False Dichotomies: Arundhati Roy on Mumbai

I’m always interested when novelists write about politics. As passionate a fan as I am of modern literature, I can’t help but thinking that writers let themselves down when they express their views on contemporary political debates in the op-ed pages. Some examples: I think Martin Amis’ frequent interventions on terrorism are hopelessly misplaced, a tragic misuse of his unmistakeable prose style. Amos Oz should stop with the banal entreaties about divorce and fanatics, and get back to novels. And then there’s Paul Auster’s recent statement that 9/11 might not have happened had Al Gore been president. That’s some counterfactual.

Arundhati Roy, however, should present a more compelling case for literary interventions into political disputation. Since winning the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things, eleven years ago, she’s devoted herself to politics, both as a writer and a campaigner. In India, she’s been active in the campaign against the Narmada dam, and has been an outspoken supporter of Kashmiri independence. Worldwide, she’s known as one of the leading writers of the New Left, a disciple of Noam Chomsky et al, and one of the most articulate opponents of what some people view as U.S. imperialism.

Her reflections on the attacks in Mumbai, then, were always going to arouse interest. In a piece entitled The Monster in the Mirror, published last weekend in the Guardian, Roy begins to challenge some of the accepted wisdom regarding the implications of the atrocities. Her central theme is that the Mumbai attacks don’t represent India’s 9/11, and that India should think very carefully before it acts. She reminds us that many other Indian cities have been targeted by terrorists this year, and that not all the terrorists have been Muslims. She reminds us that the poor were mowed down as indiscriminately as the rich, taking the Indian media to task for its obsession with elitist symbols like the Taj hotel, “the glittering barracades of India Shining.” She reminds us that the problem of poverty remains India’s most urgent problem.

These are all reasonable observations, and she manages to steer clear of the sentimentality which often creeps into her writing. Once she comes to the crux of her argument, though, things begin to unravel. I shall quote her in full:

“There is a fierce, unforgiving fault-line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let’s call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially “Islamist” terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even to try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime itself.

Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm’s way. Which is a crime itself.”

This is a pretty transparent attempt to put a straw man up against an iron man. More than that, though, it  shows a disturbing lack of nuance. Yes, there are people who think like Side A and Side B. But what about the people in the middle? The people who reject these black and white dichotomies, who spend most of their life in the grey. Who understand that, yes, everything does have a context, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that draining the swamp will kill all the mosquitoes.

Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-a-Taiba, we are told, is on Side A. So are Babu Bajrangi and Narendra Modi, two of the instigators of the 2002 Gujarat massacres. By including such people in Side A, she’s stretching her own defintions, but that’s beside the point. The point is, she tells us, that Side B is better. “So, on balance, if I had to choose between Side A and Side B, I’d pick Side B. We need context. Always.” Again, the straw man, the needless dilemma, the false dichotomy. Side B does not have a monopoly on context, and – in that context – it’s noticeable that she doesn’t attempt to provide a context for the Hindu massacres of Muslims in the Gujarat.

But the context for all of this is much bigger, she tells us. It’s partition and Indian discrimination against its Muslim citizens, a failed policy towards Pakistan and homegrown state repression. All of these are important points. Roy is to be commended for her outspoken support of Kashmiri rights; she is like an Indian Amira Hass, with a bit more national pride (albeit of the anarchic variety). Then she reminds us once more: “Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid.” In short, “What we’re experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet’s squelching under our feet.” Side B.

It’s frustrating when someone like Roy seems to willingly simplify herself. It’s even more frustrating that she’s a prize-winning novelist, no stranger to complication. For her to provide such great insight about Indian domestic problems, about the absurd way it’s gone about fighting terrorism, about Kashmir, about the Narmada dam, only to conclude by asking Indian’s to take the blame, is deeply disappointing. Perhaps, in this sense, it’s wrong to speak of her as a novelist dabbling in politics. She’s frequently said that the problem of injustice is so great that it must take priority over literature: her’s is the rare literary choice of action over contemplation. But she seems to have totally lost the subtlety which made her such a promising writer in the first place. 

She concludes with another simplistic dichotomy:  ”The only way to contain (it would be naive to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says Justice, the other Civil War. There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.” I hope somebody reminds her of this prediction in a few years time; I’ll happily take the bet that India will go on rumbling somewhere in between, somewhere in the murk of reality, somewhere where a one-time writer is falling between the cracks, neither narrating nor explaining, just losing the power of her art.