My life took a deadly beautiful turn to cross paths with Arundhati Roy, and I haven’t come across anything more dangerous or satisfying since. She published The God of Small Things which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and I was born in 1998; I was born in the post-Roy era. She slowly happened to me during the formative years of my life. She got on my nerves. She consumed me. It has been quite a ride since.
I absolutely adore the way she carries herself. Often we, women of colour, are penalised for every little anti-Victorian bodily and behavioural feature we have –dusky skin, curly hair, curvy body, then outspokenness, firmness, assertiveness, the mere ability to speak, to exist wilfully in public, own and control our private. Basically lacking ‘manners.’ She made me question every single one of those manners. She made me fall in love with everything that was me, that was her, that is Us. And look at her now. A woman in her early 60s with short grey curly hair falling effortlessly all over as if claiming the space on her behalf almost without asking her, without her knowledge. She made me look forward to getting old. To the wisdom, clarity, boldness, and affection of aging in a society which shames women and makes them fearful of getting old, or at least, looking old. And not only that. In a society where women are chastised for answering back, she took her pen and let her words roar! And when the need came, she took that mic and stood tall with fist high.
She lives alone in a house full of books and herself. I believe she has a pet too. I hope it’s a cat. She firmly says in her interviews that being lonely and alone are two very different things. How often do young women like us hear something like that in this casteist patriarchal society? Marriage as the ultimate goal and reality is shoved down our throats from such an early age that it starts conquering our subconsciousness. Eventually but certainly, every failed relationship starts feeling like a personal failure, a dream broken, a future lost.
As I understand it, alone is a state of physical aloofness whereas loneliness is a state of emotional hollowness. For most of the women I’ve met, alone and loneliness seem mutually inclusive, eternally together. She in her raw essence, made these two distinct. Moreover, even normalised it. Just by her presence, through her books, online essays and interviews, she enables us to think of a life where we are the main characters; where our wishes and wants are supreme; to de-burden ourselves from the burden of traditions, culture, religion and everything that forms one-dimensionality! She signifies multitude.
I started reading her works from a very early age, before I could really understand them. I have read God of Small Things some three times and yet it feels that it will offer me something more, something different when I read it for the fourth time. I never realised when I started imitating her, attempting to write like her. Not to copy her writing in its physicality, but the very intent of it, the humane presence of her writing, the power behind her words and the way she assembles them, creating a dauntingly hypnotic effect on the reader. Those long sentences, multiple commas joining multiple realities together to form a space full of life and pain, her clever use of alliteration which made her essays versions of poetry which one cannot put down, and the very topics she chooses to write about. Her writing symbolises nothing but depth and disruptions. She has always represented to me, a woman who finds meaning in rowing the boat against the current, a woman who chooses to speak against it. She made me believe that I could do it too. And I did. She has been an inseparable part of my writing journey.
I come from an extremely conservative oppressive caste of Rajputs where women are considered nothing more than cultural symbols. Women in my family are like antiques. The antiques are kept ‘safely’ in the confines of four walls, guarded against, displayed to others for their exquisite beauty and eventually left in a corner to be submerged under dust and ignorance. Another important characteristic of these antiques is –they do not speak. I, however, learnt to scream. I’ve been screaming since.
When I first read, The God of Small Things, it was these sentences which stuck with me.
“That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much”
These lines blew my mind. In a world which stands neatly on the brutal division of public and private, she shattered both to allow something else, something new, to take shape. In a world which thrives on the apoliticalness of Love and the consequent possibilities of exploitation and subordinations it brings, she amalgamated one into the other in such a way that the ways of the world could no longer escape our scrutiny. She politicised Love and left it there for us to take it up and run. I’ve been running since.
She broke the boundaries of a neatly compartmentalised world which was divided into fiction and non-fiction. She ruptured this when she chose to not write fiction after her big hit and with certainty and consistency, published her non-fiction works. As she says in one of her interviews,
“Fiction is truth because without footnotes and without any kind of factual reportage, when it’s true, you know it and then it becomes dangerous”.
By fusing writing with activism she introduced me to the possibilities of –Activist Writing. From Walking with Comrades to Narmada Bachao Andolan she redefined the meaning of writing for a lot of us, as something which takes birth from the ground and grows up to the aching hearts of people. This is what I attempt and aspire to do.
I have been writing since I was little but only a few years back I started writing with an intent — Activist Writing —to contribute to the feminist movement(s), to document the struggle of women and marginalized people by standing behind them with my notebook and dictaphone. To every protest we organise, to every demonstration I take part in, to every strike our workers hold, I write all of it. The first major protest I was part of was the All India Scheme Workers’ Protest where women workers from across the nation came in hundreds and gripped Jantar Mantar and demanded what was rightfully theirs’ which I documented for Frontline Magazine and ever since I have been trying to put their anger on paper for our larger society to see and shame itself. Every ounce of pain that goes through the rage and sobs of our likes, every day they sleep empty stomach, every time they bring a halt at the factory sites, they speak, I listen and we write. We write and write so that it becomes impossible for the fascists to delete us from history. From every nook and corner, their words and mine would appear and reappear and would thus remain.
I feel an unusual but obvious sense of connection with her even before I had any sense of politics. After all, being born in an oppressive caste blurs one’s vision of reality and often the privileges shut one’s mouth. It was during my undergraduate study, when I was introduced to politics in an academic sense, and then I went on to study it further with a Masters degree in Political Science and now doing a PhD. Writing, Politics, Activism and Roy, in no specific order, have been the jigsaw puzzles of my life which helped me to unlearn more than they directed me to learn. Reading between her lines, reading below her words, deciphering the meanings of her pauses and being engulfed by the sea of possibilities and power with which she ended her works only to become the beginning of desires, discontent and potential disruptions. However, this very learning made me disappointed when I read her essay The Doctor and the Saint, which was an introduction to Babasaheb’s seminal work Annihilation of Caste. I found myself turning pages after pages, struggling to find Babasaheb but she seemed too engulfed with critically engaging with Gandhi. But criticisms like these is what she stands for; for dialogues to flow, dissent to grow and freedom of speech to prosper.
In one of her recent interviews with Aishwarya Subramanyam (another difficult woman for another time) for Huffpost, she said with more anger than displeasure, “I get so annoyed when I hear “cool” young women say “I am not a feminist”, and it scrapped a very sensitive and volatile spot within me. I cannot reiterate this enough. Whatever we are today is because of the army of feminists before us who died so that we can speak! Maybe what connects us is rage, anger, movement and everything alike. She has never turned her back on movements, on women demanding to be heard, on masses fighting for justice, on the cause to carry on necessary battles.
Any rights we have now have not dropped from the sky. They are the outcome of blood; they have been snatched and fought for. And now it is on us to take it further. Writing is the weapon we choose to fight with against the oppressive systems that dictate our families, societies and the world at large. Where women are still being killed for merely living, where every ounce of profit is being extracted not only from seas and mines, but also from living bodies. Where the world has ammunition enough to destroy itself twice in totality. Where an impending wave of fascism waits to engulf us all. In such a world, we dare to write, we dare to speak, we dare to resist.
I don’t remember where I read her saying, “I’ve to write to think” and nothing can ever make more sense to me. I’ve never been an organised writer; neither have I thought that I could be. It’s just not me –making a framework, pre-deciding sub-themes, and making a broad design, etc. Mostly as I pick up my pen, an urge and urgency to write, almost a panic overtakes me and moves the pen. For a long time, I’ve been thinking about why I write. What is my intent? And as far as I could make some meaning of the chaos I carry, I write to survive. As someone who feels too strongly, I write so that the tsunami in me does not end up drowning me. I write to ascertain my living beyond mere breathing. I write to save myself from my rage and anger and sometimes love. I write before it consumes me. The bleeding of a pen has always been and will always be better than bleeding blood, I have heard.
I do not define my writing, my writing defines me. I do not own my writing, my writing owns me. I am at its mercy. It guides me and takes me to places where I might not be able to cross on foot. I am in awe of it. It surprises me in ways uncountable. It leaves me gasping. It brings to the paper things which I am afraid to say aloud. It expresses feelings which are so strong that I rather numb myself to escape the tides of pain it brings. When I have found myself inclined to pick up a knife, a pen has come to my rescue. It saves me from myself. It is my language of expression in a culture where I was taught only the language of silence. It gives me wounds which only it can heal. It breaks me open and forces me to broaden my horizons.
I wonder what I would be if writing had not happened to me. The first time I thought about being a writer was in 9th standard, also the year when I spoke about Arundhati Roy in my school morning assembly. Why did my class teacher choose me for this? Why did she choose Roy for me? That day our lives got intertwined, she is still unaware and I can only wish to write something that could reach her someday. That would be a token of gratitude, for being my light in the darkest times, and for inspiring my younger self. I wonder what I would have been if Roy had not happened to me.
We are in times plagued by hatred, cold blooded murders, livestreamed genocide, facism at our doors, destruction and a cruel disregard for nature. Even being in a privileged bubble, everyday it takes courage to open that newspaper. At times, we find ourselves grappling with sheer hopelessness and gloom. More often than ever I find my words trapped in my throat, cutting it like a sharp knife only to find a way out. So I would rather write. In the time of hopelessness, I write about the hopeless times, with the hope for a better time. For Roy reminds us,
“Hope is the building block of resistance.”
So here I end daring to feel a beautiful, dangerous hope.
