HUM HINDUSTANI: Authoring another debate —J Sri Raman

The state’s war on the Maoists, in fact, has served to focus attention on the subject. It has even made the elite media send out reporters to discover the mysterious eating habits of people in tribal terrain without discernible sources of normal food

The proposition has held true for 13 long years now: come to India anytime, and you will find the country engaged in a furious debate over a female writer. This column is not about to take sides in the polemics raging currently over Arundhati Roy, but only to look at it in a larger perspective with its conspicuous ironies.

Everyone who is anyone has switched sides, more than once sometimes, in the debate or the series of debates over the prominent publicist of poetic as also popular prose. The ongoing debate, triggered off by her typically passionate and provocative observations on the Maoists of midland India and the state-declared war on them, has seen similar shifts among articulate onlookers.

It all started way back in 1997. That was when an almost unknown Arundhati Roy catapulted to fame as the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things, published a year before. Earlier, she had caught some eyes for her screenplay of a film, ‘In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones’, a success but no Bollywood biggie. She had made more of a ripple by critiquing Shekhar Kapur’s ‘Bandit Queen’, a former outlaw and a future member of parliament, reputed to have avenged her rape by 22 upper-caste men by killing them before fleeing into the outback.

Roy called the film, which features some frontal nudity, “the great India rape trick” and questioned Kapur’s right to portray the sexual crime without the living victim’s permission. Phoolan followed suit by suing Kapur and winning an out-of-court settlement before being killed in a case of return revenge. Roy’s stand did cause a debate but no political rifts of the kind she was to provoke in subsequent instances.

From the furore over The God of Small Things, few could have foreseen her later development as a firestarter of debates. The novel, set in a Kerala landscape, pitted her against the Left, incensed over her caricatures of some of its leaders in the southern state. That, automatically, made the Right adopt her as a loved and long-awaited icon. Literary critics of this camp made her advent on the scene appear a phenomenon parallel to the country’s political fortunes: the first ever BJP-headed government had assumed office in New Delhi in 1995.

Roy’s tenure as the Right’s icon, however, proved remarkably short-lived. It took barely a year for its hopes from her to be blasted away. In May 1998, India conducted its Pokharan nuclear-weapon tests, proclaimed as the political achievement of a BJP-led regime that had been beyond its pusillanimous predecessors. Roy, however, did not respond to the machismo with mellifluous prose.

She greeted it, instead, with an essay of grim indictment titled the ‘End of Imagination’. It was the leftist rallies around the land that reverberated with her words against the weapons that could, very conceivably, lay a subcontinent waste. Instantly, the Right became her rabid enemy, going to ridiculous lengths in its attempt to demolish its erstwhile idol. Her declaration, “If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede,” was one example that was cited as proof of her secessionism, punishable under law.

It was a further southward slump for the Right’s relations with Roy when she went on to join the Narmada Bachao Andolan — Save Narmada Movement — under social activist Medha Patkar. The movement was the first to focus on the issue of displacement of people, often the poorest of the poor and too often of aboriginal tribes, presumed to be the demand of development. And the movement confronted the government of Narendra Modi in Gujarat, held as the model of development by the BJP and big business.

At least for one large newspaper that applauded Roy’s novel and acknowledged her right to oppose nuclear weapons — even if wrongly — this was the limit. Ridiculing a mass agitation under the movement, with participants courting arrest, the paper reported an alleged discovery of condoms in the prison cell occupied by them for a night!

Followed yet another debate with a reputed historian denouncing Roy for “equating big dams with nuclear weapons”. She responded by accusing him of misinterpreting her statement: “Big dams are to a nation’s ‘development’ what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal.” The debate left the Left divided somewhat. The division was to continue with her stand on issues of land acquisition for industries in West Bengal under a Left Front government.

The latest of the debates has been the most lacerating of them all. It erupted in the wake of her visit to Dantewada — a forested region in the tribal-majority central Indian state of Chhattisgarh and a stronghold of Maoist insurgents — and her reportage on the visit in a weekly on March 29, 2010. The account, captioned ‘Walking with the Comrades’, has aroused strong reactions all around — stronger after the Maoists shot dead 76 paramilitary personnel on April 6. For an idea of how strong, sample the headlines of some of the articles to appear on the subject: ‘Arundhati Roy’s Sleepwalk in the Red Corridor’, ‘Moonwalking with the Comrades’, ‘In Defence of a Bitch’, ‘Romanticising Violence’, ‘Freedom is Just a Word’ — about the threat of legal action against Roy — and ‘We Can do Without Moral Certificates’.

None of Roy’s detractors and critics denies the extreme poverty and exploitation of the tribal people. The state’s war on the Maoists, in fact, has served to focus attention on the subject. It has even made the elite media send out reporters to discover the mysterious eating habits of people in tribal terrain without discernible sources of normal food. The criticism has mainly targeted Roy’s validation, and even glorification, of Maoist violence.

Roy has also drawn criticism for her denunciation of Mahatma Gandhi. She has poured scorn, if only in passing, on Gandhi’s “pious humbug”, on non-violence and even more on his idea of social ‘trusteeship’ for the rich. Comments one of the critics, Jyotirmaya Sharma: “Had she said [Prime Minister] Manmohan Singh was a pious humbug or [Congress president] Sonia Gandhi a pious humbug, foreign newspapers would hardly have reproduced her article in their pages. Both Montblanc — which produced a $ 23,000 worth pen in memory of the Mahatma — and Arundhati Roy need Gandhi, after all, to sell their products.”

Roy’s denunciation of Gandhi is reminiscent of the diatribes hurled at him on behalf of the Dalits (the Untouchables), especially for his description of them as Harijan (children of god). To many — including this columnist — this may seem a cruel thing to say about someone who was among the first to raise the issue of ‘untouchables’ and to seek a place for the poor in Indian politics. Is this, however, the price he has to pay posthumously for trying to forge a united Indian front against a common colonial foe? History will judge.

Meanwhile, we can expect Roy to trigger off more debates, as the country’s quest continues for a system where democracy can coexist with development. We can also count on Gandhi to figure in the debates that will signify much despite their sound and fury.

The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled At Gunpoint