Oppressive ruling classes in every part of the world have always exerted their hegemony over narrative. In such a context how can – and indeed, how should – writers make the novel suitable for the world we inhabit?
Text by Meena Kandasamy
As someone who came to writing novels after years of publishing books of political translation and feminist performance poetry, I quickly realised that disciplined novels, the singular point-of-view, the conventional protagonist, were not for me.
My 2014 book, The Gypsy Goddess, is about a 1968 massacre in Tamil Nadu, India, when 44 landless Dalit agricultural labourers were killed for striking for higher wages and its writing was as charged as the story itself. There was no need to keep up the pretence of an imaginary world found only within the book’s universe; the fourth wall had to be smashed to smithereens. The protagonist here could not be any one person because the sort of middle-class individualism so essential to the form of the novel in general was anathema to this story. The protagonist was a collective: the village of Kilvenmani. To tell the story from only one perspective would have been to do an injustice to the multilayered, multidimensional narrative, so each chapter, each with a different point of view, was vested with its own register. Language was power, language was violence, language was a nuanced culprit, betraying the particular interests that each class was trying to protect.
Oppressive ruling classes in every part of the world have always exerted their hegemony over narrative. The accounts that came out in response to the Kilvenmani atrocity were fictionalisations. Powerful caste and feudal structures were shaping the narrative in another way, not fictionalising what happened as writers do, but making fictitious what was the truth. The policemen started this falsehood production by taking witness statements callously. The judiciary in Kilvenmani blatantly embraced the peddled falsehood that the landlords were not involved in the massacre. They wrote long judgements saying that car-owning landlords were gentlemen who wouldn’t soil their hands with blood. The judiciary refused to see the truth. The police and judiciary invented lies in order to exonerate the landlords. Who writes (better) fiction then? Novelists who invent names and character and reimagine scenes or a state machinery that lies through its teeth in the hope of preserving the caste-feudal structure?
In my second novel When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, I again had to restart my quest to modify and make the form of the novel suitable to the world we inhabit. This was a work of auto-fiction, I was bleeding on the page, borrowing from my own trauma, and at the same time, I was aware that my writing was not about self-sympathy or sentimentalism. It was a work of art. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Domestic violence and marital rape in India are horrors that a vast majority of women suffer. Women experience it or witness it at close quarters– yet as a society we believe in the fiction that it does not happen at all. That’s perhaps why when I wrote about it I called it auto-fiction: society’s conscience does not allow it to digest the fiction label, even if it was OK to deny the reality of domestic violence. For a victim to be anything other than a victim, for her to be a writer of stories, for her even to cast her story in the framework of fiction, that was outrageous.
For all of the art and thought, the craft and politics that went into it, it was misclassified as memoir, repeatedly. Indian women. “Third-world” writers. People of colour. Some of us are always seen as incapable of writing anything except our own lives. This is the problem of the white gaze. Yet the white literary establishment is not the only oppressive system I have to encounter as a writer. I made this work in India under the eyes of a casteist, patriarchal society where women who leave marriages are disparaged, speaking against violence is a shameless act, the law refuses to recognise marital rape, and judges take turns in slut-shaming and victim-blaming. To write this kind of work – whatever it’s called: fiction, auto-fiction, novel, autobiographical novel – was to go and stand naked at the centre of a stone-throwing crowd. I have never felt more vulnerable as a writer; I have never felt more brazen, powerful and radiant.
Being constantly misread, misattributed and having others dictate and decide the genre into which my work was to be slotted, I felt both sadness and rage. For my third novel, Exquisite Cadavers, I cleaved the page into two: margins holding the everyday world and its struggle; the main text holding the fictional world I was forging right in front of the reader’s eyes. I had started the experiment trying to keep the margins far away from each other, not allowing any seepage, not allowing my life to influence what I was writing. It was, all the enthusiastic critical reception aside, a very fulfilling experiment. I was witness, writer and curator; I could see (and show) how the things happening around me started permeating the fictional bubble universe I was creating for Maya, an Englishwoman, and Karim, her Tunisian lover.
In my novel, in the margins that happened in real-time, I wrote about the Bhima Koregaon conspiracy case in which one of my friends, Rona Wilson, was arrested in 2018. As part of the state’s investigation into this violence during Dalit protests, several other extremely prominent intellectuals and Dalit activists were also rounded up and were charged with plotting to assassinate the Indian prime minister. The government’s aim was to create a spectacle, to divert people’s attention by arresting the people challenging it. The task of imagination, in its most bizarre and evil incarnation, had now been taken up by the state machinery under Narendra Modi, a nationalist right-wing Hindu inspired by both Mussolini and Hitler. You can read Walter Benjamin or Guy Debord – choose your philosopher to interpret this – fascism is doing what it has always done.
The police were not probing a crime, they were probing a conspiracy. The only aim was to incarcerate voices of dissent. Three years later, evidence from Arsenal Consulting, an independent digital-forensics firm, revealed that the incriminating documents – the justification for these arrests – had been planted remotely on the accused’s laptops using malware. The state, the ruling BJP party, all the corporate-sponsored media were screaming about a terrorist plot. Who was killed? Not the prime minister, all hale and hearty and growing a glistening white beard. Instead, it was Father Stan Swamy, an 84-year old Jesuit priest, who worked for India’s indigenous tribals, arrested as part of this case a year earlier, who died in custody in early July 2021. He had never been questioned. The state never provided any evidence against him. He pleaded for bail; it was denied. This was the aim of the fictional narrative being spun: to silence the most vocal critics of the regime, to punish them with death, even. When we spin a story, we only inflict pain and suffering upon our characters. When the oppressive state spins a story, we are the characters upon whom pain and suffering are inflicted.
The oppressor always attempts to seize the narrative of victimhood. In pretending to be the victim, and in seizing that space for themselves, oppressors make sure that the real victims have no space for articulation. This narrative of victimisation by the oppressor is cleverly deployed in political discourse: firstly, to gain ideological legitimacy (we are assertive only because we face threats); secondly, to silence critics and deflect away from real and urgent issues; thirdly, to help recruit people to the cause; and finally, to inflict violence with impunity. The aim of the save-the-holy-cow campaign is to lynch Muslims. The aim of save-the Hindu-women-from-love-jihad campaign is to lynch Muslims. The aim of save-tribals-from-being-converted campaign is to lynch Christians. The most common myth of all is the one that cries about affirmative action and how it is preventing upper-caste students from accessing higher education, the one that ensures that universities and educational institutions remain Brahminical citadels, where the small number of Dalit students are left isolated, alienated, and sometimes pushed to commit suicide.
This narrative is carried by new media that, after helping to catapult the Hindu extremist-fascists of the BJP to power, now sustain their continuing hate crimes. An anonymous algorithm-based study found that 18,000 Twitter accounts were engaged solely in spreading misinformation on behalf of the party. Journalist Swati Chaturvedi’s 2016 book I Am a Troll investigated the secret world of that troll army. Numbering in their hundreds of thousands, the paid and volunteer trolls spread false propaganda and hound their political opponents and critics. I’ve personally been threatened with acid attacks, televised gang rape, and murder. Every time the ruling party, its ideology, or the caste system is criticised by someone, millions of bot accounts and shell accounts descend on the person’s profile and mass report in an effort to get the account suspended. To erase an ideological enemy from social media is the non-violent mode of targeted assassinations. This is organised criminal activity, except that no one has been punished for it. While Twitter trolling helps with forming opinions and image perception, communication services like WhatsApp are used to appeal to the older generation and to disseminate fake news with incredible speed (vaccine hesitancy is directly attributable to the lies peddled in these forwards). Lynchings and mob violence have been triggered by WhatsApp videos, especially those with rumours of child abduction, organ theft and cattle smuggling. The online space has been completely invaded by the BJP and its paramilitary partner, the RSS: their shared budget for Facebook and Google ads is more than five times that of their political rival, the Congress party. The prime minister of India claims he is one of the most followed persons on Twitter, the platform’s one-way traffic allowing him to hold his halo in place, while avoiding holding a single press conference in seven years.
Even as the right wing has weaponised the online space to disseminate hatred and to justify a horrendous capitalist-casteist-sectarian government, it also uses the legal system to go after anyone who uses online tools disruptively and to crush dissent. In February 2021, for example, 20-year-old climate-justice activist Disha Ravi, was arrested and held in custody because she had a tweeted a toolkit on how to support farmers’ protests in India. In the worst human-rights abuse, internet in the occupied Jammu and Kashmir region was shut down for 18 months.
Social media is the new battleground, and this is where I find myself posting my thoughts in a handful of sentences. Often, I do threads. I’ve more than 130,000 followers on Twitter, and it feels like an enormous audience to broadcast political ideas.
My friends drop me polite advice from time to time in their effort to remind me that I’m a writer and not a tweeter: conserve your energies; preserve the best part of you for your novels, your poetry. They will bring you awards and accolades; Twitter will just get you a thousand retweets and then nothing. People won’t even venture to read your “real” work because they feel fulfilled by the tweets. Tweets do not show you for the artist that you are.
All of that well-meaning advice may indeed be true. What is also true is that the lifecycle of publication of fiction – from the writing to the editing to the publication to the reader – is a good four to five years. Even in the most pressurised circumstances, it still is a year-long cycle. Even as we writers prune the novel into the shapes we want, we cannot afford to remain silent on social media merely because we are chasing and creating art. I concede that the novel is my favourite home, a place where I make all the rules, where I bring all my politics. Yet I believe that the writer’s task is also to take their ideas to where people are. They are on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, and that’s where we must go. It is a new playground, a new medium, but it shatters fascist propaganda faster than well-argued 10,000-word essays or 300-page novels. ◉