A VOICE ACROSS THE TUNNEL
The Hindu
8898.ece
Dec 2 2009
India
Arundhati Roy talks about the issues highlighted in her latest book
of essays
Arundhati Roy’s "Listening to Grasshoppers" treads through dark
episodes in our recent past; it engages, prods, questions and compels
readers to see the stories from the other end of the spectrum. The
recently published collection of essays, written at different points
in time, treks through the Gujarat pogrom, the Parliament attack,
last year’s siege of Mumbai, the ills of a corporatised media, the
judiciary, dwells on the visit of former United States President
George W. Bush to India as well as the killing of Armenian journalist
Hrant Dink.
Many pieces in the book, published by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint
of Penguin Books, as Roy writes in her introduction, "were written
in anger, at moments when keeping quiet became harder than saying
something." She asserted it last week at the Jamia Millia Islamia,
where Roy read out from "Listening to Grasshoppers" and engaged in
a dialogue with faculty member Shohini Ghosh.
On what led Roy to her political writings, she said, "I don’t know,
often a kind of anger. I know I am being lied to by the corporate
press." She wrote, she added, "When it gets easier to write than not
to write."
Roy spoke about the subjects in the book and beyond — Kashmir,
Narmada, dams, their aftermath, Maoists and violence as a mode of
protest. The talk hinged on the thread running through the book,
"What have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What
happens when democracy has been used up?"
Hope vs reason
The book’s title is drawn from a piece of Armenian folklore about
grasshoppers unusually descending on the fields as if pre-empting
the genocide of more than a million Armenians in Turkey in 1915. On
invoking such a dark premonition, Roy said, "My book is dedicated to
those who have learned to divorce hope from reason."
She cited chapters from history where the fight has always been against
a more powerful one — in South Africa, slavery in the United States,
colonialism in India. Picking out an episode from her novel, "The
God of Small Things," where Chacko tells the story of an optimist
who rummages through a heap of horse dung hoping to find a pony,
Roy said, "There must be a pony somewhere," as an answer to all the
battles ahead.
"All of us who engage with very serious problems that face our society
are optimistic. Whether we win or not, this is the side we want to
be on….The legacy of political resistance is a complicated one,"
she said. The book, Roy said, is about the "systemic problems with
our democracy."
Though it was her political writings that invited discussion, the
writer whose ambition is to grow "into an irresponsible, giggly old
lady" also lingered on her identity as a fiction writer. "I pay a
lot of attention to how a story is told. You can move across genres
in order to tell a story how it needs to be told. To me fiction is
the simplest way of telling a complicated thing," she said.
She quoted Lennon as she looked back at her pile of non-fiction in
the past 10 years. "It happened while I was busy making other plans."
Arundhati Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers, political writings, The
God of Small Things