My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  There are other egregious assumptions in the “survey.” Annexure Six of the resettlement plan states that there are 176 trees and thirty-eight wells in all the affected sixty-one villages combined. The villagers point out that in just a single village— Pathrad—there are forty wells and more than 4,000 trees.

  As with trees and wells, so with people.

  There is no accurate estimate of how many people will be affected by the dam. Even the project authorities admit that new surveys must be done. So far they’ve managed to survey only one out of the sixty-one villages. The number of affected households rose from 190 (in the preliminary survey) to 300 (in the new one).

  In circumstances such as these, it’s impossible for even the NBA to have an accurate idea of the number of project-affected people. Their rough guess is about fifty thousand. More than half of them are Dalits, Kevats, and Kahars—ancient communities of ferrymen, fisherfolk, sand quarriers, and cultivators of the riverbed. Most of them own no land, but the river sustains them and means more to them than to anyone else. If the dam is built, thousands of them will lose their only source of livelihood. Yet simply because they are landless, they do not qualify as project affected and will not be eligible for rehabilitation.

  Jalud is the first of the sixty-one villages slated for submergence in the reservoir of the dam.56 As early as 1985, twelve families, mostly Dalit, who had small holdings near the dam site had their land acquired. When they protested, cement was poured into their water pipes, their standing crops were bulldozed, and the police occupied the land by force. All twelve families are now landless and work as wage laborers. The new “private” initiative has made no effort to help them.

  According to the environmental clearance from the central government, the people affected by the project ought to have been resettled in 1997. To date, S. Kumars hasn’t even managed to produce a list of project-affected people, let alone land on which they are to be resettled. Yet construction continues. S. Kumars is so well entrenched with the state government that they don’t even need to pretend to cover their tracks.

  This is how India works.

  This is the genesis of the Maheshwar Dam. This is the legacy that the Ogden Energy Group of the United States was so keen to inherit. What they don’t realize is that the fight is on. Over the last three years, the struggle against the Maheshwar Dam has grown into a veritable civil disobedience movement, though you wouldn’t know it if you read the papers. The mainstream media is hugely dependent on revenue from advertising. S. Kumars sponsors massive advertisements for their blended suitings. After their James Bond campaign with Pierce Brosnan, they’ve signed India’s biggest film star—Hrithik Roshan—as their star campaigner.57 It’s extraordinary how much silent admiration and support a hunk in a blended suit can evoke.

  Over the last two years, tens of thousands of villagers have captured the dam site several times and halted construction work.58 Protests in the region forced two companies, Bayernwerk and VEW of Germany, to withdraw from the project.59 The German company Siemens remained in the fray (angling for an export credit guarantee from Hermes, the German ECA).

  In the summer of 2000, the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development sent in a team of experts headed by Richard Bissell (former chairman of the Inspection Panel of the World Bank) to undertake an independent review of the resettlement and rehabilitation aspects of the project.60 The report, published on June 15, 2000, was unambiguous that resettlement and rehabilitation of people displaced by the Maheshwar Dam was simply not possible.

  At the end of August, Siemens withdrew its application for a Hermes guarantee.61

  The people of the valley don’t get much time to recover between bouts of fighting. In September, S. Kumars was part of the Indian prime minister’s business entourage when he visited the United States.62 Desperate to replace Siemens, they were hoping to convert their memorandum of understanding with Ogden into a final contract. That, fortunately, didn’t happen, and now Ogden has withdrawn from the Maheshwar project.63

  The only time I have ever felt anything close to what most people would describe as national pride was when I walked one night with four thousand people toward the Maheshwar Dam site, where we knew hundreds of armed policemen were waiting for us. Since the previous evening, people from all over the valley had begun to gather in a village called Sulgaon. They came in tractors, in bullock carts, and on foot. They came prepared to be beaten, humiliated, and taken to prison.

  We set out at three in the morning. We walked for three hours—farmers, fisherfolk, sand quarriers, writers, painters, filmmakers, lawyers, journalists. All of India was represented. Urban, rural, touchable, untouchable. This alliance is what gives the movement its raw power, its intellectual rigor, and its phenomenal tenacity. As we crossed fields and forded streams, I remember thinking: “This is my land, this is the dream to which the whole of me belongs, this is worth more to me than anything else in the world.” We were not just fighting against a dam. We were fighting for a philosophy. For a worldview.

  We walked in utter silence. Not a throat was cleared. Not a beedi lit. We arrived at the dam site at dawn. Though the police were expecting us, they didn’t know exactly where we would come from. We captured the dam site. People were beaten, humiliated, and arrested.

  I was arrested and pushed into a private car that belonged to S. Kumars. I remember feeling a hot stab of shame—as quick and sharp as my earlier sense of pride. This was my land, too. My feudal land. Where even the police have been privatized. (On the way to the police station, they complained that S. Kumars had given them nothing to eat all day.) That evening there were so many arrests, the jail could not contain the people. The administration broke down and abandoned the jail. The people locked themselves in and demanded answers to their questions. So far, none have been forthcoming.

  A Dutch documentary filmmaker recently asked me a very simple question: What can India teach the world?

  A documentary filmmaker needs to see to understand. I thought of three places I could take him to.

  First, to a “Call Center College” in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi. I thought it would be interesting for a filmmaker to see how easily an ancient civilization can be made to abase itself completely. In a Call Center College, hundreds of young English-speaking Indians are being groomed to staff the backroom operations of giant transnational companies.64 They are trained to answer telephone queries from the United States and the United Kingdom (on subjects ranging from a credit card inquiry to advice about a malfunctioning washing machine or the availability of cinema tickets). On no account must the caller know that his or her inquiry is being attended to by an Indian sitting at a desk on the outskirts of Delhi. The Call Center Colleges train their students to speak in American and British accents. They have to read foreign papers so they can chitchat about the news or the weather. On duty they have to change their given names. Sushma becomes Susie, Govind becomes Jerry, Advani becomes Andy. (Hi! I’m Andy. Gee, hot day, innit? Shoot, how can I help ya?) Actually it’s worse: Sushma becomes Mary. Govind becomes David. Perhaps Advani becomes Ulysses.

  Call center workers are paid one-tenth of the salaries of their counterparts abroad. From all accounts, call centers are billed to become a multibillion-dollar industry.65 Recently the giant Tata industrial group announced its plans to redeploy twenty thousand of its retrenched workers in call centers after a brief “period of training” for the business, such as “picking up [the] American accent and slang.”66 The news report said that the older employees may find it difficult to work at night, a requirement for US-based companies, given the time difference between India and the United States.

  The second place I thought I’d take the filmmaker was another kind of training center, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) shakha, where the terrible backlash to this enforced abasement is being nurtured and groomed. Where ordinary people march around in khaki shorts and learn that amassing nuclear weapons, religious bigotry, misogyny, homop
hobia, book burning, and outright hatred are the ways in which to retrieve a nation’s lost dignity. Here he might see for himself how the two arms of government work in synergy. How they have evolved and pretty near perfected an extraordinary pincer action—while one arm is busy selling the nation off in chunks, the other, to divert attention, is orchestrating a baying, howling, deranged chorus of cultural nationalism. It would be fascinating to actually see how the inexorable ruthlessness of one process results in the naked, vulgar terrorism perpetrated by the other. They’re Siamese twins—Advani and Andy. They share organs. They have the ability to say two entirely contradictory things simultaneously, to hold all positions at all times. There’s no separating them.

  The third place I thought I’d take him was the Narmada valley. To witness the ferocious, magical, magnificent, tenacious, and above all nonviolent resistance that has grown on the banks of that beautiful river.

  What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain. But it is a terrible, terrible thing. To contemplate its girth and circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible. The only way to combat it is by fighting specific wars in specific ways. A good place to begin would be the Narmada valley.

  The borders are open. Come on in. Let’s bury Rumpelstiltskin.

  First published in Outlook, November 27, 2000.

  THE LADIES HAVE FEELINGS, SO … SHALL WE LEAVE IT TO THE EXPERTS?

  India lives in several centuries at the same time. Somehow we manage to progress and regress simultaneously. As a nation we age by pushing outward from the middle—adding a few centuries on to either end of our extraordinary CV. We greaten like the maturing head of a hammerhead shark with eyes looking in diametrically opposite directions. I have no doubt that even here in North America you have heard that Germany is considering changing its immigration laws in order to import Indian software engineers.1 I have even less doubt that you’ve heard of the Naga Sadhu at the Kumbh Mela who towed the district commissioner’s car with his penis while the commissioner sat in it solemnly with his wife and children.2

  As Indian citizens we subsist on a regular diet of caste massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breaking and fashion shows, church burnings and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labor and the digital revolution, female infanticide and the Nasdaq crash, husbands who continue to burn their wives for dowry and our delectable stockpile of Miss Worlds. I don’t mean to put a simplistic value judgment on this peculiar form of “progress” by suggesting that Modern is Good and Traditional is Bad—or vice versa. What’s hard to reconcile oneself to, both personally and politically, is the schizophrenic nature of it. That applies not just to the ancient/modern conundrum, but to the utter illogic of what appears to be the current national enterprise. In the lane behind my house, every night I walk past road gangs of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber-optic cables to speed up our digital revolution. In the bitter winter cold, they work by the light of a few candles.

  It’s as though the people of India have been rounded up and loaded onto two convoys of trucks (a huge big one and a tiny little one) that have set off resolutely in opposite directions. The tiny convoy is on its way to a glittering destination somewhere near the top of the world. The other convoy just melts into the darkness and disappears. A cursory survey that tallies the caste, class, and religion of who gets to be on which convoy would make a good Lazy Person’s Concise Guide to the History of India. For some of us, life in India is like being suspended between two of the trucks, one in each convoy, and being neatly dismembered as they move apart, not bodily, but emotionally and intellectually.

  Of course India is a microcosm of the world. Of course versions of what happens there happen everywhere. Of course, if you’re willing to look, the parallels are easy to find. The difference in India is only in the scale, the magnitude, and the sheer proximity of the disparity. In India your face is slammed right up against it. To address it, to deal with it, to not deal with it, to try and understand it, to insist on not understanding it, to simply survive it—on a daily, hourly basis—is a fine art in itself. Either an art or a form of insular, inward-looking insanity. Or both.

  To be a writer—a supposedly “famous” writer—in a country where 300 million people are illiterate is a dubious honor.3 To be a writer in a country that gave the world Mahatma Gandhi, that invented the concept of nonviolent resistance, and then, half a century later, followed that up with nuclear tests, is a ferocious burden. (Though no more ferocious a burden, it has to be said, than being a writer in a country that has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the earth several times over.) To be a writer in a country where something akin to an undeclared civil war is being waged on its subjects in the name of “development” is an onerous responsibility. When it comes to writers and writing, I use words like onerous and responsibility with a heavy heart and not a small degree of sadness.

  This is what I’m here to talk to you, to think aloud with you, about. What is the role of writers and artists in society? Do they have a definable role? Can it be fixed, described, characterized in any definite way? Should it be?

  Personally, I can think of few things more terrifying than if writers and artists were charged with an immutable charter of duties and responsibilities that they had to live and work by. Imagine if there was this little black book—a sort of Approved Guide to Good Writing—that said: All writers shall be politically conscious and sexually moral, or: All writers should believe in God, globalization, and the joys of family life …

  Rule One for a writer, as far as I’m concerned, is There Are No Rules. And Rule Two (since Rule One was made to be broken) is There Are No Excuses for Bad Art. Painters, writers, singers, actors, dancers, filmmakers, musicians are meant to fly, to push at the frontiers, to worry the edges of the human imagination, to conjure beauty from the most unexpected things, to find magic in places where others never thought to look. If you limit the trajectory of their flight, if you weight their wings with society’s existing notions of morality and responsibility, if you truss them up with preconceived values, you subvert their endeavor.

  A good or great writer may refuse to accept any responsibility or morality that society wishes to impose on her. Yet the best and greatest of them know that if they abuse this hard-won freedom, it can only lead to bad art. There is an intricate web of morality, rigor, and responsibility that art, that writing itself, imposes on a writer. It’s singular, it’s individual, but nevertheless it’s there. At its best, it’s an exquisite bond between the artist and the medium. At its acceptable end, it’s a sort of sensible cooperation. At its worst, it’s a relationship of disrespect and exploitation.

  The absence of external rules complicates things. There’s a very thin line that separates the strong, true, bright bird of the imagination from the synthetic, noisy bauble. Where is that line? How do you recognize it? How do you know you’ve crossed it? At the risk of sounding esoteric and arcane, I’m tempted to say that you just know. The fact is that nobody—no reader, no reviewer, agent, publisher, colleague, friend, or enemy—can tell for sure. A writer just has to ask herself that question and answer it as honestly as possible. The thing about this “line” is that once you learn to recognize it, once you see it, it’s impossible to ignore. You have no choice but to live with it, to follow it through. You have to bear with all its complexities, contradictions, and demands. And that’s not always easy. It doesn’t always lead to compliments and standing ovations. It can lead you to the strangest, wildest places. In the midst of a bloody military coup, for instance, you could find yourself fascinated by the mating rituals of a purple sunbird, or the secret life of captive goldfish, or an old aunt’s descent into madness. And nobody can say that there isn’t truth and art and beauty in that. Or, on the contrary, in the midst of putative peace, you could, like me, be unfortunate enough to stumble on a silent war. The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, kee
ping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.

  Today, perhaps more so than in any other era in history, the writer’s right to free speech is guarded and defended by the civil societies and state establishments of the most powerful countries in the world. Any overt attempt to silence or muffle a voice is met with furious opposition. The writer is embraced and protected. This is a wonderful thing. The writer, the actor, the musician, the filmmaker—they have become radiant jewels in the crown of modern civilization. The artist, I imagine, is finally as free as he or she will ever be. Never before have so many writers had their books published. (And now, of course, we have the Internet.) Never before have we been more commercially viable. We live and prosper in the heart of the marketplace. True, for every so-called success there are hundreds who “fail.” True, there are myriad art forms, both folk and classical, myriad languages, myriad cultural and artistic traditions that are being crushed and cast aside in the stampede to the big bumper sale in Wonderland. Still, there have never been more writers, singers, actors, or painters who have become influential, wealthy superstars. And they, the successful ones, spawn a million imitators, they become the torchbearers, their work becomes the benchmark for what art is, or ought to be.

  Nowadays in India the scene is almost farcical. Following the recent commercial success of some Indian authors, Western publishers are desperately prospecting for the next big Indo-Anglian work of fiction. They’re doing everything short of interviewing English-speaking Indians for the post of “writer.” Ambitious middle-class parents who, a few years ago, would only settle for a future in Engineering, Medicine, or Management for their children, now hopefully send them to creative writing schools. People like myself are constantly petitioned by computer companies, watch manufacturers, even media magnates to endorse their products. A boutique owner in Bombay once asked me if he could “display” my book The God of Small Things (as if it were an accessory, a bracelet or a pair of earrings) while he filmed me shopping for clothes! Jhumpa Lahiri, the American writer of Indian origin who won the Pulitzer Prize, came to India recently to have a traditional Bengali wedding. The wedding was reported on the front page of national newspapers.