Transcript of 'The Interview': Arundhati Roy Knows Where America Is Headed

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From the New York Times, this is the interview. I'm Lulu García-Navarro.

As we get older, we often struggle to untangle the impact our parents have on our lives.

For acclaimed author Arundhati Roy, that process of excavation happened after her mother's death in 2022 through writing. Her new memoir, Mother Mary comes to me, is more than just a chronicle of her complex relationship with her mother, whose bouts of clawing, lashing fury, as Roy describes it, scarred both her and her brother. It's also about Roy herself and why she's become a writer transfixed by the pain and suffering of those around her. Roy has spent her career writing about the rich lives and deep struggles of marginalized and oppressed people in India. Her Booker Prize-winning first novel, The God of Small Things, has sold over 6 million copies and made her an international literary star when it came out in 1997. What followed over the next several decades were dozens of articles pointing her pen at a range of injustices, from India's caste system to the treatment of Muslims, especially in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Both her work and her person have been repeatedly targeted by India's government under populace leader Narendra Modi. She's currently facing possible prosecution under anti-terrorism laws for comments she made years ago about the territorial conflict in Kashmir. When we spoke, we started with her mother's story.

But in our second conversation, she talked about the cost of speaking out and her fears for America under President Trump. Here's my conversation with author, Arundhati Roy.

Hi.

Hi, Lulu. How are you?

I'm very well. Thank you so much for coming on to the interview. I'm very pleased to have you.

Thank you.

This book really resonated with me. It's a memoir of you, but also a biography of your mother, who died in 2022 at the age of 89. She was a very complicated and difficult person, as you describe her. While I was reading it, it reminded me of this quote by the writer Cheslaph Milosch, who wrote, When a writer is born into the family, the family is finished. Did you struggle with how much to reveal about your mother and your family, just in the personal context of how difficult your upbringing actually was?

Well, obviously, when you write something like this, you choose what you write and what you won't write. But I know that this doesn't work as literature. If you're trying to present some acceptable version of yourself or of her, then you might as well not do it. But to me, it wasn't so much of a struggle because I think what was incredible about her was that there was a There was this public part of her which hammered me, but then it also created me. But then there was this public part of her which was so extraordinary. I could never settle on what I really thought or felt I could never remove myself from her because I admired her, too. I just felt that the entire range of what she had was a challenge to me as a writer. Can I put down this unresolvable character?

Well, let's talk about Mary Roy and that public part of her before we get to the part of her as your mother. I mean, on the most basic level, tell me about who she was outside of your relationship. I mean, she was indeed a well-known person.

She belonged to the Syrian Christian community in Kerala, which is pretty tiny but privileged community that's insulated from the wildness and the poverty of the rest of India for many reasons. But then she married outside the community and then got divorced, which was absolute taboo. She started a small school, initially in the rented premises of what was called the Rotary Club. I used to think of it as a sliding, folding school because we had to sweep up all the stubs on the coffee cups of the men and put out our furniture, and then they would come the next day and mess to sit up again. Then ultimately, built this beautiful school which still runs. I studied there, too, in the early years. But what she's equally well known for is that when she left her husband, my father, we lived in this tiny little cottage that used to belong to her very cruel father, who was dead by then. Then her mother and her older brother came there and they asked us to leave the house. They said that as a daughter, according to the Travancor Christian Succession Act, a daughter can inherit a quarter of her father's property or 5,000 Rupees, whichever is less.

So We were literally going to be turfed out onto this road in the middle of the night by my grandmother and my uncle. We ran to the lawyer, and he told us that law applies in Kerala, not in Tamil Nad. We weren't kicked out. But she nurtured this humiliation and kept it to herself for a long time. But when she was economically stable, when she could afford to. She filed appeal to the Supreme Court, challenging this law, calling it unconstitutional. The Supreme Court actually struck down that law with retrospective effect and made it equal inheritance for everybody. It took years and years and years in court before she actually won the case. She had very few people on her side while she was fighting it.

There's that side of your mother. You start the book, though, really discussing how you were raised by her. Your early life, as you describe it, was one of hardship, poverty, instability, and abuse, both verbal and physical. I should ask before we continue, is abusive actually the word that feels right to you in describing your relationship to her?

I flinch when we use these words because nowadays there are a lot of these words that are used, and I suppose they are useful in some ways. But I don't know. I didn't use any of these words in the book. If it was a single thing that one was dealing with, if it was just abuse or just violence or just one thing that you could settle on and decide how to feel about it, that's one thing. But I think I had a schism in me very early where even as a young child, I could see that her anger against me and my brother was somehow connected to what she herself was going through. So one half of me was taking the hits and the other half of me was taking notes. And somehow That, in a sense, made me a writer very early, where you're trying to understand why is she doing this to me? It was so often clear that it had nothing to do with what I had said or what I had done. It had something to do with something that I couldn't fully understand or control and was always struggling to understand and control.

I just want to give the audience just a sense of some of these incidents that you describe in the book. Some of the moments that were hardest to read about were when she would berate you, belittle you. You tell a story about being on a plane for the first time when you were about six years old. Can you recount that story?

Yeah. Well, my mother had an older sister who was very different from the rest of the family because she was the only one who had held her marriage together. She was married to someone who was a pilot who worked in Indian Airlines. She had, as I say, a proper house and a proper husband and proper children. Because this uncle of mine was a pilot, we had free tickets to get on a plane which we had never been on. On the When I was on the plane, I asked my mother, how come her sister was so much thinner than her? My mother was a very, very severe asthmatic. She She was at the time on steroids, and she had just become very overweight, and she had this moon face. She just turned on me in a fury and mimicked me. She had this way of mimicking my baby way of speaking, and that used to just rip through me. Then she said, By the time you're my age, you'll be three times my size. Of course, very quickly, she said, Well, I'm your mother and your father, and I love you double, so you forgive her, and yet you're shredded also.

That was the constant thing that you had to manage, that something would tear you up and then stitch you back together, then tear you up, then stitch you back together.

That leaves a lot of scars.

Well, it does, but maybe it also made me the writer that I am.

You write that her mimicking you and calling you names made you feel that I swirled like water down a drain and disappeared. I think that anyone who's had a difficult parent, which I have, can identify with that line. Did you think that you had to hide yourself, disappear when she was attacking you?

Yeah. Well, it's not only that she was the only parent, she was also the only person in a society and in a family that makes it clear that you're not part of it. She's all you have. I mean, there are no relatives, there are no neighbors, there's just nobody. For me, in some ways, I've welded myself to her when I was very young and then exploded her apart when I was older. But she had these terrible attacks of asthma, and she used to keep telling me, I'm going to die, and you better figure out what you're going to do. You live on the street. Who's going to look after you? I became like her lung. I used to breathe for her. My body was an extension of her body. Then when I was 16, and I I went to architecture school and I just walked into those lawns and watched all the students, and I knew that I would be fine. I would be able to work. I would be able to survive. I wouldn't die if she died. I didn't have to breathe for her. She sensed that the valiant organ child of hers, the extra lung that she had, suddenly was breathing for itself.

That generated a whole a lot of hostility.

I just want to clarify that you ended up leaving your home at 16. There was a huge period of separation where you didn't see your mother at all, and you basically raised yourself.

I left Kerala to join architecture school when I was 16. After my second year, I just stopped going home because it was too painful. I put myself through the rest of it.

We should say that- Sorry, I just I just keep wanting to say that I don't want this to end up like some litany of horrors about her because as I keep saying in the book, I had huge admiration for her, too. You talk about the battles that she was fighting, even within the school, how she taught women and the men to look at gender dynamics in a completely different way. You tell a story about her making the boys parade around in bras because one of them had disrespected one of the girls.

Not parade around in bras, but- Something similar. She learned that they were making fun of the girls because they had started wearing bras. She said, Go to my cupboard and get my bra. Then she showed them. She said, This is a bra. This is what it's for in assembly. She said, If it excites you so much, you can keep mine. It changed the PH balance of what goes on between boys and girls when the girls know that there's someone who's got their back.

One of the most interesting things in the book is how you write about gender dynamics. In the book, you describe India as the land of son worshippers, that's S-O-N. But you also describe how harsh your mother was with your brother in particular. She would call him a male chauvinous pig when he was only a child. When he was a teenager, she said to him, You're ugly and stupid. You should kill yourself. You write that the way she treated him was like she was punishing him for the sins of the world, and that that complicated your own views of feminism. I'm wondering how that played out for you.

Well, even today, I think that my brother, he's one of the most amazing people that I know. Having endured all that from her My brother, the one that asked me, I don't understand how you can be so upset about her death after everything that she did to us. I understand that It's very puzzling for him and perhaps even hurtful that I don't hate her. But I think it's just because I see that her public battles were making space for women in ways that included making space for me. But at the same time, just because you're a feminist doesn't make you a great person. Feminism doesn't have only to do with women's rights. It has to do with a way of looking at the world in which men and women are equal, and men and women are respectful of each other. It doesn't mean disrespecting a lovely man. It doesn't mean that, which is what I saw happening with my brother and which it affected me deeply.

I want to just linger here for a moment because I am curious Just because you and your brother saw your mother so differently, what the conversations around this book have been. I mean, has he read it and what has he thought of it?

Yeah, he has it. I think it was hard initially for him to read because he, in a way, has, or maybe thought he had put it behind him. But then he wrote to me saying, I'm laughing and crying and I can't breathe. If I die, it'll be your fault. But then he did say, I don't understand why you feel so much about her. Because I said, I I can't hate her because there is so much of her in me I'd have to hate myself. I see that he's been, and I respect that he's been deeply, deeply hurt by her. But he, too, has made his life on his own, and so both of us survived.

There is this other moment that really struck me in the book where you describe you and your brother being sent to boarding school, and you write that your brother got a report from school that said, Average student, and your mother beat him with a ruler until it broke. In the morning, she then turned to you and gave you a hug because your report card had been good and said that you were brilliant. You wrote, On the occasions when I am tosted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room. I have to say that stopped me in my tracks.

Yeah, I think the sentence after that is, If you stop to think about it, it's true, someone is. Actually, that is the truth, that when you get applauded and rewarded and everybody laughs and you know that somebody you love and somebody quiet has been beaten. To me, that expands far beyond my brother and me. It expands into the country that I live I live in now or the world that I live in now, that I might be a writer with whatever is conventionally known as success. But the things I write about and the people that I write about are being beaten. They are being beaten down. Even as we speak today. They are being starved in Gaza, they are being broken. They are being occupied. What does it mean when you are applauded, when your heart belongs in the whole world?

When you wrote that section and were thinking about that incident and how it applies to your life as someone who has been frequently publicly applauded and given so many awards, was it a sense of discovery that this was the root of that connection?

No. I don't think that the process of writing this made me understand it deeper because I wrote it because I understood it. In order to survive or in order to make sense of my life, I've had to think and think and think and think about all these things. Even, for example, when I won the Booker Prize and so on, there was more than one half of me that was thinking about what What does it mean to be this bestseller novelist in this country where people can't read, in this country where it's hurtling towards what we have now? There was hardly a moment for me to feel great about myself before things started to unravel quickly. Even the celebration of me had this whole nationalistic fervor, which I despised at that time in '97. I was very quickly kicked off that pedestal, and I kicked myself off it, too. I always have this feeling that those of us who've been very unsafe as children, we seek out the unsafe. We seek out the lack of security. If you have security, you blow it You've risked your security many times in your career.

We should say that at the moment, actually, you are under legal threat in India for your writing and the things that you've said. What do you think the role of writers and creators is at a moment when there is censorship and people are trying to shut you down?

I think that writers have survived, whether it's in the Soviet Union or whether it's in East Germany or whether it's in the darkest places and times they have managed to survive. Their work has survived. It's, for me, very important to understand that I just can't keep striking the same note again and again. You have to change it up. You have to vary things. You have to experiment. You have to insist that your work is not just a reaction to what's happening to you. Your work is a thing in and of itself and a way of positing another vision of the world. That's a challenge because you can't do it as a manifesto, as some clumsy, hitting everybody on the head with some ideological hammer, you've got to do it beautifully. Somebody told me the other day that, Oh, the reason I like your writing is because you write as though they've already killed you. You don't hold back stuff for another book or another essay or something. Let's just put it all out there.

It's your epitaph. To bring this back to your mother, One of the things that I was most curious about is once you had this immense success and the pressures that it brought because of your non-fiction writing about the situation in Kashmir, about huge dam operations, and many of the other issues that you have passionately written about, including the rise of Hindu nationalism in India. How did she view that? Was she worried for you? Was she proud of you? Was she jealous of you?

Of all the people that I know in my family, she's the one who used to read it, especially every political essay, and she used to follow it closely. I know that she was worried, but not because she told me she was worried, but because other people in the school used to tell me she's worried. But to me, she was always like, What the hell do you think you're doing? Very dismissive. But perhaps she also had as unresolved feelings about me as I did for her because once she called me up to say that I went to buy some fruit, and that woman asked me, Are you Arundhati Roy's mother? I felt as though she had slapped me. She called me to tell me this. At the same time, she was also proud because I was not just her daughter, I was also a product of her school. I think she had her moments when she was very, very ill. She used to get very upset if I wasn't there in the hospital. But if I was there, she would say, Oh, these people, they're just coming here because of you. They don't care about me.

How did that make you feel that she seemed to have a complicated relationship with you, even as you became an enormous success?

Well, first of all, as we've spoken before, success was in itself without her and her opinions, a complicated thing for me. But occasionally, it used to break my heart that she had such a tawny response to it. But at the same time, I always was very clear in my mind that I never wanted to defeat her. I wanted her to go out like a queen, which she did. That involved reducing myself sometimes. That involved being mauled and shredded and having to piece myself together sometimes. That involved calibrating how many I could be there before I was absolutely corroded. It involved coming home and being quite sick physically for a long time just to get over it. But at the same I think I'm somehow I had that ability to detach myself and sit on the ceiling fan and think, God, this is quite funny, the whole thing, isn't it? I think that saved me. Also, Also because the more I travel, the more I saw of the world, the more I wrote about things that were happening, the less able I was to put myself at the center of some great tragedy. I was just like, It's okay.

Things are bad elsewhere.

Well, we are going to speak again in a short time, and I want to talk more about your political writing, your activism, and the situation in India, and we'll pick up there. But I want to thank you so much for this conversation.

Thank you. It's my pleasure.

Can I ask you one more question, actually?

Yeah, sure.

Is it hard to talk about this?

I'm just learning to talk about it.

I can see your physical self when I ask certain questions, and it might be uncomfortable territory, I imagine.

I read the audiobook, and the audio engineer producer, he told me, It's okay, you can take some breaks, and if you get upset. I said, Me? Why would I get upset? I wrote it, I lived it. I'm not going to get upset. He says, Oh, Well, the last third of the book, your voice is completely different from this first two-thirds. I have to see how it goes. I think, to me, it's important that people don't think that this is just a book about a mother and daughter, because this is a book about two women who happen to be mother and daughter, but it's also about the village and the city and the state and the country and the world. If it weren't that, it would not be as important to me.

After the break, I talked to Aarindhati again, and I asked her about the parallels she sees between Indian politics and American politics.

I look at it in shock because you thought that there was a mechanism in place, there were checks and balances in place, but clearly there isn't a way of handling someone who's completely out of control.

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Hi. Nice to see you again.

Hey, Lulu. Nice to see you, too.

After we spoke last time and we talked a little bit about the political situation in India and the situation for you in particular, just in the past few days, the Indian Regional Government of Kashmir has banned one of your books. Of course, this is not the first time your work has been targeted. This time, the book is Azadhi. It was published in 2020. It's about the fight in Indian-controlled Kashmir, the concepts behind freedom and authoritarianism more broadly. I'm going to quote what the directive said. It said that your book and others, it wasn't the only one that was targeted, would, deeply impact the psyche of youth by promoting a culture of grievance, victimhood, and terrorist heroism. Why do you think your book was included in that list, and what's your response to that more broadly?

My response to it is to not respond because I don't know, it sounds like some list they got out of ChatGPT or something. You never know why these things happen when they happen. When they target me now, I just don't say anything because you never know whether they really mean it or it's just some side game to distract from something or whatever. I have no idea, so I'm not going to say much about it.

Okay. As you mentioned in our first conversation, you are currently under threat of arrest in India for comments you made about Kashmir in 2010. I mean, for our audience, do you feel comfortable explaining your position? Can you tell me a little bit about the status of that legal case?

I really don't want to talk about it, actually, because it just increases the risk of something being taken out of context and something blowing up. It's dormant right now, so I just let it be.

Then let me ask you this, because even the manner in which you're responding which is that you do not want to address this because of the fear of legal repercussions that could even mean jail and other punishments. What does What would that say when governments try and silence authors, writers, academics, regarding their work and what they try and put out in the world?

Well, I think in America, you're beginning to head in that direction. Ours started a long time ago, and one has to learn how to navigate it. The reason that I don't talk about it is because I would much rather write what I want to write than have some controversy about something you just say off the cuff. It's like they're always trying to trip people up and trying to prevent you from thinking clearly. This culture of fear is everywhere here. Now, people are arrested for things they say on Facebook, on Twitter, or what they don't say. In the US, it seems new to you, but we have been living with this and it's increasingly becoming normalized. It's a very disturbing situation, and especially disturbing, obviously, for Muslims, where it doesn't stop with just court cases in jail. It goes on to lynching and murder and social boycott and economic boycott and their homes being bulldozed. So one thing leads to another, to another, to another, and you end up being in situation where you meet people who have stories that you can't look away from.

This thing is, I think, seminal to your work. When you have seen injustice, you have not been able to look away. Many people do look away. What do you think it is about you that makes you not flinch?

Actually, I think the point is that I do flinch when I see it, and most people don't flinch. They just accept it as a part of daily injustices. The thing is that India is a society that is built on a social hierarchy which is amongst the most cruel in the world. We have a situation where people are divided up hierarchically according to what is considered levels of purity and impurity and the dehumanization of people who are considered outcast, which has actually institutionalized. It's a society that accepts injustice as a given.

You touched on this a little, and so I would love to hear your thoughts on how you view parallels between the Hindu Nationalist Movement in India and the Maga Movement here in the United States.

There are a lot of parallels. One of the first things that happened when Modi came to power was demonetization, was this direct hit on the economy, where he said, 500 Rupee notes were illegal overnight. If you look at the attack on citizenship, the attack on universities, the attack on students, the attack on Rohingyas, the continuous uncertainty, the fact that you might be ambushed by anything at any time. It's so similar that you wonder, is there a playbook or is it just osmotic, authoritarian behavior? Of course, there are other things like voter suppression. The leader of the opposition had a huge exposé of how voter lists have been manipulated It's not a good idea. I don't think it's worth it. Basically, what you're seeing is that the ruling party is confused with government, and all of it is confused with one man. You're seeing that in the US, and I look at it in shock because you thought that there was a mechanism in place, there were checks and balances in place, but clearly there isn't a way of handling someone who's completely out of control. The way statisticians are being fired for giving out figures that the authoritarian doesn't agree with.

Same thing here. You can't believe any of the government figures on economics because everything that doesn't suit Without the ruling establishment is dismissed, it's thrown away, and a new picture is put in its place. The one big difference between what's happening in India and what is happening right now in the US is that in India, the mainstream media has completely compromised. It's not just rolled over. It is actually an organ of the authoritarian state. It's actually calling for people's arrest or making up lies. Of course, America is sitting on top of a crumbling world. Whatever Trump does affects the whole world, whereas here it just affects this country.

Why do you think authoritarian leaders go after people like you, people who deal in ideas? When you said there's echo of a playbook. We've seen that, yes, in places all around the world. I've covered it.

From time immemorial.

Exactly. But as someone who's the subject of that censure, I'm wondering why you think it happens.

I think they are terrified of people who they feel like and communicate, not just cerebrally, but emotionally and otherwise with people. People who can, even however small they are and even however little access they have to the mainstream or to the thundering, pulpit-thumping television anchors, they know that there are something There are people who somehow people eventually do listen to. They know it. They know who is read, they know who is loved, they know also who is not invested in the things that everyone else is invested in. It's not just about fame and money and awards and whatever it is. There's something else going on. There are a lot of people like that who they know just will not bow down.

I think what you're referring to, in part, is people like yourself who also deal with emotional truth, not just facts, but being able to capture ideas that resonate on a different level.

It's really interesting because now you see the government moving to capture Bollywood. One after another, after another, they churn out these absolutely hateful films, hateful, violent, literally almost evil films, but they just don't work.

In our first conversation when I asked you about how you see the role of artists in turbulent moments, you said something that struck me. You have to insist that your work is not just a reaction to what's happening to you. Is that feeling specific to your fiction? Because you're, as we've said, a very prolific political writer, but maybe that work feels different.

That work is different because that work is often an argument that is made at a time when things are closing down, when I see the media, the government, everybody closing in on a vulnerable community or lie about them, pretend that they are what they are not, and so on. It's really like trying to blow a space open that I would go in. Almost all the essays are written despite telling myself, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to Because you get into so much trouble after. Then when it just becomes harder to keep quiet, then to write, I write. For me, it's not about the product or how many books I write. I'm not interested in that output being huge. I'm interested in living the life of a writer, which does not involve just sitting and writing. It involves a lot of living, a lot of listening, a lot of traveling, a lot of inhabiting worlds and worlds and worlds, which is why I love this place, because there's so much about it that I still don't know.

That's Aarndhati Roy. Her memoir, Mother Mary, Comes to Me, will be published on September second. To watch this interview and many others, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube. Com/@symboltheinterviewpodcast. This conversation was produced by Seth Kelly. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon, mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Dan Powell, Ron Niemistow, and Marion Lozano. Photography by Nishanth Radha Krishnan. Our senior booker is Priya Matthew, and Wyatt Orm is our producer. Our executive producer is Allison Benedict. Video All of this interview was produced by Paula Newdorff and Shivali Khattar. Cinematography by Zack Caldwell and Ranak Chopra. Lighting by Kamal Sene, and sound recording by Rajeev Rastogi. It was edited I'm Mark Zemmel. Brook Minters is the executive producer of podcast video. Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Ronan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddie Macielo, Nina Lassam, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnik. I'm Lulu García-Navarro, and this is The Interview from The New York Times.