≫ Good evening.  Good afternoon.
Good morning wherever you are in
the world because we know we 
have people here with us all 
over the world.
Greetings and welcome.  My name 
is Rick.
I work in a bookstore in Seattle
called Elliot Bay Book Company.
On behalf of all the people 
staging
this production today, we are 
delighted to be celebrating
the publication of our Arundhati
Roy's newest book, "AZADI: 
Freedom. Fascism. Fiction."  
This is being published, 
launched
with her in New Delhi,
so she is in the evening hours. 
I'm in Seattle where it is still
a new day.
Nick Estes, who I'll say more of
shortly, is an hour ahead of me.
We know all of you joining us 
are everywhere on the spectrum.
You may be earlier in the 
morning here and later in the 
night than it is in new deli.  
The publication of this book 
today is an auspicious one.
I want to first acknowledge and 
thank all the good work that
Haymarket Books, who is the 
book's
publisher, has done to not only 
make this occasion happen but
also in publishing
this book Haymarket is
a publisher based in Chicago, in
the U.S.
, who has been around since 2001
and is
dedicated to social justice book
and has been publishing several
of Arundhati Roy's nonfiction
books that have come around 
these past 20 years.
I'm not sure if people have seen
this beforehand,
but you can go to 
Haymarketbooks.org and see what 
they do.
There are amazing books coming. 
Books particularly speaking to 
the moment we're in.
They are a huge part of why 
we're here today.  
Also, in Seattle, one of the 
other copresenters
of this day is an organization
called Tasvir.
It's a south Asian arts 
organization based with
a strong social justice bent 
that came about in 2002 in 
response to what was happening 
in the U.S. 
in the wake of 9/11 and has done
these ambitious south Asian film
festivals and
now is increasingly doing 
literary festivals.  Versions of
both will be online.
You can go to tasvir.org and see
more of what they're about.
They've helped present Arundhati
in some of
her recent Seattle visits.
Elliot Bay Book Company, I've
worked there for 47 years.
It's doing the long and hard 
work
of putting books in people's 
hands.
I believe we may have a longer 
history
with Arundhati than any other 
bookstore or at least outside of
India.
It was in the spring of 1997 
that she came to the U.S. for 
just a few cities.
Seattle was I think one
of the 
first that took her work to 
heart and soul.
As anyone who has read
that book, knows what happens in
that remarkable book.
Her last visit was for her 
second novel, which came
20 years after "The God
of all Small Things.
"  That was the "Ministry of 
Utmost Happiness." 
There are people who have 
wondered where Arundhati was in
terms of her writing, those 
looking for another novel.  
There were other writings.
Over the series of what was 
basically a 
20-year period, these writings, 
which were published
initially in Indian
Magazines, 
"Frontline" and 
"Outlook," particularly.
They kept happening.
Various things that Arundhati 
felt compelled
to speak out about and where 
those places met.
In India and other countries, 
those
books are published under other 
titles.  
Usually, it was a slightly 
different combination of the 
same essays and with a different
title.
This was all sort of addressed 
with the
publication last year of the
collective nonfiction, "My 
Seditious Heart.
"  This is this tome, which is 
noteworthy for its
thickness because it is 1,000 
pages of writing that happened. 
As things developed, many people
that came to work came first to 
these essays.
Some went back and read the 
novels.
(Breaking up).  
The book she's here for today is
a book two years on from the
essays in "My Seditious Heart," 
this book ""AZADI: 
Freedom. Fascism. Fiction.
"  It was launched here in the 
U.S.  
It's coming out in a new days in
India.
There are nine pieces that have 
been written since then.
These pieces have a compelling,
vital power that speaks
-- that addresses certainly 
things in India, but with 
resonance and relevance here in 
the U.S.
That's a subject we'll talk 
about today, where things are.  
With Arundhati will be Nick 
Estes, who is joining us from 
Albuquerque.
He is a professor of American 
studies.
He's the cofounder of an 
organization started in 2014
called "The Red Nation.
"  Go to therednation.org.
He's the author of a book 
published last
year called 
Versa, which is a powerful book,
which
we have to send to Arundhati 
because I don't think the book 
has made it to India.
Last year, he 
co-edited this 
anthology, "standing With 
Standing Rock."  
Arundhati and Nick will have a 
conversation for the next hour 
or so.
You are invited to
put questions in the chat field 
as you're watching.
Those will be fed to Nick, and
he will work those in.
Also, today is being live 
captioned.
If you wish to have access to 
that, there's information in the
chat, instructions in the chat.
Tess Stephenson is doing that.
Yes, your questions, your 
comments,
the closed captioning, and I 
will 
disappear in just a moment and 
will reappear at the very end.
To say you're in
great hands now
and to thank you-all for joining
us.
I can only imagine the energy 
that would be in a room with 
Arundhati and Nick.
This is their first meeting too.
We also get to bring people 
together in different
ways, so this will be part of 
what we get to benefit from 
that.
Direct your energy and focus and
what would be applause
in the affirmation and support 
to these two people that are
doing great work and
particularly to the book you're 
about to
hear from that Arundhati has 
written.
Please welcome Arundhati Roy and
Nick Estes.  
≫ Thanks so much, Rick.  That 
introduction was really 
wonderful.
As I was preparing for this 
particular interview, I was 
reading
a little bit about Arundhati
Roy's background.  The things 
she has written has been very 
powerful.
You can look at the things she's
been criticized for and
persecuted for by the Indian 
state as a
testament to the power of her 
particular work and role as a 
writer.
For me, personally, this is a 
great honor.
I'm a huge fan of Arundhati Roy.
I haven't told her this offline,
but
I'm incredibly nervous because 
it is a huge honor for me to
just be talking to you and to 
have the opportunity
to read this wonderful book,
because it speaks to this moment
in time.  
I wanted to begin this interview
with a question about the 
book's title, which is 
"Azadi," which is a Kashmiri 
word for freedom.
The first word that comes to 
mind when you think of
Ada
-- Azadi is novel. 
You can move the world's 
languages and times
through societies and politics.
You read the long history of 
India through Kashmir.
Can you explain your choice of 
using this word and how it 
shapes
this collection of essays?  
≫ Azadi is a word which is
perhaps Persian in 
origin, and then Persian came 
and
mingled with
Hindu and became a Urdu word.
It traveled from the
Irani revolution.
It was used by feminists.
It's meaning is the
haunting cry of Kashmiris who 
have been
fighting the Indian military 
occupancy, who have been killed 
in their houses for it.
But oddly enough, there's
a deathly silence in India about
the Kashmiris struggle.  There's
a silence from the left.  
There's a silence from the 
liberals.  
There's a lot of noise from the 
right, which covers the real 
truth of the story.
Also, what is very dangerous in 
this part of the subcontinent is
that -- 
let's say the large Muslim 
population in 
India, as in 15% or 30%, which 
is millions,
hundreds of millions of
people, are a kind of hostage to
the
rivalry with Pakistan,
to the Kashmiris
independence movement.
They have a different space that
they occupy.  They don't have 
the option of thinking about 
freedom.
They have to think about how to 
live here with dignity.
Recently, this 
government, the right-wing Hindu
nationalist government,
came up with a new citizenship 
law,
which is piggybacking on an old 
thing
called the national register of 
citizens, which was 
reactivated in the state that 
borders Bangladesh.
Some 20 million people were off 
that register, people
who were born and have lived in 
India for generations.
On top that, the government 
passed another
law called the citizen
Amendment Act,
which was blatantly anti-Muslim.
There was something that 
happened last year on the 5th of
August.  It was stripped of its 
status.
It was integrated into
India in the most brutal way 
possible.
It's the most densely
militarzed zone in the world.  
Their phones were put off.  
Kashmir has been under curfew, 
silenced, lockdown, COVID, all 
of it.
While Kashmir was silenced, 
massive
protests came out on the streets
of
India by this new
Muslim, anti-Muslim, citizenship
law.
Their chant was also Azadi.
While the Kashmir Azadi
chant was silenced, here there 
was a demand
for a different kind of Azadi.
Obviously not independence as in
secession or an independent 
state but a cry for 
dignity, for human rights, for 
being treated as equal citizens.
That, too, was brutally crushed.
The rest of India sort of became
-- I mean not with the kind of
cruelty that Kashmiris have 
witnessed, but there was curfew.
People were brutalized, killed.
This series of essays really 
began to
ask what is the connection 
between
the Kashmiris call for Azadi and
the new cry on the Indian 
streets.  Is a chasm?  Is it a 
bridge?
The essays are
written from the point of view 
of
a literary 
imagination, which then 
basically integrates
the idea of
Azadi in its myriad forms.  
≫ You're muted.  
≫ Sorry.  I can't hear you, 
Nick.  
≫ Can you hear me now?  
≫ Yeah.  
≫ Okay.
I think you make a point in one 
of the
essays, which is a talk that you
gave about how your writer 
friends
were approaching you and talking
about, well, when are you going 
to get back
to writing, when are you going 
to get back to 
the, quote, unquote, work of a 
fiction writer.
You make a powerful point not 
just in this book but
I think throughout your career 
that what you are doing is a
form of literature, whether it's
fiction or nonfiction.
Can you talk a little bit about 
your role as a writer and how 
you see it
playing out not just in the
realm of political analysis and 
commenting on current events but
also
imagining new worlds whether it 
is through
"the God Of
Small Things" or your newest 
novel.  
≫ I used to work -- you know, 
I'm an architect.  Then I worked
in cinema.
This was my first book,
"The God of Small Things."
Who could anticipate that kind 
of attention for a first book?  
It won the Booker Prize and it 
sold millions of copies.
I found myself very
suspicious of this kind of 
embrace by
an establishment that I've 
always been very suspicious of.
I felt like my proteins were 
being sort of melted down.
I was being turned into some --
fame is also very domesticated, 
domesticating.
Everybody wants you to write the
same book again and its 
different things.
That was just around the time 
that India had sort of
shifted from being this 
nonaligned 
power, a poor country but a poor
country
with some spine, with some
dignity with a great socialist 
underpinning.
Where I grew up, it was the 
first
Democratically elected communist
government in the world, if
that's not an
oxymoron.
Suddenly, by the 90s, everything
changed.
The markets were opened.  The 
Soviet Union had collapsed.
India aligned itself with the 
free market, with the U.S., with
Israel.
Suddenly, the literary 
imagination, the cinematic 
imagination, the poetic 
imagination, the public 
language, everything changed.  
In '97, I was on the cover of 
every magazine.
In '98, the right-wing 
government
came in and did a series of 
nuclear tests.
I was sort of being marketed as 
this -- sort of the
new India, the new India
taking its place on the high 
table.
I knew I didn't have the option 
of keeping quiet.
I wrote the first political 
essay, which was
called "The End Of Imagination."
Within hours, I was kicked off 
the
pedestal of a great literary 
sensation.
There was this incredible 
disappointment in me by people 
around me.  They were like, how 
could you have done this?
In that essay, I was talking 
about
the fact that nuclear weapons
-- it's not just whether they're
used or not that's the problem 
but
how they colonize your 
imagination, how
they nationalize your 
imagination, how
they change the public language.
I said if it is anti-Hindu
to have this imagination, I 
secede.  
In this orgy of nationalism,
the fairy princess had just come
out and shat on everyone.
I was just like out, but
there was another world where 
suddenly kind of opened up to 
me.  I traveled.
I began to write these essays.
People were ununsure of what 
this was.  Is it academic?
Is it a pamphlet?  
They were somewhere between 
genres because there were 
certainly -- it was an 
intervention.  It was urgent.  
It was furious.
I saw that these
movements, like the displacement
of these
nations of people,
of ancient people -- you know, 
there needed to be
o  -- a story.
A story was putting a weapon in 
the hands of the movement.
I was not writing what people 
call the truth to power.
I was not writing on the one 
hand this and
on the other hand that and on 
the third hand is this.
I was saying this is not right, 
and
I'm the writer on the side of 
the line.
I think things might have 
changed a little very 
recently, but there's this kind 
of fear
of a writer being political,
as if "the God of Small Things" 
wasn't political.
Dealing with a subject that was 
absolutely taboo,
which is to talk about caste and
the ways in which the
left has not been able
to deal with it -- but people 
managed to change it into, oh, 
it's so beautiful.
It's about children, the 
language, you know.
People kind of work hard to
soften the edges sometimes
of writing, which makes demand 
easy.  
For me, when I started writing 
the political 
essays, they would get
translated immediately into 
Indian
languages, made into pamphlets, 
distributed
in forests.  They understood the
literature, people on the front 
lines.  
That's what I said in one of the
essays.
For me, there's something about 
literature that is
constructed between readers and 
writers.
Not between critics and 
literature festivals and
reviewers, but between readers 
and writers, which is
urgent and which is a kind of 
shelter.
There are some moments in
my life
that are so -- more than any 
royalties, more than awards.
I remember being in a village in
Bangor very
late at night walking through 
the paddy fields.
There was a huge standoff 
because the government, which 
happened to be a left 
government,
was trying to take over the 
land, giving it
to a huge chemical plant.  There
was firing.  I could hear the 
firing happening in the 
distance.
I was just walking along.
This man just appeared in the 
shadows, and he 
said, you know, I just want to 
thank you
for understanding what we're 
doing. 
They think, the other side 
thinks, we have weapons.  We 
just pretend we have weapons.  
We use sticks and silhouette.  
We don't have weapons.
We don't have anything, but 
we're fighting.
Very few people at that point --
at that
point, everyone in the TV
studios started turning
Gandhian and denouncing 
violence, expecting everyone
to just lie down and die while 
the land is taken,
which is why I was so happy to 
read your piece.
I thought goodness how much you 
would have had to talk about
if you had come here and walked 
with the comrades
in the forest of central India. 
≫ Yeah, I really appreciate 
that.
There's a lot to be said.
One thing a friend of mine once 
said -- she's a poet.  I tried 
to be a poet.
Not good at it, but she said, 
you have to look for poetry.  
Poetry is more than just words. 
You have to look for poetry in 
actions.
It's the job of the writer to 
basically capture
or to be able to see that kind 
of poetry.
One thing I've really been 
inspired by your
writings specifically is that 
you don't confine yourself to 
one thing.
I think there's a lot of
expectation for people to be
characterized as a certain kind 
of writer, like you're a fiction
writer, you're a poet.  
We confront that, especially 
within literary 
nationalism, especially people 
who are not part of the European
tradition but nonetheless
have inherited the baggage of 
that, whether it is through 
colonialism or imperialism.
One of the ways I appreciated 
that you pushed back on that
is this idea of translation and 
the multiple languages that one 
has to know and to understand.
I'm not just talking about 
languages that
people speak because capitalism 
itself is a language.
It transforms relations into 
profit.  It transforms things 
into money.
I've been thinking about this 
because I'm writing this piece.
I haven't crystallized how I 
understand 
it, but I felt like you were 
really kind of challenging
-- in some ways you were being 
more
cosmopolitan than the 
cosmopolitan people.
You're looking at a place that 
as you say is
simultaneously captured in
different centuries, but also 
it's overlapped
in nations and different kinds 
of people
that can't just be encompassed 
in one single literary 
tradition.  
≫ Yeah.
In India, one of the
essays I say novels shouldn't 
have an
enemy, but if "The Ministry
of Utmost 
Happiness" has an enemy, it is 
the
idea of one religion and one 
government.
It is what the fascists are 
trying to push for.
In India, there are more than 
700 languages spoken.
22 of them are official 
languages.
Within each language, there is
such a history of colonizing, 
being colonized.
There's so many cycles
of respect and disrespect
disrespect, the words used
to describe this caste or that 
gender.
The first essay in the 
book, the caption is a line
which says in what language does
rain fall over tormented cities.
It's really talking about --
"Ministry of Utmost Happiness," 
the characters are swimming in 
this ocean of sadness.
It is the memory of the 
massacres that took place in
1947 when India was
partitioned and Pakistan and 
India became two separate 
countries.
Although, there were many 
nations where the violence was 
of assimilation as much as it 
was partition.
One of the things you see is
that before the partition 
happened language was 
partitioned.
The language that we
used to call 
Hindustani, which was 
partitioned into
Urdu, which was supposedly 
spoken by Muslims.  The violence
of that continues to this day.
To this day, you have
fascist mobs raise to
the ground some poet who wrote 
300
years ago -- some
poet of love.
Language has been at the heart
of much of the violence
in this continent that is 
masqueradeg
as a nation.  
Even as I was saying earlier, 
when they did the
nuclear tests, you could see the
public language changed.
When they start off on
these national register of 
citizens and you have
people who live in these little
islands in the most
distant parts
of the 
Rama Putra, all
of them have these little 
plastic bags with their 
documents.
They have internalized these
bureaucracy legacy papers.
Similar to people who are beings
displayed by the dam.
They have a whole other language
by which they are described in 
government files.  
PAP, that is project affected 
person.
There is canal affected.
As a writer in this part of
the world, to study
love and violence and
nation hold and religion, 
language is a
perfect entry point, you know?  
≫ Uh-huh.
Elaborating on this idea of 
language and the partition
of language, you talk about 
caste quite a bit in your work.
This is me being the ugly 
American.
We have a racial hierarchy in 
this country.
I wouldn't say it is comparable,
but there are similarities.
One of the things you talk 
about, it's
not so much a caste system, as
you say, it's about Brahmanism
and the
reBrahmanization of
sections of India society by the
RSS, which is one of the most
powerful organizations in Indian
society.
People have messaged me 
privately and asked
me,
isn't Arundhati Roy Brahmani?  
Isn't she upper caste?  
≫ No.
My father belonged to
an organization but became a 
Christian.
I'm not a Brahman.  
When the anti-caste movement has
used the word Brahmanism, it 
isn't about the word Brahmans.  
It is about the idea of this 
kind of caste hierarchy.
It's not just Brahmans that 
practice Brahmanism.
I would say fundamentally the
difference between race and 
caste
is only that caste has
also given itself religious 
sanction.  
Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, 
all of
them in their texts say all 
human beings are
equal or brothers, but no.
In the religious texts, you have
a
stipulated hierarchy.
You have four
divisions.
Each of these is
divided into these tiny little
jatis, which are castes. 
Each has hereditary occupation. 
The Brahmans are the priests.  
There are traders.  There are 
warriors.
There are menials, and the 
outcasts are the untouchables 
and the unseeable. 
The violence of thinking like 
that, it is unbelievable.
If you look at Indian society
and you look at even I would say
most Indian liberal 
intellectuals, even left-wing
intellectuals,
they just rely on this issue, 
which is the engine on which 
Indian society runs.
I have written a little book 
called
"The Doctor and The Saint.
"  There are conversations 
between the most beloved
leader and the most revered 
human being in
the world, Gandhi.
While I was researching 
this, I
am indoctrinated
in a completely falsification of
what
Gandhi was, what he stood for.  
I went back.
This little text is based not on
speculation, not on 
interpretation but
only producing his own writing.
At the time when Gandhi was in 
South Africa,
all of us are told he fought 
racism and segregation.  No.
His first battle in South Africa
was for
a third entrance to be opened
to the post office so Indians 
and
Blacks would not have to share 
the same entrance.
He continuously in his writing 
made a
difference between the upper 
caste
Indians and the lower
castes who are liars and are
basically unreformable.
I traced that from his time in 
South Africa up to
the end of his life, how his 
views
on race were informed on his 
child
hood and his views on castes and
his views on women.
Like I said in these essays -- 
not
elaborated upon like I have in 
"The Doctor
and The Saint -- but 
fascism, like we're experiencing
now, it adorns
itself with fake news, but the 
fake news is built on a fake 
history.
Liberals and left-wing
intellectuals laugh at the kind 
of corny fake
history of the right, but they
themselves have created a
fake history, which
aligns the role of caste
in this country, which is
absolutely -- the dishonesty is 
unbelievable.  
≫ And I think recently in the 
wake of the George
Floyd protests, which I would 
say have
erupted all over the world -- 
it's probably one of the largest
mass protests in history.
The only thing I can
think of comparable to them in 
this moment of recent
history is the mass 
demonstrations against the U.S.
invasion of Iraq back in 2003.
In South Africa, they toppled a 
Gandhi statue.  
≫ I think it was in Ghana.  
≫ Or Ghana.  
≫ There are movements in South 
Africa saying Gandhi must fall. 
It's difficult to talk about 
this subject just
in an interview because it is 
such a difficult subject.
In "The Doctor and The Saint," 
I'm
not saying Gandhi had nothing to
recommend himself.  Of course 
I'm not saying that.  He was a 
brilliant politician, a cunning 
politician.
He had a lot of things that
I think were visionary,
but we cannot
build an understanding of who we
are and
what we are fighting for
unless we are honest about his 
views on 
race, his views on caste, and 
his views on women.  
If you contract them, it's very 
hard
to prefix the word
Mahatma to his name for me.  
≫ There's an element in your 
writing that I think a lot of 
folks
here in this part of world can
identify with.
You write this in the nation 
piece that came
out, which I've read the day it 
came off the presses.  
How this 
Houdi 
Modi that's happening in Texas
-- increases in
searching for Indian girl.  
While Trump visited India in his
most
recent meeting with Modi, there 
was a massacre happening. 
≫ Yeah.  In my city.  
≫ In your city.
Modi seems to be a little bit 
more on the
softer edge in his public 
appearance.
Having an iron fist in
his crackdown against his 
dissent, which Trump doesn't 
really care about.
But the thing they share is
a make-believe fantasy in how 
they've dealt with dissent and 
the current pandemic.
I was wondering if you can 
elaborate a little bit more
on that and this relationship, 
this very
loving relationship between 
these two
leaders.  
≫ Yeah.
The difference between them is 
that
Trump
, of course, does
have his militias and his
media 
outlets
and --
are showing a kind of resistance
to him.  
Modi has been a member of this 
organization called the 
RSS, which has modelled itself
on Mussolini's black 
shirts, whose ideologues have 
openly prayed to Hitler.  They 
have a massive infrastructure.
They have a militia of something
like 600,000 people.
They have these branches, 
hundreds of thousands of 
branches all over the country.  
They are the state, you know?  
≫ Uh-huh.  
≫ The difference between the two
is that one has
the organization of fascism
behind them as well as
the 4
400 24/7 news channels and
Bollywood, which is a
great ambassador of the Hindu 
right.
You have a situation here where 
it is a machine that's running.
All the institutions of 
democracy have been taken 
over, but both of them are great
trends.
In fact, one of the reasons why 
Modi didn't react early to the 
COVID pandemic was Trump was 
visiting.
There was going to be this huge 
namaste Trump
meeting, which turned
out to be a hub of massive 
Coronavirus soon after that.
By the time Trump
came to Delhi, you had the 
protesters who were
on the streets very much like 
the Black Lives Matter protests.
There were millions of people on
the streets against the 
citizenship law.
By then, it had become about 
more than just that.  There was 
poetry.  
There were students.  
Universities were being just 
battered by
police and so on, but then you 
had the
massacre while Trump was here.
The brutality was 
unbelievable and it was exhibit
ionist.
We saw the pictures of police
forcing them to sing the 
national anthem, mobs burning 
down mosques.
Now the whole narrative has been
turned.  
Muslims are being blamed for 
killing Muslims.
Major human rights activists, 
students
all are being put into prison 
every day.
I don't think it's a coincidence
that the three
geniuses of the early 21st 
century
are on the top of the charts of 
Coronavirus.
Today, the newspapers are 
telling us --
not the TV channels but the 
newspapers -- that
the Indian economy has shrunk 
23.9%.
Modi ordered a lockdown.
Fascists love spectacle.
He decided to call
the most strict lockdown that 
the world has ever known.  
That was like a chemical is 
experiment.
You had millions of work-class 
people who had
no way of getting home, walking
hundreds of kilometers
home, getting beaten by
police and being sprayed with 
bleach and
carrying the virus to the four 
corners of the country.
Right now, we're sitting on an 
economy that's crashed.
Millions of people are out of
work that are developing work on
the borders. 
India, whose army was always on 
the alert on the
western front with Pakistan, now
has to be
battle ready on a 
3,000-kilometer long front.  
Forget weapons.
They don't even have warm
clothes in an economy that is 
collapsing.
You almost feel like you're
sitting on the creator of a
volcano just cushioned by 
propaganda.  
≫ That was kind of my next 
question.
"The New York Times" reported 
yesterday the Indian economy
contracted nearly 24%, which is 
the
most drastic fall in decades.  
≫ Ever actually.  
≫ Ever.  This is a global thing.
It's not just for India 
specifically as a country.  I 
think the U.S. economy shrank 
like 9.5% and Japan 7.6%, to 
give people an idea.
I was thinking about this in 
terms of
a country like Beirut that had 
that explosion.
They estimated it initially
to be about $5 billion USD in 
damages, but they didn't account
for
the actual blast radius, which 
now they think is around $25 
billion.  
The gross domestic product of a 
country like
Lebanon is 50 billion.
Half of its GDP was knocked out 
almost in a single blast.  
≫ In a single blast.
In India, we must
remember that it isn't just 
because of the Coronavirus 
lockdown.
It was already before 
Coronavirus, a 
45-year high of unemployment.
In 
2016, 
Modi announceannounced
-- it was like he had taken a 
gun and shot the engine of a 
moving car.
Now the wheels have been taken 
away.
But the problem is
that the poor do not
exist in the imagination of the 
elite anymore.
Since the 1990s, even if you
look at Bollywood 
films, they used to be about 
fighting, about the poor,
about workers, about unions, 
about villages.
Now they're films that are shown
in malls that don't have poverty
in them.  
Literature has no more poor 
people in it.
Poetry has lost the poor.
Somehow there's no way
of planning for them if they 
don't exist in your imagination.
When they started walking, when 
the
lockdown was called -- you know,
they had been
hidden away in the
crevices of cities 
unacknowledged and
suddenly they appeared.
You are in a situation
where it's just been happening.
I recently said to someone it 
feels like a diabetic
who has just had a
silent heart attack after silent
heart attack after silent heart 
attack, but the diabetes is the 
propaganda that masks the 
illness.  
Suddenly, you have a situation 
where the heart is failing.  
≫ In your closing
essay in this book around the
Coronavirus, you write this -- I
think it is a very pertinent 
phrase.  You say the pandemic is
a portal.
You talk about how in the past 
pandemics have
forced societies to break with 
the past and imagine their world
anew.
I think this can be said of many
crises that societies face.  I 
feel after reading this book -- 
not just reading this book but 
the
times we live in --
I feel less pessimistic about 
that world.  I think a lot of 
people feel that way.
A lot of questions we're getting
in the chat now
is how do we imagine a new world
in this particular
moment as we've seen the 
intersection of the rise of
fascism and this pandemic.  
≫ In this portal, are we going 
to drag the
carcasses of our dead and the
smoky skies and the idea that 
our oceans are filling
up with PPE and masks?
I think it is important to 
understand the ways in
which we are being controlled 
now apart from the fact
that nothing suits the
fascists more than having us all
siloed into our homes.
In a country like India that is 
not possible.
The politics of a lockdown is 
completely the reverse heme.  
People don't have homes.
A lockdown means social 
compression, not social 
distancing here because it is 
just impossible.
You are seeing data which shows 
that
in poorer areas where people 
have been
cramped up and people have just
had to go about their
work that there is a greater 
resistance and a sort of herd 
immunity coming out.
But I think the real danger that
we face is the idea that
the classes that can be
socially distanced will begin to
view those that can't be as a 
biohazardous body.
There'll be a lot of attempt
to try and see if
the world can be
made to work with the working 
classes, the labor
classes that had to walk 
thousands of kilometers home.  
They'll be separated from the 
flying classes.
Can we have production in which 
these two classes don't meet at 
all?
Can we do away with the
biohazardous body, the surplus 
people?
The governments have shown --
all these governments have
shown every sign that they will 
seize upon
this pandemic
to increase controls, to 
increase
surveillance, to increase the
polarization of who is wealthy 
and
who is 
not, but at some point that is
going to break apart, which I 
think you're
seeing in the United States.
I haven't spent a lot
of time there,
but in the last two months in 
the
run-up to the 
election, people do understand 
whatever happens in the 
elections, the elections
are not going to be the way to a
new world.
Although, it is very important 
that Trump is
voted out, but the new people 
that come in will not come in 
with a new imagination.
The polarization is so
deadly that the chances of a
kind of violence on the streets 
is very, very high.
Similarly over here, the
chaos that we can expect as
things break down -- maybe we 
shouldn't be so scared of it
is what I'm saying because 
nothing is going to
transition so beautifully, so 
easily
without a kind of real battle.  
Nothing is going to change.
It is terrifying to think that 
way, but I think that way now.
Many of us will perish
in it, but the polarization
is so huge and so
obviousobvious.
Conversations are not even 
happening.  
≫ I had a final question,
and you don't have to answer it,
but I wanted
to ask what is the future of 
Indian democracy?
≫ I wanted to read something.  
Somebody sent it to me.
It was like a little passage 
that I had written many years 
ago about democracy.
Let me see if I can find it.
Someone actually just sent me 
this yesterday.
This was from a trauma essay I 
wrote
called "Democracy's failing 
Light
light."  It's not in this 
collection, but a previous 
collection.  What have we done 
to democracy?  What have we 
turned it into?
What happens when democracy has 
been used up, when it is 
hollowed out and empty of 
meaning?
What happens when each of its 
institutions has
metastasized into something 
dangerous?
What happens now that democracy 
and the free market
have fused into a single 
predatory
organism with a thin
constricted imagination that 
revolves almost entirely around 
the idea of maximizing profit?  
Is it possible to reverse this 
process?
Can something that has mutated 
go back to
being what it used to be?
When I look at
India -- the British left in 
1947.
By the 1960s,
there were revolutionary 
struggles here
against feudalism, calling for 
land to the 
tiller, calling for the 
redistribution of 
wealth, calling for revolution.
Those movements were crushed 
mercilessly.
By the 1980s and 90s,
you had the large anti-dam
movements, indigenous people 
fighting against displacement.  
From asking for the 
redistribution of wealth,
we were reduced to saying 
whatever little people have, 
don't take that away.  Those 
movements were crushed.
Now you're reduced to begging 
for
your citizenship because these 
citizenship laws are not for 
refugees.
They're not for people coming, 
migrants.
They are for people who already 
live here, like
the Nazi regime in Germany.
The
Neurembourg laws did that.  You 
have citizens begging for it.
You're just praying that you 
don't go to jail tomorrow.
The laws that have been passed
now are -- the question you 
ask, what kind of
democracy is Indian, I would
say it is partly a democracy,
which is an 
oxymoron, is compromised. 
The creator, the volcano
that is about to erupt, won't be
soothed by any election.
In the elections, the media, the
machinery, the 
money, the data, everything 
belongs to one party.
That's why I say there will be 
an implosion.  
≫ We have some questions from 
viewers that I'd like to get to.
You've kind of answered some of 
these, so if
you want to flip it however you 
want, please feel free to do so.
There was a recent book 
published by
Isabelle Wilkerson called 
"Caste."  I don't know if you're
familiar with this.  
≫ I've met her actually, but I 
haven't managed to read the 
book.  
≫ I'll skip that one because it 
was about your perspectives on 
that.
The other one was going back to
Gandhi and whether or not he 
ever
changed his racist kind of 
caste-based views.  
≫ In "the Doctor and the 
Saint," it traces Gandhi's 
writings
from the 
1860-something to 1946.
While he is known to have 
campaigned
against castes, he actually
didn't change his views I would 
say.
He had a very missionary 
approach to it. 
He said he was against the idea 
of untouchability.
If you look at
essays that he wrote like the 
ideal 
bungi,
whose 
caste-based hereditary
job was to clean shit, he talks 
about how this is a holy job.
The Brahman should always be a 
Brahman.
A bungi
should always be a bungi, but 
everybody should be treated 
equally.
Rather than listen to me, read 
that book because
it is a complicate ed
.  It is a little scary to talk 
off the top of my head.
The writing quotes the writing 
and the sources.
It deals with the complications 
of that debate.  
Let me say after having written 
it
and researched it, researched 
against my
own indoctrination, I was 
appalled. 
≫ The other question, I'm going 
to modify it a little bit 
because you kind of already 
answered part of it.
Is there an organized front
to fight the rise of fascism in 
India today? 
≫ You know, the political 
parties that are in opposition
to the 
BJP, the parliamentary parties, 
have more or less been 
decimated.
Even the anti-caste parties have
been decimated.  
The opposition in parliament 
exists in
the form that the BJP wishes it 
to exist, doing work that only 
helps them.
When the huge 
protests sprang up against the 
citizenship law, there were 
students.
It was almost beginning to look 
like a
revolution, but then Coronavirus
came.  It was smashed.  People 
had been arrested.
In Delhi, people were killed and
now hundreds are people are in 
jail.
Students, professors, activists 
are being cordoned by the 
police, threatened, picked off 
one by one.  There was no 
lockdown for the repression.  
There was only a lockdown for 
people.
Right now, there isn't an 
organized front.
An organized front may not be 
even possible in
a country like India because
an organization also can be 
broken quite easily.
I do believe the situation is so
dire now that something new
will come up because people 
can't live like this.  
≫ The next question has to do 
with the
reporting I'm assuming on the 
issues around
Kashmir and how journalists 
report on
what's happening in Kashmir 
within India.
I guess the question is, how do 
reporters and
writers work to combat the 
oversimplification that's coming
out of the propaganda machine?  
≫ The problem is not 
oversimplification.
The problem is a kind of
nationalism that
demonizes the people.
You have a situation where you 
have an
internet siege in Kashmir since 
August
5th last year on and off but 
mostly on.
Imagine the world locked down 
for Coronavirus.
We're all doing this.  Kashmiris
can't do this. 
For many months, they couldn't 
even make phone calls, so 
businesses collapsed.
Students, hospitals, courts.
It's a kind of mass violation of
human
rights this is unprecedented in 
the world, this digital siege.  
First, you push everyone into a 
digital era.
Then you say, oh,
Kashmiris don't need the 
internet.
They only use it for pornography
and terrorism.  
That's what senior people in 
government say.
Then you have this 
24/7 propaganda, but you have a 
lot of
people, including a lot of young
Indians,
I think, who have begun to
feel
to let this happen in your name 
eventually corrodes you.
It's not some altruistic thing 
you're doing on
behalf of someone else but only 
to honor yourself, to
say I'm sorry, but
this is not something I find 
acceptable.
It is very, very frightening,
very frightening because people 
are picked up, arrested.  
For me, people have said, okay, 
she
should be tied to a tank and 
used as a human shield.
If I do a book launch, they'll 
come and smash up the
stage or whatever, but these 
things have to be said.
Ultimately, I said it long ago 
and
I'll say it again,
India needs
Azadi from Kashmir almost
as much as Kashmir needs
Azadi from India. 
It is this hate-fueled blind 
rage that it can't manage to see
through.  
≫ A final question is -- 
especially with the
case of Kashmir, what are the 
possibilities for
solidarity not just within India
but
I think internationally with the
Kashmiris cause?  It's something
I'll admit ignorance on.
I see it peripherally in a lot 
of
advocacy work and movement work,
but I think in
this moment in time,
especially with the George Floyd
protests and the current
pandemic, there are 
possibilities for solidarity.  
What does that look like?  
≫ Obviously, first, before any 
kind of
solidarity can be embarked upon,
one needs to understand what's 
going on there.
I'd say the
solidarity could begin with 
reading.  
There's an organization in 
Kashmir called the
JKCCS.  It has a website.
It's recently brought out a 
really brilliant report on the 
internet siege.  
It should be available online.  
It's something that people need 
to
read and understand what is 
being done to people, hundreds 
of people.
It is apart from thousands of 
people being killed.
People being blinded by pellets 
and now being put under this 
siege, which is absolutely 
inhuman.  
≫ One last question.  What are 
you currently reading?  
≫ Oh, my goodness.
I just finished
reading -- for two
days after that, I could hardly 
see because the type was so 
small.  
It is a 2,000-page biography of 
Hitler
by Ian Kershaw.  That's what I 
was reading.
I just finished it a couple of 
days ago.
Then I started reading quite a 
beautiful book called a Chinese 
writer.
I think it's called "China in 
ten Words."  It is really 
lovely.  
≫ Thank you so much, Arundhati, 
for taking time for this 
interview.  I have a lot more 
questions, but sadly I have to 
turn it over to -- 
≫ When we meet.  
≫ Yeah, when we meet.  
≫ Yes.  It's been a pleasure 
talking to you.  Thank you.  
≫ Thank you so much.
≫ At this point, I'm
coming in audibly to thank both 
Nick and Arundhati.
As she said, one of the things 
to do from this is read.  Read 
her work.  Read Nick's work.
I will say
"The Doctor and The 
Saint" is available as a
freestanding book from 
Haymarket, but it is
also contained in "My Seditious 
Heart.
"  Another little comment I'll 
just make because Nick
in his role was -- this last 
part when he was asking about
international work and 
solidarity, he's being doing a 
lot of work with Palestine.
For the work he does in North 
America, there's a lot of
affinity and learning and 
rapport there.  That is an 
example.
We didn't get into a specific 
one, but I know Nick has done 
that.  
I don't know how people are 
going to go
to bed on this because it is 
nighttime.
Nick where he is
and where I am, it's a lot
to go into the day with.  
Thank you so much.  The two of 
you can be in the same place 
together and continue.
It will be even deeper because 
-- 
≫ Elliot Bay Bookshop.  I'll be 
coming there.  
≫ Yes.  We'll go anywhere.
I left out infomercial parts to 
order books
and buy books.
We have copies of publication.  
There's links to buy the books. 
We also have Nick's books, "our 
History is
the Future" and "standing
With Standing Rock: 
The Anthology."  We have 
Arundhati's other books.
On that note, as there's still 
so much
for us to say and to carry, a 
heartfelt
thanks to all those who have 
been part of this.
To Anthony and Sean and
Haymarket to Rita and
all my colleagues at Elliot
Bay Book Company and certainly
most fully to Arundhati and Nick
themselves.  
We've got a lot of work to do 
and part of that is the reading,
but all the rest that comes with
it.
These two people are doing so 
much to make this a more just 
and better place and better 
world.
With that, we thank you and bid 
you good night, good morning, 
good day, and take care and 
thank you.  
≫ Bye, everybody.  It was lovely
to see you.  
≫ Yes, thank you.
