Azadi : freedom, fascism, fiction / Arundhati Roy.

Includes index.

In What Language Does Rain Fall Over Tormented Cities? The Weather Underground in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness -- Election Season in a Dangerous Democracy -- Our Captured, Wounded Hearts -- A Place for Literature -- The Silence Is the Loudest Sound -- Intimations of an Ending: The Rise and Rise of the Hindu Nation -- The Graveyard Talks Back: -- Fiction in the Time of Fake News -- There Is Fire in the Ducts, the System Is Failing -- The Pandemic Is a Portal

"The chant of "Azadi!"-Urdu for "Freedom!"-is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it has also become the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu nationalism. Just as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for freedom-a chasm or a bridge?-the streets fell silent. Not only in India but all over the world. The coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of azadi, making nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could. In a series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. She writes of the existential threat posed to Indian democracy by an emboldened Hindu nationalism, of the internet shutdown and information siege in Kashmir-the most densely militarized zone in the world-and of India's new citizenship laws that discriminate against Muslims and marginalized communities, which could create a crisis of statelessness on a scale previously unknown. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world"--