'I'm A Pre-Programmed Optimist'

Amy Goodman: Well it's a great pleasure to be able to see you face to face and to talk to you in person.We've spoken to you on the phone many times and I very much look forward to your address tomorrow night. Wellyour book has come out now in a new edition, War Talk and in it, it includes one of the speeches that we haverun a lot here and that is your speech Come September that you gave in Santa Fe. Juan mentionedthe issue of media centralization in this country. In India you see the United States through the lens of --what is it you've said? Fox is what you watch?

Arundhati Roy: Fox and CNN I think, are the two channels you get there.

Amy Goodman: So what do you think? What do you think of America through that lens?

Arundhati Roy: Well you know it's it's true that last year before I came, I was coerced to come to Americabecause I did think that there was no need for me to come here and, you know, be insulted and called names andso on. Because you think of it as a homogenous place in some way, and I was so delighted to find the opposite.I was so delighted to find that we who are protesting against these things on the outside have some of ourstaunchest allies in America.

And I must say that, it put me in the extraordinary position of defendingAmerican citizens against an assault which is absolutely racist sometimes, outside, because of these mediachannels and because of the policies of the US government, people in America are just seen as a homogenousbunch of rabid, nationalist bullies and that's such a sad thing because I think if we are going to fight toreclaim democracy that fight has to begin here.

And all of us have to acknowledge that it is the people ofAmerica who have access to the imperial palace. And so, it was wonderful to come. At the same time, thisconsolidation of the American media, I mean, I think, one of the good things that happened after September11th, was that this myth of free speech and the free market crumbled along with the twin towers, you know.

Outside America, the American free press has become the butt of some pretty dark humor and nobody now ... it'scontextualized you know. When you watch CNN and FOX news -- anyway, not everybody, but a lot of people just watchit as the boardroom bulletin of the White House you know, and know it for what it is.

Juan Gonzalez: Well in your latest book War Talk, you talk about Empire in a much broader way than perhapswe're accustomed to discussing here in the US, cause we're always centering in on the US Empire and the US'srole in world domination but you talk about Empire and all the allies of Empire in all the different countriesaround the world including your own. I'm wondering if you could expound on that a little bit?

Arundhati Roy: Well, you know there are two ways that Empire spreads its tentacles, one is with the cruisemissile and the daisy cutter and so on, and the other is with the IMF checkbook. So you know the argument thatis being made across the world is that the people of Argentina and the people of Iraq have been decimated bythe same process but by different weapons -- in one case the cruise missile, in the other case, the check book.

And what happened was just like the colonial enterprise which needed the collusion of native elites you know,it wasn't as though Britain had huge armies stationed in India, it had the Indian elite colluding with it. Inthe same way now, this project of corporate globalization has the collusion of local elites in third worldcountries you know. And so what happens is that you have a process in which the white man doesn't even have tocome to the hot countries and get malaria and diarrhea and die an early death because it is being managed ontheir behalf by governments like say the government in India or the government in South Africa who arewillingly genuflecting to that process.

And a situation in which, very interestingly say you look at a countrylike South Africa you know, 1994 apartheid officially ended. By 1996, the ANC who had fought so hard andpeople who had fought so hard for that freedom look what's happened to them. Out of a population of 44million, 10 million have had their water and electricity cut off and you have the traditional power, the whitepower in say South Africa, more secure and happier than it's ever been cause it's apartheid with a cleanconscience now and it's called democracy.

Amy Goodman: How do you decide when to write fiction and when to write non-fiction?

Arundhati Roy: That's a very, very troubling question, you know because, well, I don't decide, it's somehowdecided somewhere else in the ether. But the fact is that for me, fiction is my love. Fiction is what makes mehappy. The other writing that I do, each time I write I swear that I'll never do it again. It's sort ofwrenched out of me and it ends up -- I end up paying a price for it which I'm not sure that I want to pay.

Andthat's not just in prison sentences, or criticism or insults which I have my share of, but even the other --youknow it keeps pushing you into this very public place where you know there are times when you don't want tobe. You want to be tentative and you want to be uncertain and you don't want to .. to .. to sort of bang your fiston the table and yet I know that there are times in the world when you can't look at it as what you want to door where you want to be. You have to intervene.

It's like I never, ever decide to write something in terms ofmy essays, you know. Like if someone asks me, some newspaper asks me, will you write this or someone asks me, Iwill say no. It's just when something happens and I read about what's happening, and then I know that there'ssomething that hasn't been said which I want to say and it sets up this hammering in my head and I can't keepquiet and I have to do it and I do it and I -- most of the time regret it immediately.

Amy Goodman: We have to break for stations to identify themselves but we will be back with Arundhati Royhere live in our firehouse studios just blocks from ground zero, from where the towers of the world tradecenter once stood.

Amy Goodman: Arundhati can you talk aboutwhere you grew up, where you were born, where you grew up, and on this day after Mother's Day, your mother,Mary Roy.

Arundhati Roy: Well, I was born in a town called Shillong, that is in the north-east of India. You knowIndia is like -- more complicated than the whole of Europe, so you know, My mother was -- is -- from South India in astate called Kerala. My father is from Bengal. I was born in Shillong which at the time was in a state calledAssam. But now it isn't. And my parents were divorced when I was about one or something, and I came back withmy mother to Kerala, where I grew up in a village called Aymanam, which is the village in which The God ofSmall Things is set.

She [Mary Roy] comes from a community of Syrian Christians who are Christians who believe they wereconverted at the time when St. Thomas traveled east after the crucifixion of Christ. But the first realevidence of that is around the 8th century. Anyway it's a very small parochial community and my mother wassort of shunned for being this woman who dared to marry a Hindu outside her community and then got divorcedand came back to the village with her children and so on.

So I suppose now that that is behind me I have tolook at it as fortunate, because I grew up on the edges of an extremely feudal, suffocating society where ...youknow, which was not prepared to assure me ... the assurances that it would hold out to other sort of, you know,children who belonged to that community. One was outside it cause you were not of it. And because I grew up inKerala which has traditionally been a communist state, it was very interesting because you had Christianity,Hinduism, Muslims, Marxists all sort of rubbing each other down and you lived outside the framework -- I livedoutside the framework of all this.

Growing up in a rural area, but at the same time having, the ... beingeducated in the ways that other people would not have been in a rural area. So I keep saying that as a writerit was a lucky place to be at the top of the bottom of the heap. Somehow, without the perspective, this sortof tunnel vision of the completely oppressed... without the paranoia of the ... completely of the oppressors.Somehow you grew up in ... the cracks between this very complex society.

Juan Gonzalez: And why was it that Kerala, being, as you mentioned, such a feudal and rural place could thendevelop to have a communist administration so early on? What were the conditions and dynamics that gave riseto that? What kind of impact did that have on your consciousness?

Arundhati Roy: Well, don't make the mistake of assuming that the communists aren't feudal. They...they aremore progressive than others, so what they did was to harness that feudalism to, kind of, not challenge it insome way. So the irony of course is that the communists are all upper caste people and very intellectual andso on. But the situation is that's what The God of Small Things is all about, you know, where you havea Kerala [which] is the only place in India where they claim a hundred percent literacy and yet the kind of... the kind ofoppression that you see there or the kind of attitudes towards women that you see there is so suffocating, youknow.

My mother is ... I didn't talk about her ... she is the most... she's a remarkable woman. Also someone who I oftenthink kind of escaped from the sets of a Fellini film, but that's a separate thing. And she... she.. really...it was acombination of her being in this place where she was shunned and, you know, ridiculed for who she was, and so Inever grew up being told that I should play by the rules, you know, which is very lucky for me.

But I findmyself in this really strange position cause so many years of my life I spent fighting to escape thesuffocation of tradition as an Indian woman, and I got there only to be up against the bestiality of themodern world which I don't want either, you know, so you're somehow in this narrow alley between these twomonolithic, monstrous things and you know sometimes, you don't know where to go with it. Every single decisionthat you make is a decision and a political one, you know, for that reason.

Amy Goodman: Your mother ran a school and also stood up for women's rights in India?

Arundhati Roy: Yeah, my mother runs a school. I studied there. She started it when she left my father. Shestarted it with seven children, two of whom were her own. It used to be what I called the sliding, foldingschool cause it used to be in the premises of the Rotary club.

In the evenings the men used to meet and drinkand smoke cigarettes and throw the butts and their dirty glasses on the floor. In the morning we would comeand clean it all up and, you know, open up the furniture and it used to be the school and then in the eveningthey would come and dirty it up again.

Now of course it's a beautiful school on the outskirts of this littletown called Kotayem and yeah, she still runs it. It's a fabulous place. She became very well known, my mother,because you know, she filed a case, a public litigation case in the Supreme Court of India, challenging a lawwhich said that Syrian Christian women could inherit one fourth of their father's property or five thousandrupees which is about .. which is less than a hundred dollars, whichever is less.

So she challenged that and saidit was unconstitutional and the law was changed with retrospective effect giving women equal rights. So thatwas a very, very big thing then. Not that it has made such a huge difference cause that was a law in casea man didn't leave a will, in case a father didn't leave a will. So now of course they are taking will-makingclasses on how to disinherit their daughters.

Amy Goodman: And now, like it or not, Arundhati Roy, you've ended up in court yourself on severaloccasions. One had to do with your own book as people -- men in Kerala called The God of Small Things obscene,or at least in some sections of it. And then in your own activism around the issue of dams in India. Can youtalk about both?

Arundhati Roy: In The God of Small Things, I was accused of corrupting public morality which-- the case isstill in court actually -- and I keep saying there is a technical legal issue here because at least it shouldhave been "further corrupting public morality" since I can't believe public morality was pure untilI came along. But, in India the legal system is like this lumbering thing. It's part, like 75% of it is aboutharassment. It's not about conviction. It's not about what will happen at the end. It's about courtappearances and paying lawyers and disrupting your life and so on. You know it's used for that reason.

For meto go from Delhi to Kerala to appear -- it's almost like going from Delhi to London. It's so far away. And I'll gothere and the judge will arrive and he says "everybody is ready to argue the case," and he says"every time this case comes before me I get chest pains and I don't want to decide it." You knowcause he knows that everybody is waiting for him to say something and he doesn't want to so, then it'sdismissed and it's been going on for years.

The other one is much more serious, was much more serious and ismuch more serious. Because, you know there are two ways of looking at it. One is just personally -- the courtharassing a writer, a famous writer or whatever. But that's not as important as if I can explain an issue ofdemocracy. Because you see people now have begun to think of democracy as elections, you know, that's it.That's the only genuflection you have to make in the direction of democracy.

But, in actual fact, it is alateral system of checks and balances with various institutions checking each other and balancing each other. Now in India, the Supreme Court is perhaps the most powerful institution in our so-called"democracy". And now it takes decisions which are ... it's a micro-management of Indian society. Itdecides whether slums should be cleared, whether dams should be built, whether industry should be privatized,whether diesel should be the public fuel or it should be compressed natural gas, whether industry should bemoved out of a city or not, whether history text books should contain such and such a chapter or not, whetherthis mosque should be built or not.

Every single decision is taken today by the Supreme Court of India. Now,there is a law called "contempt of court" which says that you cannot criticize the Supreme Court. You cancriticize a judgment, but you can't, say, put a series of judgments together and say "look there's a verydistinct politics emerging here." A wide -- you can't question it except in their terms, let's say. Sothat makes it an institution which is completely undemocratic.

And I was, you know, hauled up on contempt ofcourt. And I was saying: "You can't have this law. You can't have this law and call yourself a democracy.It's a judicial dictatorship." And that's what it is. People are terrified, terrified of the SupremeCourt.

Juan Gonzalez: And why do you think that that has evolved in that way, this judicial dictatorship? What inthe political development of Indian society has allowed the court to exercise such power?

Arundhati Roy: Well I think the philosophical answer to that is we are still a feudal societywhich looks toauthority somehow, you know. But really what has happened is that, you know, power looks for ways in which tosubvert democracy at all times. And so you have a situation where you have a very corrupt political elite. Youhave a media that is increasingly becoming a corporate media. And so you have this court.

It's like you have asystem. You have this contempt of court now, which is a law, which means that the court works like a manhole,like a floor trap. It attracts all the power because it's not accountable and it's able to exerciseunaccountable power. Today, if I had documentary evidence of a corrupt judge - say I had evidence of a judgehaving taken a bribe for making a particular judgment ­ I can't put that evidence before the court becauseit's contempt of court. Truth is not a defense in contempt of court. So you can imagine the extent of powerthat is being exercised. It's completely unaccountable.

And now having put me in jail on this, what hashappened is that the message has gone out to the Indian media that "Don't mess with us ­ if we can dothis to her, you think of what we can do to a journalist in a little town who has no money, who can't hire alawyer, who doesn't have the protection of, you know, being a public figure." They can just be thrown injail. They lose their jobs. They lose everything. So they just allow the court this wide berth. And it keepsgoing.

You know, sometimes it makes judgments which are good. But most of the time, its judgments, at themoment, are retrogressive, you know? And of course those judgments suit the middle class; it suits the Indianelite so the court is a holy cow. So they say "Oh but how can she, you know, like, there should berespect for something," you know? That hierarchical way of thinking.