I have admired her The God of Small Things as much her The End of Imagination, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Listening to Grasshoppers and her live lecture – on why a fiction writer needed to be an activist with regards to the Narmada Dam – at the University of Cambridge in 2000 when I was a student there. While she entered the domain of social activism immediately after her first novel, there were people who questioned why a fiction writer would turn to public writing on social issues instead of working on another fiction.
Her response at the Cambridge special lecture was: this is the point. Only a fiction writer can look at social issues in a different, aesthetic, non-mundane way implying that reading social issues requires an artistic creativity, a perspective often lacking in the raw data and information and hard facts with which general public writings bear little appeal.
Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy is the latest of Roy’s non-fiction work. If fiction is about thinking the unthinkable, treading the untrodden path of human imagination and questioning the sacred, Listening to Grasshoppers is no less a fiction. The only difference is that its characters are real, its issues are brutally human, and its commentary is, painfully, a living truth for a large marginalized population in India and across the world. In this book, which is a collection of essays and lectures again – some of which have already appeared elsewhere – we see Roy as a fiction writer using her (literary) poetic license of writing to critique the sacred of democracy. The very first sentences from the Introduction of the book run thus: “While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy?”
To add to Roy’s sentences, the point is: Is democracy the end of imagination? Is it democratic enough to imagine if there are alternatives to democracy which are more democratic? Can we not question the sacred of democracy when what democracy means is the political hegemony, corporate power, further marginalization of the voiceless, and championed by the largest and biggest (corporate, inhuman) democracies of the world – India and America?
Well, let’s pay quick tributes to the Roy’s critics once again. For some wise old literary critics and intellectuals, Roy is still too young to be admired. Besides, she just has one work of art to her credit (how easily they differentiate between a literary work and non-literary one/s, putting the former as the superior, and the latter as “the other”). For others, it is like “can she not really write another fiction?” For the critics of this sort, writing is a ritual, a profession where one has to keep on producing a book each year. The nature of this criticism is self-exposing though. Why I’m referring to the criticism here is because an awareness of this is a precondition to read Roy’s new book, like the previous non-fiction works, and appreciate this.
“Listening to Grasshoppers” has more questions about the cruel clutches of the corporate democracies than answers to those questions. Much in the fashion of an artist, and not as a political analyst, Roy has an appeal here to get past the limits of comfortable imagination confined by democracy as the ultimate imaginable political system for the future of people. In the world we live in today, democracy is that sacred Gita, Koran or the Bible that any questioning of which is tantamount to libel. The thrust of her essays and lectures in Listening to Grasshoppers is: When we have seen democracy fail, and not represent the interests of the commoners as opposed to those of the elites, can we not even begin to imagine its alternatives, imagine a better future past democracy? Of course, she’s not suggesting any dictatorial form of political system. It’s something else, something better and more democratic than democracy. She doesn’t suggest any name for the system. She only suggests that it’s time to imagine towards that.
The book covers several areas of social injustice where the world’s biggest and largest democracies have failed, betrayed the poor, hence the marginalized, and the voiceless. It’s about ‘democratic’ capitalization that renders the poor poorer and allows the ‘democratic’ military occupation of states and countries. The book performs an elaborate surgical operation on the body of hollow democratic elections that lends legitimacy to the elites, who in one way or another, are the limited people who are elected through periodic elections and do perpetuate their control over power and resources.
The title of the book comes from her lecture given in Istanbul in January 2008 to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper Agos. It comes from a poignant recount of an old Armenian woman who remembers the swarms of grasshoppers that arrived in her village at that time. The woman recalls, “The village elders were alarmed… because they knew in their bones that the grasshoppers were a bad omen. They were right; the end came in a few months, when the wheat in the field was ready for harvesting.” According to the lecture, one and a half million is the number of Armenians who were systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire in the genocide in Anatolia in the spring of 1915. The grasshoppers brought an alarm of the doom. The title of the book thus is listening to the grasshoppers, to the omen they bring, to the alarm of the corporate democracy that is established as the ultimate sacred in the present day.
For me, Nine is not Eleven (And November isn’t September) is one of the most brilliant pieces in the collection. The Mumbai attacks of 2008 were described by many as India’s 9/11, comparing it to the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001. In order to justify that it was an important event for India, people compared it with the American 9/11 so that the Indian event would also get some value, and it could be used as an excuse to crack down more. As Roy’s title to this essay itself brilliantly exposes the inferiority with which the Indian elite follows the American, she says: we’ve forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. (When nine isn’t eleven, November isn’t September, 2001 isn’t 2008, and Mumbai isn’t New York, why compare the Mumbai attacks as India’s 9/11?).
Thematically, almost all the pieces in the collection are about the hegemony of the corporate world, about the cruelty and injustice the commoners have had to undergo, and about the voices of those that have been silenced in the name of democracy and development. Roy, through her trademark bold, imaginative and maverick style, offers alternative readings to the global and social issues from the perspective of “the other”.
In Listening to Grasshoppers, she challenges the comfortable conventional wisdom, notion and arguments, and exposes the hollowness behind big talks on democracy and development, by imagining the unimaginable, and thinking the unthinkable. And, once again, she rightly justifies why a fiction writer is needed to write on social issues that conventionally belong to an activist, not to the author of The God of Small Things.
bishnu.sapkota@gmail.com
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