You at the next event. Thank you pj. Book tv continues on cspan two television for serious readers. Good evening good afternoon we know we had people here all over the world. Greetings, welcome. The Elliott Bay Book company. On behalf of all of the people who are staging this production today we are delighted to be celebrating the publication of Arundhati Roys new book azadi. This is been published and launched with her in new delhi. In the evening hours. I am in seattle where it is still a new day. All of you joining us everywhere around the spectrum. May even be earlier in the morning. The publication was the suspicious one. First to acknowledge all of the books publisher. In publishing this book. Haymarket is published based in chicago in the u. S. Its been around since 2001. And dedicated to social justice books. They have come around for on for the past 20 years. You can certainly got it haymarket books. Org. They are huge part of this. It is a south asian arts organization. It was a response to the u. S. The ambitious south asian film festival. They were more of what they were about. They helped to present them. In the recent visits. In the bay company is where i work. The independent bookstore. I had been fortunate to work there. It was a long hard work for the good and private books. And to say a little of our history here. I dont want to go too far on the limb. From the spring of 1997. Seattle was one of the first. Thats all that happened. What really happens is in that remarkable book. Weve had visits since. The last one was for the second novel. It is the ministry of the most up up most happiness. There was a twentyyear time there. They were looking for another novel. There were other writings. These writings which were published initially in indian magazines. This is a form of a small books. They kept happening. We felt compelled to speak out about. And where those places met. With the slightly different combination. With a different title. This all kind of has been addressed with the publication last year. That was this tone. Its also noteworthy. It is a thousand pages of writing. With the book she is here for today its actually a book already to gears on from what the essay will look like. Is a very publication. Our nine pieces that have been written since then. Certainly things through india. With relevance here in the u. S. With Arundhati Roy will be nick s. With the citizen of the lower proulx suit. Also the cofounder. Also the offer of published last year which is a another independent radicalization. Later last year co edited this analogy. In standing with the standing lock. That activists and scholars. So they will have a conversation for the next hour or so you are invited to put questions in the chat field. As you are watching and those will be sent to nick. They will be sent and worked into the conversation. If you need to have access to that. There is information there. Your questions and comments. In the closed captioning. I will disappear in just a moment. Great hands now. Thank you all for wherever you are. In the places that you are joining us for this. I know you can only imagine the energy that would be there. And this is their first meeting. All of the things that we miss and not bringing together. This would be part of what we get to benefit from that. Director good energy and focus. And to the affirmation in support to the two people that are doing such great work. And of the book the book you are about to hear from. Thank you all. Thanks so much. As i was preparing for this particular interview as much as her work is the things that she has written. You can also look at the things she has been criticized for by the indian state as a testament to the power of this particular work and role as a writer. For me personally this is a great honor. Im a huge fan. I havent told her this offline. But im incredibly nervous because its a huge not honor for me to be talking to her and to have the opportunity to read this incredible book. It speaks to the moment in time and i wanted to begin this interview with a question about the books title which is a kashmiri word for freedom. You say that first word that comes to mind. As you write the introduction a novel gives the writer of the freedom to be as collocated as she wants. To move through the world language and time through society and community in politics. In many ways, you read the recent and long history of india through kashmir. Can you explain your choice of using this word and how it shapes the collection of essays. It is a word in which and then they came and mingled with those things. More recently and traveled i think from the revolution. It was used by feminist now and meaning for several decades has been the hunting cry they had been fighting that the military occupation. Oddly enough. There is a death silence in india about the struggle in and a silence from the left and the liberals of course. There is a lot of noise from the right which covers the story. What is very dangerous is that the large Muslim Population in india which is incorporation is 15 . Hundreds of millions of people they are a kind of hostage to the Independence Movement and the Indian Muslims have a completely different space that they occupy. They dont have the option of even thinking about freedom they have to think about how to live with dignity. And recently, this government came up with the new citizenship law which is on the old thing called the National Register. It was reactivated in the state of a son. 20million people were off of that register. And on top of that the government passed another law called the citizenship amendment act. And so suddenly there was a severely odd juxtaposition that happened last year. They have a special state on the indiana constitution. It was indicated into india. The siege with the most densely militarized zone in the world and almost for the whole of this past year they had been under curfew and silence locked down with coed and all of it. The massive protests came out on the streets of india by that citizenship law. And why they were silence it was the swell of a demand for a different kind. Obviously not independence. A cry for dignity for human rights. Being treated as equal citizens and that she was brutally crushed. The rest of india not with the kind of cruelty. It began to seem like there were internet cards. People have been brutalized and killed. This series of essays really began to ask what is the connection between the call and the new cry on the indian street. The essays are written from the point of view and imagination but then interrogates that idea. In the military form. The literary imagination you make a point in an essay a talk you gave about howure writer friend were talk about when are you going to get back to writing and the quoteunquote real work of a fiction writer and you make a powerful point in your career what you are doing is a form of literature, whether its fiction or nonfiction. So can you talk but all your role as a writer and playing out not just in the realm of political analysis and commenting on Current Events but also imagining new worlds through whether its through the god of small things or the ministry your most recent novel. Guest so, when i wrote the god of mall small things, obviously i used to work in im an architect and thin worked in cinema and this was my first book, and who could anticipate that kind of attention for a first book. It won the booker prize and sold millions of copies, and i found myself raising issues of this kind of embrace by an establishment that ive always been very suspicious of. I felt like my proteins were being melted down and i was turning into some domestic fame is also very domesticated, domesticking and everybody wants you to write the same thing. And it was around the time that india shifted from being this nonaligned power, poor country but a poor country with some spine, with some dignity, but with a great socialist underpinning. I mean, canada where i grew up was the first democratically elected communist government in the world if thats not an oxymoron but whatever. So i grew up with the strikes and the big protests and the red flags and the revolution was coming, and then suddenly by the 90s, everything changed, and the markets were opened, of course the soviet union collapsed and india elined itself with the free market, and suddenly the literary imagination, the sin nat tick imagination, the poetic imagination, the public language, everything changed, and in 97s way on the cover of every magazine. In 1998, the rite wing government came in and a new series of Nuclear Tests and i was being marketed as this sort of thank you in the india, the new india in the high table, and i knew that if i didnt have the option of keeping quiet because if i kept quiet that meant i agreed with all that. So i wrote the First Political essay which was called the end of imagination, and within hours i was kicked off the list, great sensation did and there was this incredible disappointment in me, by people around me, that how could you have done this . And i literally in that is that is say i was talk but the fact that Nuclear Weapons are its not just whether theyre used or not that this problem but but how they colonize your imagination and nationalize your imagination, change the public language, and i said if its antihindu and antiindian to have this imagination then i declare in this orgy of nationalism, the fairly princess just came out and shat on everybody. Just like out. But there was another world which suddenly kind of opened up to me, and i traveled, i and i reacted writing essays and people were unsure what is this . Is is academic, is it a journalist, a pamphleteer. They were somewhere between genres because there was certainly a it was an intervention. It was urgent. It was furious. It wasnt was more like i saw that these movements, i like the big antidam movement, the displacement of nations of people, ancient people. You know, there needed to be a story, like a story was a weapon in the hands of the movement. So i was not writing what people called to power. I was not writing some on the one hand this and on the other hand this and on the their hand this. I was saying this is our fight, and i am the writer on the side of the light. And people i think things might have change a little recently but theres this kind of furor of a writer being political, its the god of small things wasnt political. The people in thought was political and teaming with a subject that was absolutely taboo, to talk but caste and the ways in which he left has not been able to deal with it. But people managed change that interest its soful beautiful, its about children and language. People kind of work hard to soften the edges sometimes of writing, which is makes the for me when i started writing the political essays, they would get translated immediately into languages, made into pamphlets, distributed in forests and they understood the literature. People on the frontline. So, that is what i say in one of the else says, for me essays, for me, theres something but literature that is constructed between readers and writers, not between critics and literature festivals and reviewers but between readers and writers, which is urgent and which is a kind of shelter. So, its like there are some moments in my life to me a soul i mean, more than any royalties, more than any awards, like, i remember being in a village, way late at night, walk us through the paddies and there was a huge standoff because the government, which happened to be a left gunfight government, was trying to take over the land, give it to a huge Chemical Plant and there was firing i could hear the firing in the distance, and i was just Walking Around along. This man just appeared in the shadows and said, you know, i just want to thank you for understanding what were doing. They think the other side thinks we have weapons. We dont have weapons. We just use sticks and silhouette and pretend we have happens but we dont have anything but were fighting and very few people at that point everybody in the tv studios was turning gandhian and denounce violence when its easy for them. Expecting everybody to lie town and die while the land is taken; which is why i was so happy to read your piece. I thought, goodness, how much you would have had to talk about if you had come here and walked with the comrades in the forests of central india. Thats a really appreciate theres a lot to be said and i think one thing that a friend of mine once said, her name is lala, poet, i tried to be a poet. Not good at it but she said you have to look for poetry. Poetry is more than just words. You have to look for poetry in actions, and its the job of the writer to basically capture or to be able to see that kind of poetry, and one thing i really have been inspired by your writing specifically is that you dont confine yourself to one thing and i think theres a lot of expectation for people to be kind of characterized as a certain kind of writer. Youre a fiction writer, youre a poet. And we confront that especially within literary nationalism, especially people who are not part of kind of the european tradition but nonetheless have inherited the baggage of that, whether its through colonialism or imperialism, and one of the ways i appreciated that you pushed back on that is this idea of translation. The multiple languages that one has to know and to understand, and im not just talk us about languages that people speak because capitalism itself is a language. It transforms relations into profit. Transforms things into money. And ive been thinking about this because im writing a piece and i havent, like, crystallized what how i understand it, but i felt like you were really kind of challenging some ways more cosmopolitan than the cools mow poll tan people because youre looking at a place that is as you say, is simultaneously captured in different centuries and also overlapped in nations and different kinds of people that cant be just income passed in one kind of sing literary tradition. I think india one of the essays i say that a novel shouldnt have an enemy but if the ministry of happiness has an enemy then its the idea of one nation, one language, one religion, which is what the Modi Government and the fascists around him are trying to push for, but in india there are Something Like more than 700 languages spoken, 22 of them are official languages, and within each language there is such a history of colonizing, being colonized so many cycles of respect and disrespect, the words that will be used to describe this caste or that gender, and so like the first essay in the book, of course the caption is a line from which says in what language does rain fall or would tormented cities, and its really talking about the ministry of happiness sort of swimming the characters are swimming in this ocean of languages and you see, for example, the most shattering memory of people in modern day india is the memory of the massacres that took place in 1947 when india was partitioned and pakistan and india became two separate countries, although there were many nations where the violence, assimilation was as mach partition, but one of the things you see is that before the partition happened, language was partitiones. The language that used to call hindustani was partitioned into udu which is supposedly spoken by muslims and by hindus and the violence of that continues to this day. To this day you have fascist mobs, razeed to he ground some 300 years ago a poet of love. So language has been at the heart of much of the violence in this continent that is masquerading at a nation, and so even as i was saying earlier when they did the Nuclear Tests you could see the public language changed, and so and now you have when they start off on these National Register of citizens, and you have people who live in these Little Islands in the most distant parts of the area, mighty which keeps changing course, which has storms and tornadoes and consumed people alive but all of them have little plastic bags with their documents and they have internalized this bureaucracy, the legacy papers and waterless and similarly the people in the valley who are being displaced. By the dam, they have a whole other language by which they are described in government files. Pap. Project affected person. Canal affected or whatever. And like as a writer in this part of the world, to study love and violence and nationhood and religion, language is a perfect entry point. Host kind of elaborating on this idea of language and the partition of language, you talk about crasse in your work and this is me being the ugly american. We have a racial hierarchy in the country. No comparable but there are similarities, but one thing you talk about, its not so much a caste system but brohminism and the rebrohminnization of sections of Indian Society, specifically through this organization which you call the one on the most powerful organizations in india, the r. S. S. Can you explain about that . Because i think reading some of your interviews and then also people have messaged me privately and asked, isnt she brahmni evers, upper caste. Im not. My mother was a christian and my father belongs to an Organization Called the he also became a christian, so im not a brahmin and when the Anticaste Movement has traditionally word used the word brahminism, i the idea of caste hierarchy. Fundamentally the difference between a race andcaste and caste is that caste was given itself religious sanction. Christianity, islam, siekhism, all of them in the text may say all human beings are equal or brothers but, no, they also have their but in the relation texts you have a stipulated hierarchy and each caste so you have all four divisions which are called the brahmain, the the and then outside of it, the outcast and each of these is divided into tiny little castess and each one has hereditary occupation. This is the and you have the brohm brahmaics or the priests. The other their menials and the outcaste are the untouchable and unseeable. The violence of thinking like that, its unbelievable. And if you look at Indian Society and you look at even i would say most indian liberal intellectual, even left wing intellectual. Just allied this issue which is the engine on which Indian Society runs. So i have written a little book called to the doctor and the sane but a about conversations and debates between the most beloved leader of the