it's to be anticipated that a public figure must at some point confront the contradictory nature of widespread admiration and condemnation this is especially true when exposing the duplicitous nature of Institutions and Government powers this is familiar territory for writer and activist arundhati Roy as is evident in her books and essays including 1997's Booker prize winning novel The God of small things Roy has a remarkable talent for laying bare the inner workings of systems of Injustice within socio-political structures to understand an issue and reveal it to an audience with such rage energy passion and eloquence is in part what makes Roy so significant in the political and literary spheres while criticized and threatened by many of India's right-leaning she is simultaneously revered in India and across the globe for her intellectual honesty and alertness to Fascism racism classism War nuclear weaponry the caste system environmental destruction religious discrimination and violence and so much more which is why it's so well deserved that she's being honored with the 2022 St Louis literary award while visiting St Louis to receive the award and take part in the ceremony in her honor I had the privilege of sitting down with her and discussing her journey and experience as a writer of such esteem congratulations arendady Roy [Music] thank you so much for sitting down with us today oh you're so welcome it's my pleasure you're considered one of the most important writers of our time you've received so many awards including the booker prize and now you're here in St Louis to receive the St Louis literary award which congratulations for that but as you've said so many times before you don't write for accolades or recognition you're clearly writing with a purpose and a point I'm wondering if you ever take a step back and look at all the work that you've done and the impact that you've had and and really feel it you know how does that feel well look uh when you know when you sort of introduce a writer you tend to you know make a list of all the prizes they've won but that's just one side of the story for me because mostly it's been it's been writing that has been written at a time of conflict at a time when the country I live in the society I live in is being torn apart where one struggles to to to search for forms literary forms whether it's fiction or non-fiction to to tell the stories that one wants to tell or make the arguments one wants to make and sometimes you know I've never been a person who wants to be sort of introduced by the awards I've won but sometimes for us for people like me living in the space that I live in and the time that I live in an award is also a protection of a kind you know so um it's it's a very uh complicated river that I swim in and so the the body of work is something that is not something that one looks back and and necessarily to feel good about oneself you know but it all informs what you do next and how you do it and what is the next layer that you add to it and it's about it really is about understanding the world I live in you know I write not to have an impact on other people but to to understand for myself where I live how I fit in and to communicate a a world view that is not mine alone so it's very interesting as a writer you you are alone and yet you you don't want to separate yourself from your people or from people in the world whether you agree with them disagree with them you know you're a fish that swims in that River along with everybody else you know you have a background in filmmaking and you studied architecture what is it about writing that felt like the most adequate way to say the things you want to say well I uh grew up in a very small place on the banks of a river and I I used to think so much about the Mississippi when I was growing up when the banks of my small River but um I studied architecture partially because I I I left home when I was very young and I really needed to be independent I knew because I I somehow sensed from a very young age that I I could not expect social or family support for the ways in which I think or act but then architecture became a very deep foundation and a Fascination not just in the building of buildings but just in a way to think you know and soon after I I graduated I I actually got involved with Cinema which where again you know there was there was the use of architecture because I would design the films that I wrote or sometimes have acted in and all of it together became very fundamental to the ways in which or the lens through which I would try to understand how the world works but I I think fundamentally even from the time I was very young I I knew that I was a loner and that I needed to work in ways in which I could control my work you know and that's not the reason I'm a writer the reason I'm a writer is because I think the reason musicians are musicians or you know basketball players are basketball players or something deeper which you can't understand but for me the idea that in a world in a capitalist World in a world where so much of your art forms are now um so dependent on what capital you have access to for me writing is that singular way of of it being between yourself and your work before the world comes in and negotiates I'm just wondering if you have any wisdom for especially young people who understand their place and their own responsibilities but also the fact that they are one person you know and and there's so much Beyond them that maybe there is out of their control especially for me in order to be a writer I knew that I have to be as independent as possible you know it's almost like being a gorilla you know like in the in the in the ways in which I have had to do my writing it's like an intellectual Ambush and then move out and and hold your peace for a while you know think about things and um also the independence from institutions for me was lucky because I wrote a book which made me financially independent everybody cannot expect that to happen to them it's a you know it was a very fortunate but I do know that many of the things that I have written I would not have been allowed allowed to write where I in style inside an institution you know I'm referring specifically to a small book I wrote called the doctor and the saint which was about Gandhi and ambedkar um and and their debates about caste about race about women about the working class and um it it's just simply not allowed especially not in India if you were in an Institutional space you would have suffered greatly for writing that because there's so much intellectual dishonesty there's so much falsehood there's so much literally intellectual real estate built upon those those false things that you really can't mess with it if you're inside the system this is not to say that you can't do something if you're not entirely independent but to be as independent as possible I would say the fundamental thing which human beings are not taught is that you must value that Independence more than you value uh wealth of Fame and so it's it's it's a constant calibration a constant titration of what to walk away from and what to embrace which is not to say you to live in a cave and be an ascetic but how do you negotiate that moment when you have been bought over you also include a lot of humor in your writing it's very funny to read your work at times and I'm wondering how important it is to you to maintain a level of humor in the world and also in your writing well it's not something when consciously maintains you know it's just something that one is and I I know that living in India despite the fact that I write about the things I write about and the Hindu write constantly accuses me of hating India and being anti-india in truth I I love living there you know and every day something on the street makes me burst out laughing you know and I think um especially because as a woman you know one has been sort of I not me personally because I'm a crazy mother but generally women in India so indoctrinated to be the one that sacrifices the one that suffers the one that lays oneself down as a doormat and for me part of the battle of surviving as a woman in India has been to laugh and it's a militant laugh that I have you know that is like you're not going to take away that from me you know the idea that I'm gonna just fight these battles and suffer and be a martyr and be quivering with moral outrage that's not me you know we're gonna have fun while we are doing it we're going to pursue art we're going to find the things you do ridiculous because that too is a part of a political lens you know both the god of small things and the ministry of utmost happiness while they're very different in story and structure and approach they're um so similarly complex and layered and you are crossing so many timelines and through so many different minds and you find this magical way to converge these individuals into a larger connected story which ultimately reflects the way that the world works and um I want to know how how one goes about beginning that process and mapping mapping out a story of such scale like I often say that the god of small things it's like a family with a broken heart at its Center and while you while it's a extraordinarily unfamily like family at least you recognize the Contours of a family the utmost happiness sort of starts out with a shattered heart and then people bring these shards of their broken hearts into a graveyard and make a mended heart you know but to me um that is the excitement of writing a novel you know that that you can sort of range over so many things and so many times without um without overt judgment you know and yet obviously no writer can hide their worldview from the glare of literature even a bad writer can't you know so it's um that is the challenge for me and I think maybe that is where architecture and urban planning come in because the novel how it's structured how the language that it uses the characters and the story Are all uh are all one thing and each has to be as complex as the other you know uh I I'm that sort of novelist which is why I can't write you know a novel a year or a novel every two years because nothing makes me happier than living inside my novels while I'm writing them you know and it's almost as if the ministry of utmost happiness gave me a world to live in a world which is which exists for real in the real world but it just tells you there are different ways of relating to each other than what we what the prescription says you know when you were writing fiction um you know you're you're getting to know these characters you're living in that world as you say do you go into fiction writing with the intent to make a political statement or does that naturally just kind of come as you go I don't you know I don't think that I can go into the kind of fiction I write with any simple intent but I know that you know whoever I am will manifest itself in that whatever my intent is or isn't you know because as we all know even a fairy tale is a political document you know but um I think infection for example in the ministry of utmost happiness one of the most challenging parts for me was to write this this character called biplov Das Gupta who's who whose College friends call him Garson Hobart and he is this very upper caste a very brilliant Indian intelligence officer who's kind of fused with the establishment and in some ways completely antithetical to me except that when I wrote him I really respected his intelligence it was not good enough for me to to to make him easy meat or to just more you know just to minimize him to show how ridiculous my enemy is you know to respect one's enemy is important and one and so it was like going out of your mind creating this character you know who was in some ways your intellectually cool but on the other side he's also the only character written in first person I noticed yes because he just it was just very interesting perhaps the authority of the state you know gave him that Authority and I tried I try to stop that but it it just didn't happen what distinguishes the motive to write fiction versus writing an essay you know when you get the seed of an idea how does that direct itself into either either direction well it's very different for me in terms of urgency you know somehow most not all but most of my non-fiction there's a there's a sort of urgency to its surfaces because you know this curiosity I spoke about earlier that takes you to places and that sort of settles the kind of understanding on you and then at some point you you have to blow open the consensus that is being built because you know otherwise you know but in fiction there's no urgency I mean almost to a ridiculous degree you know but it took me 20 years to write the second novel I mean I was working on the ministry for years and years but I was just happy to to to weave it in my own time in the characters on time actually it was almost like I needed to know them for a lifetime I needed to know what they would be like even outside of the novel you know I I mean I need to know what they're thinking of Saint Louis now you know so it's it's like you're creating as I said a universe where you're using what exists and I don't mean this in a you know crass sense because what exists also is our imaginations in this world and in this time our hallucination all of that but creating a universe which is almost like parallel to the one that exists on the ground the grids the social hierarchies the things that we are tutored to function within but presenting a different way of doing that in the 20 years that it took you to write the ministry of utmost happiness did you feel any pressure to make it the same as the god of small things or to surpass it in some way well I had definitely the one pressure I felt was not to repeat the code of small things you know I thought the opposite that since I had done that and I I wanted I certainly didn't want to write the son of the god of small things you know it gave the god of small things gave me the opportunity to experiment to write a more complex I mean I knew that it was a much more difficult book that I was doing and it was certainly not gonna sort of walk up to people and sit and embrace them like the god of small things does or did you know and of course I was you know that much older lived those many more years and so the excitement was in trying to do something else and um I didn't feel pressure because I think when you have had an experience like the success and the immediate success of the god of small things you can either use it to torment yourself or to liberate yourself you know and it liberated me in so many ways not just artistically but financially and politically and so to me it just gave me freedom and uh to try something different and something else and yet you know when you you read the ministry you will see so many Echoes of the god of small things which is just fun for me you're known in part for your ability to be blunt and confrontational and to say things that need to be said but are you ever or have you ever been hesitant or or fearful before coming out with with with the truth I think a lot before I say the things I see because every sentence every comma every semicolon every pause is examined and fired upon and argued over so in this moment in India where there's so much danger so much danger all my friends I mean so many of my friends are in jail even when I'm here I'm reading about another friend being arrested and you know so I can never be a fan of being uncertain or being confident one has to think very carefully about saying things and then you can say them with confidence once you've thought it through you know but um I love uncertainty you know I love ambiguity it's not that I have some uh Sledgehammer with which I uh were to come down on things so even the things that I say with certainty will be said after having taken into account the complexities the uncertainties the ambiguities because sometimes having taken those things into account you still must pick a side you know otherwise you are cowardly often you know something happens and I am enraged about it you know and I will write and then I have close friends who are my rage editors to be like calm down yeah you're right in such a cinematic way it's clear that you know your experience with filmmaking has had some kind of effect on the way that you write but the scenes that you describe are so vivid and so visually and auditorily supplemented and I I'm wondering if you can picture your books being adapted into films well it's funny that you ask because when I started writing the god of small things I used to think I'm going to write this stubbornly visual but unfilmable book because I felt limited when I was writing screenplay you know exterior day River and I I was like no no no I want to spend two pages describing the river which mean nothing in cinema writing you know but um so of course I've had many many many many offers to to turn the god of small things and even the ministry into into film but I think that they are exactly in the form in which they should be I know I mean when you know at some stage when I'm not around and you know copyright doesn't exist maybe they will be made in full but for me a film then makes a book my books into one thing whereas actually every reader has a film in their head you know I think and so a film might be beautiful but it might colonize it you know it's more free to be yeah but if you can imagine you know uh it's it's like I don't know if you remember but there's a description in the ministry about knows happiness about this little Shrine called hazrat Sharma Sheikh Shrine in the JAMA Masjid it was the shrine to an Armenian Jewish poet who came to India from uh Armenia then converted to Islam then that no then then renounced it and then was executed it's a small Shrine and and all kinds of people go there and everyone is allowed to to to make their own story about him you know and that's such a beautiful thing to to let people imagine things rather than imagine it in specific ways you know Cinemas such an overpowering medium and I I I like these these these novels to belong to the reader and not to the filmmaker you know what are you currently working on currently working on nothing because I am currently living in a situation in India which has turned so dangerous that I'm just trying to think of how to how to live in it you know it's like watching something just come apart and as a writer I'm I'm struggling to to to to find it's it's almost like every day you wake up something new something terrible someone's been lynched someone's been killed massacres you know right now I just got a message about how the the the current establishment Hindu right-wing anti-islam has decided that they just bulldozing Muslim neighborhoods uh you know there's Mass there's been Mass Killing In My City so you know to step back from that and and and really build a piece of literature is is difficult you know uh they have uh this new citizenship law where already two million people who have lived in India for Generations have been struck off so it's not a refugee management policy but a refugee manufacturing policy and now they're they're talking about starting and this is just in one state there are 28 states in India now there's talk of starting a new process of verification whether they're already stating that their goal is to strike 5 million Muslims off the list of citizenship which means you have no rights you are nobody they are building huge detention centers so where does one find the you know even a part of the river that where there isn't a fast current to sit and think is really difficult but uh it will happen you know but you have to just know how not to react to every moment and every little new piece of news that comes in but you have to react you know how do you remain hopeful well you have to understand that that is the building block of resistance you know if they get you to lose hope if they get you to lose Joy if they get you to lose entirely your peace of mind your ability to love your ability to focus on small things then then you then the one you know so even as I've said in the most despairing situations I have found you know hope and love and an ability to say anyway you know whatever you want to do to us we're never going to be on your side you know we're here and we're doing our work and whether we win or lose we're here so it's not even a question of whether you have hope or not even if you don't have hope you're gonna do what you're gonna do you know well thank you so much for sitting down with me oh you're very welcome it was a pleasure talking to you foreign [Music]