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Authors: Arundhati Roy
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term for civil disobedience. The term is now commonly applied to any movement that confronts its foe—typically, the State—nonviolently.
Savarna Hinduism: that part of caste Hindu society which excludes the Dalits and so-called backward castes.
shakha: an RSS branch (literally) or center. RSS shakhas are training camps or cells.
Shiv Sena: a rabid right-wing regional Hindu chauvinist party in the state of Maharashtra.
shloka: stanzas, or verse in general, that are prayers to the deities.
stupa: a Buddhist religious monument.
swadeshi: nationalist.
Pravin Togadia: former surgeon, rabble-rousing demagogue of the Hindu right wing, synonymous with inflammatory hate speech against Muslims.
Tehelka case: an exposé by the Tehelka website, in which senior Indian politicians, defense officers, and government servants were secretly filmed accepting bribes from journalists posing as arms dealers.
VHP: Vishwa Hindu Parishad, literally the World Hindu Council, self-appointed leaders of the Hindu community and part of the “Sangh” family of Hindu nationalist organizations to which the BJP also belongs. The VHP was in the forefront of the move to destroy the Babri Masjid and build a Ram temple at Ayodhya.
Yatra: (literally, pilgrimage) can be translated as any journey “with purpose.”
Part I
1. The End of Imagination
First published in Outlook (India) and Frontline magazines, July 27, 1998.
For marmots and voles and everything else on earth that is threatened and terrorized by the human race
“The desert shook,” the government of India informed us (its people).
“The whole mountain turned white,” the government of Pakistan replied.
By afternoon the wind had fallen silent over Pokhran. At 3:45 p.m., the timer detonated the three devices. Around 200 to 300 meters deep in the earth, the heat generated was equivalent to a million degrees centigrade—as hot as temperatures on the sun. Instantly, rocks weighing around a thousand tons, a mini-mountain underground, vaporized . . . shock waves from the blast began to lift a mound of earth the size of a football field by several meters. One scientist on seeing it said, “I can now believe stories of Lord Krishna lifting a hill” ( India Today ).
May 1998. It’ll go down in history books, provided of course we have history books to go down in. Provided, of course, we have a future. There’s nothing new or original left to be said about nuclear weapons. There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has, over the years, already been made by other people in other parts of the world, and made passionately, eloquently, and knowledgeably.
I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. So those of you who are willing: let’s pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes, and speak our secondhand lines in this sad secondhand play. But let’s not forget that the stakes we’re playing for are huge. Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children’s children. Of everything we love. We have to reach within ourselves and find the strength to think. To fight.
Once again we are pitifully behind the times—not just scientifically and technologically (ignore the hollow claims), but more pertinently in our ability to grasp the true nature of nuclear weapons. Our Comprehension of the Horror Department is hopelessly obsolete. Here we are, all of us in India and in Pakistan, discussing the finer points of politics, and foreign policy, behaving for all the world as though our governments have just devised a newer, bigger bomb, a sort of immense hand grenade with which they will annihilate the enemy (each other) and protect us from all harm. How desperately we want to believe that. What wonderful, willing, well-behaved, gullible subjects we have turned out to be. The rest of humanity (yes, yes, I know, I know ,
Savarna Hinduism: that part of caste Hindu society which excludes the Dalits and so-called backward castes.
shakha: an RSS branch (literally) or center. RSS shakhas are training camps or cells.
Shiv Sena: a rabid right-wing regional Hindu chauvinist party in the state of Maharashtra.
shloka: stanzas, or verse in general, that are prayers to the deities.
stupa: a Buddhist religious monument.
swadeshi: nationalist.
Pravin Togadia: former surgeon, rabble-rousing demagogue of the Hindu right wing, synonymous with inflammatory hate speech against Muslims.
Tehelka case: an exposé by the Tehelka website, in which senior Indian politicians, defense officers, and government servants were secretly filmed accepting bribes from journalists posing as arms dealers.
VHP: Vishwa Hindu Parishad, literally the World Hindu Council, self-appointed leaders of the Hindu community and part of the “Sangh” family of Hindu nationalist organizations to which the BJP also belongs. The VHP was in the forefront of the move to destroy the Babri Masjid and build a Ram temple at Ayodhya.
Yatra: (literally, pilgrimage) can be translated as any journey “with purpose.”
Part I
1. The End of Imagination
First published in Outlook (India) and Frontline magazines, July 27, 1998.
For marmots and voles and everything else on earth that is threatened and terrorized by the human race
“The desert shook,” the government of India informed us (its people).
“The whole mountain turned white,” the government of Pakistan replied.
By afternoon the wind had fallen silent over Pokhran. At 3:45 p.m., the timer detonated the three devices. Around 200 to 300 meters deep in the earth, the heat generated was equivalent to a million degrees centigrade—as hot as temperatures on the sun. Instantly, rocks weighing around a thousand tons, a mini-mountain underground, vaporized . . . shock waves from the blast began to lift a mound of earth the size of a football field by several meters. One scientist on seeing it said, “I can now believe stories of Lord Krishna lifting a hill” ( India Today ).
May 1998. It’ll go down in history books, provided of course we have history books to go down in. Provided, of course, we have a future. There’s nothing new or original left to be said about nuclear weapons. There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has, over the years, already been made by other people in other parts of the world, and made passionately, eloquently, and knowledgeably.
I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. So those of you who are willing: let’s pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes, and speak our secondhand lines in this sad secondhand play. But let’s not forget that the stakes we’re playing for are huge. Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children’s children. Of everything we love. We have to reach within ourselves and find the strength to think. To fight.
Once again we are pitifully behind the times—not just scientifically and technologically (ignore the hollow claims), but more pertinently in our ability to grasp the true nature of nuclear weapons. Our Comprehension of the Horror Department is hopelessly obsolete. Here we are, all of us in India and in Pakistan, discussing the finer points of politics, and foreign policy, behaving for all the world as though our governments have just devised a newer, bigger bomb, a sort of immense hand grenade with which they will annihilate the enemy (each other) and protect us from all harm. How desperately we want to believe that. What wonderful, willing, well-behaved, gullible subjects we have turned out to be. The rest of humanity (yes, yes, I know, I know ,
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