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The Ordinary Person’s
Guide to Empire. by Arundhati Roy. Flamingo, London. Pages
160. £ 8.99. Words on Water, a documentary film by Sanjay Kak, which was recently screened by Critique, a group of student activists and researchers at Panjab University, is a terrifying comment on the displacement of people in the Narmada valley as a result of the escalating Sardar Sarovar project. Arundhati Roy, who is associated with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, is one of the few political activists like Kak who have aggressively championed the cause of the Adivasis who are doomed to drown at the stroke of a bureaucratic pen. The very first essay of this book, Ahimsa, is about a fast in protest by some of those who are threatened by the Maan Dam in Madhya Pradesh. Roy imparts a Gandhian flavour to this long fast by protecting the right to having non-violent movements, a right which is being violated by the government. By default, the government seems to be privileging violent dissidence. It is clear by now that most of the people do not procure the land they are promised; those who do, face acute shortage of fodder and water in the new settlements. Bargi, the first dam to be built on the Narmada, displaced 1,14, 000 persons, most of whom are still not settled. The Bargi dam has submerged more land than it irrigates, as is expected to happen when the other 3,165 dams on the Narmada are constructed. Come September, the next essay, is a continuation of the theme of cultural freedom and democratic thinking and protest in the wake of America’s war on terrorism post 9/11. Here, Roy poses some poignant questions: "What does the term ‘anti-American’ mean? Does it mean you’re anti-jazz? Or that you’re opposed to free speech? That you don’t delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? Does it mean that you hate all Americans?" Many Americans like Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert, Chalmers Johnson, William Blum and Anthony Arnove, who have chosen to adopt an anti-American stance, are only a few among those who speak of "what’s really going on." It is the state that unambiguously compartmentalises us into binary opposites: "If you’re not a Bushie, you’re a Taliban. If you don’t love us, you hate us. If you’re not Good, you’re Evil. If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists." But why forget August? For it was in August that America dropped those atomic bombs—Fat Man and Little Boy—on Japan. Young funky Americans even buy souvenir earrings designed as miniature atomic bombs at the National Atomic Museum at Albuquerque as if to mock the fall of Japan. 9/11 has indeed become a fateful event for the US, but this day has significance for many others as well: it was September 11 (1922) when the British government proclaimed the power of Zionism in Palestine; again, it was September 11 (1973) when General Pinochet, aided by American Intelligence, overthrew in a coup Salvador Allende, who had been democratically elected; on another September 11 (1990), George Bush Sr. announced his government’s intention to wage war on Iraq. Another essay in the book, The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky, which also appeared in The Hindu and which also serves as an introduction to Chomsky’s For Reasons of State, describes how it has become America’s calling to manufacture consent. It can even manage to convince others that the atomic bomb was a "weapon of peace." In one of his essays, "The Asian Mind—the American Mind", Chomsky explains the so-called psychology of the enemy who "stoically accepts the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives" because, being imbecile, they are forced to invite the sophisticated Americans to teach them democracy. America, thus, pained by the "terrible burden" of genocide, is nonetheless committed to it. It even pretends that genocide never happened. Its history textbooks bear witness to that. Hard-hitting yet comic, Roy’s images and language have an alarming effect so that even the most lackadaisical and indifferent pro-American reader would tend to sit up with a bruised conscience on reading these essays: "Nobody doubts that Saddam Hussein is a ruthless dictator, a murderer. There’s no doubt that Iraqis would be better off without him. But, then, the whole world would be better off without a certain Mr Bush." It is with such passion
and conviction that Arundhati Roy has, in the last couple of years,
written and lectured extensively on the failure of democracy and the
future of progressive movements, a pro-active stand that has established
her as one of the significant dissident voices from South Asia. |
