Writer Arundhati Roy warned an audience in Kerala about the many dangers in the rest of the world – the fascism that was fast seeping into the public of northern states, the imminent attack she fears the US will unleash on Iran and the dominance of Artificial Intelligence. Arundhati’s speech came as part of her acceptance of the Malayattoor Foundation Award for her contribution to literature, at the Thiruvananthapuram Public Library on Wednesday, January 28.
“We are in Kerala, one of the last few outposts in the world,” she said, referring to the state’s history of not electing the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party to power. “You have to preserve what you have; you have to fight for what you have. It was very sad to see what happened in the Thiruvananthapuram corporation election [where BJP got a majority for the first time]. This cannot happen to us. This is where the fight has to start. We have the politics, the culture, the history, the intelligence, the education. Don't let go. Fight for it. Keep it. Proudly keep it.”
Arundhati, who won the Booker Prize for her first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1997, brought out last year the acclaimed memoir about her mother, the famous educator Mary Roy: Mother Mary Comes To Me.
Any day now, the US will attack Iran, and the world will change, she said. The AI was fast taking away the powers of critical thinking of a new generation, she feared. Arundhati kept coming back to the topic of Kerala, calling it home, ‘not sentimentally, but politically, literally and culturally’.
“I don't know how long we are going to stand up; so far we have stood up, and I hope we will always stand up. It doesn’t matter that the Congress and the CPI(M) are fighting each other. The reason I feel proud is that every five years we kick out the government and elect a new one, but we don’t want that other one; we don't want that Delhi one [the BJP and its allies],” she said.
“Sometimes I just want to pick up busloads of people from Kerala and take them to UP and Bihar and Delhi to see what has happened to our country. Speakers here said that we are up against a fascist state. Sadly, if you go to north India it is not a fascist state anymore. That fascism is in the public. It is in the people, in everyday conversation and every single cultural thing that is put out. We are in a very dangerous position,” Arundhati said.
“Now we are fighting for our citizenship, for our right to be on the electoral roll. This is where we have reached. As a writer, maybe I am successful, but in what I write, I am a complete failure because of what is happening in the country,” she remarked.
