Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction.

Azadi is a collection of essays and speeches delivered recently by Arundhati Roy. All with the recurring theme of the rising Hindu Nationalism in India : where it came from, where it is now and where it is going. And more importantly, the puzzling duality of the cry for freedom (Azadi) which remains deafening and dampened at the same time.

This is not a renewed political stance of Arundhati Roy, or a novel analysis of India’s socio-economic landscape. The book also does not provide you with new information than what you already possess unless you have been living under a rock (or call yourself “apolitical” and have instead been living under the ass of privilege).

What she does, and does brilliantly, is an intellectual anatomisation of the same, but from a practical perspective. The intellectual space in the current Indian politics is riddled with superficial debates of the ideologies of Marx, Machiavelli, Smith and the like, or with ancient Indian philosophies, both of which are incredibly reductionist when it comes to the intricacies of the Indian socio-political scenario as it exists today. This space, for the most part, fails to take into account the perspective and lives of the common Indian. More importantly, that of the marginalised classes. And that is exactly what Arundhati Roy has been able to navigate, as she always does, with much profoundness.

The problem with our smartphone wielding generation is that we have, for the most part, a historically short attention span. And when we have a government that commits one atrocity after the other in quick successions, it can get easy sometimes to forget these events and dilute our convictions. This book is a very quick and poignant summary from a ground level perspective, a micro-analysis if you will, of most of the injustices meted out and massacres carried out.

I must forewarn that the very nature of this book being a compilation of speeches makes it repetitive. Which I do not altogether mind, for reading anything written by Arundhati Roy is a literary delight.