A conversation between Arundhati Roy and Fawwaz Traboulsi
Introduction by Rima Majed. Edited by Farah-Silvana Kanaan.
This conversation took place at Barzakh Bookshop, Hamra, Beirut, on June 10, 2024. It is the second installment of “The Transcripts,” a section of The Public Source featuring significant interviews and conversations.
Rima Majed:
The idea of this evening was to have a conversation between Arundhati Roy and Fawwaz Traboulsi about writing as resistance to fascism. I think when you think about what these two people have in common, one of the most important things is their joint commitment to writing as an integral part of the struggle: they both write as part of their resistance.
Arundhati Roy:
I’ll start by talking about where we are at in India right now. We just had an election. But let me begin by saying that, however unfair those elections were — and they were very unfair — Modi and the BJP did not get a majority. This is the first time the opposition has some muscle. For ten years, they’ve had no muscle at all.
The BJP is probably the richest political party in the world. They had every agency of the state, they had the media, they had social media, they had the intelligence agencies — all of it. And yet they could not get a majority. Now this is not to romanticize the opposition. But the fact is, after ten years of total dominance, they’ve been weakened.
Let me tell you about this architecture. In 1990, India opened its markets and embraced neoliberalism. Simultaneously, the locks of a disputed mosque, the Babri Masjid, were opened. So you had two kinds of fundamentalism unleashed — market fundamentalism and Hindu fundamentalism. And these two have moved in tandem ever since. The corporations fund Hindu nationalism, and Hindu nationalism opens the way for corporations. Each enables the other.
This architecture is about how you manage a population of 1.4 billion people. The caste system is the key. There are over 4,000 castes, each with a designated occupation. The system is held together by the permanent threat of violence. What it prevents is horizontal solidarity. Everyone is looking up or looking down, never across.
Fawwaz Traboulsi:
You mentioned the BJP and their resources. This reminds me of something. Here in Lebanon, we’ve had our own experience with parties that have immense resources — financial, military, media — and yet at certain moments, the population breaks through that. The question is always: what happens the day after? Do you see any horizon for what comes after Modi, or are we looking at a permanent structure?
Arundhati Roy:
I think the architecture of Hindu nationalism has been built over a hundred years. It’s not going to be dismantled by one election. But what this election showed is that there is a limit to how far you can push people. And that limit is connected to real material conditions — jobs, food, the economy.
Let me talk about Gandhi for a moment, because he’s central to how India tells its own story. We are taught that Gandhi was the father of the nation, that nonviolence liberated India. But Gandhi also said some extraordinary things. In South Africa, he was explicit about his contempt for Black Africans. He called them “kaffirs,” said Indians were superior. And on caste, he believed in the caste system. He called it “the genius of Indian society.”
The alternative figure is Dr. Ambedkar — a Dalit, an “untouchable” — who understood that caste was the central organizing principle of Indian society, and that without annihilating caste, there could be no democracy. Ambedkar is being rediscovered now, but in a distorted way. Modi’s party claims him while practicing everything he stood against.
Fawwaz Traboulsi:
This question of appropriation of historical figures is something we know very well in the Arab world. Every regime claims the heroes of resistance. They turn revolutionaries into icons that legitimize the status quo. The question is always: who controls the narrative?
Arundhati Roy:
Exactly. And narrative control is what fascism is really about. It’s not just about violence — it’s about controlling the story. In India, the entire history curriculum has been rewritten. Textbooks have been changed. The Mughal period — centuries of Muslim rule — has been reduced to almost nothing. They’re creating a Hindu supremacist version of history.
On Kashmir — Kashmir is the most militarized zone in the world. 700,000 soldiers for a population of about seven million. In August 2019, the Indian government revoked Kashmir’s special status, shut down all communications — no phones, no internet — imposed a complete curfew, and essentially turned it into an open-air prison. The parallels with Palestine are obvious, though every situation has its specificities.
Fawwaz Traboulsi:
One thing that strikes me about what you describe in India, and what we see here, is the role of NGOs. There’s been a process of what you might call the NGO-ization of resistance. How do you see this?
Arundhati Roy:
This is something I’ve written about extensively. The NGO-ization of resistance is one of the most effective tools of neoliberalism. What it does is it takes rights and converts them into charity. It takes the most talented, most articulate people from communities and gives them salaries, offices, and a seat at the table. In return, they must moderate their demands, speak the language of the donor, and essentially depoliticize resistance.
The brilliance of this system is that it looks progressive. It looks like civil society is functioning. But in reality, it’s a pressure valve. It lets off just enough steam to prevent an explosion, while the fundamental structures of power remain untouched.
And the moment any of these organizations steps out of line, the state can cut their funding, revoke their licenses, and shut them down. We’ve seen this happen systematically in India under Modi. Thousands of NGOs have had their licenses revoked.
Fawwaz Traboulsi:
We have a saying: “The NGO is the civilian arm of the World Bank.” But the reality is more complex. Some NGOs do important work. The question is always about autonomy and about whether you can maintain a political horizon while working within these structures.
Arundhati Roy:
I want to talk about writing, because that’s supposed to be what tonight is about. For me, fiction and nonfiction serve very different purposes. Fiction is a form of prayer. It creates an alternative universe. It says: the world as it is, is not the only world that is possible. My nonfiction is a knife — it’s argumentative, confrontational, it takes on power directly.
But both come from the same place — which is the refusal to accept the way things are. Writing is not activism. I’m not an activist. Activists are the people on the ground, in the forests, in the valleys, facing the bulldozers. But writing is a form of bearing witness. It says: this happened. This is happening. And it will not be erased.
Question from the audience:
How do you relate to the Palestinian resistance? Do you support armed resistance?
Arundhati Roy:
I believe in a diversity of resistance. I think it is not for those of us who are not living under occupation to tell people who are living under occupation how they should resist. What I will say is that the attempt to create an equivalence between the occupier and the occupied, between the colonizer and the colonized, is one of the great moral frauds of our time. There is no equivalence. And any analysis that begins from that false premise is already corrupt.
This transcript was originally published in The Public Source on September 9, 2024.