Arundhati Roy’s clarity is impossible to deny. I have disagreed — and at times still disagree — with some of her ideas, especially her positions on Kerala politics. My sense has been that some of those views were shaped under the influence of certain Islamic fundamentalist groups here. Another disagreement, years ago, came from my emotional reaction when she criticized Gandhi. At that time, I felt Gandhi stood above such criticisms.
But now my understanding is that, on these religious matters, Gandhi and the neo-Nazis were separated only by the thinnest of lines. In other words, emotionalism is never a healthy thing in politics or in literature. The demolition of the mosque, for example, was taken up by Muslim politics as a purely emotional issue (instead of a political one), and that became its undoing — a fact later confirmed by the course of national politics itself. That is how extremist groups eventually captured the entire discourse. (Even today, a religious organization that smuggles drugs and gold is propping up one of Kerala’s political fronts — and that power is rooted in emotion.)
Extending this further, Malayalam poetry too was destroyed by cultivating this same cheap emotionalism. It is a continuation of this that led untalented poets into writing mere political and environmental slogans, only to be ridiculed. The completely apolitical and the utterly ignorant, driven only by emotion, not only block criticism but also nurture an anti-intellectual climate.
When I read Roy’s memoirs, what astonishes me is her unwavering intellectual clarity. I have even begun to feel that I ought to have been thinking from her angle long ago. That kind of clarity is very difficult to articulate. One has to work extremely hard oneself to reach it. In the past, I used to lace my criticisms with irony — because I thought a touch of humor was an effective way to “put the point across” on Facebook. But today, when Sujeesh makes similar points — with some intelligence, and without emotionalism — I see how unsettled many people become. Many bastions begin to shake. Which only proves: intelligence cannot be silenced.
Imagination itself is intelligence. Clarity in thinking is intelligence. None of this is born of emotionalism. Today, when I read Marx, or when I read Proust, I do not feel boredom. When I read Liu Cixin’s brilliant Death’s End, I see his imagination as nothing less than his intelligence itself. This ability — to focus on the matter at hand, and to say only what needs to be said — belongs to people of intellect. The critics who call his characters “cardboard” keep silent about this fact. But in a hard science fiction novel, the three fables he inserts are where the destiny of humanity truly lies — what more does one need? That, to me, is the achievement of intellectuality.
It stands for truth. Emotionalism, on the other hand, serves deception. If that recognition comes to me through Roy, or through Sujeesh, I am with them.