Acceptance speech on receiving the HERMANN KESTEN PRIZE 2022, Darmstadt, 15 Nov
Good evening!
I thank PEN-Center Germany for conferring me with the Hermann Kesten Prize for 2022. I also thank the Hessian Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts for its sponsorship of the prize.
When Cornelia Zetzsche from PEN-Germany called me, I was energised at the opportunity for amplification of struggles back home. I felt grateful that such an award was personal protection. At the same time, I understood I was left intensely exposed. When news of the prize became public, right-wing troll armies on Twitter called this a Western imperialist conspiracy. Trolls are trolls—they wanted the German Ambassador to be immediately expelled, they wanted Putin to turn off the gas pipelines in the winter. Their desperation, I like to believe, brought some comic relief to the Honourable Ambassador, and to the German people.
I come here, however, carrying sad clouds.
Last month, the Supreme Court rushed to deny 90% disabled poet G N Saibaba the bail he had won in a lower court. Prof. Saibaba was charged with being a member of the Maoist insurgency. The court opined that "direct involvement is not necessary" to prove the charges. "The brain is more dangerous," it said. Maoist organisations, or more commonly Naxalites are banned in India—however the charge of being a Maoist/Naxalite is used indiscriminately to silence dissidents. Days ago, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke out in support of India’s dreaded anti-terror law UAPA calling for the police to face “every form of naxalism, be it the one with guns or the one with pens.” Accusing leftist forces of “misleading the youth of the country”, he said they get “international help” and that “they speak the language of law and Constitution.” In this flowchart of authoritarianism, when one pledges allegiance to the law, and to the Constitution it is a suspect activity.
When one makes noise on international platforms, it is conspiracy and treason. Poets and journalists and intellectuals are being locked up on the smallest pretext because writers in this fascist framework are meant to be put down with the same force as guerrillas.
When the oppressive Hindutva regime feels so rattled by the power of those deploying their words as weapons, I am filled with enormous pride in being a radical writer from India. We are battling not only censorship under neoliberalism, but the ideological hegemony of a centuries-old system of social organisation, the caste order, which regiments every aspect of our life. It is the belief in the racial superiority of one set of people; the enslavement and ruthless exploitation of the labouring castes; the brutal subjugation of women’s sexuality to uphold the bloodlines of a caste-pure family as a building block of society; the blurring of distinction between religion and state; the terror and relentless violence unleashed for the smallest transgression; the self-identification as historical victims to legitimise and lay the ground for the extermination of others. I say with all the courage I can summon: India’s caste system is the great-great grandfather and spiritual guru of fascism. Our independence, our Constitution offered a rupture, but we are being dragged back to the old order. In India today, power is in the tyrannous hands of those who openly acknowledge being inspired by Mussolini and Hitler, and who are eager to apply this extreme ideology on a deeply unequal, misogynist, and violence-ridden caste society. What awaits India is a catastrophe.
Thinking of what to say on this stage, I initially resisted the urge of slipping into the realm of the sentimental. Fighting fascism is a political duty. Yet, I remember the precise moment when Hindutva terror started feeling personal. Yes, the Babri Masjid demolition 1992. Yes, the Gujarat pogrom 2002, where about a 1000 people were killed, most of them Muslim, being attacked by Hindu mobs.. Five years ago, it hit close to the bone. I was at my parents’ home, watching television, loosely translating for my Francophone-Belgian partner why Tamil students were out on the streets protesting the educational policy of the Indian federal government. I kept pausing to read the Tamil letters scrolling on the ticker—and it said, Gauri Lankesh shot dead in front of her house. I was on the floor, crying, knocking myself against the walls, wailing. Dramatic as it might seem, this was how grief landed on me. Gauri Lankesh was a left-wing journalist and editor of an eponymous weekly newspaper, unsparing in her criticism of the Modi regime. She had written to me that summer, saying that she felt I was like a daughter to her, inviting me home. I would never see her alive.
In March 2020, when I was visiting New Delhi to write about the riots, days before India’s borders closed—I called up Anand Teltumbde, scholar, civil rights activist and author, who had written extensively about the dangers of Hindutva and neoliberalism capturing power. I read in the papers that his bail application had been rejected by the nation’s highest court. I offered my help, to volunteer and run errands if required. “They’ve thrown the Constitution in jail,” he said. I have known him for 20 years, from the time I wrote to him as a seventeen-year-old asking for an article for The Dalit, a little magazine I was editing. One of India’s foremost leftist intellectuals, his words helped us make sense of the world we inhabited. This conversation was different. “I have two daughters, you are my third, I’ve always considered you one,” he said. “Take care of my girls, talk to them.” What was a political task had become a personal obligation. At seventy-two, Anand is one of India’s oldest political prisoners. He is being held without trial in the Bhima Koregaon conspiracy case, on terror charges, along with 14 other prisoners, many of them prominent writers and activists who have served four years in jail.
I convinced myself to proudly own up to this theme of being a daughter because I was reading Ingeborg Bachmann, I wanted to quote her tonight, to echo what she said, “if we had the word, if we had language, we would not need the weapons.” I wanted to tell you that like her I am writing and fighting an intimate enemy. Let me quote something I wrote in my last book.
“My father had belonged to the same ultra-right Hindu organization to which the Indian Prime Minister belongs, to which the assassin of Gandhi belonged. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). My father, like Narendra Modi, had also been a full-timer. A pracharak as they called it, meaning a propagandist.
He had been arrested during the Emergency. He left the organization a few years after marrying my mother. I grew up in a strange setting – a fundamentalist right-wing father who was also deeply Tamil nationalist.
Obviously, these could not co-exist: my father’s love for Tamil in a culture and society that wanted one language (Hindi), one religion (Hindu) and one nation (Hindustan) in a plural and diverse country with many cultures and languages.
There was another thing that could not co-exist: my father’s low-caste nomadic-tribe parentage in an organization that was Brahminical, top-down. They were committed to upholding what they call the Sanatana Dharma, that nothing ever can change, that your birth determines your station in life, that the caste order was what held society in place. All of these contradictions came to the fore and he had quit.
He had been recruited into their fold not because he was attracted by any ideology. He was recruited because this was the only community that was offered to someone like him, from the margins, landless, dirt-poor, the first of his family to finish school, to finish college, to go to live in the big city.
They took away all my best years, he tells me now. I worked so hard for them.
They are ruining this country, he says, and it will become something beyond recognition in thirty years’ time. You must write all you can against them, tell the people about their real nature, he says.
Don’t be afraid.
Do you want me to be killed? I joke.
Life is worthless if it does not hold meaning, he replies, and adds, as if to console me: At least your death will have meaning.”
As one of India’s daughters, this is what keeps me going forward. Indians who speak the language of the law and the Constitution, Indians who get international support—we are being seen as suspect. Yet, I want the people of Germany, and the wider European nations, whose people’s history includes a valiant resistance to fascist ideologies and a commitment to democracy to lend their voices in support of India’s political prisoners. I accept this award in the name of Anand Teltumbde, Varavara Rao, GN Saibaba and every radical writer, journalist or public intellectual in India who have been unjustly incarcerated by this tyrannical regime.
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