KLF 2019 | ‘I could not be the one who ran away,’ says Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy narrates how she fled to London in fear with her manuscript

Kozhikode, Kerala, 13/01/2019: KLF_Arundathi Roy( to go with Jayanth story).Photo: S.RAMESH KURUP/THE HINDU.

Just when the student leaders of New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) were being bandied about as antinationals, author Arundhati Roy had fled to London in fear with the manuscript of her unfinished novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

It took her a couple of days to regain her composure, come back to India, and complete the novel, Ms. Roy recalled at a session on fiction writing at the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF) here on Sunday.

Answering a question if she ever felt threatened in India, Ms. Roy said: “... I had nearly finished writing

The Ministry... That happened to coincide with the unrest in JNU. Umar Khalid was being defamed on television and Kanhaiya Kumar had been arrested...” People were saying on television channels that they would have to be silenced, also “the person who wrote about the Parliament attack, Kashmir, and Gujarat”.

“One night I was going up a dark staircase to have dinner with a friend. And I could hear from the television in the flat a guy shouting,

koi bhi ho, Arundhati Roy bhi ho, hum usko nahin jhodenge . (Whoever she is, even if it is Arundhati Roy, we will not spare her).” That night, the writer said, she lost her nerve, got on a flight, and went to London. “I remember sitting in a restaurant, crying and telling a friend what are they doing to this country, they are just shattering it.” Within three or four days, Ms. Roy said, she realised she could not be that person who ran away, and came back.

Mob lynching

The author said that censorship had now been outsourced to the mob. “Any group of people with political clout decide how they wish to be represented and what their history should be. They have the right to burn cinema halls, to kill people, more or less rampage through the world of ideas with clubs,” she said.

Fiction was a writer’s deepening of understanding and she could express truth better through it. “...Often people try to confuse the fact that a writer who writes politically is some kind of a leader. That cannot happen. Because I am the opposite of a politician, who goes among the people and say please vote more me. I might say things that may not please you. I am not asking you to vote for me. My job is not to be popular.”