Author Arundhati Roy reveals why penning a novel after 20 years about India and its people should be interpreted not as reality, but a reflection of our changing times
Arundhati Roy
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Chaotic, slangy, messy, superficial. The audacious and most condemning review yet of the most-awaited Indian novel of this decade unsettled many book lovers when it came out early this week. Reviewer Eileen Battersby minced no words in her scathing attack of the book, shredding an effort of 10 years, piece by piece, word for word. Closer home, actor and BJP MP Paresh Rawal ruffled feathers when, last week, he tweeted asking for the same author to be tied to the now, infamous Indian army jeep, instead of the 'stone pelter' from Kashmir, who was paraded as a human shield. The immediate trigger was a fake news story attributed to the author, where she allegedly condemned the Indian Army.
Sitting at her home in New Delhi, we can imagine writer Arundhati Roy - curly wisps of her pepper-salt hair carelessly falling on her face - half smiling, half amused as she absorbs the venom spewed at her. Some criticism she needs to steel herself to, others, like Rawal's, probably unwarranted and uninformed. But, Roy is no stranger to this hate campaign. Two decades of activism has taught her to take things in her stride. Having been charged with sedition back in 2010 for her alleged anti-India speeches, and later being derided as enemy of the nation for sympathising with the Maoist cause, has taught her one lesson - her writing will always singe, if not destroy.
Her new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Penguin), second only in 20 years, comes long after the celebrations of winning the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things. But, unlike the first book, when Roy came with zero baggage, the second one has the writer pigeon-holed as a firebrand activist taking her cause forward.
While the book doesn't disappoint to that effect, in an email interview, Roy makes it clear that her fiction should not be compared with the reality of her polemic essays and non-fiction. "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is born of many years of travelling, thinking, reading and writing. The political writing, my essays are also born of that. And yet, they are completely different creatures," says Roy. "The essays are urgent political interventions that were made when things were closing in… they trace the battle lines, they take sides. The novel attempts to create a universe… a way of seeing. I would never write a novel that is a disguised manifesto, peopled with mechanical characters who are slaves to that enterprise."
Yet, almost everything in the novel spells out the problem that has plagued India in the turn of this century and before. From Ayodhya, to the Anna Hazare movement, the steady decline of the Congress, burning militancy in Kashmir, the Maoist insurgency and the rising saffron tide helmed by a leader, whose story she dangerously unveils in the Gujarat Riots of 2002 - Roy spares no moment in modern Indian history while weaving her narrative. "Listening carefully to the music. Catching the beat. Mastering the movement. Knowing the geography of the stage on which you perform," she says, while hinting why so many conflicting ideas, movements and causes take centrestage in the book. But, for Roy there is "no larger purpose than telling a grand, tender, beautiful story". "The Ministry is not just about people - it's about animals, landscapes, cities, valleys, mountains, music and poetry too," she clarifies.
Sometimes, it all feels like an overdone hodgepodge. While the characters, especially that of the hijras Anjum and Tilottama, are beautifully fleshed out, the many layers of stories and back histories, can leave you high and dry, but not before reeling you in.
Roy's groundwork is, however, strong and her prose lends the novel enough urgency for one to stand and take notice.
The writer doesn't reveal this urgency in her writing - also, one of the reasons why The Ministry took so long to pen. "I did not feel under any pressure whatsoever to write another novel," she says of the time after TGOST, when she made a sudden leap as a literary giant to reckon with. "I have never thought of it as a duty. I always said that I would write another novel if I had another novel to write. And, even when the characters in The Ministry began to visit me, which was about 10 years ago, I was in no hurry. I knew it would take its time," adds Roy.
All said and done, one can't deny that the writer is among the few shining superstars of the literary world. "The attention is not what counts. Only the quality of the writing counts," she says. Her bitter-sweet and enduring prose reflect that.
And, there's never a moment when Roy is not writing. Her obsession with aerobics doesn't stand a chance either. "Even when I work out, I'm writing. I'm always writing," says Roy, who describes herself as a "disciplined writer". If and when she takes a break from writing and activism, it is to "bite her dogs".
Stirring controversy for things she said, and never said, no longer disturb her. "Lately, many people have been lynched by mobs because of fake news and rumours; lynched while policemen and people looked on. It's become normal life in India. I'm privileged to be alive. Or maybe I'm alive because I'm privileged."
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