 Lovely welcome. I know it was meant to be a lecture, but I thought it might be easier for us to move through a vast range of subjects if we had a conversation. So what I'm going to do is to just set out a landscape where we kind of complicate this idea of liberty. And first let me start with thanking the women who have brought Nur in Ayat Khan to us. I didn't know about her, actually, until I read Shraabani's book quite recently. And Shraabani explained, Nur was the daughter of a Gujarati Indian Sufi and an American mother. She was born in Moscow. She grew up in Paris in France. She was a fluent speaker of French as well as English. And when the Germans invaded France, she fled to England. So I mean, the story is, of course, as Shraabani said, she was airdropped into France after she joined British intelligence to work with the French resistance. As a radio operator, was betrayed, was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, taken to Dachau, and eventually shot. And the story goes that when she was shot, she said, liberty. That was the last word she uttered. I began to think about her, what it is indeed what she said, what did she mean by it. Because Nur was a woman with an untidy identity, but a very clear, internal moral architecture. And fascism, underlying fascism, is a desire for neatness. Including underlying Stalinism was the desire for neatness. And here was this woman with an untidy identity. She was not neat. She was one of those many, many people, many thousands of people whose own people were enslaved by the British or by other allies who fought this war. And what did she mean by liberty when she said liberty? I don't think we'll ever know. But there was something so clear and so innocent about that one word at that time. And I just thought to myself, I mean, many of us now who live in places like India, I mean, as we speak, there are friends and comrades of mine, many of them in jail. Places like Bangladesh, people are being incarcerated, Turkey, all over the world. So those of us who are involved in arguing, do sometimes think to ourselves at night, what kind of a prisoner would I be? How would I react to torture or to interrogation? Because it's easy for people to say or applaud you as a brave person. I don't know really if I'm a brave person. I don't think I have been tested enough to easily call myself that. So I just thought, but if I had to say liberty, what would I mean by it? Is it such a simple word now? So I just thought, let me just talk about a few things to complicate this idea of liberty. I mean, initially, I thought, oh, so the school of Oriental and African studies, maybe we should have a so-as in India, too, called the School of Occidental and American Studies. Perhaps. You know? But I'll start talking from around the time the Second World War ended, which was also around the time that India became, quote, unquote, independent. The post-colonial era, where one must ask whether colonialism is really post. Is it something we can say so easily post-colonialism? With Indian independence came what is known as the violence of partition, the million people that were killed in the violence between Hindus and Muslims. So being a writer, I had to think of that word partition, too. What does it mean? It suggests that there was a whole that was then partitioned. And in the partitioning came a great deal of violence. But that's not really true. There was no whole. And there was the violence that came from partition, as well as a violence that came from a forced assimilation. There were hundreds of independent princely kingdoms that were forcibly assimilated, either by India or by Pakistan. So today, if you do hear the single ringing, clear tone of liberty, the cry for liberty, of course, in Urdu or Hindi, Azadi, it comes from Kashmir. And the violence of partition and the violence of assimilation has meant that overnight India, the colony, turned into India, the colonizer. And there hasn't been a day since August 1947 when the Indian army has not been deployed against its own people within its own borders. There has not been a day. And I'll come to who those people are against whom that army has been deployed. But Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, Panjab, Kashmir, Hyderabad, June Nagar, Chattisgarh, security forces, or the armed forces. So you do have this one moment where you wonder what does liberty mean in a situation that changed so rapidly and so quickly. Even as we speak, Kashmir is, you have people facing down bullets. You have people whose eyes are being shot out by pellets, shouting liberty. You have mass graves. You have thousands of people killed. You have whole populations being profiled as terrorists. And now we have something that a fiction writer would delight in. Two days from now, there's going to be an election in Kashmir where nobody knows who the candidates are. That's secret. Most of them are going to be elected unopposed. So it's strange territory, the most densely occupied military zone in the world. Secondly, what does liberty mean in a society whose engine is cast? Now, I mean, obviously I can talk about this for a long time. But most people know about the history of India's freedom struggle from watching Richard Attenborough's film, Gandhi. And I always wished that somehow on the front of that film, they would just say, this is a work of fiction. Because it is a falsification of a kind which is pretty unforgivable. And anyway, I won't get into it very deeply. But the debate between Gandhi and Dr. Ambedkar, who was in many ways the person who wrote and was the most political representative of the community of Dalits who were then called untouchables, will tell you the complications of even that freedom struggle. So for Dr. Ambedkar, Hinduism was a form of colonialism in many ways more terrifying than British colonialism. It was a form of enslavement. Today, there are many young scholars who will talk about how Hinduism is a way of making history into mythology and mythology into history. You have a young Dalit leader in Uttar Pradesh day who calls himself Ravan. Ravan is the demon king in the Ramayana, who Hindus burn to mark the triumph of good over evil. But for many indigenous people, for many Dalits, their gods, their kings, their people were demonized in this form of myth-making. So the question of colonialism, again, is deepened. And today, if you look at India, it is a society which functions entirely along the lines of caste. I mean, to put it quite simply, if you look at all the owners of the huge Indian corporations, whether it's Reliance or Adhani or so, they all belong to the same sort of trader caste, Maradi, Bani, Ajay, Gandhi's caste. If you look at who are the munisuba sweepers, 99.9% belong to the Valmiki community. And if you look at who are the editors, who are the judges, who are the accountants, it all breaks down. The modern India breaks down into caste so easily. So what does liberty mean there? 70 years after independence, actually, India is not ruled by a political party. India is ruled by a political party that is ruled by an organization called the RSS, the Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh, which is a fascist organization, born in 1925, that always believed that India should be declared officially a Hindu nation. So one of the debates between Gandhi and Ambedkar that was fascinating, and one of the different ways in which they looked at things is Gandhi belonging to an upper caste intrinsically longed for the village republic, intrinsically longed for the rule of the benign people, whereas Ambedkar suspected society. Ambedkar suspected Hindu society. Ambedkar worried about being ruled by upper caste Hindus. So Ambedkar, for him, liberation, meant trying to draft a constitution that was far ahead of its time than society itself. Ambedkar was not willing to just leave it to the people. Ambedkar was not willing to believe in this old notion of this wonderful India because he was a man who didn't have to go all the way to South Africa to find injustice. He didn't. And so today, now we are faced with the rule of the RSS. The RSS is by far the most powerful society. I mean, the most powerful organization in India. It's an organization whose ideologues have openly said that its enemies are Christians, Muslims, and communists. It's an organization that has openly declared that it wishes to change the Indian Constitution, whose opening lines are that India is a socialist secular republic to turn it into a Hindu nation. All the members of the BJP, the prime minister, most of the senior ministers, all of them belong to the RSS. RSS ideologues have often written about how they believe that the Muslims of India are like the Jews of Germany. And it is an organization that has moved to power since 1925 on the wheels of hatred, on the wheels of creating a kind of drip feed of divisiveness, on the wheels of believing that India, the vision for India is Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan. The land of the Hindus, the main language should be Hindi and Hindustan. I mean, the irony, of course, is that these are all Persian words. You know, anyway. And so in the coming to power of this organization, you are seeing a country which is actually a country of minorities, which is actually a country where nobody can claim to belong to a majority because of the breakdown of caste, of ethnicity, of religion, of tribe. But since the turn of the century, they have been trying to create this Hindu majority. And the creation of that majority and who is to be assimilated into it and who is to be expunged creates a violence in itself. So I mean, I did a lecture last year where I said if a novel can have an enemy, then the enemy of my novels is the idea of Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan. But so what we are living through now is, I don't know, maybe you could call it history as fake news. So there's a sort of the Hinduization, the corporatization of education of history, which all of you are going through in different ways now. So what does liberty mean then? Where, to me, the most dangerous thing is when what young people are being put through before they have even learned how to think is so twisted. When educational institutions like the ones in America privatized to the point where the pension funds are now used to fund private prisons. When the pedagogy is corporatized. When your mind, I mean, minds are incarcerated before they even learn how to think. What do we mean by liberty then? What does liberty mean for love in these times, you know? A lot of publicity, good publicity happened when the Supreme Court in India decriminalized same-sex love. And that was a great thing, but at the same time, we live in a society where if young people marry across caste or across religion, their own families behead them, mobs behead them, lynch them, kill them. Where you're actually being told what you can eat, what you can't eat, who you can marry, who you can look at. Dalits are being lynched because they dared to ride a horse. A man was scalped because a Dalit man was scalped because he dared to wear a turban. Of course, Muslims are lynched. Almost every day you read it in the papers. Now all forms of mob justice are taking place. So what would we mean by liberty then? What does liberty mean in the era of permanent electronic surveillance in the era of Facebook, in the era of telling the intelligences agencies voluntarily surrendering all our information to them? What does it mean when we know that artificial intelligence is going to result in the loss of masses of jobs? We are going to be a surplus population who has to be controlled. And many things are being put into place in order to control this restive and useless population because we won't be needed to do jobs very soon. In India, we have just initiated the most huge data bank of biometrics in the world waiting to be hacked. So what does it mean if we were to shout liberty, what would we mean? And finally, of course, what does liberty mean to the arts? What does it mean to writers and artists and painters and filmmakers? What does it do to our internal architecture? And how do we function in these times? So I think Showni is going to really talk much more about that with me, about the idea of literature, of language, of trying to think and understanding how to function not entirely freely because there can be no entire freedom in a time when people are just being killed, trolled, lynched, and jailed. I mean, as we speak, there are some of the finest activists in India under house arrest right now. But how do we continue to think and work and reproduce the world in some ways? So that is something that I guess we're going to speak about now. Thank you. Food for thought, I'm sure. And we're going to continue this wonderful conversation that has begun in our heads, liberty, freedom, happiness, and many other things. And I would now like to invite Professor Showni Ghosh, Professor of Media Studies, documentary filmmaker at Jamia Miller University in Delhi. They're going to be speaking for about 40 minutes or so. We will then open the house to questions for about another 20 minutes or so. And then after the 20 minutes question and answer exchange, we will then invite Alun Nathiroy to read a little excerpt from a book because I'm sure all of you would like to hear that too. So I shall leave you to go ahead now, Shraini. Can you hear me? First, I want to thank the Nurinath Khan Foundation and Shabani Basu for inviting me to participate in the second edition of the Liberty Series lectures. I'm very honored to be here. Thank you. And I'm also very, very delighted, always, to speak to my friend Alun Nathiroy about her writings. And today, of course, we are going to be talking about freedom broadly. But I should begin by saying that I got to know Alun Nathiroy's writings before I got to know her as a friend. And then as I got to know her as a friend, I had had no idea what she was writing because she never talks about the fiction that she writes, and she wrote it over 10 years. But while she was writing that fiction, she was also writing a lot of nonfiction. And what originally drew me to her writings, and which is why I had a file of all her articles even before I had met her, is because she was trying to tell the stories of our lives. Because I think that, you know, Alun Nathiroy is kind of a fearless witness to the history of the present. But we also know that fearlessness or bearing witness by themselves don't produce good literature. And what interested me was how do you tell the stories about the world that we live in when it becomes more than just telling of the story, and when the telling of the story becomes as important as the story. And that is also the challenge of the documentary filmmaker. Is it just the story that you're going to tell, or how are you going to tell the story? And I think that this interest that Alun Nathiroy has in bringing the art of the novelist into to bear upon the stories of our everyday lives, I think that is not only very, very essential and important, but also under discussed, I feel. Because what happens is that we tend to talk more about the literateness of Alun Nathiroy's writings when we are talking about literary fiction, but not very much when we are actually talking about her nonfiction essays. But I do feel that she does give a lot of thought about how to tell these stories. And as I said, she brings the novelist skill to bear on all that. She's also done, in her nonfiction writing, a lot of work that is missing from the mainstream journalism, for instance. And what I like about her nonfiction writing is when she brings the writer and the detective together. She's also a very good detective because she will study the material, so thoroughly come up with hard facts and details that others have missed, and then map them into some kind of a story which is remarkable. Of course, the other part of the detective story is that she's secretive when it comes to writing literary fiction. So we never get to know what she is actually doing. So I think that one of the powerful things that Arundhati does with her nonfiction is that she's able to tell these intricate and complex stories, which are also very privileging for us, all these issues. And she is able to convey them to us in a way that we understand without making it simple, making complex things simple, without making it simplistic. And but one of the things that I want to talk about today you were talking about in the introductory comments that you made, you talked about all the issues that you write about. But I think what is very fascinating is how you write about those issues. And just to go back to this idea about the form that she uses to write either fiction or nonfiction. And we've got a small thing is a text that I use for my students in one of our writing classes. And what is interesting in God of Small Things is that all the important, the plot twists are revealed to you very early on. So there are no surprises waiting. I mean, there is one surprise. But most of the time you know what it is. But each time you revisit, you get to know something more. And the interesting thing is that there is a description of this kind of writing in the novel itself, which I think kind of describes the novel really well, but also describes what good literature is about. And if I may just read that section. And here I'm quoting from the God of Small Things. It didn't matter that the story had begun because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of great stories is that they have no secrets. The great stories are ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones that you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end. And yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you don't. In the great stories, you know who lives. Or you won't. Or you won't or don't. This is the authorial voice. There is a good reason why in cultural studies we say that once the author has written the book, the author is dead. But what about when you start re-authoring it? Like just randomly changing words. You know, reading and spectatorship is also making meaning. It is a kind of authorship. But will you let me finish the quote? I might. In the great stories, you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again. And I think that this is actually the wonderful thing about her writing. Not just about not just the God of small things, but it's true for the ministry of utmost happiness and also the political assays. So I would like to start our conversation by talking about you, mostly your early life, about the idea of freedom. What did it mean for you? Because one of the things that you did try to indicate in our, you know, in your comments about Noor is that you're trying to figure out what is this outward fight that she has about, and you talked about, you know, you've coined a beautiful word today about the internal architecture of, what? The internal moral architect. That's three words. A phrase. So if you could just tell us a little bit about what your own early fights for freedom were till you actually became a writer. Well, I think there were, you know, I'm always interested in, I think one of the reasons I was interested in Noor was what I said, these untidy identities, you know, in a society which is seeking tidiness. And in India, that tidiness is sought to be imposed mostly by caste. So in my case, I grew up, I mean, I was my mother, my mother's a Syrian Christian from Kerala. She married a Bengali. I was born in Shillong, which used to be a part of Assam. Then my parents were divorced and I came back to Kerala. It was, you know, it was, she arrived in this village, I'm in a, where the God of small things is set, which is where I grew up, unwelcomed. And I, and my brother unwelcomed even more. But we were not at the bottom of the caste system. We were just outside of everything because it was just made very clear to us that you're not gonna, you don't belong here. Why don't you go away? You know, that sort of thing. And so one grew up, and because it was, I grew up in a village, so it was just on the river and my friends were the fish and the insects. And there was a strange, very unique, sort of unsupervised childhood in some ways where one wasn't indoctrinated even into the usual kinds of prejudices that one is indoctrinated with. Not because of anything, but just neglect. You know, there's people neglected to tell me to not like gay people or whatever. I just, so we're just neglect. And, but to me, growing up as a girl there, I longed to escape to the city. You know, because the village or the small town where every, you know, that marriage, that dowry, that settling down, that awaited every woman, first of all, it didn't await me because I was just constantly told no one is going to marry you. And they never asked me whether I was... And this is even before you started writing. Yeah. Somebody saw the signs really early. Yeah, so that was the, you know, I used to say I was the worst thing Syrian Christian girl could be, which was thin and black and clever. They were like, get her out of here. So I mean, the first urge to freedom was really to leave the village, you know, somehow to get away from that. And that was, of course, I'm talking the external things. Internally, I mean, anyone who has read The God of Small Things knows how... You see, for me as a novelist, I've never been able to see these things as so separate. You know, those walls are so porous and the kind of rejection and cruelty that was imposed on my mother having returned from making this bad marriage. Now, I mean, I was the person, me and my brother were the people who she... We were the only people. So she could take that despair out on, you know. So there was a lot of all that personal stuff going on too. So to flee was my aim in life, basically. And then you fled to Delhi, you came here, you studied architecture, you wrote a dissertation, you talked to your batch and you wrote spin scripts. You know, I'll come to that. But I was just thinking that can we move a little bit ahead and talk about when you started writing, you know, the different kinds of close encounters that you had with different legal provisions. You know, in the 1990s, a lot was happening in India because, you know, with the economic restructuring, there was the opening of the skies and, you know, satellite television had arrived. And there was a huge moral panic about that, you know, Indian culture is now going to get corrupted because all these Western and terrible ideas are coming in and the Hindi film song became the number one villain. So even the National Human Rights Commission identified the Hindi film song as the greatest danger that there was. And of course, there's this whole, you know, thing about obscenity and vulgarity and the Hindu supremacist groups were leading that kind of fight, but it's very important to know that even the people on the left and feminists were participating in it, you know, demanding censorship at various points in time. And then in 98, there was a huge big debate around the film Fire by Deepa Mehta, about two lesbians in India. And the film had actually been passed without any cuts and it was, you know, it played in the halls for about two weeks with no problems at all. And then the mob started attacking, you know, the film. And after that, there was a kind of a realignment of forces and feminists realized that, you know, once you start using the weapon of censorship, something that you want for yourself is going to get censored. Now, around that time, God of small things also got into some tangle. And after that, Arungati has not only, you know, attracted trolling and all kinds of, you know, mobs, but also certain kinds of legal provisions like contempt of God, for instance, you know, and twice invoked against you. And then I think once sent to jail for a day, you know, and some penalty. And then nearly kind of getting charged with sedition. So I was just thinking that could you just tell us a little bit about your close brush with legal provisions? Well, it seems like a sort of cycle that happens to me. Every few years, about five male lawyers get together and file a criminal case against me. So the first one was with the God of small things, I was, you know, they filed a case against me for obscenity and corrupting public morality. And I wanted to file an appeal saying, shouldn't it be further corrupting public morality? I mean, like, was public morality pure till I came along? But it was a criminal case, you know, and the only thing that was submitted in the court was the last chapter of the book. So clearly, and my new Kerala is the, you know, I mean, if you look at Malayalam cinema or really the center of pornography, and so why they would have been so disturbed by this book was interesting because of the last chapter which has to do with an upper caste woman and a Dalit man making love. And this was offending their sensibilities. It was a caste issue more than anything else and it was offending the left as well. But when the case was filed, just around then, you know, I won the booker. So now they wanted to claim me as well as not claim me. They were on a bind. So there was this attempt to sort of make out this is a book about children or something. And I was in court. The lawyers were ready to argue on both sides and the judge came and he said, every time this case comes before me, I get chest pains. And he just sort of, then the second time, the second case for contempt, it was after the God of Small Things and I wrote this essay called The Greater Common Good and it was about the building of big dams on the Narmada River. And it went on for a while, but initially they took offense at the fact. I was talking about displacement of indigenous people from their lands and I said that, you know, to pay cash compensation to an indigenous person is like paying a Supreme Court judge his salary in fertilizer bags. And they thought that that was offensive. So they warned me and all that. And then just a few months later, another group of five lawyers, male lawyers, said that I had tried to kill them outside the gates of the Supreme Court. I said, extremely believe me. Yeah, so I was actually sent notice by the court and asked to appear and I didn't have a lawyer. And essentially I basically just said, like, don't you have anything better to do? And they asked me to apologize. And they kept throwing my book, The Greater Common Good from one brother judge to another and they would only refer to me as that woman. So I began to think of myself as the hooker that won the booker. And then they basically wanted me to apologize and I didn't. So then they said that I wasn't behaving like a reasonable man, so I was getting very confusing. Anyway, and then I was sent to jail for a day. The next time it was about this essay that I wrote called Azadi on Kashmir. I was not actually charged with sedition, but there was a lot of moves were being made, you know? Yeah, I mean, following this. And then the last, which is most recent, was an essay that I wrote called Professor POW. And it's about a professor called Professor Sai Baba who is basically paralyzed from his waist down. He's a professor of literature who has been sentenced to life imprisonment and is serving his sentence in the Nagpur jail. And this was at the time he was arrested. And again, five male lawyers, you know, saying that I was trying to influence the course of justice, which I was. And I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, you know? And the charges were things like I had said, you know, that the police arrived at Professor Sai Baba's house with a warrant signed by a magistrate in a hairy comma, a small town in the state of Maharashtra. And I think she's calling the judge a small town man. And so, you know, just a comma can be like a criminal offense. So, but I'd like to say, you know, that the thing is that really, I mean, though the sound died, the thing is censorship now has been outsourced to the mob, you know? And you have these various groups who sort of simplify their own identities, appoint their own spokespeople, decide their own histories, fake their own histories and then start burning cinema halls, attacking people, burning books, killing people. So, you know, the state has sort of moved out of the way of censorship. And now it's the rule of the mob. And this is more terrifying than being hauled up for contempt of court or going to jail or arguing your case because you just don't know who is deciding what the correct history should be, what the correct representation should be, what the correct identity should be or what the only identity should be. So for me, I feel that militant desire to complicate these simplifications, you know? Which actually, you know, kind of brings me to the next question that I wanted to ask you, which has to do with a different kind of liberating yourself from different kinds of constraints. In your case, I'm talking about the literary constraints, you know, because you wrote this really wonderful essay that you presented in this very city, right? What is the morally appropriate language in which to write and think? In which you talk about how at some point in life, and you were writing the screenplays that, you know, Sharabani talked about, you felt that you didn't want to write, you know, scene one and, you know, exterior or river, et cetera, but you felt that you had a need to write differently, you know, talk about things in excess. And then when you did come out with a second literary fiction, which is the Ministry of Art, Most Happiness, it didn't bear any resemblance to God or small things except, you know, in the inner layers of it. So I was wondering whether you could talk about how you managed to free yourself from different kinds of literary convention that you have set up and then move away from them and what that does for you? Well, I think, you know, I've never been somebody who believed in having a profession, you know, or even being a professional writer or like you write a novel, then you have to write another and another and another. So I, so, of course, I trained as an architect and when I began to look at the city and how it came to be what it is and think about the city, even when I was studying architecture, the architecture thesis, the college mandated that the architecture thesis had to be a building or a housing complex or a hospital or a cinema hall. And I said, no, I want to do a written thesis. You know, so that was freeing yourself from what is being imposed on you, like they're trying to tell you how to think, how to express yourself and so on. When I wrote The God of Small Things, obviously, you know, it became this sort of moment in which you just shot out of your own life and fame is a kind of incarceration too, you know? And everyone expects you to write The Son of the God of Small Things or the, you know, God of Small Things too and to use that same language. And for me, that was exactly the time when, you know, India took a sharp turn to the right, the nuclear tests happened and I was being obviously marketed as the poster girl of this new aggressive rising India and I didn't want to be that person. So the private language of The God of Small Things turned into a very public argument when I started to write about the nuclear tests, the greater common good. I remember telling myself at that point, you know, okay, so you've written a book about childhood, about love, about, you know, about violence. You've written an essay about nuclear tests. Now try writing about irrigation, baby. You know, see, if you can use those skills to make people understand, because to me, one of the most profound political understandings that came to me was the understanding of the battle in the Narmada Valley and what it means and so on. And then after a point, you know, every time you make a new field and then you expect it to stay there, but then you want to move and change and when I wrote the Ministry of Atmos Happiness, it was, I needed a new language and I needed to take, I think I said that in the Zeba lecture I did in the British Library that I took the language of the God of Small Things and nudged it off a very tall building and I went down and collected the shattered pieces because the Ministry required a different language. So it's always a form of liberation that you seek, you know, because there's always that impetus that requires you to, you know, requires you to reproduce the same thing again and that doesn't interest me. And also you chose a form that you felt was, you know, suitable for the kind of issues that you were raising because Ministry of Atmos Happiness is a very different book from God of Small Things. Well, more than, I mean, I don't think of fiction as issue-based, you know? So it wasn't that I wanted to raise the issue, but for me the Ministry was also more like, how can you challenge the idea of the form of the novel itself, you know? And I wanted to look at the city, the story as a city and a city that is planned and unplanned, controlled and uncontrolled, not just this epic story which is played out through the light of a family or something. Right. So the canvas is broader, but one of the things that you said right now is that, you know, when you think about fiction, you think very differently than when you write, you know, an essay and I don't know whether I'm quoting you exactly, I'm not very careful. You said something about how fiction, writing, dances out of you and non-fiction has to be wrenched out of you. Have you disclaimed that? The tension or... I... Well, just to finish my question, is that what is it that fiction writing affords you that non-fiction doesn't? Well, I think, I would say that in my DNA I'm a fiction writer, you know? And of course I always wonder why people think that there's some sort of bipolarity between fiction and fact. That's not true, you know? Fiction is truth. I would say particularly in the era of fake news, there's nothing truer than fiction, you know? But what, I mean, the non-fiction for me these last 20 years of writing, they were not planned. They were always interventions in a situation that was closing down. There was always an argument, you know, a plea to look at something differently in a very, in a time when things were becoming dangerous for people, you know? Whereas fiction for me is the construction of a universe. You know, the fiction is the most beautiful thing that I can possibly imagine doing because it's like inviting a loved one to walk with you through this world that you've tried to construct. It's not an argument, you know? It's a complication. It's something which is the opposite of urgent, the opposite of timely, you know? It's timeless, or it should be. Yeah, and you've also kind of compared your writing fiction to slow cooking. Yeah, it's also, it also allows you, I mean, nowadays, you know, the world is becoming so harsh and rigid and reactive and twitery, and fiction allows you to be naughty, to be whimsical, to be, you know, it gives you that bandwidth which is, I think, getting lost to us in some ways. So yeah, fiction, I mean, surely when I started writing the Ministry of Art, Most Happiness, it was, to me, it's a book where actually you know, the Janet Guest House and Funeral Services, you know, it ends on this person, Anjum, who runs a guest house and a graveyard simultaneously. And it gives me great comfort, that place, and the characters in the Ministry of Art, Most Happiness, who began to literally drop in on me and lived with me for 10 years and directed my life in some ways, are and became more real than real people, you know, and they afford me a kind of comfort which I don't think I could do without now. And of course, you know, I'm sure many of you here have read the Ministry of Art, Most Happiness, and it's a novel, not just about human beings, but about creatures, about dogs and cats and all kinds of bugs also. And one of the interesting things is that, you know, you refer to this, you know, which you used as a kind of a metaphor, this bipolarity, you know, you wanted to break out of that. And in a way, isn't it a little bit, you know, true of the characters as well, that in your fiction, you break every kind of binary, you know? In some ways, when you were talking about the untidiness of news, you know, your characters are like that, you know? There is this guy called Saddam Hussein who's actually, you know, a Dalit who takes on a Muslim identity because of, you know, something that happens in his life. So people are, they have different kinds of identity at different points in time. You know, they're trying to liberate themselves from something and go towards something else. And I was wondering whether, and which makes it very difficult to fix any identity about them, like Anjum, for instance. And I was wondering whether you could talk a little bit about that. Well, I think, I mean, I didn't, I don't think I set out to do this as some kind of thing. No, this is all post-mortem. Yeah, it just happens that I look back at them and I see how, you know, for example, Anjum, who's in India would be called a Hijra, which means a body in which a holy soul is trapped. She's born as Aftab in Old Delhi, as born as a boy and then becomes Anjum, ends up living in a graveyard. Now, you know, but being a Hijra is not her only identity. Like, she's also a Shia. And in fact, in India today, her Muslim identity is a more dangerous one. It is the identity that makes her more vulnerable. And in fact, when she goes to Gujarat, Anjum gets caught up in the 2002 massacre because she's a Shia, but she survives because she's a Hijra, you know, because they feel that killing a Hijra will bring you bad luck. Saddam Hussein, who you mentioned, he's a Dalit from Haryana, whose father is lynched by a Hindu mob in a little place called Jhajjar, and he converts to Islam. And he calls himself Saddam Hussein. He's a video of the execution of Saddam Hussein in his phone. And Anjum says, you know, this Saddam was a bastard. He says, I know I want to be a bastard like him, but I want to, he's very impressed by how, how, how bravely Saddam goes to his death, you know? But the other characters, like one of the characters I worked a lot, I lived very closely with, let's say, is a character called himself Garson Hobart, or whose friends call him Garson Hobart because it's the name of a character in a play, a college play, but he's a kind of satyr, you know? He's half, he's trans in a way because he's half a human being and half the state. He's a very senior, very sophisticated, self-deprecating intelligence officer. And he has the ability of the state to wait, to take the great long historical perspective, to be unmoved by the signs of tragedy, you know? So in many ways, there are Musa, who's a Kashmiri, who has a national border running through him. So you have, you know, in this country which lives in the grid of caste and ethnicity and religion, not even a grid, a mesh, you have almost all the characters with these borders running through them and through that, you illuminate the grid. Yeah. Well, I have a little thesis about the Ministry of Art Most Happiness, which is that, and this is my mandatory reference to 377, is that it's also a very queer book, not because it has a trans or a genderqueer person at the center of it, but I think that the queer idea of passing is actually very central to the idea of the book. So, you know, Dachand, passing as Saddam Hussein, Das and Hobart, you know, using this name to pass as somebody else. Musa is constantly passing as all kinds of people. And then Anjum, after she has that terrible experience in Gujarat, teaching her daughter, Zainab, her adopted daughter, the Gayatri, Sanskrit Gayatri Mantra, so that if there is, at a point of communal violence, she can use the Gayatri Mantra to protect herself and pass as a Hindu. Comridriviti, yeah, just show all the characters. All the characters, yeah. Passing as something of the other. And also just to go back to the question of identities, you know, when I was talking about how fluid it is and how it's very difficult to fix somebody, but even, you know, gender sexual identities, which we tend to see as actually, you know, put them in little boxes, is also very beautifully done in a way that I will say that I haven't seen that many queer writers write like this, you know, and you will have to wait patiently till I quote Razia from the first chapter, which is the Quagga, the Palace of Dreams, where there's a hijra called Razia. And, you know, she's not, she's not actually a hijra, and I just want to quote from that book, and I don't want you to interrupt it when I'm reading. Dominatrix, Razia, this was, that was a queer moment. Very spontaneous, I appreciate that. So Razia was not a hijra. She was a man who liked to dress in women's clothes. However, she did not want to be thought of as a woman, but a man who wanted to be a woman. She had stopped trying to explain the difference to people, including to hijra as long ago. And I think this is actually quite remarkable, because what it does is it also talks about the many different aspirations that people have, which then brings me to try and connect the idea of freedom, struggling to liberate yourself from different kinds of things, and actually moving towards happiness. Arundhati, you will agree that we need to talk about happiness today as well. Do I have a choice? I'm like, the tone. The very threatening tone in which happiness is being claimed. And in the Ministry of Art Most Happiness, it's the Janna of Guest House actually, which is a locus where all the people who, as she says, has fallen off the grid or the mesh, the kinds of misfits who don't fit in anywhere. And it has an inclusive culture where everybody can walk in all kinds of anonymous people who didn't fit in anywhere else and they have. And there is a kind of an imagination around happiness over there. I mean, and of course, I have to reiterate this, that a writer understands a work in a particular way, the reader may understand it in a different way, and the two coming together might actually result in something. So in Janna of Guest, in the Ministry of Art Most Happiness, the Janna of Guest House is this locus, where you can have hope. And of course, Arundhati has this beautiful line in another essay where she says that you have to separate hope from reason. So I think that the people in the Janna of Guest House do that. But there's also a beautiful, you know, a literary sleight of hand that I like to talk about in the Court of Small Things, which is that these people who have broken what you call the love laws in the book, that you have this upper caste woman and you have this Lalith man, and they've broken these love laws and they will face the most devastating consequences for that. But because the novel does not actually tell its story chronologically, but moves back and forth in space and time, the novel ends with the love making. It ends in the middle of the story. It ends in the middle of the linear story, where Ammu and Velata have made love and they go away saying, promising to meet tomorrow. And we know what the tomorrow is that it has devastating consequences. And for me, that's a fantastic way to define happiness because happiness is something that we are told should be understood in a durational kind of way, happy forever, you know? And this is claiming a moment of happiness. Looking at happiness is a kind of intensity. And I don't think you thought about it exactly like that. I don't understand that. But I just want to hear what your thoughts are on this matter. Well, you know, I think in the case of the God of small things, I hate to tell you, but I did think about it. But anyway. That's one revolution there. But the thing is that it was, you know, it really is, if people say that, you know, the consequences of what happened were terrible. But to me, the fact that it happened that all was wonderful. That is the love making. More wonderful than if everybody had just retreated into safety and maintained the status quo, you know? But in the case of Janet Guesthouse, in the case of people who have fallen out of this very hard grid of belonging and which is, you know, which is put out in Indian society. And so eventually you live in a graveyard. But actually, if you look at, if you read the book and if you look at who runs that Guesthouse, who lives in it, who dies in it, and what are the prayers that are being said, you know? I mean, today, literally, cemeteries are ghettos, you know? Not just for the dead, but also for the living because obviously, you know, you have graveyards only for Muslims or Christians since Hindus cremate the dead. And there have been politics over the graveyard and why should they have graveyards and why should they have facilities and so on. So you have this graveyard where when you look at who's buried there, whether it's the other friends of Anjum, Suhajjahs, who's saying the prayers, Tilotima's mother's ashes are buried there, Saddam Hussein's father's gets a little grave there in his memory. Comrade Revati from the forest, you know? A gorilla, she's buried there. The prayers are so anarchic, you know? There's the international, there's the Fatihah, there's the recitation of Shakespeare. So eventually what you have is a revolution. In there, you know? And eventually what you have is the idea of solidarity as opposed to, because these are people who have suffered and who have been beaten down because of their identities or of who they are. But their politics is one, not a further siloization but of expansion, of solidarity, of willingness. In this moment in India, the willingness to recognize that moment of happiness is so radical, you know? As opposed to- And also your choice of Sarmat Sheikh as being the- And Sarmat Sheikh is the patron saint of the ministry of what most happens, you know? And he's, if you go to Jama Masjid, there's a little shrine stuck like a limpid to the side of the big steps of Jama Masjid. And Sarmat Sheikh was an Armenian Jew who left Armenia in pursuit of the love of his life who was a Hindu boy called Abhichan, who was then, who then lived naked on the streets of Delhi. He became a Sufi, he gave up Judaism, took to Islam, then gave up Islam, said he was searching for the true God and then he was beheaded on the steps of Jama Masjid. He's like the hasrat of the indeterminate, you know? The man, the saint who stops the circle from closing. To me, the idea of the battle against even these new fashisms that are looming is those of us who will not allow that circle to be closed, who will not allow any form of neatness, who will insist on being untidy. Because that's what this world is. It's an untidy, chaotic world that has to be celebrated as such. So now we'll open the conversation to the audience. If you will just raise your hands and I will come to you, yes. And I will request Mitha to tell me when I have to ask, take the last question. So she's our official timekeeper. So I'll start with you, please go ahead. Yes, go ahead. Do we need a mic? Okay, yes. Hi, hi. I wanted to ask about you in the recent book you wrote about the Gujarat riots, the massacres. And I wanted to know how important was it for you to cover that? And is it because it's something that's still suppressed in terms of like, I know because of the law court, the law cases and things like that. It hasn't been addressed properly. People are still fighting for their stories to come out. Was that something really important for you to address? And then I just wanted to ask quickly as well. You talk a lot about messy identities and did it surprise you from God of Small Things, especially, did it surprise you that people in countries that have less complicated identities that seem to be more unified, like places like Denmark or Sweden, how much they resonated with that idea of messy identities? And how did you feel about that? Well, I don't know if I need to explain the Gujarat massacre at all. Do I? Well, so in 2002, a massacre of Muslims to place in the streets and towns and villages of the eastern state of Gujarat when the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, was the chief minister. It was, there have been many massacres and many worse massacres with greater numbers of people killed in India before. So what was the difference between those and this? One difference was that it happened in the era of television or live TV. But to me, the more important difference was that in the other times, while killings took place, there was always the public posture of secularism, the public aspiration to secularism, even if parties that were involved in the killing were doing the killing, they still didn't. It was not a stated ideology. Once it becomes part of a stated ideology, you know that trouble is coming your way. And I mean, if you look back just to the recent history, in fact, how did it happen? In 2001, in September, after 9-11, suddenly the world was ready to accept RSS ideology. The Islamophobia and the world meant that it was possible for this particular ideology in India, which has been brewing since the 20s, even earlier, to take a good step forward. And in fact, Modi was not the chief minister in September. After September happened, he was paradropped, the BJP chief minister of Gujarat was removed and Modi was put in his place. And within months, the Godra incident happened where a train with Hindu pilgrims in it was burnt. Nobody still knows today who did the burning. And then there was, then the mobs were unleashed. In fact, just yesterday, I think there was an army general who talked about how the army was told, move in, move in, but they arrived in Gujarat and there was no preparation for them. They were made to stay in the airport while the riots, I mean, we don't call them riots, while the massacre rolled on, you know? Now, the thing is after that massacre within, in India, elections and massacres go together. Often killings are a form of campaigning. And very soon after the massacre, Modi became the elected chief minister before he was just a nominated chief minister. And he won again and again and again. He has never, never apologized for them, you know? And when he became prime minister, there were a lot of even people who think of themselves as liberal, who welcomed him as the new development chief minister and the massacre we were told to forget, you know? Constantly told to forget. And even today, when the disappointment is setting in, not because of the communal situation, but because of the economic situation. People who celebrated his arrival in 2014 as the prime minister cannot now go back to the 2002 massacre, because that wouldn't say very much for them. So to me, it was a very central moment, you know? And yes, it's a very important part of the ministry about most happiness. The second question was less complicated identities than Denmark being. Ah, well, you know, I must say, you know, the God of small things, I think it was translated into 42 languages and the ministry about most happiness in 49. And both these books are so particular, so local, including most of the political essays are too, those some are dealing with 9-11 and imperialism and capitalism and so on. So I actually don't know, and I don't necessarily even want to know what it is about these stories that somehow do the opposite work of nuclear weapons, the opposite work of nuclear weapons, you know? They just jump over these cultural barriers. They, I remember being in Estonia and someone came to me and said, but that was my childhood, you know? So I think somehow that belief that deep, very, very deep down, you know, beyond all the noisy debates that we are involved with which are important, we do have to believe that we all love and we all fear and we all laugh in ways that we can recognize each other, you know? On the right, yes, go ahead, yes. Firstly, thank you so much for this evening. And I just wondered, you started this evening talking about the way in which the imposition of a border caused huge violence both in terms of separation and assimilation. And when you've talked about the Ministry of Upmost Happiness, you've talked about the way in which there are incendiary borders that run through all of the characters and you've talked quite often this evening about the importance of transgressing borders and boundaries. And I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about the relationship between borders and liberty. Do you mean in a political sense? Or in any sense? In any sense. You were talking about the incendiary boundaries. Borders that run through the characters. Through people. So it's just the idea of borders and how hard and fast they are, whether they can be porous and sort of the political but also the personal. Well, I suppose, you know, if I were to talk politically, right now today in India, the great accusation that is hurled at anybody who disagrees with this RSS-centric view of India is that you're an anti-national. And I keep thinking, but all of us somehow evolved from a time way before the nation-state existed. So how can you expect me as a writer to only think along those borders? I mean, there was a time when India and Pakistan and Bangladesh were one country. And now you're supposed to, now that it's been partitioned, you're supposed to hate each other, whereas you share so much language and music and poetry. How is it possible? And how are these emotions being dictated to us in these ways? But on the other hand, there's a part in the Ministry of Atmos Happiness where Musa, who's a Kashmiri character, who eventually, because of the circumstances of Kashmir, is forced underground. And actually, he and a woman character called Telotimah and Garson Hobart, all of them knew each other when they were young. And at one point, many, many years later, Musa shows up in Garson Hobart's flat. Garson Hobart is now a drunk sort of person who's looking back on his life and thinking about Kashmir a lot. And Musa tells him that he says Kashmir will destroy India because you can blind us, but you still have to look at us. You still have to deal with what you've done to us. And if you even take that statement literally, you see, there's a time when Kashmiris had the most precious thing to them was their ID. They were just numbers. They couldn't go anywhere without that card. Now, all of India has the UID. Kashmir has made the Indian army into a bloated, corrupted administrative force. And meanwhile, the insurgencies in India are turning the Indian police into an army. Every institution, so once you're calling yourself a democracy and yet you're able to absorb the kind of cruelty that's being inflicted in your name on a people, the corruption that comes from that is incredible. And it's incredible that the countries that call themselves democracies, whether it's Israel or America or India, are the ones that are busy running military occupancies. I've been told by the organizers that we have time for two more questions. And I'm going to take one from this row and one from there. So I'll just come back to you after this. Go ahead, sir. Hello. I just wanted to ask you as a person who so beautifully uses the language of the everyday life in your work as a writer or as an artist or as a citizen, how do you interrogate yourself and ground yourself and keep yourself using that language while entering spaces of institutionalized and corporate spaces of the university, of the workforce, of the nation-state in general? And how do you analyze where you can use the language of the everyday life and how that language is influenced by the language of the nation-state? Well, I think language is the thing that is most under attack, the NGOization of language, the nationalization of language, or simply the murder of language. I'll tell you a funny story. Many years ago, when I was writing a lot about water and privatization and the dams, there was a big water convention in the Hague. So I was asked to go and I don't go because I don't really go to these kinds of things. But then I heard that there was a big delegation going from India to basically promote privatization and the building of big dams. And so I just arrived to see how much of it I could wreck. So they put me on this panel. And they said it was a panel of writers. And they said, everyone has to introduce themselves and say why they write about water. So there was an American privatization, whatever, expert. And he said, I write about water because I'm paid to. And God gave us the rivers, but he didn't put in the delivery systems. And for this, we need private enterprise. You have to say the name. So I said, well, I write about water because I'd be paid a great deal not to. I said, the thing is that all of you call yourself writers. But you're not really writers. You're the opposite of writers. Because writers spend a lifetime trying to close the gap between language and thought. And you spend your lifetime trying to devise a language that masks thought. That every single word that you can destroy, you'll destroy. What do you mean by freedom? What do you mean by empowering women? What do you mean by the poor? What do you mean by everything you mean the opposite of what you say? So whatever else you do, don't call yourself writers. Find another name or a word for yourself. But we have one last question there. Go ahead. For my Christian name, my Christian name is Shiva. But moving on from that, the world recently lost a writer who dedicated his life to the narrative of the untidy life of the society that tries to tidy the untidy life and the inefficiency of the whole process. I still can't find his blue plaque in London. And he was crucified in all the obituaries. We know who that writer is. You have dedicated your life, it seems, to the art and the narrative of the untidy life. Would you say that the art of writing without a cause is a lost cause? The art of writing without a cause. Well, you see, I have never understood what a cause is. In that, to me, when I'm writing about, let's say, big dams or I'm writing about capitalism or privatization or I'm writing about the attack on the Indian parliament or whatever, none of it is a cause. It's a way of seeing. It's a way of understanding and deepening life around you. So a cause is like a charity or something. Like a cause is something that some celebrity endorses. But I don't ever see what I do as a cause. I somehow am not able to isolate these things. For 20 years, I've written political essays. Most of the time, it's written to explain to myself. And each essay I write deepens my understanding about the next thing. So they are not really separate. They're a way of seeing. So for me, I don't think that there is any piece of writing that isn't about a way of seeing. However fragile or however unobvious it might be, everybody has a way of seeing something. Everybody. There's nothing that is neutral or mechanical about things. Thank you, Arundhude. That was wonderful. But before we end, you have to read something. Yes. And we will end with that. I just thought I would read a little. It's just very short. And it's a little bit about. It's from the first essay that I wrote after the God of Small Things came out. It was an essay called The End of Imagination, which was about the nuclear tests, the 1998 nuclear tests in India. And I mean, not that this part makes that obvious, but it's just something about writing. So there's a part in that essay where I meet a friend of mine, an old friend of mine, in New York. And she's talking to me about success and fame. And she's basically telling me that after the nuclear tests, the huge success and the winning of the Booker Prize, that the rest of my life was going to be vaguely disappointing to me. So I'll just read this little part. I told my friend that there was no such thing as a perfect story. I said, in any case, hers was an external view of things. That the trajectory of a person's happiness, or let's say fulfillment, had peaked and now must trough because she had accidentally stumbled upon success. It was premised on the unimaginative belief that wealth and fame were the mandatory stuff of everybody's dreams. You've lived too long in New York, I told her. There are other worlds, other kinds of dreams, dreams in which failure is feasible, honorable, sometimes even worth striving for, worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth. There are plenty of warriors that I know and love, people far more valuable than myself, who go to war each day, knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they are less successful in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled. The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead, which means exactly what? Arched eyebrows, a little annoyed. I tried to explain, but I didn't do a very good job of it. Sometimes I need to write to think, so I wrote it down for her on a paper napkin, and this is what I wrote, to love, to be loved, to never forget your own insignificance, to never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you, to seek joy in the saddest places, to pursue beauty to its lair, to never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple, to respect strength, never power, above all, to watch, to try and understand, to never look away, and never, never to forget. Thank you.