 Thank you so much, Arundhati, for joining us on this, for this conversation. I mean, there's so much, so much to talk about, but I would like to begin by talking about the fact that your second novel is now in, going to be in 49 languages. You're always in your work related to real-life events on the ground and very disturbing happenings around you, and yet you immerse yourself in very, very high-quality fiction. I mean, do you think that's a very rare thing for a writer, difficult? You know, I mean, I think that people make this mistake to think that fiction is somehow untrue. Actually, good fiction has to be true. And I'm not talking about true in terms of facts and figures, but true as in music is true, you know? As you know that when you hit the right note, it is a true note. So it's an imaginary garden, surely, but it's full, it's tap roots of all the plants in it come from a place which is true, you know? And so I don't know why people sort of seem to, seem to suggest that you have fiction that has to be purely imaginary and then you have non-fiction. Whereas, for me, the line is an osmotic one. And none of what I write in the Ministry of Atmos Happiness would have been even ethical if I was just imagining massacres and lynchings and brutalization. You know, these are the things that are caste or gender or all of it. You know, it is the substance of the air we breathe and, you know, a... Coming to the substance of the air that we breathe today. Sorry, I mean, just if I may say it. No, please. And yet, literary fiction is not factual, you know, when people go around trying to say, oh, this is so-and-so and this is so-and-so, that is reductive and stupid. But the air is true, you know? Yeah. Actually, that's a very, very robust point. If you look at the journey that you have made and say your environments have made since the God of Small Things and the Ministry of Atmos Happiness, you see a whole arc which goes this way or goes below the Earth. I don't know how. So where are we today? In a very dangerous place, you know, in a very, very dangerous place, because we, you know, when the massacre in Gujarat happened, I certainly was one of those people who made the mistake of believing that if you just describe what happened and if you sort of bring it out in all sorts of ways, whether it's in your outrage, whether it's in your writing, whether it's in court, whatever, you know, that would be enough to create a climate where it couldn't happen again. But in fact, you actually came up against a terrifying scenario in which there were people who said, so what? Or they deserved it. And, you know, it became, in some ways, the massacre became an election campaign. It became something to be proud of. And today we have a prime minister who was chief minister at the time who has refused ever to admit any wrongdoing or neglect. And so, you know, whether this path to power came despite the massacre or because of it is something which is a very troubling point, you know, it's a very troubling point because you're not talking about, you know, on the one hand, you're not sure there's individual accountability and certain people murdered, certain other people, certain people raped, certain other people, certain people burnt, certain other people, yes. But what sort of a society is it in which this kind of thing is not abhorrent, you know? So it sets off a very complex current. And today, of course, we've seen a situation in which you have a whole cultural configuration, a nationalist configuration, a Hindu nationalist configuration who has ridden to power on a manifesto of hatred. But now what you're seeing is, you know, when you put that kind of hatred down on the table and you think that you can control it and say, oh, it's just between Hindus and Muslims, no, it's an idea, it's a way of thinking. And then that way of thinking can infect relationships between castes, between classes, between genders, between ethnicities. And so, you know, this is a country where everybody is a minority in some way or the other. And once you light those fires, they may burn for a thousand years. You know, you made a very interesting point earlier and now that we've seen this kind of hatred which has been legitimized, in a way, through a political campaign, which is communal hatred. But we've also lived with centuries of caste violence, which is like an everyday thing which we tolerate in one sense as a society, state sort of abolished untouchability in the constitution, but within a abolished caste. There are all these kind of, and there are these symbols which still anger people when the Dalit man decides to become a bridegroom on a horse or decides to take the name of Singh in Gujarat, you know, because the Rajput name and all sorts of things. You know, the thing about caste is, you know, that when it comes to caste, the real violence is more than just the flogging and the killing, you know, because caste itself as a social structure is a form of violence and it can only be kept in place by the continuous threat of violence, the continuous threat. So it's an abomination that I frankly don't know how it has passed under the international radar of all kinds of outrage for so long. But it is, you know, it is obviously complex and simple at the same time because it's not, in a way casteism and racism is the same thing, but it's not just white people, you know, oppressing black people, but a system in which society is divided into an infinite, not an infinite, but a finite hierarchy, I mean, levels of hierarchy. Each one is then wired into that sense of a vertical hierarchy, you know. So it's not only those at the very top, but all the way down the line that has been indoctrinated to think in these ways, you know. But caste, the violence of caste is not just the violence of the flogging, the killings, the lynching, you know, the violence of caste is in its daily implementation, in its belief that certain people are entitled to less than other people in the way democracy and elections and constituencies are configured. And within caste, of course, the whole notion of untouchability is so abhorrent, you know, that you have, of course, that overall segregation and exclusions. And then the fact that you can actually think of fellow humans as being so impure as to be untouchable, which is legitimized by some sections of the scriptures, you know, so. Yeah, so that's the one difference between caste and race, that race created by the human mind and caste is, they pretended that it is sanctioned in some divine way, you know, which makes it so hard to even overcome because it is imbued with religious belief. Yeah. So we had the manual scavenging act passed only in 2013, I don't know why it was not passed soon after independence because we have article 374 which says that our law should have got constitutionalized soon after we became independent and that's what Ambedkar said that, you know, we are giving ourselves political independence but not economic and social equality. So that is the problem, you know, on all of this, that it, you know, you might have a legal system, you might have laws, you might have a constitution, but you don't have, I mean, society is way behind the constitution because obviously Ambedkar was an enlightened person, you know, way beyond his time. Anandati, today, I mean, coming back to the here and now, we've had this spate of attempted arrest and some arrests actually, we have had raids on the homes of lawyers and activists and academics. Fortunately, the Supreme Court has stepped in the day before yesterday which was very, very welcome and one thing about that entire, the drama of the last three days was, you know, Professor Satya Narayan's comment and his, whatever it was, daughter's comment that, you know, the police kept asking me that why are you not wearing a saree and why don't you have a sindhu in your head. So I mean, how do you see this panning out? I mean, this regime, which has probably taken authoritarian fascism to its testing limit under the constitutional framework. Well, it's gone outside the constitutional framework already, you know, but see the way I see things right now, I mean, that's what I was trying to say yesterday at the press conference and is that there are, you know, there are, you also know from your experience in Gujarat that the dangerous time came and the Gujarat massacre happened at a time when the ruling party there was losing popularity, losing election. These are very dangerous times, you know. So that is the situation right now. Surveys have shown actual data analysis of real voting in the elections have shown a serious drop in approval and popularity. So two things have to be done to regain that. One is that you've got to consolidate your own constituency. And the other is that you have to obviously divide the opposition and you have to divert attention away from the reasons why your popularity is dropping. These are the things that we are witnessing right now. So obviously, you know, while the communal pot is kept on the boil, you have a situation in which, you know, the disaster of demonetization, which everybody felt, but now the figures are out. The Reserve Bank has said that 99.3% of the money has come back. The papers are reporting the cash economy is larger than it ever was. Other newspapers like The Guardian have reported that it likely caused a 1% shrinkage in the GDP that 1.5 million jobs were lost. So this is something that's affecting everybody and particularly the poorest people, you know. And the betrayal of a person who comes to power, an organization that comes to power promising 15 lakhs in everyone's bank account and then does demonetization is an outrage, you know, that. Then the whole business of corruption, which is the basis on which the UPF fell with those 40 days of agitation and so on. Look at the Raphael deal now, you know. I mean, the allegations are unimaginable corruption. So the demand is by all opposition parties that there should be a joint parliamentary probe, is that going to happen? God knows. If you look at things like obviously the distress in the agricultural sector, you look at farmer suicides, all of that is creating anger, which people don't have to look to newspapers to understand because it's happening to them. It's happening to them. You know, the TV channels don't have to tell them. Now the only thing to do is to say, oh, but all this distress is in order for the great Hindu Russia to come, which is a very, it's not a foolish move, it's something that can sell, you know, it could. But if you look at what is happening, I mean, during the UPF government, you had the huge attack on Adivasis in Bastar. But now the attack is on Dalits too, always disguised as action against Maoists. You know, earlier it was only Adivasis who were called Maoists. Now it's also Dalits, which is an insult to assertions of Dalit pride, Dalit leadership, you know, making them out to be people who are just manipulated by this handful of urban naxals or whatever they want to call them, you know. And so, but at the same time, you know, there is going to be a great wooing of that constituency because that is 150 years old, you know, that, you know, Garwapsi starting, it started in the 1870s, you know. So in some ways, if you look back at Gauraksh, Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan, Garwapsi, all these things, they have 150 year old history, you know. So we are living in those times and I don't, I mean, I have a sense that people's mood is shifting, but I mean, that means the most dangerous times because whether this, you know, trying to drag people back into that cauldron of hatred, whether it's going to be, you know, we've seen now the police have, because of the investigation into the assassination murder of Gauri Lankesh, you've seen those organizations being exposed, but how many more of them are there? God knows, you know. How many more of them are plotting things and where are they plotting? Where is the fireball going to fall? You know, where is the false flag attack or the bomb blast or the killing or the lynching going to happen to royal up people's feelings? I don't know. So complicated, difficult times, challenging times, but also I think people are showing incredible humor and courage and stepping up to the plate in ways which is wonderful, you know. And do you feel worried and scared personally at any time because you've had to bear the most wild attacks at different points of time in the last 10 years? No, I mean, I don't feel, I mean, I don't allow myself to feel that because I just think all of us are, you know, I mean, I don't want to put myself in a special category of danger because I think everybody who speaks out and in my case, the stakes are just higher, you know, in the sense that because, you know, because of, I mean, I don't think any, well, I hope nothing happens, but I don't think we should allow ourselves to be spooked by that, you know, because it is something that personally for me, I don't want to be loved by these people. So I don't mind the insults at all, you know. Your home state recently went through a terrible, terrible flood. And this morning, I saw a tweet by the state finance minister of Kerala saying that the Chief Minister's Relief Fund had crossed 1,000 crores, you know, of Indian donations when you have a very, very petty central government not allowing foreign aid to come in, despite the fact that NDA1 had around crossed to come in for the Gujarat earthquake in 2001. How did you feel when that happened and this kind of discourse, which is tremendous resilience from within and outside Kedela, lot of support from the rest of India? Well, I felt, I mean, you know, obviously, it's not perfect what has happened there because I know, I mean, from personal friends that they have been caste issues, you know, I know, like, people in my own hometown where Dalit families have a separate relief camp and, you know, money's not getting there and so on. But on the whole, on the whole, I felt, I felt like from hearing stories and from hearing, yeah, you felt like, yeah, that's the kind of place I'd like to belong to, you know, and that's the kind of place we could all belong to if only, if only there was a slightly more long-term idea of how things should be because it could be a wonderful place. This, if people were, if it was the kind of place that a society that people wanted to belong to, people in the Northeast, people in Kashmir, you know, you, it's not impossible to have a revolutionary vision of a society because it doesn't have to get there. It has to be there, you know. It's not, there is no society that is just anywhere in the world but are we yearning for justice? Are we moving towards justice or are we moving in the opposite direction? If you have a sense that people are trying, that people have a vision, that people want to move towards egalitarianism, you know, then the imperfections and the flaws are one thing but if you're seeing everyone in power leaning in the opposite direction, you see the elites, you see the majoritarianism and it's all leaning in the opposite direction, then what hope is there, you know? A few words on the opposition today, the political opposition. I mean, we know that from the ground we feel that the mood is changing, people are looking up, people are fighting back at various levels. The political opposition today seems to be in better shape than it was a few months ago and they seem to be talking about alliances to make sure that this regime doesn't come back to power. How do you see that? Well, I see that, you know, one thing is an alliance which is based on agreement and, you know, a common minimum program and so on. Another thing is an alliance, you see what I see now is a situation where on every side it's a battle for survival. The VJP is going to fight for survival because people know that if they lose, it's not just that they'll be out of power but they could be in serious trouble, you know? I mean, there are a lot of things building up which are disturbing and extremely worrying. For example, the death of Justice Lawyer, the very questionable death of Justice Lawyer, you know? Where is that going to end? I mean, I know the courts have thrown it out for now but I don't think it's going to go away, you know? Now, on the side of the opposition, I think if you take the Congress or you take Samajwadi or you take the BSP, I think they are fighting for their own survival, for their existence. You know, another five years of this, will they even exist anymore, you know? So the alliance is also, their alliances are based on a kind of need to survive, which is a good thing, which is a good thing. I believe that, you know, I mean, I'm speaking from my experience of Kerala, for example, as opposed to West Bengal. You know, the fact that no party has been able to consolidate itself for 40 years like the CPM did in West Bengal. It's a very good thing, you know? I think even if you're like me, who has not that much faith in, you know, the goodness of governments when they come, I mean, parties or the state when it comes to power, I see myself as a person who's decided to be in an oppositional space. I have criticized them all, the CPM, the Congress, everyone. So from my experience in Kerala, you know, the fact that that state has never had a government coming back to power twice in a row. Unlike, say, the consolidation of power in West Bengal by the CPM for so many years, it creates a kind of rot, you know? It creates an arrogance, it creates a violence. So even, whereas in Kerala, the CPM and the Congress have never been given that opportunity by people, you know? Which is great. And I feel that in India, even though, you know, you take someone like me who is a person who believes that I am a part of society, I'm not a part of the state, I have deliberately put myself in that oppositional space. I refuse to think like a state, right? So whoever comes to power, obviously one will be oppositional to them. But I think that today, we do have to keep switching them around. We do have to never allow them to grow roots. I'm quite happy with coalitions. I'm quite happy with uncertainty, compromise, debate. I mean, you can't have a situation like this again where a prime minister comes out and announces demonetization without consulting. So even let's say it had been a great success. The point is that that kind of thing is dangerous. I mean, what do people who want to invest in India think? That anything can happen at any time, right? And it's what I call a form of micro-fascism, you know? We moved from the big mobs to the micro mobs to the lynching mobs, and this kind of micro-fascism, which is also going to be administered by Aadhar, right? Everyone's data centralized, and everyone can be managed through their data. And similarly, demonetization, it was like taking a cricket bat and breaking everybody's spine, you know? That I have the power just to take the money out of your wallet, you know? So it was a kite that was flown. Can I do this? And will people react or will they not? Nobody reacted. It was early days, so nobody reacted. People had faith, which was a terrible thing. We should have reacted. We should have reacted. Equally, these arrests, it's kite flying. It's like, let me do this and see, let us do this and see what will happen, you know? It's a testing ground, you know, to take the temperature of people. And so while we must know that they already knew how we would react in terms of, of course there would be protests and they would wait them out. But so I believe that the opposition is going to be fighting for its survival as is the government, as never before. You sort of rightly flagged a couple of things in connection that this is going to be a very challenging time. It's going to pull out our reserves in terms of creativity, resistance. Maybe we never had a challenge like this in 77. Three or four things which have really struck me is that you have something like the law commission today saying that simultaneous polls is probably not a good idea. That sedition is something that should be really looked into again. We should not have 124A on our statute books. It should not be seen as questioning. The government should not be seen as sedition which has been reiterated today. You have a debate going on as to whether there should be a cap on election expenditure and election, all the opposition party is saying yes, there should be and only the BJP is saying that there should be no limit. And then you have demonetization and what it has meant. Then you have a kind of crony capitalism which we know the way the government is favoring certain capitalists. Not all capitalists even. So they have access to unlimited money in terms of elections. Well, that is the interesting thing that you had demonetization. You have this very, very complicated goods and services tax which has taken the stuffing out of small businesses. And at the same time you have the BJP emerging as by far, by far, by far the richest political party. It has introduced the secret electoral bonds so that political funding becomes very, very mysterious. You have, while small businesses and jobs and the GDP drops, you have certain favorite corporations who have multiplied their wealth manifold and certain favorite businessmen who have escaped with thousands of crores of money. So I mean, it's a no-brainer that people who have that much wealth are going to say that there should not be a cap on election expenditure because they can just bulldoze their way through with money. They have the money, they have the EVMs, they have the voter lists. So you're up and they have a great section of the media which has been extremely culpable in doing things. You know, for example, the media houses that played again and again and again the faked videos of the young students in JNU, Umar Khalid and Kanhaiya. Today, Umar Khalid has survived an assassination attempt. Kanhaiya was beaten up. I mean, they are legally culpable, surely. And in fact, the investigation by the magistrate into that video, which was shown again and again by Zee, was found to be doctored. That's what I'm saying. It was shown by Zee, it was shown by Times Now, I think it was shown by, I think. But whoever showed it, I mean, should they not apologize? Should they not compensate this boy who, honestly, I mean, his whole life is affected by this? His whole life, you know? I mean, fortunately, he has a life and he wasn't killed that day. But who's to say that it won't happen five days down the line? Shouldn't they be clarifying that this is not true? He didn't say these things. He's not a terrorist. He wasn't trained by ISIS. You know, he's just a student. You know, that's the way interesting what you said because there's labels that they use and misuse. That they first create and they misuse and particularly misuse social media with and all these electronic media channels like Tukre Tukre Gang, Urban Naxals, stuff like that. They're deliberately used to malign and to, like you said, consolidate their own constituencies. Tukre Tukre Gang should be the people who are trying to divide this country up into, you know, majorities and minorities and good Indians and bad Indians and so on. I mean, they're the ones who are gonna end up dismembering the place, no? You know, Trump came to power in America and Modi had come to power here before that. And one of the things I keep telling people and we had these discussions over is that, you know, though you have America being this, we know what the American state is, the foreign policy, the war machine, all of that, but you saw huge protests both after he came to power and even when the Supreme Court of America about two months ago passed a horrendous judgment on migrants and their families, you had cities erupting in protest. We here have a man who of course represents what he did in 2002, but also symbolizes an organization like the Rashtra Swamseh Vaksan which will be 100 years old in 2025, which has actually attempted to restructure Indian society and state to achieve its game of a Hindu Rashtra, you know? And it's not, it's called itself a cultural organization but it's uncapped foreign funding, all of that. And its tentacles are in society which are now being reflected on trolls and social media. So in that sense, it's a much more dangerous scenario here than even in America. That's true, of course. You know, the institutions of American democracy are very, very troubled by Trump. I mean, including the army, the media, the courts, all of that here, institutions have been hollowed out and just their shells remain, you know? So you have those problems, whatever government comes to power next, if it isn't them, even if it isn't them, the institutions are all compromised, you know? So what is happening is a much deeper problem than elections can solve right now, you know? Much deeper, I mean, the compromising of all educational institutions, of textbooks, of what the young are being taught, you know? I mean, even people who believe in that ideology, they also tend to believe in sending their children to America. But we are going to lose any vestige of collective intelligence, you know? With this kind of teaching. Yes, yes. Romila Thapar and other historians say that, you know, India has always been a civilization where the Shraman has battled the Brahman for centuries. I mean, you had Buddha, you had Jain, you had the Chadwaka, you had the Lokaya. So there has always been this deeply questioning and anti-establishment tradition, which has questioned the hierarchy of caste, hierarchy of injustice, all along. And it's not a foreign concept. And therefore, pluralism and diversity within the Constitution is very much rooted in the soil here, much as it's been tried to be crushed. So yet we have modernity and the way, like you're saying, we are going back. We have, you know, everything is unique about this place, including its unique brand of fascism, you know? And of course, you know, questions have been raised for millennia. But the fact is that, you know, right now, not right now, for a long time, what has happened is that history has been turned into mythology. And mythology has been turned into history, you know? So you have a situation where, a bizarre situation, where you have people going into the forest where indigenous people live and have lived for centuries before Hinduism existed. And they are doing ghar vapsi. Okay, they are telling Adivasis that they are returning home to the Hindu fold. And yet at the same time, those same people, the Hindu evangelists will claim that they are Aryans who came from outside, who are the descendants of Alexander, you know? So you can say anything at any point. And so you do see the, you do see the fact that in many, many areas, you know, in many, many Adivasis communities and rural communities, their deities are the demons of Hinduism, right? Including Ravan in the south, you know? And including the conquest of the Vedians. So, and it keeps coming up. I mean, you know, every now, like, when Africans were being attacked on the streets, Tarun Vijay said, no, we are not racist because we live with all these black, South Indians. So I think, you know... Unique brand of fascism you were talking about. Yes, unique everything. I mean, unique beauties, unique complexities, unique pluralism. It cannot have been otherwise, you know? Because what we also take for granted is when we say India, India, what do we mean by it? You know, the borders of this nation state were drawn by the British. Otherwise, they were the ones who tried to homogenize it. Otherwise, it wasn't. We were not all bound together in this. In fact, a lot of the violence of Hindutva is to try and create that majority community that never existed. To try and forcibly create a majority that never ever thought of itself as a majority, early on. For me, Arundhati Roy became a name and I read your essay in the Sunday magazine all those years ago on Phulandevi, you know, the film, Shekhar Kapoor's film, and the way you interrogated the violence there. So would you just, I mean, just the question of violence? Well, that's really interesting, you know, because that, the great Indian rape trick you're talking about, that was written in, I think, 93 or something way before I was writing the God of Small Things at the time. And, you know, I'm just reading it now because it's going to be part of a compilation. And it's really interesting, you know, because it raises those questions that are very moved today, you know, questions of consent and violence and all of that. But in a very different way, in the sense that, of course, the main point I was making was that you can't restage the rape of a living woman without her consent. Because Phulandevi was saying that, you know, it's like, keep latching her in the halls and all that. But the other more interesting thing I think is that, you know, Phulandevi was India's most famous bandit. She was in the chumble at the time and everyone else was being caught by the police. They couldn't find her, they couldn't catch her, they had never seen her. And she led a gang of dacoits who, and eventually she surrendered, she was never caught. It cheated her afterwards in the terms of that surrender. But the film turns this most famous bandit into history's most famous victim of rape, you know? And starting from the beginning, like in her own telling, you know, she became a bandit because when she was very young, I think 10 years old or something, her father's brother stole her father's land. And this little kid went and argued and fought and finally to get her out of the way, they married her off to some guy. Now the film sort of suggests that she was raped by him and then she became a bandit because of that. No, she became a bandit, like all men become bandits because she was fighting for land, you know? And then according to her own version, she was furious with that husband, not because he raped her, but because he sent her home and said, what am I gonna do? So when she became a bandit, she returns to punish him and his wife, you know, for humiliating her. So what I mean is that so many rapes are added, there's such a lascivious attitude, masquerading as concern and family, very old trick. I grew up in Kerala where every Malayalam film, the woman got raped till a point where I felt I really grew up believing that every woman gets raped and I was so furious with the fear that this instills in a young woman, you know? So all these are forms of violence, you know? Making you retreat, making you fearful, turning every achievement into a humiliation and then you're rewarded for your wisdom hold. So I was pleased to read that essay too out of so long that was my introduction to Arun Dati. Yeah, actually that was, it wasn't the first essay I wrote. I'm such one I remember, I'm sure there was one before. There was just one about making movies and things. But that one, yeah, it was... And then of course one kept following you very closely. Thank you so much, Arun Dati. It's been a wonderful, wonderful conversation. Thank you so much.