IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BARSAMIAN, FEBRUARY 2001.
An earlier version of ‘The Colonization of Knowledge’ appeared in The Progressive, April 2001.
Tell me about Kerala where you grew up. It’s a singular place in India for many reasons. It’s multi-religious, has a high rate of literacy and has been reasonably free from the kinds of sectarian violence that plague other parts of the country.
Kerala is a place where great religions coincide. You have Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Marxism [laughs]. They all rub each other down and metamorphize into something new. Politically Kerala is quite volatile. This might mean a clash between the Marxists and the right-wing Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS] or between different communist parties, though it’s relatively free of the kind of caste killing that you have in states like Bihar or Uttar Pradesh.1 When I first came to north India, it was almost like visiting a different century. Still, Kerala is a complex society because it’s progressive and parochial simultaneously. Even among the Syrian Christians—who are the oldest, most orthodox Christians in India—you have caste issues. If you look at the communist parties, most of their leaders are from the upper castes. When they fight elections, candidates are carefully chosen to represent the dominant caste of their respective ‘vote bank’—an example of how communism will harness the traditional caste system in its quest for power in a ‘representative’ democracy. Kerala is known for its high literacy rate, but the quality of the education itself is execrable. Kerala University is among the worst universities in India.
I don’t think that something like the Narmada valley development project could easily happen in Kerala.2 That kind of mass injustice—the eviction of hundreds of thousands of people—might be hard to pull off. On the other hand, the first thing E.M.S. Namboodiripad did when he came to power as head of the first democratically elected communist government in the world, was to get Birla, the big industrial group, to set up a huge rayon factory in Calicut.3
In the last thirty years that factory has denuded the bamboo forest, poisoned the Chaliyar river and polluted the air. There is a high incidence of cancer among the local people and the factory workers. The factory is Kerala’s biggest private industry and Kerala, being Kerala, has thirteen trade unions. In the name of employing 3,000 people it destroyed the livelihood of hundreds of thousands who lived on these natural resources: fishermen, bamboo workers, sand quarriers. (They don’t qualify as ‘workers’ in the communist dictionary.) The government and courts did nothing about it. Eventually the factory closed down on its own because it had finished off all the raw material there and wanted to move elsewhere.
Because Kerala is so riven with internecine politics, everybody disagrees with everybody else. There are hundreds of factions, and eventually everything remains frozen in a sort of political rigor mortis.
What’s the status of women generally in Kerala? Is it different from the rest of India given the high levels of education?
I know that people say that fertility rates have dropped in Kerala because of literacy.4 It’s probably true. But you have only to watch Malayalam cinema to feel sick to your stomach at the way women are treated and the way women behave. When I was a child, every film I saw had the heroine being raped. Until I was about fifteen, I believed that every woman gets raped. It was just a question of waiting for yours to happen. That was the kind of terror that was inculcated in young girls.
Growing up in a little village in Kerala was a nightmare for me. All I wanted to do was to escape, to get out, to never have to marry somebody there. Not that people were queuing to marry me [laughs]. I was the worst thing a girl could be: thin, black and clever. No looks, no dowry, no good.
Your mother, Mary, also broke the unofficial love laws.
She married a Bengali Hindu and then, what’s worse, divorced him, which meant that everyone was confirmed in their opinion that it was a terrible thing to marry for love—outside the community.
What was it like growing up without a father at home?
In Kerala everyone has what is called a tharavaad, your ancestral home. If you don’t have a father, you don’t have a tharavaad. You’re a person without an address. ‘No address’, that’s what they call you. I grew up in Ayemenem, the village in which The God of Small Things is set.5 Given the way things have turned out, it’s easy for me to say that I thank god that I had none of the conditioning that a normal middle-class Indian girl would have. I had no father, no presence of this man ‘looking after’ us and beating or humiliating our mother occasionally in exchange. I had no caste, no religion, no supervision.
It was made very clear to me early on by everyone around me that I would not be given the protection that other children around me had. Anything could have happened to me. I could have gone under. But because I didn’t, I have a vantage point from which to watch what’s going on now. I’m not rural, not urban, not completely ‘traditional’ nor wholeheartedly ‘modern’. I grew up in a village. I saw rural India at work. And yet I had the advantage of having an education. It’s like being at the top of the bottom of the heap—without the blinkered single-mindedness of the completely oppressed nor the flabby self-indulgence of the well-to-do. There must be very few girls in India whose mothers say, ‘Whatever you do, don’t get married. And don’t sleep with a man until you’re financially independent.’ It was sound advice—not that I listened [laughs]. When I see brides all dressed up for the sacrifice, it gives me a rash. I find them ghoulish, almost. I find what that whole thing means in India so frightening—to see this decorated, bejewelled creature willingly, happily entering a life of permanent subjugation.
You’re close to your mother today?
I left home when I was sixteen, for all sorts of reasons, and didn’t see her for many years. Like many mothers and daughters, we had a complicated relationship—nothing to do with our politics, though. My mother is like someone who strayed off the set of a Fellini film. But to have been brought up by a woman who never made it her mission in life to find another partner to entwine herself around is a wonderful thing.
My mother runs a school in the town of Kottayam. It’s phenomenally successful. People try to book their children into it before they are even born. Yet folks in town don’t know quite what to make of her. Or me. The problem is that we are both women who are unconventional. The least we could have done was to be unhappy. But we aren’t. That’s what bothers people: the fact that you can make these choices and be happy—like a pair of witches.
My mother’s school is very unconventional. She started it with five or six students when I was about four or five. She managed to persuade the Rotary Club of Kottayam to rent us their premises in the daytime. In the morning we would put up tables and be taught how to read and write. In the evening the men would meet and smoke and leave their cigarette butts and teacups and whisky glasses all over. Middle-class Indian men leave their rubbish everywhere for others to clean up. The next morning we would clean it all up and then it would be the school. I used to call it a sliding, folding school. People know that the education children get from my mother’s school is invaluable. And yet it makes them uncomfortable because she’s not amenable to all the rules and regulations of their society.
Now it’s complicated even further by what has happened to me since The God of Small Things was published. I was the first student from her school. In a way she’s vindicated—it’s like a B-grade film script. Suffering, belief and hard work, then beautiful retribution. You can’t imagine that something like this could happen: the way we were treated by that town, the way things were when I was a child, compared to now. Even the book, people don’t know how to deal with it. They want to embrace me and to say that this is ‘our woman’, and yet they don’t want to address what the book is about, which is their society and its intrinsic, callous brutality. They have to find ways of filtering out the parts they don’t want to address. They have to say it’s a book about children, something like that.
You were the target of a criminal case in Kerala because someone said The God of Small Things was obscene.
I was charged with corrupting public morality [laughs]. As though public morality was pure until I came along. I was at the high court in Cochin a year or two ago. I had appealed to have the case quashed, saying that for a number of reasons it wasn’t legally valid. The lawyers of both sides were ready to argue but the judge came on and said, ‘I don’t want to hear this case. Every time it comes up before me I get chest pains.’ [laughs] He postponed the hearings, and the case still sits there in court.
Since you wrote your novel, you’ve produced some remarkable political essays. What was that transition like, from writing in the world of fiction and imagination to writing about concrete things, like dams, people being displaced in the Narmada valley, globalization and Enron?
It’s only to other people that it appears to be a transition. When I was in fourth year in architecture school, I already knew that I would never practice architecture because it involves being a part of a chain of such ugly exploitation. I couldn’t do it. I was very interested in urbanization and town planning, in how a city comes to be, what it is and what it does to those who live in it.
I’ve been doing this kind of work since I was twenty-one. It’s only to the outside world, those who came to know me after The God of Small Things, that it seems like a transition. I wrote political essays before I wrote the novel. I wrote three essays called ‘The Great Indian Rape Trick’ (in two parts) and ‘The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane’ about the way the film Bandit Queen exploited Phoolan Devi and whether or not somebody should have the right to re-stage the rape of a living woman without her consent.6
I don’t see a great difference between The God of Small Things and my non-fiction. In fact, I keep saying, fiction is the truest thing there ever was. Today’s world of specialization is bizarre. Specialists and experts end up severing the links between things, isolating them, actually creating barriers that prevent ordinary people from understanding what’s happening to them. I try to do the opposite: to create links, to join the dots, to tell politics like a story, to communicate it, to make it real. To make the connection between a man with his child telling you about life in the village he lived in before it was submerged by a reservoir, and the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. The God of Small Things is a book which connects the very smallest things to the very biggest. Whether it’s the dent that a baby spider makes on the surface of water in a pond or the quality of the moonlight on a river or how history and politics intrude into your life, your house, your bedroom, your bed, into the most intimate relationships between people—parents and children, siblings and so on.
If you lose these connections, everything becomes noise, meaningless, a career plan to be on track for tenure. It’s a bit like the difference between allopathy and homeopathy or any other form of indigenous medicine. You don’t just treat the symptoms. You don’t just say, ‘Oh, you’ve got a patch on your skin, so let me give you some steroids.’ You ask, ‘Why do you have it? How has it come there? What does it mean? What are you thinking about today? Are you happy? Why has your body produced this?’ You can’t just be a skin expert. You must understand the human body and the human mind.
You’ve talked about the colonization of knowledge and its control and a Brahmin-like caste that builds walls around it. What do you think the relationship should be between knowledge and power and politics?
All over the world today people are fighting for a right to information. The organizations that control the world today—the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank—operate in complete secrecy. Contracts that goverments sign with multinationals, which affect people’s lives so intimately, are secret documents. For example, I think that the contract between Enron, the giant Houston-based energy corporation, and the government of Maharashtra should be a public document. It is the biggest contract ever signed by the Indian government. It guarantees this one corporation profits that add up to more than 60 per cent of India’s rural development budget.7 Why is it a secret document? Who is the government to sign away its public buildings as collateral? The government holds everything, whether it’s the natural resources or the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the President’s residence in New Delhi, in trust for the people that it represents. It cannot sign these things away. That contract must be a public document. That’s one aspect of the relationship between knowledge and power.
But there is a more insidious aspect. It isn’t a coincidence that 400 million Indian people are illiterate. When I say ‘illiterate’, I don’t want to imply that the kind of education that is being imparted is literacy. Education sometimes makes people float even further away from things they ought to know about. It seems to actually obscure their vision. The kind of ignorance that people with PhDs display is unbelievable. When the Supreme Court judgement about the Narmada valley came out in October 2000, I wrote an analysis of what it meant.8 Then I went to the valley. People were marching. They were so angry, they desecrated a copy of the judgement and buried it. There was a public meeting at which many adivasis and farmers spoke. A friend of mine said, ‘Isn’t it amazing that there isn’t a single point that you have brought up that they’re not already talking about with the same sophistication?’ I said, ‘No, we’re the ones who have to make the leap of faith. For them, it’s their lives.’
The Supreme Court judgement transforms their lives. It’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s not research. If you see how far away people who are educated and have become consultants or experts or whatever have floated from what’s happening, I think you’ll see the entire ‘development’ debate is a scam. The biggest problem is that what they say in their project reports and what actually happens are two completely different things. They’ve perfected the art of getting it right on paper, but that has nothing to do with what is happening on the ground.
The distance between power and powerlessness, between those who take decisions and those who have to suffer those decisions, has increased enormously. It’s a perilous journey for the poor—it’s a pitfall filled to overflowing with lies, brutality and injustice. Sitting in Washington or Geneva in the offices of the World Bank or the WTO, bureaucrats have the power to decide the fate of millions. It’s not only their decisions that we are contesting. It’s the fact that they have the power to make those decisions. No one elected them. No one said they could control our lives. Even if they made great decisions, it’s politically unacceptable.
Those men in pin-striped suits addressing the peasants of India and other poor countries all over again—assuring them that they’re being robbed for their own good, like long ago they were colonized for their own good—what’s the difference? What’s changed? The further and further away, geographically, decisions are taken, the more scope you have for incredible injustice. That is the primary issue.
The power of the World Bank is not only its money, but its ability to accumulate and manipulate knowledge. It probably employs more PhDs than any university in the world. It funds studies that suit its purpose. Then it disseminates them and produces a particular kind of world view that is supposedly based on neutral facts. But it’s not. It’s not at all. How do you deal with that? What is the difference between that and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) openly rewriting history texts and saying that we will now give you the Hindu version of history?9 The World Bank version of development is the same thing.
The Narmada valley project envisions the construction of something like 3,000 large and medium dams along the course of the Narmada river and its tributaries. It covers three states, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. There’s been a resistance movement to what was originally a World Bank scheme. The World Bank has now withdrawn from the project and the government of India has taken it over. Tell me about the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), the Save the Narmada Movement.
The remarkable thing about the NBA is that it is a cross-section of India. It is the adivasis, the upper-caste big farmers, the Dalits, and the urban middle class. It’s a forging of links between the urban and the rural, between farmers, fishermen, writers, painters and lawyers. That’s what gives it such phenomenal strength.
When dam proponents in India say, ‘You know, these middle-class people, they are against development and they’re exploiting illiterate farmers and adivasis,’ it makes me furious. After all, the whole Narmada valley development project was dreamed up by the middle-class mind. Middle-class urban engineers designed it. You can’t expect the critique to be just rural or adivasi. People try to delegitimize the involvement of the middle class, saying, ‘How can you speak on behalf of these people?’ No one is speaking on behalf of anyone. The criticism of middle-class dam opponents is an attempt to isolate the adivasis, the farmers and then crush them. After all, government policy documents aren’t in Hindi or Bhilali, and the Indian Supreme Court doesn’t work in Hindi or Bhilali.
The NBA is a fantastic example of a resistance movement in which people link hands across caste and class. It is India’s biggest, finest, most magnificent resistance movement since the independence struggle succeeded in the 1940s. There are other resistance movements in India. It’s a miracle that they exist. But I fear for their future.
When you travel from India to the west, you see that the western notion of ‘development’ has to do with a lack of imagination. A taming of the wilderness, of the human soul. An inability to understand that there is another way to live. In India, the anarchy and the wilderness still exist (though they’re under the hammer). But still, how are you going to persuade a Naga sadhu—whose life mission has been to stand naked on one leg for twenty years or to tow a car with his penis—that he can’t live without Coca-Cola? It’s an uphill task.
Estha, one of the characters in your novel, walks ‘along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans’.10
When I first met activists from the NBA, they told me, ‘We knew that you would be against big dams and the World Bank when we read The God of Small Things.’ I’ve never had that kind of a reading before [laughs].
In India, the whole pesticide issue is just unbelievable. The Green Revolution, bringing canal irrigation, borewells, and chemical pesticides and fertilizer, has now led to serious problems. After a point, the productivity of the land begins to diminish. That has started happening in places like Andhra Pradesh, where farmers have been forced to abandon traditional farming and grow cash crops. Now that move has backfired because of the import of foodgrains under new WTO rules. Hundreds of farmers in Punjab and Andhra Pradesh are committing suicide because of their growing debt. They have to invest more and more in pesticides and fertilizers. Pests have grown resistant to the chemicals. The farmers have to make large capital investments to force a little bit of productivity out of these dead lands. They end up killing themselves by drinking pesticide.
Arrogant interventions in ecosystems that you don’t understand can be ruinous. In the Northeast of India, some states started exporting frog legs to France. It became a big earner of foreign exchange. As the frogs began to disappear, the pests they used to eat began to destroy crops. The states started having to buy pesticides (with World Bank loans), which eventually cost more than the money they made by exporting frog legs.
I think it was in Tanzania that farmers began to shoot hippos because they were raiding and destroying the crops. When the hippos disappeared, so did the fish in the river. Later they discovered that these fish used to lay their eggs in the shit of the hippos. When human beings don’t respect something that they don’t understand, they end up with consequences that you cannot possibly foretell.
The western notion of thinking that you must understand everything can also be destructive. Why can’t we just be satisfied with not understanding something? It’s all right. It’s wonderful to not understand something. To respect and revere the earth’s secrets.
There was a particular mountain in the Himalayas that hadn’t ever been climbed. Some climbers wanted to climb it. I had a friend who led a campaign to allow that one peak to remain unclimbed. There’s a kind of humility in that. I don’t mean to take an extreme position and say that science is bad. But there ought to be a balance between curiosity, grace, humility and letting things be. Must everything be poked at and prodded and intervened in and understood?
Proponents of the Narmada valley project say that it will bring water to the thirsty and crops to the parched land of three states. What’s wrong with that?
I’ve written about this extensively in my essay ‘The Greater Common Good’.11 They say the Sardar Sarovar dam is going to take water to Kutch and Saurashtra, the regions of Gujarat which were the hardest hit by the earthquake in January 2001. They have a terrible drought in these areas. But if you look at the government’s own plans, you’ll see there is no possibility that the water will get to these regions, even if everything that they say were to work. For example, they arbitrarily assume an irrigation efficiency of 60 per cent. No irrigation project has ever been more than 35 per cent efficient in India. Kutch and Saurashtra are right at the tail end of this big canal system, but all the politically powerful areas are right up at the head of the canal. They will take away all the water. Already big sugar factories have been licenced before the dam has been built. According to the project, sugar was not going to be allowed to be planted. Huge five-star hotels and golf courses have been built.
Even if all this hadn’t happened, according to the Gujarat government’s own plan, the Sardar Sarovar dam will irrigate 1.2 per cent of the cultivable area of Kutch and 9 per cent of Saurashtra. That’s forgetting about the irrigation efficiency and the sugar factories, about the fact that rivers close to Kutch and Saurashtra are being dammed and the water is being taken to central Gujarat.
In fact, when the Supreme Court judgement came and the Gujarat BJP government had a huge ceremony to inaugurate the beginning of the construction of the dam, Kutch and Saurashtra boycotted it. They said, ‘You are just using us to mop up 85 per cent of Gujarat’s irrigation budget—and in the process not leaving any money for local water harvesting or for more local solutions to this problem.’
That’s one thing. The second is that they don’t even ask, ‘Why is there a drought in Kutch and Saurashtra?’ The reason is that the government has systematically cut down all the mangrove forests. They have mined groundwater indiscriminately and so there’s an ingress of seawater from the coast. They have big industrial complexes that poison whatever groundwater remains. The Gujarat government will do nothing, nothing at all to control this kind of thing.
If they want to take water from the Narmada to Kutch just to make a political statement, of course they can, but it will be as a circus—an economically unviable political circus—like taking red wine or champagne to Kutch. Narmada is so far away from Kutch and Saurashtra that it’s a joke to take all that water all the way up through Gujarat. For the price of the Sardar Sarovar dam, you could finance local water-harvesting schemes in every single village in the state of Gujarat.12
What prompted the World Bank to pull out of the project?
The people’s resistance movement in 1993 and 1994. The World Bank was forced to set up an independent review. They sent out a committee under a man named Bradford Morse. The Morse Report, which is now a kind of landmark, said in no uncertain terms that the Bank should pull out. Of course the Bank tried to cover up the report. It sent another committee, the Pamela Cox Committee, which tried to say everything’s fine. But Morse had agreed that he would do this study only provided it was an independent report. Finally the World Bank was forced to pull out.13 This is unprecedented in the murky history of the World Bank.
The government of India seems to be determined to complete the Narmada project. What’s driving it?
First of all, you must understand that in India the myth of big dams is sold to us from the time we’re three years old. In every school textbook, we learn that Pandit Nehru said ‘dams are the temples of modern India’.14 Criticizing dams is equated with being antinational.
The thing about dams and the struggle against them is that people have to understand that they’re just monuments to corruption and they are undemocratic. They centralize natural resources, snatch them away from people, and then redistribute them to a favoured few.
The first dam built on the Narmada was in Madhya Pradesh, the Bargi dam, which was completed in 1990. They said it would displace 70,000 people and submerge 101 villages. One day they just filled the reservoir. 114,000 people, almost twice the government’s projection, were displaced and 162 villages were submerged. They were just driven from their homes when the waters rose. They had to run up the hill with the cattle and children. Ten years later, that dam irrigates 5 per cent of the land that they said it would. It irrigates less land than it submerged.
In Gujarat, the Sardar Sarovar dam has been used by every political party as a campaign issue for years. The amount of disinformation about this dam is extraordinary. For contractors and politicians, just the building of the dam makes them a lot of money.
Forty per cent of the big dams that are being built in the world today are in India. Tens of millions of Indians have already been displaced by many of the dam projects.15 What happens to these people? What kind of resettlement or compensation is provided by the government?
Nobody knows. When I was writing ‘The Greater Common Good’, what shocked me more than the figures that do exist and are thrown around and fought over by pro-dam and anti-dam activists are the figures that don’t exist. The Indian government does not have any estimate of how many people have been displaced by big dams. I think that’s not just a failure of the state, but a failure of the intellectual community. The reason that these figures don’t exist is that most of the displaced are the non-people, the adivasis and the Dalits.
I did a sanity check based on a study of fifty-four dams done by the Indian Institute of Public Administration. According to that study, the number of reservoir-displaced, which is only one kind of displacement, came to an average of something like 44,000 people per dam. I said, ‘Let’s assume that these fifty-four dams are the bigger of the big dams. Let’s quarter this average and say each dam displaced 10,000 people. We know that India has built 3,300 big dams in the last fifty years. So just a sanity check says that it’s 33 million people displaced.’ At the time I wrote this, people mocked this figure. Now, the India Country Study done by the World Commission on Dams puts that figure at as much as 56 million.16
Today, India doesn’t have a national resettlement policy. The government of Madhya Pradesh, where 80 per cent of Sardar Sarovar-displaced people are from, gave a written affidavit in court saying it did not have enough land to resettle people. The Supreme Court still ordered the construction of the dam to go ahead.
What happens to the people who are driven out from their villages by these development projects and by the general garrotting of India’s rural economy? They all migrate to the cities. And there, again, they are non-citizens, living in slums. They are subject to being evicted at a moment’s notice, any time a new office complex or a five-star hotel chain covets the land they live on.
You compare the uprooting of these people to a kind of garbage disposal.
That’s exactly what it is. The Indian government has managed to turn the concept of non-violence on its head. Non-violent repression. Unlike, say, China or Turkey or Indonesia, the government of India doesn’t mow down its people. It doesn’t kill people who refuse to move. It just continues to pursue the brutal path of this particular model of ‘development’ and to ignore the consequences. Because of the caste system, because of the fact that there is no social link between the people who make the decisions and the people who suffer the decisions, it just goes ahead and does what it wants. It’s quite an efficient way of doing things. India has a very good reputation in the world as a democracy, as a government that cares. But, that’s just not true.
But you say about your own politics that you’re ‘not an anti-development junkie nor a proselytizer for the eternal upholding of custom and tradition’.17
How can I be? As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I’ve spent my whole life fighting tradition. There’s no way that I want to be a traditional Indian woman. So I’m not talking about being against development. I’m talking about the politics of development. I’m talking about more development, not less. More democracy, not less. More modernization, not less. How do you break down this completely centralized, undemocratic process of decision-making? How do you make sure that it’s decentralized and that people have power over their lives and their natural resources? I don’t even believe in the modern business-like notion of ‘efficiency’. It dovetails with totalitarianism, fascism. People say, ‘If it’s decentralized it will be inefficient.’ I think that’s fine. Let it be inefficient.
Today the Indian government is trying to present privatization as the alternative to the state, to public enterprise. But privatization is only a further evolution of the centralized state, where the state says that they have the right to give the entire power production in Maharashtra to Enron. They don’t have the right. The infrastructure of the public sector in India has been built up over the last fifty years with public money. They don’t have the right to sell it to Enron. They cannot do that.
You say private enterprise is going to be more efficient? Look at what Enron is doing. Is that efficient? The same thing is happening in the telecom sector.
Three-quarters of our country lives on the edge of the market economy.18 You can’t tell them that only those who can afford water can have it.
Talk about the material you covered in your essay, ‘The End of Imagination’:19 the nuclear testing in India, followed by Pakistan. You say in India the official reasons given for the testing are threats from China and Pakistan and exposing western hypocrisy.
When India carried out the nuclear tests in May 1998, within weeks the Pakistani infiltration of Kargil in Kashmir began. The Indian government didn’t do anything about it because they knew how embarrassing it would be to actually admit that the nuclear tests triggered a war. So they allowed it to happen. Hundreds of soldiers got killed.20 The Indian government and the mainstream media used the Kargil war to whip up more patriotism. It’s so frightening, the nationalism in the air in India. I’m terrified by it. It can be used to do anything.
Some of the cheering young Hindu men who were thrilled with the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh were also celebrating the nuclear tests.
And the same ones were protesting about Coke. The same Bal Thackeray of Shiv Sena who met Rebecca Mark of Enron and signed the 30-billion-dollar deal wants to ban birthday parties and Valentine’s Day because they are an attack on Indian culture.21 Indian intellectuals today feel radical when they condemn communalism, but not many people are talking about the link between privatization, globalization and communalism. Globalization suits the Indian elite. Communalism doesn’t. It doesn’t create a good ‘investment climate’. I think they have to be addressed together, not separately. They are both two sides of the same coin. Growing religious fundamentalism is directly linked to globalization and to privatization. The Indian government is talking about selling its entire power sector to foreign multinationals, but when the consequences of that become hard to manage, the government immediately starts saying, ‘Should we build the Ram temple in Ayodhya?’ Everyone goes baying off in that direction. Meanwhile, contracts are signed.
It’s like a game. That’s something we have to understand. It’s like a pincer action. With one hand they’re selling the country out to multinationals. With the other they’re orchestrating this howling cultural nationalism. On the one hand you’re saying that the world is a global village. On the other hand governments spend millions and millions patrolling their borders with nuclear weapons.
You use a metaphor of two convoys of trucks, one very large one with many people going off in the darkness and another, much smaller, going into the digital promised land.22
Every night outside my house in New Delhi I pass this road gang of emaciated labourers digging a trench to lay fibre optic cables to speed up our digital revolution. They work by the light of a few candles. That is what is happening in India today. The convoy that melts into the darkness and disappears doesn’t have a voice. It doesn’t exist on TV. It doesn’t have a place in the national newspapers. And so it doesn’t exist. The people that are in the little convoy on their way to this glittering destination at the top of the world don’t care to see or even acknowledge the larger convoy heading into the darkness.
In Delhi, the city I live in, the cars are getting bigger and sleeker, the hotels are getting posher, the gates higher. The guards outside houses are no longer the old chowkidars, watchmen, they are young fellows with uniforms. And yet everywhere the poor are packed like lice into every crevice in the city. People don’t see that any more. It’s as if you shine a light very brightly in one place, the darkness deepens around it. They don’t want to know what’s happening. The people who benefit from this situation can’t imagine that the world is not a better place.
It’s part of that regular diet of contradictions that Indians live with. You made a decision, or the decision was made for you, to identify with, or to be part of, that large convoy.
I can’t be a part of the large convoy because it’s not a choice that you can make. It’s a choice that’s made by your circumstances. The fact that I’m an educated person means that I can’t be on that convoy. I’m too privileged. Besides, I don’t want to be on it. I don’t want to be a victim. I don’t want to disappear into the darkness.
You talk passionately about taking sides, about not being a neutral observer, reporting on events in a distant way.
Once you’ve seen certain things, you can’t un-see them, and saying nothing is as political an act as speaking out …There’s no innocence and there isn’t any sense in which any of us is perfect or not invested in the system. If I put money in a bank it’s going to fund the bombs and the dams. When I pay tax, I’m investing in projects I disagree with. I’m not a completely blameless person campaigning for the good of mankind. But from that un-pristine position, is it better to say nothing or to say something? One is not powerful enough nor powerless enough not to be invested in the process. Most of us are completely enmeshed in the way the world works. All our hands are dirty.
I read somewhere that you once lived in a squatter’s colony within the walls of Delhi’s Ferozeshah Kotla in a small hut with a tin roof.
That’s true. But it’s not tragic. It was fun [laughs]. As I said, I left home when I was sixteen. I had to put myself through college. So I used to live there because the mess manager of the canteen in the school of architecture hostel had this little hut. Ferozeshah Kotla was right next to my college. I used to live there with my boyfriend and a whole lot of other people who could not afford to live in the hostel.
What was your experience working in the film industry in India?
I worked on a few films that were a part of the lunatic fringe, films that no one really wanted to see. It wasn’t at all part of the film industry. It was very marginal.
Some of these stories that you’re telling about resistance and the NBA would seem to be grist for a film or a television series. Is anything like that going on in India?
No. There are a lot of documentary films. Few of them transcend the boundaries between activism and art. I think there are tremendous stories for making films, like the Bhopal tragedy that Union Carbide was responsible for. But I’m a loner. I can’t bear the idea of working with a film crew, negotiating with the producer, actors and all the rest of it. I’ve done it—it’s not my thing.
You could write a screenplay.
But then they’ll fuck it up [laughs]. One of the things about writing The God of Small Things was that I negotiated with nobody. It was just me and my book. A fantastic way to spend four and a half years of my life. No negotiations.
In January 2000, in a village on the banks of the Narmada, there was a protest against the Maheshwar dam. You were among many who were arrested there.
The Maheshwar dam, which is the dam upstream from the Sardar Sarovar, is India’s first private hydroelectric project. Its chief promoter is a textile company called S. Kumars. The resistance managed to kick out a whole host of private companies, starting with US companies like Pacgen and Ogden, then German firms like Siemens and HypoVereinsbank. Last year, the villagers decided that they were going to take over the dam site.
I was in the valley in a village called Sulgaon. All night, people were arriving from the surrounding villages, by tractor, by jeep, on foot. By three in the morning there were about 5,000 of us. We started walking in the dark to the dam site. The police knew that the dam site would be captured, but they didn’t know from where the people would come.
It was unforgettable. Five thousand people, mostly villagers, but also people from the cities, lawyers, architects, journalists, walking through these byways and crossing streams in absolute silence. There was not a person that lit a bidi or coughed or cleared their throats.
Occasionally a whole group of women would sit down and pee and then keep walking. Finally, at dawn, we arrived and took over the dam site. For hours, the police surrounded us. Then there was a lathi, baton, charge. They arrested thousands of people, including me. They dumped me in a private car that belonged to S. Kumars. It was so humiliating. The jails were full. Because I was there at that time, there was a lot of press and less violence than usual. But people have captured the Maheshwar dam site so many times before, and it doesn’t even make it to the news.
What is the status of the Narmada valley project now that the Supreme Court decision of October 2000 has granted permission for the completion of the Sardar Sarovar dam in the state of Gujarat?
The status is totally uncertain. Gujarat is in a shambles from the earthquake last month. What is happening there is ugly. The Gujarat government, and its goon squad the VHP, is commandeering all the relief money. There are reports of how Muslims, Christians and Dalits are being left out of the reconstruction efforts. In Bhuj, one of the worst-hit towns, they have seventeen different categories of tents for the seventeen different castes. It’s infuriating to think of how much money these guys must have received from international donors and what they will end up using it for.
Everyone is keeping very quiet about what effect the earthquake will have on the dam. Sardar Sarovar is on a fault line. This is a point that’s been brought up again and again. Everybody’s ignored it.23
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad or VHP is the religious arm of the ruling party, the BJP.
It’s a sort of extreme right-wing. There’s the RSS and even more right-wing than the RSS is the VHP. Even further to the right is the Bajrang Dal. They are the ones burning churches, destroying mosques and killing priests.24
You make the connection between the rise of extreme Hindu-based nationalism and globalization. Are there any local factors at work here?
There are plenty of local factors, but for me this connection explains how disempowerment works. When you have dispossession and disempowerment on this scale as a result of corporate globalization, the anger that it creates can be channelled in bizarre and dangerous ways. India’s nuclear tests were conducted to shore up people’s flagging self-esteem. India is still flinching from the cultural insult of British colonialism, still looking for its identity. It’s about all that.
Are you thinking about writing any more fiction?
I need to write fiction like you need to eat or exercise, but right now it’s so difficult. At the moment, I don’t know how to manage my life. Just one writer who says quite simply to the people in the Narmada valley, ‘I’m on your side,’ leads to so much love and so much affection and so many people asking you to join them. Just the fact that you’re known as somebody who’s willing to speak out opens you to a universe of conflict and pain and incredible suffering. It’s impossible to avert your eyes. Sometimes, of course, it becomes ludicrous. A woman rang me up and said, ‘Oh, darling, I thought that piece on the Narmada was fantastic. Now could you do one for me on child abuse?’ I said, ‘Sure. For or against?’
People just assume you’re a gun for hire, you can write about anything. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to make the space to say, ‘I’m writing a book now, and I’m not going to be able to do x or y.’ I would love to.
You are a celebrity within India and also outside. How do you handle this?
As a rule I never do things because I’m a celebrity. Also I never avoid doing things because I’m a celebrity. I try to ignore that whole noisy production. Of course I have the whole business of people asking me to inaugurate this or that. I never do that. I stand by what I write. That’s what I am—a writer. If I began to believe the publicity about myself, whether for or against, it would give me a very absurd idea of myself. I know that there’s a very fine balance between accepting your own power with grace and misusing it.
When I say my own power, I don’t mean as a celebrity. Everybody, from the smallest person to the biggest, has some kind of power and even the most powerless person has a responsibility. I don’t feel responsible for everybody. Everybody is also responsible for themselves. I don’t ever want to portray myself as a representative of the voiceless or anything like that. I’m scared of that.
Gandhi called India’s independence ‘a wooden loaf’. Many of the issues plaguing the subcontinent are rooted in its partition. What’s your perspective on relations between India and Pakistan? India is a multi-cultural, multi-layered country and has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world.
Partition has left a huge and bloody legacy between India and Pakistan. I think both countries are doing their best to keep it alive. The reasons for this range from actual communal hatred and religious suspicion, to governments and bureaucrats making money off arms deals. They use this manufactured conflict and hypernationalism to gain political mileage in their own countries.
I sense some optimism on your part on what you call the ‘inherent anarchy’ of India to resist the tide of globalization.
I don’t know whether to be optimistic or not. When I’m outside the cities, I do feel optimistic. In India, unlike perhaps many other countries which are being broken by these new forms of colonialism, there is such grandeur. Ultimately, people prefer to eat rotis and idlis and dosas rather than McDonald’s burgers. Whether it’s Indian food or textiles, there’s so much beauty. I don’t know whether they can kill it. I want to think they can’t. I don’t think that there is anything as beautiful as a sari. Can you kill it? Can you corporatize a sari?
Just before I came here, I went to a market in Delhi. There was a whole plate of different kinds of rajma dal, lentils. Today, that’s all it takes to bring tears to your eyes, to look at all the kinds of rajma that there are, all the kinds of rice, and think that they don’t want this to exist.
They want to privatize it and control the seeds.
They want to do the same to cultures and people and languages and songs. Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.
‘I’m not rural, not urban, not completely “traditional” nor wholeheartedly “modern”. I grew up in a village. I saw rural India at work. And yet I had the advantage of having an education. It’s like being at the top of the bottom of the heap—without the blinkered single-mindedness of the completely oppressed nor the flabby self-indulgence of the well-to-do.
‘Yet, just as inevitable as the journey that the powerful undertake is the journey undertaken by those who are engaged in the business of resisting power. Just as power has a physics, those of us who are opposed to power also have a physics. Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.’