UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Recentering the Individual: Reading Arundhati Roy's Nonfiction Prose

in the Context of Edward Said's Theories

by

Navneet Kumar

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

SEPTEMBER, 2010

©Navneet Kumar 2010

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••I Canada Abstract

Arundhati Roy's Man Booker Prize winning novel, The God of Small Things, has

received generous attention within literary studies. Yet, Roy's numerous collections of nonfiction

prose have hardly made it into class rooms or literary, academic journals. This perhaps is a

symptom of the state of English Studies today, its now long-standing habit of focusing on poetry,

drama, short-stories, and the novel as worthwhile genres. My thesis contributes to knowledge in

the following ways: a) by focusing on the nonfiction prose of Arundhati Roy the thesis

recognizes the importance of this genre for literary studies; b) by tracing a pattern of what I have

called "re-centering of the marginalized individual" in Roy's works, and that too within the

framework of the theories of Edward Said, my thesis argues for alternative modes of representing

the marginalized (these modes are derived through close readings of Roy's works and reflections

on Said's theories, especially on humanism); c) by critically engaging with the form and content

of Roy's works, particularly by examining related concepts of the individual, the universal, and representation, and as developed by Said, my thesis provides a modest challenge to postcolonial

studies, encouraging its return to historical and political processes.

This thesis argues, in the context of Said's theories on humanism, that Roy's choice to

deploy nonfiction as her narrative style to recenter the oppressed individual articulates a politics

of resistance for the individual and, further, disrupts the prescriptive boundaries of the literary

canon. I develop this thesis in the course of three chapters: the first chapter examines what it means for Roy to recenter the individual in her nonfiction works and how this can be interpreted within the framework of Said's theories of the intellectual; the second chapter re-examines Roy's representation of the individual but within Saidian arguments that favour universalism; the final

chapter theorizes representations of the marginalized through re-readings of Said's Orientalism

iii and later works. In an "Introduction" and "Conclusion" I summarize my methodology and contributions to literary studies in general and postcolonial studies in particular. Throughout, the thesis emphasizes the importance of the genre of nonfiction prose for literary studies and highlights the relationship between genre and issues of social justice.

IV Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Clara Joseph for many reasons: for teaching me how to construct an argument, for always being available for meetings and discussions, for her tireless readings of those innumerable drafts, for her incisive comments on those drafts, for constantly and endlessly pushing me to further develop my thoughts and ideas, and for being a true guide, mentor, and an inimitable role model. The rigors of thesis writing were quite enlivened by your wit and humor. Dr. Joseph, thanks once again for everything as this has been a true learning experience for me in the real sense of the word. I owe this first major piece of my writing to you in more ways than one.

Thanks are also due to Dr. Pamela McCallum for her belief in the project. Her incisive comments on the initial proposal drafts have provided the much-needed depth and direction to the thesis. Dr. Victor Ramraj has been ever helpful in discussing with me issues and complexities related to ideas of humanism and universalism. The pleasures of a conversation were made alive with those numerous discussions covering a wide range of issues. Dr. Ramraj, many thanks for those memorable discussions.

Thanks to Dr. Karim Dharamsi, whom I have known for less than a year, but whose humor, brilliance, and friendship have been inspiring especially during the crucial stages of my writing. Thanks for buying me those cups of coffee and many thanks for those wonderful discussions.

I am also grateful to my family for contributions to my writing that really extend far beyond the merely academic ones. Shelly, for inspiring me to take on research which landed me in Calgary, and for her love and support; Shrey, for enduring those long hours in my office, while

I wrote my dissertation; and Saanya, for giving me those much-needed breaks when she would

v run with my books and I had to chase her down. My Dad, for teaching me things that have become a part of my life and even my thesis here. Thanks Dad for encouraging me to read and constantly supporting all my endeavours. Thanks to my mother-in-law and father-in-law for their unswerving encouragement and belief in me.

Pilar, for being a supportive office mate and a friend. Thanks to Sunny for all his prayers and his unvarying support. Without all these people and their support this dissertation would not have been possible. Thanks to the Department of English at the University of Calgary— especially, Dr. McWhir and Dr. Perreault for making available a timely Thesis Completion

Grant, which ensured that I was able to write.

VI For my Mother, Pushpa whose presence I can feel; For Saanya, Shrey, Shelly, & Dad

VII TABLE OF CONTENTS

Approval Page ii Abstract iii Acknowledgements v Dedication vii Table of Contents viii

INTRODUCTION 1 Arundhati Roy and the Small 3 Roy and the Genre of Nonfiction Prose 8 Edward Said 11 Saidian Humanism 13 An Overview of the Chapters 17

CHAPTER I: RECENTERING THE INDIVIDUAL 24 Arundhati Roy and Genre 30 The Individual in Roy 37 Said's Humanism and the Individual Contextualized 41 Foucault, Said, and Humanism 45 The Writer-Intellectual as a Humanist 53

CHAPTER II: THE INDIVIDUAL RECONSIDERED: HUMANISM AS UNIVERSALISM...58 Said's Relevance for Roy 62 Humanism 62 Nonfiction Prose 72 The Individual in Roy vis-a-vis Said's Humanism 75 From Individual to Universal 84

VIII Individual Freedom and Genre 90 Said and Genre 103

CHAPTER III: BEYOND REPRESENTATION OF THE MARGINALIZED AND RESISTANCE 109 Section I: Representation 115 Orientalism and Representation 120 The Problematics of Representation 126 Section II: The Saidian Intellectual 131 The Intellectual as an Amateur 133 Professionalism Contextualized 137 Amateurism and Communication 142 Section III: Representing Resistance as Opposition 146 Roy, Said, and Gandhi.... 154 Imagining Popular Resistance 158 Section IV: Genres and Canonicity 167 Genres and Resistance 175

CONCLUSION 187 Works Cited 199

IX 1

Introduction

Recentering the Individual: Reading Arundhati Roy's Nonfiction Prose

in the Context of Edward Said's Theories

National consciousness ...must now be enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into real humanism.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Arundhati Roy's nonfiction prose repeatedly engages with the representation and consequent recentering of the marginalized individual through the figure of the writer- intellectual. However, a closer examination of her works reveals a nuanced understanding of the ideas of representation, which she interprets as speaking with rather than speaking for or about the marginalized. Roy's narratives, even as they simultaneously attempt to represent the oppressed, reveal a space for creating opportunities of responsibility and freedom as suggested forcefully by the Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen. When Roy, through her nonfiction writing helps create these opportunities of responsibility and freedom for the marginalized, then her narratives in many ways resemble what a Saidian humanist would do for the benefit of the marginalized other. Humanism, as understood by Said essentially relies on the power of "human will and agency" to alter the situations of other less privileged human beings across the globe (Humanism and Democratic Criticism 15).1 Thus, "humanism might or could be a democratic process producing a critical and progressively freer mind" for the others (HDC 16). In other words,

Saidian humanism is perceived to be a democratic process, coterminous with the practice of

"participatory citizenship"—an idea which views all human beings, the marginalized included, as worthy of equal consideration and opportunities (HDC 22). Therefore, universalism has 2 become one of the prerequisites of the humanist practice as offered by Said. As a consequence, when Roy represents the marginalized relying on notions of universalism and helping create responsibility and opportunities of freedom, she acts as a Saidian humanist. Her focus on the marginalized other, the ignored and the suppressed, the small, and the seemingly insignificant is to decry the invisibility of the minute.

In what follows I introduce Arundhati Roy to suggest that her concern for the ignored and the marginalized is constant in her fiction as well as nonfiction; and yet I argue that ways in which she foregrounds the oppressed individual through her unique style of focusing on

individual stories, that her nonfiction prose deserves consideration. Next, I analyze the genre of nonfiction prose in the nineteenth-century Indian tradition of essay writing in Hindi to argue that while some similarities with the above tradition can be made—for instance, helping place local

issues within a larger context and also in linking the literary sphere to the wider public one—to make any further claims of origins can prove fallacious. On the other hand, she seems to share in common with the modem journalistic essay of the West, the intent to resist and critique any mistreatment of land, body, language, gender, race, and other similar issues. Next, I argue that in her attempt at representation of the marginalized individual, Roy shares many of the assumptions put forward by Said in his critique of Orientalism and his propagation of humanism primarily in

Humanism and Democratic Criticism. I argue that Said resolutely returns to humanism because he proposes it as a "worldly practice" that can help intellectuals and academics connect their work to the world in which they live as citizens. Implicit in this statement is his critique of the trend of specialization visible in the study of humanities in the United States early on in the

1960s which had divorced the contours of everyday existence—issues of oppression, justice, and equality—from pedagogy. Saidian humanism addresses itself to literary critics, intellectuals, 3 writers, and academics alike. According to Said, increasing specialization has removed worldly matters away from the field of criticism and as a result the field has become more insular.

Against such a move, Said proposes humanism not only as an antidote to increasing specialization, but as a worldly practice which helps critics, writers, intellectuals, and academics to orient their practices towards individual freedom, universal human rights, and self- determination and freedom for the disenfranchised people. The next section discusses that since

Saidian humanism voices a universal concern for the other, and recognizes the perspective of others, Roy can be seen as a Saidian humanist, one who accords primacy to the "most disadvantaged people" and to notions of "participatory citizenship" (HDC 10, 22).

Arundhati Roy and the Small

Arundhati Roy was born to Mary Roy, a Syrian Christian who married a Bengali Hindu and later divorced him. Mary Roy fought against the anti-women Christian inheritance law, a move which in turn initiated a landmark change that later granted Christian women in Kerala the right to inherit property. Perhaps an argument could be made for locating Arundhati Roy's rebellious streak in her own mother. In an interview with David Barsamian, Roy reminisces that her childhood's greatest gift was a lack of indoctrination, the absence of a box that was never imposed on her which she owes to growing up with her mother (The Checkbook and the Cruise

Missile 106).2 She reveals, "I was the child who was wandering all over the place, spending hours on the river alone, fishing.. .1 never went to a formal school until I was about ten"

(Checkbook 106). She recalls growing up in Kerala with her mother spending her childhood "just catching fish and learning to be quiet" absorbing the landscape. The landscape and her mother's divorce were probably two of the strongest influences on her growing up she would recall later—

"My mother was divorced. I lived on the edge of the community in a very vulnerable fashion" 4

(np). Roy's vulnerability was primarily constituted by the ensemble of her mother's marriage

outside the community and later on entering a divorce with her husband. As a consequence, Roy

would feel vulnerable answering the seemingly simple and mundane yet forceful identity-based

questions related to her name, her father's name, and her mother tongue.

Roy grew up in Ayemenem, a small town in Kerala, on the edge of the community because of a lack of a tharawaad lineage. A tharawad consisted of the karanaver, senior most

male member, his wife ammayi and their children; his sisters and their children, where senior

male members managed the property on behalf of the women. Under this patriarchal and

ostensibly protective structure for women, the make most senior member managed, provided,

and controlled all aspects of the household. While for Antonia Navarro-Tejero in Gender and

Caste in the Anglophone-Indian Novels of Arundhati Roy and Githa Hariharan, the lack of a

tharawaad lineage is interpreted as only preventing Roy from the conditioning that a middle

class Indian girl would have had, (30) it can be argued that the implications of not having a

tharawaad lineage could be twofold. While on the one hand it meant a sort of social ostracism,

on the other it could be potentially liberating where the patriarchal conventions associated with

the tharawaad and its forceful structures were not imposed on her. Not surprisingly at the age of

sixteen she was to leave home to study architecture in Delhi, where she lives now. Roy's

mother's exemplary stand to challenge such patriarchal conventions not only through her act of

marriage outside her community, its defiance later on in living with the stigma of a divorced

woman, but even through disputing the inheritance claims for women arguably helped shape the perspectives of Arundhati Roy. Thus Roy's writings, both fiction as well as nonfiction

concentrate on that which has habitually been ignored, marginalized or even taken for granted. I 5 turn now to her fiction which brought the first ever Booker prize to an Indian woman and the foremost to a non-expatriate Indian.

The narrative in The God of Small Things revolves around both an understanding of the marginalization of women, Dalits (untouchables), and children and an attempt to recuperate their voices. The novel, among other issues, treats the love affair between an untouchable carpenter,

Velutha, and an upper-class Christian woman, Ammu. In their tragic love story, the reader discerns the operations of rigid kinship and societal structures where Velutha's torture and death by the police in the novel become symptomatic of the treatment meted out to these non-people.

While Ammu survives the physical ordeal and death for belonging to the upper class, the injustice perpetrated against Velutha becomes one of the moral high grounds to defend in the novel as he is doubly and falsely accused of having killed Sophie Mol and raping Ammu.

Navarro-Tejero in Gender and Caste in the Anglophone-Indian Novels ofArundhati Roy and

Githa Hariharan points out astutely that Ammu is not only mistreated as part of the hierarchical kinship structures as a daughter by Pappachi, as a sister by the opportunistic and hypocritical

Chacko, and as a wife by Baba (66), she is also utterly humiliated as part of the societal attitude towards women in general by Inspector Mathew as he taps her breasts and calls her a veshya (a woman of loose character). The mistreatment meted to Ammu's two children, Estha and Rahel, is quite Dickensian in context where the extreme vulnerability and innocence associated with their age is exploited by people around them. The children are manipulated into talking against

Velutha at the police station, their innocence carefully maneuvered to yield desired results. At the same time Estha's encounter with the sexually perverted Orangedrink Lemondrink Man at

Abhilash Talkies not only confounds and perplexes him but the incident leaves him a silent man for the rest of his life. Roy's recentering of the marginalized characters—the children, the 6 untouchables, the women—in her narrative not only gestures towards the subjugation which these characters undergo it also becomes an alternative projection of values and ethics in times of similar crises. The idea of a "recentering on the individual" is voiced by Emilienne Baneth-

Nouailhetas in her essay, "Committed Writing, Committed Writer?" where she also discusses questions of "individual freedom" and "subject's agency" (98, 102). According to Baneth-

Nouailhetas, Roy's act of focusing on the small and the ordinary as opposed to the bigness of history lends a "remarkable ideological continuity" to her work of fiction and her essays (95).

Roy's act of recuperating these oppressed voices effectively becomes an act of resistance initiated by the author to understand the ensemble of social relations which constitute these individuals. A similar emphasis is discernible in her nonfiction prose as well.

The focus on the small in the title of the novel points towards a larger politics of Roy's concentration on the small or even the smallest in order to understand the big. Fred Dallmayr in

"But on A Quiet Day" comments that Roy's concern with the small and ordinary lives is in fact an inversion of the general cultural preoccupation with bigness or greatness. Anuradha

Dingwaney Needham in "The Small Voice of History in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small

Things" analyzes Roy's deployment of the small—that is subordinated or subaltern subjects—to be integral to Roy's critique of "dominant existing social and political arrangements and modes of writing" (371). Pranav Jani in "Beyond 'Anticommunism': The Progressive Politics of The

God of Small Things" writes of how "Against the histories and actions of states and ruling elites,

Roy seeks to recover the stories of those who, like Velutha, are forced to wipe away even the traces of their own footprints" (53).Or even when Roy writes about India's nuclear bombs, dams, about corporate globalization, neo-fascism and terrorism, at a very elementary level her writings deal with the brutal inequalities faced by an ordinary person today—the ordinary person for 7 whom "peace is a daily battle for food and shelter and dignity" {Checkbook 110). The touchstone for her methodology is customarily the affected, the afflicted individual who, when pitted against the bigness of the politics of power, is invariably the subject matter of her writings. In many ways, such a move constitutes the framework of dissent in her works. However, David Jefferess in his essay, "The Limits of Dissent: Arundhati Roy and the Struggle Against the Narmada

Dams" points out "limitations of dissent as a mode of politics" in Roy's nonfiction prose (158).

He argues that Roy's stories of conflict limit the conflict to dissent which is limiting in its real aim of social and political transformations desired from it. In other words, Jefferess points out that "there are some limitations of dissent as a rhetoric and rallying point of the struggle for global justice" (159).

As Miriam Nandi points out in her entry on Arundhati Roy in The Literary Encyclopedia one of "Roy's most important concerns is the marginalization of the lower castes in rural India"

(np). This concern has certainly translated well into her nonfiction activist prose where her intention of reevaluating her politics and subject has fore-grounded her preoccupation with the marginalized individual. Roy's nonfiction engages with the individual, one who is variously manipulated, marginalized, vilified, and oppressed by the state and the elites. Roy's tryst with nonfiction prose has been written about and commented on by several critics. Susan Comfort's essay, "How to Tell a Story to Change the World: Arundhati Roy, Globalization, and

Environmental Feminism" engages with Roy's "articles and speeches" to make the claim that

Roy's work can be assessed as her search "for an appropriate storytelling technique to address what are emerging as new conditions of hegemony and counter-hegemony in a neoliberal capitalist era that is fast becoming a new imperial age" (118, 137). Though Comfort does not specifically argue from a genre perspective, she does refer to Roy's use of nonfiction as enabling her critique of neoliberal imperatives.

Roy and the Genre of Nonfiction Prose

To locate Roy's nonfiction prose writings as originating from the Indian tradition of moral essay writing can be a reductive task since the style and content of Roy's essays constantly defy an easy conflation with any traditions of essay writing. However, some similarities, like the creation of a readership and a public forum, can be made between the writings of the nineteenth century essayists Bharatendu Harishchandra, Balmukund Gupt, and Arundhati Roy. Since these essayists propagated a particular religious and national identity with their use of Hindi language in their essays, the similarities with Roy stop there.

The origins of the essay in Indian writing can be traced back to the nineteenth-century writings of periodicals and newspapers which made their appearance in Calcutta.3 In her book,

The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harishchandra and Nineteenth-Century

Banaras, Vasudha Dalmia argues that from being a mere summary of events, the essay written in

Hindi very quickly developed into a literary form, flexible enough to cover a wide range of issues—from colonization to social issues of the day like foeticide, the status of women, widow remarriage and so on (315). Dalmia's argument centers on examining how the development of the periodicals in Hindi created "the collective identity of the emergent Hindu middle class" and simultaneously "emerged as a vital cultural and political forum" (225). Dalmia writes that what is novel in the moral essay writing of the nineteenth century is "the emotional but not pathos- ridden language, and the skill with which a local incident is placed within a larger issue, which is essentially political and seen as national" (322). According to Dalmia, the creation of a public sphere where issues of social importance could be discussed, deliberated, and written about was one of the most significant contributions of the nineteenth-century development of prose. On

similar grounds, Roy's contribution to literary studies can best be assessed in her contribution to

writing nonfictional prose that places local issues within a larger context and also in linking the

literary sphere to the wider public one.

While the essay has always been subjective in form, content to exhibit the authors'

personal feelings, the modern journalistic essay has taken an increasingly polemical content to

impact wider social issues. In the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to the The Origin of German

Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin, like Georg Lukacs before him and Theodor Adorno after him,

understands the essay as speculative, philosophical, and critical. He comments on the usefulness

of the digressiveness and fragmentariness of the essay but also notices its purposeful structure.

Adorno, in turn, developed Benjamin's ideas into a full theory of the form of the modern essay

where its fragmentary and experimental form would be polemical in intent. The modern journalistic essay has been increasingly deployed to exhibit politics in everything from the

mistreatment of land, and body to issues of language, race, and ethnicity. It is not written as a

product of isolation anymore; rather, the self of the writer which emerges here, is one which is

grounded in community: a self which resonates in a dialogue with the others.

Ken Hyland in "Crossing the Boundaries of Genre Studies: Comments by Experts"

proposes that genres exist because of grouping similar texts together. Hyland's view finds favor

with Brian Paltridge's notion of a prototype articulated in "Working With Genre: A Pragmatic

Perspective" where he explains that "people categorize items and concepts in keeping with a

prototypical image they build in their mind of what it is that represents the item or concept in

question" (394). While their works explain the process of canonization of certain literary genres,

they fail to provide an answer as to why certain genres are preferred over others. The thesis 10

contends that both fiction and nonfiction are techniques of storytelling, and the purposes to which writers can put their art—for Roy, nonfiction is primarily about reiterating or adding one's voice to the others—addresses a different rhetorical concern than creative ends of fiction.

Writers, therefore, know which genre to deploy in each situation. Such an analysis finds favor with Anis Bawarshi's views who points out in "Crossing the Boundaries of Genre Studies:

Comments by Experts" that how writers discover what they want to say, how they say it, and what content to include within particular rhetorical situations is dependent on the writers' knowledge of the genre (244).

Jefferess, commenting on Roy's deployment of nonfiction prose, favors the view that her nonfiction prose delves into addressing the audience directly and personally, something which

does not occur in traditional academic writing ("The Limits of Dissent" 164). Additionally, he proposes that Roy's storytelling technique "humanizes abstract statistics"—a view which echoes

Said's theories of humanism (164). Theories of humanism suggested by Said are valuable to

comprehend such affiliation on the part of the writer-intellectual towards the oppressed. Said's

critique of Orientalist representation helps him define representation and humanism as interminably related to each other—a link of which the modern day writer-intellectual needs to be aware. Representation of the other if not practiced in a humanistic manner ends up perpetrating the mistakes of controlling and silencing the other which Said accuses Orientalism of having perpetuated a century or so ago (Orientalism 60, 208). Said's contribution to literary studies in general and postcolonial studies in particular has been a matter of debate and even contestation; however, the consistency in his work has constantly addressed issues related to the role of the intellectual today. 11

Edward Said

As pointed out by E. San Juan Jr. in Beyond Postcolonial Theory, an elision of the facts

of exploitation across the categories of race, gender, and class has taken postcolonial theory

away from questions of agency and intentionality of transformative practice (7). What seems to

be true as a recent aspect in postcolonial theory also seems equally plausible in the study of

humanities in general. Thus, arguably, the category of the individual stands in need of

reclamation. In Said's writings one discerns a similar emphasis on individual responsibility borne out of human action and agency. Said terms this humanism, where the focus on the

"individual particular" and its agency to work for "ideals of justice and equality" for all

individuals becomes the "useable praxis" for intellectuals and academics (HDC 80, 10, 6). The

origins of Saidian humanism can be located within his criticism of the embrace of literary theory

in the American literary scene from the late twentieth century. He writes that even though "The

intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were .. .insurrectionary.. .From being a bold

interventionary movement across lines of specialization, American literary theory of the late

seventies had retreated into the labyrinth of 'textuality,'" —which he describes as the "somewhat

mystical and disinfected subject matter of literary theory." {The World, the Text and the Critic 3).

Textuality, for him, becomes the exact antithesis and displacement of history with the result that

as it is practiced in the American academy today, "literary theory has for the most part isolated

textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical senses that made it possible and render

it intelligible as the result of human work" {The World, the Text and the Critic 4). Coupled with

the idea of critical noninterference, the philosophy of pure textuality—writing and producing

texts—has resulted in divorcing social realities from critical practice. 12

As an antidote to the literary and critical practice of "noninterference in the affairs of the

everyday world" ("Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Communities'" 155), Said posits his humanism, not as an original concept as Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan argues, but as a particular project that he wants to salvage at a particular point in history ("An Intellectual

Portrait of Edward Said's Humanism, Criticism, and Politics" 32). In other words,

Radhakrishnan urges the understanding that it is important to acknowledge why Said comes back to humanism. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism and his "Preface to Orientalism," Said

answers the question as to why humanism is important to this society at this time. According to him, academic humanities "had for years represented an unpolitical, unworldly, and oblivious attitude to the present.. .extolling the virtues of the past, the untouchability of the canon, and the

superiority of'how we used to do it' approach." For Said, "The humanities became harmless as well as powerless to affect anyone or anything" (14). Displeased by the trajectory of the humanities, Said suggests humanism as a critical practice that enables academics to connect their

scholarly principles to the world in which they live as citizens (HDC 6). In the process of widening the academic horizon of humanism, Said proposes humanism as a "worldly practice" that "can move beyond and inhabit more than just the original privacy of the writer or the relatively private space of the classroom" (HDC 75). In this regard, Emily Apter remarks that

Saidian humanism adhered to emancipatory ideals even as it embraced values of "individual freedom, universal human rights, anti-imperialism, release from economic dependency, and self- determination for disenfranchised people" ("Saidian Humanism" 36-7).

In many ways Roy too, like Said, advocates the link between a writer's or academic's writing practice, style, and worldly, transformative issues. Although Roy and Said share certain premises and goals, namely, the power of individual efforts to determine systems of language, 13 belief in resistance and agency, and an articulation of the vocation of the writer and academic as intellectual, the act and style of recentering the individual that Roy offers affirms several precepts of Said's humanism. This thesis analyzes the ways in which Roy recenters the individual in her nonfiction prose and how an engagement with Said's theories leads to a conception and redefinition of humanism along with reclamation of centrality for the genre.

On the other hand, Said's contention with and response to earlier conceptions of the word enable him to articulate some of the inadequacies present in understanding the full scope and meaning of the word humanism. Because Said presents his humanism as a worldly practice that aims for the transformation of real lives, it holds special relevance for postcolonial societies which are still in a position of subordination and economic inequality vis-a-vis countries of

Europe and North America (HDC 2). He draws affinities between his practice of humanism and democracy understood as the inclusion of the marginalized in its domain. His democratic humanism attempts to bridge the gap between the sacrosanct enclave of academic and literary humanism on the one hand and the worldly sphere which this humanist practice seeks to transform, on the other hand. In the postcolonial context and with reference to Roy's nonfiction prose, it can be argued that Said's democratic humanism translates into an articulation of liberation for the oppressed and the marginalized. With its key emphasis on participatory and democratic notions, it can be argued that Said's humanism makes an ethical imperative of democracy and equal participation for all.

Saidian Humanism

The word humanism, much debated and discussed both in the past and even today, provides the primary framework for understanding the thematic unity in the works of Said.

While humanism has been a continual referent in philosophy, anthropology, literature and 14

cultural studies, the differing meanings the term has evoked makes it nothing short of being

controversial today. From being deployed during the Renaissance to denote scholastic learning to bourgeois humanism to the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, where it was associated with reason and freedom of thought to finally the twentieth century where its amorphous nature has diluted the significance and even its usage, the term has had varying fortunes as if to say.

Tony Davies concurs that humanism "is a word with a very complex history and an unusually wide range of possible meanings and contexts" {Humanism 2) which make it virtually impossible

to offer a single definition of the word today. He points out how each humanism has "its

distinctive historical curve, its particular discursive poetics, and its own problematic scansion of

the human" (131). Davies also points out that all humanisms until now have been associated with one form of imperialism or the other where they speak of the human in the accents of a

class, a sex, or a race. Said suggests that a critique of humanism with a view to seeing its

insurgent possibilities opens the way for a politics that is just and emancipatory, and enables a

cosmopolitan humanism. The universal applicability of humanism employed by Said critiques the sectarian emphasis on and a preference for a particular race, class, or religion. Therefore, and understandably so, Said employs humanism in a bid to rid it of its negative connotations even as his democratic humanism can be seen as initiating a break with traditional notions of humanism.

Said invokes humanism as a practice that responds to the worldly situations in the context of contemporary injustice and suffering. In turn, when he redefines humanism as "participatory citizenship," or "as a form of disclosure," or as a "worldly practice," or even as resistance, the striking similarities of such concerns with Roy's writings become apparent (HDC 22, 74, 75).

Roy, for her part, believes in writing to be a form of disclosure that communicates with urgency of what is happening in the world. Additionally, Said radically revises what the humanist 15

tradition has considered to be human and makes of humanism a mode of universal inquiry into

all that poses a challenge to human dignity, freedom, and agency. His celebration of the ethical universal as a prescriptive boundary for humanism makes sure that it does not deny the

variability of human needs and in turn becomes truly universal. In suggesting these to be the

norm of humanistic endeavors, Said makes humanism relevant to postcolonial studies, especially when the latter deals with these questions from imperial, racist, and nationalist perspectives.

Therefore, from the standpoint of postcolonial studies, universal humanism becomes a

critical yardstick by which to constantly measure and re-evaluate the liberating potential of the

field enumerated in some of the concerns cited above. R. Radhakrishnan in History, the Human,

and the World Between rightly explains that in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, considered

to be his final statement on humanism, Said is "deprofessionalizing, de-academizing, and

laicizing the term humanism. He is seeking more kinship with a nontechnical, nonhumanities person on the street than with a philosopher to whom humanism is actually 'humanism.'" (138).

Said's inflection with the understanding of humanism has had its sympathizers as well as critics.

Among numerous other critics, William Spanos in The Legacy of Edward Said also treats the

question of Said's humanism (also called as "historicist philology" or "secular criticism") vis-a­

vis the poststructuralists in considerable detail. Instead of a general coercive tendency to view

Saidian humanism and poststructuralist theory in a binary opposition, Spanos argues that poststructuralist criticism—signified for him primarily in the writings of Michel Foucault,

Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida—is in fact radically worldly (7). He critiques Said for attempting to define humanism by avoiding its genealogy and

symptomatically putting it into a binary opposition with poststructuralism that renders its meaning ambivalent (177). In "Criticism Between Culture and System," Said opposes the works 16

of Derrida and Foucualt mainly on three counts: for their focus on textuality, their annulling the possibility of human agency, and their attendant political quietism (The World, the Text and the

Critic 214, 186). As a result, his discontent with the works of Derrida and Foucault leads him to

celebrate humanism and the human individual in his work as sites of creating human history and

agency.

According to Said, the practice of humanism begins in the individual particular, rests on

individual effort, but ironically is meant to transcend the individual towards a more democratic,

collective, and participatory citizenship for all people across the globe. Saree Makdisi in "Said,

Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation" writes that Said "conceived humanity as a

collective, absorptive, embracing, heterogeneous, and infinitely open-ended striving rather than

the violent, fractured, binary conception of humanity underlying European imperialism" (89).

Makdisi implicitly refers to Saidian humanism as a critique of the logic of the binaries of

European imperialism and Zionism. Furthermore, Said locates his humanistic practice within the universalism of values of justice, equality, and freedom for all. Roy summarizes the universal

applicability of such values when she writes that "If it is justice we want, it must be justice and

equal rights for all—not only for special interest groups with special interest prejudices. That is nonnegotiable." (An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire 117). For her, the belief in justice,

freedom, and dignity needs to be made common cause for resistance movements to take effect.

Hence discussions of collective resistance, "planetary humanism" as suggested by Paul Gilroy in

Postcolonial Melancholia, ideas of universals of justice and equality emerge as counter- hegemonic solutions to the problems of oppression with which the word humanism was

associated during the Enlightenment period. Said contends that in the re-evaluation of American 17 literary humanism lies the moment of assessing the rigidity of genres as well. He writes in

Humanism and Democratic Criticism that:

Neither the novel, nor drama, according to the rigid terms of this system had very much

to do with the specific historical, political, and economic circumstances that also enabled

their rising. The thought that other genres can exist or do exist never occurred to the

American literary critics of the early twentieth century which through its complicity

perpetuated a rigidity of genres in the academy. (39)

Thus, for Said, the rigidity of genres is to be understood as part of the insularity of the literary academy which tacitly declared that because literature had nothing to do with contemporary history, politics, and economy of the sordid world, preference for certain genres as representative of such enclave was advanced over others in a very systematic way. Certainly, Said's exposition of the association between humanism and genre in the American academy gestures towards the politics of appropriation of one genre over another in the writings of Roy.

An Overview of the Chapters

The following chapters will examine how Arundhati Roy's nonfiction prose writings, namely, her essays, interviews, public speeches, and lectures recentering the marginalized individual contend with Edward Said's theories on humanism and how her efforts manage to reinstate the status of literature for these art forms. The present study has been organized into three chapters which follow the logic of sequence emanating from the idea that the individual who had been decentered theoretically needs to be reinstated, his/her agency restored by the assistance of the public intellectual, and finally centers oh an analysis as to what all this bodes for the future of postcolonial theory and studies today. 18

The first chapter, on the individual, attempts to understand the individual as part of the poststructuralist assault on its sovereignty and its simultaneous recentering amid debates of universalism. This chapter examines Roy's essays namely, Power Politics, "The Greater

Common Good," "The End of Imagination," The Cost of Living, The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, "The Collateral Damage of Breaking News," and "The Ladies Have Feelings, So" to present the theme of recentering the individual. The individual, understood as part of the collective encourages theoretical investigation of the concept of the universal which implies the universal applicability of ideas of justice and equality. Roy's method is best understood through

Said's humanism, which begins in a realization of dignity of the individual particular (HDC 80) and then moves to an extension of this dignity to all individuals in a universal manner. However, the idea of justice and equal rights for all never loses sight of the local and the particular situations—which best captures the spirit of universal humanism.

Representation of the individual but within Said's arguments that favor universalism forms the cornerstone of chapter two. It is argued that Said effectively reworks the idea of universalism and makes it a prerequisite for his humanism. Thus humanism for all and everyone alike translates into a writer's non-discriminatory affiliation with all those who are marginalized, constituting the basis of a truly all-inclusive universalism. Roy's essays, "Power Politics," "The

Greater Common Good," "Listening to Grasshoppers-Genocide, Denial and Celebration," "The

Reincarnation of Rumplestiltskin," "Peace?...," "The Road to Harsud," "The End of

Imagination" "Darkness Passed...," "The Great Indian Rape-Trick I," "The Great Indian Rape-

Trick II," "Democracy," and "Summer Games with Nuclear Bombs," are considered in detail here primarily for their attempts at not representing the individual. 19

The works of Roy and Said critique the universalism of Enlightenment where the interests of a small group were made to stand for the interests of all humanity and subsequently justified conquest and imperialism in that same vein. Kwame Anthony Appiah in In My Father's

House alerts us to the association between universalism and Eurocentrism where he argues that those who oppose universalism, in real terms, object to "Eurocentric hegemony posing as universalism" (58). Both Said and Roy, likewise, object to this false universalism of the

Eurocentric model where Europe and its interests spuriously stood as an alibi for entire humanity and instead, they propose a universalism which is aware of local differences and realities.

When Said makes of humanism a politically enabling entity it, as if to say, finds favor with Roy, who, it can be argued shares several of her assumptions with him. While Said remained suspicious of any totalizing interpretations or formulaic proposals, he endorsed universalism as part of his realist politics. Said returns to humanism despite its many failures and

Eurocentric assumptions because, according to Radhakrishnan, Said's ultimate advocacy of humanism despite its problematic record and genealogy is in fact diagnostic of his immense confidence that "by sheer intensity and density of individual critical consciousness and human agency, systemic, historical, epistemological forms of negative baggage can be divested and shed" {History, the Human, and the World Between 23). According to Radhakrishnan, the intellectual's critical consciousness and agency are instrumental in effecting change. The proposed objective of the chapter is to argue from the basic premise that since individual agency is central to Saidian humanism, universalizing such a version of humanism embraces all people in a democratic manner. When Roy recenters the individual through her nonfiction prose, she in effect highlights the universal. 20

Roy's interviews and lectures trace the severe societal marginalization of the religious and caste minorities and their subsequent resistance and attainment of agency. Chapter three focuses on Roy's interviews and public lectures to highlight issues of representation, the writer- intellectual, and the attendant questions of resistance and agency. In this respect, I provide a re­ reading of Said's Orientalism vis-a-vis some of Roy's interviews and lectures, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, "The Ladies Have Feeling

So...," "Come September," "Shall We Leave it to the Experts?" "Scimitars in the Sun," "Seize the Time," and "Finding Justice with Arundhati Roy," subsequently published as chapters and books, to argue for the role of the writer-intellectual in representing the marginalized individual.

In Orientalism, Said objects to Orientalist representations of natives on the ground that such representations tended to contain, control, and dehumanize the Oriental who were invariably excluded from such narratives. Additionally, such representation existed as an expert's domain where the Orientalist attempted to explain and interpret the Orient for his compatriots and therefore the Orientalist remained outside such representation. As a corrective to this dehumanizing representation of the other, Said proposes universal humanism as a critical practice which treats of the marginalized other in human terms. I argue that Roy's use of nonfiction prose favors intellectual activity that represents the other, but at the same time does not seek to contain, limit, or dehumanize the other. Consequently, when Roy deploys nonfiction prose as a process of thinking "together with people," she acts a Saidian humanist; one who manages to bridge the unbreachable gulf between those representing and the ones being represented {Checkbook 98). I contend that Roy's "speaking with" favors a mode of representation that goes beyond the conventional notion of representation of the marginalized. 21

Using Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom, Edward Said's Humanism and

Democratic Criticism, and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I contend that Roy's representation of the marginalized leads to a relationship of open dialogue and "reflective participation" with the marginalized (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed 65). Based on an understanding of an equal and participative relationship between the intellectual and the ones being represented, I argue that the intellectual helps create more opportunities of freedom and liberation from forces of neoliberalism and corporate globalization. The intellectual's vocation to offer resistance to such forces forms the core of the next section.

The discussion on resistance ranges from its Gandhian understanding, where it relies on the goodwill and a change of heart and perception of the enemy, to Said's reconciliation, to ultimately privilege Roy's opposition. I argue that while Roy is indebted to Gandhi for the spirit of nonviolence in her works, she shares with Said the imperative to listen to the other.

I argue that questions of resistance and agency leading to concrete action of mass resistance movements are probably better addressed not as part of the private, solitary act of writing fiction, but as a process of thinking with others through the interview, the lecture, and the public speech. While Said's interviews titled, Power, Politics, and Culture too shed some light on the genre's efficacy in engaged participation for intellectuals, his views and modes of resistance articulated primarily as a mode of reconciliation in Culture and Imperialism differ from Roy's approach of confrontation. The chapter argues that Roy's set of interviews, namely,

The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, "Scimitars in the Sun," "Dissent Has to be Localized," and "Salon Interview," demonstrate the theorization of resistance as confrontation and illustrate a movement towards the achievement of change and agency by individuals. Such a view of resistance holds special relevance for postcolonial theory which, according to E. San Juan Jr., 22

"mystifies the political/ideological effects of Western postmodernist hegemony and prevents change" {BeyondPostcolonial Theory 22).

The conclusion to the dissertation argues that Roy's act of recentering the individual has close affiliations with Said's humanism and that together they force a revaluation of the relevance of postcolonial studies for anti-colonial theory. Such a move invokes Robert Young's designation of postcolonial criticism as a "form of activist writing that looks back to the political commitments of the anti-colonial liberation movements and draws inspiration from them"

(Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction 10). Even though postcolonial studies concentrate on traditional subaltern groups from newly independent countries, there rarely has been an examination of the field from a genre perspective. This project, therefore, argues for the inclusion of so-called alternative genres into the rubric of postcolonial studies, based on Roy's re-contextualization of Said's theories on humanism, resistance, and the writer-intellectual.

Roy's debates and interventions on questions concerning the individual, resistance, agency, rights, and to an extent, genre are pressing postcolonial concerns. Carving out and devising resistive strategies in the face of mounting threats from corporate globalization and its attendant perils have become urgent matters because they affect millions of people on a daily basis. Thus articulating resistance through essays, interviews, lectures, and public speeches becomes one seminal task of writer-intellectuals whose humanism impels them to these acts. Such an agenda is compatible with postcolonial studies and politics as it resists all forms of exploitation in a bid to restore agency and dignity to the exploited. Additionally, from a literary perspective, these alternative genres can now be better appreciated for their aesthetic value apart from valuing them primarily as tools of subversion. 23

Notes:

1. Hereafter referred to as HDC.

2. Hereafter referred to as Checkbook.

3. According to Vasudha Dalmia, "The National Identity of the Hindus," the first literary

journal in Hindi, the Kavivachansudha, appeared in 1868. The first newspaper in Hindi,

the Banaras Akhbar, appeared in 1845 in Benaras.

4. For a detailed analysis of the postcolonial shift away from historical processes, see Benita

Parry, "The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies." 24

I

Recentering the Individual

Arundhati Roy's nonfiction prose constantly recenters the individual even as her works

manage to both reinstate and reinvent the use of nonfiction prose in literature. This project argues

for Roy's unique style of focusing on the individual when she discusses national and

international systemic issues in her essays, interviews, and lectures. Roy's recentering of the

individual is no mere anthropocentric concern; rather it points towards a social concern of humanistic solidarity with other members of the community. In voicing her concern for the

individual when forces of corporate globalization, their reincarnation in varied but interrelated

forms of neo-liberalism, neo-fascism, and neo-imperialism have resurfaced, Roy makes an

argument for the dignity and worth of each individual which these forces have consciously

sidelined. In other words, her recourse to the small, the individual, is a political and stylistic move which allows her to focus on the smallest unit of humanity, the human being. This recentering of the marginalized individual for Roy translates into the conception of the human being as an agent; one who can resist and act, and in turn become responsible for one's actions.

And yet an engagement with Michel Foucault's works reveals how his archaeology displaced the human subject from the central role it had played in the humanism of the eighteenth century.

Foucault, in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, by according primacy to

discursive formations and linguistic structures, questions individual autonomy, the category of

intention, and most importantly the search for universal truths, and ultimately he ends up negating human action and agency (The Archaeology of Knowledge 56).

In Roy's nonfiction prose and Said's writings on humanism the emphasis on the

individual translates into the statement that human beings make, determine, and create systems 25 and not the other way around as apparently being suggested by Foucault. In fact, Said's own disenchantment with Foucault's works later on was impelled by their anti-humanist stance.

Foucault's anti-humanism, best understood as the primacy accorded to language over human action and intent leads him to decry the ability of human beings to alter events and processes.

Individual responsibility and individual statements or the chances that individual authors can make individual statements have all been diluted with the proclamation of the "death of the author" by Roland Barthes and more recently and strongly by Michel Foucault. This chapter analyzes how and why Arundhati Roy recenters the individual in her nonfiction prose and how an engagement with Edward Said's theories leads to a conception and revaluation of humanism along with reclamation of centrality for the genre.

Most importantly for Roy, realizing human agency and choosing to deploy nonfiction as her narrative style to recenter the marginalized individual articulates a politics of resistance for the marginalized individual in addition to disrupting the prescriptive boundaries of the literary canon. Essentially, what this means is that whereas literary studies have typically valorized traditional art forms such as the novel, drama, and poetry often overlooking the importance of nonfiction, this project insists that when nonfiction prioritizes the concerns of the individual in an urgent political manner such a move manages to reclaim the status of literature for the genre of nonfiction.

Can Roy's writings be considered under the rubric of humanism provided by Said or do they challenge his conception of humanism to push the boundaries further to fathom a new understanding of the link between the individual, the genre of nonfiction, and humanism? On the other hand Said's contention with and response to earlier conceptions of the word enable him to articulate some of the inadequacies present in understanding the full scope and meaning of 26 humanism. Because Said presents his humanism as a "critique.. .in search of freedom, enlightenment, more agency," and a practice offering alternatives to the "dehumanizing forces of globalization, neoliberal values, economic greed (euphemistically called the free market), as well as imperialist ambition," it holds special relevance for postcolonial societies which are still in a position of subordination and economic inequality vis-a-vis countries of Europe and North

America (HDC, 75, 71). His democratic humanism attempts to bridge the gap between the sacrosanct enclave of academic and literary humanism on the one hand and the worldly sphere which this humanist practice seeks to transform on the other hand. This project takes a step further to argue for the relevance of such a move for postcolonial studies which too is embroiled in somewhat similar issues of the individual, resistance, and agency. How does Roy's preference for a particular genre implicate postcolonial studies and theory? Also, does Roy's move force a reevaluation within postcolonial theory of the nearly forgotten category of the individual?

According to Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas the "link between Roy's aesthetics of the appreciation of the small and the minute in her novel and contemporary events is ... political"

("Committed Writing, Committed Writer?" 97). It is instructive to be reminded that ever since the publication of her novel, The God of Small Things in 1997, Roy has published just one piece of fiction to date—a short story, "The Briefing" which deals with issues of climate change and disastrous effects of corporate globalization. Roy does not view this vast gap in writing fiction as an aberration; instead she looks at people in disbelief who in these times of war and destruction ask her if she is writing another book of fiction. Admittedly for Roy, the decision to write nonfiction is based on using "language as a weapon" ("And a Fleece That's as White as Snow"

1). By constantly addressing the "daily grind of injustice" through her repeated use of nonfiction, 27

Roy enables a project of continuous public conversation between citizens and the State (An

Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire 21).

As a writer, Roy asserts her right to write nonfiction prose as it enables her to take sides, to take a position and argue to solicit support for that position ("The Ladies Have Feelings, So"

196 ). Roy acknowledges that writing nonfiction is about using language as a weapon where as a writer one must be aware of the mechanics of using that weapon wisely and diligently. She argues that while fiction and nonfiction are both modes of representation, nonfiction is the visible manifestation of a lot of pent-up anger where the author has observed constant mocking of individual rights and liberty. Through her unique style of writing, telling politics like a story,

Roy suggests that such individuals can acquire agency by being a part of the collective of resistance movements to effect real transformation to their material conditions. Thus, questions of inequality of power and control over resources and peoples' lives, also mentioned partially in studies from ecocritical perspectives, and stated in an urgent manner today by literary critics such as Barbara Epstein in "Radical Democracy and Cultural Politics: What About Class? What

About Political Power?" and Graham Huggan's "'Greening' Postcolonialism: Ecocritical

Perspectives," are neither elided nor overlooked in Roy's writings. Through her nonfictional writings, Roy speaks to those postcolonial literary writers and critics who have tended to shy away from environmental issues. In fact, any dismissal of the centrality of environmental issues to postcolonial studies is disproved by the numerous indigenous environmental movements currently gaining ground across the globe. For instance, in India, in the so-called Seed

Satyagraha, 200,000 farmers protested against transnational efforts to prevent control the reproduction of seeds by traditional farmers. Even as these movements stress the ecological 28 imperative, they simultaneously affirm each individual life as dependent on and coterminous with the environment.

On the other hand, the individual as a category of inquiry was partially popularized through Said's efforts at articulating the marginalized perspectives in his elaboration of humanism. Said finds humanism to be erroneously enmeshed in a Darwinian logic that some people deserve ignorance, poverty, ill health, and backwardness as dictated by the free market

(HDC 22). This logic led to natural justification and consequent marginalization of the concerned individuals as well as groups. Thus for him these marginalized individuals or groups need to be rescued from what was being done to them in the name of humanistic education. As a result,

Said redefines and resituates humanism within a new context of universalism and minority consciousness where marginalized perspectives are prioritized and this in turn implies a recognition that makes all claims of a universal nature to be particular claims. On the other hand,

Roy too arrives at the marginalized individual through her critique of the undemocratic and centralized processes of decision-making that impacts these individuals profoundly. Roy discovered that by telling stories of dispossession focused on individual suffering she was initiating a process of intervention on behalf of ordinary citizens (Checkbook 43-44). Thus both

Said and Roy, one through redefining humanism and the other through writing stories of loss and dispossession, variously recenter the concerns of the individual.

One of the positive consequences of this recentering of the individual is what E. San Juan

Jr. in a different context calls the recovery of "the histories of peoples with their distinctive trajectories of survival and achievement" (Beyond Postcolonial Theory 6). Such a recovery with distinct experiences of survival and achievement becomes the next step forward in the quest for solidarity and resistance across the globe—an idea which is powerfully expressed in Roy's 29 writings. Within the postcolonial context, recentering of the individual has a particularly humanizing context. Linda Tuhiwai Smith's impressive study on indigenous peoples

Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples treats colonization primarily as a dehumanizing process which considered indigenous people as not fully human or not human at all. She writes how some indigenous peoples were hunted and killed like vermin, others rounded up and put in reserves like creatures to be broken, branded and put together—all processes of dehumanizing the individual (26). Smith contends that the struggle to assert and reclaim humanity has been a consistent threat of anti-colonial struggles which she argues "have been

framed within the wider discourse of humanism, the appeal to human 'rights', the notion of a universal human subject, and the connections between being human and being capable of

creating history, knowledge, and society," (26) in other words, resisting and acquiring agency.

For Smith, while this assertion of humanity has to be seen within the anti-colonial analysis of imperialism and its dehumanizing imperatives, for Roy the modern day avatars of imperialism— corporate globalization, neoliberalism, and neo-fascism—are equally or more dehumanizing in intent and action. Roy's writings about the Adivasis, the Dalits, religious minorities and so on are efforts to make them agents in the making of their own history. When Smith writes that "writing is part of theorizing and writing is part of history" (29) she concurs with Roy's belief that in their struggle for self-determination people in the Third World must tell their own stories in their own ways and for their own purposes.

This brings us to the question of the modes of representation and the role of intellectuals.

Roy's articulation about the persona of the writer as an intellectual who is involved because of his/her concern for the other, affirms her belief in the social import of writing; it helps one connect to the world and is not intended to take one away from it. However, the politics of what 30

Roy does to the representation of the individual, the genre, and to literary studies can be described as nothing short of revolutionary in many ways. Nagesh Rao points out that "in the context of the multicultural classroom, the globalizing of dissent provoked by Roy's essays represents a return of the repressed" ("The Politics of Genre and the Rhetoric of Radical

Cosmopolitanism; Or Who's Afraid of Arundhati Roy?" 173), an insurrectionary tactic which uniquely combines the use of a particular genre with the repressed individual. Roy manages to recenter the repressed, the marginalized individual against the antihumanist tendencies of the widely prevalent poststructuralist theoretical impulses of discourse and systems and also manages to force a serious academic reconsideration of the fourth genre, which according to Rao is severely circumscribed and suffering from neglect for various reasons (160-61).

Arundhati Roy and Genre

Anis Bawarshi's "The Genre Function" is particularly instructive here in helping us understand "the role that genre plays in the constitution not only of texts but of their contexts, including the identities of those who write them and those who are represented within them"

(336). In other words, according to Bawarshi, not only do we as readers recognize Or judge an activity by the choice of genre, in fact writers are equally constituted by the genres they choose to write in. Bawarshi argues that genre "helps shape and enable our social actions by rhetorically constituting the way we recognize the situations within which we function" (340). Heather

Dubrow in Genre also suggests that genre is like a social code of behavior established between the reader and the author (2), a kind of "generic contract" (31) that stabilizes and enables interpretation. Effectively, genre selection by the authors not only determines what subject they will represent, instead the identities of these authors are also shaped by that choice. Such a view corrects the commonplace notion that genres are as if passive classificatory modules which 31 writers employ to represent their ideas. Instead, if genres are understood to shape and influence writers' identities then the choice of one genre over another potentially dictates the choice of subject matter of representation as well. However, what really concerns us here is the marginalization of the genre of nonfiction in literary studies. While this thesis argues that categorization of literary texts into different genres is a significant classificatory exercise it also claims that over the years the genre of nonfiction has been marginalized. Contesting the primacy of the literary triad of novel, poetry, and drama is crucial in reconceptualizing the pedagogic significance of literary studies today. In this regard Robert L. Root Jr. in "Naming nonfiction (a polyptych)" forcefully argues that:

All literary genres essentially create representations of reality and require craft and design

and discovery and process, but nonfiction is unique in that it alone is required by virtually

unstated definition to apply those strategies and techniques to something that already

exists. It's that preoccupation with factuality, with pre-existing reality, with a world

outside the writer's mind, that he or she has to interpret and represent, that separates it

from the other "three genres." It also helps account for some of the discomfort some

creative writers have with a genre that they feel isn't "creative" in the same way that

fiction, poetry, and drama are. (246)

Thus while Root Jr. emphasizes nonfiction's preoccupation with an author's representation of factuality and preexisting reality, he equally accentuates the value of literary tools such as craft, design, discovery, and process to argue for the creative element in nonfiction. If not overtly, then implicitly, Root Jr. argues for parity between fiction and nonfiction on the basis that both are literary representations and creative in aspect. 32

At the other end of the extreme poststructuralists like Jacques Derrida argue against the

imposition of genre in literary studies as he views genre classification to be one more controlling

structure designed to impose order on texts. Derrida argues that in relation to textual

indeterminacy which he favors from all accounts, the order that genres enforce makes genres

exist tenuously ("The Law of Genre" 65). However, contesting both the extremes where one proposes rigid compartmentalization of genres and its hierarchy and the other favors its

irrelevance if not for its dissolution where the genre is seen to interfere with the text's

indeterminacy, it can be argued that genres are neither to be understood in terms of a hierarchical

structure nor are they to be understood as controlling structures which limit the free play of texts.

Rather, according to Bawarshi genres have a socio-rhetorical function where they help us recognize our communicative goals. They are also what Carolyn Miller calls "typified rhetorical

actions based in recurrent situations" ("Genre as Social Action" 159). Thus Roy's written

response to recurrent situations becomes typified as genres where when she chooses one genre

over another she enters an already existing rhetorical debate about that genre. Suffice it to say here that choice of genres is a political selection which thwarts the poststructuralist argument that

literary texts exist or can exist independently of genres. The manner of Roy's deployment of one

genre over another is dictated not only by the choice of her subject matter but is also constituted by its reception among the readers and audience. Thus speaking within a specific genre is to be

aware of the contextual relations within which the writer inserts his/her work. As Bawarshi

argues "Genres thus endow literary texts with a social identity within the 'universe of literature,'

constituting a literary text's and its producer's 'mode of being'—a literary context within which

literary activity takes place. According to Bawarshi, as sociological concepts, "genres constitute

and regulate literary activity within particular space-time configurations" ("The Genre Function" 33

347) where texts exist in relation to one another within a specific genre. Not only do genres regulate our perceptions of time they also control how we spatially negotiate our way through time, as both readers and writers. Thus each genre forms a genre-mediated socio-rhetorical construct where certain events and actions are allowed to take place ("Genre Function" 347-48).

In Roy's case her decision to write nonfiction enables her to enter the specifics of time and space where all communicants, readers, writer and even those represented, assume and enact genre- constituted realities. But before delving into the socio-rhetorics of the genre further it will be useful to consider the status of nonfiction first.

The capacious nature of the term nonfiction can be gleaned from the following definition from Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition:

Nonfiction n. 1. The branch of literature comprising works of narrative prose dealing

with or offering opinions or conjectures upon facts and reality, including biography,

history, and the essay (opposed to fiction and distinguished from poetry and drama).. .all

writing or books not fiction, poetry, or drama, including non-fictive narrative prose and

reference works; the broadest category of written works, (np)

It is easy to observe that the very definition of the term nonfiction exists as a negation of and exclusion from fiction. Even the staggering inclusive nature of the term where almost everything that is not fiction can be included here makes it even more complicated to define it precisely.

Because of this difficult aspect it becomes both apposite and necessary to announce what is understood by the word nonfiction in the context of Roy's works. The word is primarily used here to denote Roy's essays, interviews, and public lectures and speeches, the use of which Roy directs towards righting the dehumanization of the individual and also the transformation of systems that produce it. The list of sub-genres to be examined under nonfiction can by no means be restricted to the above three, but within the limited scope of the project here, this thesis seeks to focus on the above mentioned forms when dealing with Roy's recentering of the individual.

While much has been written on nonfiction, not sufficient research has been conducted on the causes of marginalization and devaluation of the genre within literary studies. Suffice it also to mention here that the essay has been seen to be representative of the common perception of the associations with the word nonfiction. It is also one of the stated aims of the thesis to argue for the expansion of the understanding of the term nonfiction to include other modes, primarily the lecture, the public address, and the interview.

There are some such as Alexander J. Butrym who think that the academic world did not conspire to devalue nonfiction in general or the essay as a literary form in particular. Instead he argues that one of the reasons for such devaluation was the dropping of distinction between the essay and the popular journalistic feature writing which led to the essay losing its cachet as a belletristic form ("Introduction" 3). The other reason he points out to is the general inclination in modern popular culture for immediate satisfaction and instant entertainment which tended to devalue the essay's appeal (3). However might we respond to these reasons which led to the devaluation of the genre of nonfiction, one of the harsh truths is that when literature or literary values are introduced and considered for first year students in colleges and universities, nonfiction is usually relegated to the margins of the canon. Butrym further argues to conclude that such academic dissociation has reinforced the idea among educated readers that the genre of nonfiction is somehow isolated from the allegedly more important types of literature

("Introduction" 4). Moreover, fiction has become a metaphor for all encounters thereby rendering the economy of discourse into a paradigm for all encounters. In other words, literature unambiguously translated as fiction suffices for what goes on in the world. 35

Talking about the relegation of the genre of nonfiction to the margins Rao argues that not only have Roy's essays been ignored by academic scholars and critics, but "essay as a literary genre has increasingly been relegated to the margins of the English curriculum" ("The Politics of

Genre and the Rhetoric of Radical Cosmopolitanism; Or Who's Afraid of Arundhati Roy?" 160-

61). As if almost missing his point entirely about the broader neglect of the essay genre within the literary canon, Rao further argues that Roy's "essays are neglected by scholars because they are regarded as 'journalistic' rather than 'literary'" (161). Rao's premise that if these essays were considered literary then they would find their way into the classroom, precludes the whole argument of the neglect of the genre in general. Instead of contesting the marginalization of the genre of nonfiction in literary studies, Rao, after pointing it out, seems to argue by implication for inclusion of journalism within literature. Such an argument somehow merely reinstates the canonical hierarchy and insularity where what is considered literary is privileged and prioritized over the non-literary. However, the thesis argues that Roy's nonfiction prose contests the marginalization of the genre itself and does not advance any agenda for inclusion of the non- literary into the literary.

In "Beyond 'Anti-Communism': The Progressive Politics of The God of Small Things"

Pranav Jani proposes that her political activism disrupts "any assimilation of Roy into the category of the disengaged .. .writer," (47). Such a comment has far reaching consequences for the relation between literature, politics and pedagogy discussed elsewhere decisively in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Writers in Politics and bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress. By implication, Jani seems to suggest that disengaged writers or writers who are not overtly political are more acceptable to the academy than their visibly political counterparts. However, such a claim can be challenged by arguing that writers and critics such as Harold Pinter, Dario Fo, Edward Said, 36

Ngugi wa Thiong'o and many others have been welcomed into the academic space with their political activism and are taught as part of many canonical courses at all levels in the university.

The cause for Roy's relative academic neglect and possible preclusion lies not in the choice of her subject matter but in her choice of genre; a decision which has arguably marked her out of the classroom to some extent. Roy's fiction, infused with similar political verve as found in her nonfiction, would probably still be accepted in most classrooms across the globe. Her nonfiction has variously addressed issues of privatization of natural resources, construction of ecologically destructive and economically unviable dams, assault on democracy, racism, and empire, and the ill effects of corporate globalization; and yet a common thread that links all pieces together is her focus on the treatment of the individual as collateral damage. Be it through her essays, interviews, or her lectures and public speeches, Roy's genre preference contests the marginalization of the genre in literary studies and the narrow conception of the genre of nonfiction as limited only to the essay.

The Individual in Roy

When Partha Chatterjee in The Politics of the Governed'points out the distinction between citizens and populations in the emergence of mass democracies in the twentieth century, he raises important issues of governmentality which help understand Roy's emphasis on the individual. While she associates the concept of citizenship with the ethical connotation of participation in the sovereignty of the state, the concept of population makes available to government functionaries a set of rationally manipulable instruments for reaching large sections of the inhabitants of a country as the targets of their policies (Chatterjee, The Politics of the

Governed34). Roy is concerned with the excluded citizens described by empirical criteria and who are amenable to statistical techniques and treated as population by the state. Thus the state 37 claims to provide for the well-being of the population but shuts out the participation of citizens in matters affecting them. Chatterjee points out that the state's mode of reasoning is not deliberative openness but rather an instrumental notion of costs and benefits (34) and when that occurs, Roy believes the individual is treated like collateral damage. She objects that individuals are treated as populations, as lying within the domain of policy to be acted upon and not considered to be citizens who can be granted equal rights of participation. Chatterjee argues that most postcolonial states carried over their policies of modernization and development based on the classificatory but ethnographic ideas of erstwhile colonial regimes. Thus, according to Chatterjee, caste and religion have remained the dominant criteria for identifying communities in India. Much of what

Roy finds objectionable in the state's dereliction of duty towards the individual stems from the fact that more often than not such marginalized individuals can easily be classified either as religious or caste minorities. While for the state these people are virtually non-existent and invisible, who are not supposed to exist, the non-citizens "who survive in the folds and wrinkles, the cracks and fissures of the official city," for Roy they need to be represented ("The Ladies

Have Feelings, So" 206). While Chatterjee is still hopeful of the promise held out by the welfare functions of the modern governmental practices to bring the minorities into the manifold, Roy is not only skeptical about the welfare role of the state, she believes that "a new kind of art" is needed, an "art which can make the impalpable palpable, the intangible tangible, the invisible visible, and the inevitable evitable" ("The Ladies Have Feelings, So" 215).

To understand Roy's technique and motive for representing thoroughly marginalized individuals, it is important to keep in mind that her representation of the marginalized is a move towards solidarity and empowerment of the peoples she represents and is never intended to take agency away from them. For Roy, this act of representation is no mere vainglorious act aimed at 38 self-promotion, rather it is an act of speaking with and not speaking/or or about someone. While she dismisses the idea of being considered a spokesperson for the marginalized peoples when she argues that she does not "feel responsible for everybody" {Checkbook 38), she nonetheless affirms that "What is happening in the world lies, at the moment, just outside the realm of common human understanding. It is the writers, the poets, the artists, the singers, the filmmakers who can make the connections, who can find ways of bringing it into the realm of common understanding" ("The Ladies Have Feelings, So" 214). At other moments, Roy has sought to underplay her vocation as a writer and an activist in view of the larger concerns of being human—"One is not involved by virtue of being a writer or activist. One is involved because one is a human being" ("The Ladies Have Feelings, So" 211). Roy argues that she does not attempt to represent these millions of non-citizens but like them "at the end of the day, a writer is a citizen, only one of many, who is demanding public information" ("The Ladies Have Feelings,

So" 210).

Also, when she writes that she does not "feel responsible for everybody. Everybody is also responsible for themselves" {Checkbook 38), one discerns that she is not shrugging off the responsibility of writers to represent their people. When Roy mentions that everybody is also responsible for themselves, the implicit argument and emphasis centers on the fact that in addition to the writers' responsibility for the masses, people too are responsible for themselves against the vagaries of the state. Thus her argument underlines the role of the individual as subject and citizen; one who realizes his/her responsibility to act, to disagree, to criticize, and to be self-critical.

The subject matter of what Roy writes about both in her fiction as well as nonfiction is primarily the religious, class, and caste minorities; people who resign themselves to "living in 39 ghettos as second-class citizens, in constant fear, with no civil rights and no recourse to justice"

("Democracy" 277). Roy's lectures, interviews, and essays engage with the individual, one who is variously defined through negations as a "non-citizen," "non-people," and "non-being." Her writings on these various dehumanized minorities, and their recentering in her works chronicle the problematic of representation of the marginalized human person. Much focus of "The Greater

Common Good" centers on the "millions of displaced people" who have ceased to exist for the

Indian State. The essay is a plea to reassert the humanity of these "millions of displaced people" who have been shut out from any accounts of history ("The Greater Common Good" 20).

Mocking the use of acronyms such as PAPs for Project-Affected Persons, Roy reveals the cold statistics which come into play when people are pitted against their own governments ("The

Greater Common Good" 32).

Clearly, Roy's emphasis in description and choice of such individuals centers on the erosion of their civil liberties, the day-to-day injustices perpetrated against them by the oppressive state, the institutions of patriarchy, corporate globalization, and religious nationalism.

Writing in a different context but touching similar issues, Clara Joseph in The Agent in the

Margin: Nayantara Sahgal's Gandhian Fiction points to the not yet quite popular genre of risk literature defined as "the kind of writing that is literature in so far as it is excellent in form or expression and expresses ideas of universal interest but has for its content issues around the risks of industrialization and globalization" (156). Thus literary works dealing with globalization and its myriad manifestations realizable in issues of neo-liberalism, neo-fascism, and neo- imperialism qualify as risk literature. However, the use of the term points to a liberating and even a wider understanding of the term literature and its inclusive civic contexts. As Joseph points out the genre of "risk literature performs at the borders of literature and journalism, challenging 40 readers with the critical imagination of history and the critical realism of literature" (156). When literary writers engage with risk literature not only do they manage to recenter the underprivileged individual, they also challenge the rigidity of genres in literature. Risk literature manages to open spaces not only from a genre perspective but also from the angle of subject matter of literature. Most importantly, the genre of risk literature redefines the commitment of literary studies to the underprivileged and the marginalized thus highlighting its social responsibility and its inherently political and nature (Joseph, The Agent in the Margin 157).

When Joseph argues that risk literature "evolves as a genre of amateurism and revolution, a grassroots voice that trespasses into the very gaps of corporate ideologies of globalization" (157) she ascribes to such a practice the quality of literary writers who write as amateurs about the field of globalization but who target its consequences from the perspective of the impact of globalization on ordinary people. While Roy's efforts to link and view the war in Iraq to corporate globalization, growing religious fundamentalism in India and assessing the dispossession and disempowerment of the marginalized individual as part of the same interconnected process have been hailed as exemplary by many critics, she has also had to face much criticism for such efforts.

It can be argued that Roy has come under criticism less for her writings and more for what Graham Huggan calls her "strategic exoticism" which according to him is evident in her

"marketably exotic looks," "incorrigibly photogenic" images, and "unusually attractive" pictures catering to the western audience (The Postcolonial Exotic 77).' To charge Roy with enhancing and promoting her exoticism through her image is to only recognize that Roy is a celebrated author in the Western hemisphere. Huggan's charge of exoticism fails to account for the popularity of Roy's political works in the universities in the east, where neither her image nor 41 her works seem exotic enough to be marketed for the sake of it. As far as the dynamics of marketing and the author operate today Roy is well aware of the commerce Huggan bases his argument on. Roy writes that today writers are more commercially viable than they have been ever before as they "live and prosper in the heart of the marketplace" ("The Ladies Have

Feelings, So" 193). She writes that this commercial success and neoteric seduction can easily end with writers playing the role of "palace entertainers," ("The Ladies Have Feelings, So" 195) complicit with those in power. She explains that the risk is real, but as long as writers recognize

"an intricate web of morality, rigour and responsibility that art" imposes on them, their beliefs in taking sides," taking a position will all be worth it ("The Ladies Have Feelings, So"191).

Said's Humanism and the Individual Contextualized

A reading of Roy's works with their emphasis on the individual as a subject with the ability to act, resist, and determine systems along with reading Said's powerful rejection of the idea of the power of discursive formations to create subject positions, suggests space for humanism and agency. Lennard Davis rightly sums up Said's humanism as an "individual- centered humanism" with its deep belief in the power of the individual to think new things and make intellectual history ("Said's Battle for Humanism" 126). While both Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment were anthropocentric and reinstated their belief in the power of the human subject to think and act rationally, the humanism evident in Roy's and Said's writings stresses the concern for the other. In their failure to think of the other as a human like one's own self, one can discern the shortcomings of Enlightenment reason which served as the rationale for colonization and imperialism of vast areas later on. In view of the above oversight, Said proposes his humanism to be a self-critical practice as well as a notion which is associated with a global minority consciousness thus making humanism truly democratic in form and spirit. 42

Judith Butler in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence is particularly instructive in this regard when she argues that we need to critically evaluate and oppose those conditions under which certain human lives become more valuable and more grievable than others. (32) The positing of common human vulnerability translates into a universalism here, which forcefully contests what has been considered to be the normative notion of the human. For instance, she argues how sexual, racial, and caste minorities have been globally excluded from the definition and understanding of the normative and hence violence has been perpetrated against them in the name of humanity itself. By including the element of common corporeal vulnerability into her understanding of humanism, Butler's argument helps us understand the term universalism better. By suggesting that universals of justice and equality work along with the universals of corporeal vulnerability in the face of violence, Butler advocates what she calls

"a new basis for humanism" (42). Thus the constitution of each and everyone's equal vulnerability in the face of violence becomes as much a precondition of the human as much it is the recognition of the universals of justice and equality. Butler provides a cautionary narrative to ensure that humanism in its urge to be universalistic, be not entangled again with neo-colonialist ventures.

When Nadia Abu El-Haj emphasizes that humanism has been trenchantly critiqued for

"its fundamental entanglement with colonialism, its configuration of the (modern, secular) subject as normative, and its definition of 'the human'" it could be argued that we need now to redefine humanism in the present context ("Edward Said and The Political Present"). The task is

"to affirm an ethical universal that does not deny the variability of human wants and values, or cast them aside as unworthy or ephemeral but rather encompasses and integrates them as the real ground on which that ethical universal must be established" (Chatterjee, The Politics of the 43

Governed 6). When Said underscores that the essence of humanism is "to understand human history as a continuous process of self-realization, not just for us, white, male, European and

American, but for everyone" {HDC 26) he suggests that humanism is not all about us even as he posits a new egalitarian basis for humanism.

It is the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who in Alterity and Transcendence helps us articulate this preoccupation with the other when he writes:

But that face facing me , in its expression—in its mortality—summons me, demands me,

requires me: as if the invisible death faced by the face of the other .. .were 'my

business.'.. .The death of the other man puts me on the spot, calls me into question, as if

I, by my possible indifference, became the accomplice of death, invisible to the other

who is exposed to it; as if even before being condemned to it myself, I had to answer for

that death of the other, and not leave the other alone to his deathly solitude. (24-5)

Consider the striking similarities in tone and content between the above statement by Levinas and Roy's declaration of solidarity and collective responsibility. Roy writes, "Once you've seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and saying nothing is as political an act as speaking out.

There is no innocence" {Checkbook 32). Statements from both Roy and Levinas would imply that indifference to the other amounts to complicity. While Levinas's ethical response refers to the asymmetrical interpersonal ethical relation with the other where the other enjoys primacy over the self, Roy's response to a plurality of beings is what Eduard Jordaan in Responsibility,

Indifference, and Global Poverty: A Levinasian Perspective might term political in contradistinction to the ethical. The political response, according to Jordaan, indicates the beginning of politics, justice, institutions, and equality—a division of one's responsibility now with multiple others as opposed to an interpersonal one (2-3). Although there is no chronology 44 between the ethical and the political relation, Jordaan suggests that it is in the ethico-political response that responsibility for the other at a plural level can be recognized. This oscillation between the Levinasian ethical and the political binds the ethical with the multiple and the universal. Coming back to Said's point about the democratic nature of humanism, open to all classes and backgrounds, one concludes that while the humanistic practice might begin with the individual, it is only in its universal realization that a politics of resistance and transformation can be properly realized.

Said's universalizing of humanism comes close to Roy's attempts at recentering the marginalized individual. Meant to be an intervention on the relevance of postcolonial theory today, Neil Lazarus' "National Consciousness and the Specificity of (Post) Colonial

Intellectualism" attempts to revive the category of the universal "from which it is possible to assume the burden of speaking for all humanity" (52). Such talk about universal or global human community is not without its detractors either. In Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation, David Jefferess argues that Said's positing liberation as a global human community conflicts with the dependence upon an oppositional framework of East-West for imagining such a social transformation (90). However, Jefferess's claim can be contested because of its innate assumption that the oppositional framework of the colonizer-colonized or the East-West that Said presents was never meant to be transcended. Said's Orientalism, while it seeks to understand the colonial past in terms of those binaries, in his bid for a global human community he proposes a definite challenge to Eurocentrism and other such Manichean structures. While Said's writings on nineteenth century colonialism take the all-important inequity between nations as an important given of history, his views on transcending such 45

binaries in the future are precisely to offset similar imperialistic projects from taking any shape

in the future.

Foucault, Said, and Humanism

To fully comprehend the objections many poststructuralists have against universalism or universal human nature one needs to read Noam Chomsky's objections to Michel Foucault over

the issue and the latter's opposition, in turn, to the Enlightenment rationale of Immanuel Kant. In

Human Nature: Justice versus Power, debating against Foucault, Chomsky affirms the value of

universal human nature, some firm human essence which would help to create a just future

society and ultimately be the end of any political action. According to Chomsky, the humanist

idea of history as a quest for justice and equality is impossible without the centering of the

human subject. In fact, Chomsky argues that such a paradigm of a just society would help the

intellectuals, the presumed agents of change, in conceiving a more humane and just social order.

Thus for Chomsky, the universals of reason, justice, and equality inform the political choices

taken by writers and intellectuals towards a desired end. While Foucault seems to agree with

Chomsky that we need to fight against oppressive institutions—"to criticize the working of

institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent" {Human Nature 171)—he does not

seem to agree that we need to pose such a resistance in order to attain some higher goal of justice. At his Nietzschean best, Foucault essentially discredits the notion of universal justice to

argue that we need to fight against oppression to alter power relations and not in the name of universals of justice and equality. One questions Foucault's prescription for altering power relations if the new sets of power relations are not already defined. Foucault's anti-humanism, basically a questioning of the whole edifice of Western metaphysics which has based history on

an essence of man, objects to man as the subject of history. Thus Foucault manages to decenter 46 man as the privileged subject of history in addition to making illusory the autonomy and worthiness of teleological action of the individual subject. In the wake of this decentering of man, Roy's recentering of the individual serves to counter the effect Foucault's theories have had on literary critics. A resuscitation of the values of autonomy, responsibility, and self- determination in the writings of Roy creates a space for the individual as well as for humanism.

In his 1984 essay, "What is Enlightenment?" Foucault argues forcefully to discredit the universal claims of Immanuel Kant's Enlightenment rhetoric. Foucault believes that Kant equates the word "mankind" with the entire human race as if the entire human race is caught up in the process of the Enlightenment. Thus Foucault, through his probing into Kant's usage of the term "mankind," problematizes the category of the universal to further suggest that the

Enlightenment must not be viewed as a process prescriptive for all humanity or even affecting all humanity. Any subsequent claims for universality have had to contend with the usage of the term which articulates the general process affecting all humanity. Because the Enlightenment considered itself a humanism, Foucault discredits both universalism as well as humanism in the process. The purpose of Foucault's questioning, coupled with the fact that colonization in the nineteenth century was rationalized by the same use of reason and rationality, led to a critique of universal categories of "mankind." According to Foucault, it is no longer possible either to posit universal categories which speak on behalf of all mankind or to conjecture a unified rational subject. Treating real events as linguistic effects primarily, he stresses that even the

Enlightenment must be acknowledged as one more discursive paradigm within the Western genealogical framework. He goes to one extreme to fashion the anti-humanist position by proclaiming that discursive formations create and determine subject positions (The Archaeology of Knowledge 56). Thus in modernist or even postmodernist parlance, such deconstruction of the 47 subject has only managed to relegate the individual subject to determinism of language and representation.

Therefore, to recenter the individual, it is essential to argue that human beings make and determine systems of language, power, representation, and other social practices. Said, though influenced early on in his career by Foucault's notion of discourse, later parts ways with him for what he believes to be Foucault's political quietism. In an interview with Gary Hentzi and Anne

McClintock, "Overlapping Territories," Said, distinguishing between Fanon's genuine historical change and Foucault's historical determinism notes:

There is a kind of quietism that emerges at various points in Foucault's career: the sense

that everything is historically determined, that ideas of justice, of good and evil, and so

forth, have no innate significance, because they are constituted by whoever is using them.

(Power, Politics, and Culture 53)

Said critiques Foucault for giving in to the idea that since everything is historically determined, resistance and subsequent ideas of justice, freedom, and responsibility become futile. In "Edward

W. Said: Truth, Justice and Nationalism," Jan Selby argues that even though influenced by

Foucault's notion of discourse, Said has deeper affinities with Noam Chomsky than with

Foucault (40). Said was to concur with the above view when he concluded "that Chomsky's is the more honorable and consistent position" as opposed to the Foucauldian one (Saluzinsky,

Criticism and Society 133-4). The consequences of such avowed affiliation are many indeed. The ethical commitment to universals of justice, equality, and freedom has an empirical basis because

Said believes "people all over the world are moved by ideals of justice and equality.. .and that humanistic ideals of liberty and learning still supply most disadvantaged people with the energy to resist war and military occupation" (HDC 10). Thus obliquely Said presents humanism as an 48 alternative not only for Third World nations but as an ethical practice for the contemporary world order.

Also in Ruben Chuaqui's "Notes on Edward Said's View of Michel Foucault," the analysis centers on Said's positive valuation of humanism and Foucault's disdain for humanistic values. More so than the textual formalism of Foucault's writings, Said has been troubled by the rejection and dissolution of the individual subject's autonomy in his works. In "Criticism

Between Culture and System," Said argues that what is reprehensible in Foucault's work is that he "dissolves individual responsibility in the interests not so much of collective responsibility as of institutional will" (The World, the Text and the Critic 186). Said argues that for Foucault, individual responsibility and intention are categorized as subservient to a regularizing collectivity called discourse, itself governed by the archive. To overwhelm the individual subject or will and replace it with rules of discursive formations, rules that no individual can either alter or even circumvent, was Foucault's contribution to the notion of decentering of the individual

(Said, The World, the Text and the Critic 187). Foucault's interest in the overarching limitations imposed on the individual accounts for his belief in the impossibility of any historical change.

Instead, Roy and Said argue that individual subjects are responsible for their actions and live and act in a world of their own making which they can alter according to their own capacities. Thus individual intention, will, and responsibility ignored by Foucault, are powerfully reinstated in the activist prose of Roy and theories of Said. Said challenges the invisible anonymity of discursive and archival power in Foucault; what he sees as his limitations which while they enable him to describe the link between knowledge and power prevent him from seeing a way out of their prison house. In "Travelling Theory" Said describes Foucault's theory of power as a form of

"theoretical overtotalization" that does not make any allowance for emergent movements and 49 none for revolutions, counterhegemony, or historical block" (The World, the Text and the Critic

246). According to Said, Foucault's unwillingness to take seriously any ideas about resistance to power result in insufficient attention devoted in his work "to the problem of historical change"

(The World, the Text and the Critic 222). As a result, Said was to distance himself from Foucault in favor of Frantz Fanon, a move he describes in Culture and Imperialism as follows:

Foucault's work moves away further and further away from serious considerations of

social wholes, focusing instead upon the individual as dissolved in an ineluctably

advancing 'microphysics of power' that is hopeless to resist... Foucault, perhaps because

of his disenchantment with both the insurrections of the 1960s and the Iranian

Revolution, swerves away from politics entirely. (335-36)

Arguably, Foucault's political inefficacy, coupled with his influence on postcolonial theory is viewed by critics such as Simon Gikandi as having led to an epistemological failure of postcolonial discourse by privileging the act of reading over politics ("Poststructuralism and

Postcolonial Discourse" 97).3 However, arguing from a different perspective, Spanos in The

Legacy of Edward Said proposes that there is a lot in agreement between Said and Foucault than the former is willing to acknowledge. Spanos argues that the indissoluble relationality of the various sites of being—the ecos, the subject, language, gender, race, and so on—often stressed equally in the works of Said and Foucault points towards a collaborative rather than an oppositional framework not only between the two but among postcolonialism and poststructuralism as well.

It is widely recognized that the poststructuralist influence on postcolonialism, felt in the ascendance of a discursive approach where primacy accorded to language determinism over politics and people, has diluted the opposition between the colonizer and the colonized. 50

Concomitantly, the works of Benita Parry, Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, and E. San Juan Jr. in particular, are critical of this insular move in postcolonial studies where the symbolic order has managed to displace real-world situations and transactions between antagonists have replaced conflict with the result that the individual has been relegated to being an effect of linguistic representation. Parry argues that postcolonialism which was initially rooted in the historical and social anti-colonial movements, with the arrival of poststructuralism, has revealed a preference for an "exorbitation of discourse" {Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique 26). Homi

Bhabha's linguistic determinism apparent in his statement that "there is no knowledge—political or otherwise—outside representation" {The Location of Culture 23) narrates the individual and its social agency at the level of enunciation. Thus for Bhabha, the individual is already constructed and determined—it is language that acts and performs and not the individual subject.

One can surmise that while the levitation towards a discursive analysis has consigned the social, the material, and even the human to a second order, it is in realizing the primacy of these overlooked categories that one can open the debate about the significance of human will and agency.

In a related manner one can argue that the humanism as advocated by Roy and Said speaks to contemporary concerns of global injustice, dispossession, disempowerment, and neo- imperialism even as it prioritizes such concerns in their bid to suggest that human history is made by human action and agency. For them, a belief in the existence of systems of thinking and perception transcending the powers of individual systems to create such structures contradicts the core of humanistic thought. Likewise, it becomes crucial to the project of this humanism to locate and situate agency within an individual and for all individuals alike. What possible form a realization of such an agency may take can be observed in the somewhat differing responses both 51

Roy and Said suggest. While Said primarily argues the need "to present an alternative point of view" ("The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals" 133), Roy's emphasis is more on a mode of active dissent with those in power. Where Said is more geared towards constructing "fields of coexistence rather than fields of battle ("The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals" 141), Roy seems to be more for striking at the economic heart of what she calls Empire today. 4 She seems to be getting weary of the symbolic nature of the nonviolent methods of struggle when she writes:

[Governments of today have learned to deal with that. They know how to wait out a

demonstration or a march. They know the day after tomorrow, opinions can change, or be

manipulated into changing. Unless civil disobedience becomes real, not symbolic, there is

very little hope for change. {Checkbook 136)

She stresses that we need to reimagine the meaning of civil disobedience as an effective mode of resistance today where governments have learned to wait out any peaceful demonstration.

Saidian humanism makes an ethical imperative of democracy and equal participation even as concern with other cultures and traditions occupies a central place within it.

The concept of humanism, much debated and discussed both in the past and even today, provides the primary framework of understanding the thematic unity of the works of Said and

Roy. The theories and issues addressed by Said permeate the writings of Roy where both seem to agree that the invocation of any humanist ethos has to rise above the level of mere rhetoric and offer alternatives of resistance. While Said argues for a version of literary criticism which would help academics and critics reorient the source of their activities to the individual particular (HDC

80), Roy too locates the origin of her subject matter where individuals are treated as non-citizens.

The relevance of each individual across the globe which makes up the collective grid of 52 humanism features as one of the key concerns in the works of both Roy and Said. Simply put, the essence of such humanism as advocated by both the authors lies in the expression and realization of dignity, rights, and self-determination for each individual. Roy clarifies that, "If it is justice that we want, it must be justice and equal rights for all—not only for special interest groups with special interest prejudices. That is non-negotiable" (An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire 117).

Roy not only affirms humanism and universalism as categories that are coterminous with each other but by foregrounding such concerns she reevaluates the notion of a writer-intellectual today.

The Writer-Intellectual as a Humanist

Over the years the public role of writers, literary critics, and artists in society has been much debated and even criticized. Today writers have become nothing short of public celebrities with prestigious awards bringing both fame and fortune to them. Over the years the definition, involvement, and the role of writers and artists as public intellectuals have all undergone a transformation. Said argues that insofar as "they both act in the new public sphere dominated by globalization.. .their public role as writers and intellectuals can be discussed and analyzed together" ("The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals" 129). The word intellectual has been used over the years to mean different occupations and variable concerns with respect to the intellectual's attitude and involvement with the society.

One of the earliest commentators on the idea of the intellectual has been Julien Benda, whose The Treason of the Intellectuals had crystallized the debate about whether intellectuals should remove themselves from the concerns of the world or intervene and influence it. We have come a long way from Benda's definition of the intellectual as a person who must retain political neutrality and whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims. Writing in the 1920s, 53

Benda did not mean to suggest that intellectuals as citizens should abstain from political interventions. Rather, he sought to correct the view that intellectuals had lately allowed political concerns to weigh more than their artistic achievements. Nevertheless, a useful point of contrast was offered by Antonio Gramsci in Selections from Prison Notebooks where he argues that the working class must produce its own theoreticians, the 'organic' intellectual, as distinguished from the 'traditional' intellectual. Gramsci's framework of the intellectuals, written in Italy in the

1930s is rooted in class power and proletarian sympathies. While traditional intellectuals— defined variously by their professions as priests, lawyers, teachers, doctors and so on—are conceived of as having bourgeoisie affiliations, the organic intellectuals can emanate from any class. Gramsci argues that organic intellectuals arise within each social class, both bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and are defined by their ability to organize and manage the ideology of that class. The lynchpin of Gramsci's argument is that in order to implement a new hegemonic project, it is necessary for the organic intellectuals "to assimilate and to conquer" the traditional intellectuals ideologically (10). Most importantly for Gramsci's counter-hegemonic project, the working-class movement should produce its own organic intellectuals who help undermine existing social relations in any society. Thus for both Benda and Gramsci, in spite of their differences over the nature and extent of involvement, the preoccupation with the marginalized individual which in turn necessitates intervention on the part of the intellectual remains a primary concern.

Even though Roy does not explicitly use the term intellectual the way it is understood by

Benda, Gramsci, and even Said, it can be argued that when she writes about the role and responsibilities of writers and artists in society today, she enters the same debate both facilitating and critiquing it at the same time. For instance, while she agrees with Said that writers and artists 54 have a responsibility to society to construct alternative narratives and even alternative paradigms of existence than actually extant, she, however, does not believe in the essentialism of phrases such as "speaking truth to power" or even the label "writer-activist" ("The Ladies Have Feelings,

So" 197). Roy appears to be against the whole professionalization of the aspect of intellectual activity which for her is less definable in codified terms. In Roy's case, the guiding light for her intellectual activity is "the intricate web of morality, rigor and responsibility" that she argues is imposed on each individual writer ("The Ladies Have Feelings, So" 191). For her, the role of the writer as public intellectual is defined as an exquisite bond between the artist and her medium which in her case is defined by her flagrant solicitation and support for the "non-citizens" she continuously writes about. No doubt her writing is overtly political and in a related manner when she questions, "since when did writers forgo the right to write nonfiction?" Roy clarifies that writing nonfiction prose allows her to take a position and take sides ("The Ladies Have Feelings,

So" 196).

To sum up here, for Roy, without quibbling about the terminology, the role of the writer- intellectual, though not fixed and defined, is one of conscientious intervention and involvement geared towards protecting the rights of minorities and the "non-citizens." She dismisses the essentialism which articulates a position that all writers have to be political activists and intellectuals, because she argues that one "is not involved by virtue of being a writer or activist.

One is involved because one is a human being" ("The Ladies Have Feelings, So" 210). Roy's humanist articulation about the persona of the writer as intellectual who is involved because of his/her concern for the other, affirms the traditions of solidarity and resistance that marginalized people continue to express among themselves. One can argue that Roy believes in the social import of writing which helps one connect to the world and is not intended to take one away 55

from it. Articulations of historical specificity leading to acts of social transformation as found in

the writings of Roy, work towards the actual liberation of the oppressed across the globe. The

task of representing the marginalized peoples begins with the writer-intellectual who through the

use of public platforms such as lectures and symposia foregrounds concerns of justice and

equality. The lecture, not meant as a political treatise but a humanistic plea that underlines the

constant need to make literary genres relevant to society today, provides intellectuals with the necessary public platform to voice their concerns about the individual; in doing so, intellectuals

highlight the importance of the genre through the public sphere.

Debating what he calls to be the perceived disintegration and decline of the public sphere

Jurgen Habermas in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category

of Bourgeois Society, argues that the public sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth century became an arena where public opinion could be stage-managed and manipulated. This view of

Habermas is reflected in Roy's "Peace is War," where she contends that public opinion is not

only stage-managed but is also effectively viewed as a consumer entity in constant search for a

"crisis turnover" (6). The media invents a crisis to manipulate public opinion accordingly.

Habermas is critical of the bourgeois public sphere as he believes it to be a Utopia that still

remains unfulfilled. The ideal of a universally accessible voluntary association of people, coming

together as equals to engage in unconstrained debate in the pursuit of freedom and common

good, even though it appears to be a Utopia to Habermas, it is one he believes is still worth pursuing. In the works of Roy, even as she enlarges the public sphere by including the oppressed

to participate in public debate, she invokes the idea of the intellectual to represent the common

interests of all mankind. It is this universalism which is treated in the next chapter as essential to 56

Saidian humanism that prevents the interests of a small group of people to pose as the interests of a larger humanity.

Notes:

1. Huggan's critique also includes Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth as part of his

argument on the marketability of the postcolonial exotic and Third World as a global

merchandizing tool.

2. For more on the equation between Said's secular criticism and the minority

consciousness see Aamir Mufti's essay, "Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular

Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture."

3. Gikandi's argument is much more complex and elaborate than this. He argues that it

was structuralism that represented the first major resistance to humanism and also

enabled the emergence of poststructuralism. The structuralist project prioritized

language as the key to understanding human society and valorized the transcendence

of humanism and its presumed ethnocentrism ("Poststructuralism and Postcolonial

Discourse" 107).

4. Roy's understanding of the word Empire and its attendant meanings are challenged

by Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's concept of empire in Empire. They argue

while the US does occupy a privileged place in this empire, this privilege derives not

from similarities to the old European imperialist powers but from its differences. 57

II

The Individual Reconsidered: Humanism as Universalism

The anti-humanism of the French intellectual movement of the 1960s challenges not only the role of the individual as subject and agent but also proclaims the end of universals of truth and justice. Especially in the works of Foucault one notices that all claims of individual rationality and autonomy for universal validity are to be mistrusted. He distrusts claims for universalism because historically such attempts have systematically denied differences and heterogeneity in human nature. However, the works of both Roy and Said, keen to avoid the pitfalls of the association between the universalism of Enlightenment which led to Eurocentrism and imperialism of the nineteenth century, not only support heterogeneity and local differences, but are critically premised and based on such differences. Thus, in this chapter I argue that not only are individual agency and responsibility seminal to Roy's nonfictional works and Said's humanism, but also that a belief in universal values of justice and equality is powerfully reinstated in their works.

While Said remained suspicious of any totalizing interpretations or formulaic proposals, he endorsed universalism as part of his realist politics. Apart from emphasizing what he understood and meant by humanism, Said's preoccupation with the universal reach of humanism remains a constant in his search to merge the political and the worldly with literary studies. He argues that humanism makes sense if only it is understood as a set of cultural practices within a democratic society with universal appeal. Without the universal applicability of these cultural practices, the category of humanism holds little appeal for Said. Likewise for Roy, universalism translates into "justice and equal rights for all—not only for special interest groups with special interest prejudices" (An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire 117). For her, universalism is about 58

inclusivity and representation to those who have been systematically excluded from positions of privilege.

The denial of universal values and the human freedom to change these values is central to

Foucault's understanding of human nature. However, Said's persistence with universalism as a prerequisite to humanism saves the latter from privileging certain identities over others since universalism acknowledges human dignity and equal rights for all. His articulation of humanism

from the point of view of the marginalized or the subaltern constitutes it as something different

from earlier forms of humanism. In this respect, Roy's essays, even as they recenter the

individual simultaneously acknowledge an affiliation to a universalism of human dignity and

equal rights for all. The term universalism used in the context of humanism, implies the validity

of universal values of truth, justice, and freedom. Additionally, individual agency and responsibility are reinstated in Saidian humanism and Roy's act of recentering the individual in her nonfictional works. What Said objects to in Foucault is his assent to the subjugation of

individuals to some suprapersonal disciplines or authority and his ignoring the category of human intention and will {The World, the Text and the Critic 186) to alter institutional will.

The relationship between individual freedom, the genre of nonfiction prose, and its pedagogical significance, though not immediately apparent, follows a logical sequence in the works of Arundhati Roy. Roy's essays, "Power Politics," "The Greater Common Good,"

"Listening to Grasshoppers-Genocide, Denial and Celebration," "Peace?...," "The Road to

Harsud," "The End of Imagination" "Darkness Passed...," "The Great Indian Rape-Trick I,"

"The Great Indian Rape-Trick II," "Democracy," and "Summer Games with Nuclear Bombs," are considered in detail here primarily for their attempts at recentering of the individual and its implications for genre and pedagogy. Emilienne Baneth-Noualihetas in "Committed Writing, 59

Committed Writer?" writes, "What Roy proposes implicitly.. .is a recentering on the individual and on a subjective, small-scale time as opposed to the 'bigness' of history" (98). She further contends that for Roy the "recentering on the individual" lends a rhetorical as well as a political unity to her writings (98). Thus for Roy, the choice of subject matter—usually the afflicted individual as a victim of institutional violence—dictates her style of writing, the effect of which in pedagogical circles forces a reevaluation of power structures under scrutiny along with a reassessment of the institutional validity of some genres over others.

Roy's essays present the theme of recentering the individual. The individual understood as part of the collective encourages theoretical investigation of the concept of universal which implies the universal applicability of ideas of justice, freedom, and equality. Joel Haefner's 1992,

"Democracy, Pedagogy, and the Personal Essay," written from a poststructuralist perspective argues against what he calls the "shibboleth of individualism" (127) He writes that "If the self is not unitary, if language is not based on individual knowledge but on collective experience, then the referentiality of personal, expressive prose is called into question, and the accessibility of the personal essay to a universal readership that shares 'human experience' is also in doubt" (129-

30). The objection to the emphasis on the individual mind in the case of the writer here is part of the larger argument against the threatening potentialities of individualism. The focus on the individual in Roy is not to be confused or even conflated with the idea of individualism. The focus on the individual in Roy is a move towards a collective described elsewhere in a different context in Benedict Anderson's words as the "ethical universal" that does not deny the variability of human wants but rather integrates them as the real historical ground on which that ethical universal must be established {The Spectre of Comparisons 29). The charge of "shibboleth of individualism" cannot be applied to Roy since in her writings the focus is not on the individual 60 as writer but individual as the subject matter of her writing. In this manner when Roy recenters the individual she comes close to Said's notion of humanism.

Therefore, in the first section of this chapter I discuss the relevance of Said's theories of humanism for Roy. In this section, I will argue that Said's articulation of humanism from the perspective of the marginalized holds special relevance for Roy whose nonfiction prose attempts to represent the marginalized. Apart from humanism, Said's writings on the relative marginalization of the essay form and the need to make it imperative in any canon formation also bode well for Roy's own preference for nonfiction prose. Thus Said's relevance for Roy will be examined at the above two levels.

In the next section, building on the relevance of Said for Roy it will be argued that since

Said's humanism is centered on the importance it accords to minority consciousness Roy's recentering on the marginalized individual makes her a Saidian humanist. The following section on "From Individual to Universal" asserts that Roy's act of recentering the individual, while it emanates from her belief in the universal values of justice and equality is seen to allow her to universalize the issues. Benedict Anderson's essay, "Nationalism, Identity, Logic of Seriality" from his The Spectre of Comparisons treats universalism in a positive manner even as it draws a fine distinction between bound and unbound serialities. Anderson's "logic of seriality" is examined vis-a-vis Roy's works. Since unbound serialities tend to move beyond identity politics, they afford the opportunity for individuals to imagine themselves as members of larger than face- to-face solidarities—an idea which blends well with Roy's call for universalism.

The next section, "Individual Freedom and Genre" argues for the relevance of the genre of nonfiction prose in the manner that Roy's essays reject the treatment of human lives as mere algebra or mathematical counts and figures. This section focuses on two aspects—notions of 61 individual freedom by linking Amartya Sen's work to Roy's essays, and secondly, it argues that

Roy's move towards nonfiction prose can be construed as an attempt that refocuses attention away from what traditionally has been considered canonical in literary studies. The chapter ends with a section on Said and his reassessment of the coexistence of and interrelationship between the literary and the social. Said emphasizes on making literary studies more responsive to worldly needs, especially the marginalized individual. The idea is presented through arguing for breaking the rigid structures of canon formation and genre hierarchy and making disciplines more relevant in "represent[ing] humane marginality" ("Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community" 155).

Said's Relevance for Roy

Humanism

Said's humanism begins in a realization of dignity of the individual particular (HDC 80) even as it subsequently moves to an extension of this dignity to all individuals. Said stresses how it has to be universally accepted that certain democratic freedoms, certain freedoms from domination of one kind or another, freedom from various kinds of exploitations, and so on, are the rights of every human being—which is not the framework of the imperial world in which we live (Power, Politics, and Culture 197). Thus he highlights the need for universality of freedom.

He has repeatedly clarified that his version of universalism is no mere degeneration into vulgar

Marxism or a hortatory humanism. Nadia Abu El-Haj in "Edward Said and the Political Present" argues that in fact, it is Said's commitment to humanistic beliefs which has shaped his politics and his secular outlook and not the other way round (549). Said's lifelong engagement with the worldly and the Palestinian cause rests on his belief in individual effort and action. For him, the 62 idea of Palestine was intermittently linked to what it meant to be human where the individual is simultaneously a site of repression as well as a site for resistance in the future.

Lennard J. Davis, a former student of Said, comments on Said's enduring commitment to the fusion of the political and the literary life which for him had been led as two separate lives early on in his career ("Edward Said's Battle for Humanism" 129). Said acknowledges the two worlds but is equally vocal about an attempt to fuse them. He writes, "There are links between the two worlds which I for one am beginning to exploit in my own work" (Power, Politics, and

Culture 15). Such a synthesis of the socio-political with the literary was to steer Said's work (the most constitutive element of which was to be humanism) towards a critical corpus that was acutely self-conscious of where it turned inwards and away from worldly issues. In an interview,

"Orientalism and After" with Anne Beezer and Peter Osborne, Said states that:

The question of oppression, of racial oppression, the question of war, the question of

human rights—all these issues ought to belong together with the study of literary and

other forms of texts; as opposed to the massive, intervening, institutionalized presence of

theoretical discussion. (Power, Politics, and Culture 216)

Said's humanism thus defines and positions itself in the context of its relation to issues of individual freedom, agency, and development.

Abu El-Haj writes that Said's humanism shaped his understanding of politics, "his commitment to universal values, and his vision of the intellectual as an agent, a "maker of meaning with a distinct public responsibility" (549). When Said returned to write a new preface to Orientalism (1979) twenty four years after its original publication, he said he was stubbornly arguing for humanism to be "the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history." (xxix) He elaborates that humanism is "centered upon 63 the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority" {Orientalism xxix). More so, his Presidential address to the MLA community in the year 1999, was appropriately titled, "Humanism and Heroism." He viewed the practice of humanism as a heroic act; a gesture of resistance, defiance, and critique. The importance of the idea and practice of humanism for a Said scholar lies not in comprehending

Said's originality in defining or redefining the concept of humanism, rather the value of such scholarship lies in comprehending Said's inflection with the concept and in conceiving that polemical moment when he resolutely decides to keep coming back to humanism.

Said's articulation of humanism from the point of view of the marginalized or the subaltern constitutes it as something different from earlier forms of humanism within the

Western metaphysical tradition. Since, as Leela Gandhi points out in Postcolonial Theory: A

Critical Introduction, "The Renaissance humanist valorization of the State as the proper end of knowledge recurs in all subsequent manifestations of humanism," Said's inflection of the humanist tradition celebrates his opposition to the emergence of a unified and centralized nation- state. Even though Said has affinities with the Western humanist tradition, he most significantly marks a break with that tradition to introduce his own version of humanism. Said's humanism, in contradistinction to the previous versions of humanism, emphasizes individual will and agency along with positing itself as a useable praxis for academics and intellectuals who want to connect their work to the world in which they live as citizens. Said justifies his humanism in the name of what Radhakrishnan calls "individual intentionality and critical consciousness" ("Said's Literary

Humanism" 7). Instead of theorizing the word humanism, Radhakrishnan argues that Said would be more interested in pragmatically making the word more suitable and transformative of peoples' lives. In this sense then, Said's humanism becomes a practical way of connecting his 64 reading, writing, and pedagogical reflections with the world as opposed to what Matthew Arnold in "Culture and Anarchy" calls the disinterestedness of literature and criticism from the practical life outside. Gandhi argues that:

[T]he Araoldian appeal to disinterestedness effectively works to conceal the fact of the

State's investment in the production of knowledge and culture—it serves to disguise the

collaboration between knowledge and dominant interests. As a strategy, disinterestedness

helps to bolster the State's fallacious claim to universality. (Postcolonial Theory 51)

As a consequence, notions of political interference and universalism, within the purview of literary studies, have become effective antidotes to the malaise of disinterestedness and the strategy of state collaboration with the dominant.

In a similar fashion, Said argues for literary studies to be insurrectionary in nature claiming its ultimate authority from the universalism of humanism he espouses. Where the mission of the humanities and literature as conceived traditionally to be served by poetry, drama, and the novel is to represent non-interference in the affairs of the everyday world, to represent humane marginality in the world requires a different mode of representation. Said challenges the autonomy of literary representation made possible through poetry, drama, and the novel, which he argues has primarily been linked to non-interference with worldly affairs. In "Opponents,

Audiences, Constituencies and Community," Said ruminates on similar issues to argue that it goes directly against the grain of reading and writing to erect barriers between texts or to create monuments out of texts (150), by which he means to criticize both the curricula of literature departments as well as the obtrusive tendency to canonize texts. Any canon formation, for Said, working on the strict principles of inclusion and exclusion, reflects a guild solidarity which resembles a religious or un-secular consciousness. Understood this way, Said argues that literary 65

studies have traditionally not been about society but about masterpieces in need of periodic

adulation and appreciation ("Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community" 153). Said

does two things here—one, he argues that literary studies as understood today have divorced

their concerns from worldly affairs and this academic insularity or purity has negated the relationship between literature and the social. The second issue Said raises regarding genres is

implicit in his critique of the inadequacies of the existing modes and genres of literary representation. To sum up, Said argues that literature needs to address worldly issues in a

transformative manner by focusing on marginalized or subaltern individuals where the mode of representation has an urgency to it.

Moreover, in "Edward Said's Literary Humanism," Radhakrishnan further argues that if

anything, Said is not just a humanist, but a literary humanist, where his literary-critical expertise

and sensibility shape his humanistic imagination (13). It is Radhakrishnan's basic contention that

Said's brand of humanism is "inspired by aesthetics and literature" (23) where "literature is the pedagogical voice of authority, inspiration, and leadership that makes humanism available... for the future" (22). Despite Said's provocative and critical remarks about the formation of the

literary canon and its insipid hierarchy, it can be argued that he does not challenge the very idea

of the canon itself. The twin categories of aestheticism and humanism interminably deployed with each other in Said's oeuvre, point towards a pedagogy which is non-discriminating and

egalitarian in principle. Said's relevance for Roy lies at both the theoretical as well as the pedagogical level, which Said proposes to interbraid. While the theoretical impulse asserts the importance of looking for alternative genres within which humanism can be effectively articulated, the pedagogical desire makes the genre-specific articulation of humanism a key transformative practice. 66

Said's relevance for Roy can also be examined at the level of the former's commitment to the Palestinian cause which not only suggests struggle for the minorities but also the notion that since history comes about as a result of human agency, events in the future can be potentially altered by individuals in an ethical and democratic manner. Said's focus on the individual both as an intellectual and as the marginalized subject matter of history has prompted Davis to proclaim

Said's humanism as "individual-centered humanism" ("Edward Said's Battle for Humanism"

126). Said's humanism attempts to bridge the gap between the sacrosanct enclave of academic and literary humanism and the worldly sphere which this humanist practice seeks to transform.

Traditionally, where literary humanism has been thought to be the purview of critics insulated from the worldly matters of inequality, Said's humanism is critical of such an insular practice, while simultaneously making of humanism a conscious tool and "the achievement of form and will by human agency" (HDC 15). The question of human agency is best understood as a feature of affiliation, proposed by Said primarily as a mode of reading that enables "the critic to see the literary work as a phenomenon in the world, located in a network of non-literary, non-canonical, and non-traditional affiliations" (Ashcroft, Edward Said 25).

In this sense, affiliation is seen as enabling a humanism, where a critical affinity with other cultures and texts is seen as leading to new perspectives and knowledge. While filiation suggests continuity and affinity in biological terms, often restrictive as it prevents new cultures and knowledges to surface, affiliation suggests new and different ways of looking at issues. Thus it can be argued that Said's humanism proposes itself to be an affiliative critical activity that relies on the intellect of the writer and the critic to look for new and different ways to transcend the petty and ethnic identitarian politics associated with filiative leanings. In "Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation," Makdisi points out that the horizon of Saidian humanism "is 67

the production of new forms of life... understood as indeterminate, expansive, and existing precisely in the connections and affects that tie human beings together" (90). In other words,

Said's humanism understood as an affiliative activity is a call for the intellectuals to be more

engaged with worldly concerns which in turn enables them to transcend the homologous

seamlessness of ethnocentric politics. It can be argued that Roy's political writings, written from

an affiliative position, accommodate several viewpoints even as they signify the presence of

other perspectives. Her primary allegiance to her subject matter enables her to rise above petty

identity politics to effectively articulate some of the humanistic assumptions which from the core

of Said's thought. Writing about an authentic Indian identity, Roy quibbles as she questions: "Is there such a thing as an Indian identity? Do we really need one? Who is an authentic Indian and who isn't? Is India Indian? Does it matter?" ("The End of Imagination" 115).

Questions of democracy, self-determination, and secularism are all tied to humanism as practiced by Said. In the postcolonial context, this thesis posits that Said's new humanism translates into (a tool) an articulation of liberation for the oppressed and the marginalized,

especially with reference to his eloquent advocacy for public intellectuals to both empathize and

intervene in matters of nationalism, ethnocentrism, religious fascism, and neoliberalism.

Theorizing empathy, Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe argues that:

The person who is not an immediate sufferer but who has the capacity to become a

secondary sufferer through sympathy for a generalized picture of suffering, and who

documents this suffering in the interests of eventual social intervention—such a person

occupies the position of the modern subject. (119)

Chakrabarty argues that this recognition of the suffering of others or what he calls the "suffering

as a subject of modern social thought" (120) could not have happened without the aid of secular 68 reason, where opposed to religious thought, in social thought suffering is specific, induced by humans and hence open to secular corrections and interventions. When Said writes that "We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics but as the active practice of worldly secular discourse," he echoes a somewhat similar sentiment to

Chakrabarty's ("Preface to Orientalism" xxix).

Said's enduring commitment to ideas of the general human (the universal), reason, and secularism express his underlying convictions that humanism is a practice, an activity that is sustained by a sense of empathy and with other sufferers who are viewed as part of a collective, general humanity where reason fuels the power of comprehension and reflective understanding leading to genuine disclosure of interventionary nature. Writing about two social reformers,

Rammohun Roy and Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar in nineteenth-century British-colonized India,

Chakrabarty argues that they espoused "the idea that compassion was a sentiment universally present in something called 'human nature" (Provincializing Europe 123). It is in a realization of this idea of the universalism of human nature, the idea that people all over the world are moved by ideals of justice and equality, that one discerns a humanism which is all-embracing and truly universal. As much as any author realizes the universal applicability of human rights, justice and equality, any threat to their curtailment, according to Edward Said, "by the dehumanizing forces of globalization, neoliberal values, economic greed, as well as imperialist ambition," also becomes an issue of universal significance and magnitude (HDC 71).

In "The End of Imagination," a deeply-moving and well-argued, political essay written after India's testing of its nuclear weapons, Roy underscores the negative implications of the testing of nuclear weapons, and the simultaneously unhelpful consequences of such an act on 69 humanity in general. Though believed by many to be just Roy's sentimental and passionate outburst against nuclear weapons, the essay systematically bares the link between the neoliberal, the communal, and the partisan government forces, whose vested interests are served by fuelling communal frenzy among its own people. She mourns the passing away of a world which for her existed prior to the testing of nuclear weapons, a world which she loved dearly because, she writes "it offered humanity a choice" (109). For Roy, nuclear weapons portend the end of imagination, a fearful curtailment of all the freedoms and liberties that humanism stands for. She writes about the passing away of such a world in a humanistic manner when she mentions metaphorically that "It was a rock out at sea. It was a stubborn chink of light that insisted that there was a different way of living" (109).

Likewise, in "The Reincarnation of Rumplestiltskin" Roy decries and exposes the government-mediated drive to privatization of most natural resources in the name of efficiency.

She condemns the only-alternative-approach of an inefficient, corrupt state that has privatized most resources as a result of profitable contracts between the private institutions and the ruling elite in the Third World. The essay, while it critiques privatization also, exposes the nexus between financial institution, Enron and the "ruling elite of the third world" (169). This "elitist affair" leaves out those whose lives directly depend on the access to those natural resources.

Their end of freedom and agency is signified by a loss of choice for those individuals.

Conversely, the revival of freedom and agency is constituted by what Said calls the humanist offering alternatives to what has been now silenced or considered unavailable (HDC 71). As much as a lack of alternatives signifies a loss of agency, offering those individuals with alternatives empowers them in many ways. 70

Said's lifelong struggle for the realization of a Palestinian state epitomizes his humanistic concern for Palestinians who have been treated as minorities. For him the struggle for the idea of

Palestine is predicated on inclusivity and community. Makdisi rightly points out that for Said,

"the idea of Palestine is a struggle for the articulation of a new sense of what it means to be human" ("Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation" 80). Roy's political essays force the reader to consider the histories and experiences of religious, ethnic, and race minorities, namely, the Muslims, the Dalits, and the Adivasis in India, much in a similar vein as Said's writings have been intermittently linked to the Palestinian cause. The call for a purely Jewish state of Israel resonates powerfully with the advocacy of a pure Hindu state in India. For Said, such assertions of religious nationalism oppose notions of secularism which forms the basis of humanistic thinking. When he argues for the dissolution of the purity of polarities—whether they are religious, national, or ethnic—Said effectively articulates a universalist ethics which forces a realization of the possibilities of a different relationship from the purely adversarial or oppositional ones. Roy is only too aware of the pitfalls associated with such partisan politics where the "us versus them" model virtually dictates the identities of all involved. Keen to bypass such politics, Roy declares in a universalist fashion, "I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am citizen of this earth. I own no territory. I have no flag. I'm female but have nothing against eunuchs. My policies are simple.. .Immigrants are welcome. You can help me design our flag" ("The End of Imagination" 109). As much as universalism is to be understood as equal opportunities and rights for all, it can also be viewed as an effective antidote to the partisan and ethnic politics pervading most democracies today. For Said, the advocacy for the universal is not to be misunderstood as a promotion for homogenized unities or for stable identities. Rather, the move towards universalism ensures that certain democratic freedoms are 71 the rights of every human being, which sadly is not the framework of the imperial world we live in.

The issues associated with challenging such an imposing imperial order from a literary perspective also involve questions of genres. Interestingly, when John Berger in Another Way of

Telling writes that the "triad of genres has almost become akin to a master narrative" (qtd. in

Power, Politics, and Culture 157), he clearly refers to the canonization and hierarchization of literary genres as well. Berger's remarks resonate well with Said's comments that only the genres of novel, poetry, and drama have historically defined literary studies, an effect which in turn has not only precluded literary studies from social and worldly affairs making it a systematic guild but also authorized in the name of literature acts of shameful complicity and justification in the marginalization and systematic exclusion and extermination of people. Said does not simply argue for a contamination of genres, he also argues for interference, a crossing of borders, a merging of disciplines. One of the interferences to be ventured is a crossing from literature

(supposed to be subjective and powerless by many) into journalism, considered to be objective and powerful in many ways.

Nonfiction Prose

Roy's nonfiction prose writings negotiate with the worldly concerns to argue powerfully for reinstating and recentering the marginalized individual through literary representation in an urgent manner. Reflecting on her choice to write political essays after her novel, Roy writes that she has "tried very hard to communicate the urgency of what is happening in the valley. But in the cities peoples' lives go on as usual" (The Cost of Living x). Clearly for Roy, it is this manner of urgency where literature's engagement with worldly affairs simultaneously dictates the choice of the genre of nonfiction prose over fiction. Said reflects both on the marginal status of the 72 essay in literary studies and the marginal individuals as subject matters of such essays. When he questions, "What is the essay's consciousness of its marginality to the text it discusses?" {The

World, the Text and the Critic 50), Roy would reply that the essay writer is acutely conscious of deploying a marginal genre for representing the concerns of marginalized individuals where the essay becomes a political tool in the hands of the writer.

When one examines the essays of Roy, one notices a powerful evocation of the theoretical impulse put forward by Said, the desire to intervene, to object, to make literature relevant and connect it with issues surrounding us everyday. Even though Said does not explicitly argue for the preference of nonfiction over fiction, in "Swift as Intellectual" he admires

Jonathan Swift largely as a pamphleteer and a writer of devastating and effective political tracts than as a novelist. His comments on a contamination of genres gesture evocatively towards a viewpoint which effectively blends with the role he assigns to literary studies to be more symptomatic of the struggles and politics of the contemporary world. Roy's own comments on her use of nonfiction prose are illustrative in that they suggest how "nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning" {An Ordinary Person's Guide to

Empire 3). In other words, for Roy, the travails and tribulations of everyday existence signified in the phrase, "broken world," are forceful and uncontrollable at the same time. Though she posits that fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of storytelling, the appropriateness of one technique over another for Roy, is invariably dictated by her instincts and the wish to achieve a desired result. For instance, her essay, "The End of Imagination" is a humanistic plea to save the planet for future generations from the horrors of nuclear armament in the Indian subcontinent. The moral urgency of the situation demands that the literary response to such a matter be constructed in an explicit manner to counter the narratives of abuse of power. 73

However, for some literary critics, this clarity of purpose has gone against the essay being

accorded equal standing as other genres. Chris Anderson in Literary Nonfiction: Theory,

Criticism, Pedagogy argues that in American literature opaqueness has been the source of

literary and philosophical prestige and the essay because of its clarity, less philosophical

ambitions, does not make for literary credibility (56).

Said targets such opaqueness which he considered to be synonymous with the American

literary turn towards the abstractions of theory in the 1970s, manifesting itself variously through

what he termed "textuality" and "political vacuousness" (The World, the Text and the Critic 3).

Disturbingly, the essay's clarity of intent and purpose have gone against its aesthetic

trustworthiness making the essay occupy a lower position at the crude end of the spectrum. Thus

for Said while the theories of the time proclaimed that literature was a deconstructive blur, he

resolutely maintained the purposefulness of literary expression.

The question above, in turn, leads to the debate between the originality of the author on

the one hand and the reiteration of issues on the other. Georg Lukacs in "On the Nature and

Form of the Essay" lends weight to this argument when he writes that "The essay is always

concerned with something already formed, or at best, with something that has been; it is part of

its essence that it does not draw something new .. .but only gives a new order to such things as

once lived" (10). About her political essays, Roy writes: "They're not meant to be a career

move—they're about re-stating the issue, they're about saying the same things over and over

again" ("Scimitars in the Sun" 13). This statement, unequivocally presents her position on the purpose of writing political essays as distinct from fiction writing. Roy highlights the

transformative aspect of social writing, where the essay, through its directness of style and

concise and unambiguous prose, becomes a vehicle of social justice. Pranav Jani in "Beyond 74

Anticommunism" argues that the genre of the essay allows Roy's unmistakably progressive and leftist voice to emerge more explicitly and directly in her political essays than her novel (48).

When Roy writes, "My style is my politics" ("Scimitars in the Sun" 9), she suggests an intimate connection between any author's predicament towards life and their choice of genre to write apart from addressing larger questions of a writer's role in society and politics.

When Saidian humanism as a critical practice associates itself with a minority consciousness and proposes to act in a universal fashion then it holds great relevance for Roy's project of redefining the politics of writing today. Additionally, Said's advocacy of defying thef purity of generic separation bodes well with Roy who has found it unproblematic to delve into nonfiction to recenter the concerns of the individual. Addressing these issues, one is forced to consider the relevance of what Roy does with the genre vis-a-vis the individual. How is the individual represented in their writings and where does the representation of such a marginalized individual lead them to?

The Individual in Roy vis-a-vis Said's Humanism

It can be argued that Roy's recentering of the displaced and marginalized individual through her political essays powerfully evokes the humanism of Said which is centered on the agency of human individuality. Roy's narrative, which invariably centers on the displaced and marginalized minorities, focuses on a loss of such agency for the protagonists in her story. In most of the essays listed at the beginning of this chapter, she argues credibly that these people have been systematically deprived of their agency by the Indian state. The act of recuperation of agency relies on a deep belief in the power of the individual to resist an ideological construction of the benevolent national state and also to reassess that relationship between the individual and the state. Since for Said, humanism is the achievement of form by human will and agency, the 75

individual's capacity to renegotiate that relationship of dispossession and servitude with the state becomes significant. In "Introduction: Edward Said and After," Matthew Abraham explains that

for Said, "Humanism is ultimately a belief in the power of the human, contra those who believe

that human effort no longer matters in shaping the political" (5). The onus to alter the state of

affairs lies with the individual's capability to resist, critique, and articulate his/her dissent with the state.

Roy's choice of the genre of the political essay gives her the privilege to position both herself and the subject of her writing, the variously marginalized and displaced people, in a realistic, contestatory mode with the state. Writing about the Indian state she argues repeatedly:

It is a state that has succeeded impressively in what it set out to do. It has been ruthlessly

efficient in the way it has appropriated India's resources... and redistributed them to a

favored few.... It is superbly accomplished in the art of protecting its cadres of paid-up

elite, consummate in its methods of pulverizing those who inconvenience its intentions.

("The Greater Common Good" 23)

Roy's technique of dichotomizing the actors in a Manichean fashion has been critiqued by

Gurleen Grewal in "Home and the World: The Multiple Citizenships of Arundhati Roy" where

she argues that since "Roy approaches her material as a playwright would, identifying protagonists and antagonists, identifying conflict or crisis and theatrically amplifying it," the reader loses some objectivity in favor of affect and memorable turn of phrase (148). Grewal laments the loss of objectivity in favor of what she considers is the treatment of subject matter by

Roy where the separation between protagonists and antagonists, the sarkar-public dichotomy, is a foregone conclusion. Grewal's lament over the loss of objectivity in Roy's writings avoids the polemical purpose of such political essays. The separation between the protagonist and the 76 antagonist does not mean that Roy is not objective in her assessment of the subject matter, where each argument is carefully weighed and then articulated to reveal her preference from among all the players involved. For her, it has been repeatedly confirmed that the Indian state is culpable when it has come to defend the interests and lives of all minorities—religious, gender, and caste minorities.

In "Democracy," an essay Roy wrote after the brazen killings of Muslims in the state of

Gujarat were conducted under the benign gaze of the state government, she indicts the state government of colluding in fomenting and inciting communal violence. She argues in a humanistic manner that no matter who they were, or how they were killed, each person who died in Gujarat deserves to be mourned as a human being. As if in response to such inhuman and barbaric acts, Said advocates that "humanism is the only...the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history" ("Preface to Orientalism" xxix). In "Democracy" again, Roy outlines instances of inhuman practices—only one among many that make up her narrative—by focusing on individuals being treated as religious minorities. For instance, the brutal dismembering and killing of the Muslim Member of

Parliament, Ehsaan Jaffri in Gujarat as a reprisal for the death of fifty eight Hindus on the

Sabarmati Express in Godhra, enables Roy to both identify the protagonists and antagonists and to take sides. She recounts the words of a man who took part in the savagery: "Five people held him, then someone struck him with a sword.. .chopped off his hand, then his legs.. .then everything else.. .after cutting him to pieces, they put him on the wood they'd piled and set him on fire. Burned him alive" ("Listening to Grasshoppers-Genocide, Denial and Celebration" 9).

The recentering on individual plight and helplessness underscores the humanistic impulse to 77

intervene and retell the story against the background of systematic killing of not just one

individual but many like him.

In "Listening to Grasshoppers-Genocide, Denial and Celebration" Roy's act of

recentering on the story of another individual, Araxie Barsamian, one of the survivors of the

Turkish repression against Armenians, not only offers a testimony that is officially denied by the

Turkish government but also provides an alternative version to received or official history. The recounting of the event by Roy, though not original in content and even information, is

interspersed with her subjective assessment of the participants involved and points to the perpetrators of the crime. The strategic incorporation of the journalistic with the literary is

guided by her commitment to both fields. This mixing enables her to suggest a narrative of humanism; a narrative which espouses humanism as an alternative way of thinking and living.

She sensitizes the reader to the systematic and deliberate attempt by the state and its apparatus to

look away while the killings and lootings happened in Godhra, Gujarat. While more than two thousand people died as a result of communal violence, more than 150,000 Muslims driven away

from their homes now live as refugees. Muslim dargahs and masjids were destroyed as part of the retaliation by outraged Hindus. Roy's political essays enumerate such inhuman practices and yet suggest redemption through the practice of humanism. The antidote to such inhuman practices, according to Roy and Said, lies in recentering the dignity and worth of each individual being, to think of alternatives to the existing ways of living. Humanism, according to Said, is about choices even as the work of the humanist is to offer "alternative narratives," now silenced or seemingly unavailable (HDC 141). Likewise, Roy argues that humanism can be seen as "a

stubborn chink of light that insisted that there was a different way of living" ("The End of

Imagination" 109). For instance, in the essay, "Darkness Passed..." Roy celebrates the coming to 78 power of the alternative Congress government after six years of rule by the right-wing Hindu - supported BJP (National People's Party). Though she remains aware and critical of the ideological collusion between the two governments, nevertheless the euphoric tone marked by skepticism guides the reader to an alternative which surely can be read literally as well as metaphorically as the passing away of darkness. Both Roy's and Said's writings constantly emphasize that the amateur intellectual's conception and articulation of alternatives to the present state of affairs signifies search for freedom and more agency. Thus the role of the intellectual, discussed in depth in chapter 3, in articulating the possibilities of individual freedom and human agency despite an apparent predetermination of historical events by linguistic structures points towards an enabling as well as a liberating future.

However, Roy has been critiqued for what Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas identifies as her "focus on the individual isolated from social or collective functions in order to dramatize a

'story.'" ("Committed Writing" 103). Baneth-Nouailhetas's premise is clear as she argues that

Roy's focus or recentering of the individual is a rhetorical device, a tactic she calls it, which is

"populist in form and tradition" (103). Baneth-Nouailhetas's argument precludes the possibility of any organic link between the individual and the masses in Roy's essays. Instead, it can be convincingly argued that the recentering of the individual might be considered a rhetorical device, but it is a contrivance that serves a powerful purpose of linking the individual to the masses in an organic and constant manner. In Roy's political essays, the individual is never isolated from the social or collective functions; in fact the presence of an individual variously manipulated and mistreated gestures towards the need for social commitment at a universal level.

At a related level, the importance of the local and the individual to make up the mass resistance movements against various manifestations of corporate globalizations is constantly underscored 79 in Roy's essays. It can therefore be argued that Roy's recentering of the individual points towards an ethics of universal humanism, best articulated in the works of Said. For instance, writing about her visit to one of the resettlement sites of the Sardar Sarovar Dam oustees, Roy focuses on individual displacement not as an end in itself but to draw attention to the millions displaced as a result of the Indian government's callousness towards its own people. She writes:

shivering children, perched like birds on the edges of cots, while swirling waters enter

their tin homes. Frightened, fevered eyes watch pots and pans carried through the

doorway by the current, floated out into the flooded fields, thin fathers swimming after

them to retrieve what they can. ("The Greater Common Good" 52)

Roy's political essays narrate individual dispossession and displacement in the manner of a heart-wrenching story which is told with great poignancy and compassion to both alert the reader to the absolute inequity perpetuated in the name of development and also to offer alternatives to the present state of affairs. Relying on factual information to create her stories, Roy repeatedly informs her readers that even though she might be dealing with numbers and facts, she attempts to "create links, to join the dots, to tell politics like a story, to communicate it, to make it real"

{Checkbook 10). When Roy deploys the political essay to voice the concerns of the marginalized individuals and groups—"the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard" as she calls them—she not only forces a revaluation of the individual as a subject capable of responsibility, action, and agency, she also manages to reinstate the importance of literary essay as an instrument of intervention ("Peace?..." 1).

Roy consistently views herself primarily as a literary writer and not a political activist or leader of any mass movement. When receiving the Sydney Peace Prize in November 2004, Roy remarked that she was accepting the award as a "literary prize that honors a writer for her 80 writing" ("Peace?..." 1). Implied in the comment is Roy's construction of her self-image as a literary writer who writes political essays. As she asserts herself as a literary writer, Roy helps redefine and simultaneously expand the horizons of literary studies. For instance, when she writes about Harsud, a small 700-year-old town in Madhya Pradesh, slated to be submerged by the reservoir of the Narmada Sagar Dam, she assumes that the question of submergence of a town is a topic fit for literary studies. In the essay, "The Road to Harsud," the town's topography is revealed to the reader in a moving way. She writes:

The first to greet us was an old, buffalo, blind, green-eyed with cataract.. .Behind the

buffalo, silhouetted against the sky, the bare bones of a broken town. A town turned

inside out, its privacy ravaged, its innards exposed. Personal belongings, beds,

cupboards, clothes, photographs, pots and pans lie on the street. In several houses, caged

parakeets hang from broken beams. An infant swaddled in a sari-crib sways gently, fast

asleep in a doorway in a free-standing wall.. .Perched on the concrete frames of wrecked

buildings, men, like flightless birds, are hammering, sawing, smoking, talking...The local

cartoonist is exhibiting his work on a pile of stones. Every cartoon is about how the

government cheated and deceived people. (6)

Roy's description of an about-to-be-abandoned town, even as it is rich in its evocative imagery and apt use of similes, eventually portrays the individual as a victim of the violence perpetrated by the government. The violence this time she talks about is "Only cold, brilliant strategy" as there was "no bulldozing, no police firing, no coercion," but simply dispossession on a huge scale ("The Road to Harsud" 6). People who could afford to bribe the land revenue inspectors were compensated while the others fell prey to the legal procedures which they eventually cannot even challenge. Roy's description of the events in Harsud "stretches the text as a link of affect 81

and accountability" between the author and the reader (Baneth-Nouailhetas, "Committed Writer"

99). Roy repeatedly addresses the reader directly creating an effect of a dialogue or a

conversation in turn enfranchising both the reader and the writer. However, Roy reaches her

greatest literary success in linking various disparate events to see them as part of a common process of a savage, corporatized, militarized world.

For instance, the considered linking of the Turkish genocide against Armenians to the genocide against Muslims in Gujarat, India in 2002, is a stylistic move that Roy indulges in to raze barriers that prevent ordinary people from linking and understanding similar but seemingly unrelated events. She joins the dots further to argue that "when genocide meets the Free

Market... [it becomes] a multinational business enterprise" ("Listening to Grasshoppers" 4). Roy

insinuates the often not-grasped link between the occurrence of genocide and the invisible market forces that usually aid the process of killings for their own vested interests. She points out that markets even determine the occurrence or non-occurrence of genocides in many cases. For

instance, the Rwandan mass killings of 1994, where close to 800,000 people were systematically

exterminated, was denied the official word of genocide primarily because an acknowledgement

of the killings as genocide would have forced the US to intervene since it was a signatory to the

Genocide Convention of 1948. However, the larger argument Roy furthers through her focus on genocide concerns the systematic marginalization and dehumanization of the Muslims along with the Adivasis and Dalits ("Listening to Grasshoppers" 9). In a recent essay, "The Monster in the Mirror" published after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Roy argues that consistently and

systematically the caste and religious minorities have been targeted in all cases of violence.

Instead of viewing the attacks as an isolated event, Roy traces the lineage of communal bigotry

and hatred which has been sown even before the Partition of the country. However, one of the 82

central arguments in the essay reveals the fact that in the big picture of terrorism, whether state-

sponsored or otherwise, "individuals don't figure in their calculations except as collateral

damage" ("The Monster in the Mirror" np). Roy's subversive energies work to reclaim the status

of both—individual human dignity and the political essay as well.

Writing further about the systematic dehumanization achieved through marginalization

and dispossession of all minorities, Roy links it to "the structural adjustment program through

which India has privatized every public asset and laid it at the mercy of the corporate elite and

multinational corporations" (Challakere, "More to the Point, Less Composed" 115). In a twist to

the perceived reality, Roy opines that "in reality, those who we call poor are the truly wealthy"

because India's mineral and forest wealth is geographically stacked up with the homelands of the

Adivasis. But when the "Sky Citizens," Roy's term for the middle and upper caste Indians, cast

their eyes on the precious resources, she argues that a program of systematic exclusion and

dehumanization falls logically in place. The human species' natural impulse to expansion in its

search not just for space but for sustenance is described by Roy as a lebensraum, a word coined

by the German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel to describe the Nazi ideologues'

naturalization of dominance of a supposedly stronger species over a weaker one. She argues that

this struggle for lebensraum is an annihilating struggle realized not necessarily through killing, burning, bayoneting, gassing, bombing or shooting but also through displacing people from their

homes, blocking access to food and water and denying the basic amenities and dignity of a

human existence. This corroborates well with Roy's figures which reveal that dams alone in

India have displaced more than more than 30 million people and spiraled them into abject poverty making of them non-citizens in the literal sense of the word. Therefore, it becomes 83 imperative to enshrine the locus of sovereignty of all human beings through the universalism of rights which remain unrestricted by race, religion, income, class, or ethnicity.

As a result, Roy's tactical ploy to reveal instances of inequity through focusing on an individual's plight broadens the purview of literary studies to include within its realm a genre which makes the intangible tangible. Roy's desire to write about instances of social injustice stylistically begins with the individual but she is quick to dismiss the singular focus of her critique. She mentions that when she writes about an individual she is "not talking about one man, of course, [I am] talking about millions and millions of people who live in this country"

("The End of Imagination" 125). The fact that Roy belongs to an elite, privileged, educated class, does not prevent her from expressing her solidarity and communication with actual people and communities. Even though she recenters the individual she simultaneously acknowledges an affiliation to a universalism of human dignity and equal rights.

From Individual to Universal

It is Partha Chatterjee who in The Politics of the Governed argues that the modern form of the nation is both premised on the universal as well as the particular or the local. According to him, in the universal the people are the locus of sovereignty and all humans are potentially considered as bearers of equal rights unrestricted by race, religion, ethnicity or even class (29).

However, it is Chatterjee's belief that without a transformation of the institutions and practices of civil society, it becomes virtually impossible to create and sustain freedom and equality for all.

He points out that to have modern and free political communities we first need to have people who are citizens as opposed to the population. ' It must be pointed out though that Roy does not follow the important distinction Chatterjee makes here as she uses the term citizen indiscriminately even for people who do not seem to posses any participation in the sovereignty 84 of the state. She uses the term citizen interchangeably with the populace, lacking the caution and definition of what Chatterjee prescribes. Moreover, Chatterjee continues that the government secures its legitimacy not by the participation of its citizens but by claiming to provide for the well-being of the population—a vacuous rhetoric which has been exposed in the political essays of Roy which seek accountability for the millions marginalized, and subsequently displaced as a result of government policies.

Said cautions against ascribing any totalizing intent to universalism by which a system of thought is believed to account for everything too quickly, and slides into a quasi-religious synthesis often overlooking the contraries involved. Much like universalism, Said did not want humanism to be considered a totalizing discourse as well. Radhakrishnan argues that "humanism is a very specific ideological "ism" that masquerades as a transideological human and humane universalist vision" ("Edward Said's Literary Humanism" 5). He further questions Said's motives in embracing humanism which he argues is laced with notions of universalism.

Radhakrishnan queries as to why Said is not critical of an essentialism like humanism when he frontally attacks other debilitating and reductive modes of essentialisms such as Orientalism.

This leads Radhakrishnan to argue that Said's univocal commitment to praxis forces him to make essential claims about the human. There is a part of Said that wants him to hold on essentially and universally to something called human nature. Radhakrishnan critques Said, who he argues in spite of his deep-seated anti-essentialism, approves of essentialism when it comes to human nature. However, Said would argue that without universalism, humanism runs the risk of privileging certain identities, as it has done in the past, over other ones. Thus universalism provides a direction to the practice of humanism, as it transcends the binarism of European imperialism, which is not left to the whims and fancies of its interpreters. Thus the difficulty lies 85 not with humanism per se, but ways in which humanism has been historically deployed to

"betray its real promise" (Radhakrishnan, "Edward Said's Literary Humanism" 4).

In her essay, "Saidian Humanism," Emily Apter writes that "Saidian humanism.. .prompts an activist to return to the 'great works' of humanism, with the understanding that humanism itself be rezoned to avoid the misleading cartographic divisions between European and non-European cultures" (52). Said approves of a critical universalism which he argues cannot be an end itself, but can only be progressive when it takes a critical, anti- systemic form. The faulty universalism of European imperialism in the past and what Aamir

Mufti in "Auerbach in Istanbul: Edwarsd Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority

Culture" calls the contemporary "notion of the universalism of the logic of'capitalist development,'" have managed to sustain the hierarchies of Eurocentrism. Mufti points out in this context that:

A genuine alternative to this universalism of contemporary Eurocentric thought is not a

retreat into the local, into so many localities, but rather a general account of the play of

the particular in the universalizing process of capitalist-imperial modernity. (122)

Such a move by Said, where he intermittently links humanism to universalism in a pedagogical imperative, while it gestures towards his affinities with the humanist tradition, also signals his break with that tradition. Said's humanism exists neither to deny the specificity of individual efforts and experiences nor to rule out the projected sense of the whole.

In effect, Jan Selby in his essay, "Edward Said: Truth, Justice, and Nationalism" sums up

Said's universalism as an "ethical commitment to certain intrinsic universal goods: justice, equality, freedom, and knowledge" (45). He argues that there is an empirical basis to Said's penchant for universalism. Said wrote in Humanism and Democratic Criticism: 86

that the affiliated notion that humanistic ideals of liberty and learning still supply most

disadvantaged people with the energy to resist unjust war and military occupation, for

instance, and try to overturn despotism and tyranny, both strike me as ideas that alive and

well. (10)

For Said, humanistic ideals realized through their universal applicability move towards concerns of social justice. For Said, the central concern was justice, not identity. Therefore, his support for the Palestinian right to self-determination, akin to Roy's advocacy of somewhat similar rights for the Dalits, Adivasis, and other religious minorities, is in harmony with his universalist critique of nationalism and ethnic politics. On Said's show of solidarity for the Palestinian people, Selby comments that "Said's attempt to write a collective Palestinian narrative—to speak on behalf of a

Palestinian 'we'—and to put the Palestinian reality before the western reader is, in turn, but part of a universalist project of liberation" (51). The concern with the universals of justice and truth is blended with narratives of representation as well as self-representation.

Roy's act of recentering the individual, primarily realized through focusing on individual- specific stories, points to a strategic move that not only allows her to universalize the issues involved but also manages to create a space for literary studies that challenges the notion of what literature has conventionally engaged with. For instance, in "The Road to Harsud" Roy writes about Baalak Ram, a labourer who had been uprooted two years back and now earning a meager livelihood rounding up cattle who had gone wild. Again, Baalak Ram's story serves as a case in point to highlight the massive scale of dispossession created by government greed and mismanagement in relation to the construction of big dams. Therefore, the demand for resettlement is a humane concern—a demand for dignity and respect for the millions of lives affected by the construction of big dams. She invokes the genre of the political essay and the 87

literary forum to voice her dismay and disappointment with the so-called democratic procedures

in India. Roy, as if, invokes the Saidian humanistic concept of participatory citizenship to

question the democratic aspect and accountability of any institution in India. If people are on

their own then how does change come about? Participatory citizenship, as an essential

component of Saidian humanism, is democratic in nature and universal in aspect. Participatory

citizenship works by embracing other cultures, other people, other races, and other perspectives.

A writer's non-discriminatory affiliation with all those who are affected and marginalized

constitutes the basis of a truly all-inclusive universalism.

However, Chatterjee cautions that the rhetoric of universalism should not blind us to the

fact of local caste, religious, or gender inequalities. The challenge is to embrace these

inequalities in a move towards universalism. In his book The Spectre of Comparisons, Benedict

Anderson, writing about the politics of ethnicity, differentiates between what he calls, bound and unbound serialities. Unbound seriality, for Anderson, is composed of the everyday universals of

modern social thought, i.e., nations, citizens, revolutionaries, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and so on

as opposed to bound seriality which consists of governmentality, the finite totals of enumerable

classes of population produced by modern census (29). According to Anderson, "where bound

seriality, which has its origins in governmentality, is exemplified by finite series like Asian-

Americans, beurs, and Tutsis," unbound seriality with its origins in the print market, especially

in newspapers, and in representations of popular performance, is exemplified through open-to- the world plurals as nationalists, anarchists, and so on (29). Anderson argues that bound

serialities can only operate with integers, thus implying that any individual can only exist as one

or zero and never as a fraction. Bound serialities are potentially reconstructing and even

conflictual because they eliminate all mixed, hybrid, and marginal populations. Such serialities, 88

though they seemingly create a sense of community, can potentially produce the tools of ethnic

and religious conflict. Emily Apter writes that Said's "concern to move 'beyond identity'—

reprised in the opening of his memoir Out of Place.. .recalls the intellectual disposition of an

entire generation of humanists who...resisted the claims of identity in the name of an ontological

something else" (42). Apter's statement on identity politics in the context of Said's humanism

underlines the need for humanism to transcend parochial identity politics with a simultaneous

movement towards what she calls "global humanism" ("Saidian Humanism" 52).

On the other hand, unbound serialities are potentially liberating because within a

framework of universalism: "They afford the opportunity for individuals to imagine themselves

as members of larger than face-to-face solidarities, of choosing to act on behalf of those

solidarities, of transcending by an act of political imagination the limits imposed by traditional

practices" (Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed 5). Thus Anderson's distinction between the

two serialities as pointed out by Chatterjee, highlights what is "genuinely ethical and noble in the

universalist critical thought characteristic of the Enlightenment" (The Politics of the Governed

6). Anderson argues that the planetary spread of a conception of politics reflecting on everyday

practices requires the understanding of the world as one. He asserts the importance of

universalism as a concept that is essential to the modern imagining of communities.

Much like Anderson, Said too is keen to preserve what is noteworthy in Enlightenment

thought about humanism as well as universalism. Thus most importantly, the politics of universalism has to brace itself to deal with the charge that the slogan of universality has often been seen as a mask to cover the perpetuation of real inequalities. So when Roy recenters the

individual, she in effect highlights the universal. This universalism, as it embraces universal

human rights, universal self-determination for disenfranchised people, and universal release from 89

economic dependency, becomes as if to say, a precondition for humanism to exist and function

effectively. One can argue that without the achievement of the above-mentioned indicators of

social justice at the universal level, humanism becomes an empty signifier, devoid of any

content. Thus, for humanism to take effective shape, certain criteria must be met at a universal

level. In representing the universalism of ideas of social justice articulated through a recentering

on the individual, Roy's political essays advance a symbiotic relation between the subject matter

and genre.

Individual Freedom and Genre

Roy's political essays need to be distinguished from the larger body of what is considered

essays today. The general use of the term essay, though initially associated with its originator

Michel de Montaigne, has moved much beyond the personal form to be used erroneously without

distinguishing the personal from other forms of essays. While it is beyond the scope of the project here to conduct a large-scale treatment of the essay or even to enumerate and evaluate all

different kinds of essays in use today, it is useful to however argue that the term has become

much more capacious moving well beyond the personal essay. While the roots of the personal

essay in the West can be traced to Michel de Montaigne, the essayistic writings of Arundhati

Roy belie any easy categorical and sub-generical identification. Taking its cue from Wendell

Harris' convincing exposition of the characteristics of the personal essay, this project among

other issues, also argues that Roy's essays should not be classified as personal essays in the vein

of what Montaigne wrote. Harris is worth quoting at length to help us understand the

distinctiveness of the personal essay:

The personal essay does not have as its primary goal the presentation of facts, instruction

in how to do anything, the making of recommendations about how to handle a current 90

problem, the judicial evaluation of anything, the construction of an argument for any

theory, or the inculcation of moral rules. Neither is it primarily satirical or humorous. The

reader may well find the author's point of view in some way useful, but the immediate

effect of the successful personal essay is simply the consciousness of participating in an

individual way of looking at things, of savoring the striking or pungent phrasing that

gives force to the author's individual point of view, or of pursuing fresh thoughts of one's

own for which the unique mental organization of the author has somehow been a catalyst.

("Reflections on the Peculiar Status of the Personal Essay" 936)

Thus while Harris qualifies what the personal essay is not, his insights into the matter are useful to help us understand that Roy's essays should not be classified as personal essays. His argument that the topicality of the essays of John McPhee, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe outweighs the personal voice is convincing in the case of Roy as well. M.H. Abrams's Glossary of Literary

Terms only incidentally mentions the term "personal" (along with "familiar") as a synonym for

"informal." Abrams defines the informal essay as one where "the author assumes a tone of intimacy with his audience, tends to be concerned with everyday things rather than with public affairs or specialized topics, and writes in a relaxed, self-revelatory and often whimsical fashion"

(82). If this is any indication of what the personal reads like then surely Roy's essays cannot be classified as belonging to the sub-genre of the personal. The political astuteness with which Roy

"write[s] about things that vitally affect peoples' lives" ("Scimitars in the Sun" 14) brings the focus away from the personal to the political, where the personal is noteworthy as far as it is politically significant.

Roy's first encounter with defending the terrain of the individual was accomplished even before she published her first novel in 1997. In "The Great Indian Rape-Trick, I and II," Roy's humanism focuses on the muted agency of Phoolan Devi, the bandit on whose life the story of the film, Bandit Queen was based. What triggered the conflict between Roy and the director of the film, Shekhar Kapur, was the latter's claim that the film was a true version of Devi's life. In an interview with Antonia Navarro-Tejero, "Dissent has to be Localized," Roy says, "The enthusiasm to depict rape in the garb of self-righteous feminist politics repulsed me. It distorted the story of a woman who was simply not a victim." (193). Roy argues that the reasons for

Devi's becoming a bandit lay in her claims to land titles which were forcibly taken away from her and not her rape which is what the film claimed. Roy's essays thus, while recentering the individual by arguing that Devi ought to have agency over the representation of her rapes,

simultaneously accentuate the idea of intervention through literary writing. Nagesh Rao points out, in a different context though, that "Roy's essays represents] a return of the repressed, the return of the class as a category—as genre, in other words.. .calls for a radical re-c/ass-ification of the multicultural essay canon" ("The Politics of Genre and the Rhetoric of Radical

Cosmopolitanism; Or Who's Afraid of Arundhati Roy?" 173). Thus Roy's radicalism, invoked through her political essays, speaks to the agency of the individual and yet addresses the concerns of the multitude.

It is this focus.on the individual and the concern for the multitude that guides her vitriolic outbursts against those in power. "The Greater Common Good," published in her book The Cost of Living, primarily deals with the Narmada Dam oustees even as it attacks the spiteful politics of the government which sacrifices the nameless millions in the name of a greater common good.

The essay's spotlight cast on Bhaiji Bhai's narrative is symptomatic of a larger systemic problem highlighted through an individuals' story of loss not only of belongings but also the ability to tell their own stories. Bhaiji Bhai, a Tadvi Adivasi from Undava, one of the first villages where land 92 was acquired for Wonder Canal dam construction, lost seventeen of his nineteen acres to the dam project. Bhaiji Bhai is just one of the possible 100,000 people affected by such projects who have become paupers overnight and their lives sacrificed in the name of the greater common good. Or for instance, in "Ahimsa" translated as "non-violence," Roy focuses on the plight of four Adivasi activists on an indefinite hunger strike and fighting against the Madhya Pradesh government's decision to forcibly evict the Adivasis from the proposed dam construction site. Roy's story of these individuals, often directly addresses the reader or an audience, and in turn becomes symptomatic of the larger troubles faced by the group of marginalized peoples. Even though she names these four individuals—Vinod Patwa, Mangat Verma, Chitaroopa Palit, and Ram

Kunwar—the naming works at the level of representation to point to the larger problem of a lack of freedom and a consequent lack of development. Roy's essay is written on the twenty-ninth day of the activists' indefinite hunger strike and as a mark of solidarity with the protesters.

Focusing on human freedoms as indicators of development is the basis of the pioneering work of the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. While traditionally the view of development has associated it with the growth of gross national product, or with technological advance, or with social modernization, it is in Sen's work, Development as Freedom that individual freedom is seen as a constitutive element of development. Thus for Sen, "Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states" {Development as Freedom 3). Sen contends, somewhat similarly to Roy, that viewing development in terms of expanding substantive freedoms rather than relying on state collected data on individual incomes is an important indicator of the relation between individual freedom and the achievement of social development. He argues that "Despite 93 unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers" [Development as Freedom 3-4) an idea which powerfully echoes with

Roy's contention that even though India has progressed, most of its people have not ("The

Greater Common Good" 22). Clearly, for both Roy and Sen, progress and development are measured on a different scale and with different indicators, where human freedoms are seen to advance development.

According to Sen, "Freedom is essential to the process of development for two distinct reasons.

1. The evaluative reason: assessment of progress has to be done primarily in terms of

whether the freedoms that people have are enhanced;

2. The effectiveness reason: achievement of development is thoroughly dependent on the

free agency of the people." {Development as Freedom 4)

Sen's premise throws light on the relation between individual freedom and the achievement of social development thus making free agency not only a part but the principal end of development. While for Sen, human freedom is essentially realized in the coexistence of market economy with relevant social support and public regulation of those markets, for Roy and Said the critique of a privatized, capitalist economy is central to their realization of what constitutes freedom. It is Sen's basic contention in Development as Freedom that economic unfreedom, in the form of extreme poverty, can breed social and other kinds of unfreedoms (8). Roy's political essays connect these various forms of unfreedom to expose the ideology of the development state and its fake rhetoric of benevolence towards its own people. According to Roy, one unfreedom leads or adds to another with the result that a dehumanized life of dispossession becomes a norm for the impoverished millions. It is only when the conception of development and progress go 94 beyond the accumulation of wealth and the growth of gross national product and other income- related variables that development can proclaim a universalist reach for itself. It is only when

economic indicators take account of development that includes the masses, that freedom is

achieved universally. As Sen contends, "Expanding the freedom that we have reason to value makes not only our lives richer and more unfettered but also allows us to be fuller social persons" {Development as Freedom 15). However, for a great number of people their lives are

still lived with economic as well as political unfreedoms. In fact, Roy argues that it is always the

impoverished, the indigenous peoples all over the earth, the Adivasis, the minorities that must

always learn to sacrifice for the greater common good of the nation, which ironically they can barely call their own. Roy provides a stylistic justification by clarifying that when she focuses on

one man, she is not talking about one man, but of course, she is "talking about millions and millions of people who live in this country" ("The End of Imagination" 125).

In "The End of Imagination," an essay addressing the false euphoria associated with

India's testing of the nuclear bomb, she powerfully asserts her belief in universalism, allying it

strongly with a humanistic and democratic spirit. The essay is a humanistic plea to save the planet from the horrors of total destruction. The dedication to the essay reads: "For marmots and voles and everything else on earth that is threatened and terrorized by the human race" ("The

End of Imagination" 92). As she does that she simultaneously mourns the passing away of a world which for her existed prior to the testing of nuclear weapons. She argues that she loved that world, a world of humanism, because it gave humanity a choice, freedom to choose their

future.

In the section titled, "Bomb and I" from "The End of Imagination," Roy speculates on her own death in the aftermath of a future with nuclear weapons. The section deals with an 95 individuals' reaction, in this case Roy herself, to the bomb which lends a confessional as well as a personal tone to the essay. Roy is located in the essay as a protagonist, one who has been variously implicated and traumatized by the government's decision to test the nuclear bomb. She gives vent to her own feelings so that the text reveals her personal tirade against nuclear weapons—a subject which she feels has nothing new or original to it. She writes: "There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has, over the years, already been made by other people in other parts of the world, and made passionately, eloquently, and knowledgeably' ("The End of Imagination" 94). The purpose of nonfiction, namely the political essay here, is to keep reaffirming the issue till the desired transformative end is achieved. Though Roy might assert that there is no great difference between fiction and nonfiction, however, her stated choice of dealing with issues of such urgency and magnitude through the genre of the political essay, suggests that Roy's subject matter dictates her genre.

Even though she might try to narrow the gulf between fiction and nonfiction by suggesting that fiction is the truest thing ever, as she does in an interview with David Barsamian in The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, she unambiguously demarcates between the two (10).

In "The Greater Common Good," she writes:

"Instinct led me to set aside Joyce and Nabokov, to postpone reading Don LeLillo's big

book and substitute for it reports on drainage and irrigation, with journals and books and

documentary films about dams and why they're built and what they do. My first tentative

questions revealed that few people know what is going on in the Narmada valley...For the

people of the valley, the fact that the stakes were raised to this degree has meant that their

most effective weapon - specific facts about specific issues in this specific valley - has 96

been blunted by the debate on the big issues. The basic premise of the argument has been

inflated until it has burst into bits that have, over time, bobbed away. (9)

She has been led by her instincts to embrace an art form that she describes not only takes cognizance of contemporary politics, it even thinks of transforming it. Or even, whenever she has been asked if she was writing another book of fiction Roy has retorted by saying: "Another book? Right now! This talk of nuclear war displays such contempt for music, art, literature and everything else that defines civilization. So what kind of book should I write?" ("Summer Games with Nuclear Bombs" 303). Clearly enough, Roy makes the case for nonfiction writing here, in particular justifying the situation and subject matter to be grave enough to dictate the genre to the author.

Commenting on the art of retelling events as stories, Gurleen Grewal remarks that "In her retelling, Roy does the work of making common sense and common cause for a fragmented world" ("Home and the World" 150). Thus the numbing and chilling facts are not relegated to unintelligibility and are not even considered mere statistical figures. Instead, Roy's predilection for nonfiction makes the reader embrace those facts and figures as stories about real people afflicted with real dangers. However, the political is presented with emotion, vigilant research for facts, and an open eye to the past evidence and its linkages to the present. Jefferess in "The

Limits of Dissent," points out that Roy's attention to emotion and her consciousness of "story" allows her to represent the Narmada issue, or any issue, in a more full or authentic way than the form and structure of academic reason would permit (158). When Jefferess alludes to the "full or authentic way," he refers to the explicit and candid treatment of the subject matter through Roy's deployment of the political essay; an act which is distinct from writing fictional stories about the same issues. 97

Roy's own awareness about her turn to nonfiction is never presented or articulated as a momentous event. She writes that the tale she has to tell is "full of numbers and explanations.

Numbers used to make my eyes glaze over. Not anymore. Not since 1 began to follow the direction in which they point" ("The Greater Common Good" 21). Roy's allusion to her embracing nonfiction prose and her trust in facts and numbers is part of her effort to try and convince the reader of the possibility of a story behind numbers, explanations, and facts. Her writing fuses these numbers with a humanistic impulse to weave a story out of such factual information. For her, the displaced millions as a result of government-initiated policies, communal disharmony, the granaries overflowing with tons of food grains and the starving millions, and millions of dollars doled out as loans by the World Bank are not mere figures. She argues that there is as much human method and motive attached to all these events. Roy points out the humanistic consequences of these facts and figures in her 'political essays.' She argues how these figures disturbingly point towards a non-egalitarian society where in spite of a glut of food grains availability, people are left to starve. Numbers make sense—she recounts that

114,000 people are flushed out like rats from the land they have lived on for centuries—when they become part of a story to sustain and verify a truth. Also for instance, in War Talk, she points at numbers to speculate that roughly for the price of a Hawk bomber, the Indian government could provide one and a half million people with clean drinking water for life. The ironical aspect of Roy's writing is that even though she takes to writing 'political essays' because of their factual overtures, she is critical of the one-must-stick-to-facts-alone approach. In her political writings one discerns a fastidious blend of both facts and sentiments in a sense that

"humanizes abstract statistics" (Jefferess, "The Limits of Dissent" 176). Having said that,

Jefferess points to the numerous objections he has towards Roy's approach which he finds is 98

limited by the narrative framework of dissent. He writes that "The tradition of dissent within

which Roy writes limits the sort of stories she can tell" (176). However, to write within this

tradition of dissent marks a conscious choice made by Roy who is writing to advocate a political position and whose overt commitment to social justice takes precedence over interrogations and

speculations about what different stories she can tell in an original manner.

Jefferess further argues that since Roy's dissent is essentially articulated through a narrative framework, "it is much more aligned to the narrative of crisis than it is to a radical

intervention" ("The Limits of Dissent" 176). Jefferess's distinction between narrative and

radicalism relies on a binary logic which analyzes these categories as mutually exclusive to each

other. His contention, by implication, is that radical intervention in any sphere cannot or should

not rely on a narrative framework of any sort; fiction or nonfiction are all relegated to the

margins of a sphere dictated and ruled by what he calls "radical intervention." Jefferess objects

to the rhetorical structure and the ideological assumptions of the idea of dissent which he finds

are severely limiting in scope. Now, Jefferess's fault lies in mistakenly considering dissent to be

a figure of rhetoric only; it precludes the possibility of considering dissent to be expressed in any

way other than by way of rhetoric. However, it can be argued that all dissenting activity needs a

narrative outflow and Roy's innovation lies in expanding and popularizing those narrative forms,

namely, the speech, the lecture, and the interview that have traditionally been ignored by the

academy. The literary academy has devalued the acceptance of these art forms—the political

essay, the speech, the lecture, and the interview—in the curricula for various aesthetic reasons.

Dealing with numbers and facts, Roy critiques the underlying assumptions of

Environmental Impact Assessments, written by consultants and experts to clear any project from

any possible adverse impact of the project on the environment or related beings. She argues that 99 the costs of human beings undesirably affected, displaced, or forced to die are never too high for any project to be shelved for that reason. When Roy consciously states her case through her

'political essays,' for many critics such as Jefferess, her art, form, and style are often reduced to mere restatements, which do not provide any new information ("The Limits of Dissent" 163).

Jefferess contends that Roy's essays are not "the product of "new" research by a journalist or academic" (163)—whereby he overlooks and misses the key purpose of Roy's art, which she articulates in an interview with N. Ram. She clarifies:

When one is writing to advocate a political position, or in support of a peoples'

movement that has been yelling its lungs out for the last fifteen years, one is not trying to

be original, one is adding one's voice to theirs in order for them to be heard. Almost by

definition, one is reiterating what they are saying. My essays are not about me or my

brilliance or my originality or lack of it. ("Scimitars in the Sun" 13)

Roy and Jefferess disagree over the purpose of writing political essays, their originality or lack of it, and most importantly the question of relationship between literature and society and the transformative aspect and role of literature. For Jefferess, political essays, if merely restating a case or drawing upon the work of others, in spite of the fact that they are well-researched, well documented, and poetically written, do not possibly qualify as great literature. As the above quote from Roy's interview amplifies, the concern with the transformative powers of her writing is paramount for her; such writing gives her the opportunity to recenter the marginalized and as a result the political essay as a genre of political expediency and urgency gains its currency in literary and pedagogical circles.

However, Roy has been criticized for her move towards essay writing—a move which expands on the politics of a writer's place and role in society. In "The Arun Shourie of the Left," the Indian eco-historian, Ramachandra Guha makes an erroneous distinction between political essays and literature to argue that Roy should stop writing political essays and go back to writing literature, that is, writing fiction (C5). Clearly, Guha operates from the pristine notion that politics and literature are mutually exclusive and the two cannot overlap or possibly intersect.

Nevertheless, Roy's writings make that possible—the merging of the political and the literary in a polemical and transformative fashion. For Said, the transformative aspect of any humanistic writing naturally allies it with democratic and liberatory aspects. To determine Roy's importance for literary studies it becomes essential to recognize her contributions not only in refashioning humanism as defined by Said but also in understanding her contribution to dissolving the rigidities of a generic tradition which has conventionally trumped fiction over nonfiction. Lynn

Bloom in her path breaking study on the canon of the essay writes, "Essayists are lonely travelers in an indifferent universe of literature, lurking on the edges of the mainstream territories mapped out and claimed by writers of fiction, poetry, and drama ("The Essay Canon" 409). To compound matters, Bloom claims that because their works are less likely to appear in whole books, a pragmatic constraint from the pedagogical perspective, and to add to it the fact that

"bookstores disperse belletristic essays according to key words—biography, travel, nature, politics, and more" (409), the essayists have had a furtive status in twentieth-century writing.

In "Newspaper Culture: Institutions of Discourse; Discourse of Institutions," Richard

Terdiman, even though preoccupied with French literary culture and journalistic writing per se, reflects on the "culturally influential anti-organicist mode of discursive construction" offered by the origins of the newspaper in the nineteenth century {Discourse/Counter-Discourse 122). He argues that the form of the newspaper "denies form, overturns the consecrated canons of text structure and coherence which had operated in the period preceding its inception" {Discourse/Counter-Discourse 122). According to Terdiman, the newspaper becomes anti- organicist in its refusal to reharmonize and contain social space. Instead, by implication

Terdiman suggests an opening of debate, conflict, and contradiction as the avowed purpose of journalistic writing. In a similar vein, Theodor Adorno too in "The Essay as Form" writes that the essay "does not permit its domain to be prescribed" (152) even as it "shakes off the illusion of a simple, basically logical world that so perfectly suits the defense of the status quo" (163).

How successful Roy has been in this task is a matter too early to decide on right now as

Lynn Bloom points out in her essay in a subsection appropriately titled, "How Essays Become

Canonical," that essays gain value through repeated inclusion in literary anthologies. She writes,

"No matter where an essay first appeared.. .if it is to survive in the hearts and minds of the twentieth-century .. .reading public it must be reprinted time and again in a cosmopolitan

Reader" ("The Essay Canon" 401). It remains to be seen and investigated how many of Roy's essays have been repeatedly anthologized in readers over the last few years and ever since they have been published. Most of Roy's political essays have made their first appearances in newspapers, magazines, or on the internet. Bloom further contends that aspects such as length of the essay, its intellectual and political resonance, the author's reputation, the essay's aesthetic quality, and level of difficulty are factors that dictate the pedagogical feasibility and canonicity of any essay. What is of relevance here is the impact on writers such as Arundhati Roy whose collection of essays have featured alone and sold as books and the inclusion of whose writing in the classroom teaching curricula has refocused attention away from what traditionally has been considered canonical. John Berger, in Another Way of Telling, revolts against the totalizing aspects of the triad of the literary canon, which he argues has become almost akin to a master narrative (qtd. in Power, Politics, and Culture 157). When the canon becomes a master narrative 102

it essentially works by exclusion and assumes for itself the totalizing force and means of self- justification and self-perpetuation.

Said and Genre

Since for Said, producing or even preserving a canon becomes inextricably linked to

notions of purity, an opposition to which forms a part of his larger disagreement with the purity

and authenticity of literary criticism, national identities, purity of cultural institutions, and even

identity politics. Said discerns a conscious effort to carve out the "purely literary" with its

emphasis on canonicity which he finds reprehensible because of its claims to authority and a

demand for deference to such authority (Power, Politics, and Culture 81). A roundtable

discussion in 1976, "Criticism, Culture, and Performance" which Said was a part of with others

such as Bonnie Marrance, Marc Robinson, and Una Chaudhari, put forward the idea that there

are two ways for contemporary artists to deal with the burden or oppressiveness of the classic

tradition, and the canon—one is just to keep pushing it aside and write or compose new work and

the other is to try to absorb it and then remake it somehow, to kind of neutralize it, and recharge

it in a subversive way (Power, Politics, and Culture 109). Said responded enthusiastically to the

second suggestion since it involved not supplanting one canon by another, which is implicit in

the first suggestion. Said and even Roy never argue for doing away with the idea of a canon

altogether, instead their writings enjoin a nuanced understanding of a canon that is all-inclusive,

responsive to human needs and aspirations, and reflective of the broad spectrum of people who

exist today in the Third World. Roy's 'political essays' serve precisely to offset the totalizing

effects of a canon that has powerfully allied itself with maintaining its status quo and in doing so

she charts a fresh path combining the individual, the genre of nonfiction, and issues of pedagogy.

As she inaugurates the link between the three, the relevance of her writings to Said's theories becomes apparent when one realizes Said's own focus on the individual and the worldly in his

literary criticism to articulate his own version of humanism. Thus in many ways, one can argue

that Said's theoretical writings, evincing his brand of humanism, arguably provide the

humanistic framework on which Roy's work can be based.

For instance, Said writes that a writer can write for an immediate audience, which is not

academic but engaged politically, and then the same writer can write for policymakers,

academics, and his/her own ethnic and political constituencies, which by implication suggests

that one may have to engage in multiple genres as well. He argues that there can be tensions

between being a literary scholar and academic on the one hand and being politically involved on

the other. In this vein he argues that not only is it sufficient to write academic books, but it also

becomes decisive to follow it up, with talking, with interviews, and with public lectures. Thus

Said endorses the incorporation of alternative genres into the canon to not only supplement the

academic work but to engage "attention and to draw things into focus" (Power, Politics, and

Culture 173). Elsewhere, in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said pursues his idea of

alternatives to forcefully contend that the humanist, either a metropolitan intellectual or a writer-

intellectual, "must offer alternatives now silenced or unavailable through the channels of

communication controlled by a tiny number of news organizations" (HDC 71). It must be

clarified that though Said advocates a contamination of genres, he remains critical of what he

sees being practiced in the name of journalism today. Instead, he proposes that the humanist as a

writer or intellectual must exploit all the available genres and media alternatives, including journalism, as he believes that resistance is becoming more and more difficult and increasingly

the responsibility of metropolitan intellectuals ("Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and

Community" 157). He is critical of that journalistic activity where, he writes, "Journalists internalize governmental norms to a degree that is quite frightening" (Power, Politics, and

Culture 45) but he remains appreciative of the task of journalism when practiced by the metropolitan intellectuals. What Said finds disturbing about the practice of modern journalism is his belief that the process of reporting news and events is full of fragmentation, where there is no background, no accumulation of past narratives to view the present issues critically against the past. Therefore, according to Said, "humanistic reflection must literally break the hold on us of the short, headline, sound-bite format and try to induce instead a longer, more deliberate process of reflection, research, and inquiring argument that really looks at the case(s) in point" (HDC

74).

While Said opens up the literary field to a plethora of genres, his preference for looking "at case(s) in point," becomes a pedagogical imperative which implies a strong preference for the political essay. For him political essays represent academic choices which are related to the circumstances that originally gave rise to them. When Said's humanism professes to more accurately transform the contemporary world, when writers write stories that claim to change the world, then questions of style and genre become significant. In a critical essay on Arundhati

Roy's political essays titled, "How to Tell a Story to Change the World," Susan Comfort elides over what can be considered to be the main issue of genre. Though she argues effectively that

Roy's narrative strategy attempts to reconnect the deprivation and impoverishment of ordinary individuals to capitalist forms, Comfort fails to provide a genre-based analysis of Roy's

storytelling specifically when the title of her critical essay points towards the possibility of such a treatment.

At the level of style, Roy has been critiqued by several critics. Julie Mullaney, in an

essay, '"Globalizing Dissent'? Arundhati Roy, Local and Postcolonial Feminisms in the 105

Transnational Economy" argues that Roy's style is "hyperbolic" and "full of dangerous moral

equivalences" (64-5). She writes that Roy not only exaggerates issues when she is restating them, she also faults Roy for equating incidents and events which she believes are disconnected.

Mullaney reproaches Roy for what she calls her "inappropriate comparisons" and "for

"confalt[ing] different historical moments" (64). However, given the transformative impact

Roy's political essays intend to achieve, the role of hyperboles and conflations serves an entirely different purpose than it would in a traditional academic setting. Roy's 'political essays' seek to intervene, deploying the literary and rhetorical techniques of conflations and even hyperbolic language at times. It would be misleading to assume that hyperbole, absurd conflations and histrionics is all that Roy does in her writings. Surely, the hyperbolic language, instead of distorting the truth, aids the reader in comprehending the enormity of the situation. Conflations become a part of her rhetorical repertoire which assist her in linking seemingly disparate events and also prevent her from seeing events in isolation. For instance, when she writes about the millions of Indians displaced as a result of government policies, she equates their existence to be no better than the victims of gas chambers in German concentration camps. Her conflation links the vital issues of liberty and government terrorism, where the latter can operate silently yet repressively on its own people rather than equating that modern India to Germany during Adolf

Hitler's time. In an essay published in 2008, "Listening to Grasshoppers" Roy returns to the same comparison to forcefully argue this time that the ethnic nationalism perpetrated by the right wing Hindu government and its allies openly embraces the fascism of Benito Mussolini and

Adolf Hitler.

The rhetorical purpose of such conflations is not an elision of historical accuracy or thereof; instead, Roy's political essays link the past to the present in a critical, self-interrogating and questioning manner to recenter the individual. For example, in one stroke when Roy relates the occupation of Iraq and the snatching away of resources, infrastructure and jobs in India to the same process of corporate globalization, she touches the most fundamental aspect of rights and human dignity for all. While it is a bit facile to argue for claims of human dignity and rights from a genre-specific perspective, there is some truth in the contention that when such claims are made through the lecture, the interview or even the essay, the language is more immediate and pertinent to the issues discussed. For instance, Roy has repeatedly clarified how nonfiction is a more immediate and direct response to what is happening around us or even when she writes that in her political work (by which she means her nonfiction prose), she thinks aloud {Checkbook

98) she suggests an interactive relationship with the reader. In this respect, Said suggests that in spite of the existence of a direct correlation between a writer's literary, cultural, and political writings, each writer has many constituencies and he underlines the need for an exploration of these many constituencies. He writes how "the audience for literacy is not a closed circle of three thousand professional critics but the community of human beings living in society" ("Opponents,

Audiences, Constituencies, and Community" 158). Since the rigidity of genres has focused on a certain aspect of specialization which in turn has led to a specific insularity in literary studies,

Said's call for "breaking out of disciplinary ghettos" can be read as a call "to represent humane marginality" ("Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community" 158, 155).

Notes:

1. Chatterjee distinguishes between citizens and populations by claiming the concept of

citizen to carry the ethical connotation of participation in the sovereignty of the state as

opposed to the population, which he argues inhabits the domain of policy where people are identifiable, classifiable, and describable by empirical or behavioral criteria and

amenable to censuses and sample surveys.

2. Organicist writing, according to Terdiman aimed its energies at mastering the conflict

and dissonance in social and political existence. 108

III

Beyond Representation of the Marginalized and Resistance

What I am calling for, against either universal ism or cultural relativism, is politics that is premised on closer encounters, on encounters with those who are other than 'the other' or 'the

stranger' [...], Such a politics based on encounters between other others is one bound up with

responsibility - with recognising that (labouring) relations between others are always

constitutive of the possibility of either speaking or not speaking. [...] It is the work that needs to

be done to get closer to others in a way that does not appropriate their labour as 'my labour', or

their talk as 'my talk', that makes possible a different form of collective politics. The 'we'of such

a collective politics is what must be worked for, rather than being the foundation of our

collective work.

Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality

In Orientalism, Edward Said argues that the Orientalist represented the Orient in a way that

was always a "way of controlling the redoubtable Orient" (60), where howsoever intelligibly he

might try to interpret and portray the Orient, the Orientalist always remained outside and never

became a part of it. Thus for Said, the notion of representation in Orientalism is invariably tied to

the ideas of containment and control. Said's argument leads one to believe that an interminable

gulf both existed and separated the representer from their object of representation. Such control

and containment, according to Said is evident in the near absence and silence of the Orient in its

own representation {Orientalism 208).

On the other hand, in representing the marginalized—an act which one can arguably

compare to the representation of the Orient by the Orientalist and which I argue occurs to a great 109 extent in her interviews, lectures, and speeches—Roy not only attempts to bridge this gulf between the one representing and the one being represented but also works to recover the voices of the marginalized. Thus, while her fiction, The God of Small Things is not excluded from representation of the marginalized, albeit it engages in such instances with its sympathetic portrayal of the untouchable Velutha, I argue that in her interviews, lectures, and speeches Roy tells politics like a story to communicate it, to not only make it real and concrete but also to transform those who receive it as participants. Through her ability to tell stories innovatively,

Roy adds her own voice in support of the activities of the marginalized.

This is the task of the Saidian intellectual, whose role is not only to represent people and issues that are unjustly ignored, but also in a Freirian manner to unite "reflection and action, inciting the learning of democracy through collective participation" (San Juan, Beyond

Postcolonial Theory 106). This notion of "collective participation," which was ostensibly lacking in the Orientalist representation of the Orient, becomes the key defining aspect of the Saidian intellectual. Thus, working much like Freire's educator vis-a-vis the oppressed, the Saidian intellectual engages the marginalized in their conscious action and reflection on their part to work towards their own emancipation—an act which I construe as "speaking with" as opposed to speaking for or about the marginalized. In fact, this idea of "speaking with" also finds similarities with what San Juan Jr. describes as the notion of a "collective speaking subject" which he understands to be the convergence of popular initiatives and the mediating force of the indigenous intellectuals {BeyondPostcolonial Theory 267, 268).

Instead of stigmatizing the word "representation" because of the negative associations it carries since the publication of Orientalism, and discussed in Deleuze's and Foucault's

"Intellectuals and Power," Linda Alcoff s "The Problem of Speaking for Others," and Gayatri 110

Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" I argue for a positive revaluation of the term representation to denote a speaking with rather than a speaking^br or about the marginalized, the latter, is a position which assumes passivity and a lack of responsibility on the part of the marginalized. I contend that in her lectures, interviews, and public speeches, Roy demonstrates the more positive and interactive version of representation, the speaking with. A close examination of Roy's interviews and lectures namely, Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, "Peace?...," "I Wish I had the

Guts to Shut Up," "The Ladies Have Feelings, So," "Dissent Has to be Localized," "Scimitars in the Sun," "Come September," "Shall We Leave it to the Experts?" "Seize the Time," and

"Finding Justice with Arundhati Roy," reveals her constant engagement with issues of representation, individual responsibility, and freedom. She names her political writing written under various genres of lectures, interviews, and speeches to be an act of "think[ing] loud" where she likes to pit her "mind against another person's or think together with people" {Checkbook

98). Such "thinking together with people" becomes the basis for my claim that the representation which Roy advocates goes beyond the conventional understanding of the word. The intellectuals' ability to directly connect and engage with the people or the subject of their representation serves to critique the Orientalist predicament where increasing specialization had led to an interminable distance between the two. By foregrounding the concerns of the marginalized other in her interviews, lectures, and speeches, Roy bridges the gulf separating the intellectual from the object of representation.

Said's critique of representation of the Orient rests primarily on the following conclusions: representation of the other has tended towards becoming a professional activity; representation of the other has tended to be antihumanistic, and such representation has also failed to involve the other in its own representation. As much as Orientalist representation was thought to be antihumanistic, was conceived as an area of expertise, and delved primarily in containment and control of the Orient, intellectual activity as conceived by Roy and Said is, I will argue, humanistic, conceived as an amateur activity, and can be seen as liberating in essence.

In the first section of this chapter, I will analyze first Roy's and Said's notion of representation with as integral to their critique of dominant existing social conceptions of representation. According to Said, representation of the Orient was never really about the Orient; instead, he critiques how representation becomes a form of institutionalized oppression and even prejudice against the Orient (Orientalism 253). In this context, Roy too argues how the dominant conception of representation is intended to take responsibility and freedom away from the marginalized. Then I will examine their procedures for accessing or giving voice to these subjects, otherwise considered incapable of self-representation. For instance, in contrast to the

Orientalist for whom the Orient was not always a place or person one encountered directly, it was something or someone one read or wrote about, the Saidian intellectual interacts with the other in a direct manner (Orientalism 275). Roy writes that intellectuals can give voice to these subjects by telling "real stories about real people with real lives" ("The Ladies Have Feelings,

So" 214) by discussing strategies of resistance, waging real battles, inflicting real damage (An

Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire 117), making subjects more accountable for their decisions and creating more opportunities for their freedoms. Thus, the possibility of representation is tied to the notion of making the marginalized responsible for their own decisions (Checkbook 38,

HDC.73).

Along with Deleuze's and Foucault's argument against representation of the masses in

"Intellectual and Power," I will consider Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" to be the representative text of the argument of the near impossibility of representation. Critically engaging with these critics, I shall argue that representing others and speaking with others leads to creating responsibility and freedom for the marginalized. Through a reading of Roy's works listed above I shall argue that those represented are participants in their own representation.

Using Amartya Sen's argument from Development as Freedom and Paulo Freire's from

Pedagogy of the Oppressed I will propose that, in the manner suggested by Sen and Freire, the redemptive form of representation both Roy and Said engage in leads to a relationship between intellectuals and their subjects which is no doubt representational but one of open dialogue. I will conclude this section by arguing that Roy's actions of representing others make of her a Saidian humanist: one who is constantly supplying the most disadvantaged people with the energy and resources to resist injustice (HDC 10).

In the second section, taking Said's criticism of Orientalism as a career or an area of expertise where the Orientalist became an expert on the Orient and yet never a part of it, also implying that this expertise eliminated humanistic values, I propose that Arundhati Roy, when she acts as an amateur intellectual, deprofessionalizes the vocation of the intellectual and also helps reinstate those humanistic values—essentially, an ability to see the other in the same human terms as one sees one's own self, the capability to discuss the other as individuals and not as collectivities, the "possibility of development, transformation, human movement," and a bridging of the relationship between the Oriental and the Orient (Orientalism 154, 208, 222).

Further, I argue that the relationship between the amateur intellectual and their subject matter is quite akin to how Paulo Freire views the relationship between teacher and learner—one that is participative and engages people in "the fight for their own liberation," is non-hierarchical, and which unites reflection and action, inciting the learning of democracy, through collective and

"reflective participation" (Pedagogy of the Oppressed 53, 65). Thus, the amateur intellectual goes much beyond merely representing others to create more opportunities and choices for their subjects of representations.

In the third section I argue that the Saidian intellectual supports the masses in a transformation of their lives through resistance. While critics David Jefferess and Homi Bhabha and thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi have provided a nuanced understanding of resistance by viewing it essentially as reconciliation, I note that while Roy subscribes to Gandhi's idea of nonviolent resistance, for her resistance does not rely on the goodwill of the enemy. Instead, she argues for laying siege to forces of empire and corporate globalization, and of "forcing accountability" ("The Ladies Have Feelings, So" 215). On the other hand, while Said too believes in nonviolent means to achieve ends, his shying away from a politics of blame and retaliation marks his strategy of resistance as different from that of Roy.

I critically engage Said's notion of "reconciliation" with Roy's "listening to grasshoppers," also the title of one of her works, to point to similarities in their concerns for the other. What Said terms as "reconciliation" is not a way of reducing or forgetting oppositional histories but rather a way of situating the opposing factions "in a space that isn't all about fighting" (Power, Politics, and Culture 83). On the other hand, Roy's "listening to grasshoppers' is a powerful metaphor which echoes with Said's "reconciliation" to suggest similarities in concerns for the other. Said writes that intellectual activity is premised on an appreciation of other cultures (HDC 26) and therefore, the failure of imagination is in part a failure of intellectual activity, where the intellectual in essence fails to grasp the significance of the other.

For Said, the failure of Orientalism is in part a failure of imagination of the other and concerned humanistic values. Whereas, for the Orientalist, the Orient was the other, "it was different,"

(Orientalism 277) an object of scrutiny and analysis, for the Saidian intellectual, the other is not distinct from one's own self. In other words, for the Saidian intellectual to "ignore a part of the

world [the other] ...is to avoid reality" (109). By foregrounding the concerns of the marginalized

other in her interviews, lectures, and speeches Roy bridges this gulf separating the intellectual

from her object of representation. The objects of representation are the people, or the multitude,

which in Hardt's and Negri's terminology are not the same {Empire 102). Ultimately, I end the

section by arguing that "reconciliation" and "listening to grasshoppers" become powerful and

evocative ideas as well as metaphors which facilitate the channelling of intellectual activity in a

bid to make it more humanistic and people-oriented.

In the fourth and final section, I propose that since the question of the genre of nonfiction

has been central to Roy's politics, when she deploys nonfiction prose she manages to reclaim the

centrality for the genres which have otherwise been relegated to the margins. Her deployment of

nonfiction prose is nothing else but a storytelling technique or the creation of "new art" which

allows her to draw out the incorporeal adversary and make it real ("The Ladies Have Feelings,

So" 215). I argue that her use of the "testimonial narrative"—narrative that can be read as

factographic literature—coalesces a specific form of literary narrative with the marginalized peoples. Padmaja Challakere writes that the conclusions that reading of such literature as Roy's

allow "are ethically and politically productive because they are based on a relation of truth rather

than on the authority of the verifiable" ("More to the Point, Less Composed" 111).

Section I: Representation

As an intellectual Roy represents the underprivileged, namely, the Dalits, the Adivasis,

and numerous other tribals of India whose concerns have conveniently either been forgotten or

consciously swept under the rug. The issue of representing others is at the heart of a debate on

representation, where the appropriateness or a lack of it has become a contentious matter. Since 115 representation invariably requires donning a public mantle, the writer-intellectual is called upon to have oratorical or written skills to enter the public domain. As an intellectual guided by the universal values found within Saidian humanism, Roy experiments with the genres of the interview, the lecture, and the speech to enter the public domain the way fiction would not permit her to. To be an intellectual is to be in the public domain and to constantly address issues of representing the underprivileged through a genre that evokes interaction or a dialogue with the people. According to Said, since "humanism is the exertion of one's faculties in language in order to understand, reinterpret, and grapple with the products of language in history, other languages, and other histories," suggesting a similar role for the intellectual would not be inappropriate (HDC 28). A Saidian intellectual works as a humanist to understand the nuances of language deployment in representing people. To make it truly democratic language needs to have that interactive aspect where the distance between the speaker and the audience is minimal or at least dialogic. In "The Intellectuals and the War," Said mentions how a large body of American intellectuals are basically provincial because drawn only by virtue of expertise which leads to a lack of affiliation with areas outside their own specialities.

A point of entry into the discussion of the role of the writer-intellectual can be gauged by a small remark Roy makes in her introduction to Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on

Democracy, one of her latest books to be published. She notes that Varun Gandhi, one of the young scions of the renowned Nehru family but now associated with the right-wing Bharatiya

Janata Party (BJP) won his election with a colossal margin after his hate speech against the

Muslims. His brief stint in prison and his callous and outspoken remarks against the Muslim community did not deter people from voting for him in the subsequent assembly elections in

2009. As a response to this irony, Roy ponders, "are 'the people' always right?" (xxxi). This 116 brief question not only gestures at some of the fears and uncertainties of leaving key decisions to the multitude but also opens up possibilities within Roy's literary oeuvre for the inclusion of a class of intellectuals in the decision-making process who need to connect the dots to tell stories that people can understand. Hence, addressing trade unionists in Raipur, Roy explains: "It is of utmost importance that we understand that the American occupation of Iraq and the snatching away of our fields, homes, rivers, jobs, infrastructure, and resources are products of the very same process' (An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire 80). Even though Roy discredits the terminology, "writer-activist" or "writer-intellectual" she attributes to any artist the responsibility of representing the underprivileged sections of society.

Roy asks a question which is too often side-stepped by contemporary intellectuals: the question regarding the social responsibility of literature and art, "What is the role of writers and artists in society?" she queries in Power Politics. "Can it be fixed, described, characterized in any definite way? Should it be?" (4) And she finds herself answering in the negative for a prescribed or a defined role of an intellectual. In what ways can writings and actions of writer- intellectuals influence the issue of pedagogy making it more critical, transformative, and political? Said's basic contention is that writers and intellectuals need to take up a more proactive role in matters of the world, while Roy makes it clear that one does not need to be a writer to be a concerned activist; it is enough that one is a concerned human being ("The Ladies

Have Feelings, So" 210). She argues that writing just happens to be one of the forms of protest and not a precondition to her activism. The question one asks Roy is, is it political and effective enough to be a concerned human being? What are the modalities of engaging with the public and effecting change? What public platform can one aspire to responsibly? As if responding to these questions, Said emphasizes the public aspect of the intellectual and the modern intellectual's 117 interface with the people through the "lecture platform, the pamphlet, radio, alternative journals, the interview form, the rally, church pulpit and the internet" ("The Public Role of Writers and

Intellectuals" 132). One cannot help notice the difference in emphasis on a quest both Said and

Roy agree upon. While one (Said) seeks to institutionalize intellectual activity by defining the role and tools available to the intellectual, the other (Roy) emphasizes the need to play a nameless game away from labeling of any kind.

However, in Power Politics Roy concedes:

What is happening to the world, lies at the moment, just outside the realm of common

human understanding. It is the writers, the poets, the artists the singers, the filmmakers

who can make the connections, who can find ways of bringing it into the realm of

common understanding. (32)

At the same time she is dismissive of any "sort of Approved Guide to Good Writing," the kind of ideas which prescribe a certain morality and political consciousness for intellectuals' and writers'

"honesty" and "responsibility" (Power Politics 4). Roy reflects on these two words and explains how they signal towards a burden of being a writer in a country that has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the earth several times over.

The words "honesty" and "responsibility" are somewhat differently articulated in literary criticism under the Saidian notion of affiliation, where in contrast to filiative criticism, affiliative procedures allow for new and different ways of looking at things than traditionally conceived. In other words, it can be argued that a Saidian intellectual works from affiliative impulses, presenting alternative narratives acquired from a method or system based not on peoples' birth, nationality, or even profession but rather attained "by social and political conviction, economic and historical circumstances, voluntary effort, and willed deliberation" (The World, the Text and 118 the Critic 25). Thus Said's affiliation works in a prescriptive manner to highlight the role and function of an intellectual today. Since, according to Said, affiliative procedures function in a counter-canonical manner, in questioning the whole edifice of the sanctity of the canon, the energies of the intellectual can also be conceived in counter-canonical ways. Elsewhere, Said writes that "The intellectual's social identity should involve something more than strengthening those aspects of the culture that require mere affirmation and orthodox compliancy from its members" (The World, the Text and the Critic 24). What is proposed here is the synthesis of critical, affiliative activity with counter-canonicity. The point of such a synthesis according to

Said, is to highlight critical, contrapuntal, and affiliative activity to be the core of intellectual labor.

Thus Said intermittently views humanism and the writer-intellectual's vocation as a critical practice which for him becomes a means of offering alternatives to the dehumanizing forces of globalization, neoliberal values, economic greed, and imperial ambition (HDC 71). In addition to the abovementioned qualities, Roy proposes a "compelling sense of humanity" to be one of the greatest gifts of the writer-intellectual, since it is this particular trait that sets the writer-intellectual apart from that of a mere novelist, dramatist, or an essay writer (An Ordinary

Person's Guide to Empire 80). This "compelling sense of humanity," it can be argued, leads the writer-intellectual to speak with and represent other marginalized individuals. Since humanism is not all about us, Said affirms that its essence lies in a recognition of the presence of the other

(HDC 26). This other could be understood as a linguistic other, a racial other, someone belonging to a low caste, or someone lacking agency to represent one's own self. A critical rethinking of the us-versus-them dichotomy is identified by Said as one of the epistemological functions of the intellectual. As much as humanism is critical consciousness, it is a consciousness 119 that must serve the interests of the marginalized others who arguably either lack the ability to represent themselves or as pointed out earlier, according to Roy are "deliberately silenced" or

"preferably unheard" ("Peace..."? 1).

Viewed from this perspective, the issue of representation becomes a key one in the debate on the role of the writer-intellectuals today. According to Said, one of the crucial aspects of the vocation of the writer-intellectual is the act of representation; an act which invariably begins by acknowledging and recognizing the presence of the other and the other perspective. Thus Said's definition of public intellectuals stresses their ability to represent those people and issues that are routinely forgotten. It is essentially in Orientalism that a full blown critique of the practice of representation—Orientalism as a system of representation of the Orient—can be found.

Orientalism and Representation

According to Said, Orientalism illustrated the view that all professional scholarship is based on the denial of self-representation to oppressed groups, making possible a monopoly of uncontested and degrading representations of them by authoritative, self-accredited professionals. Said writes that such professionalization and scholarship has led to the view that representation is inherently elite and undemocratic in nature. He argues that the "Orient that appears in Orientalism is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later Western empire"

(203). The Orientalist represented the Orient in a way that the European representation of the

Orient was "always a way of controlling the redoubtable Orient" (60), where howsoever intelligibly the Orientalist might try to interpret and portray the Orient, he always remained outside and never became a part of it. As a corrective to this view, Said argues that since we cannot deny representation, we can only work towards greater democracy of representation. Roy, links representation to "resistance," "dissent" and "radical change" which she argues can only be enforced by people linking hands globally {Public Power in the Age of Empire 26). Thus for

Roy representation is inextricably linked to active participation by the others.

But as Said discusses in Orientalism, passivity and absence were characteristics that defined the Orient (308, 208). According to Said, passivity was the presumed role of the other or the Orient, who was invariably represented by the Orientalist (308). In other words, the Orient was always written about and such representation was always governed and justified by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would. However, the notion of representation put forward by Said in his writings on the public intellectual and by Roy seeks to work against passivity and absence and attempts to not only uncover the silence of the other but also tries to make the presence of the other visible. In Roy's works, one gauges that the role of the marginalized is not one of passivity because they become participants in their own representation. In The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, Roy writes:

Everybody from the smallest person to the biggest, has some kind of power, and even the

most powerless person has a responsibility. I don't feel responsible for everybody.

Everybody also is responsible for themselves. I don't ever want to portray myself as a

representative of the voiceless or anything like that. (38)

Roy's statement locates the real power of individual freedom and resistance with the people and yet she does not discredit the role of the intellectual as well who is required to accompany them.

The role of the writer-intellectual is to enter with them into the opportunities for individual choices and to be held responsible along with them, for those choices. Responsibility teaches people to use their capabilities in an ethical manner. When Roy writes that "Everybody also is responsible for themselves" she alludes to the fact that in addition to the marginalized people being responsible for themselves and their actions, there is someone else who is also responsible in associating with them. The relationship of responsibility is not mutually exclusive; rather it feeds on the idea of what Roy calls, solidarity, "a joining of minds and a vision of the world" between the intellectual and the marginalized {Checkbook 57). The notion of responsibility is also central to Said's critique of representation in Orientalism.

In Orientalism, Said writes that even though the Orientalist represented the Orient, he was never responsible to the latter and the idea of making the natives responsible for their own actions was a real far-fetched one (94). The result of the relation between Western writing and

Oriental silence was that the Orientalist never became responsible to their objects of representation, the native inhabitants. However, in responding to the idea of responsibility in representation, Roy's The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile and "The Ladies Have Feelings,

So" highlight the possibility of the creation of responsibility through freedom. Unlike many who believe that the writer and the intellectual need to be mouthpieces or spokespersons for the marginalized masses, Roy favors a collaborative process with the people she represents. When she conceives of intellectual activity as a "thinking together with the people," Roy in many ways redefines what it means to be an intellectual today.

Roy's and Said's conception of an intellectual and the relationship with those being represented bears a striking resemblance to the relationship between teacher and learner as elaborated by Paulo Freire in his work on critical pedagogy, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Much as the relationship between teacher and learner, as promoted by Freire, is no longer conceived as hierarchical or even as top-bottom, the relationship between writer-intellectuals and their subject matter is, no doubt representational but one of open dialogue, bilateral and conceived as non- hierarchical. The task of a Saidian intellectual is not only to represent people and issues that are unjustly ignored, but also, in a Freirian manner "to unite reflection and action, inciting the learning of democracy through collective participation" (San Juan Jr., Beyond Postcolonial

Theory 106). In other words, issues of representation and education work in a teleological fashion empowering the masses to be active agents in attaining their own liberation. The Saidian intellectual works much like a Freire educator—emphasizing both conscious action and reflection on the part of the masses—to help them work towards their own emancipation. For instance, in her speech delivered at the World Social Forum in 2004, "Do Turkeys Enjoy

Thanksgiving?," Roy elaborates on the relationship between the intellectual and those being represented. She argues that to fight corporate globalization we need to put up a unified front of intellectuals and the oppressed together. Next, she suggests:

We choose by some means two of the major corporations profiting from the destruction

of Iraq. We could then list every project they are involved in. We could locate their

offices in every city and every country across the world. We could go after them. We

could shut them down. It's a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience

of past struggles to bear on a single target. ("Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?" 94)

Interestingly, Roy's deployment of the pronoun, "we" indicates the unity of the intellectual and the marginalized through what she calls, "collective wisdom." Instances of such collective unison and wisdom abound in Roy's nonfiction works.

Additionally, the writer-intellectual can perhaps benefit from Amartya Sen's writings on freedom and responsibility discussed in his quite popular Development as Freedom, where he forcefully argues that "There is a difference between "nannying" an individual's choices and creating more opportunity for choice and for substantive decisions for individuals who can then act responsibly on that basis" (284). Sen argues, in quite an unconventional manner, that the 123 appropriate space for freedom is neither that of utilities nor that of primary goods but that of

"substantive freedom"—"the capabilities to choose a life one has reason to value" (74). Quite characteristically he broadens the operative sphere of individual freedom to include several extra state institutions that he believes can contribute significantly. In many ways, Sen contributes to a nuanced understanding of the role of the writer-intellectual, who aids in individual responsibility and in turn creates a substantive space for individual freedom. Since according to Sen, responsibility requires freedom (284), it can be argued that intellectual activity is geared towards creating that freedom. Roy's acts of creating that freedom and responsibility parallel Said's understanding of humanism, which the latter argues is "always restlessly self-clarifying in search of freedom, enlightenment, more agency..." for the marginalized (HDC 73).

According to Sen, "an approach to justice and development that concentrates on substantive freedoms inescapably focuses on the agency and judgment of individuals; they cannot be seen merely as patients to whom benefits will be dispensed by the process of development" (288). In other words, individual freedom, responsibility and a realization of their capabilities gives the oppressed and the marginalized agency to influence and shape their own lives.1 What Roy, Sen, and Said articulate is that the masses, realizing their responsibility and aided by the intellectuals' endeavors, can consciously work towards the plausibility of resistance, agency, and, ultimately, freedom. Opportunities for posing/creating resistance are indicative of instances of agency. Thus one can argue that the relationship between intellectuals and the subjects of representation is much more egalitarian than was historically conceived of between the Orient and the Orientalists.

When Roy makes of intellectual activity an egalitarian task which involves those being represented as much as the ones representing, she effectively reworks the Gramscian provenance 124 of the idea of the intellectual as a guide or a leader to suggest that the intellectual, even though proficient in language skills, still cannot negotiate and effect "radical change," which she argues

"can only be enforced by people linking hands globally" {Public Power in the Age of Empire

26). While traditionally public intellectuals have been looked upon as guides and leading figures of their age, when Roy suggests that it really needs the power of resistance from people to effect change, she makes of intellectual activity to be reliant and even contiguous upon the strength of the masses. In an interview with Jonathan Crary and Phil Mariani, "In the Shadow of the West"

Said writes:

What we must eliminate are systems of representation that carry with them the kind of

authority which, to my mind, has been repressive because it doesn't permit or make room

for interventions on the part of those represented...the whole science or discourse of

anthropology depends upon the silence of this Other. The alternative would be a

representational system that was participatory, and collaborative, noncoercive, rather than

imposed. (42)

What Said acknowledges here is that representation implies control and a certain kind of disorientation on the part of the one representing. Therefore, he advocates a certain economy and process of representation where such systems become less repressive to the ones being represented. Said writes further that, since the "act of representing (and hence reducing) others, almost always involves violence of some sort to the subject of representation," such acts of representation need to be sentient to the needs of those being represented (42). However, the debate on the ethics and modes of representation continues to simmer despite best efforts by some critics and intellectuals to claim certain forms of representation to be fully instructive and inclusive of those being represented. The Problematics of Representation

Because of the mediacy of all representation, many critics are dismissive of the vocation of the writer-intellectual. Such critics, arguing from an ethical perspective, doubt the efficacy and even the legitimacy of ever being able to speak for someone else. Linda Alcoff in "The

Problem of Speaking for Others" points out that while the act of speaking for others, as a kind of discursive practice, has come under increasing criticism, the scenario of not speaking for others is equally marred by the pristine notion that no one can really represent or speak for anyone else except the concerned person or oppressed groups themselves (6-8). Additionally, the manifold resonances of the term, "representation" are brought out by Ella Shohat in her, "The Struggle

Over Representation: Castings, Coalitions, and the Politics of Identification." A writer's right to write/speak for others can additionally become a problematic issue arising in part from the outsider/insider, privileged/marginalized divides. Alcoff identifies the writer's/speaker's location to have an epistemically salient impact on the writer's/speaker's claims.

On a different note, a similar idea of the inadequacy of representation is brought forward in a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze titled, "Intellectuals and Power."

The conversation between the two, recorded in 1972, discredits both the idea of the intellectual as well as the notion of representation captured famously in the phrase, "Representation no longer exists" (206). The two philosophers work from the assumption that the masses no longer need the intellectual because they are capable of expressing themselves on issues of resistance and dissent (207). This leads them to decry representation and further impels them to equate it with "the indignity of speaking for others" (209). On the other hand, even though Roy admits that the "politics of representation is complicated and fraught with danger and dishonesty"

("Scimitars in the Sun" 12), she argues that the masses need representation because: 126

What is happening to the world lies, at the moment, just outside the realm of common

understanding. It is the writers, the poets, the artists, the singers, the filmmakers, who

make the connections, who can find ways of bringing it into the realm of common

understanding. Who can translate cash-flow charts and scintillating boardroom speeches

into real stories about real people with real lives. Stories about what it's like to lose your

home, your land, your job, your dignity, your past, and your future to an invisible force.

("The Ladies Have Feelings, So" 215)

Roy's statement highlights the necessity and orientation of such representation, which she argues is an onerous task for the intellectual to perform. Said too avers with Roy that it is not so much a question of the masses being unable to represent themselves; rather the fact is that intellectuals are in an "exceptionally privileged position in which to do their work" of representing others

(HDC 71). What Said essentially remarks about are the privileges of linguistic skills and the public persona of intellectuals which they can bring to bear on issues of grave import.

And yet, in her path-breaking essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Gayatri Spivak contests the powerful and benevolent claims of academics and researchers to use their research tools and skills as recording devices that faithfully represent the authentic unheard voices of the subalterns.

Spivak argues that the allocation of a voice to the subaltern does not eventually free the represented subject from ideological influences and hence such representation cannot be considered liberatory in any sense. Spivak acknowledges that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate the conditions of the subaltern or the marginalized by granting them collective speech will invariably encounter the following problems: 1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among an "irretrievably heterogeneous" ("Can the Subaltern Speak?" 79) people, and

2) a dependence upon Western intellectuals to "speak for" the subaltern condition rather than 127 allowing them to speak for themselves. As Spivak argues, by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe their subordinate position in society.

The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an ethnocentric extension of Western logos—a totalizing, essentialist "mythology" as Derrida might describe it—that does not account for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic. Firstly, Spivak theorizes on the insider-outsider assumption where she ascribes to the academic or the intellectual the position of the outsider compared to the inside enclave of the subaltern and the marginalized. Secondly,

Spivak problematizes the represented subject which she argues cannot be spoken of as a collectivity because it essentially militates against their heterogeneous aspect. In her focus on woman as subaltern, Spivak suggests that the possibility of collectivity is "persistently foreclosed through the manipulation of female agency" ("Can the Subaltern Speak?" 78).

Contesting such a claim one can argue that the idea of representation and intellectual activity promoted by Roy does not attempt to appropriate the voices of the marginalized; instead because of her ability to tell stories innovatively, she ends up lending her voice to the activities of the oppressed thereby bridging the outsider-insider divide. Roy responds in The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile as follows:

I'm not necessarily the kind of writer who holes up somewhere and then emerges. I did

that with my novel. I don't talk when I'm writing fiction. It's a very private act. But in

my political work, I think aloud. I like to pit my mind against another person's, or think

together with people. It's not necessarily with journalists, or interviewers with whom I

work. It's an interesting process. (98)

For Roy, this "thinking aloud" manifesting itself in the lecture, the interview, and the speech, constitutes itself as the key to her narrative strategy—an interactive and evolutionary procedure that not only enables her to constantly pit her knowledge against others, but also questions the existing canonicity and ideological imperatives of prevalent literary forms. Additionally, her modes of resistance for empowering the marginalized have focused on listening to the whispering of the truly powerless and giving a forum to the myriad voices from the hundreds of resistance movements across the globe. Her activities have prompted Gurleen Grewal in "Home and the World: The Multiple Citizenships of Arundhati Roy" to write that Roy has strategically taken her writer's ability to make it her vocation to speak with the disenfranchised" (145). Roy's speech, "In Memory of Shankar Guha Niyogi" on the death anniversary of the popular trade union leader becomes representative of her affiliations with the ordinary people and it amply illustrates the notion of joining her voice to the voices of others. Such acts of solidarity can be construed as acts of speaking with as opposed to the acts of speaking for the marginalized. And yet, if a privileging of the speech of the marginalized cannot be made on the grounds that its content will necessarily be liberatory, it can be made on the grounds of the very act of speaking itself. Speaking constitutes a subject that challenges and subverts the opposition between the knowing agent and the object of knowledge, an opposition that is key in the reproduction of imperialist modes of discourse.

And neither does Roy homogenize the subaltern nor does she attempt to reclaim a collective identity for them. Instead, what she has attempted to perform through her retelling of stories of individual misery and despair is to point to the heterogeneity within a seemingly homogeneous community. By naming individuals and specifying their conflicts, Roy constructs individual struggles instead of labelling all the marginalized together as a collectivity.

On another front, Roy has resolutely maintained that it is not that the marginalized cannot speak themselves; rather, she argues that they are either "wilfully ignored" or remain "the preferably unheard" sections of society" ("Peace?..." 1). Said, looking at the history of liberation movements in the twentieth century also proclaims that "indeed, the subaltern can speak"

{Orientalism 335). As a corrective to this, both Roy and Said advocate that the intellectual needs to amplify the voices of the marginalized that can actually speak but are left unheard. Said mentions how the intellectual "testifies to a country's or region's experience thereby giving that experience a public identity forever inscribed in the global discursive agenda" (HDC 127). At her own end, Roy too is aware of her celebrity status and the media attention she brings to any issue through her presence and support. Jefferess points out to this effect how "the value of her celebrity status as a recent Booker prize winner certainly contributed to the mass distribution and consumption of her essays" ("The Limits of Dissent" 162). This status has led her to a much wider audience than even the writings and activism of Medha Patkar or other critical analyses of the project of NBA. Therefore intellectuals are able to provide a public identity to the sufferings of the marginalized because of their celebrity status and in the case of Roy she is able to achieve this also through her engagement or speaking with the people.

The thought of speaking with others also becomes the edifice for Said's articulation of the role of the public intellectual in modern times; the key notion guiding the intellectual activity for

Said was to be a sense of social responsibility, a sense of affiliation with the public sphere—an absence of which, he argues, could seamlessly lead these intellectuals to become provincial and parochial in their approach. It is through a cognizance of the idea of social responsibility that one can elide the debate concerning representation. Thus representation becomes an offshoot of the imperative of social responsibility which in turn helps define the role of the public intellectual.

The intellectuals impelled by a sense of social responsibility promote and represent the concerns of the marginalized individual, and when they do this through the interview, the lecture, or the public speech, they open up the literary sphere to make it one of the enclaves from where to mount resistance to those in power.

However, the idea of representing others should not be confused with a diluting of the responsibility the marginalized owe to themselves. Roy's comments are instructive when she writes that "As a writer, and ultimately, as an outsider, I can't fight their fight. I can fight as a writer to prevent it, but my house isn't drowning, my land isn't being submerged, and my anger shall never be more than theirs. They have to fight. I don't" ("I Wish I had the Guts to Shut Up"

31). In other words, the act of representation undertaken by the writer-intellectual is merely to guide and at times supplement the efforts and activities of the marginalized people themselves.

On the other hand, Roy's statement does not suggest a prescription of non-interference; instead it merely acknowledges the problematics of speaking for others. Although Alcoff distinguishes between speaking^br others and speaking about or with others, she resolutely maintains that such a distinction is difficult to sustain and might not be obvious at all times. What, however, is common to the idea of speaking for or speaking with or about others, is the act of representing the others' needs, demands, grievances, and goals. While representation of the other is central to intellectual activity, it can be argued that the key to such representation lies in not conceiving of intellectual work as an expert's domain; rather, the intellectual as amateur is seen to work towards representation in a more egalitarian manner than the expert counterpart.

Section II: The Saidian Intellectual

A close reading of Said's Orientalism reveals that he objects to the Orientalist practice of representation of the other the moment it assumes for itself the tone and tenor of a specialist.

Said writes that what began as a field of liberal inquiry gradually consecrated itself into an

"academic discipline" and very soon "the term Orientalist came to represent the erudite, 131 scholarly, mainly academic specialist in the languages and histories of the East"; it came to be regarded as "the special agent of Western power as it attempted policy vis-a-vis the Orient" (340,

223). As a result of this expertise, the Orientalist came to play a special part in policy decisions which leads Said to argue that "because Orientalism had accomplished its self-metamorphosis from a scholarly discourse to an imperial institution" it failed to identify with the human experience of the other or the Orient (95). Arguably, Said's intervention into Orientalism can be construed as his reassessment of the politics of representation. He believes that:

The contemporary intellectual can learn from Orientalism how, on the one hand, either to

limit or to enlarge realistically the scope of his discipline's claims, and on the other, to

see the human ground...in which texts, visions, methods, and disciplines begin, grow,

thrive, and degenerate...But before that we must virtually see the humanistic values that

Orientalism, by its scope, experiences, and structures, has all but eliminated. {Orientalism

110)

Said advocates that the contemporary intellectual can benefit from the mistakes of the

Orientalists , who are accused of ignoring the "human ground." He favors intellectual activity that does not seek to replicate the errors committed by Orientalists—their chief error consisting of ignoring a large part of humanity.

In many ways, according to Said, the intellectual's role is seen in contradistinction to that of an Orientalist—someone who is a non-specialist and one who can reinstate those humanistic values which the Orientalist has all but eliminated. In this respect, Roy's The Checkbook and the

Cruise Missile, and "Scimitars in the Sun" offer amateurism and a restoration of humanistic values to be central to intellectual activity. 132

The Intellectual as an Amateur

The organizing theme of Said's 1993 lectures, later published as Representations of the

Intellectual was an engagement with the "public role of the intellectual as an 'amateur,' and disturber of the status quo" (x). Amateurism, in Said's terms, is a quality the contemporary intellectual cannot function without in our society. Characterized by a "desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a professional" (76), the intellectual as amateur stands in contradistinction to the professional or the expert. What Said terms as professionals, Roy calls the experts, and the disdain both exhibit towards the category makes apparent their similarities and concerns. Roy speaks out against this version of specialized academia and confined professionalization in The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile. She writes: "if you are an economist, you are only an economist. If you are a sociologist, you are only a sociologist... And now, to understand you must cross disciplines, and you must see the connections between dispossession and the despair created by corporate globalization" (135). This insularity of professions is what Said too criticizes when he brings up the idea of the amateur intellectual.

However, the issue poses the following question: are these roles clearly demarcated for Said and can the professional not act as an intellectual or conversely cannot the intellectual be a professional of sorts?

When Said talks about the need for the intellectual to be autonomous in his or her thoughts and actions, not to be beholden to anyone or any power or institution, he tends somewhat, according to Neil Lazarus, to not realize the practice of intellectualism, to imagine that it is less materially implicated than it actually is. We can concede that what Said calls "amateurism"— 133

"choosing the risks and uncertain results of the public sphere—a lecture or a book or an article in wide and unrestricted circulation" is to be preferred over "the insider space controlled by experts and professionals" {Representations of the Intellectual 87). Lazarus in "Representations of the

Intellectual in Representations of the IntellectuaF argues that the "public sphere" is not quite as accessible as Said's formulation makes it out to be. According to Lazarus it is not for nothing, after all, that Pierre Bourdieu speaks of the "power relations which are imposed on all the agents entering the field [of cultural production]-and which weigh with a particular brutality on the new entrants" (In Other Words 141). Lazarus thinks as though Said has for a moment forgotten about the dialectics of privilege. However, in a chapter devoted to the discussion of professionals versus amateurs, Said clarifies the issue to suggest that to "accuse all intellectuals of being sellouts" (Representations of the Intellectual 69) or complicit in government agendas just because they earn their livelihood working in a university or for a newspaper is a coarse charge.

Conversely, to think that no power relations can weigh down the intellectual's voice to criticize or destabilize is an issue which Said is aware of. Said contends that one can blend the roles of the professional and an amateur but the activities one performs as an amateur need not be backed by any certification as the amateur acts out of love and concern for something. Said questions whether an amateur intellectual who is impervious to the demands of university affiliations or political parties can exist and, implicitly, he seems to argue in the affirmative. The university, the political party and the think tank do not have a purchase on the amateur. The amateur intellectual, who is not affiliated to any of these institutions, obtains—and maintains—the

"critical voice" which the professional intellectual cedes to these powerful social structures

(Said, Representations of the Intellectual 68). According to Said, even if one is a professional of sorts, as a critical voice one must act as an amateur devoid of any specialization in the concerned field. Roy fits in with Said's description of an unaccommodated intellectual who has no strings attached to those in power and thus is unwilling to compromise on important issues. Said is in fact disdainful of the accommodated intellectual aligned with powerful institutions and deriving power from them; a charge argued earlier on and one which he has spent a lifetime facing from critics such as Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dirlik.

In Representations of the Intellectual, Said cites Noam Chomsky as a professional linguist and a University Professor, a professional on the one hand and an amateur on the other.

Said prizes Chomsky's role of an amateur and his intervention in American foreign policy in ~ documenting, researching, probing and unmasking the opportunism and hypocrisy of the United

States. Said somewhat confuses the issue when he cites Chomsky and at the same time defends the domain of the amateur. However, through citing Chomsky as an amateur, Said argues that even though Chomsky is a professional, which an intellectual has to be, to earn a living, his interventionist role is that of an amateur, as Chomsky lacks any certification in foreign policy.

Said argues that Chomsky intervenes because of his love and care for the individuals and societies in general. Providing a challenge to Lazarus's and Bourdieu's contention of how power relations weigh on new entrants is the figure of Roy who has defied notions of institutional and governmental power structures to raise embarrassing questions about the malfunctioning of government structures. She has reiterated that her work is "telling the story in a way that ordinary people can understand," a domain which Said has been trying to reclaim from the experts and professionals {Checkbook 69). In her role as an amateur intellectual she writes that a part of what she does is "snatching our futures back from the experts and the academics and the economists and the people who really want to kidnap or capture things and carry them away to their lairs" {Checkbook 69). Roy's dissenting writing on issues of dams to privatization and 135 globalization to Hindu fanaticism to the war in Iraq are examples of a non-specialist or an amateur who has marshaled evidence to the contrary and revealed that events occur as part of what Said calls "an unfolding of history whose broad contours include one's own nation as an actor" {Representations of the Intellectual 99).

Grant Farred in his 1995 book review ofRepresentations of the Intellectual critiques Said for his debunking of the idea of the professional. Farred argues that:

despite the unusual though painful benefits that accrue to the marginal(ized) thinker, we

cannot forget that without a secure public positioning (which often requires professional

accreditation of some sort), both the exiled and the amateur intellectual will find it

difficult to speak to a broad public. They will find it hard to champion the cause of the

poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented; the primary constituencies to

which Said's intellectuals are committed. {Review 516)

I believe that Farred too misses the point because Said never advocates the role of the amateur at the cost of the professional. In fact, Said writes that in one's role as a professional one is often compromised in one's assessment of issues which if done by the same person from a non- specialist position would yield the desired results. Roy has refused to be co-opted by any political parties and has rejected the idea of toeing any particular ideology and has thus ensured for herself the necessary and relatively autonomous position to speak from. It is indeed mistaken to assume as Farred does that Said's amateur intellectuals stand outside any socio-political arrangements and are unable to sustain themselves materially. Said's amateur intellectuals are neither recluses nor content to be cloistered in their environment deprived of any means of livelihood. Rather, they are public persons of high integrity who feel socially and morally 136

obligated to others in general. It has already been discussed that the amateur intellectual need not

preclude the role as a professional of sorts which sustains him or her materially.

Professionalism Contextualized

Said's first engagement with the professional or the expert occurs in his lament on the

workings of the Orientalist, whose knowledge of the East made him a specialist or an expert in

the field. Said argues that, as a result of this specialization, Orientalism metamorphosizes from a

scholarly discourse to a field of public policy where the Orientalist enlisted his/her specialization

at the service of the state (95). This leads him to conclude that "Orientalism had accomplished its

self-metamorphosis from a scholarly discourse to an imperial institution" (95). In other words, an

observation about Arabs in general translated and multiplied itself into a policy towards the

Oriental mentality in the Middle East. For instance, Duncan MacDonald in The Religious

Attitude and Life in Islam writes:

The Arabs show themselves as not especially as easy of belief, but as hard-headed,

materialistic, questioning, doubting, scoffing at their own superstitions and usages, fond

of tests of the supernatural—and all this in a curiously light-minded, almost childish

fashion. (180)

The Arabs are typified and such huge generalizations made about them contributed to a justification for the White Man's civilizing mission. Thus, Orientalists as experts or professionals

contributed to imperial designs and policy formation because they assumed an "unchanging

Orient," they stereotyped the Orient, and made huge generalizations in the name of the Orient.

Further, Said argues that Orientalism as an innocuous sub-speciality of liberal humanism quickly

transformed into a form of oppression and prejudice {Orientalism 254). He concludes that

"liberal humanism, of which Orientalism has historically been one branch, retards the process of enlarged and enlarging meanings through which true understanding can be attained" (254).

Somewhat differently though Roy expresses a similar concern when she argues that the expert is someone who is too locally concerned and fails to see organic connections between issues

(Checkbook 11). She contests the decision-making power accorded to the experts who, she argues, have reached the top because of their expertise in some matter. What Said calls the "cult of expertise" in literary criticism and what Roy calls "professionalism" is basically aimed at targeting the confinement of intellectual activity to a constituency of fellow experts.

The amateur is supposed to reverse the trend of literary theory towards real events of the society for which criticism really exists. In The World, the Text and the Critic, Said contextualizes American literary criticism with a lament on the scenario prevalent in the 1980s.

His primary criticism is targeted against what he calls the increasing specialization and an attendant policy of noninterference. What Said calls "textuality" is his lament on the

"specialization and professionalization" of literary critics and theorists whose "surprising quasi- religious quietism" has transported them into a zone of specialized functions with no equivalent in everyday experience" (The World, the Text and the Critic 3, 25). This insularity of professions is what Roy comments on in Checkbook when she writes that "specialists and experts end up severing the links between things, isolating them, actually creating barriers that prevent ordinary people from understanding what's happening to them" (10). The exclusion of ordinary people, whom Said calls the "opponents" as distinguished from the "constituency" of experts, is systematically concluded by upholding the banner of expertise. While the expert fails to make connections across disciplines and even fails to connect the dots to construct a story, the intellectual as amateur is seen precisely doing these things. Such endeavor, reflected in literary activity, leads Said to proclaim that the separation of fields, objects and disciplines constitutes an 138 amazingly rigid structure which needs to be addressed through a crossing of boundary disciplines and creating links between disciplines.

Said sees the "cult of professional expertise" to be responsible for a very precise division of intellectual labor. Such division, while it gave the experts a legitimization and a sustained investment in re-validating their own roles, it promoted what Julien Benda spoke of in 1920s as the "treason of the intellectuals" or a worldview which promotes a policy of noninterference in the affairs of the world. In the field of literary criticism as well, Said conceives a somewhat similar role being performed by literary critics and professional humanists whose expertise is based on noninterference in matters of the world (2). In "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community," Said argues that "the particular mission of the humanities is, in the aggregate, to represent noninterference in the affairs of the everyday world" (155) which he believes can generally be seen as an offshoot of increasing specialization. Experts have ended up creating what Said calls "disciplinary ghettos" and an insider-outsider division which has proved detrimental to literary studies. He uses the term "opponents" not to signify the people who are in disagreement with the constituency of experts and professionals, but rather, people who are to be kept out, non-experts and non-specialists, for the most part. Thus, specialization promotes a guild conscience which works to exclude people who do not form a part of this confederation. Bill

Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia comment that as a consequence of specialization and expertise on literary criticism, it has made their activity marginal to pressing political concerns {Edward Said

30). It is in precisely a distancing of oneself from such exclusive specialization that Said defines his intellectual as an amateur.

The amateur speaking from the margins of any discipline can see the organic connection between disciplines and speak outside the script of the specialist. For Roy, this connection 139 between things, objects, events, and people's motives is probably the most important function of

the writer-intellectual as amateur. She writes:

If you lose these connections, everything becomes noise, meaningless, a career plan to be

on track for tenure. It's a bit like the difference between allopathy and homeopathy or any

other form of indigenous form of medicine. You just don't treat the symptoms. You don't

just say, "Oh, you've got a patch on your skin, so let me give you some steroids." You

ask, "Why do you have it? How has it come there? What does it mean? What are you

thinking about today? Are you happy? Why has your body produced this? You can't just

be a skin expert? You must understand the human body and the human mind. {Checkbook

11)

This elaborate quote by Roy explains what she means by looking for organic connections between events and things. Whereas the role of the expert or the skin specialist, maybe essential, but is primarily seen here as reductive to the problem, what is required is organic knowledge of the understanding of the human body and the mind in this case. Therefore, she insists that it is time now to snatch "our futures back from the experts and the academics and the economists and the people who really want to kidnap or capture things and carry them away to their lairs and protect them from the unauthorized gaze or the curiosity of or understanding of passer-by"

{Checkbook 69). Roy's comment makes apparent what Said discusses with reference to guild-

solidarity and the necessity to promote and preserve such a constituency for one's own survival

as experts. Since the "cult of expertise" perpetuates itself as essential to the lives of those

affected by it, Roy argues that most ordinary people find it hard to challenge it at the outset.

Therefore, she writes that "we need to deprofessionalize the public debate on matters that vitally

affect the lives of ordinary people" ("The Ladies Have Feelings, So" 210). "Deprofessionalizing the public debate" amounts to according the amateur intellectual the power to represent people and issues in a manner which the expert failed to achieve.

Performing this role, the amateur intellectual brings the contours of everyday existence— issues of oppression, marginalization, justice, equality and so on—back into the realm of literary representation from which it has been excluded for long. The amateur intellectual can open the culture to "experiences of the Other which have remained "outside"... the norms manufactured by "insiders" (Said, "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community" 158). Thus the amateur intellectual, through representation and "interference," incorporates the experiences of those who have been marginalized and excluded from consideration so far. The Orientalist as an expert had represented the Orient for the West but such representation, according to Said, fast degenerated into huge generalizations and propagation of negative stereotypes of the Orient.

Paradoxically, while translating and interpreting the Orient, the Orientalist was never a part of the Orient. However, the intellectual performing the role as an amateur, can bridge this gap by creating opportunities for what Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom terms as "substantive freedoms"—the capabilities "to choose a life one has reason to value" (74). The amateur intellectual actively works towards creating such freedoms for the marginalized through representation. Whereas the Orient was only written about and never wrote about itself, and moreover, it was linked to passivity, the amateur intellectual helps create responsibility and freedom through identifying with the human experience of the other, a task which the Orientalist failed to perform. Roy too sees intellectual activity within the purview of humanity and not as a field of specialization. The amateur intellectual achieves what the Orientalist or the specialist failed to—a relationship of representation which is not presumed on the silence and passivity of the other but based on open and reciprocal communication between the two. Amateurism and Communication

The relationship between the amateur intellectuals and their subject matter can be conceived to be quite akin to how Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the OppressedViews the relationship between a teacher and learner. Freire writes:

One cannot impose oneself, nor even merely co-exist with one's students. Solidarity

requires true communication...Yet only through communication can human life hold

meaning.. .The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thought on

them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in

ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. (77)

Freire emphasizes "communication" to be essential between the teacher and student, an aspect lacking in the relationship between the Orientalist and the Orient. In this respect Freire distinguishes between "banking education" and "problem-solving education" to conclude that where the former resists dialogue; "problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality" (83). One can argue that the Orientalist-Orient relationship described by Said can broadly be compared to what Freire terms as "banking education." According to Freire, the central idea governing the concept of "banking education" rests on the curtailment of "critical consciousness" of the learners. He believes that the more the learners accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is. Such passivity is quite akin to what Said regards was the defining feature of the

Orient in his own representation. The concept of "banking education" and Orientalist representation alert us to the dangers of a closure of open dialogue in any relationships. This closure of an open dialogue further intensifies the passivity and silence of the learner or the

Orient. 142

Roy argues that the role of the intellectual goes beyond merely representing others to create

more opportunities and choices for her subjects of representation. She does not consider the

intellectual to be the "representative of the voiceless" and instead proposes the notion of creating

opportunities of responsibility for the marginalized themselves. In a somewhat similar vein

Freire too suggests that "The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her

thought on them. Authentic thinking .. .does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in

communication" (Pedagogy of the Oppressed76). Such unequivocal emphasis on

communication creates a dialogic community of participants where according to Roy "there is a joining of minds and a vision of the world" (Checkbook 57). Carrying the idea of two-way

communication further, Freire also suggests that the educator and "the people (who would

normally be considered objects of that investigation) should act as co-investigators" which

makes ordinary people active agents in their own creation (106). Roy and Freire locate the power

of individual responsibility and freedom within the marginalized people themselves. Where in

Orientalism, the Oriental was given as fixed, stable, in need of investigation, in need even of

knowledge about himself, the marginalized now in Roy's and Said's oeuvre is no longer seen as

inert subject matter. In this respect, Sen's work elucidates the link between individual

responsibility and freedom.

Sen works from the premise that any affirmation of social responsibility that replaces

individual responsibility cannot but be, to varying extents, counterproductive. However, he

argues that responsibility requires freedom where without the substantive freedom and capability

to do something, a person cannot be held responsible for doing it. But having the freedom and

capability to do something does impose on the individual the responsibility to act. Thus,

according to Sen, freedom is necessary for responsibility to occur in a meaningful way. In this respect then the intellectual's role is geared towards the social commitment to individual freedom and not to nannying an individual's choices or even speaking on behalf of an individual or a group of individuals—as was the case discussed by Said in Orientalism. Roy believes that the idea of social commitment to individual freedom and responsibility can be conveyed to ordinary people by communicating with them and telling them of what is happening in the world

{Checkbook 120). Roy believes that it is only through the amateur work of the intellectuals that ordinary people are able to understand their responsibility, since experts end up creating lairs of knowledge which they guard against any encroachers.

Interestingly, Roy characterizes amateurism through "empathy" as opposed to professionalism which she typifies through "concern" ("Scimitars in the Sun" 7). Roy distinguishes between "empathy" and "concern" to argue that "concern usually leads to articles, books, Ph.Ds, fellowships" whereas empathy would "lead to passion, to incandescent anger, to wild indignation, to action" (7). According to Roy, professionalism tries not only to colonize knowledge but ideologically perpetuates a self-validating worldview where the specialist knowledge of the expert is made out to become essential to the existence of others. Roy thinks of concern to be a professional activity which she argues has put aside the amateur empathy of intellectuals who are primarily seen as displaying feelings, sentiments, and emotions. Therefore, she suggests that intellectuals in their bid to recenter the individual need to empathize with the subject of their representation which leads to speaking with the marginalized instead of merely exhibiting concern for the oppressed. Professionalism tries to colonize knowledge. For Said this has happened in the field of Oriental studies and in the field of literary criticism in the 1920s in

America. As the Orientalist came to be seen as an academic specialist in the languages and histories of the East, the idea of crossing fields/disciplines and areas becomes an implicit 144 precondition for Said's intellectual. Roy's opposition to the construction of big dams in India rests on incriminating evidence she has produced to argue that such dams are not only ecologically unsustainable but economically unviable as well. Amateurism breaks the hegemony of specialist knowledge and releases information into the public domain, which makes it more accessible to the ordinary citizens.

Additionally, Roy argues that the amateur intellectual's voice is essentially the voice that amplifies the voices of the marginalized. Such amplification of the voices of the marginalized can be construed as a "speaking with" as opposed to the unilateral representation on behalf of someone else—Roy adds her own voice to the myriad voices of people engaging in the Save the

Narmada Movement, her support for individual voices such as Shankar Guha Niyogi, the World

Social Forum, and various other forums. Said's affiliation with the liberation of the Palestinian people has occupied his writings throughout his academic career. Such amplification of the voices of the marginalized leads Roy to argue that conversations and voices must be related to concrete actions and if mere conversation replaces civil disobedience then it renders itself politically defunct.

Crucially for her, conversation, by which she means nonfiction political writings by writers across the world or debates at the World Social Forum etc., should not seek to replace concrete political action rather it should supplement political action. Even as she underscores the importance of deploying alternative modes of literary narration to effect social change, Roy argues forcefully to connect these narratives to actual resistance movements which can otherwise atrophy as mere political theatre or even spectacle. Central to our understanding is the way in which Roy links conversations about resistance to actual resistance movements in the world. In many ways Roy thus forces a re-evaluation of the concept of resistance and even of literary

studies.

Section III: Representing Resistance as Opposition

It is instructive to be reminded that the word resistance has been variously understood,

theorized, and even appended to several activities and attitudes. Though the concept of resistance has historically been associated with ideas of freedom and opposition, with the advent of poststructuralism and a dilution of the transcendent principles of truth and justice, the grounds for debate over what is meant by resistance have become fertile. For instance, in his book-length

study on the idea of resistance, David Couzens Hoy in Critical Resistance: From

Poststructuralism to Post-Critique proposes that we need to distinguish between resistance that is emancipatory or transformative, and resistance that is reactionary because the word resistance itself does not differentiate between the two (5). Hoy argues that "to equate resistance with what is progressive and good is to buy into the standard way of thinking of power as bad and freedom as good," (5) when the whole edifice of poststructuralism questions this dichotomy. She argues that since resistance can be both reactionary as well as emancipatory, to have any essentialist notions about resistance is to misconstrue the meaning of the word. Poststructuralists worry that in the absence of a transcendent principle of good, truth or any universal human nature how does

one justify resistance, which can degenerate into directionless flailing. Poststructuralism in general, prefers a genealogical approach to resistance that renders unimportant the whole

emancipatory potential of the concrete social situation. Amid such poststructuralist objections where resistance is not naturally allied to social change it becomes mandatory to explain the various dimensions and connotations of the term and even the appropriateness of using it in

conjunction with agency. Resistance in the humanist context connotes concrete social change resulting from concrete action. Thus for Roy resistance, agency, and material transformation are inextricably linked to each other.

To begin with, it may help us to signify that opposition to an object, policy, institution, nation, or even an ideology which further aims at any sort of social change constitutes the fundamental characteristic of resistance. Alongside, while resistance might be either emancipatory or reactionary or even both, resistance becomes integrally allied to questions of agency. Couzens Hoy argues that emancipatory resistance signifies a mode of liberation distinct from other modes of resistance which could be co-opted by the oppressive forces. Resistance can range from a polite demurral to the in-your-face refusal to its realization into social movements or it can even range from street activism to the recovery of marginalized voices to unveiling the discursive aspects of the constitution of any hegemonic force. Geeta Chaudhary and Sheila Nair in their "Introduction" to Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations advance the idea that the subaltern historiography of Ranajit Guha, Gyan Prakash, and Dipesh Chakrabarty conceives of resistance and agency as "recovery," "specifically the recovery of self through anti-colonial political struggles and a search for cultural identity (26).

Butler reminds us that "when we are speaking about the subject we are not always speaking about an individual: we are speaking about a model for agency and intelligibility, one that is very often based on notions of sovereign power." (45) Thus she argues that questions of individuality, subjecthood, and agency are interrelated if not interlinked. Agency is a problematic socio-cultural construct where the ostensible lack of agency in a particular cultural act might be construed differently in another context. For instance, when Chandra Mohanty in "Under

Western Eyes" argues that lack of agency signified in wearing a veil misapprehends the cultural context and the politics of the discourse of womens' liberation, we need to rethink the category of universal keeping in mind such critiques and an uncritical conflation of cultural and other differences. Mohanty cautions us against what she terms the "ethnocentric universalism" of any discourse that seeks to represent others (199). In this context, Mohanty, whose referents are constantly women, points out that "The assumption of women as an already constituted and coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location, implies a notion of gender... which can be applied universally and cross-culturally" (199). Thus any universalist prescriptions of resistance and agency, if there are any of this sort, have to be contiguous and coterminous with local differences and be aware of the local politics. Any belief in the idea of collective resistance has to be cognizant of the array of incommensurable epistemological and political beliefs that make up that actual module of that globalized resistance movement. Universalism of justice and equality has to be simultaneously aware of the local affiliations, differences, and considerations which play a vital role in the constitution of the subject as an agent. Butler, arguing from within a feminist context rightly points out that as long as we agree that we need to defend "the rights of indigenous women to health care, reproductive technology, decent wages, physical protection, cultural rights, freedom of assembly" (48) and so on, we can disagree on many epistemological issue such as the status and character of modernity today. In writing about the World Social Forum, "the first formal coming together of an exciting, unindoctrinated, energetic, new kind of public power" {Public Power in the Age of Empire 34),

Roy too emphasizes that despite disagreements over certain issues, the "forum has become a platform where hundreds of conversations, debates, and seminars have helped to hone and refine a vision of what kind of world it should be" {Public Power in the Age of Empire 35) Effectively one can posit that arguments of universalism need not dilute the arguments for agency. 148

Postcolonialism opens up possibilities of resistance and agency varying from mimicry and hybridity on one end of the spectrum to framing counter-narratives to mass mobilization and involvement towards a revolutionary potential on the other. It is in the writings of the critic Homi

Bhabha that one realizes the full potential of mimicry and hybridity as sites of resistance. In The

Location of Culture, Bhabha writes:

Resistance is not necessarily an oppositional act of political intention, nor is it the simple

negation or exclusion of the 'content' of another culture, as a difference once perceived.

It is the effect of an ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition of dominating

discourses as they articulate the signs of cultural difference and reimplicate them within

the deferential relations of colonial power—hierarchy, normalization, marginalization,

and so forth. (158)

For Bhabha, thus, resistance is not essentially an act of opposition. Instead, mimicry and hybridity serve as strategies of resistance and agency where the native's inappropriate imitations of colonial discourse have the effect of menacing colonial authority. In other words, for him, the hybrid, through mimicry, can parody, displace, and resist colonial authority. In an interview with

MitraTabrazian, Bhabha speaks about resistance as follows:

Not all kinds of resistance are the same. Conceptually, my work has always tried to think

about resistance in a less orthodox way, to find agency when and where it was deemed to

be weak or obscure or ineffective. My continuing interest in psychoanalysis has been to

try and redefine agency. That's why people have both attacked and attached themselves

to my work. Forms of agency and resistance don't remain the same and we have to shift

our own paradigms to see the new forms in which they emerge. For instance, now a

number of people in the United States say that black music culture, although highly commodified, has within it traditions of resistance. So the question of resistance changes.

(12)

Benita Parry, in "Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse" has responded to

Bhabha's strategies of resistance to argue that in his work "resistance is limited to its returning the look of surveillance as the displacing gaze of the disciplined"—"an exorbitation of discourse" which she argues leads to an "incuriosity about the enabling socio-economic and political institutions and other forms of social praxis" {Postcolonial Studies 26).

In postcolonial literatures, resistance has been used from denoting textual resistance, where the focus, according to Stephen Slemon in his essay, "Reading for Resistance in Post-

Colonial Literature," is on the "assumption of a new kind of mimeticism at work in the post- colonial reiterative text" to outright subversion and opposition (104). Slemon gestures towards the affinity between post-structuralist valorization of textual reiteration and the post-colonial textual reiteration as a strategy for textual rupture and refusal. In fact, in an essay dealing with resistance in postcolonial studies, "Figures of Colonial Resistance," Jenny Sharpe examines the works of Spivak, Bhabha, and Jan Mohamed who argue that resistance must go beyond the mere questioning of colonialist authority. One of the significant points she draws out is that resistance is always necessarily complicit in the apparatus it seeks to transgress (145). Significantly, Roy expands on the idea of resistance to include not only the critical-pedagogical activity of the metropolitan intellectuals but also effectively articulates the notion of resistance within the context of a people's movement or movements joining hands across the globe.

Additionally, people's role as participants and agents of change is highlighted throughout

Roy's writings. Her work, Public Power in the Age of Empire is a concise treatise on the role the masses need to play in order for resistance to become truly oppositional and transformative. Said too shares a somewhat similar attitude towards resistance whose most explicit treatment of the concept occurs in Culture and Imperialism within the context of his understanding of movements of decolonization. Nationalism associated with a radical energy propelling people into mass insurrection occurs as one of the aspects of resistance. In his later writings, notably, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, resistance is envisaged as a "worldly practice" and a "technique of trouble" where people's role in redefining and promoting dissent is dealt with in great details

(75, 77).

In one of her lectures, Public Power in the Age of Empire delivered to an overflowing crowd in San Francisco in 2004, she articulates, "By resist I don't mean only to express dissent, but to effectively force change" (27). What is revelatory about Roy's narrative is that resistance is conceived not merely as an expression, a rhetorical act or even conversation but as material and social transformation. Without such an end in mind, resistance can easily degenerate into directionless flailing. Thus, according to Roy, the writer as a public intellectual plays a crucial role in effecting such a change through the use of the lecture, the interview, and the speech. In her Sydney Peace Prize acceptance speech titled, "Peace?..." Roy is convinced that "without resistance there will be no peace" and therefore she describes herself as a person "who spends most of her time thinking of strategies of resistance and plotting to disrupt the putative peace"

(1). For Roy, resistance is opposition and cannot be conceived without linking it to radical change and transformation of an existing state of affairs.

Roy's model of oppositional politics would find an opponent in Ulrich Beck, whose work on the characterization of modern society, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity has led him to believe that in a "risk society" a series of new resistances emerge which are grass-roots oriented, extra-parliamentary, and no longer linked to political parties—something which would seemingly find favor with Roy (39). Risk society, for Beck refers to a society that is threatened

by a set of risks and hazards which are a consequence of scientific and industrial development. In

order for societies to evolve, he maintains that societies must become reflexive where reflexivity

can be located in the broad masses of the lay public and not in some hypothetical ideal speech

situation. The idea that reflexivity and resistance can emerge from within the ordinary people

echoes powerfully with Roy's belief that it is only the people that can initiate resistance and

change. However, the model of "new ambivalence" which Beck proposes in a related manner

where "generalized skepticism" and "centrality of doubt" preclude the emergence of antagonistic

relations militates against Roy's central tenet of resistance as confrontation. In other words, even

though it may seem that Beck's "reinvention of politics" as a pacification of conflicts might

seamlessly fit with Roy's understanding of the political sphere today, the differences in their

means to achieve probably similar ends are quite apparent. While opposition and antagonism

define Roy's notion of resistance, Beck's resistance is characterized through skepticism and

doubt. Roy's emphasis on analyzing, blaming, exposing, and naming the perpetrators, forms the

cornerstone of her oppositional politics and resistive techniques.

A challenge to the idea of resistance as opposition is the subject matter of Jefferess'

Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation. Jefferess articulates

resistance, primarily and quite unconventionally as a mode of reconciliation rather than a mode

of opposition to colonial authority as put forward by Roy. Jefferess writes that in his formulation

of a notion of resistance he is concerned not with "the ideas of opposition or the production of

counter-discourses, but with the transformation of structures/cultures of power" {Postcolonial

Resistance 20). It is as if Jefferess assumes that transformation of structures of power can only

happen through reconciliatory modes of resistance. Jefferess clarifies that resistance "transforms the structures of power assumed within colonial discourse by recognizing, and fostering, an order in which the relationship between Self and Other is one of mutual interdependence rather than antagonism" (17). Jefferess points to

Mahatma Gandhi's evocation of an ethics of reconciliation as an exemplary model for the transformation he seeks to achieve and theorize simultaneously. While he examines Gandhi's reconciliatory model as leading to the desired transformation, he reads Edward Said's propositions as essentially invoking the resistance-as-opposition paradigm which allows

Jefferess to dismiss Said's writings as ever only gesturing towards an ideal of transformation and never actually reaching it. However, one can argue that it is through a conceptualization of

Saidian resistance as essentially rooted in reconciliatory and transformative models that one can challenge Jefferess' contention which articulates the view that Said relies on the resistance-as- opposition model only. In this respect I argue that there are striking similarities between Said's

"model of reconciliation"—based essentially on the idea that reconciliation is not a way of reducing/forgetting oppositional histories but rather a way of situating the opposing factions in a space that isn't all about fighting" (Power, Politics, and Culture 203)—and Roy's "listening to the grasshoppers." Roy's "listening to the grasshoppers" is a powerful metaphor which echoes with Said's reconciliation to suggest similarities in concern for the other, the marginalized. One can thus argue that Said's "reconciliation" and Roy's "listening to the other" are different from the "reconciliation" of Gandhi as suggested by Jefferess. Roy, while she reinstates her belief in the idea of ahimsa or nonviolence deriving from Gandhi, she does not conscript to his model of dissent—essentially constructed, according to Ashis Nandy, as an ethic of social conduct and not as a form of oppositional resistance—which dilutes the oppositional framework within which she intends to open a space to alter these confrontational relationships (The Intimate Enemy 57). 153

Roy, Said, and Gandhi

Roy repeatedly invokes Gandhi in her works to essentially highlight his use of civil disobedience as a strategy of resistance against the British during colonial times. Thus for her, resistance is inextricably linked to the idea of civil disobedience, which she however, argues is beginning to become more symbolic than real these days. In Public Power in the Age of Empire, when she ruefully posits that, "Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars," Roy gestures at some of the limitations inherent therein

(39). While Said does not invoke Gandhi explicitly, Roy is more pronounced in her treatment and use of Gandhi as an emblematic figure of the strategy of non-violent civil disobedience movement. In The Agent in the Margin, Joseph writes that "Nonviolence was multifaceted for

Gandhi. On the one hand it meant abstaining from injuring another. On the more positive side it meant the largest love, the greatest charity" (19). Together with truth, nonviolence was to become for Gandhi not only a political strategy but a matter of lifestyle as well. While Gandhi's ethic of social conduct would, for instance, appeal to the conscience of high-caste Hindus to alter their attitudes towards the untouchables; Roy's strategy of resistance in a similar situation would, perhaps, amount to enabling the untouchables to actively fight for their rights and enable them to snatch back their freedoms. Clearly, Roy's strategy of resistance while adhering to nonviolence is more aggressive than Gandhi's or even Said's advocacy for restraint, caution, and circumspection. In spite of this, Roy's "listening to grasshoppers" shares with Said's

"reconciliation" because of the way they conceive of the marginalized or the other.

In his essay, "Truth and Reconciliation," Said advocates "peaceful coexistence and genuine reconciliation" between Israelis and Palestinians who have been in a situation of war since the creation of the Israeli state (18). Said writes: 154

There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve

that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such. This does not

mean a diminishing of Jewish life as Jewish life or surrendering Palestinian Arab

aspirations and political existence. On the contrary, it means self-determination for both

peoples. But that does mean being willing to soften, lessen, and finally give up special

status for one people at the expense of the other. The Law of Return for Jews and the

right of return for Palestinian refugees have to be considered and trimmed together. Both

the notions of Greater Israel as the land of the Jewish people given to them by God and of

Palestine as an Arab land that cannot be alienated from the Arab homeland need to be

reduced in scale and exclusivity. (18)

Thus for Said, reconciliation is not reducing histories or even leading to a situation of compromise. Instead, he argues that both people should realize each others' need for self- determination which in essence can be read as an appeal to the good sense or conscience of the oppressor to relent. Said's reconciliation appears quite Gandhian in spirit here when he argues that one can rely on the goodwill of the enemy or the opponent.

On the other hand, rather than appealing to the conscience of wrongdoers, Roy advocates the strategy of confronting, shaming, and mocking them "With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe (War Talk

112). Her unequivocal emphasis on the inevitability of confrontation and struggle mark them out as almost necessary prerequisites for the realization of resistance that would lead to any social transformation in the future. E San Juan Jr. though writing in the Filipino context, essentially voices a similar concern. He writes, "No transitory reform from above, in my opinion, can alter 155

deeply entrenched property relations or effect a redistribution of wealth and power without

sustained and voluntary mass actions" {BeyondPostcolonial Theory 11). What he means "by

above" is a scenario which excludes the masses or the ordinary people. He argues that increasing

state repression has shrivelled the democratic space for nonviolent oppositional practices, an act which Roy argues, naturally privileges violence as a means of resistance.

Whereas Gandhi's idea of resistance, to a large extent, relies on the notion of conscious

individual suffering—an ethical imperative—where it does not recognize the adversary as an

antagonist, Roy, on the other hand, builds her argument of resistance based on identifying the

enemy targets, targeting the antagonist in as clear and unequivocal terms as possible and

inflicting damage. She constantly deploys the motif of "fight" in her nonfiction writing to signify

opposition and battle. Gandhi's notion of resistance relies on the goodwill of the enemy and the principle of conversion. When Gandhi writes that "By self-suffering, I seek to convert him, never to destroy him," (Collected Works 17: 490), Roy would argue that relying on the goodwill of the

enemy or the state and even negotiating with them never leads to social transformation. In Public

Power in the Age of Empire Roy works from the assumption that a permanent gulf separates the people from the government. Even though "the truly vanquished still look upon the government

as maibaap, the parent and provider," it is one of the bitter ironies that they cannot rely on the

goodwill of the government to provide the most basic needs of subsistence and existence (6). She writes that since "for most Indians, sarkar is very separate from the public" to rely on the goodwill of the government to provide for the most marginalized is a fallacy (6). So Roy's model of resistance, while Gandhian (nonviolent) in spirit, evaluates itself anew in its need to reimagine the meaning of civil disobedience today. She credits Gandhi not only with the legacy of nonviolent resistance in India, but also for involving women in the freedom struggle against the 156

British. Likewise, she believes that as long as resistance movements are nonviolent they fully allow women to participate and protest. Therefore, she abides by nonviolent resistance even though she recognizes that the state is well equipped to deal with nonviolent struggles.

Because of his surprising ability to lead as well as educate the masses, Roy credits

Gandhi with having led one of the most successful freedom struggles in the twentieth century against colonial rule. She invokes him but simultaneously points out limitations not within his model of civil disobedience (as suggested by Gandhi), but with the governments' adaptability worldwide to tackle non-violent resistance today. She remarks that since governments have learned to wait out these peaceful demonstrations, there is an urgent need to build momentum for a new wave of nonviolent civil disobedience to confront global corporate domination. Thus it can be argued that while Roy places great faith in Gandhi's nonviolent means, she advocates a revaluation of Gandhian ways in today's society to devise new strategies of civil disobedience to counter repressive state measures. Instead of looking and waiting for that pristine resistance movement which would address all aspects of injustices, she advocates that "We have to find a way of becoming the resistance or we have to find a way of supporting whatever resistance there is" ("Finding Justice with Arundhati Roy" 3). However, it would be wrong to assume that the strategy of resistance carved out by Roy would rely on the notion of implacable and irrevocable enmity. Instead, the framework of confrontation and struggle she proposes is to be understood as a stage in the struggle for self-knowledge and self-reliance.

Imagining Popular Resistance

In Empire, Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's differentiation of the multitude from the people rests primarily on the idea that to the people one will and one action can be attributed. In contradistinction the multitude according to them is a multiplicity, which is not homogenous or identical with itself and bears an inconclusive relation to those outside of it {Empire 103). As a result they propose that "Every nation must make the multitude into a people"—an arduous task which Roy repeatedly addresses in a somewhat different manner in her work on resistance movements. It can be argued that Roy's use of the words, "people" and "the public" become conscious and vigilant choices which suggest a constituted synthesis of purpose, will, and action.

Where Hardt and Negri suggest that people are distinct from the multitude, for Roy the important distinction is between the government and the people or the public. Roy makes this distinction quite noticeably in Public Power in the Age of Empire where she writes that for most Indians, the sarkar is very separate from public, words used to suggest the state and the people respectively

(6). However, she fine tunes this distinction further to suggest that the Indian elite, like the elite anywhere in the world, feel closer to the state than to the marginalized sections of society—an action which mistakenly blurs the distinction between the people and the state. Problematically, to outside observers this creates the illusion that the actions of the state are inseparable from the will of the people. Roy argues that when governments act in the name of the people, they are virtually acting in the interests of the few preferred elites. As a result, Roy suggests a linking of hands across the globe, across national borders to deflate such a myth. Therefore, she writes:

The only thing that is worth discussing seriously is the power of a dissenting public. A

public that disagrees with the very concept of empire. A public that has set itself against

incumbent power—international, national, regional, or provincial governments and

institutions that support and service Empire. {Public Power in the Age of Empire 26)

On another front one of the central omissions of Empire is the failure to fully explain and engage with the power of the multitude which the authors declare are the constituents of Empire. The multitude forms an already collective and yet incoherent subject and remains incognizant of its 158 own power to alter events and lives. In spite of their loyalty to Spinoza's philosophy of immanence which hints at resistance and action—a philosophy which transforms the world into a territory of practice along with affirming the democracy of the multitude as the absolute form of politics—Hardt and Negri ironically fail to specify the task for the multitude. They write, "The task for the multitude, however, although it is clear at a conceptual level, remains rather abstract.

What specific and concrete practices will animate this political project? We cannot say at this point" (399-400). What they propose as the first political program for the multitude is the idea of global citizenship, where the general right to control its own movement is the multitude's ultimate demand (400). Interestingly, Hardt and Negri do not ascribe any unassailable qualities to Empire as they concur that the virtual centre of Empire can be attacked at any point because of the unprecedented media attention given to resistance movements. However, for Benita Parry in

"Internationalism Revisited," written essentially from a Marxist perspective, such attention to resistance movements is not encouraging enough because she writes that the multitude of Hardt and Negri is not comparable to the formation of a new industrial working class. Instead, she critiques the idea that Hardt's and Negri's multitude portends the death of class solidarity since the multitude refers to "the dispossessed masses who while certainly exploited by capital, are not coterminous with those involved in communication, cooperation, and the production and reproduction of affects" (97). While Parry would argue that the multitude cannot be equated with the proletarians, Roy would argue for their unification and action (deriving partially from her use of the lecture and the speech) under a common banner, irrespective of their class solidarities.

Thus Hardt and Negri do not ascribe any resistive or revolutionary potential to the multitude;, something which is essential to Roy's understanding of "public power." Resistance by the multitude conceived within the framework of Hardt and Negri becomes a direct confrontation against the central repressive operations of Empire, a gathering together of experiences of resistance, and wielding them in concert against the nerve centers of imperial command—strategies, which one can argue appear far from being concrete. In the work of Hardt and Negri, resistance is conceptualized as a series of demands—demand for global citizenship, the demand to a right to control their own movement, a demand for global citizenship, demand for social wages—which figure differently from the way Roy envisages resistance. For Roy, resistance and strategies of it have to move beyond the "demanding" stage into the "forcing" stage, which constitutes active resistance as opposed to the passive and abstract resistance of demands. Thus, resistance movements, in order to become radical and geared towards transformation and liberation, need to move beyond mere demands towards waging real battles and inflicting real damage.

However, to presume that the peoples' resistance movements are a panacea to all social problems would be grossly misleading. In their isolation and lack of integration with other movements across the world, Roy locates a major shortcoming in such resistance movements, which she argues needs to be remedied sooner than later. She lists numerous other peoples' resistance movements which she maintains are in urgent need to join hands globally. What she calls for is not an abandonment of the ideals of nonviolent resistance; rather she calls for people to re-imagine nonviolent resistance today and to minimize internal injustices within these movements. Maxime Rodinson in his introduction to People without a Country: the Kurds and

Kurdistan points out the dangers of the perpetuation of monolithic or uncritical images and self- perceptions of resistance movements and struggles. What is additionally revelatory, according to

Roy, is that many resistance movements "suffer from a lack of democracy, from an iconization 160 of their 'leaders,' a lack of transparency, a lack of vision and direction. But most of all they suffer from vilification, repression, and lack of resources" {Public Power in the Age of Empire

33). But then, how does one mount resistance and what are the modalities of such resistance going to be in the face of what Roy calls "full spectrum dominance?" How can writers and intellectuals create or reclaim that space for genuine nonviolent civil disobedience?

Roy reiterates that even though our freedoms are chartered and enshrined in the constitutions of our nations, if we do not demand more and more we will be left with less and less. Within this model of resistance, conflict resolution can be achieved not through a defeat or destruction of the antagonist essentially but by forcing a transformation of people' own lives through their involvement with the struggle. Thus, according to Roy, neither the extermination of the antagonists nor a Gandhian belief in the goodwill of the antagonist to rouse them to a sense of iniquity is the aim of the resistance movements she writes about. For instance, the Narmada

Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada River Movement) has gained a couple of major successes, one of them being to force the World Bank to pull out of funding the project of the construction of dams on the river. She argues that because of the peoples' resistance movement in 1993-4, the

World Bank was forced to set up an independent review which recommended the pullout from the project. In this respect, Said too argues that true reconciliation cannot really be imposed upon a people for it must be achieved by genuine negotiation, something which has not occurred in the

Israel-Palestine scenario. In Peace and its Discontents, Said writes that this "is the first of my books to have been written from start to finish with an Arab audience in mind" thus implying that it is important to not only engage with the Palestinian people themselves but also to make these people involved in the struggle for independence (xix). Elsewhere, Roy recommends that we could reverse the idea of economic sanctions imposed on poor countries by Empire and its 161 allies by imposing "a regime of Peoples' Sanctions on every corporate house that has been awarded a contract in post-war Iraq" (An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire 66). Roy's strategy of resistance favors a process where each one of these corporate houses should be named, exposed, and boycotted. It needs to be additionally kept in mind that Peoples' Sanctions—a strategy Roy advocates—becomes a reality only after the writer-intellectual's storytelling which exposes the truth to the masses. On the other hand, Roy recounts that whenever any resistance movement has moved beyond being merely symbolic and into the realm of the real— threatening the status quo of the power structures for instance by blockading villages, occupying forest land, protesting and marching in large numbers—the state has cracked down ruthlessly. When any form of protest or dissent is likened to terrorism, as in the case of the trade union leader, Shankar

Guha Niyogi, and now more recently with the illegal arrest of Binayak Sen, the state's credibility of dealing with nonviolent dissent erodes rapidly.

Said too is critical of the state's credibility to deal with situations which he argues in most cases amounts to a betrayal of the people. Peace and its Discontents describes Said's anguish and outrage at the Palestinian leaders for signing the peace agreement with Israel which virtually led to a betrayal of the hopes and aspirations of the common people. Said affirms his belief in a model of reconciliation (where according to Said, you situate yourself in a territory or in a space that is not at all about fighting, is not about polemics and oppositional politics) as opposed to

Roy's oppositional model of not only confronting forces of Empire but laying siege to it (War

Talk 112). While Said argues optimistically for opening up this other front which enables the possibility of success over the conflictual models of the past, Roy's writings, instead of gesturing towards a Saidian reconciliation, unambiguously embrace a model of nonviolent struggle, dissent, oppositional politics, and battle (Said, Power, Politics, and Culture 203). Said shuns what he calls the "politics of retaliation—the rhetoric of blame" which he argues has prevented

Israel and Palestine from reaching any lasting peace and solution to their problems (Power,

Politics, and Culture 204).

While Said's resistance and critique can best be understood within his humanistic framework, his model of reconciliation defines as well as circumscribes his notion of resistance.

His notion of resistance is to a large extent to be understood primarily as a form of critical activity which Said links with the activity of metropolitan intellectuals and writers (Said, "In the

Shadow of the West" 44). Ashcroft and Ahluwalia write that the "Saidian strategy of resistance is premised upon intellectuals who exercise their critical consciousness .. .to intervene critically within the intrinsic conditions on which knowledge is made possible" (69). Thus for Said, the role of the intellectual is critical intervention in spheres that matter the most because they tend to influence the shape of further thoughts and knowledge production. Unlike Roy's conception of resistance, which is understood as mass resistance movements and intellectual's support for such movements, for Said resistance essentially originates from the critical consciousness of the intellectual. Writing about the success of the resistance movement initiated by the Narmada

Bachao Andolan (NBA), which eventually led to a withdrawal of the dam building project, Roy points out in Public Power in the Age of Empire that "The voice of that local movement was amplified by supporters on the global stage, embarrassing investors and forcing them to withdraw" (41). Roy argues that the resistance movement was initiated by the ordinary people and then found support from intellectuals and movements across the globe which led to its efficacy as a resistance movement. Understandably for her, and by implication, if resistance movements shy away from confrontation and opposition, they would end up becoming pawns in the hands of those they seek to oppose. The difference in emphasis between Roy and Said becomes less pronounced once we realize that the objective of bridging the gulf separating the intellectuals from their subjects of representation is what binds Roy and Said together. Thus their notions of resistance are inextricably linked to their conception of the other and the self and ensuing relationships which also help them redefine the relationship between the intellectual and their subjects of representations.

In Orientalism, whereas for the Orientalist, the Orient was the other, "it was different"

(277) an object of scrutiny and analysis; for the intellectual, the other is not a category which is to be seen as distinct from one's own self. Linking humanism to his practise of intellectual activity, Said writes that "humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods" (xxiii). In other words, for the contemporary Saidian intellectual to "ignore a part of the world [the other] now demonstrably encroaching upon him is to avoid reality" (109). The other was either ignored or was spoken for by the Orientalist which resulted in the propagation of huge generalizations about the other. Even though the contemporary intellectual represents the other, this time the representation does not seek to limit or contain the other. Instead in contemporary intellectual activity there is a forging of connections and links with the other which the Orientalist did not choose to make. According to Saree Makdisi in the case of Zionism as well, its "ideology of difference" recapitulates the binary structure basic to modern imperialism, and predicated necessarily on opposition between a fully human self and a not-quite-human other" ("Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation" 87). Makdisi draws the argument of the self and the other in humanist terms which also reiterates the link between humanism and intellectual activity. When Roy writes that the intellectuals need to "Reach ordinary people, break the stranglehold of mainstream propaganda. It's not enough to be intellectually pristine and self-righteous" (Checkbook 147), somewhat like Said, she seems to 164 suggest a proactive role for the intellectual. For her, the other is constituted by the millions who are treated as non-citizens by the state—which includes Dalits, Adivasis, and the countless poor and homeless people who live in the crevices of cities and the slums. She argues that even though the Dalits and Adivasis constitute about twenty three percent of the total population of

India, not to mention the various other backward and ignored sections of people, they do not even weigh in as real people ("Scimitars in the Sun" 6). It is in failing to conceive of, to imagine, the humanity and existence of these marginalized people that a failure of intellectual activity can better be examined.

In Orientalism, Said postulates that he considers the failure of Orientalism to have been as human as much as it can be considered an intellectual one. He writes that "in having to take up a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own,

Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience"

(328). Thus, the failure of imagination to conceive the human experience of the other is in part a failure of the imagination, and consequently a failure of intellectual activity where the intellectual fails to grasp the significance of the other. Therefore, Saidian humanism and intellectual activity are premised on an appreciation of other cultures, societies, and peoples

(HDC 26).

In this context, Spivak's call for "cultural instruction in the exercise of the imagination"

(14) in "Terror: A Speech After 9-1.1" can best be illustrated by the following:

I recall a story of the Calcutta riots, when Gandhi was fasting for peace. A Hindu man

came to him, to speak of his young boy who had been killed by the Muslim mobs, and of

the depth of his anger and longing for revenge. And Gandhi is said to have replied: If you

really wish to overcome your pain, find a young [Muslim] boy, just as young as your son,. . . whose parents have been killed by Hindu mobs. Bring up that boy like

you would your own son, but bring him up in the Muslim faith to which he was born.

Only then will you find that you can heal your pain, your anger, and your longing for

retribution. (98)

Spivak, following Gandhi here, writes that the toughest task is to imagine oneself as Muslim, when everything in one's being resists identification with that identity. Spivak writes, "What is offered as the identity of the subject must be accessed in the imagination when every impulse is to repudiate it" (98). Said's emphasis on a similar urge and necessity to identify with the other, as suggested by Spivak here, constitutes the framework of his humanistic practice. Roy's

"empathy" can be read as an ethical impulse which echoes with Said's humanism and Spivak's

"call upon the robust imagination" (Terror 9-11" 21). In dealing with the other, Roy advocates

"empathy" which can be understood as an exercise in the imagination of the other where it seeks to identify the other as an individual and as human. In "Scimitars in the Sun", she writes of how a lack of connection and empathy apparent between the people who take decisions and those who are affected by such decisions. She writes,

There is no egalitarian social contact whatsoever between the two worlds. Deep at the

heart of the horror of what's going on, lies the caste system: this layered, horizontally

divided society with no vertical bolts, no glue—no intermarriage, no social mingling, no

human—humane—interaction that holds the layers together. So when the bottom half of

society simply shears off and falls away, it happens silently. (7)

The words, "egalitarian" "social mingling" and "humane" become as if prescriptive for contemporary intellectuals to follow in order to conceive of the other's human experience. Not only should there be a bridging of this vast gulf but the ensuing debate about empowering the 166 people at the bottom is central to any question of their identity formation. Issues of people's empowerment and resistance are central to the intellectual's framing of alternative narratives than presented historically so far. The question of alternative narratives can best be evaluated by examining the genre of nonfiction prose

Section IV: Genres and Canonicity

One needs to look at some of the statistics of canon formation to conclude that while the essay is still canonized in the academy, an alternative canon of speeches, interviews, and lectures is far from a reality right now. While most introductory courses on nonfiction studies rely on a study of essays, memoirs, and travel narratives, the induction of speeches and lectures, as part of nonfiction is elusive right now. In response to a question whether the interview is a distinctive genre of literary performance John Rodden in Performing the Literary Interview does not merely answer a no. Instead he says, "Not yet" which further suggests that the interview is one of the emerging genres worthy of serious attention (1). Rodden argues that the interview is a genre in flux even as he bemoans the fact that "literary scholars have devoted scant attention to the generic issues raised by the interview form" (1). Gaining ground steadily, the interview as genre, according to Rodden, seeks to expand traditional styles of discourse in academic work (1). He lists the interview as a literary art form and an instance of performance arts. Rodden's gesture of favoring the marginalized genre of interview would find favor with Said's belief in the ability of the humanist to offer alternative and silenced models of conceiving reality (HDC 42-3).

On the other hand, Roy's persistence with these alternative genres, while primarily necessitated by the choice of subject matter, gestures towards the need to prioritize them under a common thematic concern. For instance, the recent development of the genre of prison writing/memoir has emerged, as revealed by Barbara Harlow in "Prison Memoirs of Political 167

Detainees," out of the larger framework of resistance literature (120). Likewise the generic focus on the interview, the speeches, and the lecture can be coupled with a thematic focus to unveil a tentative genre description: political speeches, interviews, or even public lectures. It is not only the alternative narratives the writer-intellectual is expected to provide, but also alternative modes of presentation of those narratives that are central to our conception of resistance literature.

Hence, the argument for the inclusion of the lecture, the interview, and the speech as literary devices that can be used by the writer-intellectual to present alternative points of view to further enable the conception of strategies of resistance. In one of the revelatory passages from War

Talk, Roy writes about modes and strategies of resistance:

It means keeping an eagle eye on public institutions and demanding accountability. It

means putting your ear to the ground and listening to the whispering of the truly powerless.

It means giving a forum to the myriad voices from the hundred of resistance movements

across the country which are speaking about real things—about bonded labor, marital rape,

sexual preferences, women's wages, uranium dumping, unsustainable mining, weavers'

woes, farmers' suicide. It means fighting displacement and dispossession and the

relentless, everyday violence of abject poverty. (38)

Roy implicitly suggests that nonfictiohal genres or modes of conversation can amplify the countless voices of resistance movements across the country. Quite characteristically, and in keeping with her conception of resistance, Roy brings together the act of expressing dissent with real dissent actualized in mass resistance movements. On the other hand, envisioned somewhat differently because based in an imperial context, Said's strategy for resistance encapsulates a twofold process that involves "fighting against outside intrusion" and "cultural reconstitution" of what has been suppressed of the natives' past by the processes of imperialism (Culture and Imperialism 252-3). This cultural reconstitution happens through writing back to empire, a

process that requires entering into the European discourse, transforming it, and making it

acknowledge the presence of marginalized cultures and peoples. Said terms this powerful

transformative initiative as "the voyage in" {Culture and Imperialism 261). Even though some

critics have accused Said of failing to provide a concrete strategy of resistance, more recently an

appreciation of his notion of resistance has linked it to a practice of critique. Homi Bhabha in

"Adagio," his farewell comments on the anniversary of Said's death, remarks that resistance as

critique must oppose eye-catching, mind-numbing institutions of instantaneity and adopt

narratives that are longer and slower. This slowness, Said repeatedly maintains, realized as a

deliberative and ethical measure helps make connections that allow us to see part and whole and

further creates opportunities for what Bhabha calls "oppositional writing—the resistance of the

part to the hegemonic whole—in the process of constructing subaltern or antinomian solidarities'

(12). Arguably when Roy uses the abovementioned genres to highlight the mode of struggle and

resistance, she reclaims the centrality of those genres.

The near absence of any courses designed and conceived around such generic structures or

even anthologies of interviews, speeches, and lectures taught from a genre perspective at the

undergraduate level affirms that to a large extent the English literature curriculum in North

America has become insular in its refusal to break the stranglehold of genre hierarchy. As Ken

Hyland argues in "Crossing the Boundaries of Genre Studies: Commentaries by Experts,"

because the idea of genre is based on grouping similar texts together, the genre refers to socially

recognized ways of using language (237). In other words, genre identification, its usage, and

ultimately canon formation, occurs in an extra-linguistic manner, based on collectively agreed

norms and conventions, and therefore to suggest an alteration to that structure would amount to a 169 contravention of that social agreement. In a somewhat related manner Brian Paltridge articulates his notion of the prototype in "Working With Genre: A Pragmatic Perspective" where he explains that "people categorize items and concepts in keeping with a prototypical image they build in their mind of what it is that represents the item or concept in question" (394). Because literary conventions have emphasized and prioritized certain genres over others, it becomes increasingly challenging to question or upset the prototype because it has already established the norms. Said's comments on the pressure to conform to the canon are instructive when he writes that:

the university experience more or less consecrates the pact between a canon of works, a

band of initiate instructors, a group of younger affiliates; in a socially validated manner

all this reproduces the filiative discipline supposedly transcended by the educational

process. (The World, the Text and the Critic 21)

Said argues that the academy has perpetuated the hierarchy of genres in its bid to canonize some genres and works over others and consequently the divorce between what is taught in the canon and worldly matters has accelerated. According to Isabel Forbes such cognitive approach to the identification of genres signifies that meaning is determined by cognitive structures outside language rather than by relation of signs within language ("Review of Linguistic Categorization"

379). Hyland's and Paltridge's works serve to reinforce the idea of a cognitive approach to genre assignment and allocation.5 In relation to Roy's works their ideas instruct readers to the knowledge that one can assume that the purpose her writings are supposed to serve helps classify her works in a prototypical manner as nonfictional writings. The question therefore, is not why to classify; rather, the focus must be on the underlying logic which justifies the traditional hierarchical genre divisions and classifications in literary studies. 170

Trying to find a justification for the relative marginalization of nonfiction studies in the literary canon, Phyllis Frus McCord in "Reading Nonfiction in Composition Courses: From

Theory to Practice" proposes that:

Because there has been so little serious criticism of nonfiction in general and of

twentieth-century examples in particular, most teachers of composition do not know how

to conduct rhetorical or stylistic analyses of the texts they use in their classes. They are

therefore unlikely to generate the questions and discussion that can enable their students

to discover the process of making meaning that writing of all kinds—nonfiction no less

than so-called "literary" texts—entails. (748)

Instead of marginalizing or even eliminating nonfictional selections from our courses, McCord argues that we consider changing the way we generally read them. She argues that the term literary has for all practical purposes become synonymous with fiction, defined conventionally as an imaginative work of high quality—an effort which has excluded most nonfiction from literary consideration. Instead McCord proposes, much in sync with Roy, that fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of storytelling and it is a fallacy to regard nonfictional prose as somehow tied to the world. When Roy proposes that, "Good fiction is the truest thing that ever was. Facts are not necessarily the only truths" she discredits the generic distinction based on their truth value {Checkbook 68). It would be worthwhile to break the hard line between what is customarily regarded as literary, specifically novel, poetry, and drama and what is considered non-literary—the polemical essay, biography, travel writing, the lecture, the interview, and the speech. When Roy writes that "The theme of much of what I write, fiction as well as nonfiction, is the relationship between power and powerlessness, and the endless, circular conflict they're engaged in," she suggests that fiction and nonfiction are different modes of representation ("Come September" 46). James Young in Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrrative and

the Consequences of Interpretation suggests—and as far as the reader is concerned— the

difference between the requirements made by fictional and nonfictional forms is one of degree,

not of kind (6). Young, argues that an increasingly prevalant 'rhetoric of fact' regarding the

Holocaust has made documentary realism the style by which to convince the reader of a work's

moral integrity and testamentary value (64). McCord argues that while fiction asks of readers

only a temporary suspension of disbelief, nonfictional discourses as news and so-called

documentary narrative lead readers to suspend our doubts more permanently and "to respond to

the printed word as if it were the thing itself (6).

Although Roy has stuck to her position that she does not see a great difference between

her fiction and her nonfiction, this might not be the case for most authors. She tries to defuse the

popular conception that nonfiction is a truer and more political account of the world than fiction.

Rather, the deployment of the lecture, the interview, and the speech as modes of eloquence

works on the premise that the truths they make available to the reader or the audience will elicit

an appropriate response from them. In The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, rather than simply

viewing fiction as a rhetorical category, indicative of an imaginative sphere, Roy induces readers

to treat fiction as "the truest thing that there ever was" (10). More so, in "The Ladies Have

Feelings, So" Roy was trying to discredit the functional separation of literary genres based on

their truth value or even their political or apolitical natures. She clarifies that even though her novel, The God of Small Things is a work of fiction it is no less political than any of her essays.

She claims that fiction can be as true and as political as nonfiction and therefore the separation of

genres based on these criteria seems quite facile to her. In the same breath as she argues for

fiction to be true and political, she also asserts the right of writers to write nonfiction. By implication she seems to suggest that both writers and readers are taken in by the neat division between fiction and nonfiction—the pragmatic truth claims of the latter linking it to worldly affairs—so much so that this distinction has consecrated itself into an ideology which seems nearly impossible to break right now. In dealing with fiction and nonfiction the right question to ask seems to be not about the political efficacy of one over the other; instead asking which one of the two is a more immediate and more direct response to what is going on around us seems more appropriately framed. However, analyzing the end result of any literary production elicits a response from Roy which clearly marks a distinction between fiction and nonfiction. While fiction may be linked to innovative ways and originality, nonfiction for Roy is primarily about reiterating or adding one's voice to the others'—a different rhetorical response from the creative ends of fiction. She resolutely maintains that this act of reiteration in support of a peoples' movement is what ultimately leads to resistance and potential transformation. Thus uttering the same political issues as spoken of in fiction but in a different manner and from a distinct platform can alter not only the lives of people but also rectify the perceived generic imbalance. In "Opponents" Said too resolutely maintains that irrespective of the mode of narrative, the mark of true professionalism is accuracy of representation of society and therefore addressing the larger question of making literary studies relevant to society, he rejects the insularity of genre hierarchy as well the artificial separation of pedagogical fields which leads to insider/outsider dichotomy (155).

Bawarshi in "Crossing the Boundaries of Genre Studies: Commentaries by Experts" contends that how writers discover what they want to say, how they say it, and what content to include within particular rhetorical situations is dependent on the writers' knowledge of the genre (244). Thus he proposes that genres are not the culmination of, but rather the starting points for the teaching of invention—a way for writers to discover what can and cannot be said and done from within a particular genre space, what actions the genre makes possible, and what goals, assumptions, and values are presupposed by other users of a similar genre (244-45).

Because such genre knowledge is integral to invention, it enables the practitioner of a particular genre to recognize when, where, and how to use a genre. With Stephen Heath, genre can be understood as "a characteristic mobilization of one or more of those possibilities [language use] to some specific end" ("The Politics of Genre" 168). Because genres develop over a period of time, they are intended to respond appropriately to situations that writers encounter repeatedly.

In this age of internet technology, most writers have responded well to constitute what Marcy L.

Bauman in "The Evolution of Internet Genres" has called the internet genre. The possibility of reaching a larger readership, the ease of publication, and the ease of accessibility of the text opens up new possibilities for the interview, the lecture, and the speech to be published. The decentralized impulse behind such publications gives them a collaborative and an egalitarian emphasis. With reader response having become a distinct possibility, writers often find themselves responding to people's queries, objections, and eulogies in a much more direct manner than ever before. With her focus on a utilization of the internet, Roy's recent writings on

ZNet, Countercurrents.org, and Alternet pose a question: How does the online production and dissemination of texts alter the issues of genre development and readership patterns in literary studies today? Unfortunately, not much critical work has been produced that attempts to trace these shifting patterns being raised here.

Nonetheless several critics have focused on Roy's treatment of genre in her work. Much focus of Bret Benjamin's "Literary Movements: Impossible Collectivities in The God of Small

Things" lies on an analysis of a failure of political action. Benjamin argues that the literary 174 figures in the novel may be able to truth-tell—to unveil or make visible an inequity or an injustice—but forces the reader to realize "the troubling gap between awareness and transformative action" (176). Interestingly enough the failure to imagine collective solidarity and agency in Roy's novel lies, for Benjamin, in the plot and story of the novel and only partially with the genre. He writes that "The construction of collective agency in GOST, though seething with potential, is hobbled by the fracturing of identification, fostered and perpetuated by the manipulations of power" (179). He points out that though Roy locates great potency in the crowd's collective expression of dissatisfaction, Ammu's deep-seated anger can find no collective solidarity with the protest marchers. As a result, Benjamin argues that any attempts within the novel to identify any collective action or solidarity—modes of resistance—are stultified.

Genres and Resistance

Comfort, in her essay, "How to Tell a Story to Change the World" detailing the process of Roy's search for a suitable mode of narration, writes that "Roy is searching for an appropriate storytelling technique to address what are emerging as new conditions of hegemony and counter- hegemony in a neoliberal capitalist era that is fast becoming a new imperial age, and the shifts in her work indicate a writer navigating rough seas" (137). Even though Comfort's essay is not written from the perspective that details the literary genres that Roy evokes, it nevertheless makes the case for the apt use of prose that is counter-hegemonic in nature as well as spirit. She justifies Roy's deployment of the language of fable, her use of imagery, her use of various tropes and even her narrative strategy of often portraying opposing forces to make apparent the differences between the two. Roy justifies all this in the name of what she calls, "a new kind of art. An art which can make the impalpable palpable, the intangible tangible, the invisible visible and the inevitable evitable. An art which can draw out the incorporeal adversary and make it real.

Bring it to book" ("The Ladies Have Feelings, So" 215). The possibility of "a new kind of art" is a realization that challenges certain preconceived notions about the role and scope of pedagogical activity in general and literary activity in particular. This new art is to provide a mode of resistance to the writer-intellectual who is called upon to take sides and ask uncomfortable questions from those in power. Suffice it to say here that this "new art" relies on the interactive aspect, where the author/speaker is not only working together with other people, but is also reliant on their responses for thinking and articulation. Hyland proposes that writers achieve engagement with their readers by using questions, reader pronouns, and directives

(consider, must). Such stylistic efforts have a dialogic purpose because they anticipate voices, questions, and positions of potential readers. He writes that "These elements allow writers to actively pull readers along with the argument, to focus their attention, recognize their uncertainties, include them as discourse participants, and guide them to interpretations" (238).

For Roy this "new art" is basically to be conceived as something that not only links the political and the pedagogical in a constant relationship with each other but also makes the pedagogical much more interactive than traditionally imagined.

Conceived within a Saidian framework of fostering this interrelationship between the literary and the social, Roy's attempt at her "new art" is nothing short of being considered quite path breaking. Roy goes on to argue that it is the writers, the poets, the artists, the singers, the filmmakers—Said's intellectuals—who can translate cash-flow charts and scintillating board room speeches into real stories about real people with real lives ("The Ladies Have Feelings, So"

214). Such writing or speaking, in many ways connects to what John Beverley in his essay, "The

Margin at the Centre: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative)" calls testimonial narrative. Beverley defines testimonial narrative as "a novel or novella-length narrative in book or pamphlet .. .told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts, and whose unit of narration is usually a "life" or significant life experience" (12-13). Beverley emphasizes more on the truth-effect of testimony rather than concerning himself with generic specifications or even the mode of narration. He writes:

Testimonio may include, but is not subsumed under, any of the following textual

categories, some of which are conventionally considered literature, others not:

autobiography, autobiographical novel, oral history, memoir, confession, diary,

interview, eyewitness report, life history, novella-testimonio, nonfiction novel, or

'factographic literature' (13).

In as much as testimonial narrative is literature, Beverley contends it is not fiction, where we are meant to experience both the speaker and the situation and events recounted as real. Beverley, citing Raymond Williams points out that historically, testimonio-like forms have existed at the margins of literature, and in turn have represented those who have been excluded from authorized representation and self-representation—the child, the native, the woman, the insane, the criminal, and the proletarian ("The Margin at the Centre" 13). 7

Understandably then the representation of these categories of people through testimony­ like forms brings the narrative into the fold of what Harlow has called "resistance literature."

Thus testimonial narrative coalesces a specific form of literary narrative with the marginalized peoples, which in turn forces a revaluation of pedagogical/classroom activities that have sought to distinguish the literary from the non-literary. Beverley is worth quoting at length because of his insights providing a link between the so-called sub-genre of testimonial narrative and issues of rights violations worldwide. He writes: 177

The situation of narration in testimonio has to involve an urgency to communicate, a

problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival, and so

on, implicated in the act of narration itself. The position of the reader of testimonio is

akin to that of a jury member in a courtroom. Unlike the novel, testimonio promises by

definition to be primarily concerned with sincerity rather than literariness. (13)

Thus in aiding resistance, the testimonio-like narratives both enhance and advance the interactive sphere between the reader/audience and the author/speaker. In the case of Roy, her succumbing to feelings and passion along with believing in the rigor of the intellect produce that testimonio- like narrative which addresses issues of injustice. In an interview with Terrence McNally, Roy argues that her studying architecture, writing fiction or even nonfiction are means of expressing her politics differently without essentially compromising the political way of looking at the world ("Finding Justice with Arundhati Roy" 1). Purposefully, Roy blends her emotions—anger, frustration, excitement, and humor—with facts in her lectures and writings to create alternative as well as realistic narratives.

Testimony-like narratives represent an affirmation of the individual subject, but always in connection with a group or class situation marked by marginalization, oppression, resistance, and struggle (Beverley, "The Margin at the Centre" 23). Such narratives, because of the form of their interactive narration give voice in literature to a previously voiceless set of people, but in such a way that the writer-intellectual is dependent on the people without at the same time losing his or her identity as an intellectual. Roy repeatedly affirms that her style and her language are neither something superficial nor a calculated or a cultivated stance to exhibit empathy with the voiceless. As if challenging Roy's motives, Dirk Wiemann suggests that "Roy's interpellation into literary stardom gets thus rendered as an ineluctable and unconditional surrender to the demands of a global cultural economy" ("Desire and Domestic Friction" 261). While he contends that

Roy's "paratextual manoeuvres" (her activism) are enabled by that highly empowered position bestowed on her by the literary circuit, by suggesting that "Roy performs within.. .the script designed for her by the culture industry," he takes a lot away from Roy and the dynamics of cultural production (262). Wiemann focuses principally on the celebrity status of Roy and on what he calls the transfer of symbolic capital from one field of production (literature) to another

('politics,' of the grassroots variety). He treats the two fields of cultural production as distinct and exclusive to each other—the traffic between them, according to him guaranteed by their

'separatedness.' The question he poses "How palatable is it to transform a vote of thanks, given on the occasion of an international literary award, into a call for solidarity with the armed resistance in US-occupied Iraq?" exudes a denial of Roy's activism essentially because he treats her activism as something essentially originating from and owing to her status as a celebrity writer (262, my emphasis). While there may be some credence in the fact that Roy's readership has gained ground after the Booker award, to suggest that she is transforming a vote of thanks into a call for solidarity raises several questions. Roy has responded to the issue of celebrity- hood by invoking first principles: "I'm a writer first and a celebrity next. I'm a writer who happens to have become, for the moment, a celebrity. As a matter of principle, I never do anything because I'm a celebrity." ("Scimitars in the Sun" 17). In fact the prize gave her a platform from where she could voice her concerns but to argue that her activism originated after the prize is to miss the point entirely. She speaks to Tim Adams in an interview: 179

The prize was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this

thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class—they

needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time,

and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my

country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a

weapon, some kind of ammunition. ("What's Exciting" 1)

This conception of writing as a weapon, though not entirely new, is expanded by Roy to comprise various marginalized genres like the interview, the speech, and the public lecture as well. When Roy writes that ways of reporting and polemic she indulges in have become a compulsion for her she implicitly suggests that even though she would rather spend her time writing fiction, events happening around her compel her to write nonfiction.

Additionally, many critics tend to forget that prior to the publication of her novel Roy had written essays defending the status of women and their representation by film directors and scriptwriters. On the other hand, while Edward Said too faced many criticisms for his activism, some originating from his own colleagues for what they termed as "his overdetermination of politics at the expense of theory" (Spanos, The Legacy of Edward Said, x) he was rarely ever accused of bringing his status to bear on issues. The activism of Roy and Said, while it reformulates and re-conceives the notion of resistance, bears testimony to the crucial link between art and social justice. While Said is more circumspect about the link when he writes,

"Always I try to strike a balance between my literary and cultural stuff on the one hand and my political work on the other," Roy is less vigilant on the distinction separating the two ("Wild

Orchids and Trotsky" 175). She fuses the two to argue that for her politics and literature are never mutually exclusive. Even though Roy is lauded as an activist and a campaigner for justice, she adamantly views and even labels herself as a writer who takes sides. On the occasion of accepting the Sydney Peace Prize, Roy ruminates: "I must accept it as a literary prize that honors a writer for her writing, because contrary to the many virtues that are falsely attributed to me,

I'm not an activist, nor the leader of any mass movement, and I'm certainly not the 'voice of the voiceless.'" ("Peace?..." 1). While Roy discredits representation to an extent she essentially views her role as presenting alternatives in the manner of a Saidian humanist to counter the dehumanizing forces of globalization, neoliberal values, economic greed, and imperial ambition.

However, as much as resistance for Said is about understanding, reinterpreting, and grappling with products of language in history, for Roy, resistance is fundamentally an act which can originate linguistically but locates itself primarily in oppositional politics.

Through her emphasis on the essays, the lectures, and the speeches, Roy is actively searching to create as well as to reclaim the space for genuine civil disobedience to target the vicious nexus between corporations and national governments worldwide. In her speech, "Peace is War" Roy urges writer-intellectuals to instigate a process of directly addressing a people, by constant questioning, permanent provocation, and continuing public conversation between citizens and the State. For Roy such acts, mediated by the writer-intellectuals, alter the nature of conversations and dissent which promises to be different from the conversation between political parties. Most of the public speeches delivered by Roy invariably end either with memorable phrases such as "Bring on the spanners" (An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire 39), "Seize the time" ("Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy" 68), "Chomsky Zindabad" ("The Loneliness of Noam

Chomsky") or they end with an exhortation to people to wake up and act—"For these reasons we must consider ourselves at war" ("Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?" 94), "Go to Bhopal. Just ask for Tin Shed" ("Ahimsa"), and "As a writer, as a human being, I salute you. Lai Johar" ("In 181

Memory of Shankar Guha Niyogi" 82). While there is no doubt about the efficacy of such narrative strategies in favor of creating and building public opinion, Roy's persistent deployment of these devices in her speeches, lectures, and interviews makes them an invaluable part of any resistance movement.

As much as she grounds her belief in political writing, Roy also discredits the notion that writers need to be ambiguous about everything they write. In a related manner when E San Juan

Jr. comments, "In this life-and-death agon for millions, the literary conceits of undecidability and indeterminacy offer neither catharsis nor denouement, only mock-heroic distractions," his remarks, instead of being read as debilitating to literary activity, can be understood as advocating both a medium and mechanism of removing any mystifications and obfuscations to literary activity {Beyond Postcolonial Theory 262). In fact, Said associates the valorization of undecidability and indeterminacy within texts with Derrida's dictum, "A text remains, moreover, forever, imperceptible" (qtd. in The World, the Text and the Critic 184). To say that the text's intention and veracity are invisible essentially militates against the notion of composition adhered to by Said which argues for a certain integrity and forthrightness in the process of writing. Understandably in her lectures, interviews, and speeches, Roy employs the rhetoric of unequivocal blame—articulating the excesses committed by people, corporations, governments, and institutions—but in a manner which does not limit her to conceive alternative social relations. In other words, the rhetoric of blame is not a limiting factor which leads her to a politics of hostility; rather it enables her to identify the perpetrators of those excesses in addition to providing alternative visions of peaceful coexistence.

Crucially for her, literary nonfiction by construing acts of civil disobedience facilitates in mounting as well in aiding resistance. After her first visit to the Narmada valley in 1999, Roy came back convinced that the underprivileged in the valley needed a writer to support the resistance movement there. She became convinced that this support had to come in the form of case by case counter-arguments, constant questioning, and creating a space for public discussion and imparting information. Significantly, her use of the genres of lecture and speech exists not only as rhetorical devices to present alternatives but they also enable her to instigate people to an insurrectionary way of being. For instance, in her speech, "Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?" delivered at the World Social Forum in Bombay on January 14, 2004, Roy deflates the myth of the benevolent and egalitarian aspects of corporate globalization. She systematically questions the inequity institutionalized by corporate globalization under the garb of development. Her allusion to turkey pardoning is a powerful image of new racism where a few carefully bred elites

o are given absolution and the rest of the millions are killed. The millions left unattended and unaccounted for become her major concern which she voices with astute wit and gravity.

Rightly so, Padmaja Challakere in "More to the Point, Less Composed" remarks that

"Roy is a charismatic speaker, who mixes seriousness and wit with powerful effect" (114).

Challakere's emphasis on the persona and even the charisma of the speaker highlights the vocation of the intellectual, which Roy appropriately metaphorizes as a "dance on the table from time to time" (Roy, "Dissent Has to Be Localized" 196). Roy labels the intellectual activity as a dance which also suggests notions of spectacle and the public aspect of such acts. In Saidian context, this "dance" needs to be performed because it signifies the public aspect of both the intellectual and the writer. The link between the word intellectuals and their public role is not an organic one which forces Said to write that: "In the French-speaking domains the word intellectuel unfailingly carries with it some residue of the public realm in which recently deceased figures like Sartre, Foucault, and Aron debated and put forward their views for very large audiences indeed" (HDC 122). For Roy, the bond between the artists and their medium of expression is one of sensible cooperation. In these terms, it can be suggested that the interview for Roy becomes a democratic and public genre of "thinking aloud" which the writer-intellectual deploys to represent the underprivileged (Checkbook 98). She proposes that writers need to constantly deploy a language that "must become more accessible, reach more people"

(Checkbook 147).

Such a move has wide implications for literary studies which traditionally have accorded a subservient role to genre studies—claiming for it the status of a mere interpretive tool or considering it as a classificatory device. To claim, as Bawarshi does, that genres constitute the identities of those who write them and those who are represented within them amounts to nothing short of being considered heretical ("The Genre Function" 336). Bawarshi terms this

"genre function" where he argues that writers are as much constituted by their genres as much as they consciously deploy certain genres. Bawarshi proposes that genres constitute the writers' mode of existence and even their functioning within a society. Thus applied to Roy, Bawarshi's genre function would maintain that the way Roy conceptualizes and experiences her situations and weighs her responses to those situations constitutes her writing and identity as well. Such a view dismisses the notion that genres only have a rhetorical function and are only to be understood as tools of communication.

The genres of the lecture, the speech, and the interview herald themselves as interactive genres of literature that allow writers to "speak the truth to power," be a witness to persecution and suffering, and most importantly to supply dissenting voices in conflict with authority (Said,

HDC 111). Even though Said does not eulogize or single out any particular genres vis-a-vis his notion of resistance, one can surmise that his view of literature would subscribe to a destabilizing 184 of the genre hierarchy and its continuing prevalence. In Culture and Imperialism, Said not only advocates an acceptance of testimonials, slave narratives, women's literature and prison literature but also an active cognition of the "experience of crossing boundaries and charting new territories in defiance of the classic canonic enclosures" (384). He argues for defying the hierarchy of the canon through an advocacy for expansion of what can be considered literary and in turn canonical. Instead of singling out any specific genres of resistance, Said advocates a more inclusive approach than Roy's. His criticism of both upholding and keeping the literary canon sacrosanct is part of his larger censure against what he calls is "the powerful cult of professional expertise" {Culture and Imperialism 389). Roy's nonfiction narratives not only become a site of resistance, aiding representation, they also seek to engage the oppressed in presenting more opportunities for their freedoms. In this sense, one can argue that her nonfiction prose goes beyond the conventional sense of representation to listen to the other; something which historically has been faulted in previous accounts of representation in Said's works. Such representation, while focusing on communication and dialogue with the subjects of representation manages to reinstate Saidian humanistic values which the intellectual as expert had obliterated.

Notes:

1. It is instructive to compare the viewpoints of Sen and Roy. While Roy's project of dissent

can be cast as antiglobalization, Sen's concern for social justice does not make him

hostile to the process of globalization. 2. Reading Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Spivak makes the crucial point that speaking for

women does not always entail speaking for the marginalized or the silenced. In "Three

Women," Spivak argues that the feminist ideal of Jane Eyre is preserved through a

demonization of Bertha Mason.

3. For more on this also see, Slemon, "Unsettling."

4. Binayak Sen is a paediatrician and national Vice-President of the People's Union for

Civil Liberties. He is currently on bail on controversial charges laid by the state of

Chhattisgarh. Sen is noted for extending health care to the poorest people, monitoring the

health and nutrition status of the people of Chhattisgarh, and as an activist defending the

human rights of tribal and other poor people.

5. Even Barbara Harlow's Resistance Literature, fails to move out of this cognitive

approach. While Harlow acknowledges novel, poetry, prison diaries, and personal

memoirs as constituting the genre of resistance literature she succumbs to the same

canonical pressure when she fails to conceive of and analyze any other genres of

resistance literature beyond the ones mentioned above. Thus Roy's insistence on

nonfiction prose to foreground issues of resistance reinvigorates the status of these

marginalized art forms.

6. Both Roy and Said have been featured speakers at numerous universities, forums, rallies,

and meetings across the globe.

7. For more on this see, Raymond Williams, "The Writer: Commitment and Alignment."

8. The allegory of turkey pardoning: where the president of the US spares one turkey only

to commit the rest of the fifty million to slaughter. Similarly, Roy argues that local elites 186 of various countries are given absolution at the expense of millions of others who lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have no water or electricity, and die of AIDS. Conclusion

Roy's nonfictional writings re-center the concerns of the marginalized individual and

evoke aspects of Saidian humanism; Roy's nonfiction prose also reclaims the status of literature

for the art forms, of the modern journalistic essay, the interview, and the public lecture. Saidian

humanism holds special relevance for Roy's works not only because of its focus on the other,

how he makes it a "useable praxis for intellectuals and academics," and how he equates it with

the notion of "participatory citizenship" but also in its proclamation of the universals of "justice

and equality" (HDC 28, 6, 22, 10). For Said and Roy, the power of "human will and agency"

leads to resistance and transformative practices, integral to the writer-intellectual.

Roy's narratives reveal a space for creating opportunities of responsibility and freedom

for the marginalized that she seeks to represent in her works. This has resulted in an

understanding of representation where the writer is seen as speaking with rather than speaking for or about the marginalized. Roy's notions have found favor with Said's critique of Orientalist

representation which had essentially resulted in representation being construed as "containment

and control," Orientalist reality being considered "antihuman," and as "propagation of negative

stereotypes of the Orient" {Orientalism 60, 44, 45).

A study of Roy's act of recentering the individual through her essays in the first chapter

has revealed her literary representation of agency, or the subject's ability to choose and act with

the thoroughly marginalized individuals. For Roy, while these marginalized, "non-citizens" need

to be represented, she reworks the conception of representation which favors the marginalized

taking responsibility for their actions aided by the efforts and writings of writer-intellectuals.

Such a position invokes the writings of Sen, notably, Development as Freedom, where the idea

of development of the marginalized is inextricably tied to their freedoms. Roy also appears to 188 agree with Said's view that "the purpose of the intellectual's activity is to advance human freedom and knowledge" {Representations of the Intellectual 17). However, Said defines that such "human freedom and knowledge" need not necessarily synchronize with a Eurocentric vision of the world (HDC 26). In ascribing to human will and agency the power to alter the lives of the marginalized, Roy's writings affirm her faith in the category of human intention. Because

Saidian humanism is seen as an "individual-centered humanism" with its deep belief in the power of the individual to think new things and make intellectual history ("Edward Said's Battle for Humanism" 126) it holds special relevance for Roy's works which delve in similar acts.

Anis Bawarshi in "The Genre Function" raises an important issue when he argues that not only the choice of subject matter but the identities of authors are also shaped by their choice of specific genres. If genres are understood to shape and influence writers' identities then the choice of nonfiction by Roy effectively dictates the choice of subject matter of representation as well.

However, when Roy chooses to write nonfiction she effectively reworks the genre hierarchy and relative marginalization of nonfiction prose prevalent in most curricula of literary studies, to forcefully argue for its inclusion.

Roy's essays, "Power Politics," "The Greater Common Good," "Listening to

Grasshoppers-Genocide, Denial and Celebration," "Peace?...," "The Road to Harsud," "The End of Imagination" "Darkness Passed...," "The Great Indian Rape-Trick I," "The Great Indian

Rape-Trick II," "Democracy," and "Summer Games with Nuclear Bombs," while they deal with the theme of recentering the individual, make clear that the individual is understood as part of the collective. Saidian humanism, even as it begins in a realization of the dignity of the individual particular, extends such dignity to all individuals. Therefore, the individual is not understood without the collective or the category of the universal, which implies the universal applicability of ideas of justice, freedom, and equality. Benedict Anderson's treatment of the concept of universalism occurs through his drawing a distinction between what he terms as bound and unbound serialises. Anderson's "logic of seriality" examined vis-a-vis Roy's works revealed that

Roy favors unbound serialities over bound ones because the former afford the prospect for individuals to imagine themselves as members of a larger solidarity than a constricted identity rooted in race, class, ethnicity, or religion. Bound serialities, because they have their origins in such institutions as the census and elections, lay the basis for much of ethnic identity and strife.

Anderson writes that "the census itself became the object of a more visible politicization" (43) by which he understands that the census has led to an enumeration of those fractured identities.

Such enumeration becomes the breeding ground for all kinds of ethnic politics. Roy's and Said's universalism abides by unbound seriality which does not believe in the "finite numerology" of census taking and its consequent discriminatory practices (Anderson, The Spectre of

Comparisons 42). Because her writing repeatedly contests the creation of such fractured identities it has led to the charge of unoriginality against her by critics such as Ramachandra

Guha and David Jefferess.

Jefferess in "The Limits of Dissent" raises questions over Roy's art which he argues is constructed primarily out of restatements and her essays are drawn from the work of others and not the product of any new research (163). Clearly, Jefferess and Roy differ over the question of purpose of art which for Roy consists primarily in its transformative powers over and above its creative aspect. Somewhat differently though Said would uphold Roy's art which relies on reiteration but aims at transformation of people's lives. He advocates a contamination of genres in a scenario where prose fiction, poetry, and drama have dominated literary studies. Roy's interviews and lectures, namely The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile,

"Peace?...," "I Wish I had the Guts to Shut Up," "The Ladies Have Feelings, So" "Dissent Has to be Localized," and "Scimitars in the Sun" deal with representation for the writer-intellectual, individual responsibility, and freedom. Said critiques Orientalist representation of the natives on the ground that it tended to exclude the other from their own representation and was therefore antihumanistic. Pitted against Said's critique of Orientalist representation, Roy's representation of the other tends to create situations for the marginalized other to work towards their own freedom through assuming responsibility for their actions. Thus, Roy's notion of representation as "thinking together with people," in opposition to representation for or about the marginalized not only critiques the Orientalist notion of representation but also goes beyond the conventional understanding of the word. Said too advocates "a representational system that was participatory and collaborative, noncoercive," ("In the Shadow of the West" 43) as part of his efforts to make systems of representation less repressive.

Both Said and Roy constantly underline the need to deprofessionalize intellectual activity, which they argue has been taken over by experts—Orientalists and literary critics for

Said, and professionals of all kinds for Roy. Since professionalism tries to colonize knowledge amateurism breaks this hegemony and deprofessionalizes intellectual activity. Roy characterizes amateurism through "empathy" as opposed to professionalism which she typifies through

"concern" ("Scimitars in the Sun" 7). I have argued that the relationship between the amateur intellectual and their subject matters is quite akin to how Paulo Freire views the relationship between teacher and learner—"a permanent relationship of dialogue with the oppressed," and which unites reflection and action, inciting the learning of democracy through collective and

"reflective participation" {Pedagogy of the Oppressed 68, 65). As a result the amateur 191 intellectual brings the contours of everyday life—issues of oppression, marginalization, justice, equality and so on—back into the realm of pedagogy and writing.

Finally, I argue that Said's "reconciliation" and Roy's "listening to grasshoppers" are terms that while they outline a similarity of concerns for the other also prefigure a nuanced understanding of resistance. Having compared the two modes of resistance to Gandhi's nonviolent resistance, where the comparison was necessitated by the fact that both modes of resistance owe much to Gandhi, I found that Roy's and Said's resistance does not rely on the goodwill of the enemy. In doing so, Roy not only reclaims the importance of nonfiction prose but also re-conceptualizes what constitutes postcolonial studies.

The relevance of Roy's nonfiction writings for postcolonial studies can best be gauged by examining what postcolonialism means today. Postcolonialism is neither a single set of ideas, nor is it defined as a homogenous practice which can be loosely applied to a set of existing values. Instead, productive overlaps between ideas of resistance and postcolonial studies have opened up a plethora of avenues not only in literary studies, but in international relations, political science, and women's studies to name just a few.

This dissertation agrees with an understanding of postcolonialism popularized by Robert

J.C. Young in his Oxford Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Young points out that postcolonialism names a politics and philosophy of activism that contests subordination and economic inequality even as it asserts the right of African, Asian, and Latin American peoples to access resources and material well-being (4). Partha Chatterjee quoted in Dirk Wiemann's "A

Modernity That is Not One: Situating Indian Writing in English," echoes a somewhat similar concern: 192

The postcolonial Indian nation-state, in its constitutional self-description as embodiment of

the modern state that formally grants equality and freedom to all citizens irrespective of

biological or cultural differences finds its own limits precisely in the figure of the citizen,

given that vast sections of the Indian population have remained economically, socially, and

culturally and, for all practical purposes, politically disenfranchised. (29)

Thus, the majority of the disenfranchised subjects have to contest and engage with the state for their entitlements and rights in what Partha Chatterjee calls "political society": essentially conceived as a zone of resistance emanating from subaltern politics designed to affirm equality and welfare as natural rights. However, on the question and engagement of the conditions of possibility of subaltern resistance, Gayatri Spivak's work, Critique of Postcolonial Reason is particularly illustrative. In spite of her initial acknowledgement of the location of agency in the

"creative performance of a given script" and through discursive displacements (her poststructuralist stance), Spivak locates "the real front against globalization [...] in the countless local theatres of the globe-girdling movements" (413). In other words, any alternative vision to the present state of affairs would require not just a facile side swipe at academic and cognitive mapping but also a performative practice in order to be considered interventionist (Wiemann, "A

Modernity That is Not One" 39-40). Wiemann believes that in order to achieve performativity, the subaltern movements have to relate to the global dominant by way of demanding insertion. In effect, what Spivak and Wiemann propose vis-a-vis resistance and its actuality is already a vital aspect of Roy's strategy of resistance which she avers consists not only in demanding insertion but over and above in staging resistance. Also central to staging resistance are the energies of the writer-intellectual in writing and speaking against neo-imperial forces. 193

Additionally, Young argues that postcolonialism also continues in new and diverse ways the anti-colonial struggles of the past. Thus countering this Western dominance of resources and knowledges, no doubt an onerous task, the postcolonial critic, academic, and the intellectual are supposed to play a major role in shaping ideologies and societal visions in the Third World. It can be argued that its intellectual debt to poststructuralism notwithstanding, postcolonialism, or more appropriately, postcolonial theory is still attentive to issues of oppression, resistance, and agency. However, to investigate the fraught relationship between postcolonial theory and its lack of political commitment is not the subject matter of analysis here—an issue which has been dealt adequately by critics such as E. San Juan Jr., Benita Parry, Aijaz Ahmad, and Barbara Epstein among several others. Rather, this dissertation argues for the inclusion of the enabling practices of resistance, as discussed in the last chapter, to be considered as integral to any pedagogic postcolonial activity. As discussed in the third chapter, Roy's reconceptualization of resistance, while it seeks to empower the dispossessed and the marginalized, still has some interventionary role for the writer-intellectual in the same process. The thesis has attempted to analyze as well as prove that the individual forms the backbone of humanism and when Roy re-centers the concerns of the individual through her use of nonfiction prose her act has lasting consequences in re- conceiving literary genres and pedagogical activity. Her visualization of the concept of resistance, deriving essentially from her belief in an amalgamation of the actions of the masses and the intellectual, meaningfully relates genre preference in literary activity to resistance movements occurring in the real world. Thus it can perhaps be advanced that such a conception of the individual, humanism, genre study, and resistance would have enduring significance for the field of postcolonial studies. Roy's re-centering of the individual challenges that conception of postcolonialism, which influenced by poststructuralism, rejects the notion that individual consciousness and reason are the most important determinants in shaping history. Instead, her

faith in social transformation through individual efforts reaffirms her belief in postcolonial

studies that is egalitarian. The significance of such a move for postcolonial studies lies in

acknowledging the Saidian impulse that literature and especially the use of nonfiction prose is politically enabling.

Deployed artistically by Roy, the genre of nonfiction prose is the genre of "thinking

together" where the writer-intellectual can generate modes of conversation. Roy's nonfiction

writings when they evoke and redefine strategies of resistance, critically engage with postcolonial studies. Despite the so-called 'discursive turn' in postcolonial studies, Roy upholds

the logic of binary and oppositional narrative of conflict. Instead of "spectacular resistance," a

term popularized by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, Roy proposes what she calls "real political resistance" {Public Power in the Age of Empire 46). The dissertation does not propose that "spectacular resistance" as conceived by Bhabha fails to disrupt colonial power or even fails

to constitute a form of resistance; rather it privileges Roy's oppositional and confrontational

approach to resistance. Thus it can be argued that through her nonfictional writings, Roy inflects

our understanding of postcolonial resistance. Resistance, for Roy, is not only conceived as

opposition but as material transformation emanating from individual consciousness and actively

validating and upholding mass resistance movements across the globe. Such transformative power of native agency in postcolonial studies may be encountered in what E. San Juan Jr. calls

"the radically democratic aspirations of people of color in both metropolis and periphery" which he argues is "in essence a struggle for liberation , a process of self-empowerment" {Beyond

Postcolonial Theory 269). Additionally, while Said locates resistance as primarily emanating through the activities of the writer-intellectuals, Roy gives equal importance to the insurgent practices of writer- intellectuals and mass resistance movements. For instance, Roy's own close affiliation with the

Adivasis in Jadugoda protesting uranium mining of their lands and her association with numerous movements such as the Koel Karo Sangathan resisting a mega-dam project in

Jharkhand; the Chaattisgarh Mukti Morcha; the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan; the Beej

Bachao Andolan in Tehri-Garhwal fighting to save the biodiversity of seeds; and of course, the

Narmada Bachao Andolan expands on the role of one's involvement as a writer-intellectual.

Constantly reconceiving and reorienting one's mode of civil disobedience to spawn resistance movements constitutes the cornerstone of literary activity for Roy. In addition to presenting alternative narratives through one's writings, interviews, and public speeches, Roy's writer- intellectuals bridge the gap between such activity and grassroots movements across the globe. As a result the prognosis for literary activity is that genres once relegated to the margins make a comeback. Neil Lazarus' "The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism," though argued from the perspective of a critique of certain prevailing interpretive protocols within the field of postcolonialism, also raises some similar issues of diversifying the canon to move beyond the usual rubric of judging postcoloniality. He argues that only a limited numbers of writers are widely thought of as postcolonial because they are labeled according to keywords such as migrancy, liminality, hybridity, and multiculturality (773). Even though Lazarus addresses the need for writers and critics to move away from subscribing to the above rubric and expand their writings into other areas, he fails to mention the idea of such writers experimenting with alternative or little known genres. In other words, though Lazarus challenges the theoretical assumptions that have so far structured postcolonial studies, he fails to point out that 196 consecration within the field of postcolonial studies is also upheld by subscribing to the rubric of postcolonial writing as operating through the novel, drama, or poetry.

Most significantly, the writings of Roy and Said converge on what the latter terms as

"alternative narratives" by which he understands the lecture platform, the public rally, the interview, and any other medium that affords the opportunity to initiate any wider discussions.

What Roy terms as a "new kind of art" is the ability to tell stories of dispossession and depravation in ways that "draw out the incorporeal adversary and make it real" ("The Ladies

Have Feelings, So" 215). Additionally, information as a component of knowledge gains credence through the use of alternative genres. The deployment of such alternative genres dispels the myth of non-interference of literary works into worldly issues in addition to opening the genres to an array of more possibilities in the future. New genres and their usage will constantly shift the parameters of what constitutes and defines literary studies today.

On the other hand, Roy's works must not be understood as providing a definitive solution to issues of injustice and inequality, but her focus on the marginalized individual and a simultaneous belief in collective agency and solidarity enables a literary politics that relies as much upon representational practices as it does on the power of the dissenting public. Thus a

Saidian humanist intellectual, in defending the universals of justice, listens to the truly powerless and gives forum to the myriad marginalized voices. Radhakrishnan rightly points out that Said speaks of humanism from a subaltern provenance and thus makes it truly democratic. Not surprisingly, in the wake of pressing concerns of corporate globalization, neoliberalism, and neoimperialism, Saidian humanism as a critical practice with its emphasis on universal justice provides an indispensable framework to contest oppression and marginalization. The rapid pace at which structures of corporate globalization are revealing their imperialist intent, it forces us to think anew of a need to go beyond a conventional understanding of postcolonial studies. Roy's use of alternative genres or modes of conversation to tell her stories initiates a process of reclaiming the status of these genres. Even as it expands the project of postcolonial studies,

Roy's work in thinking through Said's theories keeps alive the original importance of postcolonial studies as a complement to other kinds of engaged intellectual as well as political work. While Hardt and Negri see postcolonial studies in a state of crisis and nearing its end, I have essentially maintained that the project of postcolonialism needs to be more fully articulated, particularly in relation to defining its opposition to neo-colonial imperatives clearly. Such a move needs to be aided by postcolonialism being attendant to alternative genres and asking a question. What does postcolonial work in the academy hope to achieve and what methods or genres are appropriate to the task enumerated above? Diana Brydon in "Is There a Politics of

Postcoloniality?" is more to the point when she writes, "Although the ultimate orientation of a postcolonial politics is toward negotiating political change in the organizations of governance, power, and wealth in the world, the more immediate task is creating the kinds of knowledge base and the kinds of subjects who can work together creatively toward achieving such goals" (8).

The task of a Saidian intellectual who is also a universal humanist is realizable in creating such solidarities and collectivities or to help transform peoples' lives.

Notes:

1. "Spectacular resistance" as used by Bhabha is primarily to be conceived as a form of

subversion, founded on that uncertainty that turns the discursive conditions of

dominance into the grounds of intervention (172). Bhabha constructs resistance 198 through hybridity and ambivalence. For him discursive subversion, occurring through questioning of colonial authority essentially constitutes resistance. 199

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