It’s been a while since I wrote The God of Small Things. These last ten years have been years of intensely public political engagement, at once dream and nightmare for a writer of fiction. It was, of course, the decade of the War on Terror and India’s debut on the world’s stage as an economic and nuclear power. To some these years have brought undreamt of wealth and prosperity, to others such penury, such starvation, such despair as to render them barely human. To the Muslims of Gujarat they brought genocide. To the Muslims of India the spectre of Hindu fascism. To more than a hundred thousand farmers they brought suicide. To corporations, prospecting for profits, they brought unimaginable returns on investment. To the adivasis of Dantewada they brought enforced displacement and a brutal, government-sponsored civil war. To people in Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland they brought continued military occupation elaborately dressed up as ‘normality’.
Radical change has also brought new ways of doing things, creating things, communicating. Above all, there has been the excitement of witnessing the dawn of a new era of people’s resistance.
The older, non-violent Gandhian movements have been reduced to functioning like advocacy groups and NGOs. Desperately trying to hold on to what little democratic space remains, most of them have buried their structural, political critiques under reformist enterprises and legal battles, bravely striving to extract some purchase for the poor from a marauding corporate-driven state. The grandest of them all, the struggle in the Narmada valley (whose critique of that great capitalist enterprise called ‘development’ has become the anthem of most resistance movements), has been all but crushed in excruciating slow motion, humiliated in full public view by every democratic institution it appealed to.
In the meantime, a range of more militant struggles have loomed into view. They have (as they should) asked profound questions of the current practice of non-violent resistance. They ask how the hungry can go on hunger strikes, how people with no incomes can refuse to pay taxes, how those with no possessions can boycott foreign goods. They ask whether these are not tactics only available to middle-class people and are meaningless to truly radical struggles. They believe that the threat of offering themselves up for harm (a practice fundamental to the principles of Satyagraha) cannot prevail over an Indian state that would be only too happy to see millions of poor people annihilate themselves.
Every day, every week, every month, more and more people are rising up in myriad ways, massing into a colossal wave of resistance—all kinds of resistance, violent, non-violent, revolutionary and criminal—that threatens to engulf the country, fill the prisons, and for better or for worse shatter the almost pornographic contentment of India Shining.
The government’s reaction has been to meet this uprising with police-firings, arrests, with threats to call out the army, and if necessary, the air force. New laws have been pushed through. They make every kind of dissent—including non-violent dissent—a criminal offence punishable by long years of imprisonment. In our trickle-down economy, the only thing that seems to have trickled down, pretty effectively, is bullets and widespread state repression. In this way, before our very eyes, our hollow-to-begin-with democracy has begun to devolve into an elaborately administered tyranny.
This is the backdrop against which I have lived and worked as a writer. This is the backdrop (which has quite often turned into a frontdrop) against which the conversations in this book have taken place. Some of them are straightforward interviews recorded in a single sitting. Others went on for days, back and forth on email, on the phone, while I was travelling. Four interviews in the section with David Barsamian called ‘The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile’ were done with the specific intention of compiling them in a book (The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, 2004, South End Press).
I found myself enjoying these semi-formal conversations because they were a flexible way of thinking aloud, of exploring ideas, personal as well as political, without having to nail them down with an artificially structured cohesion and fit them into an unassailable grand thesis. The Shape of the Beast was born and raised in that amorphous, liminal space—somewhere between the spoken and the written word.
It’s probably not wise to attempt to re-package in a preface something which exists only because it wasn’t amenable to packaging in the first place. So I’ll leave the reader to wander through these ideas in the way I did—not aimlessly, but not aimfully either.
Let me simply say that it takes more than one person to have a good conversation (though I admit I’ve had a few good ones with myself). So I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to my co-conversationalists–N. Ram, David Barsamian, Anthony Arnove, S. Anand, Amit Sengupta, P.G. Rasool and Shoma Chaudhury.
Only the very young or the very naïve believe that injustice will disappear just as soon as it has been pointed out. But sometimes it helps to outline the shape of the beast in order to bring it down.
New Delhi |
Arundhati Roy |