Q. Not everyone writes, nor can everyone write. Tell us what inspired you to pick up a pen and start writing, along with a brief introduction of yourself. 

A. I think it has something to do with pencils, colored pencils, and a white sheet of paper, and the wonder of seeing a word form. Then the word does strange things – It connects to your thoughts. The word critiques your imagination. The word was almost a tangible being. It was like the plasticine I was given as a young person to mold. I began to write what I felt as I used to draw when I was a child. I began to see words and pictures as complements or a critique of each other. I continue to write to see my thoughts in black and white, to look at them critically, a habit that continues.

It was a very important part of my secret world- the fashioning of words and trying to make sense of what I felt. I have read since I was four. I loved the mysterious world within the covers of a book, so accessible and intimate, which I could walk into. My imagination took me all over the world, to different periods in time, walk away from my immediate surroundings at will.

My adult life has been a search for an opportunity to work to reduce privilege and look for solutions to inequality and injustice. I was selected for, worked, and resigned from the IAS, the Indian civil service ( 1968 -1975). Before the civil service, I had taught English literature in a college and after it, I had joined an NGO. Later, we set up the MKSS and engaged with people’s political involvement in asking for their rights outside the party framework. In India, we call ourselves non-party socio-political activists working to access democratic and constitutional rights.

Q. As one correctly said, every writer has their own reasons for writing—whom they write for and why. How has the feedback from your readership been regarding the book under discussion?

A. I was called to speak a great deal and listeners seemed to be engaged with what and how I conveyed my ideas. I realized that the written word has a large area of impact. It goes beyond the known, it is a challenge and an opportunity. When I was asked to write a book, I agreed. 

I am a transparency activist, but I always knew that there is another world, one that is never completely defined by the work we do. Politics has been the main paradigm of my absorption, interest, and concern. My personality was influenced partly by my privileged background; I read world literature, though in English. I was guided by my erudite and sensitive parents with wide-ranging interests. I continued to read as much as I could into my adult life. Sitting in the mud cottage, I listened to programs from the BBC on Shakespeare and contemporary writers. My interest in classical music and dance forms took me to read about great dancers and the social history of the performing arts. But the personal was strictly under wraps in my activist world.

Public action demanded that I learn to communicate through the spoken word to people with differing lexicons. Speaking to my friends in rural Rajasthan in India required a different vocabulary and access to varied idioms and language. There was also the compelling demand that I share the areas of grey seldom exposed, emotions and thoughts, or the patterns we weave out of lived memories, especially with the younger generation, to both inform and shape their way ahead. As a social activist and as a person concerned with the human condition, living with people and trying to deal with tragedy, pain, injustice, and inequality, I live through many layers of existence. In contemporary India and the world, we have narrowed down democratic political choices to its most marrow by constricting the freedom of expression and parochialism. Increasingly, the world of consumption and greed has brought in a persuasive, if superficial, language of jingles, a flat, two-dimensional worldview. I felt I must share the plurality, the language, and ideas of the many who live in the shadows of aggressive mainstream consumer jargon. Even politics has become a commodity, with investment and profit sharing as the end. Human well-being has been pushed to the horizon. 

The 60s slogan has always been an important part of my adult life, the personal is political. When I was asked to write, I thought that this slogan brought my various parts together, and the publishers accepted this as the title.

I am really happy that the book has reached the young and the socially concerned. It has started many conversations, and the quality of communication is ‘awesome’, to use a contemporary phrase. It has also broken the myth of non-communication between generations. This has re-established my faith that communication is always possible where there is honesty and a desire to listen and communicate.

Q. Our readers would be interested in learning more about your work. Could you elaborate on the story behind this book?

A. My life has been seeking resolutions for economic and social inequality, to somehow make the lives of people at the margins better. It has also meant sharing privileges. This is not merely an intellectual activity. One must live with the underprivileged and see the world as they do. Only then can policies and plans be effective. The attempt was to see how participatory democracy could be designed and work for them. 

I have lived in rural Rajasthan for 50 years; much of it in the middle of the village in a mud hut, with the workers as a socio-political activist fighting for their basic rights – to food, work, shelter, and health. The MKSS (Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan), the poor farmers and workers organization we set up in 1990, was the inspiration and continuing structure for getting major legal entitlements for people through the enactment of national rights-based laws – the Right to Information and a seminal part of the right to work law, the MGNREGA, and later the Right to Food, Education, Forest rights and so on. The success of the campaigns in seeing through these legislations – from a mud hut, the village council, and then to the parliament, has been an exceptional journey, one that  I have been privileged to be a part of. 

The Right to Information campaign, an important democratic campaign fought by people at the grassroots, was threatened by co-optation by the elite. It was a campaign fought with the ideas, struggles, and language of the people. The RTI Story- Power to the People was published with a view to acknowledging and celebrating the contribution of the people at the margins to shape a just and equal law and to correct the imbalance in the understanding of power. Information is power, as we see in its manipulation and denial by despotic governments.

The MKSS continues to work with people, continuing the battle to access rights. Every tool that is invented has been co-opted by the managers of power, leaving the underprivileged to fight another level of manipulation – technology. Technology seemed a solution,n but has become a means of control and denial of rights. Information is now collated and used by governments and corporations through technology to increase their power. The people’s Right to Information sought accountability of authority and power through the act of questioning. The struggle continues for keeping democracy’s promise of working for the people alive.   

Q. The writing process is unique to each writer. After all, it is dynamic. What is your writing process?

A. When a thought comes, I write it down, mostly in prose, and sometimes in verse. These jottings are very important for recall and later, for stimulating thought. Mine, unfortunately, are scattered over a wide range of writing materials, notebooks, diaries, on the computer, asides, my lecture notes and speeches, and articles that I have continued to write. As an activist who travels all the time, keeping these in order is a huge challenge. The culling together of these is a nightmare. But despite all these challenges, I continue to put the words down to see where they take me.

As a student of literature, Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own ‘ made a profound impression on me. I have had to battle for space and assert that logic does not have to be delivered only through the Aristotelian syllogism. It comes in many ways. Women’s language and logic are different and as truthful to the outward reality as a man’s language. It also reflects the inner turmoil of a thinking mind when it faces emotions and ethics, choices which are often very difficult. That is why ‘The Personal is Political’ got going, a book in which I resisted outside monitoring and inner inhibitions to try and break free of the patriarchal control over language. 

This was not odd because my initial years in academia, and later my professional life, even when I worked with women’s issues, were peopled and dominated by a man’s definition of language, power, and the world. It was indisputably a world in which the standards were patriarchal. I learned to cherish but edit my thoughts, to keep the kernel and principles intact, but the language of expression often had to be stereotypical to communicate.

When you are fighting for livelihood and life, the language and idioms acceptable are those used by power structures and governments. The wage, food, shelter, and medicines for the poor and vulnerable did not allow the freedom to quibble about the language and our expression. All this while, I felt unhappy about the restriction on language. It was functional but it lost the flavor of a woman’s thought, and the emphasis on the processes and ethics, which is drawn by a feminine mind.

My village friends and colleagues spoke a vivid, natural language, with no fragmentation, no polarity between thought and emotion, and without worry about correctness. There was no separation of the personal and the political. This inspiration for the book came in part from them.

Q. Three decades ago, one could sit and read fiction without much concern for facts. Today, readers are obsessed with accuracy due to their information-driven mindsets, often making it difficult for them to fully enjoy a piece of fiction. In your opinion, how has this overwhelming access to information impacted readers’ literary appreciation?

A. Language is a very powerful tool. Religion and politics have been understood and used to exercise power and control through the centuries. When I read ’Language and Silence’, by George Steiner, it made me realize how words can be used to provoke. The politics of words came as a powerful explanation for the success of demagogues.

The flood of information could be and is a problem. Especially when it takes the shape of propaganda which quotes the scripture of comfort to exploit people’s naiveté for strengthening prejudice and private profit and gain. Power has understood the relevance of language and its misuse. The battle for truth and the struggle against inequality and misuse of democracy must contend with a gigantic structure. On the other hand, the popular imagination is stoked by absurdities and the consumerist dream. Perhaps one has to understand why the language of common conversation is unable to capture the world of fact with the logic of truth.

Q. What are your thoughts on the de-digitalization of books and its impact on readers, literature, and overall human well-being, which literature ultimately aims to enhance?

A. I think digitization is a fait accompli. One has to restrict its role. It plays an important part in elderly readership, for people who need large-sized fonts and easy access to books. You can in fact, carry a large library in a pen drive or in a Kindle. 

But the feel of a book, holding it in one’s hands, the subtle fragrance in a book room, is evocative and real. The mechanical device falls short in many ways. The fact that you are surrounded literally by the minds of people of many centuries, with words that have changed the world, is an awe-inspiring happening. The books, however, need to be in black print, larger fonts, and reasonably priced… a tall order indeed. 

There is also the fact that digitization has overcome the physical distance people have to travel to access a book. In many ways, comfort controls our actions. How much of it are we willing to forego for the sake of a printed book? As I write this on a laptop, I stop to wonder whether I  would exchange it for an old-fashioned portable typewriter, and the huge Remington, which dominated my earlier years?

The technology debate, of which this question is a part, needs to be seen politically and financially as well. It needs a book on its own. I leave you with the political intent of control and manipulation on the one side, and convenience on the other. A paradox that most of us do not seem to resolve easily.

Q. Would you mind giving us a hint about your future work? 

A. The Personal is Political, the book recently published by Harper, offered as carte blanche, gave me space to write as I wished. I could write to let a thought define its own logic and sequence.  The title was the only tethering that the active mind had to respect. 

A collection of articles recollecting two important seminars, one in Montreal and the other in Trivandrum, organized as a part of my teaching assignment in McGill is due to be published by Orient Black Swan in 2 volumes, edited with Suchi Pande, called ‘Unpacking participatory Democracy’ – from theory to practice and practice to theory. I am now co-authoring a book with Nikhil Dey and Rakshita Swami, on Accountability, called ‘Promises to Keep’, for Penguin.  

Q. Any parting words?

A. The printing press and the computer are gifts of technology for expanding our minds, digging deep into the issues across time and space, looking at varied choices and wonder,  and discovering how big and small the mind world actually is. It gives us a sense of continuity and being a part of the great chain of being, as part of humanity. We step into a world where choice is not determined by the discriminatory divisions we have drawn and continue to draw in life. It spells freedom to express thoughts, to cherish, read, re-read, and enjoy. Writing follows reading. Write we must, especially as women. We must remember that we have an obligation to communicate with values and principles, as stories and fiction, as non-fiction, as thoughts to this acquisitive, war-crazy world. The Personal is Political is an attempt to see how to articulate our areas of grey.  We need to sort out our own dilemmas and face our vulnerabilities before we can say that ‘another world is possible’. 

Publications:

The Personal is Political 

The RTI Story: Power to the People

We the People: Establishing Rights and Deepening Democracy (Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, and Rakshita Swamy) 

By Dhanuka Dickwella