We are Trees: A Conversation between Arundhati Roy, Rima Rantisi, Rima Majed, and Nadia Bou Ali

The following conversation between Arundhati Roy, Rima Rantisi, Rima Majed, and Nadia Bou Ali took place on June 7, 2024, at the American University of Beirut, who awarded Roy an honorary doctorate. The event was hosted by the Critical Humanities and Liberal Arts Program, the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies, and the Department of English.

Arundhati Roy arrived in Beirut halfway through the genocidal war on the Palestinians and the war in South Lebanon. Her arrival was also in the wake of Narendra Modi’s reelection, which she had campaigned tirelessly against. In her fiery commencement speech at the American University of Beirut, which she was charged with delivering as a newly minted honorary doctor, she called the Modi regime one “that has persecuted and murdered minorities — Muslims and Christians — incarcerated its critics, and brought us so close to what we in India thought could never happen to us. Fascism.” She went on to critique Modi’s friendship with Israel, the exploitation of thousands of Indian workers who were sent to take Palestinians’ place as they lived and died in Gaza, and the American police and universities who beat student protestors. She asked: “Can there be anything more immoral than that?” She slammed western liberal democracies and the “two eighty-year-old white men” as the meager choices of the American people for president. Her speech was not poetic, but instead seized a rare opportunity on an Arab stage at an American institution to speak in solidarity with Palestine, all just one hour after being rushed off the conversation that follows.

Roy greeted a full auditorium of both readers and people who know her politics though not necessarily her work with characteristic shunning of grand labels, institutional favor and awards. After being introduced as a 2024 recipient of an honorary doctorate from the American University of Beirut, where the conversation took place, she stood up, lifted her arms toward the cheering audience, smiled, and said, “Thank you so much. I didn’t come for the honorary doctorate. I came to see you.” Despite her display of modesty, she carried her petite frame like a diva, wearing a salmon kurta with rolled up khaki pants and bejeweled boots, as if it were just another outing for her. Even though in this moment, and later in the conversation, she downplays her own success, she does not fail to leverage it to speak freely on international stages.

Over an hour and a half, Roy spoke about the futility of the search for authenticity in language; the disconnect between belonging and nationalism; India’s nuclear tests as the spark for her nonfiction writing; caste as preclusion to solidarity; the idealization and misconceptions about Gandhi; the exploitation of nature for capitalistic gains, and more. All of her arguments cling to the same conclusion for her, a conclusion that stems from what she believes about language and humans’ fundamental connection to the natural world: “The real language is that we all deeply understand each other because we are trees, we are creatures.” Going back to the forest, Roy addresses humans’ shared nature, our rootedness in it, outside the man-made borders that run through people as a way to reject the systemic forces that wish to colonize people, land, and language.
Many of us, regardless of where we were in the world, grew up with Arundhati Roy’s voice as part of the soundtrack to our education. As an English major, I must have seen Roy anthologized in nearly every English literature and composition reader between high school and university, on topics of capitalism, environment, globalization, diversity, and the infinite injustices in the world. Her words have filled the minds of readers across the globe, her influence immeasurable. But as readers of Arundhati Roy know, she does not stop at outlining or analyzing these injustices, she persists in the fight to envision a new world, at every turn in our present-day histories. For this reason, her presence in Beirut at this time was no coincidence, amidst this seismic shift in global politics, just 200 kilometers away from an unabated genocide.
For over twenty years, Arundhati Roy has spoken truth to power by doing the hard work of not only sharply and poetically describing the ills of our present-day societies and their governing structures, but she also pulls on the past, often in the same sentence, to remind us that history is not only yesterday but also today and that we have a hand in changing it. Take for example her speech “Stop This Slaughter in Palestine” delivered on December 13, 2023, in the Indian state of Kerala. “This Slaughter” does not only refer to a present day genocide but one that is ever-present, that exists in our moral fabric, that we must reckon with wherever we are in the world. In her speech, she condemns the silence of Indian intellectuals on Palestine, and centers the precarity of solidarity under nationalism. She looks toward the future and warns that “our country too could explode.” She insists in both her fiction and nonfiction that class, greed, hatred, prejudice, and broken systems of power occupy the world and that we must not fall prey to apathy or rely on fate for their evisceration.
Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things, won her the 1997 Booker Prize and was translated into more than forty languages. Roy attributes her background as an architect to her ability to plan the novel’s complex, multi-layered structure. The novel delves into the complexities of the social and familial fabric of the Indian state Kerala, interwoven with themes of politics, caste, religion, and class. Roy says, “The book is not about small things…it’s about connecting the small things to the biggest…it’s about connecting the fish in the river and the dent the baby spider makes…to the huge political forces that are raging through this very violent and feudal country.”
Roy writes from India, a place she calls home where she “functions within a huge river and stream and a rising, rushing current of solidarity.” Her writing reflects her life. The excluded, the banished, the miscreants in her novels are those she is intimate with in reality. In the conversation below, she says, “It’s almost actually true that my closest friends are the characters in my novels. They are always with me, even after the novels have been published. Anjum, she really liked her continuity. I can ask her things.”
Following her literary success, Roy pivoted towards political nonfiction, focusing on the ramifications of global capitalism and its impact on India. She has written twenty books of nonfiction including The End of Imagination (2001), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002), War Talk (2003), Public Power in the Age of Empire (2004), Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), Walking with the Comrades (2011), Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014) and her latest book of essays, Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. (2019).
In 2017, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, translated into more than fifty languages, marked Roy’s return to fiction. She describes the book as a “conversation between two graveyards.” One of them is the valley of Kashmir, covered by the graves of those who have lost their lives in the struggle for self-determination; and the other a graveyard just outside the walls of Old Delhi where one of the characters, Anjum, a transwoman, encloses graves to build The Jannat Guest House that houses a motley crew of social outcasts. Against the historical backdrop of the real-life political turmoil in India, the book offers an alternative world with alternative structures for living.
In one of her first essays, The Cost of Living, published in 1999, she addresses her moral outrage at two of the great delusions of India’s progress: the massive dam projects that were supposed to haul India into the modern age – which instead displaced millions – and India’s nuclear tests. Her voice is pleading and prescient. She claims that we will lose the earth to our nuclear weapons. The earth will become our foe. This book marks her early days as an activist and political writer, and it marks the beginning of the countless times she asks us to stay on for the battle with her toward envisioning a better world. She says, “Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children’s children. Of everything we love. We have to reach within ourselves and find the strength to think. To fight.”

–Rima Rantisi

*

Arundhati Roy: Before we get into things, I want to say I read and write better than I speak. So I will read a little extract. I’ll just give you a little context. It’s about one of the main characters in my book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness whose name is Anjum. She’s born to a Shia Muslim family and brought up as a boy and became a woman and lives in a place called the Jannat House, which in Urdu means “the house of dreams,” where many people of many genders live. But in 2002, she traveled to the state of Gujarat, where Narendra Modi actually had just become the Chief Minister, and within a few months of that, a massacre of Muslims took place where something like 2,500 people were slaughtered on the streets in the villages and cities of Gujarat.

And so they go to visit the shrine of the Urdu poet Wali Dakhani. And in fact what happened in 2002, overnight in the process of this massacre and the displacement of thousands of people, the shrine was demolished and the road was built over it so that it would not exist. It’s not just that it was demolished, but it was erased. And even today, people go and put flowers on the street where the shrine used to be, and cars ride over the flowers, and there’s a line here which says, How can you disconnect flower paste from poetry? You just can’t erase these things.
But Anjum comes back to Delhi, and she’s so devastated by what she has seen and what she remembers that she can’t live in the Khwabgah anymore. So she moves into a graveyard where her family is buried. After a long time, she lives there distraught like a spirit among the graves, and then slowly she recovers her spirit and starts to build the Jannat guest house where each room encloses a grave. So I’m going to read the part where she moves in, and she remembers what happened to her in Gujarat:

On her first night in the graveyard, after a quick reconnaissance, Anjum placed her Godrej cupboard and her few belongings near Mulaqat Ali’s grave and unrolled her carpet and bedding between Ahlam Baji’s and Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam’s graves. Not surprisingly, she didn’t sleep. Not that anyone in the graveyard troubled her – no djinns 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, didn’t seem to notice her at all. On the southern side, clots of homeless people sat around fires cooking their meagre, smoky meals. Stray dogs, in better health than the humans, sat at a polite distance, waiting politely for scraps.

In that setting, Anjum would ordinarily have been in some danger. But her desolation protected her. Unleashed at last from social protocol, it rose up around her in all its majesty – a fort, with ramparts, turrets, hidden dungeons and walls that hummed like an approaching mob. She rattled through its gilded chambers like a fugitive absconding from herself. She tried to dismiss the cortège of saffron men with saffron smiles who pursued her with infants impaled on their saffron tridents, but they would not be dismissed. She tried to shut the door on Zakir Mian, lying neatly folded in the middle of the street, like one of his crisp cash-birds. But he followed her, folded, through closed doors on his flying carpet. She tried to forget the way he had looked at her just before the light went out of his eyes. But he wouldn’t let her.

She tried to tell him that she had fought back bravely as they hauled her off his lifeless body.

But she knew very well that she hadn’t.

She tried to un-know what they had done to all the others – how they had folded the men and unfolded the women. And how eventually they had pulled them apart limb from limb and set them on fire.

But she knew very well that she knew.

They.

They, who?

Newton’s Army, deployed to deliver an Equal and Opposite Reaction. Thirty thousand saffron parakeets with steel talons and bloodied beaks, all squawking together:

Mussalman ka ek hi sthan! Qabristan ya Pakistan!

Only one place for the Mussalman! The Graveyard or Pakistan!

Anjum, feigning death, had lain sprawled over Zakir Mian. Counterfeit corpse of a counterfeit woman. But the parakeets, even though they were – or pretended to be – pure vegetarian (this was the minimum qualification for conscription), tested the breeze with the fastidiousness and proficiency of bloodhounds. And of course they found her. Thirty thousand voices chimed together, mimicking Ustad Kulsoom Bi’s Birbal:

Ai Hai! Saali Randi Hijra! Sister-fucking Whore Hijra. Sister-fucking Muslim Whore Hijra.

Another voice rose, high and anxious, another bird:

Nahi yaar, mat maro, Hijron ka maarna apshagun hota hai.

Don’t kill her, brother, killing Hijras brings bad luck.

Bad luck!

Nothing scared those murderers more than the prospect of bad luck. After all, it was to ward off bad luck that the fingers that gripped the slashing swords and flashing daggers were studded with lucky stones embedded in thick gold rings. It was to ward off bad luck that the wrists wielding iron rods that bludgeoned people to death were festooned with red puja threads lovingly tied by adoring mothers. Having taken all these precautions, what would be the point of wilfully courting bad luck

So they stood over her and made her chant their slogans.

Bharat Mata Ki Jai! Vande Mataram!

She did. Weeping, shaking, humiliated beyond her worst nightmare.

Victory to Mother India! Salute the Mother!

They left her alive. Un-killed. Un-hurt. Neither folded nor unfolded. She alone. So that they might be blessed with good fortune.

Butchers’ Luck.

That’s all she was. And the longer she lived, the more good luck she brought them.

She tried to un-know that little detail as she rattled through her private fort. But she failed. She knew very well that she knew very well that she knew very well.

The Chief Minister with cold eyes and a vermilion forehead would go on to win the next elections. Even after the Poet-Prime Minister’s government fell at the Centre, he won election after election in Gujarat. Some people believed he ought to be held responsible for mass murder, but his voters called him Gujarat ka Lalla. Gujarat’s Beloved.

Nadia Bou Ali: I think what you just read perhaps speaks to my first question. In a collection of essays titled The End of Imagination, you say that vanity leads writers to imagine that they “cull stories from the world…but that it’s actually the other way around.” It is stories that reveal themselves to us; public and private narratives, as you put it, colonize the writer, they commission the writer. They insist on being told, and that fiction and nonfiction are somewhat different techniques of storytelling. And I quote you here, you say, “Fiction dances out of me. Nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.” And then you say the theme that underlines much of your writing, and we can assume the aching, broken world that you write about, I quote you again here, “The relationship between power and powerlessness, the endless circular conflict that they are engaged in.” So essentially, we could perhaps say that you have a very deep and long interest in diagnosing mechanisms of power. Its paranoia, equal rotations, excesses, ultimately it’s ruthlessness. In a way, we see you lay bare these unconscious mechanisms of power that play and constitute our social realities, capitalism, nationalism, multinational corporations, the NGO-ization of the world, all these complex machinations of empire that you describe in all these different ways.

Is there a repetition in the story once capitalism and these structures are involved? Would you say that there’s a story that you’re telling, but only differently every time, in the hope that there will be some kind of repetition with a difference? Is this a reason for hope? Is there some reason to hope in the repetition of, let’s say, the same story, in the sense that, is this what makes one write, despite waking up to the nightmare that is the world every day? In other words, what keeps despair at bay? How can we continue to hope?

AR: Well, I think the question of hope or despair is a question that isn’t just about writing or activism. It’s a question that all of us have to deal with all the time. And I think in my case, The God of Small Things, which is of course about love and childhood and caste and how the left movement in India failed to engage in caste, became – what is it called…successful – the minute it won the Booker Prize, I could see very clearly that in order to claim that book or for India to claim me, they needed to depoliticize it. Suddenly it became a book about children. It was not engaging with caste, except that the Marxist party was pretty annoyed with the book. At the time, not anymore, I think.

The idea is: You must come to terms with having to engage with us in anything you think about in India. But I felt there was this gilded cage ready for me to step into when I was to become this fairy princess and go on to best-sellers and literary festivals. There was a sense in which as a writer, a fiction writer, a successful fiction writer, you’re not supposed to understand how the big wheels turn. And even if you do understand it, you better not really grapple with it, you know?

And for me, it was just impossible to be a writer in India, to know what was happening at that particular time. I mean, just within months of the book being published, the Hindu right came to power, the nuclear tests and the big dams happened. I wanted to know whether I could write about bombs and irrigation and electricity and displacement with the same kind of engagement that I could write about love or childhood or growing up and make people read it, make people pay attention. It was almost an ego issue. That we’re not gonna be the writers who are supposed to educate people and go to these festivals and have everybody say, Oh you’re so wonderful.

What I set out on at home, especially the first political essay I wrote after The God of Small Things, which was The End of Imagination, about a new protest, it was just incredible how immediately the establishment became furious with me for, I think, the line that they got really angry about in that essay was when I said that the danger of nuclear weapons is not just whether you use them or you don’t use them, but what does it do to your imagination? How does it colonize the way you think? And then I said, well, if it’s anti-Hindu or anti-national to have a nuclear weapon embedded in my brain, then I secede, I secede.

I came from the Modi Republic, and this was a time when the entire media was celebrating the bomb, the Indian Hindu bomb, more or less, you know. And really, you couldn’t tell when we were talking about weapons or Viagra.

There’s an odd thing that happens where people who really have their backs against the wall don’t have this option of feeling despair. And so we just have developed this very black humor, but it isn’t that I wake up every morning and I’m in despair about this thing in the world because it’s a very grand thing to be. Whereas there’s something granular about one’s life, right? It’s not theoretical. Often people ask me, Do you have researchers and an office, do you have people? Where I can decide I’ll write about this and then I’ll research it and write it. It’s the opposite. I experience something, I see it, I read it, and then I decide to write about it. When I can’t shut up, then I write it. So I was telling somebody that I studied architecture and then early on when I came to Delhi, I acted in a movie; I just wanted to know how movies are made. I didn’t have anything to say in that movie. Recently a man came to me and said, you know, Arundhati, I think the best thing you’ve ever done is to act in that movie, because you never said anything.

Rima Rantisi: The dismissal of the literary as political is interesting especially that your nonfiction pieces are somehow perceived as more political than your novels to the point an interviewer asked, do you see yourself as a literary writer twenty years after you won the Booker Prize when you published the second novel. And so you said to him, “To me, there is nothing higher than fiction, nothing. It’s fundamentally who I am. I’m a teller of stories. For me, that’s the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance it involves.”

What is it about writing fiction that makes more sense to you than other genres and modes? How does that use of poetic language allow you to see the world and sense it to the point where it makes most sense to you, and what can you and your readers access in your fiction that you can’t in your essays?

AR: I wouldn’t say fiction or non-fiction. Generally, I’m just talking about my fiction and my non-fiction, you know? When I write non-fiction, it comes, as I said, out of a feeling, most often out of a feeling of anger, some kind of consensus is building. For example, a few years ago, the government had signed off indigenous lands to all these corporate mining companies, and there was a huge kind of civil war in the forest in central India. The previous Prime Minister said that the people who are fighting against the security forces are the single largest internal security threat – he was talking about the poorest people in the country. And all the television channels were obviously immediately controlling the narrative, and I knew that I had to go into the forest just to break that consensus. So that’s why my non-fiction is usually either a short book or a long essay, with a certain argumentative anger in them. Whereas in fiction, there’s naughtiness, and there’s playfulness, and there’s a kind of freedom which that other format doesn’t allow me. You know? It’s not formatted in any sense, so that you can actually design it and live inside it. It’s almost actually true that my closest friends are the characters in my novels. They are always with me, even after the novels have been published. Anjum, she really liked her continuity. I can ask her things.

NB: It feels sometimes as though the writing itself is a form of guerrilla warfare. But there’s something interesting as well because of your insistence on constructing worlds. You are an architect, so the image of a guerrilla-come-architect is one that comes to mind here. Your readers and your conversants constantly say that it’s increasingly harder and harder to construct a literary form in a moment of these complex layers and stratifications of violence and power and so on. And this kind of big moment of attrition, decomposition.

Generally the guerrilla fighter is one that always comes with the element of surprise… So there’s something about blind spots and constructing around them. Would you enlist this kind of guerrilla-writing-architecture as an aesthetics of resistance?

AR: You might say that the fundamental thing about guerillas is that they don’t necessarily hold territory like a state; they’re operating in somebody else’s territory. Whereas when I write fiction, I do hold territory. You’re actually constructing fiction. You’re actually constructing a world. I mean, in the Ministry of Utmost Happiness, there’s a graveyard that Anjum lives in, and here one begins to build a guest house. And eventually, if you look at the people she lives with, the people that are buried there, and the prayers that are recited, it’s almost like a revolution. Something I said that people like to quote me on is, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, can’t you hear her breathing?” But this is also saying that it’s not that another world is possible, but another world does exist. It exists. It’s just a question of looking and seeing it. Because all the people in this novel are people who live a subversive life, and people who are out of the grid of the caste system, or class system or of the gender system, or whatever, in the world. So almost every character in this novel has a border running through them: either a national border, a caste border, everyone is passing, everyone has got a name, and that subversive world is always there, it’s everywhere. It is a question of staring at something hard enough until you actually can see it. And so, yes, there’s the intellectual, like where you just ambush a particular consensus that’s building up by writing an essay. But there is the other, the thing that takes much longer and takes a lot of time to construct a whole universe of your own.

Rima Majed: Speaking of holding territory and the actual existence of alternative worlds, in your book, The End of Imagination, you wrote, and I quote, “It isn’t necessary to be anti-national to be deeply suspicious of all nationalism or to be anti-nationalist. Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the 20th century.” This actually resonates a lot with us here in Lebanon, but also in this region where calls for nationalism usually come with a hyper-masculine voice. And they always come at the expense of refugees, minorities, women, migrant workers, etcetera.

How do you reconcile this deep feeling of belonging to a place that is often imagined as the nation with a political stance that is beyond nationalism? And would you say that a political commitment to a place and its people is essentially beyond nationalism?

AR: Absolutely. I don’t even see the connection between belonging and nationalism. I think of myself as a tree. And as a tree, is that an Indian tree? Those are the minerals and the kind of soil that you’re used to. People keep saying to me, why don’t you leave India? I said, well, it’s like asking a tree, Why don’t you live in that forest? My leaves will fall. We are people who understand our rivers and our mountains and our soil and our culture and our music and our poetry, and you don’t shrinkwrap my brain with a flag. So that, to me it’s fine, it’s an administrative unit, but I can’t write poetry to it. I just can’t. For example, until 1948, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were one country. Now we are the enemies, and our Indian nationalism is defying against Pakistan. What does that mean?

RR: You chose to stay in India, even though you had the opportunity to leave. You said, “Why would I go to New York? This is my home.” Your position as an Anglophone writer in India is similar to many writers here who write English in Lebanon, including myself. There’s always this question of how much do you explain about your country or the place or who are you writing to? And we do not necessarily think about that when we’re very young writers writing or reading in the language of the colonizer. We think we’re writing in our language, the one that we know. And sometimes later it does become a conundrum.
How do you present India through the English language without being swept away by the expectations of the English speaking world?

AR: See the thing is, there are probably more English speaking people in India than there are in India, you know? In Azadi, my latest collection of essays, the first essay is called, “In What Language Does Rain Fall Over Tormented Cities?” And it’s about language, it’s about how, in India we have something like 28 official languages and there are 4,000 languages that are called dialects. Personally, for example, my mother is from Kerala where we speak Malayalam. My father is from Bengal. He was born in Shillong which is another language that started in Tamil Nadu. We all live in a sea of languages and in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, all the characters are even translating to each other. We live in a world of imperfect translation. So whatever language you write in India, whether it’s English or Hindi or Tamil, how do you encompass the fact that there are other languages?

From the time I was very, very young, I knew that the language that I was looking for wasn’t about whether it’s Hindi or English or Malayalam; the language I was looking for is a language that I use, not a language that uses me. You know? And that is the difference between being a writer and not being a writer. Does the language dominate you, or do you dominate the language? Do you use it, change it, break it, force it to do things that other languages you speak do or don’t do? It’s a game, it’s a play, it’s a form of wrestling. And also the fact is that anything I write, whether it’s in India or anywhere else in the world, is translated immediately into all these other languages. So, whether it’s political writing, or whether it’s fiction, it’s translated into Malayalam, in Tamil… And yet, underneath it all, the real language is not that. The real language is what my Estonian translator asks, How did you know about my childhood? The real language is that we all deeply understand each other because we are trees, we are creatures.

In fact, I just wish to read a little bit about writing because you mentioned it. This is the beginning of this essay. I had a book reading about a week after my first novel, The God of Small Things was published.

A member of the audience stood up and asked me a question that was distinctly hostile. “Has any writer ever written a masterpiece in an alien language? In a language other than his mother tongue?” I hadn’t claimed to have written a masterpiece (nor to be a “he”). But nevertheless, I understood his anger towards me, a writer who lived in India, wrote in English and who had attracted an absurd amount of attention. My answer to his question made him even angrier: Nabokov. The correct answer to that question today would of course be algorithms.

Only a few weeks after the mother tongue/masterpiece incident, I was on a live radio show in London. The other guest was an English historian who in reply to a question from the interviewer composed a paeon to British imperialism. “Even you,” he said, turning to me imperiously. “The very fact that you write in English is a tribute to the British Empire.” Not being used to radio shows at the time, I stayed quiet for a while as a well-behaved recently civilized savage. Sure. But then I sort of lost it and said some extremely hurtful things. The historian was upset, and after the show told me that he had meant what he said as a compliment because he loved my book. I asked him if he also felt that jazz, the blues, and all of African-American writing and poetry were actually a tribute to slavery, and whether all of Latin American literature was a tribute to Spanish and Portuguese colonialism.

Notwithstanding my anger, on both occasions, my responses were defensive reactions, not adequate answers. Because those incidents touched on a range of incendiary questions—colonialism, nationalism, authenticity, elitism, nativism, caste and cultural identity—all jarring pressure points on the nervous system of any writer worth her salt. However, to reify language in the way both these men had renders language speechless. When that happens, as it usually does in debates like these, what has actually been written ceases to matter. That was what I found so hard to countenance.

So then the essay goes on about how in India, so many languages, not just English, but so many languages have colonized other languages. So that search for authenticity is a very difficult and damaging one because, for instance, a lot of Dalit people believe that English is the language of liberation for them because inside these languages is caste, you know? And so it’s a very interesting and complicated subject. But eventually, I think that a writer has to make a language their own and then what they say in that language is what matters.

RM: I want to ask you to talk about a subject or a figure that is celebrated around the world, including here. You’ve written a very important and controversial critique of Gandhi’s politics. In Lebanon and in India, and I’m sure around the world, Gandhi is celebrated as this great revolutionary, and his method of nonviolence is preached and taught to activists around the world. However, in your introduction to Ambedkar’s book, Annihilation of Caste, you wrote an essay titled, “The Doctor and the Saint,” in which you present a poignant critique of Gandhi’s racial and gender politics, as well as his position vis-a-vis the caste system in India, specifically. You start your introduction saying, “Annihilation of Caste is the nearly eighty-year-old text of a speech that was never delivered. When I first read it, I felt as though somebody had walked into a dim room and opened the windows. Reading Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar bridges the gap between what most Indians are schooled to believe in and the reality we experience every day of our lives.”

Can you tell us a bit more about what this opened window brought into the dim room? And why is it the case that Gandhi is so celebrated?

AR: This is a little book now, a separate book called The Doctor and the Saint. It’s about the debate between Gandhi and Dr. Ambedkar. Dr. Ambedkar was, I suppose, one of the most rigorous intellectuals of modern India, and perhaps the most beloved now, always has been. And Gandhi always overshadowed him.

But caste is the engine that runs Indian society. And it’s only people in India that really understand it. It’s a complex form of apartheid. It is the most, I would say, cruel form of social hierarchy human beings have come up with. You know, the difference between racism and casteism, there are many differences, but one is that here caste is presented as something divinely ordained, so that you are paying for some sins that you committed in your previous life. The whole idea is to try and prevent every form of solidarity, because it’s not just four castes as people think. There are thousands of castes, and it turns the whole of society’s brain into a hierarchical way of thinking, which precludes all forms of solidarity. I’m neither in this book nor in real life trying to just trash Gandhi and say that there was nothing great about him. But I just want to say that we should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. We should be able to understand the complexities and the absolutely regressive forms of thinking that he had.

In school, we are taught about how Gandhi was in South Africa, he was traveling by train, and he was kicked out of the train by white people in Tilda Maratswong and that’s when he began to fight against racism and segregation in South Africa. This is a complete lie. Gandhi was in the whites-only compartment because he believed that Indians were superior to black people. He only referred to them as “savages.” The first political battle he won in South Africa was to fight for a third entrance to be open to the double post office so that Indians and Blacks would not have to share the same entrance. There were two kinds of Indians in South Africa – the traders and the lawyers and so on, and the indentured laborer. When I am writing about Gandhi in India, I’m not doing any interpretation, I’m not saying what I think, I’m just presenting him in his own words in this book, all footnoted. So Satyagraha started to plead with the British to allow the Indian traders to go trading in the trans-world. It wasn’t fighting for equality or against racism or anything like that. After 1913, throughout his time in South Africa, even when he was in prison, he was protesting for Indians and black people to not share the same prison, to be given different kinds of food.

There’s a whole part where I talk about how when he was on Tolstoy farm, he says, I have all these young boys and girls living together. And one day the thing I dreaded most happened. I heard that when they had gone for a bath, the boys had been making fun or teasing one of the girls. So I called the girl and I said, What is it about you that makes the boy do this? And then we decided as a punishment for her, we should shave off her hair. You can say this was early Gandhi and there was late Gandhi, but I have followed him from the beginning to the end. And all the talk about the genius of Hinduism and the caste system…caste is not just a hierarchy, but it also has ancestral tasks, labor. You know, so this is what Ramesh do, this is what Baniya do, these are the people who clean other people’s shit, these are the people who say the prayers. And he says that’s all very good, but we should all treat them as equals. So the sadness is that there’s a huge effort to reinvent this person. I think he’s the saint of the status quo. Because caste, a society that practices caste, is a society where there’s a continuous application of the threat of deadly violence.

If you dare to step out, and that happens, it’s like if in an agricultural or feudal society, if your crop is ready, you need the people to come and harvest it. There’s no question of We are going on strike and all that, as an industrial society. How do you force people who you treat like animals to come out and serve you by the threat of deadly violence?

When you preach nonviolence in a society whose hierarchies are held together by violence, it’s a complicated thing. So these are the things that I talk about when I say he was the saint of the status quo. Because even today in India, right now, if you have an inter-caste marriage, the penalty is often death, you know? So it’s a society that is presented to the outside world as Gandhi, yoga, hippie. But actually it is a violent society that is held in place by constant threat of social violence. The chaos in India is for foreigners and the traffic and so on, but actually it’s a very rigid hierarchy in society.

RM: What you describe sounds familiar to us, but we talk about sectarianism in this country and these systems of stratification that are ancestral or take other forms. We’re all sitting here in a country that has been witnessing one of the deepest financial crises in the world. The World Bank has classified this crisis as one of the ten worst economic crises globally since the 19th century. And despite all the analyses about corruption and bad governance and why this crisis is happening, I think some of us believe that this crisis, like many others, is hardly a result of just that. But rather it signals a deeper crisis, and probably a crisis of the capitalist system as a whole. In your book, Capitalism: a Ghost Story, you write, “Capitalism is in crisis. Trickle down failed. Now gush up is in trouble too.” And then you say, “Capitalism’s real gravediggers may end up being its own delusional cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises – war and shopping – simply will not work.”

Yet, what we’re still seeing today is exactly these two old tricks: war and shopping. Beirut is just a very small, condensed space where both happen all the time. But this, of course, at the expense of this planet and life on it. So how do you make sense of this? And in the face of the failures of capitalism’s fantasy of trickle down, what is the promise of what you call “trickle down revolution”?

AR: At the end of this book, The Doctor and the Saint, that’s how I make sense of it, because the anti-caste movement, which is not new, is centuries old – they never talk about Hinduism, they talk about Brahmanism. The Brahmins are the top of the caste system, for whom caste is the perfect administrative solution to everything. I’m just talking about India because I don’t want to talk to you about Lebanon and make a fool of myself. But I’m just hoping that if I talk about that, you’ll understand what it means in your context. So what you see often is a schism between people who understand and who have fought against the oppression that comes from identity, which is of caste identity and how it has been weaponized for centuries, but there isn’t in that understanding, traditionally, an understanding of capitalism. And on the left, in India, which has a very sophisticated critique of capitalism, not a sophisticated application, but at least a critique, there is no understanding of Brahminism or caste. So one of the reasons why The God of Small Things was first attacked by the left was because they just traditionally said caste is class, comrade, and many of us are like, no it’s not.

But until these two kinds of understanding, until sectarianism or nationalism or whatever it is, has an understanding of how capital works, you’re always going to be jerked around by capitalism. This is, I think, the fundamental problem. On the surface, it might appear to be refugees who have become refugees because of a sectarian crisis, or a nationalist crisis, or a war, but increasingly it’s going to be because underneath it all, they are climate refugees. For example, for every war, I always look: Is there a flat-topped bauxite mountain somewhere in the region? Because for sure, it triggers these things. When I was in the forest where the Maoists were fighting, 99.9% of them were indigenous people fighting against mass displacement. But of course they are organized, it’s a guerrilla army, a real guerrilla army. And yet, to me the fundamental question that I ask not just the state, but also the resistance: Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? Because what is that bauxite in the mountain? A bauxite mountain is a porous mountain, it works as a water tank, it stores the water and then irrigates the plains, which is how that whole ecosystem functions. But for mining companies, the only time bauxite has value is when they take the bauxite out of the mountain. So the real beginning or end of imagination is this question: Metaphorically, can you leave the bauxite in the mountain?

RM: That’s a great segway into the follow-up question. And I’m talking about Lebanon the same way you’re talking about India, because I’m sure it will resonate somehow. The destruction of the environment and life on this planet is often sponsored by these big corporations or international financial institutions such as the World Bank, for example. And it takes the shape of dam construction. In 2019 in Lebanon during the uprising, some activists were able to stop the Bisri Dam project after a long struggle with the state and the World Bank. And you have participated in many similar struggles against dam construction. You have written extensively about the environmental danger that haunts all of us.

What is it about dams that is so central to our political struggles today?

AR: A dam allows you to steal a river. It’s like a bank where the currency is water, not cash; it allows you to steal it from somebody and give it to somebody else. Look at the dam that I was involved with, the anti-dam movement, the dam on the Nagmala, where literally the water was taken away from villagers, from indigenous communities, from farmers, and given to golf courses, five-star hotels, the largest statue in the world. It’s just unbelievable how crude it is. There are dams in India which are just left half built because just the building of the dam, regardless of whether it does anything or not, makes people so much money. It’s like constructing buildings in a city and not using them because that activity itself allows you to siphon so much money. It is about control, and it always has been. Dams, whether in a modern industrial economy or a medieval empire, were always about controlling the water.

NA: Based on the critique of the notion of infinite justice that was proposed after 9/11, and how it goes into this engagement with a counter-history or counter account of justice against that of the war on terror, which continues to be the signpost for so many atrocities that are committed even now. What would you say is a counter-concept of justice to this infinite justice, what you call the sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice, which uses this equivocating distinction between civilization and savagery. The massacre of innocent people was phrased as a “clash of civilizations” or as “collateral damage.”

Do you find the concept of justice axiomatic, or does it move the writing, does it move art, does it move literature? Is it what moves politics, what would you say about that?

AR: Well, I think there are so many ways in which I have thought about this, because there is the formal justice, justice of human rights, the justice that comes out of law and courts. There’s social justice, a private sense of justice such as within a relationship: Are you being fair with each other? Or is somebody thinking about you? Somebody over there, you know? But I think that sometimes I used to only worry about how much human rights, in a way, is the basic minimum, right? And de-politicizes everything else. Then you can say, oh, both sides are violating human rights, both sides are bad, and let’s just leave the politics out of everything. It doesn’t matter whether someone is occupying or someone is colonizing or both sides are terrible. But to me, I would say that almost everything that I write, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, comes out of a sense of justice. I think I do have a radar for it, and it’s not just necessarily, as I was saying, about courts and laws. Of course I have had several, several, several, several run-ins with the law, you know.

The first time was with The God of Small Things. In Kerala, I have a history of five men every few years getting together and filing a criminal case against me. The first was that The God of Small Things is obscene and corrupts public morality. That was a criminal case. I had to be dragged to court, and when I would appear there, they would read out the last chapter of the book. You know, the love meeting. I was humiliated as a woman. Anyway, between the time the case was filed and the time the case was heard, I won the Booker. And everybody was like, Oh now she’s ours. The judge came out and said, every time this case comes before me, I get chest pains.

And at the same time, in the essay “The Greater Common Good,” I wrote about how taking land away from indigenous people who do not live in a money economy, for example taking land from an Adivasi and giving him or her cash compensation, is the equivalent of paying a Supreme Court judge fertilizer bags. So I was then taken to court for disrespecting the court. They kept throwing my book from one judge to another. That woman, she thinks we don’t understand English and all that. So I started to call myself the hooker that won the Booker.

Then there was another case where five guys said that I had tried to kill one of them with my scarf. So that was also a criminal case, you know. And then they summoned me. I wrote a response without a lawyer, but just as an outraged human being. I said what is this? So then they said, now you have to apologize to us. So I said, No, I’m not going to apologize. So they said, but you’re not behaving like a reasonable man. Well, I said, at least that’s progress.

After I went into the forest and came out, a friend of mine, an English professor, who had polio when he was very young and so he’s paralyzed from the waist down, and I campaigned against this military operation in the forest. And they arrested him, saying that he’s a Maoist, which he wasn’t, and in fact, put him in jail for ten years. After he was arrested, I wrote a piece called “Professor, P.O.W.” And for that I was called up for contempt of court…by firemen. There’s this humorous part of it – but there’s this constant battle, sometimes with the courts, sometimes otherwise, but I think it’s always there on the table, a sense of injustice, whether it’s about yourself or whether it’s about other people, because you are living in a society where injustice is institutionalized because of caste. It’s institutionalized. It’s just all right for certain kinds of women to be raped, or certain kinds of people to be killed, or certain kinds of people to be tortured. And it’s alright for others to get away with it.

For example, in the 2002 massacre which I read with you about, a woman called Bilkis Bano was fleeing with her family, with her little daughter of three years old, her sister’s infant child, fourteen people. They were caught by the mob and all of them were slaughtered, including the babies, except for her, she was raped, and then they thought she was dead, but she wasn’t. And after so many years, those criminals, murderers, and rapists were actually jailed. But last year on Independence Day, they were pardoned. And on the same day that they were pardoned, the Prime Minister was talking about a girl-child, and all this rubbish. So to seek justice from all this obfuscation is also a task.

RM: In a powerful essay you wrote in 2020 during the pandemic, you argued that “the pandemic is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” More recently, actually just three weeks ago, Mandy Turner wrote an essay based on your article arguing that today “Palestine is a portal. It’s a gateway that will determine the future of the Middle East and the world we want to live in.” Do you agree? And can critical junctures in general, whether it is the pandemic or an unfolding genocide in Palestine, be portals into a new world? And what kind of world is that?

AR: I agree. I agree that Palestine is important, and I think it is the moral litmus test of the modern world, which is not to say that there are no genocides happening in other places. It’s happening in the Congo and it’s happening in other places, but here is a place where it’s happening in full view, where all the light is shining, all the arguments are being made, and all the people who, in Western legal democracies, have created this architecture of morality, are now unable to even begin to agree with themselves about anything. It’s outrageous. The young people in those countries are saving the older generations and are saving all of us from lazy racism. Yes, it’s a portal. And I wish I could see how it’s going to turn out.