The Subaltern Speaks
Bobuq Sayed on Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy’s debut novel The God of Small Things was a cataclysmic event in world literature. Since its publication in 1997, the book has sold six million copies and is ubiquitous to this day in bookshelves, guesthouses, thrift stores and community libraries. Seemingly out of nowhere, here was this tremendous and sweeping Indian storyteller writing in English, whom no one outside of India had previously heard of, and whose prose, for a debut novel, displayed a deft structural artistry on par with career novelists.
Roy is singular in many ways. For one, she still lives in India, unlike many other postcolonial writers of her generation—such as Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, and Anita Desai—who wrote canonical texts about the subcontinent while reaping the benefits of property ownership and citizenship status abroad. This gives Roy a perspective into the true political character of contemporary India without fear of falling prey to the diaspora’s exoticising impulse to turn the homeland into a ‘semi-mythical construct’, as Edward Said describes at length in Orientalism. Moreover, her work never balks on its ideological position. Roy frequently incorporates sympathetic and nuanced portrayals of the communist movement in India as the natural response to caste and class inequality, and especially as it butts up against various decidedly nationalist and capitalist iterations of Indian society.
Roy’s debut novel follows the childhood experiences of a pair of fraternal twins, Rahel and Esthappen, as well as their mother, Ammu Ipe. Each are tyrannised by Kerala’s ‘love laws’, which help to maintain social structure in India and designate the rights of parents over their children. One memorable scene in The God of Small Things depicts the family’s car getting surrounded by communist protesters who take aim at Baby Kochamma, the aunt of Rahel and Estha. When Rahel mentions later that she might have spotted Velutha—a servant at the family’s factory and a member of the ‘untouchable’ Dalit caste—among the protesting mob, Baby Kochamma begins to cultivate an antipathy towards him. The gory demise of the charming Velutha is among the worst of any character in the book and yet his morbid fate is the sad reality facing those who are discovered fraternising across castes in India, the consequences of which still frequently lead to murder today. This narrative decision reflects both Roy’s political commitments and the caste-centric organisation of power in India, which is designed to protect certain kinds of people at the same time as it sets others up for failure, no matter their innocence.
Roy’s nonfiction takes on a similar tack. In the twenty years between the publication of her two novels and thereafter, Roy’s writing and activism has placed her political commitments at the forefront. Her nonfiction books bear little resemblance to the fictional family saga she shot to notoriety for; instead, they make good use of the essay form to lambast the erosion of civil liberties and religious plurality in Indian society. The essay is the natural home for Roy’s polemical voice, and it was this same voice that spoke out at a 2010 conference in support of independence for Kashmir, a contested territory on the border of Pakistan that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi formally declassified as semi-autonomous in 2019. Over a decade after her comments at the conference, a top Indian government official threatened to prosecute her for sedition in October 2023, a damning indication of the enduring power Roy holds and the punitive consequences for defying the party line in India today.
Across her extensive non-fiction oeuvre, a particular interest in linking the moral bankruptcy of political leadership and multinational conglomerates emerges. Yet Roy resists the impulse to use vague language or metaphor in her lucid and scathing excoriations of the burgeoning collusion between empire and corporate interests. After all, she is a writer who came of age during the Cold War, at a time where many of her anti-capitalist contemporaries were still veiling their communist sympathies in order to evade McCarthyite smear campaigns. For this reason, notwithstanding the active campaign by the Indian government to silence her, it is all the more extraordinary that the political backbone of her work remains unbroken. Though Roy is a writer of Indian nationality, it quickly became clear after The God of Small Things that she is not at all interested in stoking the nationalist flames of the Indian nation-state to relay its grand albeit myopic cultural mythos. In 2005, she turned down the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award, and in 2015 retroactively rejected another national award she was given in 1989 for her screenplay ‘In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones’, part of a movement known as ‘Award Wapsi’. Warning of ‘intellectual malnutrition’ back in 2015, long before the recent threats of sedition were levied against her, Roy articulated the increasingly deadly overreach of the Indian ethno-state in repressing free speech and the plight of ethnic minorities. As an author and activist vehement in her opposition to the Hindu supremacist and nationalist BJP-run India, as well as its ready adoption of fascist tactics, her commitment to ethical integrity remains largely unparalleled even today.
In ‘The End of Imagination’, an essay written in the aftermath of India successfully trialing tests to develop nuclear weaponry, Roy wrote, ‘The air is thick with ugliness and there’s the unmistakable stench of fascism on the breeze.’ Later, in ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’, an essay in the Guardian adapted into a book-length essay collection of the same name, she writes,
If [the United States] doesn’t find its enemy, it will have to manufacture one. […] Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we’ll lose sight of why it’s being fought in the first place.
These condemnations of imperial power identify Roy as one of the earliest and most prescient critics of the War of Terror and the racialised and militarised bloodlust that was sweeping world governments at the time. Where many politicians, artists, and public intellectuals—Christopher Hitchens, Annie Leibovitz, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria and even Mariah Carey especially come to mind—eventually watered down their initial support and manufacture of consent for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, history proved to serve as a vindication for Roy, whose insight mere weeks after 9/11 has been eerily accurate. Even now, the questions Roy asked back in 2001 remain uncannily prophetic: ‘How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for every dead investment banker?’ It’s a shame that such lucid insights into the racist vengeance of the United States were ever considered salacious, and yet the stakes of such an ardent defense of the state’s slaughter of innocent civilians are even higher for Roy, who is unshielded from the lived realities of that state’s imperialist wars, unlike her literary contemporaries who took up academic postings in Europe or North America decades ago.
Roy seems cleverly aware that the international prestige of the Booker Prize, which she won for The God of Small Things, functions as a sort of protection that emboldens her to take aim at injustice without fear of persecution or disappearance. Even still, as a result of a peaceful protest against a socially destructive dam project in India’s Narmada Valley, she was charged with contempt of court and jailed by New Delhi police. One can only wonder how much worse this penalisation would be if Roy wasn’t a well-known public figure backed by the international literary establishment.
But the backlash to her writing hasn’t only been from the carceral arm of the Indian ethno-state. Reviews of her 2010 essay collection Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy panned the ardent political disposition of the book, with The Financial Times cautioning that Roy’s ‘extreme views’ and ‘fierce hostility to a liberalisation programme’ could prove alienating to many in India, while Nirmalya Dutta at Freepress Journal went even further, writing that ‘Roy should’ve stuck to writing fiction instead of creating fiction in news’. This is a familiar castigation for many women who dare to raise their chins and speak up against the status quo, much to the chagrin of male contemporaries who would rather they shut up and learn their place. An article in The Guardian explicates this phenomena well: ‘Abroad, then, Roy is a literary star but at home the novelist is a vulnerable, isolated, and often unpopular figure—a tall poppy surrounded by sinister men with scythes.’ For many critics, there remains a frustration bordering on cognitive dissonance: they are invested in Roy’s literary superstardom—arguably more than she is herself—but cannot reckon with her class traitorship and political investment in the human rights of the Indian subaltern. They would rather read an elaborate family saga, have a work of art to escape into. They do not want a searing mirror to ongoing and depraved national injustices.
Debatably Roy’s most radical and incisive book of all is 2011’s Walking With The Comrades, a fascinating blend of memoir and reportage based on her time in the forests of Chhattisgarh in central India. There, she lives among the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency, made up almost entirely of destitute tribal people surviving in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine, and who have never had any access to education, health care or legal redress. Furthermore, as Roy notes, ‘women are raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel’.
Roy describes how, in Chhattisgarh, the tribal insurgency has ‘a history of resistance that predates Mao by centuries’, including rebellions by the Ho, the Oraon, the Kols, the Santhals, the Mundas, and the Gonds. She goes on to defend their at times violent resistance of their indomitable spirit ‘against the British, against zamindars and moneylenders’, who have in various ways tried to disenfranchise them from their land but who, each time, have failed.
When Roy arrives in 2010, the Naxalites are organising against one of many mining corporations, including Vedanta, who, with the government’s authorisation, are attempting to forcibly displace the tribal population in Orissa to extract the land’s bauxite deposits, and who cooperate with the government to achieve this goal via an assemblage of local militarised forces known as Operation Green Hunt. It’s worth noting that Israeli intelligence, training and weaponry are also used to surveil the Naxalites, revealing in startling detail how the axis of empire continues to conspire against the racialised underclasses. Roy acknowledges that the weight of history is stacked against the Naxalite insurgents. ‘If the tribals have taken up arms,’ she writes, ‘they have done so because a government that has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have—their land’. It takes a certain level of gall to remain in a country like India, which is becoming increasingly fascist in its populist pursuit of Hindu nationalism. But writing an account of tribal militias sabotaging mining companies and government soldiers—and which simultaneously doesn’t waste time or energy prevaricating about the sacrifices it takes to win—is a caliber of political courage we should all aspire to in our displays of solidarity with freedom fighters resisting extermination.
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Due to its regional specificity and political concerns—or her shift into the nonfiction form—many readers in the global north are ignorant of Roy’s extensive publication history since The God of Small Things. For that reason, there was a great deal of media hype when Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, first hit shelves in 2017. Instead of the razor-sharp focus on Aymanam, the town in Kerala where Roy’s mother’s family originates, Ministry is far more sweeping in its geographical scope and political ambitions, painting a very different portrait of what India has become in the intervening years.
The novel begins in a rundown graveyard in New Delhi where an industrious and headstrong hijra woman named Anjum has taken residence, much to the chagrin of the local neighborhood, ‘sleeping on a threadbare Persian carpet that she locked up in the day and unrolled between two graves at night’. Anjum relocated to the graveyard alone after many years in a bustling housing complex where hijra people and other misfits in Indian society live together and give each other support.
Again, there is a pivotal protest scene in the early pages of the novel, which begins after a tubby old Gandhian ‘announced a fast to the death to realize his dream of a corruption-free India’. As he demonstrates for India’s ‘Second Freedom Struggle’, he is soon joined by camera crew and a snowballing cast of attendees who gather alongside him for adjacent but heterogenous reasons: some against the privatisation of New Delhi’s garbage and sewage services and some calling for Hindi to be officially recognised as the national language of India, alongside one performance artist’s amusing entrance as they rove the crowd in an effort to question the common social aversion towards feces. This protest crawls with a melee of downtrodden members of Indian civil society as they make earnest pleas for justice and accountability, including the mothers of slain Kashmiri boys, survivors of the Bhopal riots and Marxists from the interior forest defending their land. Among these characters is also a Brahmin toilet attendant who is present in the area but not part of the protest; he takes advantage by outsourcing his job to an untouchable person, eventually accruing enough profit from this exploitation to purchase a flat. It is as if Roy smuggled the concerns of all her previous political writings into this one scene, which ends with an abandoned infant appearing out of nowhere, who Anjum takes it upon herself to adopt. The violent origin of this baby won’t be clear for another three hundred pages, but in its own way, like Salman Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, she too is a metonym for the nation.
Much like The God of Small Things, Ministry hosts a large ensemble of characters and resists a chronological structure, preferring instead to veer into subplots and storylines with unclear relevance to characters the reader has learned about already. This can produce a dizzying, incoherent effect. In one scene, Anjum survives a massacre, not because she is Hindu but because she is hijra. ‘Only one place for the Mussalman! The Graveyard or Pakistan! [...] Sister-fucking Whore Hijra. Sister-fucking Muslim Whore hijra,’ one member of the marauding mob chants while locked in the grip of a Hindu nationalist and supremacist fever. He continues: ‘Don’t kill her brother, killing Hijras brings bad luck. Bad luck! Nothing scared those murderers more than the prospect of bad luck.’ Anjum is saved, the reader can understand this. But it’s unclear how the plot arrived at this moment of mass murder, especially since Roy was describing the different figures buried in the graveyard with a tone of tranquility just a page before:
Not surprisingly, she didn’t sleep. Not that anyone in the graveyard troubled her—no djinn arrived to make her acquaintance, no ghosts threatened a haunting. The smack addicts at the northern end of the graveyard—shadows just a deeper shade of night—huddled on knolls of hospital waste in a sea of old bandages and used syringes.
The plot’s pacing seems deprioritised in lieu of showcasing an ideological position. Although these need not be mutually exclusive, it is not the only time that the craft features of the book are steamrolled in this way.
For instance, the chapter titled ‘The Landlord’ transitions to the first person point of view from the omniscient where it had been in the preceding six chapters. While this could be pulled off à la Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut) or The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende), the voice carrying this shift in Ministry feels incapable of delivering on the promise, especially after such focused investment on the spirited hijra of the khwabgah and their unconventional role in Indian society. The next 200 pages follow an entirely new set of characters, who eventually come to resolve the question of who the abandoned baby’s parents are and how she arrived at the protest, but even this comes across as ham-fisted.
Tying together the plot just isn’t Roy’s focus. In Ministry especially, it’s as though she’s more invested in the peripheral characters than she is in the main ones. She’s committed to giving voice to the subaltern, and to the diminishing opportunities for upward mobility and self-determination in an increasingly corrupt Indian society, such as when the narrator meditates on the devastation of climate disaster after a flood has inundated Srinagar:
The city disappeared. Whole housing colonies went underwater. Army camps, torture centres, hospitals, courthouses, police stations—all went down. Houseboats floated over what had once been marketplaces. Thousands of people huddled precariously on sharply sloping rooftops and in makeshift shelters set up on higher ground, waiting for rescues that never happened. A drowned city was a spectacle.
To Roy, deviation is the point. The real story is in the margins. It is my belief that Roy knew Ministry would not match the commercial success of her debut, and that she is either uninterested in the market’s preference for another tear-jerking family saga or entirely contemptuous of it. By scrutinising the Indian occupation of Kashmir, she encounters it in its various kaleidoscopic iterations, especially as she repeatedly underscores how few hands have remained clean since or before the creation of the Line of Control after the Indo-Pak war in 1971. It is particularly telling when, at one point, recorded in one of the characters’ notebook, she writes, ‘I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here: There’s too much blood for good literature’.
Indeed, there are countless descriptions in Ministry that show how a cow can be treated better than a Muslim, for instance, or that a juice box exploding under the tire of a car can lead to the senseless massacre of hundreds of Kashmiris, all of which are not at all far-fetched. Towards the end of the novel, the baby’s mother—whose pregnancy we discover was the product of a brutal gang rape at the hands of soldiers—comes to find a sanctuary of sorts in the graveyard guest house that Anjum manages to build over the years. It is the payoff the reader has been desperate for. The difficulty that accompanies the tedious middle section of the book, then, is not so much an issue of multiplicity as much as it is an issue in discernment. You cannot include it all. Even a portrait of the Indian occupation of Kashmir can never be complete, to the extent that art can ever fully capture the scale of state-sanctioned and carceral violence even if it does stoke sympathy in those not directly affected by it.
The novel necessarily functions as a microcosm of broader political themes and ideological concerns. Knowing what to include, and what not to, is one of the crucial challenges for any writer and the editorial team they work with. With its many plots and subplots, discernment may be even more important in a novel, which differs from the more straightforward argument-based form commonly employed in essays. Reading about Amrik Singh, a secondary character and military commander who murders and tortures members of the Kashmiri insurgency and then flees to the United States on the claim that he was actually the victim of the counter-insurgency operation, is an important and jarring detail, but the inclusion of how he had committed domestic violence against his wife and conducts an extramarital affair with an even more tertiary character, ACP Pinky Sodhi, does call into question whether Roy was successful in discernment.
Ultimately, what impedes Ministry from fulfilling its brilliant potential is the ordeal of wading through so much extraneous material to get a firm grip on the book. In this respect, her editorial team also bears some responsibility for failing to insist at certain points that enough was enough. Debut novelists are rarely granted the luxury of loquaciousness or verbosity, and one can only wonder whether the international attention Roy received from the Booker prize played a role in curtailing the revision and downsizing of the text. She is an activist-writer, after all, and it makes perfect sense that she would choose to spare no detail in highlighting as much injustice as possible, even at the expense of the leisurely flow of the prose. The plot in Ministry is neither neat and tidy nor so sparse it borders on nonexistent. This may induce discomfort in some readers, and yet perhaps a difficult novel with unruly characters and an inconclusive resolution is the most incisive approximation of Kashmir’s ongoing occupation and independence movement.
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Bobuq Sayed is an Afghan cultural worker based between Berlin and Miami. They are the author of A Brief History of Australian Terror, a chapbook forthcoming from Common Room Editions.