Pages from the Past: Ramachandra Guha on Arundhati Roy
Sukla Sen
The Arun Shourie of the left
Celebrity endorsement of social movements is fraught with hazards. In the beginning, apart from inviting media attention, it may also draw to the cause previously silent bystanders ... Much depends on the kind of celebrity, says noted historian RAMACHANDRA GUHA.
THE Narmada Bachao Andolan is only the last in a series of social movements against large dams. True, the spectacular schemes of the 1950s and 1960s - Bhakra, Hirakud, Tungabhadra and the like - came up with scarcely a sigh of protest. Villages in the way of the reservoir were made to depart in the name of "national interest". It took fully two decades for this national interest to be revealed as the specific interests of the urban-industrial elite. Thus the 1970s witnessed a series of popular struggles on behalf of the to-be dispossessed. There were movements against the Koel-Karo project in Bihar, the Subarnarekha project in Orissa and the Vishnuprayag and Tehri projects in Garhwal. These varied movements and the questions they raised inspired the editors of the Second Citizens' Report on the Indian Environment, published in 1985, to dedicate their labours to the "dam- displaced people of India".
These movements were accompanied by intellectual critiques of the big dam idea. In 1981, the Gandhi Peace Foundation published a seminal document called Major Dams: A Second Look, based on a seminar held in Sirsi, in the Western Ghats of Karnataka. Then, in 1984, two college students, Ashish Kothari and Rajiv Bhartari, published a wide ranging critique of the Narmada Valley projects in the Economic and Political Weekly. After reading this essay, Medha Patkar was encouraged to move from social work in Mumbai to mobilising adivasis in Madhya Pradesh. The following year, the Annual Number of the Economic and Political Weekly printed an essay by Nirmal Sengupta entitled "Irrigation: Traditional versus Modern", an empirically rich and thoughtful analysis that made a strong case for the continuing relevance of indigenous methods of water harvesting. Sengupta's work in English was complemented by the superb field studies of water conservation published in Hindi by Anupam Mishra. Meanwhile, Pune economist Vijay Paranjype was conducting case studies of individual dams, which showed that the actual costs incurred in their construction generally exceeded their putative benefits.
These precocious works raised the basic issues so spiritedly taken up by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA): social justice, environmental sustainability, economic efficiency and cultural survival. The movement brought to these old, and always relevant, issues, the vigour of a mass popular movement and the appeal of a charismatic leader. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the Andolan organised a series of strikes, fasts, processions, padayatras and rasta rokos, these held in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and that continuing centre of imperial power, New Delhi. Inspired by an exemplary leader and a devoted cadre of workers, it drew into its fold adivasis and peasants as well as students and professionals from the cities.
This widening of the support base was necessary because of the growing pro-dam movement that confronted it. The Andolan's principal target, the Sardar Sarovar project, is a curious scheme whose benefits will flow almost wholly to one State, Gujarat, whereas its costs will be borne by upstream villages in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. The Gujaratis, regardless of ideology or political affiliation, stand as one behind the dam. The unanimity is complete, and sinister. When the respected Ahmedabad dancer, Mrinalini Sarabhai, asked about the rights of the displaced, she was told to shut up or leave the State.
Then, in the summer of 1999, the NBA secured the support of the novelist, Arundhati Roy. Ms. Roy's involvement came at a time when the movement was at a particularly low ebb. Its offices in Gujarat had been attacked. Years of selfless activism were being answered with a barrage of criticism from the pro-liberalisation press. Medha Patkar, in particular, had become a hate figure for free-market columnists. The Andolan and its leader were accused for holding up the dams that would power the factories that would make India Singapore writ large.
Arundhati Roy's essay on the Sardar Sarovar dam was published by Outlook and Frontline magazines in May 1999. At the time, I had decidedly mixed feelings about it. As a work of analysis, it was unoriginal: Kothari and company had been there before her. As a piece of literary craftsmanship it was self-indulgent and hyperbolic. Still, to criticise the essay would be to let down the side. Might not her name and her fame attract to the "cause" the undecided upper class, men and women who would read Ms. Roy in Outlook but who had never heard of Nirmal Sengupta or the Economic and Political Weekly?
To suppress my reservations was not easy, for I had been intensely irritated by Ms. Roy's previous venture into public interest journalism: her polemic against the nuclear tests in 1998. There too, I was on her side, "objectively" speaking. Yet her vanity was unreal. Ms. Roy quoted, without irony, the judgment of her friend that after having written one successful novel she had seen it all, that a barren stretch of life lay before her until the final meeting with her Maker. She spoke of how she had disregarded the advice of those who insisted that the tax man would come chasing her were she to write against the bomb. A month before Ms. Roy sat down to write her piece, 4,00,000 adults had marched through the streets of Calcutta in protest against the Pokharan blasts. Were their homes all raided by the Income Tax Department?
The anti-dam essay had its signs of self-absorption too. Its opening scene, of Ms. Roy laughing on the top of a hill, seemed a straight lift from the first lines of that monument to egotism, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. The essay was marked throughout by a conspicuous lack of proportion. To compare dams to nuclear weapons was absurd. To demonise technology was irresponsible. The scientists, K. J. Roy and Suhas Parajpye, had worked out an innovative compromise, a reduction in the projected height of the Sardar Sarovar dam which would reduce submergence while allowing the construction of "overflow" canals to the water-scarce areas of Kutch and Saurashtra. This scheme would minimise human suffering while creatively redeeming the thousands of crores already spent on the project. Ms. Roy wanted, however, for the dam to be made a museum for failed technologies. Altogether, this was an essay written with passion but without care. In her stream-of-consciousness style, the arguments were served up in a jumble of images and exclamations with the odd number thrown in. The most serious objections to the dam, on grounds of social justice, ecological prudence and economic efficiency, were lost in the presentation. What struck one most forcibly was her atavistic hatred of science and a romantic celebration of adivasi lifestyles.
It is tempting to see Arundhati Roy as the Arun Shourie of the left. The super-patriot and the anti-patriot use much the same methods. Both think exclusively in black and white. Both choose to use a 100 words when 10 will do. Both arrogate to themselves the right to hand out moral certificates. Those who criticise Shourie are characterised as anti-national, those who dare take on Roy are made out to be agents of the State. In either case, an excess of emotion and indignation drowns out the facts.
One must grant that Arundhati Roy is a courageous woman. Other novelists like to shut themselves away from the world, but she has sought engagement with it. She followed her printed blasts with long, tiring journeys in inhospitable terrain, to show her solidarity with the anti-nuclear and anti-dam protesters. Most writers have been individualists and careerists. An all-too-small minority has shown an awareness of public issues. Where do we place Ms. Roy in this line of honourable dissenters?
Perhaps the greatest of activist-novelists was George Orwell. Out of Eton and the Indian Police Service, he chose to work as a dishwasher in Paris and to live with miners in the north of England. Later, he fought with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. His engagements with poverty and fascism inspired his novels Animal Farm and 1984 and a series of imperishable essays on political subjects. In the great battles of the modern world, he took the brave, but intellectually unfashionable, stand of being for democracy but for socialism as well.
Orwell I know only through his books, but I had the honour of knowing, in flesh-and-blood, the finest novelist-activist of modern India, Kota Shivram Karanth. In a long life, Karanth helped revive Yakshagana, promote widow remarriage, transform the Kannada novel and pioneer the environmental movement in Karnataka. He translated and published the first Citizens' Reports on the Indian Environment. He led movements against the pollution of the Tungabhadra and against the Kaiga nuclear plant. These were all in the 1980s, when he was himself in his nineties. A decade previously he had inspired the successful campaign against the Bedthi power project in the district of Uttara Kannada.
Arundhati Roy might very well equal Orwell and Karanth in her bravery. But she lacks their intellectual probity and judgment. Those men wrote with a proper sense of gravitas, in a prose that was lucid but understated, each word weighed before it was uttered. Perhaps they were lucky to work in a pre-television and pre-colour supplement era, when the principle would take precedence over the personality.
Perhaps we should blame the time we live in for Arundhati Roy's carelessness. That she is careless is beyond dispute. She made disparaging remarks about the judges of the Supreme Court while that Court was hearing a case filed by the organisation she sought to support. Late in 1999, the National Law School in Bangalore convened a meeting on the Narmada issue. One of the NBA's leaders was present, as was its lawyer. At this meeting, the eminent legal scholar Upendra Baxi, a man who has written books on the functioning of the Supreme Court, gently suggested that it would be wise for the Andolan to disassociate itself from Arundhati Roy.
Now, in the light of the recent judgment sanctioning the elevation of the dam, five metres at a time, Ms. Roy has erupted again. The judges and judgment, she says, show that we are living in a "banana republic". She has suggested that the judges are ignorant and insensitive. Speaking to a foreign journalist, she has compared the judgment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's (NATO) bombing of Yugoslavia. These opinions were offered as the Andolan prepares to file a review petition in the Supreme Court.
Celebrity endorsement of social movements is always fraught with hazard. In the beginning, it may attract media attention, and draw to the cause previously silent bystanders. However, the media will soon abandon the cause for the star, and the converts will soon return to their humdrum lives. Much depends on the kind of celebrity. A film star will wave and flash a smile: do little good but no harm either. But celebrity writers will write and speak. And the natural bent of this particular celebrity is towards hyperbole and hysteria. "When NATO bombed Yugoslavia," says Ms. Roy, "a tiger in the Belgrade zoo got so terrified that it started eating its own limbs. The people of the Narmada valley will soon start eating their own limbs." (quoted in the Asian Age, October 30).
I am told that Arundhati Roy has written a very good novel. Perhaps she should begin another. Her retreat from activism would - to use a term from economics - be a "Paretto optimum": good for literature, and good for the Indian environmental movement.
Postscript: As this article was going to press, the latest Outlook arrived, with Ms. Roy's latest venture into social science. It is like the others: self-regarding and self- indulgent. The essay is also self-contradictory, a jeremiad against the market and globalisation by one who is placed in the heart of the global market for celebrity-hood.
Among the targets singled out for attack this time is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). This is a curious choice, for so far as one can make sense of her arguement, Ms. Roy seems to share the RSS's understanding of politics.
After reading Ms. Roy's most recent essay, I see no reason to revise my judgment: that we would all be better off were she to revert to fiction.
E-mail the writer at ram...@vsnl.com
II.Perils of extremism
Ramachandra Guha writes: (in response to letters on his article 'The Arun Shourie of the left' carried on December 10)
I have received some letters in response to my essay "The Arun Shourie of the Left', along with some letters sent directly to The Hindu. I need not dwell unduly on the encouraging ones. But I must address the critics. These suggest that I am an anxious, territorial academic male, who resents Arundhati Roy because she writes for a general, non-specialist audience, and because she is a woman.
As it happens, I have spent much of the past decade celebrating the work of two popular writers: Verrier Elwin and Madhaviah Krishnan. One wrote on tribals, the other on the environment: that is on subjects that Ms. Roy has chosen to make her own. Neither was dry or objective, and neither wrote for an academic audience. Both were passionate, but their passion was focussed and directed.
The example of Elwin is particularly relevant here. He wrote, as Ms. Roy does, about tribal cultures at the receiving end of the modern world. He was polemical, but also empathetic. His forte was reportage, allowing the tribals to speak in their own voices about their own dilemmas. Consider, by way of contrast, Arundhati Roy's essay on globalisation, published in the Outlook of November 27. As one letter writer, M. K. Venu, remarks, the essay displays a lamentable ignorance of economics. Ms. Roy gives up pages and pages of generalised outrage. Analysis is not her strong suit; still, one would expect a creative writer to seek out individual experiences, to tell stories of the changes in peoples' lives and emotions wrought by wider historical processes, not simply to state, and at such excessive length, her own opinions. Novelists who have written insightfully about social issues - V. S. Naipaul and Mahasweta Devi come to mind - have also been listerners. On the evidence of her essays Arundhati Roy does not belong in their company.
Information - particularly new information - understanding, coherence, readability: these are the criteria by which one judges good non-fiction. Mere passion, in the absence of those other virtues, too easily becomes shrill indignation. It is now being suggested that those who set store by these criteria are male chauvinists. The suggestion is insulting not to this particular male, but rather to Arundhati Roy herself. Unlike the professional feminist, she has never waved her gender before and after she speaks or writes.
In his rejoinder, Smitu Kothari worries that my article is badly timed and will fall into the wrong hands. Even if I had disagreements with the style and content of Arundhati Roy's writing, he suggests, I should have avoided the topic in the interests of the "movement".
This is an old argument, that the end must take precedence over the means. Through the 20th Century it was used most effectively by Communist parties to suppress dissent. Insecure intellectuals too easily capitulate to such pressures, preferring to stay silent rather than risk censure from the party or the movement. Thus is critical, independent thought silenced.
I have no doubt as to Ms. Roy's courage and commitment - I praise these myself - or that her support and its visibility has attracted to the Narmada valley dozens of young people. Her contribution to the Narmada debate, however, has to be seriously qualified in view of the irresponsible remarks she has made about the Supreme Court. As Pratap Mehta and Sashi Deshpande point out, those comments display a basic disrespect for the institutions and procedures of democracy. They were particularly unwise because it was the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and not the Gujarat Government, that had filed the case in the Court.
In private and in public the Andolan's own spokespeople have stood by Roy. That is admirably loyal. But the responses that followed my article suggest that many knowledgeable analysts of the Narmada debate agree with me. An anthropologist and a legal scholar who have both done outstanding work on the resettlement of dam oustees; two journalists who are intimately involved with the movement; an economist who has edited a book on the movement; an economist who has edited a book on the politics of the dam - all wrote to endorse my criticisms of Ms. Roy's writing - although they might have put them differently, or confined their reservations to the private realm. I treasure, too, the letter of an activist who lived for years with the adivasis of the Narmada valley. "I have been waiting a long time for someone to write something like this," says this activist: "And a lot of others have also been waiting. No one is writing because 'It would betray the cause', so to speak. This is a brave effort, if I may say so." The letter continues: "The articles (written by Ms. Roy) are points on her learning curve. She is just doing publicly what I learned in a small group 15 years ago. I can't hold those 15 years against her but I do object to such a public spectacle being made out of her education."
It is easy enough to attack the errors of the right; more difficult, but perhaps more necessary, to criticise the indiscretions of one's own side. It is my belief, and certainly not mine alone, that Ms. Roy's tendency to exaggerate and simplify, her Manichean view of the world, and her shrill hectoring tone, have given a bad name to environmental analysis. My reservations on this score were confirmed by her globalisation essay, which came too late for me to account of in my original critique. This essay presented a portrait of contemporary India as subtle as that of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch: Government Bad, Market Worse, Multinational Corporation Worst of All.
Six years ago, in our book Ecology and Equity, Madhav Gadgil and I thus described the central dilemma of Indian environmentalism: "In their own, undoubtedly sincere, opposition to large projects, environmental groups have not thus far spelt out any concrete alternatives to processes of destruction and deprivation. This might only be consistent with the defensive, almost siege-like position they find themselves in, but environmentalists have not always helped their cause by appearing to Just Say No to everything - be it eucalyptus, large dams or modern science. It has thus been easy for their opponents to dub them as anti- development, as backward-looking, retrograde rabble-rousers."
Alas, since those words were written Arundhati Roy has given a new meaning to environmental extremism. The essays she writes are unredeemingly negative. Her demonology is more capacious than that of the Ramayana. It includes impersonal forces like the State, the Market, and Science; institutions such as the World Bank; and individuals such as the President of the United States. There are no alternatives and no solutions: only rage, and more rage. Her arguments seemingly confirm what the gung-ho modernizers have been saying all along: that Greens shall Just Say No to everything.
This is unfortunate, for there are other and more constructive traditions of Indian environmental thought. Biologists like P. Pushpangadan have shown how indigenous knowledge can be creatively combined with modern science to enhance the income of tribal communities. Bureaucrats in the West Bengal forest service have crafted non-centrist, participatory and sustainable models of natural resource management that are widely admired and emulated.
I have indicated the creative possibilities of a responsive science and a reformed state. What about the market? Some Greens hate it, but the plain truth is that markets can help enforce efficiency and economy in the use of natural resources. There is no turning back on globalization. Rather, we must come to terms with it, and bend it as best we can to our own interests. If we do not want to become a "banana republic", if indeed we wish to hold our own against foreign capital, we must encourage innovation by our technologists and entrepreneurs, not mock them. Arundhati Roy, however, writes that "when the history of India's miraculous leap to the forefront of the Information Revolution is written, let it be said that 56 million Indians (and their children and their children and their children's children) paid for it with everything they ever had. Their homes, their lands, their languages, their histories."
This is typically hyperbolic, and also grossly slanderous. One it tempted to reply in the Royist mode: "Are you suggesting that this number should be divided up among the Indian software giants? Fifteen million displaced people on the conscience of Tata Consultancy Services, shall we say, ten million accounted for by WIPRO, another ten million by Infosys, with twenty-one million shared around among the rest?" As anyone except Ms. Roy knows, the IT industry uses a fraction of the energy that conventional factories do. With this tiny fraction they have generated jobs, income, foreign exchange and social equity.
The IT billionaires are, in comparison with Indian industralists of other times and stripes, more ethical and more innovative. They have given back a great deal more to society than they have taken out of it. Instead of attacking them in this ill-informed way, Ms. Roy could more fruitfully have studied how their success might be complemented by necessary reforms in other spheres of our economic and political life.
Public discourse in India is crippled by the disease of extremism. It is a disease encouraged and spread by television and colour magazines, which demand simple-minded positions on all topics, these positions then personalised in the shape of two prominent individuals with extreme and opposed views. In the latest issue of Outlook, the magazine's editor, Mr. Vinod Mehta, candidly writes: "All of us who write on day-to-day public affairs deal in hyperbole; we tend to create drama where none exists." A debate on conversion, did you say? Then we have, on the one side, Mr. Ashok Singhal, who insists that all Christians are at bottom American agents, and on the other, Mr. John Dayal, who says that Jesus has commanded him to take his Superior Gospel to the infidel.
Secularism, globalisation, the environment: on these subjects of vital importance the media, or at least large swathes of it, tends to offer only the extreme positions.
Politicians and propagandists are comfortable enough with this black-and-white view of the world. The task of the writer, and scholar, is to resist it.
That, at any rate, is how I understand the task of the writer, and that is why I wrote my original critique. Smitu Kothari now speaks of the "damage that he [Guha] potentially does to the fragile struggles for justice and social sanity in our country". This, if true, is a counsel of despair.
A writer (or struggle) that cannot withstand a single critical analysis is not worth defending at all.
Fortunately, the Indian environmental movement is more robust than that.
--Peace Is Doable
Kavita Krishnan
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Sukla Sen
Peace Is Doable
ranju radha
- Dr B.R. Ambedkar, Mahad Satyagraha Conference, December 25th , 1927
damodar prasad
What relevance does this have now?
Does Mr. Sen wants to connect to Guha's obscure views with Arundathi Roy's engagement with Maoists?
Mr. Guha claims himself to be Liberal. But this article only impress upon us as a symptom og liberal tolerance.
To stretch a bit, I think Mr.Sukla Sen is building up a scenario in the event of Mahaswetha Devi and Medha Patkar participating in the Lalgarh meeting organized by TMC.
Guha now frequently comes in TV shows anchoring pop programmes on Best Ten Dishes of Modern Indian Culiniary, Best 5 National ( and of course modern) Gymansium Clubs etc...In that sense, he is a Celeb of POP TV.
In 2000, Guha's kind of pop/hybrid academic- journalism writing faced a severe challenge from a diffferent sort of enunications like that we read in Arundathi Roy. The Police Literatures of the kind, Guha was marketing faced a market crisis as well. The market set back, pure envy and meanness arising out of some kind of inferiority complex could be the real reason that must have provoked Guha to write this stuff.
Added to the above reasons, it is also because of gradually developing dementia that prompted Sukla Sen to forward this article now. In that Mr.Sen requires real sympathy and assistance.
In fact, Arun Shourie and Ramachandra Guha both claim access to the liberal national modern Indian intellectual tradtion and its special kind of ericture.
One important highlight of A.Roy's writing is that it could demolish the tradition-ridden cliched, style of Guha kind of quasi-academic writings couched in populust vocabulary and that which is intended only to promote a Statist commonsense.
Prasad
--
damodar prasad
Ramachandra Guha's article is at least 10 years old. This article came in the context of Arundathi Roy's involvement in Narmada struggle and her stern articulations against the Hindu Bomb.
What relevance does this have now?
Does Mr. Sen wants to connect to Guha's obscure views with Arundathi Roy's engagement with Maoists?
Mr. Guha claims himself to be Liberal. But this article only impress upon us as a symptom o LIBERAL INTOLERANCE.
Sukla Sen
Sukla
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Peace Is Doable
C.K. Vishwanath
the latest one is Jairus banji's interview...
his core point is the alliance between new social movements of india and indian
late stalinists in recent years.
here,Ms.roy's role is very crucial.The aims of NSMs and Maoists are very
different..
NSM is trying to deepen the democratic process of indian society and the
maoists are trying to overcome the state of india.
the new democratic instruments of india is in conflict with this maoist
politics.
Many contradictions are here to be solved...