Molly Ivins October 6

AUSTIN — I had heard of it, this essay by a female writer from India. If you read a lot, if you follow current affairs, if you have progressive politics, you would find mention of it here and there. The woman who won the Booker Prize last year, they said, has risked becoming a pariah in her own country by opposing India's nuclear tests.

Of course, you have to be a fairly serious reader even to know that the Booker Prize is the most prestigious literary award in Britain — sort of like the Pulitzer Plus, maybe just a shade short of the Nobel for literature. "The English Patient" won the Booker a few years back, and some others you have heard of over the years, but it's a big deal only in England.

This woman with the difficult first name, Arundhati Roy, won for a novel called "The God of Small Things." Even in the United States, where our awareness of even the finest foreign writers is so vague, so overwhelmed by the latest John Grisham or Danielle Steele, "The God of Small Things" was a mild success — nowhere close to a new Dick Francis, but still, by our standards for foreign writers, it got quite a bit of attention.

When India exploded its nuclear bomb this summer, and I saw on television all the people dancing in the streets, rejoicing, victorious and feeling their testosterone, I thought sadly, "Whatever happened to the nation created by Gandhi?"

And then it got worse, Pakistan followed India, more dancing, rejoicing and chest-thumping — all over having nuclear weapons, as though no one had ever learned a thing. I followed the news reports bitterly — India has The Bomb, Pakistan has The Bomb, and the fools are happy about it.

All I thought I had learned about what is uniquely valuable about India was wiped out by the images of the dancing, grinning idiots on television celebrating (!) their nukes. But what do I know anyway? I'm just some minor regional journalist from Texas, for pity's sake, where testosterone-crazed jerks are a way of life.

I went to India once, I who have traveled so little. I thought India was special beyond all telling — so bright, so vivid, so impossibly complicated.

It was such a lesson in democracy. You think this country is variegated? Try a place with hundreds of religions, languages, races, cultures — even people living in different centuries.

I understand it's a cliche now, but I swear to you I actually saw a businessman in a Mercedes, talking on a mobile phone, speed past a farmer using an ox to drag a wooden plow. And it was all so wonderfully noisy, as democracy always is — noisy with the cheerful clang of people disagreeing with one another in the happy certainty that absolutely anyone might win the argument.

For someone from Texas, New Mexico or Louisiana — anyplace where people like their food, their politics and their language spicy — India is more of a homecoming than, say, Minnesota. (Oh! The food is fabulous. Except when they serve you what they think white people like, which is some hideous Brit glop. Eat native or die.)

Poor? Oh, yes. But by the time I hit the huge cities in the South, I was already in love with the place. Even sidling tactfully around people living and dying on the streets in Bombay is different only in degree, not in kind, from the streets of New York or Philly in the '80s.

On the occasion of India's 50th anniversary as a nation, several magazines ran retrospectives. I was proud that I had read almost all of those acclaimed as the "great writers" of India. (Listen, I haven't even read all the great writers of Mexico.) So I thought it was a place I knew, sort of; that I understood, sort of; and then came the nuclear tests and Indians reacting as though they were France winning the World Cup, and I understood nothing.

The colonialism had been nothing? Mohandas K. Gandhi had been nothing? The different way of understanding power was nothing?

And then came this essay, this magnificent act of moral courage, of defiance, this great howl of protest in the teeth of a nation drunk on some cheap testosterone high. Do you remember what it was like to be against the Persian Gulf War, when yellow ribbons were the order of the day and official patriotism was blared from every media orifice and to express any doubt was to be against Our Boys? Imagine that multiplied by a hundred, even a thousand times, and you will understand what one woman, Arundhati Roy, dared to do in India.

I am an incurable marker of what I read, underlining the most memorable phrases, checking the most important sentences. There is no paragraph of her long essay I left unmarked; almost every sentence is to be cherished, revered, cogitated upon. Find this. Read it. It is brilliant. It is devastating. It is heart-breaking.

I found it in the Sept. 28 issue of The Nation (33 Irving Place, New York, N.Y. 10003). They have a web site: www.TheNation.com. It is probably around the web in other places, from either Britain or India.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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