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Literary Review
Staying in touch with humanity
"It's sheer hysteria," said a British litterateur, referring to the "Arundhati Effect" on the Western world. You saw just what he meant at the Locarno international film festival this year (August 1-11) where Indian writer ARUNDHATI ROY was the unquestionable star. In addition to being featured in the literary event "In Progress", where her talk packed the hall, her participation in the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) was highlighted in the BBC documentary "Dam Nations: Damage", as also in the adulatory profile by Paolo Brunatto and Angela Fontana ("Arundhati Roy: The Goddess of Small Things").
Both focussed on Roy's trial at the Supreme Court of India. The film that she had scripted before she achieved worldwide fame ("In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones") was part of the Indian Summer section at the festival. Pardo News, the festival newsletter, ran feature after feature on Roy. At the talk she had the listeners hooked with the first statement. "Responsibility is a heavy word for a writer who makes a career out of breaking rules. When you are exploring you have to be irresponsible. No, I am not using my fame to endorse a political credo. I was a political person before I became famous." She added that her activism was not a matter of choice. "I have to do what I do, even when I know I'm inviting trouble by doing it."
It was no use to wonder why, despite the focus on Roy, the documentaries had to sideline Medha Patkar in a movement that had been sustained by her leadership, or how "In Which Annie" got into a package along with works by Satyajit Ray and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. The audience response for all three was enthusiastic. In fact, people couldn't get enough of Roy, their sentiments were reflected in the reverent voice which said that Roy represented "the beauty and calmness of the tradition" she represented. As the Booker Prize winner, political activist, and non fiction writer (particularly The Greater Common Good which looks into the statistics of dam construction in India) Roy has captured the imagination of the West in a way no other writer from India has done since Salman Rushdie.
The press release for one of
the films declared that Roy
"rarely grants interviews to Westerners". But she made time for
the Easterner from The Hindu.
Excerpts from an interview with GOWRI RAMNARAYAN:
Commoditisation comes with adulation. Does it bother you?
OF COURSE I think about it. I have the choice of not speaking out, of not doing what I do, which is absurd. Because keeping quiet is as political an act as speaking out. This has happened to many artists, writers, film makers who are individuals as opposed to an organisation or a movement. I very specifically do not tow the party line, or any line or organisation. I am a writer by definition, an individual who puts forward my views and perhaps it is that which attracts attention. I am not prepared to stay silent and lead a reclusive life.
Both the documentaries on your participation in the NBA screened in Locarno ignore or sideline Medha Patkar's pivotal role in the struggle. How do you react to that?
I have not seen the Italian production. But the BBC film was done very quickly, just before the final sentence of the Supreme Court. I had been asked to do a film many times before that. But before going to jail I was in a panic and wanted to put my views on record. In India it had been portrayed as though I had filed a case against myself. It was not a film about the Narmada Valley. It was supposed to be a conversation with me. I had the choice of either doing or not doing the film. But I did not have the choice of saying why don't you make a film on Medha (Patkar).
The film traces the movement and it's a question of framing it in context.
It does put the movement in context. Medha and I have very much the same problems. You make a film on Medha and they say why on Medha, why not on the Adivasis. But everybody wants to portray Medha, she is such an attractive, charismatic person. She gets accused of being individualistic. You pursue me to do this interview, and then you ask why are you hogging the show. See what I mean? Even when The God of Small Things was going to be released journalists were pursuing me, they were at my door all the time asking for interviews. I said I don't want to talk about it, when the book comes out you can write about it. They go back and write, she is the Greta Garbo of literature. When the book comes out they say look, all this hype! What do you do? Whatever you do is wrong! If you talk about issues there is a constituency to say you are talking about yourself. There is never a pure situation in which you can take some divine position. You have to take the mud that is flung at you. Somewhere along the road I hope what I say registers with people who are intelligent enough to sit down and read what I say as opposed to imagining what I am saying. This is a messy world, you have to muddle through it. If I go to jail it is for publicity, if I talk about the dam it is for publicity, if I write a book it is for publicity, if I breathe it is for publicity, if I do interviews it is for publicity.
(Changing the subject!), Isn't it good that a film festival offers a platform to writers here in Locarno?
Yes. I think we should look at what is happening in cinema today, there are people in India who are using the digital camera to make documentary films. Whatever their cinematic quality, they are dealing with huge, profound issues. This October I am attending a small documentary festival in Italy. I want to support such ventures.
But you said earlier that the new technology had not freed people to deal with urgent and explosive issues.
I expected that there would be a tidal wave of small films made about small issues, which are really the big issues because, with digital technology, it is possible to make such films on small budgets now. In a country like India what we have are our experiences, which are so real compared to a place like Locarno. After four days you want to leave, the entire city is like a five star hotel, everything so pretty and tidy. There is terror and beauty in the land we come from. I want to make a documentary film. I don't know if I can. I see things all the time just shouting to be told. I find that quite exciting.
At this point, does film making excite you more than writing?
Just because I am a successful writer it doesn't mean that I am not prepared to try my hand at other things. One needs constantly to re-invent, re-imagine feelings. It is important to understand loss, failure, breaking... They are terrible things but they are not to be sneered at, not to be dismissed. They are human traits. To stay in touch with humanity is what being a writer is all about.
In your talk here you used the word "famous" 11 times! I sensed ambiguities in your attitude to your success.
I would be dishonest if I said I didn't enjoy success. But there are things about it, which stalk me and terrify me at night. I saw "In Which Annie..." again after 12 years and thought, my God, it's a punishment to make that girl rich and famous. But there are things about it, which are absolutely exhilarating. Like yesterday when I came down from my room and found this Malayali couple patiently waiting for me. They took me home for choru and meen curry. I met a German lady who sat in the piazza with a dictionary so that she could write a long letter to me. It is wonderful to find that you can be deep friends with complete strangers because your work is read and related to. But when you are driving this very big bus you want to be careful not to hurt people. As a very famous person you can hurt people without realising it. Yet, sometimes I do tire of being nice, careful, courteous, well behaved.
Isn't it interesting that here in Locarno we can see a pattern in the films — all the affluence of the west cannot make it happy, while people living on streets where bombs are exploding all the time celebrate life?
This is part of what I am trying to say. When you look at a society bursting with washing machines and vacuum cleaners, you feel — but where are the stories? Every cat and dog has a collar, a tag, a number, and you think the people are the same, they too have a collar, a tag and a number. Yet in our countries which are full of stray cats, stray dogs and stray human beings, with terrible and beautiful things happening to them, with so many unpredictable factors in their lives, we still have many stories to tell! Everything matters to us — whether politics or literature or cinema — we think in our little ways we can change things. No antiseptic loss of imagination, or belief that this is the one single way to be. In India there are so many passionate, conflicting views of how life is to be lived, what ought to be done, where do we go from here — and all that is the stuff of art.
Whether talking on the screen or speaking in public, or in personal life as I see you now, you appear to have a serious, driven spirit within you which co exists with a detached sense of the ridiculous and the absurd. Any conflicts?
Not at all. This is something I think about a lot. I am committed to holding on to humour, absurdities and irreverences. I would die if I lost the ability to collapse on the floor and screech with laughter. In some of the most terrible situations in my life I have done just that. I think one of the weapons we must use against this Fascist, right wing government of ours is laughter. It is outrageously ridiculous to see how seriously they take themselves. Their rules are absurd and primitive. They need to be laughed off the stage as much as voted against.
So Ma'am, are you going to make your own "Great Dictator" like Chaplin did?
(Laughing) I don't know. People keep asking me who were the great influences on your work and I say it is not from written literature but from Kathakali, because to me, the fitness of the storyteller is in the ability to span a range, to scale emotions from the absurd to the tragic, to weave them together effortlessly. I am not an academic. I am not a poet. But I will use every weapon in my arsenal to tell you what I think, to tell a story. If you want to fight me, fight me. I refuse to stay under.
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