Azadi

(by Arundhati Roy)

The 9 chapters in this book are a mix of essays and lectures, and some of them can be repetitive: some lectures cover the same ground and discuss the same facts, sometimes using the same phrases. I thought chapters 6 and 7 (“Intimations of an Ending” and “The Graveyard Talks Back”) were the strongest pieces, and I almost would have preferred a much shorter book containing just those. Throughout, Roy writes about a) current affairs in India (circa 2018-2020, when these pieces were written) and b) her own writing—and particularly how her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness uses fiction to say things about current affairs in India. As she notes in the introduction, “a novel gives a writer the freedom to be as complicated as she wants,” and as she says near the end of “The Graveyard Talks Back,” fiction can be a place “that can accommodate and keep alive our intricacy, our complexity, and our density against the onslaught of the terrifying, sweeping simplifications of fascism.”

(I did also like the first chapter, which is a lecture about language and literature and translation that Roy gave at the British Library in 2018, and which contains interesting stuff about India’s complicated linguistic history/landscape.)