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Ajay Singh

My Seditious Heart
by Arundhati Roy
Haymarket Books
5/5 stars
Arundhati Roy stood on top of a hill and laughed out loud. It was the last year of the 20th century and in the distance, beyond a river in the wealthy Indian state of Gujarat, the renowned author could see tribal hamlets about to be lost to an immense government hydroelectric dam.
“I knew I was looking at a civilisation older than Hinduism,” Roy writes in her latest book, My Seditious Heart, a collection of her previously published political essays (and a few public speeches and lectures) spanning two decades of the most dizzying economic and social change India has ever experienced.
“Why did I laugh?” asks Roy, who is known for being one of India’s boldest activists and critics. “Because I suddenly remembered the tender concern with which the Supreme Court judges in Delhi had inquired whether Adivasi [tribal] children in the resettlement colonies would have children’s parks to play in.”

Lawyers representing the government had assured the judges that not only would there be parks, but there would be seesaws and slides in every one. “I looked up at the end­less sky and down at the river rushing past, and for a brief moment the absurdity of it all reversed my rage and I laughed,” writes Roy, adding: “I meant no disrespect.”
Two years earlier, Roy had won the prestigious Man Booker prize for her debut novel, The God of Small Things (1997). She was 35 and the award catapulted her from a largely reclusive life to literary stardom. “I was a front-runner in the line-up of people who were chosen to personify the confident, new, market-friendly India that was finally taking its place at the high table,” she writes.
“It was flattering in a way, but deeply disturbing, too. As I watched people being pushed into penury, my book was selling millions of copies. My bank account was burgeon­ing. Money on that scale confused me. What did it really mean to be a writer in times such as these?”
Roy found her answer by writing what she describes in the book’s foreword as “a long, bewildering, episodic, astonishingly violent story” about two unusual – and unusually destructive – forces in recent Indian history and “of the remarkable people who had risen to resist them”.
Those forces – corporate globalisation and govern­ment-aided religious fundamentalism – were unleashed simultaneously in the last decade of the 20th century. A year after the government unlocked India’s protected markets in 1991, it looked the other way while Hindu nationalists demolished a 16th-century mosque, claiming it had been built by Muslim conquerors on the site of a temple they had razed to the ground.
“Far from being antagonistic forces that represented Old and New India,” writes Roy, alluding to the nation’s economic liberalisation and religious chauvinism, “they were actually lovers performing an elaborate ritual of seduction and coquetry that could sometimes be misread as hostility”.

Corporations, Roy argues, are ruining India’s fragile communities and ecosystems with the enthusiastic consent of religiously inspired nationalism. The tyranny climaxed after the September 11 attacks that resulted in the US-led “war on terror”, catastrophes that “came as gifts to fascists all over the world [...] The rising tide of Hindu nationalism was quick to harness the headwind of international Islamophobia that followed in its wake.”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nation­al­ist widely praised as a champion of economic growth, was an unelected political novice at the time. Barely a few weeks after September 11, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which he now leads, installed him in the highest office in his home state of Gujarat by removing an elected politician.
Four months into Modi’s tenure as Gujarat’s chief minister, the mysterious burning of a railway coach in which 59 Hindu pilgrims died prompted vigilante Hindu mobs in the state to launch a pogrom against Muslims in which about 2,000 people were slaughtered. Following the massacre, Modi announced state elections, which he won.
Roy writes that several major corporate heads endorsed Modi as the future prime minister at a formal meeting of Indian industrialists in Gujarat soon after the anti-Muslim pogrom. Among them was Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, who lives in a 27-storey building in Mumbai, replete with three helipads and hanging gardens, considered to be the most expensive private home ever built.

In 2018, “all of Bollywood’s A-list superstars danced like chorus extras at his daughter’s US$100 million wedding”, writes Roy. “Beyoncé performed. Hillary Clinton arrived to pay her respects. The country must have suffered a temporary shortage of flowers and jewellery.”
Roy’s India is a place of extremes: obscene wealth and acute poverty; entrepreneurial drive and thuggery; caste-based kinship and exploitation. “India lives in several centuries at the same time,” she writes. “Somehow we manage to progress and regress simultaneously.”
Erudite and poetic, with a masterful storyteller’s eye, most of the essays in Roy’s book first appeared in print in Outlook and Frontline, two of India’s most respected mass-market English-language news magazines.
“They were written when a certain political space closed down, when a false consensus was being broadcast, when I could no longer endure the relentless propaganda and the sheer vicious bullying of vulnerable people by an increa­sing­ly corporatised media and its increasingly privatised commentators,” writes Roy.

But she also wrote to reclaim language from the carpetbaggers. “Because it was distressing to see words being deployed to mean the opposite of what they really meant,” she says, referring to phrases such as “a level playing field”, which “actually meant a very steep slope”, and “empowering women”, which in fact meant “under­mining them in every possible way”.
Her vast subject matter covers everything from caste, class, gender politics and capitalism to nuclear weapons, terrorist strikes, government-backed massacres and Hindu nationalism. Almost every piece provoked a backlash, whether in the form of outraged letters to the editor (some, bizarrely, written in anticipation of unpublished articles), police cases, legal notices, even a short stint in jail.
More than a few of Roy’s essays are so anguished that the only consolation they offer is the kind that insists on not seeking any solace at all. In fact, to read these essays is to recall the words of Elias Canetti, the German-language author and winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for literature, who wrote that it is “a mark of fundamental human decency to feel ashamed of living in the 20th century”.
Lurking behind Roy’s prose is a cry for the cleansing of India’s soul, or at least the rot within the collective subconscious of the nation’s elite, especially its politicians.

Each harassment Roy faced wore her down to such a degree that she would resolve never to write another essay. “But equally, almost every one of them – each a broken promise to myself – took me on journeys deeper and deeper into worlds that enriched my understanding, and compli­cated my view, of the times we live in,” she writes. “They opened doors for me to secret places where few are trusted, led me into the very heart of insurrections, into places of pain, rage and ferocious irreverence. On these journeys, I found my dearest friends and my truest loves.”
Some of Roy’s essays are intensely sad. In “The Algebra of Infinite Justice”, published three weeks after September 11, she urges Americans to search their souls about why the attacks might have happened, instead of usurping “the whole world’s sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own”.
And in the 2000 piece, “Power Politics”, centred on the rampant privatisation of Earth’s resources, Roy has this to say: “When all the rivers and valleys and forests and hills of the world have been priced, packaged, bar-coded, and stacked in the local supermarket, when all the hay and coal and earth and wood and water have been turned to gold, what then shall we do with all the gold?”
Her rhetorical answer: “Make nuclear bombs to obliterate what’s left of the ravaged landscapes and the notional nations in our ruined world?”


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My Seditious Heart

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My Seditious Heart traces her journey from novelist to activist, and back again
Roy takes on gender politics, corporate globalisation, religious fundamentalism and India’s caste system


In My Seditious Heart, the writer takes on gender politics, corporate globalisation, religious fundamentalism and India’s caste system.


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Review | Arundhati Roy’s My Seditious Heart: political essays on 20 years as a thorn in the side of India’s establishment

My Seditious Heart traces her journey from novelist to activist, and back again Roy takes on gender politics, corporate globalisation, religious fundamentalism and India’s caste system

My Seditious Heart traces her journey from novelist to activist, and back again

Roy takes on gender politics, corporate globalisation, religious fundamentalism and India’s caste system