Why Do We Hate Arundhati Roy?

(By Kanishka Lahiri, a Bangalore-based professional in the semiconductor industry. To provide feedback about this piece, please email him directly at kanishka.lahiri@gmail.com)

In middle-class educated circles, it has become unfashionable, in fact, often downright ludicrous to quote Arundhati Roy. In a recent email exchange with contemporaries (with whom I shared the experience of attending one of India's elite engineering schools, yes, you guessed, one of the highly trumpeted Indian Institutes of Technology) she was described as "worse than a cockroach that infests the sewer systems in our country", and the "greatest con act of an activist anywhere in the world", an anti-national who "could be convicted for treason". 

I believe many people in similiar echelons of Indian society share this view, but don't necessarily articulate them as clearly. The majority just simply refuses to read her essays based on a reasoning that goes something like - "she's just out of control, she's anti-national, there are no facts in her writing, how can educated people even consider reading her". This exchange set me thinking as to why a lot of people, including some people who's opinions I respect on other matters, dismiss this person with such venom. What provokes deeply emotional responses from people, responses that suggest that Roy has somehow insulted them at a personal level? Perhaps the hatred is not really directed towards Roy the person, or Roy the essayist. Maybe it's really directed at the idea of Arundhati Roy; the idea that such a person could actually exist.

At the end of this piece, I am dead sure many of it's readers are going label me as an "Arundhati Roy sympathizer", as if she's some sort of terrorist. Those that do, will serve as perfect illustrations of the point I am trying to make. I don't believe Roy's writing is flawless, or readers should necessarily agree with her opinions, but a refusal to even listen to her line of argument, and separate her facts from her personal opinion seems to represent a strange intent to blindfold oneself to the realities which surround us. That is downright strange, since if anything, the urban middle class rightfully prides itself on being well informed. So what's really going on with the public vs Ms Roy? 

Interestingly, most of the hysterical rhetoric flung at Roy that I have come across comes from male quarters, ranging from celebrity historian Ramachandra Guha to my IIT buddies. Could it just be that Indian men feel slighted that she can provoke the highest establishments of the land, like the Supreme Court, which have always been traditional male bastions, being a woman? Saba Naqvi in an article published some months ago in Outlook suggests the resentment may even have something to do with her sartorial taste and hair-do, which hypocritcal Indians might find more acceptable if she was say, part of the intellectual diaspora living in New York City. In the grassroot Indian context, which is Roy's habitat, to many, her physical appearance and shrill voice seems out of place in a society where where female Bollywood leads are expected to retire after they get married. The question is, if Arundhati Roy was a man, or if she tied her hair in a bun and wore a bindi, would we have aimed our collective automatic weapons at her with such deadly precision? 

I'm not trying to defend the factual accuracy of her writings, or praise her prose. The point is, so what if she's guilty of less than civil writing? So what if she's got a few facts wrong? If we the public were as effective in scrutinizing and passing judgment on the administration as we are on Ms Roy's writing, India would be a different country. It seems pretty clear that the anti-Roy rhetoric has got more to do with the fact that she raises uncomfortable topics which makes for extremely unpopular drawing room conversation in middle-class English speaking households. If these "readers" (the skepticism is rooted in an observation that several of my acquaintances are eager to dismiss her writings without even having read them) are so contemptuous of what she writes, if they think she has all her facts wrong, if she's really just an average essayist looking for attention, then why do they get roiled up at all? Perhaps it really is to do with the threat Arundhati Roy poses to the "shining" Indian middle-class and it's beloved diaspora. Maybe folks fear that she actually is a capable and knowledegable person, wielding a mighty pen and power brandishing inconvenient truths about the Indian state. Maybe deep down, the upper-middle-class Hindu knows that the train to utopia they are riding could very well be derailed, or delayed by this puny writer from Kerala. A utopia in which big dams supply water and electricity to the cities while decimating rural populations and destroying the environment, where Muslim youths are shot on sight on the flimsiest suspicions; where India's nuclear arsenal is large enough to annihilate a subcontinent that is home to a quarter of the world's population; where power is absolute and autocratic, as long as it serves the interests of the urban elite. 

India doesn't need an Arundhati Roy. We need a few thousand. From the collective screaming, there are higher chances that truth will emerge, and minor errors made by individuals such as Roy will get drowned by the availability of a quality of information that we are denied today by a media stifled by politics and profit. In the tradition of the argumentative Indian, I invite people to
counter Roy through intellectual debate, rather than calling her names.