My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

Most often I wrote because it became easier to do that than to put up with the angry, persistent hum of my own silence.

We have sentenced ourselves to an era of sudden catastrophes – wild fires and strange storms, earthquakes and flash floods. To guide us through it all, we have the steady hand of new imperialists in China, white supremacists in the White House, and benevolent neo-Nazis on the streets of Europe.

In 1937 Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians: I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

Civil unrest has begun to erupt in the global village. In countries like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, and India, the resistance movements against corporate globalization are growing. To contain them, governments are tightening their control. Protesters are being labelled ‘terrorists’ and then being dealt with as such. But civil unrest does not only mean marches and demonstrations and protests against globalization. Unfortunately, it also means a desperate downward spiral into crime and chaos and all kinds of despair and disillusionment, which, as we know from history (and from what we see unspooling before our eyes), gradually becomes a fertile breeding ground for terrible things – cultural nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism, and of course terrorism.

Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

So may I clarify that I speak as a subject of the US empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.)

Then there are those fighting formal and brutal neo-colonial occupations in contested territories whose boundaries and fault lines were often arbitrarily drawn last century by the imperialist powers. In Palestine, Tibet, Chechnya, Kashmir, and several states in India’s north-east provinces, people are waging struggles for self-determination. Several of these struggles might have been radical, even revolutionary, when they began, but often the brutality of the repression they face pushes them into conservative, even retrogressive spaces where they use the same violent strategies and the same language of religious and cultural nationalism used by the states they seek to replace.

It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy – too much representation, too little democracy – needs some structural adjustment.

Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost.

The melting has less to do with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They’re good people who believe in peace, free speech, and in human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the UN Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan … it’s a long list.) The glacial melt will cause severe floods in the subcontinent and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people.25 That will give us even more reasons to fight. We’ll need more weapons. Who knows, that sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life – and the glaciers will melt even faster.

We’re walking in pitch darkness and dead silence. I’m the only one using a torch, pointed down so that all I can see in its circle of light are Comrade Kamla’s bare heels in her scuffed, black chappals, showing me exactly where to put my feet. She is carrying ten times more weight than I am. Her backpack, her rifle, a huge bag of provisions on her head, one of the large cooking pots, and two shoulder bags full of vegetables. The bag on her head is perfectly balanced, and she can scramble down slopes and slippery rock pathways without so much as touching it. She is a miracle. It turns out to be a long walk. I’m grateful to the history lesson because apart from everything else it gave my feet a rest for a whole day. It’s the most beautiful thing, walking in the forest at night. And I’ll be doing it night after night.

As for Gudsa Usendi, many comrades have been Gudsa Usendi at one point or another. (A few months ago, it was Comrade Raju.) Gudsa Usendi is the name of the party’s spokesperson for Dandakaranya.

Women are controlled in every way,’ she told me. ‘In our village, girls were not allowed to climb trees; if they did, they would have to pay a fine of Rs 500 (eight pounds) or a hen. If a man hits a woman and she hits him back she has to give the village a goat. Men go off to the hills for months together to hunt. Women are not allowed to go near the kill, the best part of the meat goes to men. Women are not allowed to eat eggs.’ Good reason to join a guerrilla army? Sumitra tells the story of two of her friends, Telam Parvati and Kamla, who worked with KAMS. Telam Parvati was from Polekaya village in south Bastar. Like everyone else from there, she too watched the Salwa Judum burn her village. She then joined the PLGA and went to work in the Keshkal ghats. In 2009, she and Kamla had just finished organizing the 8 March Women’s Day celebrations in the area. They were together in a little hut just outside a village called Vadgo. The police surrounded the hut at night and began to fire. Kamla fired back, but she was killed. Parvati escaped but was found and killed the next day. That’s what happened last year on Women’s Day.

He thinks back. ‘In 2007, we had to issue a statement saying, “Nahin bhai, hamne gai ko hathode se nahin mara (No brother, we did not kill the cows with a hammer).”

Happiness is taken very seriously here, in the Dandakaranya forest. People will walk for miles, for days together to feast and sing, to put feathers in their turbans and flowers in their hair, to put their arms around each other and drink mahua and dance through the night. No one sings or dances alone. This, more than anything else, signals their defiance towards a civilization that seeks to annihilate them.

Once the police enter a village, they loot and steal and burn houses. They come with dogs. The dogs catch those who try and run. They chase chickens and pigs, and the police kill them and take them away in sacks. Special police officers come along with the police. They’re the ones who know where people hide their money and jewellery. They catch people and take them away. And extract money before they release them. They always carry some extra Naxal ‘dresses’ with them in case they find someone to kill. They get money for killing Naxals, so they manufacture some. Villagers are too frightened to stay at home.

‘Do you know what to do if we come under fire?’ Sukhdev asks casually, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘immediately declare an indefinite hunger strike.’

When it comes, the farewell must be quick. Lal Salaam Comrades. When I looked back, they were still there. Waving. A little knot. People who live with their dreams, while the rest of the world lives with its nightmares. Every night I think of this journey. That night sky, those forest paths. I see Comrade Kamla’s heels in her scuffed chappals, lit by the light of my torch. I know she must be on the move. Marching, not just for herself, but to keep hope alive for us all.

For refusing to buy shares in the rapidly growing condemnation industry, we were branded ‘terrorist sympathizers’ and had our photographs flashed repeatedly on TV like wanted criminals.

Gandhian satyagraha, for example, is a kind of political theatre. In order for it to be effective, it needs a sympathetic audience, which villagers deep in the forest do not have. When a posse of eight hundred policemen lay a cordon around a forest village at night and begin to burn houses and shoot people, will a hunger strike help? (Can starving people go on a hunger strike? And do hunger strikes work when they are not on TV?)

The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination—an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination that has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: can you leave the water in the rivers? The trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? If they say they cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars.

Gandhi always said that he wanted to live like the poorest of the poor. The question is, can poverty be simulated? Poverty, after all, is not just a question of having no money or no possessions. Poverty is about having no power.

Those that split away from them in the late 1960s and independent Marxist-Leninist parties in other states (collectively known as the ‘Naxalites’, named after the first uprising in the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal) have tried to address the issue of caste and to make common cause with Dalits, but with little success. The few efforts they made to seize land from big zamindars and redistribute it to labourers failed because they did not have the mass support or the military firepower to see it through. Their sidelong nod to caste as opposed to a direct engagement with it has meant that even radical communist parties have lost the support of what could have been a truly militant and revolutionary constituency.

Our forests are full of soldiers and our universities full of police.

It is of consummate importance to the Emotional Graph of the film that you never, ever stop pitying her. That she never threatens the Power Balance.

Mala’s book tells a different story. Phoolan Devi stages her first protest against injustice at the age of ten. Before she is married off. In fact, it’s the reason that she’s married off so early. To keep her out of trouble. She didn’t need to be raped to protest. Some of us don’t.

I’m not sure I know how one defines scum. But for the sake of the argument, let’s assume that she is. Phoolan Devi (Scum) – like a degree from an unknown university. Does Scum have civil rights? It took a Salman Rushdie to make the world discuss the freedom of expression. Not an Enid Blyton. And so, to discuss an individual’s right to Justice, it takes a Phoolan Devi. Not the Pope.

While I watched this, I remember feeling that using the identity of a living woman, recreating her degradation and humiliation for public consumption, was totally unacceptable to me. Doing it without her consent, without her specific, written, repeated, whole-hearted, unambiguous consent, is monstrous. I cannot believe that it has happened. I cannot believe that it is being condoned.

I’ve tried so hard to understand how it could possibly be that so many intelligent people have not seen through this charade. I can only think that to them, a ‘True Story’ is just another kind of story. That ‘Truth’ is merely a more exciting form of fiction. They don’t believe that Phoolan Devi is real. That she actually exists. That she has feelings. Opinions. A mind. A Past. A father that she loved (who didn’t sell her for a second-hand bicycle). Her life, or what they know of it, is so implausible, so far-fetched. So unlike what Life means to them. It has very little to do with what they associate with being ‘human’. They cannot put themselves in her shoes – and think what they’d feel if the film had done to them what it has done to her.