Arundhati Roy was recently awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. At the same time, several powerful individuals in her home country called for her to be convicted under anti-terror legislation. The charge? A comment in 2010 during a conference where Roy stated that Kashmir was never an integral part of India. So is Roy a literary giant or anti-national, funded by foreigners?
Is the latter view not held by people who may not know how to read works of fiction closely? Surely, anyone who has studied her writing can tell you this is a writer fiercely in love with her people and her land.
Her Booker Prize winning debut, The God of Small Things, was followed twenty years later by her second work of fiction, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The Ministry can be loosely interpreted as a follow up novel. Roy has layered her prose with subtle hints connecting her characters to The God of Small Things. For example, S. Tillotama, a central character in The Ministry (referred to fondly as Tilo throughout the novel) could very easily be the lovechild of Ammu and Velutha, had their story not met the tragic end it needed to, in The God of Small Things. Through Tilo from Kerala, Musa from Kashmir, Delhi’s Anjum-formerly known as Aftab – and a colourful supporting cast, Roy takes us on a journey through postcolonial, post 9-11 India with a focus on those who dare to live and love from the margins of society, making us reminisce about the Love Laws and those who dared to break them in her first novel.
There is violence in the novel, with a significant focus on Kashmir, but the country’s only issue isn’t the unfinished business it shares with its unfriendly neighbours. Before you arrive at Kashmir, you survive the pogrom of Gujarat, and the ugly caste politics of Kerala. From there, Roy’s vivid prose transports you to the bottom of the shikara with Musa, covered by a green moss blanket and all manners of vegetables and fruits. You hear the oars hitting the water, Kashmir’s own eerily beautiful soundtrack. Plif, plif, plif. You also hear the gunshots and the cries. The mewling of Gul-kaak’s beautiful kittens Agha and Khanum. You renounce everything and set up a solitary new life in a cemetery with Anjum, building a guesthouse to provide refuge to Delhi’s wanted and unwanted. You are Miss Jebeen The First, telling her father Musa to tell her a real story, because there is no witch in the jungle: Akh daleela wann. You are Miss Jebeen The Second, daughter to The Forests of Northeastern India, abandoned on the steps of Jantar Mantar.
One may ask, what is the plot of Roy’s novels? There is none. This is a story about ordinary people wanting to be free and so there is no end that we can see in sight. Themes of Azadi run throughout her works. Roy wants her characters to be free from violence at home, on the streets and from the state. But, through the story, one of her more malicious characters voices a question on the tip of everyone else’s tongue: ‘and after Azadi, has anyone thought?’
The ghosts of colonialism still linger after 1947, with new masters. This is because ‘we have a species problem,’ according to Roy, a statement she has made in her novel as well as at speaking events. There is no colour criterion for colonialists: the British left, and those who came to power by way of caste privilege, money or false promises to the populace, took their place. We can no longer blame the British, or those who came before them. Amidst our own elites looting natural resources and engineering communal riots in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the concept of Azadi asks us the questions, ‘Where do old birds go to die? Do they fall on us like stones from the sky?’ To simplify, the question Roy asking us is: ‘It is 2024, and are we really postcolonial?’
