For many readers, Arundhati Roy’s writing career is defined by a gap – the 20-year hiatus between her first and second novels. In 1997 Roy was a literary phenomenon. The God of Small Things had won the Booker Prize and the publishing world was enraptured with its new star. But the new star was less enraptured with her sudden fame – “the men in suits fawning” over her, the “shiny hotel bathrooms with endless towels”.
After a year of “cartwheeling around” with her book, she returned to Delhi and submerged herself in activism, speaking out against Indian nuclear tests, dam building, the military presence in Kashmir, the caste system and the coalescing of neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism.
Her next novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, wasn’t published until 2017 but during those two decades she kept writing – political essays, speeches, long-form journalism that got her into trouble and turned her into a hate figure for India’s right-wing establishment.
This non-fiction is brought together in My Seditious Heart, an impassioned, uncompromising collection. Its urgency is impossible to ignore.
Roy is a dissenter. In a style necessarily removed from the lyricism of her novels she describes poverty, mass displacement, sham trials, the rape of Kashmiri women by Indian soldiers, the murder of Dalits and Adivasis – members of the lowest caste and indigenous communities.
She writes about the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, when Narendra Modi, recently re-elected as prime minister, was chief minister of the state, and the “religious fascism” of Modi’s BJP party, which won a majority in the elections. She debunks the Gandhi myth, exploring the independence leader’s problematic views on race, caste and women, and arguing that Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar – a Dalit, a contemporary of Gandhi’s and an advocate for the abolition of the caste system – needs to assume his rightful place in history.
Not shrill
Her non-fiction has been called shrill – a telling word, disproportionately applied to women. It’s not shrill. It is unflinching and though it can also be funny and irreverent, anger is close to the surface. There are 43 essays in here, and two in the appendix that date from 1994. They are lucid and accessible, extensively researched and footnoted. They are also relentless, especially when read together. Roy is more of a truth-teller than a visionary, better at documenting what’s wrong than coming up with comprehensive alternatives.
My Seditious Heart is not just an immersion in India’s dark side. Like Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky, she scrutinises issues that extend far beyond national borders. Several early pieces focus on US imperialism and the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The collection as a whole is an indictment of corporate power and “the Privatization of Everything”, especially natural resources. For better or worse, people are entangled in the systems she would like to see dismantled and so on this level alone the essays demand engagement.
Her critics – and not all of them are on the right – object to her lack of balance but she’s not interested in giving space to those whose voices are already being heard.
“I take sides. I have a position. I have a point of view,” she says. “What’s worse, I make it clear that I think it’s right and moral to take that position, and what’s even worse I use everything in my power to flagrantly solicit support for that position.”
Ant chutney
In Walking With the Comrades, the most memorable essay in the collection, she treks in the forest with Maoist guerrillas, talking and camping with them, eating ant chutney. Occasionally she veers close to romanticising her experience: “My private suite in a thousand-star hotel.” She acknowledges the partisan nature of the Maoists’ version of history but doesn’t give much space to the atrocities they themselves have committed.
The essay is shrouded in tragic inevitability. Like a story, it has a timeline, a plot, a setting and characters – funny, blinkered, malnourished and disciplined, resolute against “a civilization that seeks to annihilate them”.
Roy’s novelist self emerges most strongly here but she releases it elsewhere too, such as when a Kashmiri man, whose daughter has been raped and murdered, stops her convoy as she leaves the region and presses a warm boiled egg into each of her hands.
It’s a surreal moment, beautiful and painful, but My Seditious Heart is not about moments; more shocking than the horrors described is the scale on which they’re happening. As hard-hitting as it is heartfelt, the collection is a testament to the importance of bearing witness, now more than ever.
