Noted writer and activist Arundhati Roy’s latest book “Broken Republic” and its Telugu translation “ధ్వంసమైన స్వప్నం” will be launched on 20th August in Hyderabad. Here is the invitation of this program
Friday, 19 August 2011
Arundhati Roy’s latest book “Broken Republic” and its Telugu translation
Noted writer and activist Arundhati Roy’s latest book “Broken Republic” and its Telugu translation “ధ్వంసమైన స్వప్నం” will be launched on 20th August in Hyderabad. Here is the invitation of this program
Thursday, 21 July 2011
Arundhati rules out movie based on her novel
THRISSUR: Novelist Arundhati Roy has ruled out selling the rights of her Booker Prize winning novel 'The God of Small Things' for making a film.She revealed this on the occasion of the release of film critic I Shanmugadas' book 'Shareeram, nadi, nakshathram' at the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Hall here on Wednesday.She said each reader had their own view about the novel and she did not want to spoil this by making a film on the novel. The Booker prize winner said that a number of Hollywood producers approached her seeking the rights of the novel. "I do not want the novel to be colonised by one imagination," she said. "The wide response to the novel shows that it was not just about Kerala. The Estonian translator of the book asked her, "How did you know about my early days?" Publishers in New York told the writer, "We all got aunts similar to Baby Kochamma (a character in the novel)."Meanwhile, the writer seemed to hesitate to take a claim on the book saying "'The God of Small Things' is not mine. It was born out of a 'collaboration' between me and the place I was living."Adivasis know that human beings alone do not constitute the world. There are flowers, bees and fishes. I don't think Karl Marx would have understood what it means to live in the present day world where 90 per cent of the fish have vanished from the seas, where plastic is dumped in oceans and fish are grown in factories."On her arrival at the Akademi hall, the BJP activists protested raising black flags against her recent comment on the Kashmir issue. Writer Sara Joseph and I Shanmugadas spoke on the occasion.
Source
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/arundhati-rules-out-movie-based-on-her-novel/169187-60-116.html
Source
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/arundhati-rules-out-movie-based-on-her-novel/169187-60-116.html
Monday, 18 July 2011
Arundhati Roy — Every day, one is insulted in India
After winning the Booker Prize in 1997, Arundhati Roy could have been a “pretty lady who wrote a book”. Instead, she took up a host of political causes . . . and fell out with her country’s elite.
Three years after Arundhati Roy published her first book, The God of Small Things, she cut off all her hair. The novel won the Booker Prize in 1997 and Roy had been hailed as a voice of an emerging nation, a literary heroine with a beautiful face, an Indian writer able to define the post-colonial imagination. Her own country revelled in her success - here was a photogenic ambassador for modern India, superpower of the future.
Knowing Roy as we do now, her reaction to the adulation seems predictable. She is a natural rebel, disdainful of mainstream popularity. There could be no way more visible to demonstrate her contempt than shearing off her long, dark hair. As she told the New York Times in 2001, she didn't want to be known as "some pretty lady who wrote a book".
Roy has not published any fiction since The God of Small Things, much to the impatience of the six million people who bought that book (and, you imagine, her agent David Godwin). Over the past 14 years, she has instead devoted her energy to India's most urgent political challenges: nuclear tests, dams, Kashmir, Hindu nationalism, terrorism, the emergence of a super-wealthy elite and the 800 million citizens who still live on less than Rs20 (30p) a day.
Roy's version of India is uncompromising. The country, she says, is in "a genocidal situation, turning upon itself, colonising the lower sections of society who have to pay the price for this shining India". Its leaders are "such poor men because they have no idea of history, of culture, of anything, except growth rates". The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, is a "pathetic figure as a human being". Democracy is thriving "for a few people, in the better neighbourhoods of Bombay and Delhi". The Indian elite are "like an extra state in America". The country has a defence budget of $34bn this year. "For whom?" she asks. "For us." In her account, there is a war taking place, not with Pakistan or China, but within India's borders: the sham democracy has turned on its poorest citizens.
There is something incongruous about listening to Roy talk in her gentle voice about the Indian state's campaign of violence as we drink tea in a five-star Westminster hotel. She sits in an upholstered chair, legs delicately folded beneath her, a grey shawl wrapped around her shoulders. But then incongruity seems to be one of Roy's closer companions. She prefers to be at odds with convention, to confound expectations. "There are people who have comfortable relationships with power and people with natural antagonism to power," she says. "I think it's easy to guess where I am in that."
Roy has not limited her antagonism to India: over the years, she has lambasted US foreign policy, accused Israel of war crimes and called for the Sri Lankan government to be investigated for genocide. But her most recent book, Broken Republic, is a return to the heart of her country. In the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, she says, the government is waging war on forest-dwelling tribal people in order to gain access to the land's mineral wealth (the mountains are full of bauxite, coal and iron ore).
Of the three essays in the book, it is the second - "Walking With Comrades" - that has garnered the most attention. Roy describes her secretive journey into the Chhattisgarh forests guided by a militant resistance group of Maoist rebels who fight the Indian army and police on behalf of the indigenous population. The piece opens dramatically - the flourish of an accomplished storyteller - with a note slipped under Roy's door, inviting her to meet the rebels in the town of Dantewada at one of four specific times. She is told she must carry a camera and a coconut to identify herself.
Over three weeks, Roy follows the Maoists through the forest, sleeping in their makeshift open-air camps under the stars. The rebels become her friends and, at times, the object of her awe ("there is a sea of people, the most wild, beautiful people"). She ends the piece with her departure: "When I looked back, they were still there. Waving. A little knot," she writes. "People who live with their dreams, while the rest of the world lives with its nightmares. Every night I think of this journey."
It is a typical passage in Roy's non-fiction - heightened emotion, the sense of a life experienced at extremes, populated by a cast of heroes and villains. She is beguiled by the Maoists, whom the Indian media and politicians vilify for their brutal resistance (the group has abducted and murdered villagers, including children, as well as frequently killing policemen and members of the security forces). Roy acknowledges their violence in her book, saying of the wider Maoist movement that "it's impossible to defend much of what they've done". But her sympathies rest with the individual activists she meets in Chhattisgarh and she has no problem, in principle, with their methods. Even though Roy identifies with Mahatma Gandhi's vision of self-reliance, she sees his advocacy of non-violent resistance as little more than "pious humbug".
The book, she says now, was "accidental". Roy does not work to commission; she has no interest in following anyone else's agenda. She writes according to instinct. "It's not some project-driven life, you know, where you're like: 'Oh, let me go to England and promote my new book,'" she tells me. "All my books are accidental books - they come from reacting to things and thinking about things and engaging in a real way. They are not about, 'Oh, did it get a good review in the Guardian?' I don't care."
Instead she wants her work to mean something to the disenfranchised constituency to which she attempts to give a voice. "All these essays, they've been translated into every Indian language and sold, made into pamphlets. I've had people in villages telling me that they sleep with 'Walking With Comrades'."
After Roy left the forest, she received a note from one of the rebels. She has memorised it, and recites the message in Hindi before translating it for my benefit: "After you wrote [your article], there was a wave of happiness that went through the forest." That simple line, she says, meant "more than any book or prize or good review - anything".
The prize counts, though. Roy would not find a publisher, let alone an audience, for her non-fiction if she had not won a prestigious literary award for her novel. "She's well aware her profile comes from the Booker," Simon Prosser, her editor at Penguin, tells me. "She often says that prizes and money don't really matter to her, but I think what does matter to her is using that position to get her message across." Prosser acknowledges that there are far fewer people who would want to read her analysis of the state of modern India than would buy her next work of fiction, and yet he is committed to publishing her political writing, placing her in the same bracket as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. These, he says, are writers who are "very different in style, but belong together in terms of their passion and their selflessness".
Bugbear of the rich
Where does rebellion begin? Not just teenage rebellion - the casual flouting of parental authority - but lifelong dedication to resistance, to wrangling with power wherever and whenever you encounter it. Roy says she spent her early years "terrified of being stuck". She was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, in north-eastern India, in 1961 and grew up in Aymanam in Kerala (where The God of Small Things is partly set), but was horrified at the thought of a future spent in a traditional rural community. So she escaped, moving to Delhi when she was 16 to study architecture.
She has an unconventional family history: her mother, Mary, who set up a school in Kerala, was to some degree an outcast in their Christian community after marrying a Hindu (Roy's father) and then quickly divorcing him. In old age, her mother has not lost her defiance. In "Walking With Comrades" Roy describes her mother calling her the day before she travelled to the forest: "'I've been thinking,' she said, with a mother's weird instinct, 'what this country needs is a revolution.'"
Roy's own revolutionary spirit is only fired by the enmity she encounters at home. "Every day," she says, almost proudly, "one is insulted in India." Last October, she was charged with sedition for a speech she made about the disputed territory of Kashmir at a seminar in New Delhi. The complaint was lodged by an advertising executive, Sushil Pandit, an associate of the leadership of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
A month later, the women's wing of the BJP attacked and vandalised Roy's house, filmed by a crew from the cable channel Times Now (which Roy has described as "Fox News on acid"). The crew had mysteriously arrived before the party activists. Such ties - threaded between business, politics and media - are common among the Indian elite, and Roy has become a primary target.
The novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra - the first to champion The God of Small Things after Roy sent him the manuscript - worries for his friend. He describes over email a "culture of intimidation" in India: the open threats from right-wing television anchors, the "crazies" who launch court cases. They all seek to drive Roy out, just as they pushed the veteran artist M F Husain into self-imposed exile in 2006 (Husain died in a London hospital in June). Their hostility is so feverish, he says, because they feel betrayed. The woman the elite of India once declared their literary icon "turned rogue" and, more to the point, turned on them.
But, he insists, their opposition is not representative. Her enemies, Mishra says, are "the Facebooking and Twittering elites, who naturally dislike her and who manage to amplify their dislike more loudly than the many more Indians from much less visible and influential classes who find her a valuable, even indispensable, critical voice". He believes you need to see Roy in a village, a small town, somewhere far from the television studios and affluent neighbourhoods of Mumbai and Delhi, in one of the thousands of places where they have no access to a computer, let alone the internet, to understand how beloved she is among the wider Indian population.
It would be simple to leave it at that: Roy as a woman of the people, loathed by the rich and powerful whose hypocrisy and cruelty she exposes. But fellow writers and activists have also struggled with her polemical stance, even when they have supported her cause. In 2000, Ramachandra Guha, a leading academic and author, wrote an essay in the Hindu newspaper criticising her campaign against the construction of the Narmada Dam in Gujarat (which, Roy said, was going to displace half a million local people). Guha suggested that Roy was careless and lacked judgement, and that her advocacy had undermined the fight against the dam, serving only as a distraction. She accused him in turn of being out of touch, a "creature that didn't make it into the Ark".
When I contacted Guha, he was reluctant to speak about Roy, saying he had nothing further to add. But his argument has been taken up by other Indian academics, such as Jyotirmaya Sharma, a political scientist at the University of Hyderabad and former senior editor of the Times of India. Sharma agrees with Roy in principle: the issues she raises, he tells me on the phone, "are first-rate". Like Roy, he believes that large parts of the Indian state are essentially criminal in their behaviour. Yet he cannot abide the way she chooses to frame her argument, or the tone - "sanctimonious, pompous, holier than thou" - in which she expresses it. She contributes nothing, he says, to proper public debate other than cooking up a controversy in which she is the central player, "people saying we love her, we hate her". "You cannot talk to the woman," he says, so overbearing is her self-righteousness.
As for the substance of her recent book, he thinks she is simply wrong in the romantic picture she paints of the Maoists, who in his view are as criminal in their actions as the government. In conclusion, he argues that "she's the Tony Benn of India". I suggest that in Britain this might well be taken as a compliment. Sharma pauses amid his rising fury and mutters, "Relics have their uses."
Sharma's bluster is typical of Roy's intellectual critics. Some put it down to professional jealousy - she is one of the few anti-establishment figures from India heard and read intently by a large international audience. This means, crucially, that she is paid well for work that would normally be found languishing in undersubscribed journals in her home country. Sharma would dismiss the notion that he craves her celebrity and success, but you can't help but wonder - as he scorns her choice to live in an upmarket neighbourhood of Delhi - if he might not like to live there, too.
Insider on the outside
Roy's commitment to prolonged protest has not made her life easy. There are the threats, attacks and legal actions, but there is also personal sacrifice. Although she mocks Gandhi, she seems to share elements of his self-denial. Her first marriage, to the architect Gerard da Cunha, broke down and her second (in 1984), to the film-maker Pradip Krishen, is complicated: the couple live separately. She tells me the pressure she feels, both from herself and externally, is exhausting and affects "everything in my life, everything!" - including her "most personal relationships".
To live her life, immersed in activism at the most local level and in subjects that are difficult and unpopular, is in part to cut yourself off. It is also to renounce the comfortable lot of a successful novelist. That is what Prosser means when he speaks of her selflessness. She spends her time travelling across India, talking and meeting with activists, not frittering her evenings away at literary parties.
Yet in some ways that kind of dedication is as selfish as it is selfless: it is pursued in a singular way, perhaps at the expense of those close to her. Roy is puzzled by her predicament. "How do you draw the line," she asks, "between how much you can give and be effective? Because you don't want to become some exhausted, pathetic martyr to something and you don't want to bore yourself, either."
For Roy, to be a writer is by definition to offer yourself up to the cause. "You are not somebody on the outside, commenting," she says dismissively. She can read a piece of work and know within "three paragraphs" if the writer is serious or if it is merely a project, the labour of someone who wants to be seen to be engaged. She knows instantly whether they are "outside or inside" their subject.
Being on the inside is fundamental to Roy, but it is not always straightforward. To what extent can a wealthy, Delhi-living author inhabit the condition of an indigenous rural population? “I know that my comrades are glad that I have some resources . . . that I can politically deploy," she says. "It doesn't help them if I stay in the forest, you know."
In her view, writers should be part of the struggle. Roy deplores what she describes as a "terrible shift" that has occurred in the perception of both the purpose of writing and the position of a writer in society - how the writer is presumed to be a fringe player, a mere observer. Mishra says that, in India, the line between literature and politics is anyway more blurred. In the west, he mocks, "people go silent for years while working on a novel and then emerge to sign a petition or two".
In India, you cannot escape politics - it shapes your daily life and intrudes into your private world. And no one embraces that intrusion more avidly than Roy. "I see Arundhati writing on the run," Mishra says, "while deeply and consistently engaged with her world."
Roy, I think, would like that image - the way it reflects her dedication to the causes she espouses but is coloured by a flash of daring. When she lies in a forest, gazing at the stars and hearing the stories of her Maoist companions, she is as enraged by their plight as she is entranced by the wonder and mystery of her adventure. It is this romanticism that so irritates those critics who might otherwise share her politics. Yet it also displays the gift of a storyteller. She happily sacrifices her credibility among the intellectual elite in order to win respect among the people she wants to help.
There is no doubt about her fervour: it is not cynical and not just for show, but that does not mean it isn't riddled with contradictions. Roy has one foot in a five-star London hotel and the other in an Indian forest (where the night sky, she says, is like a "thousand-star hotel"); she lives in luxurious isolation in Delhi but comes alive in public meetings in small Indian towns. And she recognises, poignantly, that she is "too complicated" for the Maoists to belong fully to their cause.
“The whole skill," she tells me earnestly, "is deploying your voice from the heart of the crowd and yet insisting on independence, not as some individualist who wants to be a star but as an individualist who has a particular way of living, or thinking, or loving." As a statement, it seems to capture a conflict at her core: she is the insider on the outside, part of a movement and yet, as a writer, inevitably alone - the individual at the heart of a crowd.
Arundhati Roy's "Broken Republic" is newly published by Hamish Hamilton (£17.99)
Sophie Elmhirst is an assistant editor of the New Statesman
source:
http://www.newstatesman.com/asia/2011/07/arundhati-roy-india-book
Three years after Arundhati Roy published her first book, The God of Small Things, she cut off all her hair. The novel won the Booker Prize in 1997 and Roy had been hailed as a voice of an emerging nation, a literary heroine with a beautiful face, an Indian writer able to define the post-colonial imagination. Her own country revelled in her success - here was a photogenic ambassador for modern India, superpower of the future.
Knowing Roy as we do now, her reaction to the adulation seems predictable. She is a natural rebel, disdainful of mainstream popularity. There could be no way more visible to demonstrate her contempt than shearing off her long, dark hair. As she told the New York Times in 2001, she didn't want to be known as "some pretty lady who wrote a book".
Roy has not published any fiction since The God of Small Things, much to the impatience of the six million people who bought that book (and, you imagine, her agent David Godwin). Over the past 14 years, she has instead devoted her energy to India's most urgent political challenges: nuclear tests, dams, Kashmir, Hindu nationalism, terrorism, the emergence of a super-wealthy elite and the 800 million citizens who still live on less than Rs20 (30p) a day.
Roy's version of India is uncompromising. The country, she says, is in "a genocidal situation, turning upon itself, colonising the lower sections of society who have to pay the price for this shining India". Its leaders are "such poor men because they have no idea of history, of culture, of anything, except growth rates". The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, is a "pathetic figure as a human being". Democracy is thriving "for a few people, in the better neighbourhoods of Bombay and Delhi". The Indian elite are "like an extra state in America". The country has a defence budget of $34bn this year. "For whom?" she asks. "For us." In her account, there is a war taking place, not with Pakistan or China, but within India's borders: the sham democracy has turned on its poorest citizens.
There is something incongruous about listening to Roy talk in her gentle voice about the Indian state's campaign of violence as we drink tea in a five-star Westminster hotel. She sits in an upholstered chair, legs delicately folded beneath her, a grey shawl wrapped around her shoulders. But then incongruity seems to be one of Roy's closer companions. She prefers to be at odds with convention, to confound expectations. "There are people who have comfortable relationships with power and people with natural antagonism to power," she says. "I think it's easy to guess where I am in that."
Roy has not limited her antagonism to India: over the years, she has lambasted US foreign policy, accused Israel of war crimes and called for the Sri Lankan government to be investigated for genocide. But her most recent book, Broken Republic, is a return to the heart of her country. In the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, she says, the government is waging war on forest-dwelling tribal people in order to gain access to the land's mineral wealth (the mountains are full of bauxite, coal and iron ore).
Of the three essays in the book, it is the second - "Walking With Comrades" - that has garnered the most attention. Roy describes her secretive journey into the Chhattisgarh forests guided by a militant resistance group of Maoist rebels who fight the Indian army and police on behalf of the indigenous population. The piece opens dramatically - the flourish of an accomplished storyteller - with a note slipped under Roy's door, inviting her to meet the rebels in the town of Dantewada at one of four specific times. She is told she must carry a camera and a coconut to identify herself.
Over three weeks, Roy follows the Maoists through the forest, sleeping in their makeshift open-air camps under the stars. The rebels become her friends and, at times, the object of her awe ("there is a sea of people, the most wild, beautiful people"). She ends the piece with her departure: "When I looked back, they were still there. Waving. A little knot," she writes. "People who live with their dreams, while the rest of the world lives with its nightmares. Every night I think of this journey."
It is a typical passage in Roy's non-fiction - heightened emotion, the sense of a life experienced at extremes, populated by a cast of heroes and villains. She is beguiled by the Maoists, whom the Indian media and politicians vilify for their brutal resistance (the group has abducted and murdered villagers, including children, as well as frequently killing policemen and members of the security forces). Roy acknowledges their violence in her book, saying of the wider Maoist movement that "it's impossible to defend much of what they've done". But her sympathies rest with the individual activists she meets in Chhattisgarh and she has no problem, in principle, with their methods. Even though Roy identifies with Mahatma Gandhi's vision of self-reliance, she sees his advocacy of non-violent resistance as little more than "pious humbug".
The book, she says now, was "accidental". Roy does not work to commission; she has no interest in following anyone else's agenda. She writes according to instinct. "It's not some project-driven life, you know, where you're like: 'Oh, let me go to England and promote my new book,'" she tells me. "All my books are accidental books - they come from reacting to things and thinking about things and engaging in a real way. They are not about, 'Oh, did it get a good review in the Guardian?' I don't care."
Instead she wants her work to mean something to the disenfranchised constituency to which she attempts to give a voice. "All these essays, they've been translated into every Indian language and sold, made into pamphlets. I've had people in villages telling me that they sleep with 'Walking With Comrades'."
After Roy left the forest, she received a note from one of the rebels. She has memorised it, and recites the message in Hindi before translating it for my benefit: "After you wrote [your article], there was a wave of happiness that went through the forest." That simple line, she says, meant "more than any book or prize or good review - anything".
The prize counts, though. Roy would not find a publisher, let alone an audience, for her non-fiction if she had not won a prestigious literary award for her novel. "She's well aware her profile comes from the Booker," Simon Prosser, her editor at Penguin, tells me. "She often says that prizes and money don't really matter to her, but I think what does matter to her is using that position to get her message across." Prosser acknowledges that there are far fewer people who would want to read her analysis of the state of modern India than would buy her next work of fiction, and yet he is committed to publishing her political writing, placing her in the same bracket as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. These, he says, are writers who are "very different in style, but belong together in terms of their passion and their selflessness".
Bugbear of the rich
Where does rebellion begin? Not just teenage rebellion - the casual flouting of parental authority - but lifelong dedication to resistance, to wrangling with power wherever and whenever you encounter it. Roy says she spent her early years "terrified of being stuck". She was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, in north-eastern India, in 1961 and grew up in Aymanam in Kerala (where The God of Small Things is partly set), but was horrified at the thought of a future spent in a traditional rural community. So she escaped, moving to Delhi when she was 16 to study architecture.
She has an unconventional family history: her mother, Mary, who set up a school in Kerala, was to some degree an outcast in their Christian community after marrying a Hindu (Roy's father) and then quickly divorcing him. In old age, her mother has not lost her defiance. In "Walking With Comrades" Roy describes her mother calling her the day before she travelled to the forest: "'I've been thinking,' she said, with a mother's weird instinct, 'what this country needs is a revolution.'"
Roy's own revolutionary spirit is only fired by the enmity she encounters at home. "Every day," she says, almost proudly, "one is insulted in India." Last October, she was charged with sedition for a speech she made about the disputed territory of Kashmir at a seminar in New Delhi. The complaint was lodged by an advertising executive, Sushil Pandit, an associate of the leadership of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
A month later, the women's wing of the BJP attacked and vandalised Roy's house, filmed by a crew from the cable channel Times Now (which Roy has described as "Fox News on acid"). The crew had mysteriously arrived before the party activists. Such ties - threaded between business, politics and media - are common among the Indian elite, and Roy has become a primary target.
The novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra - the first to champion The God of Small Things after Roy sent him the manuscript - worries for his friend. He describes over email a "culture of intimidation" in India: the open threats from right-wing television anchors, the "crazies" who launch court cases. They all seek to drive Roy out, just as they pushed the veteran artist M F Husain into self-imposed exile in 2006 (Husain died in a London hospital in June). Their hostility is so feverish, he says, because they feel betrayed. The woman the elite of India once declared their literary icon "turned rogue" and, more to the point, turned on them.
But, he insists, their opposition is not representative. Her enemies, Mishra says, are "the Facebooking and Twittering elites, who naturally dislike her and who manage to amplify their dislike more loudly than the many more Indians from much less visible and influential classes who find her a valuable, even indispensable, critical voice". He believes you need to see Roy in a village, a small town, somewhere far from the television studios and affluent neighbourhoods of Mumbai and Delhi, in one of the thousands of places where they have no access to a computer, let alone the internet, to understand how beloved she is among the wider Indian population.
It would be simple to leave it at that: Roy as a woman of the people, loathed by the rich and powerful whose hypocrisy and cruelty she exposes. But fellow writers and activists have also struggled with her polemical stance, even when they have supported her cause. In 2000, Ramachandra Guha, a leading academic and author, wrote an essay in the Hindu newspaper criticising her campaign against the construction of the Narmada Dam in Gujarat (which, Roy said, was going to displace half a million local people). Guha suggested that Roy was careless and lacked judgement, and that her advocacy had undermined the fight against the dam, serving only as a distraction. She accused him in turn of being out of touch, a "creature that didn't make it into the Ark".
When I contacted Guha, he was reluctant to speak about Roy, saying he had nothing further to add. But his argument has been taken up by other Indian academics, such as Jyotirmaya Sharma, a political scientist at the University of Hyderabad and former senior editor of the Times of India. Sharma agrees with Roy in principle: the issues she raises, he tells me on the phone, "are first-rate". Like Roy, he believes that large parts of the Indian state are essentially criminal in their behaviour. Yet he cannot abide the way she chooses to frame her argument, or the tone - "sanctimonious, pompous, holier than thou" - in which she expresses it. She contributes nothing, he says, to proper public debate other than cooking up a controversy in which she is the central player, "people saying we love her, we hate her". "You cannot talk to the woman," he says, so overbearing is her self-righteousness.
As for the substance of her recent book, he thinks she is simply wrong in the romantic picture she paints of the Maoists, who in his view are as criminal in their actions as the government. In conclusion, he argues that "she's the Tony Benn of India". I suggest that in Britain this might well be taken as a compliment. Sharma pauses amid his rising fury and mutters, "Relics have their uses."
Sharma's bluster is typical of Roy's intellectual critics. Some put it down to professional jealousy - she is one of the few anti-establishment figures from India heard and read intently by a large international audience. This means, crucially, that she is paid well for work that would normally be found languishing in undersubscribed journals in her home country. Sharma would dismiss the notion that he craves her celebrity and success, but you can't help but wonder - as he scorns her choice to live in an upmarket neighbourhood of Delhi - if he might not like to live there, too.
Insider on the outside
Roy's commitment to prolonged protest has not made her life easy. There are the threats, attacks and legal actions, but there is also personal sacrifice. Although she mocks Gandhi, she seems to share elements of his self-denial. Her first marriage, to the architect Gerard da Cunha, broke down and her second (in 1984), to the film-maker Pradip Krishen, is complicated: the couple live separately. She tells me the pressure she feels, both from herself and externally, is exhausting and affects "everything in my life, everything!" - including her "most personal relationships".
To live her life, immersed in activism at the most local level and in subjects that are difficult and unpopular, is in part to cut yourself off. It is also to renounce the comfortable lot of a successful novelist. That is what Prosser means when he speaks of her selflessness. She spends her time travelling across India, talking and meeting with activists, not frittering her evenings away at literary parties.
Yet in some ways that kind of dedication is as selfish as it is selfless: it is pursued in a singular way, perhaps at the expense of those close to her. Roy is puzzled by her predicament. "How do you draw the line," she asks, "between how much you can give and be effective? Because you don't want to become some exhausted, pathetic martyr to something and you don't want to bore yourself, either."
For Roy, to be a writer is by definition to offer yourself up to the cause. "You are not somebody on the outside, commenting," she says dismissively. She can read a piece of work and know within "three paragraphs" if the writer is serious or if it is merely a project, the labour of someone who wants to be seen to be engaged. She knows instantly whether they are "outside or inside" their subject.
Being on the inside is fundamental to Roy, but it is not always straightforward. To what extent can a wealthy, Delhi-living author inhabit the condition of an indigenous rural population? “I know that my comrades are glad that I have some resources . . . that I can politically deploy," she says. "It doesn't help them if I stay in the forest, you know."
In her view, writers should be part of the struggle. Roy deplores what she describes as a "terrible shift" that has occurred in the perception of both the purpose of writing and the position of a writer in society - how the writer is presumed to be a fringe player, a mere observer. Mishra says that, in India, the line between literature and politics is anyway more blurred. In the west, he mocks, "people go silent for years while working on a novel and then emerge to sign a petition or two".
In India, you cannot escape politics - it shapes your daily life and intrudes into your private world. And no one embraces that intrusion more avidly than Roy. "I see Arundhati writing on the run," Mishra says, "while deeply and consistently engaged with her world."
Roy, I think, would like that image - the way it reflects her dedication to the causes she espouses but is coloured by a flash of daring. When she lies in a forest, gazing at the stars and hearing the stories of her Maoist companions, she is as enraged by their plight as she is entranced by the wonder and mystery of her adventure. It is this romanticism that so irritates those critics who might otherwise share her politics. Yet it also displays the gift of a storyteller. She happily sacrifices her credibility among the intellectual elite in order to win respect among the people she wants to help.
There is no doubt about her fervour: it is not cynical and not just for show, but that does not mean it isn't riddled with contradictions. Roy has one foot in a five-star London hotel and the other in an Indian forest (where the night sky, she says, is like a "thousand-star hotel"); she lives in luxurious isolation in Delhi but comes alive in public meetings in small Indian towns. And she recognises, poignantly, that she is "too complicated" for the Maoists to belong fully to their cause.
“The whole skill," she tells me earnestly, "is deploying your voice from the heart of the crowd and yet insisting on independence, not as some individualist who wants to be a star but as an individualist who has a particular way of living, or thinking, or loving." As a statement, it seems to capture a conflict at her core: she is the insider on the outside, part of a movement and yet, as a writer, inevitably alone - the individual at the heart of a crowd.
Arundhati Roy's "Broken Republic" is newly published by Hamish Hamilton (£17.99)
Sophie Elmhirst is an assistant editor of the New Statesman
source:
http://www.newstatesman.com/asia/2011/07/arundhati-roy-india-book
Sunday, 5 June 2011
They are trying to keep me destabilized. Anyone who says anything is in danger
by Stephen Moss
Sunday 5 June 2011
This is not an ideal beginning. I bump into Arundhati Roy as we are both heading for the loo in the foyer of the large building that houses her publisher Penguin's offices. There are some authors, V S Naipaul say, with whom this could be awkward. But not Roy, who makes me feel instantly at ease. A few minutes later, her publicist settles us in a small, bare room. As we take our positions on either side of a narrow desk I liken it to an interrogation suite. But she says that in India, interrogation rooms are a good deal less salubrious than this.
Roy, who is 50 this year, is best known for her 1997 Booker prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, but for the past decade has been an increasingly vocal critic of the Indian state, attacking its policy towards Kashmir, the environmental destruction wrought by rapid development, the country's nuclear weapons programme and corruption. As a prominent opponent of everything connected with globalisation, she is seeking to construct a "new modernity" based on sustainability and a defence of traditional ways of life.
Her new book, Broken Republic, brings together three essays about the Maoist guerrilla movement in the forests of central India that is resisting the government's attempts to develop and mine land on which tribal people live. The central essay, Walking with the Comrades, is a brilliant piece of reportage, recounting three weeks she spent with the guerrillas in the forest. She must, I suggest, have been in great personal danger. "Everybody's in great danger there, so you can't go round feeling you are specially in danger," she says in her pleasant, high-pitched voice. In any case, she says, the violence of bullets and torture are no greater than the violence of hunger and malnutrition, of vulnerable people feeling they're under siege.
Her time with the guerrillas made a profound impression. She describes spending nights sleeping on the forest floor in a "thousand-star hotel", applauds "the ferocity and grandeur of these poor people fighting back", and says "being in the forest made me feel like there was enough space in my body for all my organs". She detests glitzy, corporate, growth-obsessed modern Indian, and there in the forest she found a brief peace.
There is intense anger in the book, I say, implying that if she toned it down she might find a readier audience. "The anger is calibrated," she insists. "It's less than I actually feel." But even so, her critics call her shrill. "That word 'shrill' is reserved for any expression of feeling. It's all right for the establishment to be as shrill as it likes about annihilating people."
Is her political engagement derived from her mother, Mary Roy, who set up a school in Kerala and has a reputation as a women's rights activist? "She's not an activist," says Roy. "I don't know why people keep saying that. My mother is like a character who escaped from the set of a Fellini film." She laughs at her own description. "She's a whole performing universe of her own. Activists would run a mile from her because they could not deal with what she is."
I want to talk more about Mary Roy – and eventually we do – but there's one important point to clear up first. Guerrillas use violence, generally directed against the police and army, but sometimes causing injury and death to civilians caught in the crossfire. Does she condemn that violence? "I don't condemn it any more," she says. "If you're an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation."
Her critics label her a Maoist sympathiser. Is she? "I am a Maoist sympathiser," she says. "I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism. But right now, when the assault is on, I feel they are very much part of the resistance that I support."
Roy talks about the resistance as an "insurrection"; she makes India sound as if it's ripe for a Chinese or Russian-style revolution. So how come we in the west don't hear about these mini-wars? "I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers," she says, "that they have instructions – 'No negative news from India' – because it's an investment destination. So you don't hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it's not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting." I find the suggestion that such an injunction exists – or that self-respecting journalists would accept it – ridiculous. Foreign reporting of India might well be lazy or myopic, but I don't believe it's corrupt.
She sounds like a member of a religious sect, I say, as if she has seen the light. "It's a way of life, a way of thinking," she replies without taking offence. "I know people in India, even the modern young people, understand that here is something that's alive." So why not give up the plush home in Delhi and the media appearances, and return to the forest? "I'd be more than happy to if I had to, but I would be a liability to them in the forest. The battles have to be fought in different ways. The military side is just one part of it. What I do is another part of the battle."
I question her absolutism, her Manichaean view of the world, but I admire her courage. Her home has been pelted with stones; the Indian launch of Broken Republic was interrupted by pro-government demonstrators who stormed the stage; she may be charged with sedition for saying that Kashmiris should be given the right of self-determination. "They are trying to keep me destabilised," she says. Does she feel threatened? "Anybody who says anything is in danger. Hundreds of people are in jail."
Roy has likened writing fiction and polemic to the difference between dancing and walking. Does she not want to dance again? "Of course I do." Is she working on a new novel? "I have been," she says with a laugh, "but I don't get much time to do it." Does it bother her that the followup to The God of Small Things has been so long in coming? "I'm a highly unambitious person," she says. "What does it matter if there is or isn't a novel? I really don't look at it that way. For me, nothing would have been worth not going into that forest."
It's hard to judge whether there will be a second novel. The God of Small Things drew so much on her own life – her charismatic but overbearing mother; a drunken tea-planter father whom her mother left when Roy was very young; her own departure from home in her late teens – that it may be a one-off, a book as much lived as written. She gives ambiguous answers about whether she expects a second novel to appear. On the one hand, she says she is engaged with the resistance movement and that it dominates her thoughts. But almost in the same breath she says others have "picked up the baton" and she would like to return to fiction, to dance again.
What is certain is that little of the second novel has so far been written. She prefers not to tell me what it is about; indeed, she says it would not be possible to pinpoint the theme. "I don't have subjects. It's not like I'm trying to write an anti-dam novel. Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything." Has she been blocked by the pressure of having to follow up a Booker winner? "No," she says. "We're not children all wanting to come first in class and win prizes. It's the pleasure of doing it. I don't know whether it will be a good book, but I'm curious about how and what I will write after these journeys."
Are her agent and publisher disappointed still to be waiting for the second novel? "They always knew there wasn't going to be some novel-producing factory," she says. "I was very clear about that. I don't see the point. I did something. I enjoyed doing it. I'm doing something now. I'm living to the edges of my fingernails, using everything I have. It's impossible for me to look at things politically or in any way as a project, to further my career. You're injected directly into the blood of the places in which you're living and what's going on there."
She has no financial need to write another novel. The God of Small Things, which sold more than 6m copies around the world, set her up for life, even though she has given much of the money away. She even spurned offers for the film rights, because she didn't want anyone interpreting her book for the screen. "Every reader has a vision of it in their head," she says, "and I didn't want it to be one film." She is strong-willed. Back in 1996, when The God of Small Things was being prepared for publication, she insisted on having control of the cover image because she didn't want "a jacket with tigers and ladies in saris". She is her indomitable mother's daughter.
I insist she tell me more about her Fellini-esque mother. She is, says Roy, like an empress. She has a number of buttons beside her bed which, when you press them, emit different bird calls. Each call signals to one of her retinue what she requires. Has she been the centre of her daughter's life? "No, she has been the centre of a lot of conflict in my life. She's an extraordinary women, and when we are together I feel like we are two nuclear-armed states." She laughs loudly. "We have to be a bit careful."
To defuse the family tensions, Roy left home when she was 16 to study architecture in Delhi – even then she wanted to build a new world. She married a fellow student at the age of 17. "He was a very nice guy, but I didn't take it seriously," she says. In 1984 she met and married film-maker Pradip Krishen, and helped him bring up his two daughters by an earlier marriage. They now live separately, though she still refers to him as her "sweetheart". So why separate? "My life is so crazy. There's so much pressure and idiosyncrasy. I don't have any establishment. I don't have anyone to mediate between me and the world. It's just based on instinct." I think what she's saying is that freedom matters more to her than anything else.
She chose not to have children because it would have impinged on that freedom. "For a long time I didn't have the means to support them," she says, "and once I did I thought I was too unreliable. So many of the women in India who are fighting these battles don't have children, because anything can happen. You have to be light on your feet and light in your head. I like to be a mobile republic."
Roy has in the past described herself as "a natural-born feminist". What did she mean by that? "Because of my mother and the way I grew up without a father to look after me, you learned early on that rule number one was look out for yourself. Much of what I can do and say now comes from being independent at an early age." Her mother was born into a wealthy, conservative Christian community in Kerala, but put herself outside the pale by marrying Ranjit Roy, a Hindu from West Bengal. When she returned to her home state after her divorce she had little money and was thus doubly marginalised. The mother eventually triumphed over all these obstacles and made a success of the school she founded, but growing up an outsider has left its mark on her daughter.
Roy says she has always been polemical, and points to her run-in with director Shekhar Kapur in the mid-1990s over his film Bandit Queen – she questioned whether he had the right to portray the rape of a living person on screen without that woman's consent. It may be that the novel is the exception in a life of agitation, rather than the agitation an odd outcrop in a life of fiction-writing. But has she sacrificed too much for the struggle – the chance to dance, children, perhaps even her second marriage? "I don't see any of these things as sacrifices," she says. "They are positive choices. I feel surrounded by love, by excitement. They are not being done in some martyr-like way. When I was walking through the forest with the comrades, we were laughing all the time."
• This article was amended on 8 June 2011. The original said Mary Roy set up a school for girls in Kerala. This has been corrected.
Sunday 5 June 2011
This is not an ideal beginning. I bump into Arundhati Roy as we are both heading for the loo in the foyer of the large building that houses her publisher Penguin's offices. There are some authors, V S Naipaul say, with whom this could be awkward. But not Roy, who makes me feel instantly at ease. A few minutes later, her publicist settles us in a small, bare room. As we take our positions on either side of a narrow desk I liken it to an interrogation suite. But she says that in India, interrogation rooms are a good deal less salubrious than this.
Roy, who is 50 this year, is best known for her 1997 Booker prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, but for the past decade has been an increasingly vocal critic of the Indian state, attacking its policy towards Kashmir, the environmental destruction wrought by rapid development, the country's nuclear weapons programme and corruption. As a prominent opponent of everything connected with globalisation, she is seeking to construct a "new modernity" based on sustainability and a defence of traditional ways of life.
Her new book, Broken Republic, brings together three essays about the Maoist guerrilla movement in the forests of central India that is resisting the government's attempts to develop and mine land on which tribal people live. The central essay, Walking with the Comrades, is a brilliant piece of reportage, recounting three weeks she spent with the guerrillas in the forest. She must, I suggest, have been in great personal danger. "Everybody's in great danger there, so you can't go round feeling you are specially in danger," she says in her pleasant, high-pitched voice. In any case, she says, the violence of bullets and torture are no greater than the violence of hunger and malnutrition, of vulnerable people feeling they're under siege.
Her time with the guerrillas made a profound impression. She describes spending nights sleeping on the forest floor in a "thousand-star hotel", applauds "the ferocity and grandeur of these poor people fighting back", and says "being in the forest made me feel like there was enough space in my body for all my organs". She detests glitzy, corporate, growth-obsessed modern Indian, and there in the forest she found a brief peace.
There is intense anger in the book, I say, implying that if she toned it down she might find a readier audience. "The anger is calibrated," she insists. "It's less than I actually feel." But even so, her critics call her shrill. "That word 'shrill' is reserved for any expression of feeling. It's all right for the establishment to be as shrill as it likes about annihilating people."
Is her political engagement derived from her mother, Mary Roy, who set up a school in Kerala and has a reputation as a women's rights activist? "She's not an activist," says Roy. "I don't know why people keep saying that. My mother is like a character who escaped from the set of a Fellini film." She laughs at her own description. "She's a whole performing universe of her own. Activists would run a mile from her because they could not deal with what she is."
I want to talk more about Mary Roy – and eventually we do – but there's one important point to clear up first. Guerrillas use violence, generally directed against the police and army, but sometimes causing injury and death to civilians caught in the crossfire. Does she condemn that violence? "I don't condemn it any more," she says. "If you're an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation."
Her critics label her a Maoist sympathiser. Is she? "I am a Maoist sympathiser," she says. "I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism. But right now, when the assault is on, I feel they are very much part of the resistance that I support."
Roy talks about the resistance as an "insurrection"; she makes India sound as if it's ripe for a Chinese or Russian-style revolution. So how come we in the west don't hear about these mini-wars? "I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers," she says, "that they have instructions – 'No negative news from India' – because it's an investment destination. So you don't hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it's not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting." I find the suggestion that such an injunction exists – or that self-respecting journalists would accept it – ridiculous. Foreign reporting of India might well be lazy or myopic, but I don't believe it's corrupt.
She sounds like a member of a religious sect, I say, as if she has seen the light. "It's a way of life, a way of thinking," she replies without taking offence. "I know people in India, even the modern young people, understand that here is something that's alive." So why not give up the plush home in Delhi and the media appearances, and return to the forest? "I'd be more than happy to if I had to, but I would be a liability to them in the forest. The battles have to be fought in different ways. The military side is just one part of it. What I do is another part of the battle."
I question her absolutism, her Manichaean view of the world, but I admire her courage. Her home has been pelted with stones; the Indian launch of Broken Republic was interrupted by pro-government demonstrators who stormed the stage; she may be charged with sedition for saying that Kashmiris should be given the right of self-determination. "They are trying to keep me destabilised," she says. Does she feel threatened? "Anybody who says anything is in danger. Hundreds of people are in jail."
Roy has likened writing fiction and polemic to the difference between dancing and walking. Does she not want to dance again? "Of course I do." Is she working on a new novel? "I have been," she says with a laugh, "but I don't get much time to do it." Does it bother her that the followup to The God of Small Things has been so long in coming? "I'm a highly unambitious person," she says. "What does it matter if there is or isn't a novel? I really don't look at it that way. For me, nothing would have been worth not going into that forest."
It's hard to judge whether there will be a second novel. The God of Small Things drew so much on her own life – her charismatic but overbearing mother; a drunken tea-planter father whom her mother left when Roy was very young; her own departure from home in her late teens – that it may be a one-off, a book as much lived as written. She gives ambiguous answers about whether she expects a second novel to appear. On the one hand, she says she is engaged with the resistance movement and that it dominates her thoughts. But almost in the same breath she says others have "picked up the baton" and she would like to return to fiction, to dance again.
What is certain is that little of the second novel has so far been written. She prefers not to tell me what it is about; indeed, she says it would not be possible to pinpoint the theme. "I don't have subjects. It's not like I'm trying to write an anti-dam novel. Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything." Has she been blocked by the pressure of having to follow up a Booker winner? "No," she says. "We're not children all wanting to come first in class and win prizes. It's the pleasure of doing it. I don't know whether it will be a good book, but I'm curious about how and what I will write after these journeys."
Are her agent and publisher disappointed still to be waiting for the second novel? "They always knew there wasn't going to be some novel-producing factory," she says. "I was very clear about that. I don't see the point. I did something. I enjoyed doing it. I'm doing something now. I'm living to the edges of my fingernails, using everything I have. It's impossible for me to look at things politically or in any way as a project, to further my career. You're injected directly into the blood of the places in which you're living and what's going on there."
She has no financial need to write another novel. The God of Small Things, which sold more than 6m copies around the world, set her up for life, even though she has given much of the money away. She even spurned offers for the film rights, because she didn't want anyone interpreting her book for the screen. "Every reader has a vision of it in their head," she says, "and I didn't want it to be one film." She is strong-willed. Back in 1996, when The God of Small Things was being prepared for publication, she insisted on having control of the cover image because she didn't want "a jacket with tigers and ladies in saris". She is her indomitable mother's daughter.
I insist she tell me more about her Fellini-esque mother. She is, says Roy, like an empress. She has a number of buttons beside her bed which, when you press them, emit different bird calls. Each call signals to one of her retinue what she requires. Has she been the centre of her daughter's life? "No, she has been the centre of a lot of conflict in my life. She's an extraordinary women, and when we are together I feel like we are two nuclear-armed states." She laughs loudly. "We have to be a bit careful."
To defuse the family tensions, Roy left home when she was 16 to study architecture in Delhi – even then she wanted to build a new world. She married a fellow student at the age of 17. "He was a very nice guy, but I didn't take it seriously," she says. In 1984 she met and married film-maker Pradip Krishen, and helped him bring up his two daughters by an earlier marriage. They now live separately, though she still refers to him as her "sweetheart". So why separate? "My life is so crazy. There's so much pressure and idiosyncrasy. I don't have any establishment. I don't have anyone to mediate between me and the world. It's just based on instinct." I think what she's saying is that freedom matters more to her than anything else.
She chose not to have children because it would have impinged on that freedom. "For a long time I didn't have the means to support them," she says, "and once I did I thought I was too unreliable. So many of the women in India who are fighting these battles don't have children, because anything can happen. You have to be light on your feet and light in your head. I like to be a mobile republic."
Roy has in the past described herself as "a natural-born feminist". What did she mean by that? "Because of my mother and the way I grew up without a father to look after me, you learned early on that rule number one was look out for yourself. Much of what I can do and say now comes from being independent at an early age." Her mother was born into a wealthy, conservative Christian community in Kerala, but put herself outside the pale by marrying Ranjit Roy, a Hindu from West Bengal. When she returned to her home state after her divorce she had little money and was thus doubly marginalised. The mother eventually triumphed over all these obstacles and made a success of the school she founded, but growing up an outsider has left its mark on her daughter.
Roy says she has always been polemical, and points to her run-in with director Shekhar Kapur in the mid-1990s over his film Bandit Queen – she questioned whether he had the right to portray the rape of a living person on screen without that woman's consent. It may be that the novel is the exception in a life of agitation, rather than the agitation an odd outcrop in a life of fiction-writing. But has she sacrificed too much for the struggle – the chance to dance, children, perhaps even her second marriage? "I don't see any of these things as sacrifices," she says. "They are positive choices. I feel surrounded by love, by excitement. They are not being done in some martyr-like way. When I was walking through the forest with the comrades, we were laughing all the time."
• This article was amended on 8 June 2011. The original said Mary Roy set up a school for girls in Kerala. This has been corrected.
Saturday, 4 June 2011
Friday, 3 June 2011
Arundhati Roy
By Amy Kazmin
Published: June 3 2011 17:15
Published: June 3 2011 17:15
As a young girl, Arundhati Roy once raided her teacher’s garden in her native village in Kerala, the lush tropical state in the south of India. She dug up the carrots, removed the edible orange roots, then carefully replanted the green tops in the soil. It took four days for the greenery to wither and the crime to be discovered. The culprit was never identified.Roy tells this story on a sweltering night in May in New Delhi, at the India launch of her new book, Broken Republic. She argues that India’s much-touted democratic institutions now resemble the post-raid carrots in the teacher’s garden: the green tops, or external forms, are present and visible, but the substance, or essence, is missing.
Sitting with the Booker Prize-winning novelist and political activist the next morning, in her tasteful, spacious apartment, I ask her what triggered the garden raid. Was it payback for an offence committed by the teacher? “I must have wanted carrots, and it was just like, Why not mess with power?” she says, then throws back her head and laughs.
On the cusp of turning 50, Roy, once the poster-child of the new India and now its most vociferous, high-profile critic, is still messing with power. For the past decade, India’s establishment has been selling the world its story: of an emerging superpower and vibrant democracy that is enjoying rapid economic growth. Roy, meanwhile, has used her special way with words, and her fame, to challenge that narrative, creating a picture of a state serving only a rapacious middle class, and trampling the poor in its rush for high living and global status.
Her latest book focuses on India’s newest unfolding tragedy: its hidden war against Maoist rebels, who have established a firm foothold among the neglected tribal people of India’s heartland. New Delhi has ignored the tribal belt – and the hardships of its residents – for years. Now, though, the government, and India’s corporations, want to mine the minerals buried beneath the region’s soil – and are dismayed to find the Maoists in their way.
 |
| In Chhattisgarh State with Maoist guerrillas. She describes travelling with them as ‘some of the most amazing moments of my life’ |
In late 2009, Roy spent three weeks with the Maoist guerrillas in their “liberated area”, in Chhattisgarh State. Her experiences travelling with them – “some of the most amazing moments of my life,” she tells me – are at the heart of her new book. Her sympathetic depiction of the Maoists has provoked angry accusations that she is too starry eyed about a violent movement with no qualms about killing Indian troops. Yet she makes no apologies.
“For me it was such a wonderful thing to see those people standing up to the most powerful forces in the world,” she says. “There is such a romance in their resistance. I believe that, and I hope I never lose the capacity to allow romance into my life, without being frightened, and without trying to protect myself.”
 |
| Roy with Narmada dam protesters outside the Supreme Court in New Delhi, 2006 |
At the culmination of her journey with the rebels, she says she was reluctant to leave the forest. “I was so happy. I was saying, ‘Let me stay here,’ and they were saying, ‘No, you go. We can’t,’” she recalls. “I was in a forest, which I love being in, and it was real. It wasn’t some tourism, or some holiday. All the things that interest me were together there.”
We are far from the forest now, sitting face to face, curled up on the two corners of a sofa in Roy’s living room-cum-work space in one of New Delhi’s most affluent neighbourhoods. One wall is lined with books, and a large flat-screen TV. Elsewhere, the walls are adorned with a portrait of Howard Zinn, the late US historian; a poster that says “Stop Dams”; and a large photograph of a Maoist fighter, his weapon next to him.
A bowl of sliced mangos is brought out by the household help, and Roy invites me to share it with her. “Let’s eat mangos,” she says, sweetly. “There is nothing like mangoes. I once thought I would retire and eat mangoes in the moonlight and generally have a good time. Help yourself.”
. . .
Roy was raised by her mother, Mary Roy, a strong-willed, temperamental woman, who repeatedly violated the social conventions of her conservative Syrian Christian community in Kerala’s Kottayam District. First, she entered into a love marriage with a Bengali Hindu. Then she divorced him. She returned to her native village of Doty, in Kerala, with her children when Arundhati was one-and-a-half years old.
It was the early 1960s, and in the tight-knit, family-oriented Syrian Christian society, the mother’s transgressions marked out her children. “I grew up in a very frightening situation,” Roy says. “My brother and I were not accepted as members of that community … I was on the edge. It was like ‘nobody’s gonna marry you’. None of the assurances that normal families, and normal communities, offer their children was available to us. So there was always that questioning, that instinct to see things from the point of view of the most vulnerable.
“I was not indoctrinated the way normal Indian women are,” she adds. “Nobody had time to indoctrinate me. There was a direct relationship with the world; it was not mediated by any protection.”
At 16, Roy left home, coming to New Delhi to study architecture, and fend for herself in the big city. “I used to have chai with all the beggars, and they thought that I was from some drug cartel,” she tells me. “And I didn’t deny it because I thought, at least they’ll think I have some protection, I’m not just on my own. From there, you learn to ask the question from the bottom, as opposed to the top.”
 |
| In London, October 1997, receiving the Booker Prize for her debut novel, ‘The God of Small Things’, for which she was paid a £500,000 advance |
“I was shocked at how even musicians and painters were celebrating the nuclear test, and I could smell the fascism on the breeze,” she recalls. “Here was a chance to say something in a major way and, of course, to earn the hatred of everybody who had so celebrated me. I felt that if I didn’t do it, I would never really be able to write. You start censoring yourself. You start playing to some imaginary audience who you want to please, and it’s just finished.”
Since then, her fiction writing has been on the backburner, while she has dedicated herself to political activism, travelling to remote corners of the country, attending political meetings and writing essays on topics from India’s dam-building to its judicial corruption and its abuses in the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir. “You get drawn into a world where people realise, here is somebody who is not frightened of saying something. All of the last 11 years has been unplanned. It’s been a process of deepening your understanding,” she says.
In her political writing, Roy has been scathing in her description of India’s two-decade old economic liberalisation programme – which is widely credited with bringing unprecedented opportunities to many – and seemingly contemptuous of the emerging middle class.
Her diatribes have made her something of a hate figure for many Indian nationalists. There is also a feeling among a number of liberals and left-leaning activists, who have a concern for social justice – and for many of the issues she raises – that her strident polemics are too extreme. “I know I alienate people, but there isn’t any possibility of writing about these things where everybody is going to agree with you,” she says. “I am not scared of alienating the middle class. I am saying what I think. I know the entire establishment obviously disagrees with it, and would like me to shut up, or soften it or be more tactical, but I am saying things in a space that no one says.”
“When I write something, I have to spend a few days filtering out the fury,” she adds. “I don’t do anything to be deliberately provocative.”
Certainly there is plenty in India to be angry – even outraged – about. I ask tentatively whether she really feels that economic reforms have brought no benefits at all. I am thinking of the remote villages, and impoverished slum dwellers, now connected to a wider world by mobile phones. After a moment’s reflection, she answers.
“It’s as though you had this churning,” she says, slowly. “You had a feudal and very unequal society. In this churning, this thin milk separates into a thick layer of cream, and a lot of water that can be just slop. The thick layer of middle class that has been created becomes a great market. Suddenly, there are so many people who need cars and A/Cs and TV, and that becomes a universe of itself. Of course it looks great. Then there is this unseen thing that’s just being drifted off.”
Isn’t is possible that India’s growing middle class might begin to push for reforms that might make India’s democratic institutions function better – for all its citizens?
“You tell me one thing that a poor person in a village can do to get justice if something goes wrong,” she says, her voice rising slightly. “There is nothing they can do. If someone gets caught and then put into prison for five years for the wrong thing, do you think that a normal villager can do anything about it except swallow that shit and just live a life of nothing?”
Roy says she was delighted when India’s on-going telecommunications spectrum scandal came out, complete with leaked tapes of intercepted phone calls by a powerful corporate lobbyist showing the close interrelationship between India’s politicians, its companies and its media elite.
“It was like an MRI that confirmed our diagnosis of everything – the role of the media, the interconnectedness of judiciary, corporates and the politicians – it was laid bare,” she says. “While everyone was expressing shock, we were stretching out on the beach saying, ‘Wow, now we don’t have to work that hard.’” And then she giggles.
Extricating herself from activism won’t be easy. India’s army is building up its presence in the tribal areas and conflict is likely to intensify. After a relative lull in violence, two recent Maoist ambushes have killed 20 Indian troops. The government’s answer won’t be long in coming. Even now, as the interview winds up, Roy is preparing to rush off to a public meeting to speak on the growing crisis.
“I can’t stop thinking about that place, the people I met and what I saw – the violence and the hope – all of it together,” she says. “And I can’t easily tell myself that it’s very important for me to write another novel and give up on all this. It is not an easy thing to do – to just look away.”
Amy Kazmin is the FT’s South Asia correspondent. Arundhati Roy’s book ‘Broken Republic: Three Essays’ (Hamish Hamilton) is published on June 13.
Source:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1ed76814-8bf2-11e0-854c-00144feab49a.html#axzz1OFGV5Ci7
Saturday, 21 May 2011
The Penumbrates : ARUNDHATI ROY
The minister says that for India’s sake people should leave their villages and move to the cities. He’s a Harvard man. He wants speed. And numbers. Five hundred million migrants, he thinks, would make a good business model.
Not everybody likes the idea of their cities filling up with the poor. A judge in Mumbai called slum-dwellers pickpockets of urban land. Another said, while ordering the bulldozing of unauthorised colonies, that people who couldn’t afford it shouldn’t live in cities.
When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and quarries. Their homes were occupied by hunger, and policemen. The forests were filling up with armed guerrillas. War had migrated too. From the edges of India, in Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, to its heart. So the people returned to the crowded city streets and pavements. They crammed into hovels on dusty construction sites, wondering which corner of this huge country was meant for them.
The minister said that migrants to cities were mostly criminals and “carried a kind of behaviour which is unacceptable to modern cities”. The middle class admired him for his forthrightness, for having the courage to call a spade a spade. The minister said he would set up more police stations, recruit more policemen and put more police vehicles on the road to improve law and order.
To make Delhi a world-class city for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, laws were passed that made the poor vanish, like laundry stains. Street vendors disappeared, rickshaw-pullers lost their licences, small shops and businesses were shut down. Beggars were rounded up, tried by mobile magistrates in mobile courts and dropped outside the city limits. The slums that remained were screened off, with vinyl billboards that said DELHIciously Yours.
New kinds of policemen patrolled the streets, better armed, better dressed and trained not to scratch their privates in public, no matter how grave the provocation. There were cameras everywhere, recording everything.
***
Two young criminals carrying a kind of behaviour which was unacceptable to modern cities escaped the police dragnet, and approached a woman sandwiched between her sunglasses and the leather seats of her shiny car at a traffic crossing. Shamelessly, they demanded money. The woman was rich and kind. The criminals’ heads were no higher than her car window. Their names were Rukmini and Kamli. Or maybe Mehrunissa and Shahbano. (Who cares?) The woman gave them money and some motherly advice. Ten rupees to Kamli (or Shahbano). “Share it,” she told them, and sped away when the lights changed.Rukmini and Kamli (or Mehrunissa and Shahbano) tore into each other like gladiators, like lifers in a prison yard. Each sleek car that flashed past them, and almost crushed them, carried the reflection of their battle, their fight to the finish, on its shining door.
Eventually, both girls disappeared without a trace, like thousands of children do in Delhi. The Games were a success.
***
Two months later, on the sixty-second anniversary of India becoming a Republic, the armed forces showcased their new weapons at the Republic Day parade. Russian multi-barrel rocket launchers, combat aircraft, light helicopters and underwater weapons for the navy. The new T-90 battle tank was called Bhishma. (The older one was Arjun.) Varunastra was the name of the latest heavyweight torpedo, and Mareech was a decoy system to seduce incoming torpedoes. (Hanuman and Vajra are the names painted on the armoured vehicles that patrol Kashmir’s frozen streets.) That the names were drawn from Hindu epics was just a coincidence. If India is a Hindu nation, it’s only an accident.Dare Devils from the Army’s Corps of Signals rode motorcycles in a rocket formation. Then they formed a cluster of flying birds and finally a human pyramid.
Overhead, Sukhoi fighter jets made a trishul, a trident in the sky. Each jet cost more than a billion rupees. Four billion then, for Shiva’s Trident.
The thrilled crowd turned its face up to the weak winter sun and applauded. High in the sky, the winking silver sides of the jets carried the reflection of Rukmini’s and Kamli’s (or Mehrunissa’s and Shahbano’s) fight to the death.
The army band played the national anthem. The President drew the pallu of her sari over her head and took the salute.
Source: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?27190
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