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Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy
- by Jafar Abbas
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Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things (Random House 1977), which
won the Booker Prize, sold six million copies, and has been translated into 40 languages.
Born in 1961, Arundhati Roy grew up in Kerala. She trained as an architect at the Delhi
School of Architecture, but became better known for her scathing film scripts.
Publication of her first book The God of Small Things shot her to international fame. Roy
is the first non-expatriate Indian author and the first Indian woman to have won the
Booker Prize.
In keeping with her longtime interest in social issues, she has thrown herself into political activism. In the central and western states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat, a series of dams threaten the homes and livelihoods of tens of millions. A huge grassroots organization, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) has arisen to resist these dams, and Roy has joined it. Not only did she give her Booker Prize money (about $30,000) to the
group, she has protested many times with it, even getting arrested. Her devastating essay
on dams, The Greater Common Good, and her searing denunciation of India's nuclear
testing, The End of Imagination, have literally kindled bonfires. The upper class didn't
appreciate her critique of development, and the nationalists abhorred her for questioning
India's nuclear arsenal. (These two major essays comprise her latest book, The Cost of
Living, Modern Library, 1999.)
Arundhati is a no-nonsense, gutsy woman who speaks her mind. She says "a feminist is a
woman who negotiates herself into a position where she has choices." An unconventional
daughter of an unconventional mother she "had none of the conditioning that a normal,
middle class Indian girl would have". She says: "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".
"...my writing isn't self-conscious at all ...I rarely rewrite a sentence. That's the way I
think. Writing this novel was a very intuitive process for me. And pleasurable. ... For me,
books are gifts. When I read a book, I accept it as a gift from an author. When I wrote
this book, I presented it as a gift..."
"Indian intellectuals today feel radical when they condemn fundamentalism, but not
many people are talking about the link between privatization, globalization, and
fundamentalism. Speaking of the government, she says: "With one hand, you're selling
the country out to Western multinationals. And with the other, you want to defend your borders with nuclear bombs. It's such an irony!"
"It's so frightening, the nationalism in the air. I'm terrified by it. It can be used to do
anything. I know that a world in which countries are stockpiling nuclear weapons and
using them in the ways that India and Pakistan and America do to oppress others and
deceive their own people is a dangerous world."
"India lives in several centuries at the same time. Every night outside my house I pass a
road gang of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber optic cables to speed up our
digital revolution. ... In Delhi the cars are getting bigger and sleeker, the hotels are
getting posher, the gates are getting higher, and the guards are no longer the old
chowkidars, the watchmen, but they are fellows with guns. And yet the poor are packed
into every crevice like lice in the city. People don't see that any more. They don't want to
know what's happening. The people who are getting rich can't imagine that the world is
not a better place."
"... I think my eyes were knocked open and they don't close. I sometimes wish I could
close them and look away. ... But once you've seen things, you can't un-see them, and
seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something."
"Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being let loose into the world. ...
Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can hear the thrumming, the
deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger. Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people
have died. The smart missiles are just not smart enough. They're blowing up whole
warehouses of suppressed fury."
"... And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of what we know to
be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in
peanut butter and strawberry jam being air-dropped into our minds just like those yellow
food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we're hungry, or shall we stare
unblinking at the grim theatre unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and
say, in one voice, that we have had enough?"
"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?"
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