ESSAYS: Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracyby Arundhati Roy Hamis Hamilton, 256pp, £14.99: Booker-winning author Arundhati Roy's activism continues to find expression in non-fiction
WHILE ART is the clearest barometer of things to come, of the futures we will inherit, it is often silenced in the face of mindless violence and unbridled aggression. The Irish Famine, the Holocaust, genocides across the African continent, all caused an immediate muteness, especially within the literary artist whose very tools are words.
This is not the same impossibility of Art which pretentious and problematic philosophers like Hegel had prophesied. It is also not wholly related to the breakdown of infrastructure, such as printing presses, which results from large-scale turmoil. Rather this kind of silencing is a physical reaction, when language cannot be fathomed to portray reality.
What then are we to make of Arundhati Roy, the Indian author who is never at a loss for words but who has, so far, refused to write another novel after her Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things?The book promises so much that it is hard to think of it as a one-hit wonder. When someone of the rhetorical and linguistic calibre of Roy is "unable" to write a novel it is cause enough to pause and reflect. But Roy is constantly writing. These writings are now speeches to be delivered at mass rallies in the fields of India, or lectures to be given from podiums in universities, or essays to be published in political magazines. Unlike some authors who contentedly bask in the fickle glory of international recognition, Roy has chosen the difficult path of speaking out for the voiceless minorities in India: the Muslim, Christian, rural and tribal populations. The international recognition after the Booker win in 1997 may have given Roy mass-media attention in India, but it has also meant that every word she utters, every political rally she organises or attends, is reviewed by some anonymous mandarin in the Indian establishment.
Roy's uneasy relationship with literary stardom is mirrored in her dangerous dalliance with the so-called legal custodians of the largest democracy in the world. Roy was hounded by the Indian legislative system in 2001, after her continued protest against the building of a dam on the river Narmada, on charges of contempt of court which were baseless at the very least. (Salman Rushdie, for example, stated that the legislative ruling put the Supreme Court of India in front of the "court of world opinion".) Roy had initially come under attack in 1999 because of an essay, called The Greater Common Good, in which she had argued against the proposed height of the dam (85 meters). Roy's point that the Sardar Sarovar Dam would displace hundreds of thousands of people by submerging almost 60 villages, would destabilise the ecology of the region, and would in essence be detrimental to the politics of "progress" which gave birth to the idea of the dam in the first place, was widely corroborated. But such is the march of progress in India (and other "developing" and neo-liberal economies) that submerged villages, starving multitudes and eroded ecosystems do not alter its course.
Roy's new collection of essays, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracygives us a "detailed underview of specific events"; seemingly minor facts, unanswered questions and the forgotten realities behind India's march towards being a global superpower. Cumulatively these call into question the shining principles which India advertises, to declare itself as the largest democracy in the world. The essays focus on the most important, and tragic, moments in India's recent past.
From what many see as the state-backed genocide of Muslims in Gujarat, to the murkiness of the legal case brought against Mohammed Afzal for the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, Roy’s trenchant analysis catalogues the true threats to Indian democracy: a widespread network of Hindu fundamentalism which is firmly established in the country, a neo-liberal economy for which to succeed thousands upon thousands must perish, and a middle-class whose disdain for “dirty politics” allows a democracy to turn into a police state with draconian laws.
Unlike small-scale terrorist networks, "Hindutva", which is a supremacist ideology of Hindu cultural identity and Hindu nationalism, functions remarkably efficiently. It has its political wing in the Bharatiya Janata Party, which many claim looked on as the killings took place in Gujarat, it has a bible, written in pre-independence India by MS Golwalker, We, or, Our Nationhood Defined(a book which seeks influence from Nazism), and it has its own ideological wing (the RSS) and its militias (the VHP and the Bajrang Dal).
Unfortunately, its followers are often versed in the placebo rhetoric of politics which makes “Hindutva” all the more dangerous. If Italy was an important centre of the Renaissance but was also the birthplace of Fascism, then the land of Yoga, Ayurveda, and spiritualism is an apt location for the demonic rise of “Hindutva”. The founder of the RSS, KB Hedgewar (an ironic name when written in English), was, after all, an avid fan of Mussolini.
Words like “ambivalent” and “ambiguous” are often used to describe Indian democracy and the Indian nation-state. They are apt because some of its politicians preach industrial progress and globalisation but use an arcane grammar of cultural and religious nationalism.
This is of course not an ambivalence which we notice only in developing countries. Modern amphibious politicians, the ones who prophesise about the future using an out-of-date imagination, were fashioned in the birthplace of the nation-state, the global North; their moulds are being perfected in some of the biggest economies in the world. Roy’s book may be about Indian democracy but its lessons can be applied universally.
These 11 essays are exercises in legitimate dissent through language. They seek to re-possess the rhetoric of “progress”, “democracy”, “justice” and “cultural identity” stolen by global corporations, neo-liberals, fundamentalists, and indeed by the nation-state to suit myopic and feudal goals. Roy’s prose is often acerbic (“the relentless, everyday violence of abject poverty”), aphoristic (“being poor is not the same as being weak”) and visceral (“Every political party has mined the marrow of our secular parliamentary democracy”). Roy’s denial or inability to write fiction is not an artistic abandonment in the face of violence, perhaps because the writer knows that poetic justice seldom benefits the victim in a concrete way.
These essays, which were written as urgent interventions, cannot be diluted; a disquieting reality needs an agitated vocabulary. Fiction and non-fiction, in Roy’s words, are both ways of storytelling. But if fiction “dances out” of her, non-fiction is “wrenched out”.
Malcolm Sen teaches in the English department at the National University of Ireland, Galway