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Hindutva -
“A Veritable Chamber of Horrors"
ARUNDHATI ROY
Although I do not believe that awards are a measure of the work we do, I would like to add India’s National award for Best Screenplay that I won in 1989 to the growing pile of returned awards.
Also, I want to make it clear that I am not returning this award because I am “shocked” by what is being called the “growing intolerance” being fostered by the present government.
First of all, “intolerance” is the wrong word to use for the lynching, shooting, burning and mass murder of fellow human beings in today’s India.
Second, we had plenty of advance notice of what lay in store for us -- so I cannot claim to be shocked by what has happened after this government was enthusiastically voted into office with an overwhelming majority.
Third, these horrific murders are only a symptom of a deeper malaise. Life is hell for the living too. Whole populations -- millions of Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and Christians — are being forced to live in terror, unsure of when and from where the assault will come.
Today, we live in a country in which, when the thugs and apparatchiks of the new order talk of “illegal slaughter”, they mean the imaginary cow that was killed -- not the real man who was murdered. When they talk of taking “evidence for forensic examination” from the scene of the crime, they mean the food in the fridge, not the body of the lynched man.
We say we have “progressed”, but when Dalits are butchered and their children burned alive, which writer today can freely say, like Babasaheb Ambedkar once did, that “to the untouchables, Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors”, without getting attacked, lynched, shot or jailed?
Which writer can write what Saadat Hasan Manto wrote in his Letters to Uncle Sam? It doesn’t matter whether we agree or disagree with what is being said. If we do not have the right to speak freely, we will turn into a society that suffers from intellectual malnutrition, a nation of fools.
Across the subcontinent it has become a race to the bottom -- one that the New India has enthusiastically joined. Here too now, censorship has been outsourced to the mob.
I am very pleased to have found (from somewhere way back in my past) a National award that I can return, because it allows me to be a part of a political movement initiated by writers, film-makers and academics in this country who have risen up against a kind of ideological viciousness and an assault on our collective IQ that will tear us apart and bury us very deep if we do not stand up to it now. I believe what artists and intellectuals are doing right now is unprecedented, and does not have a historical parallel. It is politics by other means. I am so proud to be part of it.
And so ashamed of what is going on in this country today.
Postscript: For the record, I turned down the Sahitya Akademi award in 2005 when the Congress was in power. So please spare me that old Congress-versus-BJP debate. It has gone way beyond all that. Thanks.
[Courtesy: The Guardian]
November 8, 2015
Conversation about this article
1: Bani Kaur (Washington, DC, USA), November 08, 2015, 2:54 AM.
I'm afraid little, if anything, will come out of this trickle of honesty emanating from India's so-called intellectuals that seems to be surfacing in that sad country called India. Arundhati Roy, no doubt, represents the very best that India has to offer in terms of independent and intelligent thought. Yet, even she is willfully blind to 1984 and the self-destructive course that India has embarked upon by persecuting Sikhs. You can't be in such total denial and nurse a giant blind-spot, and still claim to be an intellectual of any benefit to anybody, and think you are, or should be taken as a fount of knowledge or the source of some workable solution to the ills of the land. The biggest price that India has paid, and will continue to pay for a long time to come, is the all-pervasive dumbing of its elite -- and there appear to be NO exceptions. Sorry, guys, but you'll have to continue stewing in your own soup ... until you discover honest introspection and start making amends. That might require Indians to go through a few deeper levels of suffering!
2: Paritosh Lal (Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India), November 08, 2015, 4:43 AM.
One can't get very far with either ideas or analyses if one is wearing horse-blinders. Yes, I agree - even Arundhati is guilty of wearing them. Et tu Brute! That's heart-breaking!
3: Baldev Singh (Bradford, United Kingdom), November 09, 2015, 11:14 AM.
Lest we as a diaspora, Faith or Quom forget ... we Sikhs have a duty to stop these morbidly superstitious and misogynistic, highly criminalized thugs.
4: Ari Singh (Sofia, Bulgaria), November 11, 2015, 4:56 PM.
The caste system is several millennia old and still plagues the country. India has been a sick country for millennias. A few awards returned half-heartedly will achieve nothing. It's a country that feeds idols and not people. Even so-called scholars there are numb to this and have done nothing. God bless the Sikhs for being stuck in the middle of two banana republics.
5: Kanwarjeet Singh (USA), November 13, 2015, 3:35 PM.
@ Baldev Singh ji: May I question why? "Sikhan ne Hindu society nu sudhaaran da theka nahin leya". If a people have been a slave mentally since millennia, slavery becomes part of their genetic and psyche.
6: Arjan Singh (USA), November 14, 2015, 5:42 PM.
#3 Baldev ji: We need to get our house in order and educate our own community, as we are falling behind in many aspects as a community, especially in India. I have no inclination of helping out the Indian society with its centuries old superstitions and modern day politico-criminal nexus. Sikh community must not use its muscle or work ethic to help out this thankless octopus like social animal. We have our own share of modern-day problems. I have always looked forward to writings from Arundhati Roy's desk as she has been a fearless and vocal critic of all that is wrong in Indian society and in the world at large vis-a-vis basic human rights. However, I fail to understand how and why she has been silent on the subject of the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984 and the state-sponsored massacres of the decade that followed.