragile coalition – it is likely to be met by a ferocious onslaught of manufactured communal violence and false-flag attacks to which we have become accustomed. There will be cow carcases discovered on highways, beef found in temples and pigs thrown into mosques. When the country burns the far right will once again present themselves to us as the only ones capable of running a ‘hard-state’ and handling the problem. Will a polity that has been deeply polarised be able to see through these games? It’s hard to say.
Much of this has been the subject of my writing, fiction as well as nonfiction, for several years.
. . .
The God of Small Things, published in the summer of 1997, was the result of a search for a language and a form to describe the world I had grown up in, to myself and to people I loved, some of whom were entirely unfamiliar with Kerala. I had studied architecture, written screenplays, and now I wanted to write a novel. A novel that could only be a novel—not a novel that really wanted to be a film, or a manifesto, or sociological treatise of some kind. I was astonished when some critics described it as a work of magical realism—how could that be? The setting of the book—the old house on the hill in Ayemenem, my grandmother’s pickle factory that I grew up in, (I still have some of the jars and labels), the Meenachal river—all of it gritty reality to me, was exotic and magical to many western critics. Fair enough. But I reserve the right to think that way about New York and London.
Back home in Kerala, the reception was pretty unmagical. The Communist party of India (Marxist), which had ruled Kerala on and off since 1959, was upset with what it considered a critique of the party in The God of Small Things. I was quickly labeled anti-communist, a crying-talking-sleeping-walking Imperialist Plot. I had been critical, it is true, and the sharp end of my critique was that the Left, by which I mean the various communist parties in India, has been not just opaque to caste, but, more often than not, overtly casteist. The transgressive relationship in the novel between Ammu (a Syrian Christian woman) and Velutha (a Dalit man) was viewed with consternation. The consternation had as much to do with the novel’s politics of caste as it did with gender. The portrayal of one of the main characters, Comrade KNM Pillai’s relationship with his wife Kalyani, and of Ammu, a divorced woman who “combined the infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber”, “who loved by night the man who her children loved by day,” was not received with applause and hallelujahs. Five male lawyers got together and filed a criminal case against me, accusing me of obscenity and “corrupting public morality.”
There were factors outside of the novel that were swirling around too. My mother, Mary Roy, had won a case in the Supreme Court that struck down the Syrian Christian Inheritance Law, which gave a woman “one fourth of her father’s property or Rs. 5,000, [$70] whichever is less.” Women could now inherit an equal share. This caused a great deal of anger. There was a palpable sense that mother and daughter needed to be taught a lesson. By the time the case came up for its third or fourth hearing The God of Small Things had won the Booker prize. That divided public opinion. A local Malayali woman, winning a prestigious international literary prize was not something that could be easily dismissed—should she be shunned or embraced? I was present in court with my lawyer, who had told me in confidence that he thought that parts of my book were “quite obscene.” But, he said, according to the law, a work of art should be seen as a whole and since the whole book was not obscene, we stood a fighting chance. The judge took his seat and said, “Every time this case comes before me, I get chest pains.” He postponed the hearing. The judges who came after him did the same. Meanwhile people celebrated the nontransgressive aspects of the book – the language, the evocation of childhood. It’s still hard for many to look at the relationship between Ammu and Velutha without flinching a little. It took almost 10 years before the case was dismissed.
In May 1998, less than a year after the publication of The God of Small Things, for the first time in India’s history, a BJP-led coalition formed the government at the centre. The prime minister at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was a member of the RSS. Within weeks of taking office, he fulfilled a longstanding dream of the RSS by conducting a series of nuclear tests. Pakistan responded immediately with tests of its own. The nuclear tests were the beginning of the journey toward the crazed rhetoric of nationalism that has become a normal form of public speech in India today. I was taken aback by the orgy of celebration that greeted the nuclear tests—including from the most unexpected quarters. That was when I wrote my first essay, “The End of Imagination,” condemning the tests. I said that entering the nuclear race would colonize our imagination: “If it’s anti-Indian and anti-Hindu to have a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain,” I wrote, “then I secede. I hereby declare myself a mobile republic.”
I will leave you to imagine the reaction that followed.
“The End of Imagination” was the first of what would turn out to be 20 years of writing nonfiction essays. They were years during which India was changing at lightning speed. For each essay, I searched for a form, for language, for structure and narrative. Could I write as compellingly about irrigation as I could about love and loss and childhood? About the salinization of soil? About drainage? Dams? Crops? About structural adjustment and privatization? About the per unit cost of electricity? About things that affect ordinary peoples’ lives? Not as reportage, but as a form of storytelling? Was it possible to turn these topics into literature? Literature for everybody—including for people who couldn’t read and write, but who had taught me how to think, and could be read to?
I tried. And as the essays kept appearing, so did the five male lawyers (not the same ones, different ones, but they seemed to hunt in packs). And so did the criminal cases, mostly for contempt of court. One of them ended in a very short jail sentence, another is still pending. The debates were often acrimonious. Sometimes violent. But always important.
Almost every essay got me into enough trouble to make me promise myself that I wouldn’t write another. But inevitably, situations arose in which the effort of keeping quiet set up such a noise in my head, such an ache in my blood, that I succumbed, and wrote. Last year when my publishers suggested they be collected into a single volume, I was shocked to see that the collection, My Seditious Heart, is a thousand pages long.
After twenty years of writing, traveling into the heart of rebellions, meeting most extraordinary as well as exquisitely ordinary people, fiction returned to me. It became clear that only a novel would be able to contain the universe that was building in me, spinning up from the landscapes I had wandered through, and composing itself into a story-universe. I knew it would be unapologetically complicated, unapologetically political, and unapologetically intimate. I knew that if The God of Small Things was about home, about a family with a broken heart in its midst, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness would begin after the roof had blown off the home, and the broken heart had shattered and distributed its shards in war-torn valleys and city streets. It would be a novel, but the story-universe would refuse all forms of domestication and conventions about what a novel could and could not be. It would be like a great city in my part of the world in which the reader arrives as a new immigrant. A little frightened, a little intimidated, plenty excited. The only way to know it would be to walk through it, get lost, and learn to live in it. Learn to meet people, small and big. Learn to love the crowd. It would be a novel that would say what cannot otherwise be said. Particularly about Kashmir, where only fiction can be true because the truth cannot be told. In India, it is not possible to speak of Kashmir with any degree of honesty without risking bodily harm.
About the story of Kashmir and India and India and Kashmir, I can do no better than to quote James Baldwin: “And they would not believe me, precisely because they would know that what I said was true.” The story of Kashmir is not the sum of its human rights reports. It’s not only about massacres, torture, disappearance, and mass graves, or about victims and their oppressors. Some of the most terrifying things that happen in Kashmir would not necessarily qualify as human rights violations. For a writer, Kashmir holds great lessons about the human substance. About power, powerlessness, treachery, loyalty, love, humor, faith… What happens to people who live under a military occupation for decades? What are the negotiations that take place when the very air is seeded with terror? What happens to language?
One of the first things I began to do when I began to travel in Kashmir is to collate what appears in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness as “The Kashmiri-English Alphabet,” starting with the letter A:
C: Cross-border/Crossfire/camp/civilian/curfew/Crackdown/Cordon-and-Search/CRPF/ Checkpost/Counter-insurgency/Ceasefire/Counter-Intelligence/Catch and Kill/ Custodial Killing/Compensation/Cylinder (surrender)/Concertina wire/Collaborator
And so on….
Also: What happens to people who administer, digest, and justify the horror? What happens to people who allow it to go on and on—in their name? The narrative of Kashmir is a jigsaw puzzle whose jagged parts do not fit together. There is no final picture.
Strange people made their way onto my pages. Foremost among them, Biplab Dasgupta, an intelligence officer. I was unnerved when he arrived, speaking in the first person. I thought I was in his head, and realized later that perhaps he was in mine. What was chilling about him was not his villainy but his reasonableness, his intelligence, his wit, his self-deprecation, his vulnerability.
Even still, none of Dasgupta’s sophistication and erudite political analysis can see what the building contractor, Mr DD Gupta, one of the minor characters in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness easily can. Mr Gupta has returned to India from Iraq, after several years of earning his living building blast walls – pictures of which he proudly stores in his mobile phone. Sickened by what he has seen and lived through in Iraq, he looks around at the place he used to think of as home. His considered assessment of what is happening in his own country is that all of it in the long run will only end up creating a market for blast walls.
Novels can bring their authors to the brink of madness. Novels can shelter their authors, too.
As a writer, I protected the characters in The God of Small Things, because they were vulnerable. Many of the characters in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness are, for the most part, even more vulnerable. But they protect me. Especially Anjum, who was born as Aftab, who ends up as the proprietor and Manager of the Jannat Guest House, located in a derelict Muslim graveyard just outside the walls of Old Delhi. Anjum softens the borders between men and women, between animals and humans and between life and death. I go to her when I need shelter from the tyranny of hard borders in this increasingly hardening world.
By deploying the IAF, Narendra Modi has ensured that Kashmir is conclusively internationalised, writes Arundhati Roy, the author of The God of Small Things, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the forthcoming collection of essays, My Seditious Heart, on HuffPo. Read on:
With his reckless “pre-emptive” airstrike on Balakot in Pakistan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has inadvertently undone what previous Indian governments almost miraculously, succeeded in doing for decades. Since 1947 the Indian Government has bristled at any suggestion that the conflict in Kashmir could be resolved by international arbitration, insisting that it is an “internal matter.” By goading Pakistan into a counter-strike, and so making India and Pakistan the only two nuclear powers in history to have bombed each other, Modi has internationalised the Kashmir dispute. He has demonstrated to the world that Kashmir is potentially the most dangerous place on earth, the flash-point for nuclear war. Every person, country, and organisation that worries about the prospect of nuclear war has the right to intervene and do everything in its power to prevent it.
On February 14 2019, a convoy of 2,500 paramilitary soldiers was attacked in Pulwama (Kashmir) by Adil Ahmad Dar, a 20-year-old Kashmiri suicide-bomber who, it has been declared, belonged to the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad. The attack that killed at least 40 men was yet another hideous chapter in the unfolding tragedy of Kashmir. Since 1990, more than seventy thousand people have been killed in the conflict, thousands have “disappeared”, tens of thousands have been tortured and hundreds of young people maimed and blinded by pellet guns. The death toll over the last twelve months has been the highest since 2009. Associated Press reports that almost 570 people have lost their lives, 260 of them militants, 160 civilians and 150 Indian armed personnel who died in the line of duty.
Depending on the lens through which this conflict is viewed, the rebel combatants are called “terrorists”, “militants”, “freedom fighters” or “mujahids”. Most Kashmiris call them ‘mujahids’ and when they are killed, hundreds of thousands of people—whether they agree with their methods or not—turn out for their funerals, to mourn for them and bid them farewell. Indeed, most of the civilians who were killed this past year, are those who put their bodies in the way of harm to allow militants cornered by soldiers to escape.
In this long-drawn-out, blood-drenched saga, the Pulwama bombing is the deadliest, most gruesome attack of all. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of young men in the Kashmir Valley like Adil Ahmed Dar who have been born into war, who have seen such horror that they have become inured to fear and are willing to sacrifice their lives for freedom. Any day there could be another attack, worse, or less-worse than the Pulwama attack. Is the Government of India willing to allow the actions of these young men to control the fate of this country and the whole subcontinent? By reacting in the empty, theatrical way that he did, this is exactly what Narendra Modi has done. He has actually bestowed upon them the power to direct our future. The young Pulwama bomber could not have asked for more.
Most Kashmiris call these rebel combatants ‘mujahids’ and when they are killed, hundreds of thousands
of people—whether they agree with their methods or not—turn out for their funerals, to mourn for them
and bid them farewell. TAUSEEF MUSTAFA VIA GETTY IMAGES
Indians who valorise their own struggle for Independence from British Rule and virtually worship those who led it are for the most part strangely opaque to Kashmiris who are fighting for the same thing. The armed struggle in Kashmir against what people think of as “Indian Rule” is almost thirty years old. That Pakistan has (at one time officially and now mostly through non-government actors) supported the struggle with arms, men and logistics is hardly a secret. Nor is it a secret that no militant can operate in the war-zone that is Kashmir if they did not have the overt support of local people. Who in their right mind could imagine that this hellishly complicated, hellishly cruel war would be solved or even mitigated in any way by a one-off, hastily executed, theatrical “surgical-strike,” which turns out to have been not-so-surgical after all? A similar “strike” that took place after the 2016 attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri achieved little more than inspiring a Bollywood action film. The Balakot strikes in turn seem to have been inspired by the film. And now the media reports that Bollywood producers are already lining up to copyright “Balakot” as the name of their next film project. On the whole, it has to be said, this absurd waltz looks and smells more “pre-election” than “pre-emptive.”
For the Prime Minister of this country to press its formidable Airforce into performing dangerous theatrics is deeply disrespectful. And what an irony it is, that while this irresponsible nuclear brinkmanship is being played out in our subcontinent, the mighty United States of America is in talks with the Taliban forces whom it has not managed to defeat or dislodge even after 17 years of straight-out war.
The spiraling conflict in the subcontinent is certainly as deadly as it appears to be. But is it as straightforward?
Kashmir is the most densely militarized zone in the world, with an estimated half a million Indian soldiers posted there. In addition to the Intelligence Bureau, the Research and Analysis Wing and the National Intelligence Agency, the uniformed forces – the Army, the Border Security Force, the Central Reserve Police Force (and of course the Jammu and Kashmir Police) each does its own intelligence gathering. People live in terror of informers, double agents and triple agents who could be anybody from old school friends to family members. Under these circumstances, an attack on the scale of what happened in Pulwama is more than just shocking. As one pithy Twitter commentator put it, (she was referring to the increasingly popular Hindu vigilante practice in North India, of tracking down and lynching Muslims accused of killing cows), how is it that the BJP “can trace 3 kg of beef but cannot trace 350 kg of RDX”?
Who knows?
After the attack, the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir called it the result of “an intelligence failure”. A few intrepid media portals reported the fact that the Jammu and Kashmir Police had indeed raised an urgent alert about a possible attack. Nobody in the media seems overly worried about why the warning was ignored, and where, in the chain of command, the breach took place.
Tragic as it was, the Pulwama attack came as a perfect political opportunity for Narendra Modi to do what he does best—grandstand. Many of us who had predicted months ago that a BJP that was losing its political footing would call down a fireball from the skies just before elections, watched with horror as our prediction came true. And we watched the Ruling Party adroitly parley the Pulwama tragedy into petty, political advantage.
In the immediate aftermath of the Pulwama Attack, as enraged mobs attacked Kashmiris who worked and studied in mainland India, Modi kept dead quiet and reacted only after the Supreme Court said it was the Government’s duty to protect them. But after the air strikes he was quick to appear on TV to take credit, sounding for all the world as though he had personally flown the planes and dropped the bombs. Immediately India’s roughly four hundred 24/7 news channels, most of them unapologetically partisan, set about amplifying this performance with their own personal “inputs”. Using old videos and fake facts, their screaming anchors masquerading as frontline commandos, orchestrated an orgy of crazed, triumphalist nationalism, in which they claimed the air strikes had destroyed a Jaish-e-Mohammad “terror factory” and killed more than three hundred “terrorists”. The next morning, even the most sober national newspapers followed suit with ridiculous, embarrassing headlines. The Indian Express said: ‘India Strikes Terror, Deep in Pakistan’. Meanwhile Reuters, which sent a journalist to the site in Pakistan where the bombs had actually fallen, reported only damage to trees and rocks and injuries sustained by one villager. Associated Press reported something similar. The New York Times said “Analysts and diplomats in New Delhi said the targets of the Indian airstrikes were unclear, as any terrorist groups operating along the border would have cleared out in recent days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India vowed retaliation over the Kashmir attack.”
The mainstream Indian media did not carry the Reuters report. So, for the bulk of India’s voting people who don’t read the New York Times, their Prime Minister—with his famous 56” chest—had dismantled terrorism forever.
For the moment at least, it looked as though Modi had completely out-maneuvered his political opponents, who were reduced to tweeting in praise of India’s brave pilots. Meanwhile he and his men were out electioneering. Doubters and dissenters were terrorized by Hindutva trolls, charged with being anti-national, or just debilitated by the fear of the on-call lynch mob that seems to lurk at every street corner in North India.
But things can change in a day. The sheen of false victory faded quickly after Pakistan struck back, shot down a fighter plane and captured a pilot of the Indian Air Force—Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman. Once again, the BJP’s see-sawing electoral prospects have begun to look distinctly less rosy.
Leaving aside the business of electoral politics and the question of who will win the next elections, Modi’s actions are unforgiveable. He has jeopardized the lives of more than a billion people and brought the war in Kashmir to the doorsteps of ordinary Indians. The madness on television, fed to people like an IV drip morning, noon and night, asks people to lay aside their woes, their joblessness, their hunger, the closing down of their small businesses, the looming threat of eviction from their homes, their demands that there be an enquiry into the mysterious deaths of judges, as well as into what looks like the biggest, most corrupt Defense deal in the history of India, their worries that if they are Muslim, Dalit or Christian they could be attacked or killed—and instead vote, in the name of national pride, for the very people that have brought about this devastation.
Leaving aside the business of electoral politics and the question of who will win the next elections, Modi’s actions are unforgiveable. He has jeopardized the lives of more than a billion people and brought the war in Kashmir to the doorsteps of ordinary Indians.
This government has wounded India’s soul so very deeply. It will take years for us to heal. For that process to even begin, we must vote to remove these dangerous, spectacle-hungry charlatans from office.
We cannot afford to have a Prime Minister who, on a whim has broken the back of the economy of a country of a billion people by declaring overnight, without consulting anybody that 80 percent of a country’s currency is no longer legal tender. Who in history has ever, done this? We cannot have a Prime Minister of a nuclear power who continues to shoot for a movie about himself in a National Park while a huge crisis befalls the country and then airily declares that he has left the decision of what to do next to the “Sena”— the Army. Which democratically elected leader in history, has ever done this?
Modi has to go. The quarrelsome, divided, unstable Coalition government that might come in his place is not a problem. It is the very essence of democracy. It will be far more intelligent and far less foolhardy.
There remains the matter of the captured Wing Commander. Whatever anybody’s opinion of him, and whatever Pakistan’s role has been in the Kashmir conflict, Imran Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan has acted with dignity and rectitude throughout this crisis. The Indian Government was right to demand that Varthaman be accorded all the rights that the Geneva Convention accords a Prisoner of War. It was right to demand that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) be given access to him while he was in Pakistan’s custody. Today Prime Minister Imran Khan has announced that, as a gesture of good will, the Wing Commander will be released.
Perhaps India can offer the same courtesy to its political prisoners in Kashmir and the rest of the country: protection of their rights under the Geneva Convention, and access to the ICRC?
Kashmir is the real theatre of unspeakable violence and moral corrosion that can spin us into violence and nuclear war at any moment. To prevent that from happening, the conflict in Kashmir has to be addressed and resolved.
The war that we are in the middle of, is not a war between India and Pakistan. It is a war that is being fought in Kashmir which expanded into the beginnings of yet another war between India and Pakistan. Kashmir is the real theatre of unspeakable violence and moral corrosion that can spin us into violence and nuclear war at any moment. To prevent that from happening, the conflict in Kashmir has to be addressed and resolved. That can only be done if Kashmiris are given a chance to freely and fearlessly tell the world what they are fighting for and what they really want.
Text of The W. G. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation by Arundhati Roy - 5 June 2018, The British Library, London.
At a book reading in Kolkata, about a week after my first novel, The God of Small Things was published, a member of the audience stood up and asked, in a tone that was distinctly hostile:
Has any writer ever written a masterpiece in an alien language? In a language other than his mother tongue?
I hadn’t claimed to have written a masterpiece (nor to be a “he”), but nevertheless I understood his anger toward a me, a writer who lived in India, wrote in English, and who had attracted an absurd amount of attention. My answer to his question made him even angrier. “Nabokov,” I said. And he stormed out of the hall.
The correct answer to that question today would of course be “algorithms.” Artificial Intelligence, we are told, can write masterpieces in any language and translate them into masterpieces in other languages. As the era that we know, and think we vaguely understand, comes to a close, perhaps we, even the most privileged among us, are just a group of redundant humans gathered here with an arcane interest in language generated by fellow redundants.
Only a few weeks after the mother tongue/masterpiece incident, I was on a live radio show in London. The other guest was an English historian who, in reply to a question from the interviewer, composed a paean to British imperialism. “Even you,” he said, turning to me imperiously,
The very fact that you write in English is a tribute to the British Empire.
Not being used to radio shows at the time, I stayed quiet for a while, as a well-behaved, recently civilized savage should. But then I sort of lost it, and said some extremely hurtful things. The historian was upset, and after the show told me that he had meant what he said as a compliment, because he loved my book. I asked him if he also felt that jazz, the blues, and all African-American writing and poetry were actually a tribute to slavery. And whether all of Latin American literature was a tribute to Spanish and Portuguese colonialism.
Notwithstanding my anger, on both occasions my responses were defensive reactions, not adequate answers. Because those incidents touched on a range of incendiary questions—colonialism, nationalism, authenticity, elitism, nativism, caste, and cultural identity—all jarring pressure points on the nervous system of any writer worth her salt. However, to reify language in the way both men had renders language speechless. When that happens, as it usually does in debates like these, what has actually been written ceases to matter. That was what I found so hard to countenance. And yet I know—I knew—that language is that most private and yet most public of things. The challenges thrown at me were fair and square. And obviously, since I’m still talking about them, I’m still thinking about them.
The night of that reading in Kolkata, city of my estranged father and of Kali, Mother Goddess with the long red tongue and many arms, I fell to wondering what my mother tongue actually was. What was—is—the politically correct, culturally apposite, and morally appropriate language in which I ought to think and write? It occurred to me that my mother was actually an alien, with fewer arms than Kali perhaps but many more tongues. English is certainly one of them. My English has been widened and deepened by the rhythms and cadences of my alien mother’s other tongues. (I say alien because there’s not much that is organic about her. Her nation-shaped body was first violently assimilated and then violently dismembered by an imperial British quill. I also say alien because of the violence unleashed in her name on those who do not wish to belong to her (Kashmiris, for example), as well as on those who do (Indian Muslims and Dalits, for example), makes her an extremely un-motherly mother.
How many tongues does she have? Officially, approximately 780, only twenty-two of which are formally recognized by the Indian Constitution, while another thirty-eight are waiting to be accorded that status. Each has its own history of colonizing or being colonized. There are few pure victims and pure perpetrators. There is no national language. Not yet. Hindi and English are designated “official languages.” According to the Constitution of India (which, we must note, was written in English), the use of English by the state for official purposes was supposed to cease by 26 January 1965, fifteen years after the constitution came into effect. Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, was to take its place. However, any serious move toward making Hindi the national language has been met with riots in non-Hindi speaking regions of the country. (Imagine trying to impose a single language on all of Europe.) So, English has continued, guiltily, unofficially, and by default, to consolidate its base. Guilt in this case is an unhelpful sentiment. India as a country, a nation-state, was a British idea. So, the idea of English is as good or as bad as the idea of India itself. Writing or speaking in English is not a tribute to the British Empire, as the British imperial historian had tried to suggest to me, it is a practical solution to the circumstances created by it.
Baptist Mission Linguistic Map of India (1846)
Fundamentally, India is in many ways still an empire, its territories held together by its armed forces and administered from Delhi, which, for most of her subjects, is as distant as any foreign metropole. If India had broken up into language republics, like countries in Europe, then perhaps English could be done away with. But even still, not really, not any time soon. As things stand, English, although it is spoken by a small minority (which still numbers in the tens of millions), is the language of mobility, of opportunity, of the courts, of the national press, the legal fraternity, of science, engineering, and international communication. It is the language of privilege and exclusion. It is also the language of emancipation, the language in which privilege has been eloquently denounced. Annihilation of Caste by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the most widely read, widely translated, and devastating denunciation of the Hindu caste system, was written in English. It revolutionized the debate on perhaps the most brutal system of institutionalized injustice that any society has ever dreamed up. How different things would have been had the privileged castes managed to contain Ambedkar’s writing in a language that only his own caste and community could read. Inspired by him, many Dalit activists today see the denial of a quality English education to the underprivileged (in the name of nationalism or anticolonialism) as a continuation of the Brahmin tradition of denying education and literacy—or, for that matter, simply the right to pursue knowledge and accumulate wealth—to people they consider “shudras” and “outcastes.” To make this point, in 2011 the Dalit scholar Chandra Bhan Prasad built a village temple to the Dalit Goddess of English. “She is the symbol of Dalit Renaissance,” he said. “We will use English to rise up the ladder and become free forever.”
Angrezi Devi, Goddess of English as imagined by Chandrabhan Prasad
As the wrecking ball of the new global economic order goes about its work, moving some people toward the light, pushing others into darkness, the “knowing” and the “not knowing” of English plays a great part in allocating light and darkness.
It is onto this mind-bending mosaic that the current Hindu nationalist ruling dispensation is trying to graft its “One nation, one religion, one language” vision. Since its inception in the 1920s, the rallying cry of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), Hindu Nationalism’s Holding Company—and the most powerful organization in India today—has been “Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan.” Ironically, all three are words derived from the Arabic and Persian “al-Hind”—Hindustan, the name of the “stan” (place)—not to be confused with “sthan,” which also means “place” in Sanskrit—that lay east of the River Indus. “Hindus” were the peoples (not the religion) that lived there. It would be too much to expect the RSS to learn from other country’s experiences, but when the Islamic Republic of Pakistan tried to impose Urdu on its Bengali-speaking citizens in East Pakistan, it ended up losing half of itself. Sri Lanka tried to impose Sinhala on its Tamil citizens, and paid with decades of bloody civil war.
All this to say that we live and work (and write) in a complicated land, in which nothing is or ever will be settled. Especially not the question of language. Languages.
Susan Sontag was surely aware of some of this complexity when she delivered the W. G. Sebald lecture in 2002. Her lecture was called “The World as India: Translation as a Passport within the Community of Literature.” What I’ll talk about is “Translation as a Writing Strategy in a Community Without Passports.”
***
Twenty years after the publication of The God of Small Things, I finished writing my second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but if a novel can have an enemy, then the enemy of this novel is the idea of “One nation, one religion, one language.” As I composed the cover page of my manuscript, in place of the author’s name, I was tempted to write: “Translated from the original(s) by Arundhati Roy.” The Ministry is a novel written in English but imagined in several languages. Translation as a primary form of creation was central to the writing of it (and here I don’t mean the translation of the inchoate and the prelingual into words). Regardless of which language (and in whose mother tongue) The Ministry was written in, this particular narrative about these particular people in this particular universe would had to be imagined in several languages. It is a story that emerges out of an ocean of languages, in which a teeming ecosystem of living creatures—official-language fish, unofficial-dialect mollusks, and flashing shoals of word-fish—swim around, some friendly with each other, some openly hostile, and some outright carnivorous. But they are all nourished by what the ocean provides. And all of them, like the people in The Ministry, have no choice but to coexist, to survive, and to try to understand each other. For them, translation is not a high-end literary art performed by sophisticated polyglots. Translation is daily life, it is street activity, and it’s increasingly a necessary part of ordinary folks’ survival kit. And so, in this novel of many languages, it is not only the author, but the characters themselves who swim around in an ocean of exquisite imperfection, who constantly translate for and to each other, who constantly speak across languages, and who constantly realize that people who speak the same language are not necessarily the ones who understand each other best.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has been—is being—translated into forty-eight languages. Each of those translators has to grapple with a language that is infused with many languages including, if I may coin a word, many kinds of Englishes (sociolects is perhaps the correct word, but I’ll stay with Englishes because it is deliciously worse) and translate it into another language that is infused with many languages. I use the word infused advisedly, because I am not speaking merely of a text that contains a smattering of quotations or words in other languages as a gimmick or a trope, or one that plays the Peter Sellers game of mocking Indian English, but of an attempt to actually create a companionship of languages.
Part of the author’s bookshelf of translations – Photo by Mayank Austin Soofi
Of the forty-eight translations, two are Urdu and Hindi. As we will soon see, the very fact of having to name Hindi and Urdu as separate languages, and publish them as separate books with separate scripts, contains a history that is folded into the story of The Ministry. Given the setting of the novel, the Hindi and Urdu translations are, in part, a sort of homecoming. I soon learned that this did nothing to ease the task of the translators. To give you an example: The human body and its organs play an important part in The Ministry. We found that Urdu, that most exquisite of languages, which has more words for love than perhaps any other language in the world, has no word for vagina. There are words like the Arabic furj, which is considered to be archaic and more or less obsolete, and there are euphemisms that range in meaning from “hidden part,” “breathing hole,” “vent,” and “path to the uterus.” The most commonly used one is aurat ki sharamgah. A woman’s place of shame. As you can see, we had trouble on our hands. Before we rush to judgment, we must remember that pudenda in Latin means “that whereof one should feel shame.” In Danish, I was told by my translator, the phrase is “lips of shame.” So, Adam and Eve are alive and well, their fig leaves firmly in place.
Although I am tempted to say more about witnessing the pleasures and difficulties of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness being translated into other languages, more than the “post-writing” translations, it is the “pre-writing” translation that I want to talk about today. None of it came from an elaborate, pre-existing plan. I worked purely by instinct. It is only while preparing for this lecture that I began to really see how much it mattered to me to persuade languages to shift around, to make room for each other. Before we dive into the Ocean of Imperfection and get caught up in the eddies and whirlpools of our historic blood feuds and language wars, in order to give you a rough idea of the terrain, I will quickly chart the route by which I arrived at my particular patch of the shoreline.
My mother is a Syrian Christian from Kerala—the Malayalam-speaking southernmost tip of the Indian peninsula. My father was a Bengali from Kolkata, which is where the two met. At the time, he was visiting from Assam, where he had a job as an assistant manager of a tea garden. The language they had in common was English. I was born in the Welsh Mission hospital in the little town of Shillong, then in Assam, now the capital of the state of Meghalaya. The predominant hill tribe in Shillong is the Khasi, their language an Austroasiatic one, related to Cambodian and Mon. The Welsh missionaries of Shillong, like missionaries all over India, went to great lengths to turn oral languages into written ones, primarily in order to translate and print the Bible. As part of their own campaign to preserve the Welsh language against the tidal wave of English, they ensured that while Khasi is written in Roman script, its orthography is similar to that of Welsh.
Welsh Mission Hospital now called H Gordon Roberts Hospital, Shillong. A panoramic image prepared by the mission to raise funds for the hospital in 1939
The first two years of my life were spent in Assam. Even before I was born, my parents’ relationship had broken down irretrievably. While they quarrelled, I was farmed out to the tea plantation workers’ quarters, where I learned my first language, which my mother informs me was a kind of Hindi. The tea workers, living on starvation wages, were (and are) among the most brutally oppressed and exploited people in India. They are descendants of indigenous tribespeople of Eastern and Central India, whose own languages had been broken down and subsumed into Baganiya, which literally means “garden language.” It is a patois of Hindi, Axomiya, and their own languages. Baganiya was the language I first spoke. I was less than three years old when my parents separated. My mother, my brother, and I moved to South India—first to Ootacamund in Tamil Nadu and then (unwelcomed) to my grandmother’s home in Ayemenem, the village in Kerala where The God of Small Things is set. I soon forgot my Baganiya. (Many years later, when I was in my twenties, I encountered my cheerful but distressingly alcoholic father for the first time. The very first question he asked me was,
Do you still use bad language?
I had no idea what he meant. “Oh, you were a terrible, foul-mouthed little girl,” he said, and went on to tell me about how, when he had accidentally brushed a lit cigarette against my arm, I had glared at him and called him a “choo…ya”—an expletive in several languages, including Baganiya, whose etymology derives from the Latin word pudenda.) When I was five, my utterly moneyless mother started her own school by renting, by day, a small hall that belonged to the Rotary Club in the town of Kottayam, a short bus ride away. Every evening we would pack away our tables and chairs, and put them out again in the morning. I grew up on a cultural diet that included Shakespeare, Kipling, Kathakali (a temple dance form), The Sound of Music, as well as Malayalam and Tamil cinema. Before I reached my teenage years, I could recite long passages of Shakespeare, sing Christian hymns in the mournful Malayali way, and mimic a cabaret from the Tamil film called Jesus (which Mary Magdalene performs to seduce Jesus at a cocktail party in zero BC—before things began to go badly wrong for both of them).
Rotary Club in the town of Kottayam – Photo by Dayanita Singh
As her little school grew successful, my mother, anxious about my career prospects, decreed that I was to speak only in English.1 Even in my off time. Each time I was caught speaking Malayalam, I was made to write what was called an imposition—I will speak in English, I will speak in English—a thousand times. Many hours of many afternoons were spent doing this (until I learned to recycle my impositions). At the age of ten, I went to a boarding school in Tamil Nadu founded by Sir Henry Lawrence, British hero of the 1857 “Indian Mutiny,” who died defending the Lucknow Residency. (He who authored a legal code in the Punjab that forbade Sati, self-immolation by widows, infanticide, and forced labor. Hard as it may be to accept, things aren’t always as simple as they’re made out to be.) The motto of our school was “Never Give In.” Many of us students believed (with no real basis) that what Lawrence had actually said was, “Never Give In—to the Indian Dogs.” In boarding school, in addition to Malayalam and English, I learned Hindi. My Hindi teacher was a Malayali who taught us a kind of Hindi in a kind of Malayalam. We understood nothing. We learned very little.
At sixteen, I finished school and found myself alone on a train to Delhi, which was three days and two nights away. (I didn’t know then that I was leaving home for good.) I was going to join the School of Architecture. I was armed with a single sentence of Hindi that I somehow remembered. It was from a lesson called Swamibhakt Kutiya about a faithful dog who saves her master’s baby from a snake by getting herself bitten instead. The sentence was: Subah uth ke dekha to kutiya mari padi thi. “When I woke up in the morning, the bitch lay dead.” For the first few months in Delhi, it was my only contribution to any conversation or question addressed to me in Hindi. Over the years, this is the slender foundation on which, as my Malayalam became rusty, I built my Hindi vocabulary.
The architecture school hostel was, obviously, populated by out-of-towners. Mostly non-Hindi speakers. Bengalis, Assamese, Nagas, Manipuris, Nepalese, Sikkimese, Goans, Tamilians, Malayalees, Afghans. My first roommate was Kashmiri. My second Nepali. My closest friend was from Orissa. He spoke neither English nor Hindi. For most of our first year, we communicated in shared spliffs, sketches, cartoons, and maps drawn on the backs of envelopes—his extraordinary, mine mediocre. In time, we all learned to communicate with each other in standard Delhi University patois—a combination of English and Hindi, which was the language of my first screenplay, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, set in a fictional architecture school during the dope-smoking, bell-bottom-wearing era of the 1970s. Annie was the nickname of a male student, Anand Grover, repeating his final year for the fourth time. “Giving it those ones” meant “doing his or her usual thing.” In Annie’s case. that meant peddling his pet thesis about reviving the rural economy and reversing rural-urban migration by planting fruit trees on either side of the hundreds of thousands of miles of railway tracks in India. Why the railway tracks? Because “general janta” (ordinary folks) “shits near the railway tracks anyway, hai na? so the soil is bloody fertile, yaar.” Directed by Pradip Krishen, the no-budget film was made on what must have been the cost of backup clapboards for a modest Hollywood movie.
Our publicity brochure for the film (which no one was really interested in) had the following quotes:
“You’ll have to change the title, because ‘Giving It Those Ones’ doesn’t mean anything in English.”
—Derek Malcolm of The Guardian, waking up suddenly in the middle of the film.
“Obviously, Mr. Malcolm, in England you don’t speak English anymore.”
—Arundhati Roy, later, wishing she had thought of it earlier.
The film was shown just once, late at night on Doordarshan, state television. It went on to win two National Awards. One for the Best Screenplay and the other, my favourite award of all time, Best Film in Languages Other Than Those Specified in Schedule VIII of the Indian Constitution. (I should say here that, in 2015, we returned both awards as part of a protest initiated by writers and filmmakers against what we saw as the current government’s complicity in a series of assassinations of writers and rationalist thinkers, as well as the daylight lynching of Muslims and Dalits by mobs of vigilantes. It didn’t help. The lynching continues, and we have run out of national awards to return.)
Publicity Still from “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones” – Arundhati Roy as Radha and Roshan Seth as Yamdoot
Writing screenplays—I wrote two—taught me to write dialogue. And it taught me economy. But then I began to yearn for excess. I longed to write about the landscape of my childhood, about the people in Ayemenem, about the river that flowed through it, the trees that bent into it, the moon, the sky, the fish, the songs, the History House and the unnamed terrors that lurked around. I could not bear the idea of writing something that began with Scene 1. Ext. Day. River. I wanted to write a stubbornly visual but unfilmable book. That book turned out to be The God of Small Things. I wrote it in English, but imagined it in English as well as Malayalam, the landscapes and languages colliding in the seven-year-old twins’ Esthappen and Rahel’s heads, turning into a thing of its own. So, for example, when their mother, Ammu, scolds the twins and tells them that if they ever disobey her in public she will send them somewhere where they learn to “jolly well behave”—it’s the well that jumps out at them. The deep, moss-lined well that you find in the compounds of many homes in Kerala, with a pulley and a bucket and a rope, the well children are sternly warned to stay away from until they are big enough to draw water. What could a Jolly Well possibly be? A well with happy people in it. But people in a well? They’d have to be dead, of course. So, in Estha’s and Rahel’s imagination, a Jolly Well becomes a well full of laughing dead people, into which children are sent to learn to behave. The whole novel is constructed around people, young and old, English-knowing and Malayalam-knowing, all grappling, wrestling, dancing, and rejoicing in language.
For me, or for most contemporary writers working in these parts, language can never be a given. It has to be made. It has to be cooked. Slow-cooked.
It was only after writing The God of Small Things that I felt the blood in my veins flow more freely. It was an unimaginable relief to have finally found a language that tasted like mine. A language in which I could write the way I think. A language that freed me. The relief didn’t last long. As Estha always knew, Things can change in a day.
The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like an old hat…” The God of Small Things – Photo by Dayanita Singh
Less than a year after The God of Small Things was published, in May 1998, a Hindu nationalist government came to power. The first thing it did was to conduct a series of nuclear tests. Something convulsed. Something changed. It was about language again. Not a writer’s private language, but a country’s public language, its public imagination of itself. Suddenly, things that would have been unthinkable to say in public became acceptable. Officially acceptable. Virile national pride, which had more to do with hate than love, flowed like noxious lava on the streets. Dismayed by the celebrations even in the most unexpected quarters, I wrote my first political essay, “The End of Imagination.” My language changed, too. It wasn’t slow-cooked. It wasn’t secret, novel-writing language. It was quick, urgent, and public. And it was straight-up English.
Rereading The End of Imagination now it is sobering to see how clear the warning signs were, to anybody, just about anybody, who cared to heed them:
“These are not just nuclear tests, they are nationalism tests,” we were repeatedly told.
This has been hammered home, over and over again. The bomb is India, India is the bomb. Not just India, Hindu India. Therefore, be warned, any criticism of it is not just anti-national, but anti-Hindu. (Of course, in Pakistan the bomb is Islamic. Other than that, politically, the same physics applies.) This is one of the unexpected perks of having a nuclear bomb. Not only can the Government use it to threaten the Enemy, it can use it to declare war on its own people. Us….
Why does it all seem so familiar? Is it because, even as you watch, reality dissolves and seamlessly rushes forward into the silent, black-and-white images from old films—scenes of people being hounded out of their lives, rounded up and herded into camps? Of massacre, of mayhem, of endless columns of broken people making their way to nowhere? Why is there no soundtrack? Why is the hall so quiet? Have I been seeing too many films? Am I mad? Or am I right?
The mayhem came. On 7 October 2001, three weeks after the attacks of 11 September 2001(9/11), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then in power in the state of Gujarat, removed its elected chief minister, Keshubhai Patel, and appointed Narendra Modi, a rising star in the RSS, in his place. In February 2002, in an act of arson, sixty-eight Hindu pilgrims were burned to death in a train that had stopped in Godhra, a railway station in Gujarat. Local Muslims were held responsible. As “revenge,” more than one thousand Muslims were slaughtered by Hindu mobs in broad daylight in the cities and villages of Gujarat. More than a hundred thousand were hounded out of their homes and herded into refugee camps. It wasn’t by any means the first massacre of members of a minority community in post-independence India, but it was the first that was telecast live into our homes. The first, that was, in some senses, proudly “owned.” I was wrong about there being no soundtrack.
The End of Imagination was the beginning of twenty years of essay writing for me. Almost every essay was immediately translated into Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi, Urdu, and Punjabi, often without my knowledge. As we watched mesmerized, religious fundamentalism and unbridled free-market fundamentalism, which had been unleashed in the early 1990s, waltzed arm-in-arm, like lovers, changing the landscape around us at a speed that was exhilarating for some, devastating for others. Huge infrastructure projects were displacing hundreds of thousands of the rural poor, setting them adrift into a world that didn’t seem to be able to—or simply did not want to—see them. It was as though the city and the countryside had stopped being able to communicate with each other. It had nothing to do with language, but everything to do with translation. For example, judges sitting in the Supreme Court seemed unable to understand that, for a person who belonged to an indigenous tribe, their relationship with land could not simply be translated into money. (I was arraigned for contempt of court for saying, among other things, that paying Adivasis, indigenous tribespeople, cash compensation for their land was like paying Supreme Court judges their salaries in fertilizer bags.) Over the years, the essays opened secret worlds for me—the best kind of royalty that any writer could ask for. As I travelled, I encountered languages, stories, and people whose ways of thinking expanded me in ways I could never have imagined.
Somewhere along the way, slow-cooking began again. Folks began to drop in on me. Their visits grew more frequent, then longer, and eventually, pretty brazenly, they moved in with me: Anjum, an Urdu speaker from Old Delhi, came with her adopted daughter, Zainab, and a laconic, cloudy dog called Biroo. A young man who called himself Saddam Hussain showed up on a white horse he introduced as Payal. He said his real name was Dayachand and that he was a Chamar, a skinner from Jhajjhar in Haryana. He told me a terrible story about what had happened to his father. He spoke in a sort of Mewati-Rajasthani that I found hard to understand. He showed me a video of the execution of Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, that he kept on his cell phone. It was Hussein’s courage at the moment of his death, he said, even if he had been a bastard, that had made Dayachand convert to Islam and take the name Saddam Hussain. I had no idea what the connection between the video and his father was.
A rail-thin man with his right arm in a plaster cast, his shirtsleeve flapping at his side, slid in like a shadow. He refused all offers of food and drink. The man handed me a piece of paper that said:
My Full Name: Dr Azad Bhartiya. (Translation: The Free Indian)
My Home Address: Dr Azad Bhartiya, Near Lucky Sarai Railway Station, Lucky Sarai Basti, Kokar, Bihar
My Current Address: Dr Azad Bhartiya, Jantar Mantar, New Delhi
My Qualifications: MA Hindi, MA Urdu (First Class First), BA History, BEd, Basic Elementary Course in Punjabi, MA Punjabi ABF (Appeared But Failed), PhD (pending), Delhi University (Comparative Religions and Buddhist Studies), Lecturer, Inter College, Ghaziabad, Research Associate, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Founder Member Vishwa Samajwadi Sthapana (World People’s Forum) and Indian Socialist Democratic Party (Against Price-rise).
I offered him a cigarette. He went outside to smoke it, and returned only after a few weeks. That was the beginning of Dr. Bharatiya’s drifting in and out of my home. It continues to this day. The next to come was the opposite of a drifter. Biplab Dasgupta, from the Universe of English, was an officer of the elite intelligence services currently posted in Kabul. He asked me to call him what his friends called him—Garson Hobart—the name of the character he had played in a college play. He arrived with an expensive bottle of whiskey from which he drank steadily. He seated himself at my table and, without so much as asking, used my pen to start writing something, from which he never looked up, except to occasionally enunciate the Latin name of a bird, as though he were checking the spelling by saying it out loud. Later it occurred to me that he might have been doing it to trouble future translators in whose languages the scientific taxonomy of birds and trees, with their genus and species names that identified each of them as unique, did not exist. Hobart’s expression changed—in fact, almost everything about him changed—when my doorbell rang, and I found a man and woman standing outside. The woman turned out to be Hobart’s tenant, who had apparently gone missing. Her name was Tilotamma, and the man with her was Musa, her Kashmiri lover who seemed to know Hobart, too. They came in carrying cartons of papers and files, and towers of dusty documents. She put up a few sheets of paper on the ’fridge and secured them with a magnet. It was a word list, an alphabetically organized lexicon:
Kashmiri–English Alphabet
A: Azadi/army/Allah/America/Attack/AK47/Ammunition/ Ambush/Aatankwadi/Armed Forces Special Powers Act/ Area Domination/Al Badr/Al Mansoorian/Al Jehad/Afghan/ Amarnath Yatra
B: BSF/body/blast/bullet/battalion/barbed wire/brust(burst)/ border cross/booby trap/bunker/byte/begaar(forced labour)
C: Crossborder/Cross-fire /camp/civilian/curfew/Crackdown/ CordonandSearch/CRPF/Checkpost/Counter insurgency/Cease-fire/CounterIntelligence/Catch and Kill/ Custodial Killing/Compensation/Cylinder (surrender)/ Concertina wire/Collaborator
D: Disappeared/Defence Spokesman/Double Cross/Double Agent/Disturbed Areas Act/Dead body
It went on to cover the whole of the English alphabet, all the way to Z. When I asked what it was for, she said it was to help innocent Indian tourists in Kashmir to communicate better with the locals. She betrayed no signs of sarcasm or irony. Musa said nothing. He melted into the surroundings so quickly that I forgot he was there.
After a while Tilotamma’s ex-husband, Nagaraj Hariharan, came by, looking for her but pretending not to. For some reason, he had brought his mother-in-law Maryam Ipe’s fat medical file from a Cochin hospital. He showed it to me, even though I made it clear that I had no interest in the blood profiles and oxygen saturation charts of complete strangers. It was only much later that I saw the notes that contained Maryam Ipe’s ICU hallucinations. I could not have imagined that, if you study people’s hallucinations long enough, they tell you more than volumes of sentient conversation ever could. Major Amrik Singh, a tall Sikh officer of the Indian Army, arrived, denying several extrajudicial killings that I hadn’t even accused him of, insisting that he was being made what he called an “escape goat.” Once he picked up on the generally non-accusatory atmosphere of his surroundings, he began to boast about his counterintelligence operations and how he had passed himself off as a Hindu, a Sikh, or a Punjabi-speaking Pakistani Muslim, depending on what the particular covert operation demanded.
From the Author
A baby girl appeared on the doorstep, unaccompanied. Anjum moved in with astonishing speed, swooped her up, and would not let anybody else come close for at least two weeks. A hand-delivered letter arrived from the forests of Bastar. It was written in cramped, tiny handwriting. English, as far as I could tell. It was addressed to Dr. Azad Bharatiya, who, for some reason, read it aloud to Anjum, translating it into Urdu on the fly:
Dear Comrade Azad Bharathiya Garu,
I am writing this to you because in my three days’ time in Jantar Mantar I observed you carefully. If anybody knows where is my child now, I think it might be you only. I am a Telugu woman and sorry I don’t know Hindi. My English is not good also. Sorry for that. I am Revathy, working as a fulltimer with Communist Party of India (Maoist). When you will receive this letter I will be already killed…
My home became a commune and a confederacy of languages. Over time all of us housemates learned to talk to each other, translate each other.
The new slow-cooking recipe involved considerable risk. I had to throw the language of The God of Small Things off a very tall building. And then go down (using the stairs) to gather up the shattered pieces. So was born The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
It is not necessary for readers of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to know or understand the complicated map of languages that underpins it. If it were, if readers needed a field guide in order to properly understand the book, I’d consider myself a failure. To see it in bookshops sitting side-by-side with pulp fiction and political thrillers gives me nothing but pleasure. The fun and games with the Language Map is just that—an extra layer of fun and games. In truth, the Map of Languages of The Ministry, and their intertwining histories, could become a rather large book in itself. So, all I can do right now, just as an illustration of what I mean, is to drill below the surface of the first few chapters. I’ll start with the opening sentence:
She lived in the graveyard like a tree.
“She” is Anjum. She’s middle-aged now, and has left her home in the Khwabgah (the House of Dreams) where she lived for years with a group of others like herself. The Muslim graveyard where she now lives is close to the walled city of Delhi. The first time she gives us a hint about who she really is begins at an intersection between two languages. The traffic policeman is none other than William Shakespeare himself.
Long ago a man who knew English told her that her name written backwards (in English) spelled Majnu. In the English version of the story of Laila and Majnu, he said, Majnu was called Romeo and Laila was Juliet. She found that hilarious. ‘You mean I’ve made a khichdi of their story?’ she asked. ‘What will they do when they find that Laila may actually be Majnu and Romi was really Juli?’ The next time he saw her, the Man Who Knew English said he’d made a mistake. Her name spelled backwards would be Mujna, which wasn’t a name and meant nothing at all. To this she said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m all of them, I’m Romi and Juli, I’m Laila and Majnu. And Mujna, why not? Who says my name is Anjum? I’m not Anjum, I’m Anjuman. I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing. Is there anyone else you would like to invite? Everyone’s invited.’ The Man Who Knew English said it was clever of her to come up with that one. He said he’d never have thought of it himself. She said, ‘How could you have, with your standard of Urdu? What d’you think? English makes you clever automatically?’
Anjum is born to Shia Muslim parents in Old Delhi, in the years soon after Independence. Her father, Mulaqat Ali, who traces his family’s lineage directly back to the Mongol Emperor Changez Khan, is a hakim, a doctor of herbal medicine who works for the family that makes the legendary sherbet Rooh Afza, which is Persian for “elixir of the soul.” Her mother, Jahanara Begum, supplements the family income by stitching white Gandhi caps that she supplies to Hindu traders in Chandni Chowk. She is already the mother of three girls when Anjum is born. In the second chapter, “Khwabgah,” we witness Anjum’s birth. In addition to her mother and the midwife, her mother tongue, too, is present. And found wanting:
Ahlam Baji, the midwife who delivered her and put her in her mother’s arms wrapped in two shawls, said, ‘It’s a boy.’ Given the circumstances, her error was understandable…
…The next morning, when the sun was up and the room nice and warm, she unswaddled little Aftab. She explored his tiny body—eyes nose head neck armpits fingers toes—with sated, unhurried delight. That was when she discovered, nestling underneath his boy-parts, a small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part. Is it possible for a mother to be terrified of her own baby? Jahanara Begum was.
… In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things—carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments—had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby. Yes of course she knew there was a word for those like him—Hijra. Two words actually, Hijra and Kinnar. But two words do not make a language. Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl.
To live outside language—for a family whose lives are intricately, obsessively, wrapped up in language—is the crisis that Anjum’s birth creates. For the first few years, Jahanara Begum manages to keep her secret. But then a time comes when she has to tell her husband. Mulaqat Ali is a man whose real passion is Urdu and Persian poetry. He has a formidable repertoire of couplets, and can produce one for every occasion, every mood, every subtle shift in the political climate. He believes that poetry can cure, or at least go a long way toward curing, almost every ailment, and prescribes poems to his patients instead of medicine. When he hears the secret that his wife has kept from him for so many years, and cannot find a poem to comfort himself with, he loses his moorings. He does his best to steady himself, to come to terms with it, but eventually is unable to.
It is when we meet Mulaqat Ali that we get our first hint of the fraught history of language that mirrors the fraught history of the Indian subcontinent. The churning that eventually culminated in the bloodshed of Partition partitioned not just land and people, but a language, too, making one part “Muslim” and the other “Hindu.” This is a description of how Mulaqat Ali conducts himself with the shallow young journalists who from time to time arrive to interview him for various newspapers’ weekend supplements about the exotic culture and cuisine of Old Delhi:
Mulaqat Ali always welcomed visitors into his tiny rooms with the faded grace of a nobleman. He spoke of the past with dignity but never nostalgia. He described how, in the thirteenth century, his ancestors had ruled an empire that stretched from the countries that now called themselves Vietnam and Korea all the way to Hungary and the Balkans, from Northern Siberia to the Deccan plateau in India, the largest empire the world had ever known. He often ended the interview with a recitation of an Urdu couplet by one of his favourite poets, Mir Taqi Mir:
Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka
Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka
The head which today proudly flaunts a crown
Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown
Most of his visitors, brash emissaries of a new ruling class, barely aware of their own youthful hubris, did not completely grasp the layered meaning of the couplet they had been offered, like a snack to be washed down by a thimble-sized cup of thick, sweet tea. They understood of course that it was a dirge for a fallen empire whose international borders had shrunk to a grimy ghetto circumscribed by the ruined walls of an old city. And yes, they realized that it was also a rueful comment on Mulaqat Ali’s own straitened circumstances. What escaped them was that the couplet was a sly snack, a perfidious samosa, a warning wrapped in mourning, being offered with faux humility by an erudite man who had absolute faith in his listeners’ ignorance of Urdu, a language which, like most of those who spoke it, was gradually being ghettoized.
The language known variously as Urdu/Hindi/Hindustani, and, in an earlier era, Hindavi, was born on the streets and bazaars of North India. Khari Boli, spoken in and around Delhi and what is now Western Uttar Pradesh, is the base language to which the Persian lexicon came to be added. Urdu, written in the Persian-Arabic script, was spoken by Hindus and Muslims across North India and the Deccan Plateau. It was not, as is often made out to be, the high language of the court. That, in those days, was Persian. But neither was it, as it is often made out to be, the language of ordinary people everywhere. Urdu was the language of the street, but not necessarily the language spoken in the privacy of most ordinary peoples’ homes, particularly not by the women. It came to be the formal language of literature and poetry for Hindus and Muslims alike. Urdu varied from region to region. Each region had its own high priests staking their claim to true pedigree. In fact, it saw its brightest hour as the Mughal Empire faded.
A ghazal by one of the earliest poets of Hindavi, Amir Khusrau (1253 – 1325). Ghazal with alternating lines in Persian and Hindvi
The partitioning of Urdu began in earnest in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the 1857 Mutiny, when India ceased to be merely an asset of the East India Company. The titular Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was formally deposed, and India was brought directly under British Rule. Muslims, seen as the main instigators of the Mutiny, came in for severe punishment and were treated with great suspicion by the British administration. Power bases began to shift, hierarchies changed, releasing suppressed resentment and new energies that began to seep through the cracks like smoke. As the old ideas of governing by fiat and military might began to metamorphose into modern ideas of representative government, old feudal communities began to coalesce into modern “constituencies” in order to leverage power and job opportunities. Obviously, the bigger the constituency, the greater the leverage.
Demography became vitally important, so the first British census was a source of huge anxiety. “Hindu” leaders turned their attention to the millions of people who belonged to the “untouchable” castes. In the past, in order to escape the stigma of caste, millions had converted to Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity. But now their religious conversion was viewed by the privileged castes as catastrophic. Reformists rushed in to stem the haemorrhage. Hinduism became an evangelical religion. Organizations of privileged caste Hindus, who believed deeply in caste and believed themselves to be Aryans, descended from the European race, sought to keep Untouchables and indigenous tribespeople in the “Hindu fold” by performing Ghar Wapsi (Returning Home) ceremonies, a farce that was meant to symbolize “spiritual cleansing.” In order to clearly define itself and mark itself off from other competing constituencies, the newly emerging Hindu constituency needed cultural symbols—something to fire the imagination of its evangelists and its potential recruits. The holy cow and the holy script became the chosen vehicles for mobilization. Gau Rakshak (cow protection) societies proliferated, and simultaneously the demand was raised that Devanagari (Deva as in Dio/God—the script of the Gods) be officially accepted as a second script for Urdu. Devanagari, originally known as Babhni, was the script of Brahmins 2and had, like Sanskrit, been jealously guarded, its purity protected from the “polluting influence” of lower castes, who had, for centuries, been denied the right to learn Sanskrit. But the changing times now required that it be promoted as the indigenous script of “the people.” In fact, the more widely used script at the time was a script called Kaithi. But Kaithi was used by non-Brahmin castes like the Kayasthas, who were seen to be partial to Muslims. Extraordinarily, in a matter of a few decades, Kaithi was not just discarded, but erased from public memory.3
To turn a battle for a new script into a popular social movement wasn’t easy when the literacy rate of the population was in single digits. How is it possible to make people passionate about something that doesn’t really affect them? The solution was simple but ingenious. In his erudite tract, Hindi Nationalism, Alok Rai writes in some detail of how the mobilization for Devanagari came to be fused with the call for Hindu Unity, cow protection, and Ghar-Wapsi. The Nagari Pracharani Sabhas—Committees for the Popularization of Nagari (the God-part, “Deva,” was added later)—and the Gau-Rakshaks and the Ghar-Wapsi evangelists shared the same offices and office-bearers. They probably do today too. The campaign for Devanagari had immediate and practical goals, too, such as eligibility for jobs in government offices, for which, at the time, reading Persian was a basic qualification. The campaign gained velocity and was buoyed by the resistance to it from the Muslim elite, including Muslim leaders with a vested interest in the status quo, such as the best-known reformist and modernizer of the time, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. Here is his defense4 of retaining the Persian-Arabic script as the only official script:
Would our aristocracy like, that a man of low caste and insignificant origin, though he be a B.A. or M.A. and have the requisite ability, should be in a position above them and have power in making the laws that affect their lives and property? Never!
It’s extraordinary how sworn enemies can find common ground in each other’s worst prejudices. As always, it was a battle of old and new elites lobbying for opportunity, the new ones, as always, disguising their own aspirations as the will of “the people.”
The Devanagari Movement’s first victory came in April 1900, when Sir Anthony MacDonnell, lieutenant-governor of North-Western Provinces and Oudh, issued an order allowing the use of the Devanagari script in addition to the Persian script in the courts of the province. In a matter of months, Hindi and Urdu began to be referred to as separate languages. Language mandarins on both sides stepped in to partition the waters and apportion the word-fish. On the “Hindi” side, anything seen as Persian influence, as well as the influence of languages thought to be unsophisticated vernaculars, was gradually weeded out. (Somehow the words Hindi, Hindu, and Hindustan escaped the dragnet.) Sanskrit began to replace Persian. But Sanskrit was the language of ritual and scripture, the language of Priests and Holy men. Its vocabulary was not exactly forged on the anvil of everyday human experience. It was not the language of mortal love, or toil, or weariness, or yearning. It was not the language of song or poetry of ordinary people. That would have been in Awadhi, Maithili, Braj Bhasha, and Bhojpuri and a myriad other dialects. Rarely if ever has there been an example in history of an effort to deplete language rather than enrich it. It was like wanting to replace an ocean with an aquarium.
As the positions on both sides hardened, even the literary canons came to be partitioned. The “Urdu” canon erased the sublime, anti-caste Bhakti poets such as Kabir, Surdas, Meera, and Raskhan, a Muslim devotee of Krishna. The “Hindi” canon erased the greatest of Urdu poets Mir and Ghalib. (Something similar is at work in the world of Hindustani classical music, although it hasn’t yet had the misfortune of being formally divided into Hindu classical music and Muslim classical music.) Fortunately, progressive writers and poets, the very best of them, resisted this pressure. They continued to produce literature and poetry that was rich and deep and fully alert to what was being done to their language. But gradually, as the older generation passes, the newer one, whose formal education comes from “new” Hindi books and textbooks that have to be approved by government committees, will find it harder and harder to reclaim an ineffably beautiful legacy that is rightfully theirs.
It is for all these reasons that when Anjum’s father, Mulaqat Ali, recites his Mir couplet, his warning wrapped in mourning, he is confident that his young guests—who belong to the generation of “new” Hindi—will not grasp its true meaning. He knows that his straitened material circumstances mirror the straitened vocabulary of his visitors.
Today, many of the younger generation of Urdu speakers in India cannot read the Persian script. They can only read Urdu in the Devanagari script. Urdu is seen not just as a Muslim language, but as a Pakistani language. Which makes it almost criminal in some peoples’ eyes. In March 2017, two Muslim members of the legislative assembly of Uttar Pradesh were prevented from taking their oath of office in Urdu. A member of the Aligarh Municipal Corporation was charged with “intent to hurt religious sentiments” for trying to do the same.
Although Hindi’s victory has been a resounding one, it does not seem to have entirely allayed its keepers’ anxieties. Perhaps that’s because their enemies are dead poets who have a habit of refusing to really die. One of the sub-themes of the 2002 Gujarat massacre was poetry. As Anjum discovers to her cost when she travels to Gujarat with Zakir Mian, who was a friend of her father Mulaqat Ali.
He suggested that while they were in Ahmedabad they could visit the shrine of Wali Dakhani, the seventeenth-century Urdu poet, known as the Poet of Love, whom Mulaqat Ali had been immensely fond of, and seek his blessings too. They sealed their travel plans by laughingly reciting a couplet by him—one of Mulaqat Ali’s favourites:
Jisey ishq ka tiir kaari lage
Usey zindagi kyuun na bhari lage
For one struck down by Cupid’s bow
Life becomes burdensome, isn’t that so?
A few days later they set off by train, first to Ajmer and then to Ahmedabad. And then there’s no news from them.
Nobody disagreed when Saeeda (who loved Anjum and was entirely unaware of Anjum’s suspicions about her) suggested that the soap operas on TV be switched off and the news be switched on and left on in case, by some small chance, they could pick up a clue about what might have happened to Anjum and Zakir Mian. When flushed, animated TV news reporters shouted out their Pieces‑to‑Camera from the refugee camps where tens of thousands of Gujarat’s Muslims now lived, in the Khwabgah they switched off the sound and scanned the background hoping to catch a glimpse of Anjum and Zakir Mian lining up for food or blankets, or huddled in a tent. They learned in passing that Wali Dakhani’s shrine had been razed to the ground and a tarred road built over it, erasing every sign that it had ever existed. (Neither the police nor the mobs nor the Chief Minister could do anything about the people who continued to leave flowers in the middle of the new tarred road where the shrine used to be. When the flowers were crushed to paste under the wheels of fast cars, new flowers would appear. And what can anybody do about the connection between flower-paste and poetry?)
Why should a twenty-first century mob be so angry with a poet who lived more than three hundred years ago? Wali Dakhani, the Wise Man of the Dakhan (Deccan), was a seventeenth-century poet who also came to be known as Wali Aurangabadi and Wali Gujarati. He wrote in Dakhani Urdu, an idiom that was not familiar to the court poets in the north, who wrote mostly in Persian at the time. Although he wrote in Urdu, Wali Dakhani was the first poet in the subcontinent to present his poetry as a Diwan—a collection that was formally arranged in the Persian tradition in which poems were presented in alphabetical order in three mandatory sections: Masnavi (narrative poems), Marsiya (elegiac poems commemorating the martyrdom of Hussain), and Kasida (the tradition of singing praise to warriors). Wali Dakhani’s Diwan took the elite circle of poets, who all wrote in Persian, by storm. He became a cultural bridge between the north and the south, and the founding father of Urdu poetry.
The modern-day mob that destroyed his shrine, so high on nativism, could have just as easily valorized Wali Dakhani for being the man who influenced poets who wrote in Persian to write in Urdu, who turned the writing of Urdu into high literature. Because Urdu is nothing if not a language born on the streets of Hindustan. But, sadly, that’s not how the story goes.
The destruction of Wali Dakhani’s grave during the 2002 Gujarat massacre was not the only incident of its kind. During those same weeks, in the city of Baroda, a mob attacked and damaged the grave of Ustad Fayyaz Khan, one of the most accomplished singers in the Hindustani classical tradition. Many years earlier, in a riot that took place during the 1970s, a mob burned down the house of Rasoolan Bai (Garson Hobart’s favorite singer).5The only good thing to be said of this contemporary mob tradition is that it understands the dangers posed by art. And it has impeccable taste.
I will end this very long lecture with a short note about slogans and mantras in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
Anjum survives the Gujarat massacre because the mob that finds her lying over the corpse of Zakir Mian, feigning death, believes that killing Hijras brings bad luck. So instead of killing her, they stand over her and make her chant their slogans:
Bharat Mata Ki Jai! Vande Mataram!
She did. Weeping, shaking, humiliated beyond her worst nightmare.
Victory to Mother India! Salute the Mother!
They left her alive. Un-killed. Un-hurt. Neither folded nor unfolded. She alone. So that they might be blessed with good fortune.
Butcher’s Luck.
That’s all she was. And the longer she lived, the more good luck she brought them.
Bharat, Hindustan and India are names that are used interchangeably for the country we live in. ‘Akhand Bharat’—undivided India, which contains the territories of both Pakistan and Bangladesh, is the ideal of Hindu Nationalists. Chanting Bharat Mata Ki Jai! (Victory to Mother India) is seen by many as being patriotic and not necessarily Hindu Nationalist. In less extenuating circumstances, Anjum would surely have shouted down, perhaps even beaten up those controversialists and unimaginative literalists who ask how King Bharata, whose Kingdom was called Bharat came to be a Mata (mother), and why India is a motherland and not a fatherland.6
The second slogan she was forced to chant, Vande Mataram, usually translated as “Praise Be to Thee, Mother,” is from a poem written by the popular Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay that appears in Anandamath, his novel about the Sanyasi rebellion, first published in the 1880s. It is a novel that is, and always has been, greatly favoured by Hindu nationalists because it created a template for the ideal Hindu warrior, the fantasy Hindu warrior, who rises in rebellion against his degenerate Muslim oppressors. Anandamath is a wonderful example of how, in the process of its telling of the past, literature can also mould the future. In the poem, the motherland is conflated with the Hindu Goddess Durga. However, the first two stanzas came to be the unofficial anthem of the National Movement because they only mention “the mother,” which lent itself to being interpreted by both Hindus and Muslims as a reference to Mother India. Although it was a much-loved song during the struggle against British colonialism, in today’s atmosphere of a very different kind of nationalism, a bullying, coercive nationalism, people, Muslims in particular, many of who are not unaware of the provenance of the poem, are often forced to chant “Vande Mataram” as a form of ritual humiliation. Ironically, the modern version of the song was hugely popularized in the 1990s by the Sufi singer A. R. Rahman. Sadly, a once loved slogan has become controversial.
Bollywood version of Vande Mataram from the film adaptation of Anand Math
It is not unusual to have a Bengali slogan being chanted in non-Bengalis speaking states. Slogans in the subcontinent—whether they are being chanted by lynch mobs or protestors, by the right-wing or the left, by people in territories under military occupation, or protestors against big dams—are a performance directed outward, for the rest of the country and the rest of the world to hear, and therefore, quite often, are not in the local people’s mother tongues. In Kashmir’s massive protests, you will hear chanting in Urdu and in English, rarely in Kashmiri. The chant of Azadi! Azadi! (“Freedom! Freedom!”) is Urdu—originally, Persian—and has probably traveled east from the Iranian Revolution to become the signature slogan of the Kashmiri freedom struggle, as well as, irony of ironies, the women’s movement in India. At the opposite end of the country, down south in Kerala, I grew up to the resounding roar of Inquilab Zindabad! (“Long Live the Revolution!”) in Urdu, a language that local people neither speak not understand. The other Communist Party slogan was Swadandriyam, Janadhipathyam, Socialism, Zindabad! (“Freedom, Democracy, Socialism, Long Live!”) That’s Sanskrit, Malayalam, English, and Urdu in a single slogan.
I’ll end with the journey of a mantra through The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
Two months after Anjum and Zakir Mian go missing, and the murdering in Gujarat has begun to tail off, Zakir Mian’s son, Mansoor, goes to Ahmedabad to look for his father. As a precaution, he shaves off his beard, hoping to pass as Hindu. He does not find his father, but finds a terrified Anjum, who has been enrolled in the men’s section of a refugee camp, dressed in men’s clothes, her hair cut short, and brings her back to the Khwabgah. She refuses to tell anybody what happened to her, but—haunted by memories of “how the men were folded and the women unfolded”—she takes a wailing young Zainab, her adopted daughter, to a barber, has her hair cut off, and dresses her in boy’s clothes. “In case Gujarat comes to Delhi.” The other precaution she takes is to teach Zainab to chant the Sanskrit Gayatri Mantra that she says she learned while she was in the camp in Gujarat. She says that many of the other refugees had learned it because they believed that, in mob situations, they could recite it to try to pass as Hindu. Neither Anjum nor Zainab has any idea what it means, but Zainab takes to it happily, chanting as she dresses for school and feeds her pet goat.
Om bhur bhuvah svaha
Tat savitur varenyam
Bhargo devasya dhimahi
Dhiyo yo nah pracodayat
O God, thou art the giver of life,
Remover of pain and sorrow,
Bestower of happiness,
O Creator of the Universe,
May we receive thy supreme sin destroying light,
May thou guide our intellect in the right direction.
The Gayatri Mantra appears three times in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The first time, as a talisman against mob violence. The second time as promotional material in a British Airways commercial to attract customers from India’s new and exponentially expanding middle class. And the third time in a fast food restaurant in a shopping mall. Zainab has grown up now, and is betrothed to Saddam Hussain. Saddam tells them the story of how years ago, his father was beaten to death by a mob outside a police station. The mall they were in, Saddam says, was exactly where that police station used to be. Zainab says she knows a Hindu prayer, and recites the Gayatri Mantra as a gesture of love for her future (as well as late) father-in-law.
Such are the ways in which Sanskrit has been finally been indigenized.
A few months after Anjum returns from Gujarat, ravaged and broken, unable to continue living her old life, she moves in to the old graveyard, where she sets up home. Over the years, as she gradually recovers, she builds the Jannat (Paradise) Guest House. When Saddam Hussain joins her, they expand their business to include funeral services. The graveyard becomes a place where anybody—any body— that has been denied the grace of a funeral by the Duniya (the outside world) is given a dignified burial. Under the auspices of the Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services, depending on what the occasion calls for, prayers for the dead include the Fateha, singing the Internationale in Hindi, and reciting from Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth. In English.
So, how shall we answer Pablo Neruda’s question that is the title of this lecture?
In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?7
I’d say, without hesitation, in the Language of Translation.
