It's a Lie, says she of revolutionary leanings, of prosaic words, of patient and poignant observation, of incisive wit and lullaby voice with deep, sad eyes and a tireless old soul, of the best damn demonstration of a ball on fire, of a juggernaut there is.
And what's more, she's outing the Lie on BBC (colonial irony, of course) in front of a disbelieving (whether playing devil's advocate or not) Jeremy Paxman in no uncertain terms. Roy speaks for herself and her words speak for themselves - they say what she both wills and intends as well as reverberate of their own accord what she may not have tried to capture; such is her power and such is what compelled a small meditation of my own.
Roy's project is undoubtedly holistic and the extent of her thought and view become glaringly clear when she starts to outline the consequences of really any usurpation of common natural resources for profit. "[T]his is a profound question; it doesn't just concern India," she says. "It concerns the entire question of what we think of as civilisation....I'm not suggesting that everyone goes back to living with loincloths and bows and arrows. However, we have to redefine the meaning of modernity, to redefine the meaning of happiness". The beauty of Roy in acknowledging these truths is that they - unwittingly or not - portray the hedging of a theory and a practice. For example, she confesses that she cannot confine herself to a book-writing timeline nor take a careerist approach to her writing. For her, her writing is just one strand, one tool, one form that her theory takes. There's too much emergency, too much urgency, she confesses in a raw voice, to be doing that.
The April issue of The Monocle featured a rethink on several small and local platforms in industrialized and "developed" countries while also heralding the faint bells of ressurection of urban tidings in Baghdad and Sri Lanka. The story on the ground, however, is different. The story on the ground requires a firm question into the kind of collective consciousness, into the quality of imagination - on a popular stage - that goes into the creation of the set of material circumstances that we have today. So Roy, travelling down the path of hard questions, continues: "The question really is are we ever going to be able to look at something without thinking of it as a resource to feed the kind of capitalism that is leading the planet to a crisis?"
The problem, in my limited experience, is the fact that she is dealing with a large urban mass of people within India's own borders who - unfortunate though it is - just don't give a shit. There is a kind old man in my War and Peace in the Middle East class I take who always identifies me as The Girl from the Land of the Great Gandhi. As flattering as that is (and, indeed, that I even find it flattering asks questions unto itself), it does not really define me not least because I am physically unpresent. It cannot even define those idealists yet remaining in the country who struggle with deep questions of burgeoning modernity even right now. One cannot say that population is at a different development tracjectory but they are facing both profoundly similar and yet deeply divergent situations.
The whole view of developing or not comes from a strangely nation-statist point of view - one that is tinged and peppered with supremacy. The vision goes something like this. You take a native, indigenous population. You give them tools, education, the means of production. They go off and produce. Sometime during the production process that is necessarily dialectical, the collective population's consciousness evolves and they start to industrialize, once again, given the tools from the outside. While other parts of the world are already captured by commodities, those second-class natives are only just beginning to understand commodities, to create them. They are only just beginning to develop an imagination based on someone else's view of capitalism that they then internalize and reproduce as their own. Yet the struggles they face as they look on in wonderment and amazement at the fruits of their own production, as they become captured, while their wholly living world turns to a world of death and reification and regurgitation and simulacra are not as important as those others who industrialized "first".
The role of history is so long that they no longer have time to go back and take it all in. Globalisation is happening here and now and if they don't produce and merger and let MNCs on their soil they're going to be left behind. Never mind that the economy remains a lopsided joke. Never mind that nearly every reporter's newspiece, nearly every essay on the population's growth begins or concludes with this cheeky remark: "While the nation is poised for stardom, its dark underbelly remains infested with poverty".
I have to think this assessment gets tiring. For me, it is just plain angering. So when Roy unabashedly calls it a point-blank lie, I am immensely relieved not to have to live on in a false legacy anymore, not to have as my moniker The Girl From the Land of the Great Gandhi. Instead, I can be the truth: The Girl From the Land that Everyone Lied About.
It is shamelessly heartwarming when she starts to laugh when trying to explain the absurd violations of a country's constitution by that country itself. When trying to write an essay on imperialism, I was questioned in a discussion and cautioned. Questioned as to why I thought a warning to the descendents of empire was so necessary, what that warning might look like and cautioned against allowing it to become a mere trail of public policy reccomendations. I did change my attack but I think I now have some shade of the answer as to why. This is exactly why.
This sort of blind and hypocritical lunacy of a "emergent" power, as a "rising" nation, as a "nascent" "developing" country tries to develop begs the question as to what exactly the country is developing into, let alone what it is developing for. Is it developing aligned with its own wishes? Is it developing only in one section of the population (which is mostly urban middle-class and technocratic) and all others be damned? Is it, in its inevitable "progress", setting the terms for its own progress or is it willing to take part in a race whose end goals wipes out and villifies, destroys and makes wretched the people of its own earth?
I'll give you a hint: it's not nay. That's a lie.
