To not deal with Kashmir, is like not dealing with caste

Kashmir is in a state of utmost sadness; enveloped in a heaviness of unresolved expectations. For author Arundhati Roy, Kashmir is fundamental to what our lives have become today, “To not deal with problems like Kashmir, to not deal with caste, which many writers manage to do, is like not writing about Apartheid in South Africa.”

“I’m not talking about the fact that we have a place where we have hundreds of thousands of soldiers administering civilian life. I am not talking of only about what it does to people in Kashmir. What does that do to people in India? How do we as a people give ourselves the right to speak of the various forms of violence perpetuated on us, if we are willing to swallow it when it comes to someone else? To me, it is a fundamental, moral problem,” said Roy, at the inaugural session of the ninth edition of the Penguin Fever festival. This year’s edition coincides with the publisher’s 30th anniversary and will run till October 31 at the India Habitat Centre.

Without doubt, Arundhati Roy is a name that evokes variegated emotions and hers is a career that has seen prolific non-fiction writing bookended by two works fiction (The God of Small Things and recently, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness). The two books separated by a 20-year gap. Why 20 years, is the question on the minds of most?

“After I finished the God of Small Things, it sort of blew my life apart in so many ways – in good ways and bad. I used to wonder if I would ever regret having written a book that, in crass terms, was so successful. But, around the time was when nuclear tests were going to take place and I was, somehow, part of the marketing of this international brand and I really wasn’t up to that. When the nuclear tests happened, I felt I didn’t have a choice of keeping quiet – whether I spoke or didn’t speak, it was equally political, and I wrote The End of Imagination, which led me on a journey into worlds, which really expanded my understanding of things,” said Roy.

As she travelled, she wrote things to explain things to herself as well as to readers. Those journeys and those writings, sort of, layered in her. Explaining, Roy said, “I felt like a sedimentary rock. Much of what I was learning was accumulating me, separate to the non-fiction arguments and that at some point reached a critical mass. And that is when I began to write The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” It took her 10 years to complete the book.

For all those who have not read the book, it begins with Anjum in the graveyard, but for Roy, it began at Jantar Mantar. “The first thing I wrote is the nerve centre of the book, Jantar Mantar, which is sadly being shut down. I don’t think we should let that happen. I was there one night and suddenly an abandoned baby appeared amongst these people’s movements and nobody knew what to do with it. It made me think of the wisdom, the politics, the energy and suddenly confusion. The police had to be called too. That was the first moment when the fiction started to happen,” recollects Roy.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has already sold half a million copies worldwide and more than 90,000 copies in India. Describing the book, Shohini Ghosh, professor at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre in Delhi, says it can been seen as a scopious, sprawling landscape of vibrant characters, moving across locations, even as the narrative moves to other places and meets other characters. A sense of déjà vu dawns on you.

“I write about the air we breathe and air is full of this. This is us. We cannot think of ourselves as external to all that is going on,” points out Roy.

“For me The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is about people who find temporary ways, slender ways of recognising and celebrating happiness in the most unexpected place – a little-used graveyard. The greatest gift a human being has is the ability to recognise happiness. They have their moments, go through terrible things and the reason they cannot be defeated is because, they have already been broken, yet they know how to be happy,” elaborates Roy.