CANR
WORK TITLE: Capitalism
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.weroy.org/arundhati.shtml
CITY: New Delhi
STATE:
COUNTRY: India
NATIONALITY: Indian
LAST VOLUME: CANR 343
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 24, 1961, in Shillong, Meghalaya, India; daughter of Rajib and Mary Roy; married Gerard da Cunha (divorced); married Pradip Krishen (a filmmaker), c. 1993.
EDUCATION:Attended School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Screenwriter, novelist, essayist, and activist. Has worked as an architect, actor, aerobics instructor, and salesperson. Participant in World Tribunal on Iraq, 2005.
AWARDS:Booker Prize, and New York Times Notable Book of the Year, both 1997, both for The God of Small Things; Grand Prize of the World Academy of Culture (Paris, France), 2002; Cultural Freedom Prize, Lannan Foundation, 2002; Sydney Peace Prize, 2004, for work in social campaigns and advocacy of nonviolence; Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s National Academy of Letters, 2006, for The Algebra of Infinite Justice (author refused award); Norman Mailer Prize, 2011, for distinguished writing; Ambedkar Sudar Award, 2015; Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, 2018, for The Ministry of Utmost Happiness; PEN Pinter Prize, 2024.
WRITINGS
Also author of television series The Banyan Tree. Contributor to anthlogies, including We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples, 2009. Author of foreword to For Reasons of State, by Noam Chomsky, New Press (New York, NY), 2003, and introduction to 13 December, a Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament, by Noam Chomsky, Penguin Books India (New Delhi, India), 2006. Contributor to periodicals, including the London Guardian.
SIDELIGHTS
Arundhati Roy created an international sensation with her debut novel, The God of Small Things, which earned her a million-dollar publishing advance. The novel garnered Roy Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize; she was the first citizen of India to win that award. Following the success of her first novel, Roy remained in the public eye due to her social activism, as well as to her outspoken criticism of globalization and the negative influence exerted by the United States on global culture. She was briefly imprisoned in India in 2002 for protesting oversized dams, and she has recounted her activities and expressed her opinions in many volumes of essays.
Roy grew up in Kerala, India, a child of Syrian Christian and Hindu parents. When her parents divorced, Roy’s mother fought for and won an inheritance, despite the bias of Indian laws favoring male heirs. The victory was perhaps more significant ethically than financially, for Roy still found it necessary to live in a slum area in order to save enough money to attend school in New Delhi. She began by studying architecture, but she eventually drifted from that and took up an acting career. This led to success as a screenwriter, which put the writer in a good position to negotiate the contract for her first book. After first appearing in 1997, The God of Small Things has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold several million copies internationally.
Roy has spoken of her unconventional, independent mother as an influence she is very thankful for. She told David Barsamian in an interview for Progressive: “I thank God that I had none of the conditioning that a normal, middle-class Indian girl would have. I had no father, no presence of this man telling us that he would look after us and beat us occasionally in exchange. I didn’t have a caste, and I didn’t have a class, and I had no religion, no traditional blinkers, no traditional lenses on my spectacles, which are very hard to shrug off.” She further commented to Barsamian: “I don’t see a great difference between The God of Small Things and my works of nonfiction. As I keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort now is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding.”
[open new]Among her efforts in advocacy and activism, Roy delivered forthright commentary about India’s tenuous claim to Kashmir in 2010 after the deaths of numerous pro-freedom demonstrators. Being an ideological thorn in the side of India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi, Roy found herself at risk of being jailed for years for that commentary in the mid-2020s under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. As cited by the BBC, Amitav Ghosh was one writer who spoke up to declare the legal harrassment of Roy “absolutely unconscionable” and worthy of an “international outcry.” Canadian author Naomi Klein hailed Roy as Modi’s “most eloquent critic,” and BBC contributor Soutik Biswas recognized her as “a leading voice for liberal values and a champion of the marginalised.” For devoting her “unflinching, unswerving” attention—as phrased in Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech—to world events and politics, Roy was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize in 2024.[suspend new]
The God of Small Things
The God of Small Things focuses on themes of history and the individual, as experienced by twin siblings. The novel’s title, according to Meenakshi Ganguly in Time magazine, refers to the deity that rules over “social propriety.” The novel tells the story of Ammu, a divorced mother of twin children. Rahel, Ammu’s daughter, eventually ends up in the United States, while her son, Estha, becomes mute, but despite their physical separation the twins retain an empathic bond. The novel also explores Ammu’s forbidden love with the carpenter Velutha who belongs to the class of untouchables, and includes relatives who have come back to visit their homeland from Great Britain. One of the visitors ends up dead, and Ammu’s affair comes to a tragic end.
Ganguly noted that The God of Small Things is “infused with endless, cinematic fast-forwards that telegraph the tragedy ahead.” The critic cautioned that “Indian readers may be put off by the incessantly brutal depiction of their country. … Buildings are in near-rot and roads are graced with squashed animals.” New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani praised the novel, hailing it as “dazzling” and “a richly layered story of familial betrayal and thwarted romantic passion.” Kakutani compared Roy to British Victorian novelist Charles Dickens and twentieth-century American novelist William Faulkner for her handling of issues pertaining to race, class, society, and character, and reported that critics in the author’s native India have compared her to South American novelist Gabriel García Márquez. The critic also asserted that “Roy does a marvelous job of conjuring the anomalous world of childhood, its sense of privilege and frustration, its fragility, innocence and unsentimental wisdom.”
The Cost of Living
Roy used her newfound fame and money to further her work as an activist, and she attracted additional attention with her essay The Greater Common Good, published in book form. In this essay she denounces the multimillion-dollar Sardar Sarovar Dam project on the Narmada River in western India. Although promoters have touted the dam as a solution to India’s power and water shortages, opponents of the project believe that it will cause widespread social and environmental chaos, as it would submerge 245 villages and displace some forty million people. In another essay, The End of Imagination, Roy decries the nuclear bomb tests conducted by India in May of 1998. Why, she asks, did India spend the massive amounts of money it took to build and test the bomb when the country has 400 million citizens living in complete poverty and illiteracy?
Both essays have been reprinted as The Cost of Living. While a Publishers Weekly contributor stated that “Roy surely has meaningful things to say about India,” the critic added that “she is not yet nearly as accomplished a political critic as she is a novelist.” The Cost of Living is, in the reviewer’s opinion, “marred by general attacks on ‘the system’ and personal digressions that distract a reader from the substantive issues at hand.” In Library Journal, Ravi Shenoy allowed that Roy’s “polemical tract” is “not a dispassionate inquiry,” but added that nonetheless it “raises some important questions about the real price of ‘development,’ whether in the form of big dams or bombs.”
Power Politics
Power Politics presents more of Roy’s essays, as she criticizes the political elite of India and that group’s participation in globalization despite enormous social and environmental costs. The essays are “pithy and elegant,” according to a writer in the New Internationalist.
James Gerein urged in his World Literature Today review that readers of Power Politics should “set aside prejudgments, follow her arguments, and try to empathize with what it would be like to lose one’s land, village, job, income, way of life, and perhaps life itself to the imperatives of globalization. Her thesis is not some bleeding heart fantasy but a largely unreported consequence of big business pounding the voiceless down to compost level.”
War Talk
War Talk likewise presents Roy’s views and her passion for them, as she explores the connections between violence, poverty, and globalization. Judy Coode reported in Sojourners: “Roy is an incisive, infuriated citizen of the world, and she is determined not to allow the powers that thrive on imbalance and inequity to silence her. The essays are fairly easy to read, though at times their subject matter is difficult to stomach. Roy barely restrains herself from screaming in frustration at humans and their inability to recognize the connection between inequality and the lack of peace. She exposes herself fully, writing with such emotion and articulation that the reader can almost see her expression of righteous fury and hear her … strong voice choked with tears.”
Despite the seemingly unrelieved seriousness of Roy’s writing, Donna Seaman noted in a Booklist review of War Talk that “so fluent is her prose, so keen her understanding of global politics, and so resonant her objections to nuclear weapons, assaults against the environment, and the endless suffering of the poor that her essays are as uplifting as they are galvanizing.”
An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire
An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, another collection of Roy’s essays and lectures, was published in 2004. The collection discusses topics familiar to her readers: the occupation of Iraq, biased or ignorant reporting, and corporations that profit from restrictions that governments place upon their citizens, among other things. Unlike many other leftist essayists, however, Roy does not only inform and dissent, she also seeks to resolve.
Colorlines magazine contributor C.S. Soong stated that Roy’s “eye is always on the prize: How can those on the side of justice and equality actually win? What’s the quickest, most efficient way to overthrow the structures and policies we’ve come to despise?” Critics praised the collection. While Reviewer’s Bookwatch writer Willis M. Buhle commented that the book “spares nothing in its effort to show the raw, real, and often vicious truth,” Soong concluded that “Roy’s best weapons are her words, and to read her … is to understand the power and importance of words and ideas to the evolving global justice movement.”
Field Notes on Democracy
Roy returns her critical gaze to India in Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. In this collection of political essays written between 2002 and 2008, Roy argues that, hidden under the banner of economic progress, fascism is taking hold in her country. The Hindu nationalist government persecutes minorities, she contends, alleging their complicity in a 2002 massacre of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat. She lambasts the nations’s police tactics, which she argues have included planting evidence to secure conviction and using torture to elicit confessions. She also states that, in blind pursuit of profit and with the government’s blessing, corporations have dispossessed millions of impoverished people through mining and other projects. “Ultimately, Roy identifies the very democratic system India brandishes to the rest of the world as the underlying problem,” noted Tarquin Hall in the London Sunday Times. “It’s true, Indians are free to vote. But what connection, Roy rightly asks, does voting have with democracy when politics have mutated and justice is consistently subverted?”
Critics appreciated Roy’s polemical writings, though not all agreed with her. Roy’s “razor-sharp diatribes are threatening precisely because they are so well reported and because she is so passionate about India’s future,” commented Hall. In an Economist article titled “Necessary, but Wrong,” a reviewer opined: “Despite her flawed reporting and analysis, her left-wing prejudices and one-sided portentous writing, … [Roy] is just the sort of brave and energetic critic that India needs.” An Internet Bookwatch critic found Field Notes on Democracy a “thought-provoking read,” and a Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “These radical, powerful broadsides, written in the white heat of anger, leave little doubt that this celebrated novelist intends to continue her role as India’s fiercest agitator.”
Walking with the Comrades
In 2012 Roy published Walking with the Comrades. In three connected essays, Roy aims to present the case against the Indian government of their handling of India’s tribal peoples. Roy notes that despite the resource-rich lands they inhabit, they are among the most impoverished in the country, due to the collaboration between the corrupt government, military, and corporate greed.
Reviewing the book in the Washington Post Book World, Chandrahas Choudhury opined that “the book is strongest when Roy describes her days in the forest among the strategists and footsoldiers of the insurrection—a privilege accorded to precious few Indians outside the movement.” Choudhury commented that “Roy manages over the length of a book—and this is the point of books in any complex debate—to open out a distinctive position that belies easy summary. Although she has been painted as one, she is no simple apologist for the Maoists.” Choudhury concluded: “Fruitfully skeptical and contrarian, Walking with the Comrades is a necessary book by one of India’s most distinctive voices.” Booklist contributor Seaman mentioned that Roy writes “with exactitude, cogency, tender regard, and dignified outrage.” In a review in Library Journal, Ravi Shenoy recorded that “Roy’s book is a one-sided but absorbing and eye-opening read.” A Publishers Weekly contributor stated: “Informed, impassioned, … and fleet and fascinating when describing life on the ground among the rebels, Roy’s prose will both rouse and ruffle.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described Walking with the Comrades as “a bell-clear expose of corporate greed and governmental malfeasance that should … provoke a furious backlash in the name of human dignity.”
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
In 2017 Roy published her second novel after a twenty-year hiatus. “ The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is … the sprawling and colorfully populated tale of a transgender woman, who is known in India as a hijra, who leaves home as a child to live in a community of hijras,” explained Decca Aitkenhead in the London Guardian. Raised as a boy with the name Aftab, Anjum embraces her transgender identity and moves to Gujarat to live as a woman. “Diva-ish yet comradely, defiant and vulnerable, the community’s residents are at once outcasts and objects of transgressively glamorous curiosity,” Aitkenhead continued. “But at 46, Anjum gets caught up in a massacre in Gujarat, after which she resolves to quit the hijra community and re-enter the world. Traumatised but single-minded, she sets up home in a graveyard.” Anjum’s home becomes a place of refuge for individuals who do not quite fit into modern Indian society, whether because of their gender-identity or their politics. “For her, the characters in her latest book, like Anjum,” stated Nilanjana S. Roy in an interview appearing in the Financial Times, “… aren’t dropouts—‘just off-grid. All of them have an incendiary border running through them, of gender, of caste, of religious conversion.’” “Roy’s novel is a compendium of alternatives—alternative structures of kinship, resistance, and romance,” stated Parul Sehgal in the Atlantic. “Anjum lives in a multigenerational joint family of other hijras; together they raise a child. Later, she and a few other characters move into a graveyard. They sleep between the headstones, plant vegetables, create a new kind of human family that can obliterate the divisions between the living and the dead. Roy has imagined an inverse of the Garden of Eden—a paradise whose defining feature, rather than innocence, is experience and endurance.” The Ministry of Utmost Happiness “can be a challenging read,” admitted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. “Yet its complexity feels essential to Roy’s vision of a bewilderingly beautiful, contradictory, and broken world.”
Critics have often compared The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to The God of Small Things. “In The God of Small Things, the family is a place of danger,” Roy explained to Ratik Asokan in the Nation. “ The Ministry of Utmost Happiness turns this inside out. Almost none of the characters have families in that conventional Indian sense. What happens in Ministry is that people bring shards of their broken hearts from all over the place and create a mended heart in that graveyard—in the most unorthodox way, with most unorthodox forms of love.” “If The God of Small Things was a lushly imagined, intimate family novel slashed through with politics,” wrote Daphne Beal in Vogue, “ The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, though primarily set in Delhi, encompasses wildly different economic, religious, and cultural realms across the Indian subcontinent and as far away as Iraq and California. Animating it is a kaleidoscopic variety of bohemians, army majors, protesters, police chiefs, revolutionaries, and lovers.” “The India of the Mughals, of the raj, of Rudyard Kipling and EM Forster, and now of Narendra Modi might be very different places but somehow they find a home together in Roy’s complex work,” concluded John Boyne in the Irish Times. “She certainly has her critics but perhaps she keeps in mind something that Mahatma Gandhi said about those who speak out without fear: first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
[resume new]
My Seditious Heart
Roy brought decades’ worth of essays together in the thousand-page primer My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction. Roy perceived the turn of India’s political tide in the early 1990s, when the destruction of a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu nationalists went unpunished. Economic deregulation seemed to signal the onset of a “New India,” but old antagonisms, especially on the part of Hindus against Muslims, proved as intransigent as ever. Situating the volume in the contours of India’s history, Gavin Jacobson wrote in the New Statesman: “Roy’s essays reflect the bitter disillusionments that followed the end of the Cold War, when expectations of a post-historical, liberal-capitalist paradise of peace, prosperity and democratic deliverance were punctured by the harsh realities of corporate exploitation, environmental abuse and religious fanaticism.” The targets of Roy’s “furious broadsides,” in Jacobson’s words, range widely. She takes critical views of the caste system, nuclear armament, environmentally disruptive dams, corporate dominance of media, feudal politics, the corrosive international effects of American power, and globalization. Above all, she interrogates the levers of power and the common people’s lack of agency in so-called democratic systems like India’s. For all their good intentions and support from liberal interests, organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and ground-level NGOs tend to foster dependence and passivity in those they assist. In Jacobson’s words, “For Roy, real politics … comes from dissenting publics, from civil disobedience and mass resistance movements, which she sees as mobilizing throughout the world in a global fraternity of action.” She locates such movements locally in Kashmir and Tibet as well as in Palestine, South Africa, Brazil, and elsewhere. In her arguments and perspectives, Roy draws especially from Dalit philosopher and constitutional architect B.R. Ambedkar, who was famously skeptical of the Hindu Gandhi’s commitment to true equality and genuine democracy.
Taking her fiction into account, Jacobson suggests that Roy “is less a magical realist (a label she has always resisted) than a writer of gothic horror, documenting the grotesquery and daily barbarisms that roil below the surface of life’s modern disguise.” Of this volume, the critic declared: “The best essays are those that show Roy descending from the more elevated heights of political analysis and onto more mortal terrain, travelling and documenting the communities facing India’s deadly quest for progress and national self-assertion.” Applauding Roy’s “courage” and “searing candour,” Jacobson concluded: “The virtue of My Seditious Heart is how it carries a … premonitory charge, a warning from the decade and a half after the Cold War that can be seen as the primal scene of our present discontents. The War on Terror, extraordinary rendition, torture, hyper-surveillance, ‘fake news’ and dodgy dossiers, religious massacres, illegal wars, privatization and bailouts, climate change, authoritarianism, hardening police states and the narrowing of the democratic ambit–Arundhati Roy brilliantly documented all of this, and warned us that what came next might be worse.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 109, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.
Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.
Critical Studies of Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things,” Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (New Delhi, India), 1999.
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1997, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.
PERIODICALS
Atlantic, July-August, 2017, Parul Sehgal, “Arundhati Roy’s Fascinating Mess: Being an Activist and an Artist Is Trickier Than It Sounds,” p. 36.
Booklist, May 1, 1997, Donna Seaman, review of The God of Small Things, p. 1480; April 15, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of War Talk, p. 1433; October 15, 2011, Donna Seaman, review of Walking with the Comrades, p. 8; April 15, 2014, Donna Seaman, review of Capitalism: A Ghost Story, p. 4.
Christian Science Monitor, November 24, 1997, Merle Rubin, review of The God of Small Things, p. 11; July 18, 2017, review of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
Colorlines, December 22, 2004, C.S. Soong, review of An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, p. 53.
Ecologist, September 1, 2000, “I Wish I Had the Guts to Shut Up,” p. 29.
Economist, August 1, 2009, “Necessary, but Wrong; Arundhati Roy.”
Entertainment Weekly, May 16, 1997, Suzanne Ruta, review of The God of Small Things, p. 109.
Financial Times, December 7, 2017, Nilanjana S. Roy, “Arundhati Roy: ‘Always Try to Negotiate Freedom. The Royalties Are Peripheral.’”
Guardian (London, England), September 29, 2001, review of The Algebra of Infinite Justice, p. 1; November 30, 2002, Natasha Walter, review of The Algebra of Infinite Justice, p. 11; September 30, 2015, Nicholas Lezard, review of Capitalism; May 27, 2017, Decca Aitkenhead, “‘Fiction Takes Its Time’: Arundhati Roy on Why It Took 20 Years to Write Her Second Novel.”
Herizons, spring, 2001, Subbalakshmi Subramanian, review of The Cost of Living, p. 33.
Hindustan Times, March 8, 2018, “Arundhati Roy, Meena Kandaswamy in the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist.”
Irish Times, June 24, 2017, John Boyne, “Arundhati Roy: ‘It’s a Hatred That Crosses the Line.’”
Journal of Contemporary Asia, May, 2003, Zaheer Baber, review of The Cost of Living, p. 284.
Kirkus Feature Articles and Interviews, June 21, 2024, “Indian Government to Prosecute Arundhati Roy”; June 27, 2024, “Arundhati Roy Receives the PEN Pinter Prize.”
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2009, review of Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers; September 1, 2011, review of Walking with the Comrades; March 1, 2014, review of Capitalism; April 15, 2017, review of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
Library Journal, April 15, 1997, Barbara Hoffert, review of The God of Small Things, p. 120; July, 1997, Eric Bryant, review of The God of Small Things, p. 102; October 15, 1999, Ravi Shenoy, review of The Cost of Living, p. 90; October 1, 2011, Ravi Shenoy, review of Walking with the Comrades, p. 93.
London Times, July 12, 2009, Tarquin Hall, review of Field Notes on Democracy.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 1, 1997, Richard Eder, “As the World Turns,” p. 2.
Maclean’s, October 27, 1997, “A Literary Queen,” p. 64.
Mother Jones, January 1, 2002, Arlie Russell Hochschild, interview with Roy, p. 74.
Nation, September 29, 1997, Amitava Kumar, “Rushdie’s Children,” review of The God of Small Things, pp. 36; July 17, 2017, Ratik Asokan, “The Air We Breathe: A Conversation with Arundhati Roy.”
National Review, February 7, 2000, Kanchan Limaye, review of The Cost of Living, p. 50.
New Internationalist, October, 2002, review of Power Politics, p. 31.
New Republic, December 29, 1997, James Wood, review of The God of Small Things, p. 32; April 29, 2002, Ian Buruma, review of Power Politics, p. 25.
New Statesman, June 27, 1997, Amanda Craig, “But What about This Year’s Barbados Novel?,” p. 49; April 30, 2001, Salil Tripathi, “The Goddess against Big Things,” p. 22.
Newsweek, May 26, 1997, Laura Shapiro, “Disaster in a Lush Land,” p. 76.
Newsweek International, March 18, 2002, interview with Roy, p. 94.
New Yorker, June 23, 1997, John Updike, “Mother Tongues,” review of The God of Small Things, pp. 156-159.
New York Review of Books, August 14, 1997, Rosemary Dinnage, review of The God of Small Things, p. 16.
New York Times, June 3, 1997, Michiko Kakutani, review of The God of Small Things, p. B4; July 29, 1997, Elisabeth Bumiller, “A Novelist Begins with a Splash,” p. B1; October 15, 1997, Sarah Lyall, “Indian’s First Novel Wins Booker Prize in Britain,” p. A4; January 12, 2000, Celia W. Dugger, “Author Seized,” p. A6; August 7, 2001, Salman Rushdie, “A Foolish Dam and a Writer’s Freedom,” p. A19; November 3, 2001, Celia W. Dugger, “An Indian Novelist Turns Her Wrath on the U.S.,” p. A3; March 7, 2002, “India Jails Novelist for Criticizing a Court Ruling,” p. A4.
New York Times Book Review, May 25, 1997, Alice Truax, “A Silver Thimble in Her Fist,” p. 5; November 25, 2001, Alex Abramovich, review of Power Politics, p. 28.
Nieman Reports, spring, 2021, “‘We Live in an Age of Mini-Massacres’: Man Booker Prize-Winning Author Arundhati Roy on the State of India’s Democracy, the Role of the Media, and More,” p. 12.
NWSA Journal, September 22, 2006, Stacy Bautista, review of The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, and War Talk, p. 211.
Observer (London, England), November 17, 2002, review of The Algebra of Infinite Justice, p. 20.
People, July 14, 1997, Francine Prose, review of The God of Small Things, p. 30; November 3, 1997, Thomas Fields-Meyer, “No Small Thing: A Stunning Debut Novel Earns Arundhati Roy the Fruits of Stardom,” p. 107.
Progressive, April 1, 2001, David Barsamian, interview with Roy.
Publishers Weekly, March 3, 1997, review of The God of Small Things, p. 62; September 20, 1999, review of The Cost of Living, p. 61; May 14, 2001, John F. Baker, “Roy’s Indian Wars,” p. 20; July 30, 2001, review of Power Politics, p. 72; September 19, 2011, review of Walking with the Comrades, p. 50; April 10, 2017, review of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, p. 48.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, March, 2005, Willis M. Buhle, review of An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire.
Sojourners, July-August 1, 2003, Judy Coode, review of War Talk, p. 57.
Sunday Times (London, England), July 12, 2009, Tarquin Hall, review of Field Notes on Democracy.
Time, April 14, 1997, Meenakshi Ganguly, review of The God of Small Things.
Times Literary Supplement, January 10, 2020, Gavin Jacobson, “The Light of a Few Candles: Essays on the Gothic Half of Post-1989 Modernity,” review of My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction, p. 16.
USA Today, June 22, 2017, Patty Rhule, “Arundhati Roy Aims High in The Ministry,” p. 7B.
Vogue, October 1, 2002, Daphne Beal, “Portrait of a Renegade,” p. 244; May 19, 2017, Daphne Beal, “20 Years after The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy on The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.“
Washington Post Book World, October 20, 1997, Kenneth J. Cooper, “For India, No Small Thing: Native Daughter Arundhati Roy Wins Coveted Booker Prize,” p. C1; December 17, 2011, Chandrahas Choudhury, review of Walking with the Comrades; May 31, 2017, Ron Charles, “From Arundhati Roy, a Tale.”
Whole Earth, December 22, 2001, “India Will Not Behave,” p. 78, Paul Hawken, review of Power Politics, p. 81.
World Literature Today, winter, 1998, Ramlal Agarwal, review of The God of Small Things, p. 208; June 22, 2002, James Gerein, review of Power Politics, p. 79; September 1, 2005, author profile, p. 70; January 1, 2004, Leslie Schenk, review of War Talk, p. 75; November-December, 2017, Amit R. Baishya, review of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, p. 71.
World Press Review, January 1, 1997, John Zubrzycki, review of The God of Small Things, p. 39.
World Watch, May 1, 2002, Curtis Runyan, review of Power Politics, p. 17.
Writer, November 1, 1998, Lewis Burke Frumkes, “A Conversation with Arundhati Roy,” p. 23.
ONLINE
BBC website, https://www.bbc.com/ (June 17, 2024), Soutik Biswas, “Will India’s Booker Prize-Winning Author Face Jail for 14-Year-Old Remark?”
British Council website, https://literature.britishcouncil.org/ (September 8, 2024), author profile.
Ian Sinclair Journalism, https://ianjsinclair.wordpress.com/ (August 12, 2015), Ian Sinclair, review of Capitalism.
Internet Bookwatch, http://www.midwestbookreview.com/ (November 1, 2009), review of Field Notes on Democracy.
Salon, http://www.salon.com/ (September 30, 1997), Reena Jana, author interview.
Scott Andrew Hutchins website, https://scottandrewhutchins.wordpress.com/ (February 18, 2017), review of Capitalism.
Arundhati Roy
Drama Fiction Non-Fiction Poetry
Born:Delhi
Publishers:Hamish Hamilton Ltd
Agents:David Godwin Associates
Biography
Arundhati Roy was born in 1960 in Kerala, India. She studied architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture and worked as a production designer. She has written two screenplays, including Electric Moon (1992), commissioned by Channel 4 television. She lives in Delhi with her husband, the film-maker Pradip Krishen.
The God of Small Things, her first novel, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and has sold over six million copies worldwide. An immediate bestseller, the novel was published simultaneously in 16 languages and 19 countries, but caused controversy in India for the description of a love affair between a Syrian Christian and a Hindu 'untouchable'. Set in Ayemenem in Kerala, a rural province in southern India, it is the story of two twins, Estha and Rahel, their reunion after 23 years apart and their shared memories of the events surrounding the accidental death of their English cousin, Sophie Mol, in 1969.
She is also the author of several non-fiction books,including: The Cost of Living (1999), a highly critical attack on the Indian government for its handling of the controversial Narmada Valley dam project and for its nuclear testing programme; Power Politics (2001), a book of essays; and The Algebra of Infinite Justice, a collection of journalism. The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire was published in 2004. She has since published a further collection of essays examining the dark side of democracy in contemporary India, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy (2009).
Arundhati Roy was awarded the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2003. Her latest book is The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), her second novel. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and, in the US, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Read less
Critical perspective Bibliography Awards
Critical perspective
Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1993), Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) has been hailed as the latest literary 'discovery' from India.
Earning advances in the region of one million dollars, translated into thirty languages, snatching the prestigious Booker prize award in 1997 and selling over six million copies, the publicity surrounding this novel has been phenomenal. Its high profile has been fuelled by the controversial life of its author. Roy is a politically active writer, passionately committed to environmental politics (notably the flooding of the Narmada Valley in North Western India). In March 2002 her jail sentence attracted substantial international press attention and Roy's powerful political essays are now widely available in collections like Power Politics, The Algebra of Infinite Justice and The Cost of Living.
While many contemporary writers are clearly envious of the amount of media attention Roy and her first novel have managed to attract (there has been a critical backlash following Roy's meteoric rise to fame), the unfortunate outcome has been a conspicuous lack of debate about the text itself. This is a pity, because The God of Small Things is text that rewards serious critical scrutiny.
One of the most repeated and misleading criticisms of the novel is that it merely exoticises the East for a cosmopolitan Western readership. Certainly the novel's unprecedented success in Europe and North America, at a time when Asian-chic is all the rage, should not be viewed innocently. However, what such criticisms have tended to neglect is the extent to which The God of Small Things is a self-reflexive text that both reproduces and parodies representations of India as the exotic. Take the opening paragraph of the novel:
'May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.'
These highly wrought, beautifully poetic lines (typical of the novel as a whole) have clearly contributed to the overall success of The God of Small Things. They are part of what make it such a seductive narrative. However there is a sense in which these sentences are also overwrought. The richly figurative, conspicuously decorative prose of the novel also ultimately has the effect of foregrounding its fictional status, its status as representation. As if to accentuate this fact, the opening flirts with some of the central figures and tropes of high modernist literature, including T.S. Eliot, for whom 'April is the cruellest month', and Joseph Conrad, for whom the 'heart of darkness' is a pregnant, landscape of (seductive) fecundity and (repulsive) terror. These opening lines also self-consciously allude to some of the dominant images of Indo-Anglian fiction, including the 'heat and dust' (immortalised in Ruth Prawer Jhabwala's novel of the same name) and the reference to pickles and preserves in the chapter's title (the structuring metaphor of Rushdie's Midnight's Children). The epigraph to Roy's novel, a quotation from John Berger, is crucial to an understanding of what follows: 'Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one'.
To say that The God of Small Things makes itself available for a kind of readerly tourism is to neglect the way in which this text also offers a critique of tourism in the form of the 'History House'. The History House, at the heart of Ayemenem, has been transformed into a five-star hotel: 'In the evenings (for Regional Flavour) the tourists were treated to truncated kathakali performances ('Small attention spans,' the Hotel People explained to the dancers). So ancient stories were collapsed and amputated. Six-hour classics were slashed to twenty-minute cameos.' Such accounts politicise, rather than reinforce the construction of India as the exotic.
Of course, The God of Small Things is more than a metafictional story about storytelling. The novel is also driven be a compelling plot which moves deftly between the generations of a single family in Kerala; between grandmother Mammachi and her bitter, brooding sister Baby Kochama; between Ammu, her brother Chako, and their children Estha, Rahel and Baby Sol. The narrative centres on the consequences of Ammu's forbidden relationship (one of many in the novel) with Velutha. An 'untouchable' who is, ironically, gifted with his hands, Velutha works for the family business, Paradise Pickles. His transgressive relationship with Ammu, violates the laws of caste, class and culture with tragic consequences for the whole family.
The God of Small Things is a skilfully structured novel that shuttles almost imperceptibly between past and present. As the tale moves from the energy and laughter of youth, to the more resigned, melancholy world of adulthood, a series of correspondences are established across the generations. These include Rahel's taboo relationship with her twin brother, a sexual encounter that establishes an intricate pattern of repetitions across the narrative, repetitions that haunt both the characters and readers of the novel alike.
Dr. James Procter, 2002
Read less
Bibliography
2017The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
2014Capitalism: A Ghost Story
2011Kashmir: The Case for Freedom
2009Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes for Democracy
2004The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire
2002The Algebra of Infinite Justice
2001Power Politics
1999The Cost of Living: The Greater Common Good and the End of Imagination
1997The God of Small Things
Awards
2017Man Booker Prize for Fiction (longlist)
2003Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom
1997Booker Prize for Fiction
Arundhati Roy
Article
Talk
Read
View source
View history
Tools
Appearance hide
Text
Small
Standard
Large
Width
Standard
Wide
Color (beta)
Automatic
Light
Dark
Page semi-protected
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with Anuradha Roy (novelist).
Arundhati Roy
Roy in 2013
Roy in 2013
Born Suzanna Arundhati Roy
24 November 1961 (age 62)[1]
Shillong, Assam (present-day Meghalaya), India
Occupation Writer, essayist, activist
Education Lawrence School, Lovedale
Alma mater School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi
Period 1997–present
Genre Fiction, non-fiction
Notable works The God of Small Things
Notable awards
National Film Award for Best Screenplay (1988)
Booker Prize (1997)
Sydney Peace Prize (2004)
Orwell Award (2004)
Norman Mailer Prize (2011)
PEN Pinter Prize (2024)
Spouse
Gerard da Cunha
(m. 1978; div. 1982)[2][3]
Pradip Krishen (m. 1984)[2][3]
Parents Mary Roy (mother)
Relatives Prannoy Roy (cousin)[4]
Signature
Arundhati Roy's voice
Duration: 40 seconds.0:40
from the BBC programme Bookclub, 2 October 2011.[5]
Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961)[1] is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author.[1] She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.[6] She was awarded the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize.[7]
Early life
Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, India,[8] to Mary Roy, a Malayali Jacobite Syrian Christian women's rights activist from Kerala and Rajib Roy, a Bengali Brahmo Samaji[9] tea plantation manager from Kolkata.[10] She has denied false rumors about her being a Brahmin by caste.[9] When she was two years old, her parents divorced and she returned to Kerala with her mother and brother.[10] For some time, the family lived with Roy's maternal grandfather in Ooty, Tamil Nadu. When she was five, the family moved back to Kerala, where her mother started a school.[10]
Roy attended school at Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by the Lawrence School, Lovedale, in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. She then studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, where she met architect Gerard da Cunha. They married in 1978 and lived together in Delhi, and then Goa, before they separated and divorced in 1982.[2][3][10]
Personal life
Roy returned to Delhi, where she obtained a position with the National Institute of Urban Affairs.[10] In 1984, she met independent filmmaker Pradip Krishen, who offered her a role as a goatherd in his award-winning movie Massey Sahib.[11] They married the same year. They collaborated on a television series about India's independence movement and two films, Annie and Electric Moon.[10] Disenchanted with the film world, Roy experimented with various fields, including running aerobics classes. Roy and Krishen currently live separately but are still married.[3][2][10] She became financially secure with the success of her novel The God of Small Things, published in 1997.
Roy is a cousin of prominent media personality Prannoy Roy, former head of the Indian television media group NDTV.[4] She lives in Delhi.[10]
Career
Early career: screenplays
Early in her career, Roy worked in television and movies. She starred in Massey Sahib in 1985. She wrote the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), a movie based on her experiences as a student of architecture, in which she also appeared as a performer, and Electric Moon (1992).[12] Both were directed by her husband, Pradip Krishen, during their marriage. Roy won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1988 for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones.[13] She attracted attention in 1994 when she criticised Shekhar Kapur's film Bandit Queen, which was based on the life of Phoolan Devi.[12] In her film review titled "The Great Indian Rape Trick", Roy questioned the right to "restage the rape of a living woman without her permission", and charged Kapur with exploiting Devi and misrepresenting both her life and its meaning.[14][15][16]
The God of Small Things
Roy began writing her first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1992, completing it in 1996.[17] The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures her childhood experiences in Aymanam.[8]
The publication of The God of Small Things catapulted Roy to international fame. It received the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction and was listed as one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year.[18] It reached fourth position on The New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction.[19] From the beginning, the book was also a commercial success: Roy received half a million pounds as an advance.[16] It was published in May, and the book had been sold in 18 countries by the end of June.[17]
The God of Small Things received very favorable reviews in major American newspapers such as The New York Times (a "dazzling first novel",[20] "extraordinary", "at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple"[21]) and the Los Angeles Times ("a novel of poignancy and considerable sweep"[22]), and in Canadian publications such as the Toronto Star ("a lush, magical novel"[23]). It was one of the five best books of 1997 according to Time.[24] Critical response in the United Kingdom was less favorable, and the awarding of the Booker Prize caused controversy; Carmen Callil, a 1996 Booker Prize judge, called the novel "execrable" and a Guardian journalist called the contest "profoundly depressing".[25] In India, E. K. Nayanar,[26] then the chief minister of Roy's home state of Kerala, especially criticised the book's unrestrained description of sexuality, and she had to answer charges of obscenity.[27]
Later career
Since the success of her novel, Roy has written a television serial, The Banyan Tree,[28] and the documentary DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002).
In early 2007, Roy said she was working on a second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.[16][29]
Roy, Man Booker Prize winner
Roy contributed to We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples, a book released in 2009[30] that explores the culture of peoples around the world, portraying their diversity and the threats to their existence. The royalties from the sale of this book go to the indigenous rights organisation Survival International.[31]
Roy has written numerous essays on contemporary politics and culture. In 2014, they were collected by Penguin India in a five-volume set.[10] In 2019, her nonfiction was collected in a single volume, My Seditious Heart, published by Haymarket Books.[32]
In October 2016, Penguin India and Hamish Hamilton UK announced that they would publish her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in June 2017.[33] The novel was chosen for the Man Booker Prize 2017 Long List[34] and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in January 2018.[35]
Roy received the lifetime achievement award at the 45th European Essay Prize for the French translation of her book Azadi.[36]
Advocacy
Since publishing The God of Small Things in 1997, Roy has spent most of her time on political activism and nonfiction (such as collections of essays about social causes). She is a spokesperson of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism and U.S. foreign policy. She opposes India's policies toward nuclear weapons as well as industrialization and economic growth (which she describes as "encrypted with genocidal potential" in Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy).[37] She has also questioned the conduct of the Indian police and administration in the case of the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and the Batla House encounter case, contending that the country has had a "shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky investigations, and fake encounters".[38]
Support for Kashmiri separatism
In an August 2008 interview with The Times of India, Roy expressed her support for the independence of Kashmir from India after the massive demonstrations in 2008 in favour of independence took place—some 500,000 people rallied in Srinagar in the Kashmir part of Jammu and Kashmir state of India for independence on 18 August 2008, following the Amarnath land transfer controversy.[39] According to her, the rallies were a sign that Kashmiris desired secession from India, and not union with India.[40] She was criticised by the Indian National Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party for her remarks.[41][42]
All India Congress Committee member and senior Congress party leader Satya Prakash Malaviya asked Roy to withdraw her "irresponsible" statement, saying that it was "contrary to historical facts".[42]
It would do better to brush up her knowledge of history and know that the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir had acceded to the Union of India after its erstwhile ruler Maharaja Hari Singh duly signed the Instrument of Accession on 26 October 1947. And the state, consequently has become as much an integral part of India as all the other erstwhile princely states have.[42]
She was charged with sedition along with separatist Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani and others by Delhi Police for their "anti-India" speech at a 2010 convention on Kashmir: "Azadi: The Only Way".[43][44] In June 2024, the UAPA Act was invoked against them.[45]
Sardar Sarovar Project
Roy has campaigned along with activist Medha Patkar against the Narmada dam project, saying that the dam will displace half a million people with little or no compensation, and will not provide the projected irrigation, drinking water, and other benefits.[46] Roy donated her Booker prize money, as well as royalties from her books on the project, to the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Roy also appears in Franny Armstrong's Drowned Out, a 2002 documentary about the project.[47] Roy's opposition to the Narmada Dam project was criticised as "maligning Gujarat" by Congress and BJP leaders in Gujarat.[48]
In 2002, Roy responded to a contempt notice issued against her by the Supreme Court of India with an affidavit saying that the court's decision to initiate contempt proceedings based on an unsubstantiated and flawed petition, while refusing to inquire into allegations of corruption in military contracting deals pleading an overload of cases, indicated a "disquieting inclination" to silence criticism and dissent using the power of contempt.[49] The court found Roy's statement, which she refused to disavow or apologise for, constituted criminal contempt, sentenced her to a "symbolic" one day's imprisonment, and fined her ₹2500.[50] Roy served the jail sentence and paid the fine rather than serve an additional three months for default.[51]
Environmental historian Ramachandra Guha has been critical of Roy's Narmada dam activism. While acknowledging her "courage and commitment" to the cause, Guha writes that her advocacy is hyperbolic and self-indulgent,[52] "Ms. Roy's tendency to exaggerate and simplify, her Manichaean view of the world, and her shrill hectoring tone, have given a bad name to environmental analysis".[53] He faulted Roy's criticism of Supreme Court judges who were hearing a petition brought by the Narmada Bachao Andolan as careless and irresponsible.
Roy counters that her writing is intentional in its passionate, hysterical tone: "I am hysterical. I'm screaming from the bloody rooftops. And he and his smug little club are going 'Shhhh... you'll wake the neighbours!' I want to wake the neighbours, that's my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes".[54]
Gail Omvedt and Roy have had fierce yet constructive discussions in open letters on Roy's strategy for the Narmada Dam movement. The activists disagree on whether to demand stopping the dam building altogether (Roy) or search for intermediate alternatives (Omvedt).[55]
US foreign policy, war in Afghanistan
Roy delivering a talk "Can We Leave the Bauxite in the Mountain? Field Notes on Democracy" at the Harvard Kennedy School on 1 April 2010[56]
In an opinion piece in The Guardian titled "The Algebra of Infinite Justice", Roy responded to the U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan, finding fault with the argument that this war would be a retaliation for the September 11 attacks: "The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror against the people of the world." According to her, U.S. president George W. Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair were guilty of Orwellian doublethink:
When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said: "We're a peaceful nation." America's favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of prime minister of the UK), echoed him: "We're a peaceful people." So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace.
She disputes U.S. claims of being a peaceful and freedom-loving nation, listing China and 19 Third World "countries that America has been at war with—and bombed—since World War II", as well as previous U.S. support for the Taliban movement and the Northern Alliance (whose "track record is not very different from the Taliban's"). She does not spare the Taliban:
"Now, as adults and rulers, the Taliban beat, stone, rape, and brutalise women, they don't seem to know what else to do with them."[57]
In the final analysis, Roy sees American-style capitalism as the culprit:
"In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, U.S. foreign policy, are all controlled by the same business combines".
She puts the attacks on the World Trade Center and on Afghanistan on the same moral level, that of terrorism, and mourns the impossibility of beauty after 2001: "Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a newborn gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear—without thinking of the World Trade Centre and Afghanistan?"[58]
In May 2003, she delivered a speech titled "Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free)" at Riverside Church in New York City, in which she described the United States as a global empire that reserves the right to bomb any of its subjects at any time, deriving its legitimacy directly from God. The speech was an indictment of the U.S. actions relating to the Iraq War.[59][60] In June 2005, she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq, and in March 2006 she criticised President George W. Bush's visit to India, calling him a "war criminal".[61]
India's nuclear weaponry
In response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination (1998), a critique of the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living (1999), in which she also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat.
Israel
In August 2006, Roy, along with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and others, signed a letter in The Guardian calling the 2006 Lebanon War a "war crime" and accusing Israel of "state terror".[62] In 2007, Roy was one of more than 100 artists and writers who signed an open letter initiated by Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism and the South West Asian, North African Bay Area Queers calling on the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival "to honor calls for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions, by discontinuing Israeli consulate sponsorship of the LGBT film festival and not cosponsoring events with the Israeli consulate".[63] During the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, she defended Hamas's rocket attacks, citing Palestinians' right to resistance.[64][65][66] In December 2023, during Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza, Roy said: "If we say nothing about Israel's brazen slaughter of Palestinians, even as it is live-streamed into the most private recesses of our personal lives, we are complicit in it."[67]
2001 Indian parliament attack
Roy has raised questions about the investigation into the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and the trial of the accused. According to her, Mohammad Afzal Guru was being scapegoated. She pointed to irregularities in the judicial and investigative process in the case and maintains that the case remains unsolved.[68][69] In her book about Guru's hanging, she suggests that there is evidence of state complicity in the terrorist attack.[70] In an editorial in The Hindu, journalist Praveen Swami wrote that Roy's evidence of state complicity was "cherry-picked for polemical effect".[71]
Roy also called for Guru's death sentence to be stayed while a parliamentary enquiry into these questions was conducted, and denounced press coverage of the trial.[72] BJP spokesperson Prakash Javadekar criticised Roy for calling Afzal a "prisoner of war" and called her a "prisoner of her own dogma".[73] Afzal was hanged in 2013.[74] Roy called the hanging "a stain on India's democracy".[75]
The Muthanga incident
In 2003, the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha, a social movement for Adivasi land rights in Kerala, organised a major land occupation of a piece of land of a former Eucalyptus plantation in the Muthanga Wildlife Reserve, on the border of Kerala and Karnataka. After 48 days, a police force was sent into the area to evict the occupants. One participant of the movement and a policeman were killed, and the leaders of the movement were arrested. Roy travelled to the area, visited the movement's leaders in jail, and wrote an open letter to the then Chief Minister of Kerala, A. K. Antony, saying: "You have blood on your hands."[76]
Comments on 2008 Mumbai attacks
In an opinion piece for The Guardian, Roy argued that the November 2008 Mumbai attacks cannot be seen in isolation, but must be understood in the context of wider issues in the region's history and society such as widespread poverty, the Partition of India ("Britain's final, parting kick to us"), the atrocities committed during the 2002 Gujarat violence, and the ongoing Kashmir conflict. Despite this call for context, Roy stated in the article that she believes "nothing can justify terrorism" and calls terrorism "a heartless ideology". Roy warned against war with Pakistan, arguing that it is hard to "pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state", and that war could lead to the "descent of the whole region into chaos".[38] Salman Rushdie and others strongly criticised her remarks and condemned her for linking the Mumbai attacks with Kashmir and economic injustice against Muslims in India;[77] Rushdie criticised Roy for attacking the iconic status of the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower.[78] Indian writer Tavleen Singh called Roy's comments "the latest of her series of hysterical diatribes against India and all things Indian".[79]
Criticism of Sri Lankan government
In an opinion piece in The Guardian, Roy pleaded for international attention to what she called a possible government-sponsored genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka. She cited reports of camps into which Tamils were being herded as part of what she called "a brazen, openly racist war".[80] She also said that the "Government of Sri Lanka is on the verge of committing what could end up being genocide"[80] and described the Sri Lankan IDP camps where Tamil civilians are being held as concentration camps. The Sri Lankan writer Ruvani Freeman called Roy's remarks "ill-informed and hypocritical" and criticised her for "whitewashing the atrocities of the LTTE".[81] Roy has said of such accusations: "I cannot admire those whose vision can only accommodate justice for their own and not for everybody. However, I do believe that the LTTE and its fetish for violence was cultured in the crucible of monstrous, racist, injustice that the Sri Lankan government and to a great extent Sinhala society visited on the Tamil people for decades".[82]
Views on the Naxalites
Roy has criticised the Indian government's armed actions against the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency in India, calling it "war on the poorest people in the country". According to her, the government has "abdicated its responsibility to the people"[83] and launched the offensive against Naxals to aid the corporations with whom it has signed Memoranda of Understanding.[84] While she has received support from various quarters for her views,[85] Roy's description of the Maoists as "Gandhians" raised a controversy.[86][87] In other statements, she has described Naxalites as patriots "of a kind"[88] who are "fighting to implement the Constitution, (while) the government is vandalising it".[83]
Roy at the Jamia Millia Islamia in March 2014
Sedition charges
In November 2010, Roy, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, and five others were brought up on charges of sedition by the Delhi Police. The filing of the First Information Report came following a directive from a local court on a petition filed by Sushil Pandit who alleged that Geelani and Roy made anti-India speeches at a conference on "Azadi-the Only Way" on 21 October 2010. In Roy's words, "Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact. Even the Indian government has accepted this".[89][90][91][92] A Delhi city court directed the police to respond to the demand for a criminal case after the central government declined to charge Roy, saying that the charges were inappropriate.[93][94]
Criticism of Anna Hazare
On 21 August 2011, at the height of Anna Hazare's anti-corruption campaign, Roy criticised Hazare and his movement in an opinion piece published in The Hindu.[95] In the article, she questioned Hazare's secular credentials, pointing out the campaign's corporate backing, its suspicious timing, Hazare's silence on private-sector corruption, expressing her fear that the Lokpal will only end up creating "two oligarchies, instead of just one". She stated that while "his means may be Gandhian, his demands are certainly not", and alleged that by "demonising only the Government they" are preparing to call for "more privatisation, more access to public infrastructure and India's natural resources", adding that it "may not be long before Corporate Corruption is made legal and renamed a Lobbying Fee". Roy also accused the electronic media of blowing the campaign out of proportion. In an interview with Kindle Magazine, Roy pointed out the role of media hype and target audience in determining how well hunger strikes "work as a tool of political mobilization" by noting the disparity in the attention Hazare's fast has received in contrast to the decade-long fast of Irom Sharmila "to demand the repealing of a law that allows non-commissioned officers to kill on suspicion—a law that has led to so much suffering."[96] Roy's comparison of the Jan Lokpal Bill with the Maoists, claiming both sought "the overthrow of the Indian State", met with resentment from members of Team Anna. Medha Patkar reacted sharply calling Roy's comments "highly misplaced" and chose to emphasise the "peaceful, non-violent" nature of the movement.[97] Roy also has stated that "an 'anti-corruption' campaign is a catch-all campaign. It includes everybody from the extreme left to the extreme right and also the extremely corrupt. No one's going to say they are for corruption after all...I'm not against a strong anti-corruption bill, but corruption is just a manifestation of a problem, not the problem itself."[96]
Views on Narendra Modi
In 2013, Roy called Narendra Modi's nomination as prime minister a "tragedy". She said business houses were supporting his candidacy because he was the "most militaristic and aggressive" candidate.[98] She has argued that Modi has control over India to a degree unrecognized by most people in the Western world: "He is the system. He has the backing of the media. He has the backing of the army, the courts, a majoritarian popular vote ... Every institution has fallen in line." She has expressed deep despair for the future, calling Modi's long-term plans for a highly centralized Hindu state "suicidal" for the multicultural subcontinent.[99] On 28 April 2021, The Guardian published an article by Roy describing the Indian government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a "crime against humanity",[100] in which The Washington Post said Roy "slammed Modi for his handling of the pandemic".[101][102] Roy's op-ed was also published in The Wire[101] with the title "It's Not Enough to Say the Govt Has Failed. We Are Witnessing a Crime Against Humanity."[103]
Remarks about National Registers
On 25 December 2019, while speaking at Delhi University, Roy urged people to mislead authorities during the upcoming enumeration by the National Population Register, which she said can serve as a database for the National Register of Citizens.[104] The remarks were criticized by the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).[105][104][106] A complaint against her was registered at Tilak Marg police station, Delhi, under sections 295A, 504, 153 and 120B of the Indian Penal Code.[107][108] Roy responded, "What I was proposing was civil disobedience with a smile", and claimed her remarks were misrepresented.[109][110]
Awards
Roy was awarded the 1997 Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things. The award carried a prize of approximately US$30,000[111] and a citation that noted, "The book keeps all the promises that it makes".[112] Roy donated the prize money she received, as well as royalties from her book, to human rights causes. Prior to the Booker, Roy won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1989, for the screenplay of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, in which she captured the anguish among the students prevailing in professional institutions.[13] In 2015, she returned the national award in protest against religious intolerance and the growing violence by rightwing groups in India.[113]
In 2002, she won the Lannan Foundation's Cultural Freedom Award for her work "about civil societies that are adversely affected by the world's most powerful governments and corporations", in order "to celebrate her life and her ongoing work in the struggle for freedom, justice and cultural diversity".[114]
In 2003, she was awarded "special recognition" as a Woman of Peace at the Global Exchange Human Rights Awards in San Francisco with Bianca Jagger, Barbara Lee, and Kathy Kelly.
Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and her advocacy of non-violence.[115][116] That same year she was awarded the Orwell Award, along with Seymour Hersh, by the National Council of Teachers of English.[117]
In January 2006, she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, a national award from India's Academy of Letters, for her collection of essays on contemporary issues, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, but she declined to accept it "in protest against the Indian Government toeing the US line by 'violently and ruthlessly pursuing policies of brutalisation of industrial workers, increasing militarisation and economic neo-liberalisation'".[118][119]
In November 2011, she was awarded the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing.[120]
Roy was featured in the 2014 list of Time 100, the 100 most influential people in the world.[121]
In June 2024, she was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. English PEN Chair Ruth Borthwick described her as telling "urgent stories of injustice with wit and beauty".[122][123]
In August 2024, Roy and Toomaj Salehi shared the Disturbing the Peace Award, a recognition the Vaclav Havel Center accords to courageous writers at risk. The award committee chair, Bill Shipsey, called them "wonderful exemplars of the spirit of Václav Havel".[124]
Bibliography
Fiction
No. Title Publisher Year ISBN
1 The God of Small Things Flamingo 1997 0-00-655068-1
2 The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Hamish Hamilton 2017 0-241-30397-4
Non-fiction
No. Title Publisher Year ISBN
1 The End of Imagination Kottayam: D.C. Books 1998 81-7130-867-8
2 The Cost of Living Flamingo 1999 0-375-75614-0
3 The Greater Common Good Bombay: India Book Distributor 1999 81-7310-121-3
4 The Algebra of Infinite Justice Flamingo 2002 0-00-714949-2
5 Power Politics Cambridge: South End Press 2002 0-89608-668-2
6 War Talk Cambridge: South End Press 2003 0-89608-724-7
7 An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire Consortium 2004 0-89608-727-1
8 Public Power in the Age of Empire New York: Seven Stories Press 2004 978-1-58322-682-7
9 The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy (Interviews by David Barsamian) Cambridge: South End Press 2004 0-89608-710-7
10 The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy New Delhi: Penguin 2008 978-0-670-08207-0
11 Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy New Delhi: Penguin 2010 978-0-670-08379-4
12 Broken Republic: Three Essays New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton 2011 978-0-670-08569-9
13 Walking with the Comrades New Delhi: Penguin 2011 978-0-670-08553-8
14 Kashmir: The Case for Freedom Verso Books 2011 1-84467-735-4
15 The Hanging of Afzal Guru and the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament New Delhi: Penguin 2013 978-0-14-342075-0
16 Capitalism: A Ghost Story Chicago: Haymarket Books 2014 978-1-60846-385-5[125]
17 Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations (with John Cusack) Chicago: Haymarket Books 2016 978-1-60846-717-4
18 The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste
(the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi)
Chicago: Haymarket Books 2017 978-1-60846-797-6
19 My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-Fiction Chicago: Haymarket Books 2019 978-1-60846-676-4
20 Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction Haymarket Books 2020 1642592609
Will India's Booker Prize-winning author face jail for 14-year-old remark?
17 June 2024
Share
Soutik Biswas
India correspondent•@soutikBBC
AFP Arundhati RoyAFP
Ms Roy is an outspoken writer and activist
Will one of India's most celebrated writers really face prosecution for things she said more than a decade ago?
Last week, 14 years after the original complaint, Delhi's most senior official granted permission for the Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy to be prosecuted under India’s stringent anti-terror laws. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) is notorious for making it exceptionally challenging to get bail, often resulting in years of detention until the completion of trial.
The Modi government has been accused of using the law to silence critics, including activists, journalists and civil society members.
Ms Roy, 62, an outspoken writer and activist, is in the dock for comments on Kashmir, a perennial lightning rod in India.
Arundhati Roy's much-awaited second coming
“Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact. Even the Indian government has accepted this,” she said at a stormy, day-long conference in Delhi, organised by the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners, in October 2010.
At the time, Indian-administered Kashmir was in turmoil, with locals describing it as a fierce uprising against India.
Ms Roy's remarks had followed the deaths of dozens of protesters since fresh pro-freedom demonstrations broke out earlier that year.
India and neighbouring Pakistan, nuclear armed-rivals, claim the disputed region in full and have fought two wars over it.
Ms Roy’s remarks predictably set off a firestorm of protest, with many critics questioning her loyalty to India, and the federal government, then led by the Congress party, threatening to arrest her on charges of sedition. A senior minister said while India enjoyed freedom of speech, "it can't violate the patriotic sentiments of the people".
There were protests outside Ms Roy's home in an upscale Delhi neighbourhood. A criminal complaint was lodged against her and another defendant Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a law teacher from Kashmir, accusing them and two others of sedition.
AFP Kashmiri women mourn and shout anti-India slogans at the funeral of Umar Qayoom, 13, in Srinagar August 25, 2010AFP
Ms Roy's remarks followed the deaths of dozens of protesters in Kashmir in 2010
Ms Roy defended her right to free speech soon after the controversy. "In the papers some have accused me of giving 'hate-speeches', of wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride," she wrote in a response.
"It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians... Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds."
Lawyers are puzzled by the decision to prosecute Ms Roy more than a decade after her speech. She was originally accused of sedition, but the Supreme Court suspended the colonial-era sedition law in May 2022; invoking UAPA charges allows the state to bypass the statute of limitations and proceed with the case.
Ms Roy has been a trenchant critic of Mr Modi's government, which rights groups accuse of targeting activists and muzzling free speech. The permission for her prosecution comes just after Mr Modi's re-election for a third term.
Many view this as a political signal that the BJP will continue its strong-arm tactics, even in coalition government. Sushil Pandit, the main complainant from 2010, refused to speculate on the delay. "Those who sat on these files and decided to act now should explain. There must be an inquiry into why this was delayed, and accountability should follow," he told Times Now television.
Getty Images Arundhati Roy during the event marking 2 years of Attack on Jamia Millia Islamia, Central University on 15th December 2019.Getty Images
Ms Roy's admirers see her as a leading voice for liberal values and a champion of the marginalised
Others view this as another attempt to silence Mr Modi's critics. Writer Amitav Ghosh wrote on X: "The hounding of Arundhati Roy is absolutely unconscionable. She is a great writer and has the right to her opinion. There should be an international outcry against prosecuting her for something she said a decade ago."
When Delhi authorities approved the case to proceed in court in October, Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein warned Mr Modi on X: "You have no idea what you will unleash by pursuing this political prosecution to silence your most eloquent critic."
What exactly transpired on the day when Ms Roy made the comments?
In the minutes of the conference, Shivam Vij described it as "historic in every aspect given the topicality of the issue". Speakers included a well-known poet, several activists and journalists.
Ms Roy anticipated a heated debate. "She began her speech by asking those who wanted to throw shoes to her to do so now," Mr Vij wrote.
Shuddhabrata Sengupta, an artist, writer and curator who spoke at the event, wrote that the only "provocative actions" - interruptions, heckling, attempts to throw objects at stage - came from "self-declared Indian patriots". They were allowed to speak but were asked not to disrupt the proceedings, he noted.
However, Mr Pandit, the Kashmiri activist present at the meeting, had a different view.
"Openly, in the heart of the capital, Delhi, a call for the destruction of the Indian Union as a colonial, occupying state, a state that has subjugated people... had no business to survive. Such statements were made. A call to arms rang out from the podium repeatedly... by Arundhati Roy [among others]."
Getty Images Sushil Pandit, a Kashmiri pandit activist, participates in a protest demanding justice for the exodus of Kashmiri Pandit community who fled a rebellion in Muslim-majority areas in Kashmir valley during 1990's, in New Delhi, India on April 1, 2022Getty Images
Sushil Pandit, the main complainant, says Ms Roy, among others, made 'call to arms'
Over the past two decades, Ms Roy has written several non-fiction books and numerous essays on topics like nuclear weapons, Kashmir, big dams, globalisation, Dalit icon BR Ambedkar, meetings with Maoist rebels, and conversations with Edward Snowden and John Cusack.
The God of Small Things, a riveting family saga inspired by her family childhood, picked up the 1997 Man Booker Prize - a "Tiger Woodesian debut" gushed John Updike - and made Roy a celebrity writer at 35.
The 62-year-old author is also a polarising figure in India.
Admirers see her as a leading voice for liberal values and a champion of the marginalised.
Critics, however, have burned her effigies, disrupted her events, and she has faced charges of sedition and contempt, even spending a day in jail for protesting against big dams.
They find a lot of her non-fiction writings shrill, naïve, adolescent, self-indulgent and simplistic, peddling "picturesque poverty". One critic wrote that so often in her essays Ms Roy "never really gets to grips with the evidence".
Since Ms Roy's 2010 remarks, significant changes have occurred.
In 2019, Mr Modi's government revoked Kashmir's semi-autonomous status, dividing the region and reducing its political autonomy under direct federal control.
Many believe freedom of expression has also declined: since 2014, India has fallen from 150th to 161st in media freedom rankings by Reporters Without Borders, out of 180 countries.
Ms Roy has declined to comment on the latest development.
It is unclear if the police have investigated the allegations or have evidence against her and the other accused.
Two individuals named in the original complaint have passed away. But one thing is certain. If one of India's most feted writers faces imprisonment under a draconian anti-terror law, it will ignite global condemnation and outrage.
MY SEDITIOUS HEART
ARUNDHATI ROY
1,000pp. Hamish Hamilton. 30 [pounds sterling].
BY THE MID-1990S Arundhati Roy had already spent several years working on the manuscript to The God of Small Things. The novel originally grew out of some writing she had begun on a new computer, when she was "finding out what it could do", and was eventually published in April 1997, on the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence. Received with near-universal acclaim, it won the Booker Prize the following October and became a global bestseller, drawing comparisons with Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and transforming Roy into the face of an ascendant, market-friendly India striding towards the new millennium.
It was another twenty years before Roy published her next novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). The intermission was probably no bad thing; given the success of her debut, a second novel published soon after would almost certainly have disappointed. Besides, "what kind of book should I write?", Roy asked in 2002, when the growing "talk of nuclear war displays such contempt for music, art, literature, and everything else that defines civilization".
In the intervening years Roy turned her attention to journalism, commenting and reporting on politics, global affairs and the environment at a time when India, as she writes in My Seditious Heart, was beginning a "complicated waltz between corporate globalisation and medieval religious fundamentalism". In 1992, a year after the nation's borders were opened up to capital flows and corporate-sponsored NGOs, the government turned a blind eye to Hindu nationalists as they razed a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya. "Far from being antagonistic forces that represented Old and New India", Roy writes, economic deregulation and religious bigotry "were actually lovers performing an elaborate ritual of seduction and coquetry that could sometimes be misread as hostility". Indeed, the themes and rhetorical force of Roy's essays reflect the bitter disillusionments that followed the end of the Cold War, when expectations of a post-historical, liberal-capitalist paradise of peace, prosperity and democratic deliverance were punctured by the harsh realities of corporate exploitation, environmental abuse and religious fanaticism.
The essays in My Seditious Heart, gathered from the past two decades, are a stinging reminder of how self-serving these expectations were. Writing in 2008, the historian Tony Judt called the period after 1989 "the years the locust ate: a decade and a half of wasted opportunity and political incompetence". But another analogy for the era between the fall of communism and the present is the time of Frederick the Great's modernizing efforts in the eighteenth century. As Alexis de Tocqueville described it, "Beneath this completely modern head we will see a totally gothic body". Similarly, below the lustre of consensus politics, global governance, human rights, deregulation, financialized capitalism, economic uplift, guilt-free consumption, the further planetary extension of transport and communication networks, and the homogenization of national economies and cultures lurked the gothic half of post-1989 modernity.
My Seditious Heart sheds light on the twenty-first century's stygian blackness and shows that Roy is less a magical realist (a label she has always resisted) than a writer of gothic horror, documenting the grotesquery and daily barbarisms that roil below the surface of life's modern disguise. Roy best captures the juxtaposition of the modern and gothic in "The Ladies Have Feelings, So ... Shall We Leave it to the Experts?", a lecture she delivered in 2001:
As Indian citizens we subsist on a regular diet of
caste massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breaking
and fashion shows, church burnings and expanding
cellphone networks, bonded labour and the digital
revolution, female infanticide and the Nasdaq
crash, husbands who continue to burn their wives
for dowry and our delectable stockpile of Miss
Worlds ... In the lane behind my house, every night
I walk past road gangs of emaciated labourers digging
a trench to lay fibre-optic cables to speed up
our digital revolution. In the bitter winter cold, they
work by the light of a few candles.
With its themes and settings of ancestral curses, phantoms from the past, haunted houses, graveyards and menacing atmospheres, The God of Small Things was rightly called "gothic" by Parul Sehgal in the Atlantic. The literary scholar David Punter has also noted (in Empire and the Gothic, 2002) the "Gothic resonances" between the book, with its pages that are freighted with historical tragedy, and the theme of how "the past can never be left behind, that it will reappear and exact a necessary price".
If Roy's novels can be read as gothic fairy tales that speak of the world's horrors, then her non-fiction writings are horror stories about a world that we were sold as a fairy tale. My Seditious Heart collects over twenty years of Roy's furious broadsides against nuclear weapons, big dams, the disempowerment of peoples and the ecological catastrophes that attend the advance of globalization, as well as the ruin administered by the unfolding of American power across the Middle East. Closer to home, she has brought an acid pen to bear on Hindu nationalism, the caste system, the Indian army's brutal suppression of Kashmir, the apparent slavishness of her country's political representatives and their boosters in the corporatized media, and on how aspirations to democratic national self-determination collide with the demands of capital.
As Roy says in "Come September", a speech delivered a year after 9/11, her non-fiction writings are mostly about power, its paranoia and ruthlessness, and how "the accumulation of vast unfettered power by a state or a country, a corporation or an institution--or even an individual, a spouse, friend, or sibling--regardless of ideology, results in excesses". But the pieces in My Seditious Heart not only account for the accretion of power in the highest redoubts of neoliberal hegemony--governments, corporations and international institutions such as the IMF, WTO and World Bank--they also register the depletion of public power and the growing absurdities of representative democracy itself.
"What does public power mean in the Age of Empire?" Roy asked in 2004. "Does it mean anything at all? Does it actually exist?" The author laments the ideological vanishing point between political parties, as well as what she calls the "false consensus" of modern politics, which leaves voters with few genuine alternatives during elections. The Hindu nationalists may have been voted out of office that year, she said, but "even as we celebrated we knew that on nuclear bombs, neo-liberalism, privatisation, censorship, Big Dams--on every major issue other than overt Hindu nationalism --the Congress and the BJP have no major ideological differences". The same was true in the US: the election of John Kerry in the same year almost certainly would have ended the political careers of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but Roy thought it unlikely that his administration would have amounted to anything else but "Bushism without Bush".
For Roy, real politics, the land that enforces radical change, doesn't come from governments, nor from the "NGO-ization" of civil society, which makes "us dependent on aid and handouts". It instead comes from dissenting publics, from civil disobedience and mass resistance movements, which she sees as mobilizing throughout the world in a global fraternity of action. She points to a "globalisation of dissent", stretching from the landless people's movement in Brazil and the AntiPrivatization Forum in South Africa, to resistance movements fighting formal occupations in Palestine, Tibet and Kashmir. The corporate and military forces arrayed against these movements are formidable, and, as Roy argues, there "is no option, [by which she, presumably, means "alternative"] really, to old-fashioned backbreaking political mobilisation".
The presiding spirit of Roy's political and moral philosophy--as much as she can be said to have one in any coherent sense--is the Dalit intellectual and chief architect of the Indian constitution, B. R. Ambedkar, who entreated his countrymen to pursue "democracy not merely in form, but also in fact". Ambedkar's life and writings have been eclipsed by Gandhi--"the Saint of the Status Quo", as Roy describes him in "The Doctor and the Saint", the most subversive and intellectually precise of her essays. But Ambedkar's dire forewarnings about the consequences of inequality, and about how those who suffer from it will "blow up the structure of political democracy", hang like a shadow across every page of My Seditious Heart.
If Roy claims that power and powerlessness are the framing motifs of her work, this is only half the story. The book's opening essay, "The End of Imagination" (1998), is an excoriating response to India's nuclear tests conducted that year, and gives the essays in My Seditious Heart their unifying theme that is, the limited horizons under our existing mode of production. This is what the English writer and cultural critic Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism": "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it". From the 1990s, Roy has been lamenting a similar imaginative stunting, which has left us unable to envisage or even talk about living beyond a world "gone terribly wrong". (In a speech in New York's Washington Square Park in 2012, she praised the Occupy movement for having reintroduced "the right to dream into a system that tried to turn everybody into zombies mesmerised into equating mindless consumerism with happiness and fulfilment. As a writer, let me tell you, this is an immense achievement".)
"The point of a writer", Roy once said, "is to be unpopular", and there is no doubting her courage in taldng sides on contentious issues, which has often landed her in trouble with the Indian authorities, as well as the occasional stretch in prison. There is a directness to her prose that is distinct from the rhetorical flair and disjointed narrations in The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. "Language is the skin on my thought", she writes, and in her non-fiction her skin is wrinkle-free. While her novels deal in epic themes of love, loss, childhood, violence and families, her prose is compelling in a different way when explaining the processes of irrigation, the per unit cost of electricity, crop patterns, dam construction and the law--the texts and data amassed behind ordinary unhappiness. Instead of caution and pusillanimity, there is searing candour, as in these lines written shortly after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York:
The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling
card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message
may have been written by Bin Laden (who
knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could
well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims
of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea,
Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when
Israel--backed by the US--invaded Lebanon in 1982,
the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert
Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died
fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank. And
the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti,
Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican
Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists,
dictators and genocidists whom the American
government supported, trained, bankrolled and
supplied with arms. And this is far from being a
comprehensive list.
Roy's invective against Pax Americana is indicative of a more general impression that emerges from these essays, namely their historical specificity. Reading her attacks on American foreign policy is to be reminded of the highpoint of American unipolarity from the turn of the millennium. But there is something dated, almost unfashionable, about Roy's focus. It is certainly true that the US has led, promoted or underwritten coups, dictators, invasions, occupations, wars and shadow wars around the globe. And under Donald Trump, the country is still locked in what commentators refer to as "forever wars", and still possesses a vast complex of military bases overseas and a pervasive security apparatus at home.
But with the hopelessly mismanaged occupation of Iraq from 2003, the financial crisis of 2008, the ongoing quagmire in Afghanistan, and the rise of a geostrategically ambitious and economically competitive China, the pressing question is no longer necessarily that of the might and reach of American power but whether it is in fact stalled or in decline. And what might replace it.
There is a similar form of carbon-dating at play in what is missing from Roy's non-fiction gathered here, with little to no insight into the role of technology and social media in either subverting democracies or serving demagogues and populists who seek to undermine them. Surveillance states and the question of personal privacy are similarly absent; so, too, is AI and how it might ultimately create vast surplus populations that can be digitally managed and controlled (in a recent interview with Boston Review, Roy acknowledged that her non-fiction writing would have to be updated to account for how "new technology could ensure that the world no longer needs a vast working class").
Even Roy's prolific use of the term "globalization" feels a little of its time. It is not that she was wrong back then to talk about it, but it is no longer clear that we can learn much from that word. "Globalization" was the ultimate target of the anti-capitalist movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when it was easier to identify and fight corporate power because as individuals we weren't so complicit in its dominance over everyday life; a time when it was still possible to imagine an existence unmediated by the FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google). But brands and commercial interests have since made incursions into the most intimate recesses of our lives, so it is no longer clear where the dividing line is between domination and consent.
The best essays are those that show Roy descending from the more elevated heights of political analysis and onto more mortal terrain, travelling and documenting the communities facing India's deadly quest for progress and national self-assertion: families facing violent suppression in Kashmir, displaced residents of Harsud who destroy their own town before it is submerged by a reservoir, Maoists resisting the state in the forests of central India. In "Walking with Comrades", probably the finest essay of the collection, Roy writes how "in the forests of Dantewada, a battle rages for the soul of India".
An easy charge that has been levelled against Roy is that, for all her gifts as a storyteller, there is a depressing lack of sociological or philosophical heft behind her thought. There are few attempts, even in the context of when she was writing, to grapple with those fiercely contested concepts of "globalization" and "neoliberalism", nor does she make any real effort to prescribe alternatives to the free market. But not only is this slightly unfair to her she has never claimed to be anything other than a teller of tales--it's also a critique more accurately directed at My Seditious Heart than Roy's career as a political journalist. Read individually at the time, the essays were cogent volleys of indignation that shocked us into attention; read in one volume, cover to cover, Roy's relentless denunciations, against a fairly narrow range of targets, can be exhausting.
The essays might show their age, but the virtue of My Seditious Heart is how it carries a land of premonitory charge, a warning from the decade and a half after the Cold War that can be seen as the primal scene of our present discontents. The War on Terror, extraordinary rendition, torture, hyper-surveillance, "fake news" and dodgy dossiers, religious massacres, illegal wars, privatization and bailouts, climate change, authoritarianism, hardening police states and the narrowing of the democratic ambit--Arundhati Roy brilliantly documented all of this, and warned us that what came next might be worse.
Gavin Jacobson is commissioning editor at the New Statesman. He is working on a history of the 1990s
Caption: Mumbai, 2015
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Jacobson, Gavin. "The light of a few candles: Essays on the gothic half of post-1989 modernity." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6093, 10 Jan. 2020, pp. 16+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A631894235/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=56f59356. Accessed 27 Aug. 2024.
Arundhati Roy's first novel, "The God of Small Things," won the Man Booker Prize in 1997. Her second, "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness," was shortlisted for it. These books, written two decades apart, capture how India has changed. In addition to her fiction, Roy's political essays taught a generation of young Indian writers to think incendiary thoughts.
At a time when democratic values are under siege in India, as they are elsewhere around the world, Roy's analysis of issues like nuclear weapons, industrialization, nationalism, and more is essential to this moment. Roy spoke with the Nieman Foundation in February. Edited excerpts:
On whether India is still a democracy
Of course not. Apart from the laws that exist, like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act [1967 antiterrorism legislation to prevent unlawful associations and "maintain the sovereignty and integrity of India"], under which you have hundreds of people now just being picked up and put into jail every day, every institution that is meant to work as a check against unaccountable power is seriously compromised.
Also, the elections are compromised. I don't think we have free and fair elections because you have a system now of secret electoral bonds, which allows business corporations to secretly fund political parties. We have today a party that is the richest political party in the world, the BJP. Elections in India have become a spectator sport--it's like watching a Ferrari racing a few old bicycles.
In any case, a democracy doesn't mean just elections. First of all, India hasn't been a democracy in Kashmir or in Bastar [a district in the state of Chhattisgarh], or for the poorest of the poor who have no access to institutions of justice, who live completely under the boot of police and the justice system that crushes them with violence and indifference.
Now the oxygen is being taken away, sucked out of the lungs of even the middle class and even the big farmers, the agricultural elite.
On the role the media has played in the decline of India's democracy
None of this could have happened if it wasn't the media. Here you see the confluence of corporate money, corporate advertisement, and this vicious nationalism. You can't even call them media or journalists anymore. It would be wrong.
The only [legitimate] media that there is now is a few people who are online who are managing very bravely to carry on and a few magazines like Caravan.
I was recently listening to a very moving talk by this young journalist called Mandeep Punia who had just been arrested and beaten up. He was talking about how so many of his fellow journalists cannot be called journalists anymore.
They're just people who act out a script every day.
If you look at the media, the police--I'm sorry to say this, but it's almost diseased. [Politicians such as] Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, none of them would be anything but just some small-time hoods on the street if it wasn't for the media, I'd say. They have been built up and amplified by this unbelievably invasive, relentless propaganda machine.
On the role of the writer or the artist in democracies in crisis
It's been a question that's very interesting to me for as long as I've ever been a writer. To me, it's always been the case that I feel like you need to have eyes around your head. For example, if you look at what's happening with the farm protests now, how do you understand it, as a writer or as a human being?
The agriculture crisis is a real crisis. It wasn't created by Hindu fundamentalism. It was created by the Green Revolution when capital-intensive farming was introduced, and by the overmining of water, by the overuse of pesticides, by hybrid seeds, by putting in massive irrigation projects and not thinking about how to drain the water. So how do I make literature out of irrigation problems, or drainage, or electricity?
It's been something that I've been pretty obsessed with, understanding things which are not normally considered a fiction writer's business. To me, I can't write fiction unless I make it my business. You have to know how all these things intersect with each other. How does caste, or race, or class, or irrigation, or borewells affect what might seem like a clash between two communities?
On the writing process
I am a structure nerd. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I studied architecture, and that I always have been interested in cities, how they are structured and how they work, and how institutions in the city are built for citizens, and the noncitizens live in the cracks.
To me, if you look at my fiction or the nonfiction, even almost every nonfiction essay, it is a story.
It seems to be the only way I can explain things to myself. There is a mathematics to the way the structure works. To me, the structure and the language is as important as the story or the characters.
I don't think I'm capable of writing something from A to B. It has to take a walk around the park, and then come back to certain places, and then have these reference points. Structure's everything.
On the dangers to journalists, intellectuals, and activists in India
The thing is, what we first have to understand is how ordinary people--ordinary villagers, Indigenous people, women guerillas who've been fighting mining corporations, people whose names we don't know--have been dragged into prison, have been humiliated, even sexually humiliated. Those who have humiliated them have been given bravery awards. Look at the number who have been imprisoned, executed, buried in mass graves in Kashmir. All that violence that many Indians have accepted quite comfortably, even approved of, has now arrived at their doorsteps.
When you're a journalist, a writer, anybody whose head is above the water, you're already privileged in terms of someone's looking out for you. You have a lawyer. Meanwhile, we have thousands of people who are in prison who don't have any access to legal help, nothing.
Then you have a situation where, I'd say, the best of the best--I mean journalists, trade unionists, lawyers who defend them--are in jail. We know a lot of them are in jail for entirely made-up reasons. There are students in jail. The latest police trick is to make a charge-sheet that is 17,000 pages, 30,000 pages. You'd need a whole bloody library shelf in your prison cell to accommodate your own charge-sheet. A lawyer or a judge can't even read it, let alone adjudicate upon it, for years maybe. They are continuously arresting people, or threatening people with arrest. The harassment, even if you are not actually in prison, is unbelievable. Your life comes to a standstill.
On what gives hope
I have days of utter desolation and hopelessness, like millions of others here. But the fact is that when we develop a way of thinking and seeing, many of us end up being people who know that we've got to do what we have to do. Whether we win or lose, we're going to do it because we're never going over to the other side.
You've got to keep holding on to that, because that is what puts the oxygen in our lungs, that way of thinking, that way of not aggrandizing yourself to an extent where you think you can solve all the world's problems. You can't, but you can do something, so you just keep doing that something.
There isn't ever going to be an end to the chaos. But we have to be able to accommodate that chaos in our minds and be part of it, swim with it, absorb it, influence it, turn it to our purpose. The wind will change direction at some point, won't it?
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"'WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF MINI-MASSACRES': Man Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy on the state of India's democracy, the role of the media, and more." Nieman Reports, vol. 75, no. 2, spring 2021, pp. 12+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A678261363/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=799fac07. Accessed 27 Aug. 2024.
Under the provisions of a controversial anti-terrorism law, the Indian government is set to institute legal proceedings against novelist Arundhati Roy for comments she made more than a decade ago, according to the Guardian. In the 2010 comments in question, Roy said that the disputed territory of Kashmir is not an "integral" part of India. This caused her critics, and now the Delhi government of Narendra Modi, to assert that she was advocating secession of Kashmir. At 62, Roy is one of India's best known and most acclaimed authors; her 1997 novel, The God of Small Things, was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize. A Kirkus critic called it a "truly spectacular debut." Roy followed that book with just one other novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), devoting the bulk of her attention to human rights and environmental causes and publishing nonfiction books including Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014). Last Friday, the top official in the Delhi administration, V.K. Saxena, confirmed that the case will move forward. Roy and former political analyst Sheikh Showkat Hussain, both outspoken critics of the government, face prosecution together. According to author and journalist Siddhartha Deb, quoted in Democracy Now, "This case is so convoluted, it's hard to say where it begins and where it ends--and that's the point. The process is the punishment." Marion Winik hosts NPR's The Weekly Reader podcast.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/genres/fiction/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Indian Government To Prosecute Arundhati Roy." Kirkus Feature Articles and Interviews, 21 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A798605884/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7667ee37. Accessed 27 Aug. 2024.
Indian author Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter prize, according to a report in the Guardian. The announcement comes two weeks after Indian authorities confirmed that they would prosecute her for comments she made about Kashmir 14 years ago. The prize is given annually to a British writer or a writer resident in Great Britain who, in the words of Harold Pinter's Nobel speech, casts an "unflinching, unswerving" gaze upon the world. British actor and activist Khalid Abdalla, one of the judges for the prize, called Roy a "luminous voice of freedom and justice." Roy will receive the prize at a ceremony at the British Library in London in October, where another award will be given to a "Writer of Courage" selected by Roy from a shortlist. "I am delighted to accept the PEN Pinter prize," Roy said. "I wish Harold Pinter were with us today to write about the almost incomprehensible turn the world is taking. Since he isn't, some of us must do our utmost to try to fill his shoes." PEN International board member Salil Tripathi published an op-ed in the Guardian last week about the "hounding" of Roy by the Modi regime in India. "Pursuing someone as high-profile as Roy is the government's way of warning critics that they must not expect anything different," he wrote. "The sword hangs over the critics; Roy reminds us why the pen must remain mightier than the sword." The PEN Pinter Prize was first awarded in 2009. Previous winners include Salman Rushdie, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Margaret Atwood. Marion Winik hosts NPR's The Weekly Reader podcast.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/genres/fiction/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Arundhati Roy Receives the PEN Pinter Prize." Kirkus Feature Articles and Interviews, 27 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332388/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cb0cfddb. Accessed 27 Aug. 2024.