Arundhati Roy at Town Hall (March 29, 2010)

Arundhati Roy, small in stature, stood tall, elegant, defiant in a red sari on Monday night before a sold out crowd at Town Hall in Seattle.  She is author of the New York Times best selling and Booker Prize winning The God of Small Things. And a prolific nonfiction writer and outspoken activist and critic of social and political issues in India. She read an essay from her new collection, Field Notes on Democracy, published by Haymarket Books, a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change, as well as from a recent essay she published in Outlook called "Walking with the Comrades." http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264738.

In "Democracy's Failing Light" she talked of the failings and shortsightedness of governments bent on spreading democracy, blind to the other kind of evil democracy perpetuates. She writes, "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 profits."

In reading her recent article from Outlook, she spoke at length about her experience going into the forest of Chhattisgarh in West Bengal to meet the people that the corporations and government officials in India are calling "terrorists."

An incendiary categorization that Roy cuts down to size.  She explains succinctly by telling this story:

"I arrived at the Ma Danteshwari mandir well in time for my appointment (first day, first show). I had my camera, my small coconut and a powdery red tika on my forehead. I wondered if someone was watching me and having a laugh. Within minutes a young boy approached me. He had a cap and a backpack schoolbag. Chipped red nail-polish on his fingernails. No Hindi Outlook, no bananas. “Are you the one who’s going in?” he asked me. No Namashkar Guruji. I did not know what to say. He took out a soggy note from his pocket and handed it to me. It said, 'Outlook nahin mila (couldn’t find Outlook).'

'And the bananas?'

“'I ate them,' he said, 'I got hungry.'

"He really was a security threat.

"His backpack said Charlie Brown—Not your ordinary blockhead. He said his name was Mangtu. I soon learned that Dandakaranya, the forest I was about to enter, was full of people who had many names and fluid identities. It was like balm to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with yourself, to become someone else for a while."

In the article she describes the real issue as the enormous resources that are at stake in the conflict. To control them, corporations can make enormous profits, at the terrible, fatal expense of the poor they take them from. Stop water far up the stream by a dam, turn it into energy to be sold by the rupee to those who can afford it. Divert the water from the fields of sustenance farmers downstream, and irrigate the large company agricultural holdings or toward multinational companies like Coca Cola. http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100401/FOREIGN/703319884/1103 The corporations say they are bringing the tribal peoples "into the mainstream." Yet, they turn language into an insidious form of power to benefit those who can wield power and influence, leaving the poor isolated and alone. Add government buy-in and media influence, and Roy says the "wall of propaganda" hides the "well of silence" as the voices of those marginalized are not heard.

In the question and answer session that followed her reading, one woman asked her about the fiction Roy writes.  And Roy talked about the merging of fiction and non-fiction in the experience in the forest, about how the people she met took on and shed names and identities to protect themselves and others but also to honor the dead, who have died perhaps in the struggle for liberty and to protect their livelihood.

I see Roy unmasking what one side of the fight calls "fact" as a fictional tale they want to feed the rest of the country and the world.  And by entering the forest and recording the marginalized tribal people's history and their experience, she brings light to the truth of their struggle to survive on their own terms.