This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Books that help with election anxiety’
Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
2024 is a huge year for voting. It’s actually the biggest in history. At least 64 countries are holding nationwide elections. This includes the US, the UK, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico. Basically, people are voting everywhere. And all in all, these elections will affect 4bn people. My colleague Nilanjana Roy lives in India, which also recently had a massive election. It was a pretty anxiety-ridden one as many are these days. So Nila found herself looking for some perspective. She turned to her bookshelf to read stories of voting from literature. Nila writes a column about books for FT Weekend, and she’s a novelist herself, and she’s with us today from her home in New Delhi to share what she came away with. Nila, hi. Welcome back to the show.
Nilanjana Roy
Such a pleasure, even in the middle of what seems to be an endless year of elections.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I know, totally. It’s really so wonderful to host you again. So, Nila, you recently wrote a column on this topic, and you described the Indian election contest as a marathon. Can I ask why, in the depths of this marathon, you decided to turn to fiction about elections?
Nilanjana Roy
(Laughter) That’s a good question. And I think it had a lot to do with election-related anxiety, which is happening to a lot of us in countries that are on the edge of democracy and autocracy, and one way, my go-to in any situation like this is always books. And instead of looking at a non-fiction shelf, I went back to an old classic by a Hindi novelist called Shrilal Shukla, who wrote something called Raag Darbari years ago, and it has a vivid description of village elections. And then I said, oh, I remember that Vikram Seth also had a storyline in A Suitable Boy about elections. And the more I read, somehow, you know, the calmer you become because you realise that the stresses, the tensions, the excitement, that feverish pitch that everyone gets to is not a modern thing. It’s been going on for decades.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. It really reminded me, your piece, that voting is a ritual, and we’ve done it time and time again. So it’s not, yeah, it’s not like we’re starting from scratch here. How did it go, all the reading?
Nilanjana Roy
(Laughter) One of the beautiful things about reading, and this was unexpected, is that you start off reading, I think, instinctively about your own country or the country that you’re most nervous about, you know, whether that’s the UK or the US or India or any of the other places that are going to the polls this year. And for me, after a while, my reading became a little more global. And then you start to feel part of this wider community of voters who, by and large, don’t have much in the way of political power. You know, I’m a writer. I’m not a politician. I’m not a television anchor who gets to scream their opinions at people every night. But you have this little thing called the vote, and it’s amazing the kind of fate that we repose in that.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask you about India. India’s election is over now. I mean, famously, it’s the largest election in the world. It takes place over seven weeks. Narendra Modi won this time again. This is his third term. But, yeah, tell me a little bit about the campaign season. Do people get excited about it? What was it like?
Nilanjana Roy
It’s somewhere between a festival. Typically at my vote booth, which is in the middle class colony in Delhi, everyone gets dressed up and comes out, you know, and or, you know, they go out to a restaurant. It has a celebratory festive feel in it. This time it was what’s called a “Thanda” election. Thanda means cold in Hindi. And right from the start, a lot of the media, which tends to be tilted in favour of the ruling party, started to grumble that there was no massive wave in favour of the prime minister, which is what we’d seen in 2014 and 2019. But the other reason that it seemed a little colder right at the start is just because I think people were not willing to share their opinions. And the public’s reaction to being in a more autocratic or more authoritarian environment in many countries, not just India, I think is to quiet them down and to keep, you know, hold their own counsel. But as the campaign season revved up, there was an unexpected fightback from the opposition. And even though Prime Minister Modi won as expected, on a third term, the democratic part of it came through in the fact that the voters didn’t hand him a direct mandate. What the voters have given him is not quite a nod of approval, so much as a measured “you will have to abide by democratic checks and balances, and you will have to work with other parties”.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Thank you for the context on the way that Modi has won again. As I understand him, he’s known for his conservative politics, sometimes nationalist politics, and he seems to be tapping into the pride that Indians have in their ancient cultures and their traditions. But I want to be honest and say I’m not familiar enough with Indian culture or politics to understand it much more than that. I’ve never been to India, and so I wanted to ask if there’s a novel or two that you can recommend that sort of humanises some of this background, that would open up the news about Indian politics for us.
Nilanjana Roy
Absolutely. What I love about books is that at their best, they have a kind of depth that you don’t always get from TV soundbite. And the first book that I’d like to recommend, of course, has been around for a while, and it’s non-fiction. Christophe Jaffrelot’s Modi’s India, which is about the rise of Hindu nationalism and the rise of ethnic democracy in India.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Great. That’s Modi’s India. We’ll put all the book titles that we mention in the show notes.
Nilanjana Roy
Two of the novels that capture India in his time beautifully. One is by, a debut novel by Devika Rege, who’s an academic. It’s called Quarterlife.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Quarterlife by Devika Rege.
Nilanjana Roy
And it’s set just a few months after the 2014 election that brought Modi to power. And it follows a newly wealthy family called the Agashes. I love novels like this, you know, just the fact that it’s not just wealth, but it’s new wealth and they’re settling into a Mumbai that’s changing rapidly, you know, around these politics. They’re brimming with optimism, which was the dawn of the first Modi era. And even those whom you might consider religious fanatics, Devika Rege treats them with the same respect that she treats her other characters. I like the fact that she doesn’t diminish anybody on account of their politics.
And another book that’s a favourite is Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice, which isn’t directly about Modi per se, but it’s about this time, you know, which she calls “Kali Yuga”, the losing age, the age of vice. And it’s just brilliant on the moral and political corruption of the wealthiest in India, which is remaking the country according to their preferred blueprints. Again, you know, she doesn’t try it with a moralising voice. She just, you know, dives right into the parties and the swimming pools and the guns and all of that culture. So they’re wonderful introductions to what, you know, this engineering of this transformation is all about.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lilah Raptopoulos
I wanted to ask you also about a few other notable countries with elections coming up, a little place called the United Kingdom, a little place called the United States. The UK’s elections are next week. And it’s possible that the outcomes politically will end up pretty different. We don’t know, but it also seems pretty clear that in both places there’s real dissatisfaction with how things are now. So I guess I’m wondering if there are any books that really dig into this sense that, that something has to change, that you could recommend.
Nilanjana Roy
There were two books in particular, both of them non-fiction again, that I found myself going back to. One offers a slightly pessimistic scenario. It’s by one of the FT columnists who really is a favourite writer for his astute understanding of global politics — Gideon Rachman. You know, The Age of the Strongman. He’s very clever in the way that he captures this longing for a certain authoritarian politics, this desire for politicians to become kinglike figures.
But on the brighter side, I was so pleasantly surprised by a very optimistic book by Caroline Lucas, who was a former member of the European parliament and I think a member of the Green party as well. And she’s written a book called Another England. What she does is she goes back across the centuries to create the case for a history of progressive thought and politics in England across centuries. And if you’re looking for inspiration, one of the places where she finds it is in the love of the land itself. You know, this constant reminder that it’s not just the country. The country is made up of something very real, you know, from the cliffs of Cornwall to the forests of Epping or whatever it is, you know.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Beautiful land too.
Nilanjana Roy
Yes. And, you know, that reminder that you are, as a citizen, also attached to the land, attached to the environment, that you can turn to that and learn how to nurture it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[ADVERTISEMENT PLAYING]
Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so Nila, where does this leave us? You know, this feels like a really uncertain and really anxious time for a lot of people. I can only speak for my country, but I’m seeing people feeling both somehow distressed and uninspired by our options at the same time. It feels cold here. You mentioned cold. It feels cold here, too, in that way. Maybe I should ask you where you find hope. It doesn’t feel quite right, but . . .
Nilanjana Roy
I just wanted to say that, you know, this whole question of offering hope . . . There’s so many of us. And in India, despite Mr. Modi’s popularity, you know, we’ve watched with some alarm as he’s pushed aside institutions like parliament and as so many have been jailed. Just last week, we heard that Arundhati Roy, who’s one of our most famous writers, might be at risk of trial under a draconian law. I think that situation is mirrored in multiple countries in different ways. You know, we’re all fearing a great deal in the way of the future. But what reading reminded me, and I was going back to books written in the 1970s and the ‘80s, is a little bit of a truism. But every single decade, every single, you know, every two decades or so, the world seems to head for absolute chaos or absolute disaster. Storm clouds are hovering everywhere. There’s a new crisis, a new threat. And I don’t have, you know, that much confidence in shining optimism. But I have a great faith that somewhere through the turmoil, every now and then we find a better way of doing things. You know, we always, we try to vote for change.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. OK, so maybe what we’re trying to look for is perspective. Are there books that you would recommend that could give us some perspective and maybe like ways to look beyond ourselves? How are you thinking about it?
Nilanjana Roy
I think it’s that we still place faith in something in all of us. You know, elections are about an elemental fairness, even when the result goes against us, even when you find we’re dismayed that the citizens of your country are voting for a politics that is unfair to immigrants or that, you know, is vengeful towards people of particular faiths. And I’m speaking in universal terms because I think those are the choices that people feel. And there’s a novel by Malka Older. She’s written a book called Infomocracy. It’s not so much a novel as it is a wonderful collection of ideas about what the future of elections might be. It was written in 2016, and she speculates about this future where countries exist only in name and humanity votes in blocks of 100,000 voters across territories. And instead of the political party as we know it, you know, the election system has kind of evolved towards corporate coalitions. And one of the key things that she points to is we keep looking at participation, right? And she keeps asking about information control. And if she’s sending out a warning, it’s if the stream of information is polluted from the source. And if you feel that you can’t trust anybody to give you the right information about what’s happening in your country, then what happens to the right of elections?
But at the moment, with every election, there’s the hope that there might be not just change. You’re hoping that somehow there will be an evolution. At some point, you will start to look at parts of the system that don’t work. In the US, for example, after all these years, is a two-party system enough? Might they want to start moving towards a multi-party system? The answers to that question aren’t going to emerge if people are happy with the two-party system. It’s going to emerge after a series of elections where people are frustrated.
Lilah Raptopoulos
So this feeling that we’re having and this dissatisfaction actually is useful.
Nilanjana Roy
Like I said, you know, I distrust shiny optimism. It’s so often followed by epic failure. But what I put a lot of faith in is frustration with the process can lead you somewhere that happiness with the process might not. It can lead you in the direction of deep structural changes that you actually need. And can I share just, you know, one little thing from a poem that I love very much.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, please.
Nilanjana Roy
This is Ada Limón’s 2023 poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa”, and she ends with these lines. She says: “We, too, are made of wonders, of great / and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, / of a need to call out through the dark.”
And I stopped at that last line and I said, that’s it. Maybe in elections, no matter where we are. And yes, this is a landmark year for the world. We are not very sure, you know, what shape democracies, nations, countries will be in at the end of this process. But so many millions of voters around the world calling out through the dark.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Nila, this was so thought-provoking, in some ways reassuring and really broadening. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Nilanjana Roy
Thank you so much and such a pleasure to have a chat with you.
Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s such a pleasure for me, too.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’ve linked in Nilanjana’s piece in the show notes, as well as places you can find her books. Every link that brings you to the FT gets you past the paywall. Also in the show notes are ways to stay in touch with me, on email and on Instagram.
I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is our talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Prakriti Panwar is our intern and helped produce this episode. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful week and we’ll find each other again on Friday.
