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Journalism of Courage
Motherhood, in much of the subcontinent’s storytelling, comes wrapped in sentiment — a shorthand for nurture and sacrifice, for safe harbour, for the first and most abiding of refuges. Arundhati Roy, 63, was not raised inside that fable. Her mother, Mary Roy — gender rights advocate, educationist, founder of Kottayam’s feted Pallikoodam school — was a woman who reshaped the inheritance rights of Syrian Christian women in Kerala, transformed the lives of legions of young boys and girls with lessons in equality and self-reliance, and built a formidable life for herself out of very little. But to her two children, Roy and her brother Lalith Kumar Christopher, she was less mother, more Mrs Roy, headmistress and distant guardian, the woman who taught them to pick their way across a minefield of shifting moods and exacting expectations, and whose love arrived like a brief clearing in otherwise turbulent weather.
The day The Indian Express meets the writer, monsoon has reduced the August afternoon to a sullen half-light, slick with rain. Inside her Jor Bagh apartment, however, there is no shadow of the squall. Age has made Begum, one of her canine companions, somewhat temperamental but Mati K Lal, her other pet, is more easy-going, sleeping on a sofa despite the steady hum of conversation. Eight years since her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), and three years after her mother’s death, her new book, a memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (Penguin Hamish Hamilton, Rs 899) is set to release on Thursday. “The reason I wrote it was because I really wanted her to be in the pages of literature, not as a hagiography, but as a woman who had no problem displaying everything that she was — good, bad, whatever,” she says.
Roy’s account unsettles the familiar myth of motherhood and replaces it with something knottier, more alive: a portrait of inheritance that is equal parts brilliance and bruise, an upbringing that was as creative and dazzling as it was difficult and scarring. To sit across from Roy as she retraces those years is to encounter not just a daughter telling her mother’s story, but a writer probing the complicated alchemy of love, rupture and resilience. It contextualises the chaos that has been the creative life force behind her fiction, that has given shape to her politics, born from being an outlier on what she calls “the grid of caste, community, religion and everything that is 99 per cent of this country”.
Just as her memoir interrogates the tangled intimacies of family, her public voice continues to interrogate the tangled contradictions of the nation, its increasing dissonance with voices of dissent, with those who ask questions of it. Roy herself has been acutely aware of “things that can and cannot be said”; not that it has stopped her from voicing things she has felt need to be said. She has never been among the state’s “wonderful, willing, well-behaved, gullible subjects” that she wrote of in her essay The End of Imagination, who thrive in an echo chamber of majoritarian expression.
The unease with Roy, the activist, began about a year after the elation over Roy, the Booker Prize-winning novelist of The God of Small Things (1997). It started with the publication of The End of Imagination, decrying India’s nuclear tests in Pokhran in 1998, and hardened over the course of Roy’s condemnation of inequality, state repression, capitalism, demagoguery and the genuflection of greedy corporates in essay after fulminating essay over two-and-a-half decades.
In Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction (2020), the collection of essays recently proscribed in Kashmir alongside about 25 other books on grounds of propagating “secessionist sentiments”, Roy writes, “What we need are people who are prepared to be unpopular. Who are prepared to put themselves in danger. Who are prepared to tell the truth. Brave journalists can do that, and they have. Brave lawyers can do that, and they have. And artists — beautiful, brilliant, brave writers, poets, musicians, painters and filmmakers can do that. That beauty is on our side. All of it.”
Roy is at ease with unpopularity, but the news of the ban had puzzled her. “I do not know why it’s happening now, none of them are new books,” she says. It has done nothing to alter her commitment to speaking up against injustices. She has been accused at various points of time in her career of not showing India in “proper” light, but if there’s a light worth shining, she says, it is always the stark glare of truth. “We are living in an age where we are constantly being lied to, constantly being ambushed, constantly responding to the request to hate each other. I think we have plenty to be ashamed of. And we should not be ashamed of saying so,” she says.
In the week preceding the interview, allegations of “vote chori” by the Opposition and the press conference of the Election Commission of India dismissing them as malicious have dominated national news. What happens when distrust becomes the leitmotif of public life, denying citizens the respect and space to disagree? Roy says the metastasis has been in the making for a long time. “Sometimes I think that a society that practises caste has already institutionalised a lack of empathy because of this hierarchical social structure and then introduced ethnic and religious violence, corporate capitalism and a complete cold-heartedness towards the poor. I don’t think there is any society like Indian society in the world today which is so cruel and so uncaring of each other. One of the biggest things that we have to overcome is that kind of hierarchical thinking which closes out the possibility of your feeling something for someone who does not belong to whatever tiny group you claim you want to belong to. It’s political, it’s social, it’s economic but it’s also psychological,” she says.
The answer, she says, does not lie in a utopian imagination of reversal. “You can’t return. You have to move on and come to a new place. It won’t happen soon but I sense a fatigue with the kind of shabby fascism that is being imposed on us. The whole world is in a dangerous place right now. The way people have been controlled — the digital world is a world of surveillance and control and people think that they are free — it will take time,” she says.
