If we do not love people, what are we fighting for?

Arundhati Roy speaks at the Sharjah International Book Fair on 9^th November 2012.

She moved quietly and with grace. All eyes were on her as she made her way on to a stage in front of a packed hall in Sharjah. Her greying hair and petite figure draped in a simple red sari belied the vibrant energy she was known for. 

Arundhati Roy's presence at the Sharjah International Book Fair 2012 was greeted with applause – it was a success even before she said her first word.

Known for her fearless criticism of governments and corporate giants, the award-winning author was at the fair to talk about 'God of Small Things', her most famous work of fiction that won the Man Booker Prize in 1997.

The air was thick with anticipation. What would she say? Here was a woman disliked by both the ruling party and opposition – a rarity in India. The Indian government often called her a rebel, a woman against globalisation and progress. The UAE was about to find out if this was true or not.

After the formal introduction and welcome, she took to the stage with the interviewer. When talking about her book, Roy said she began writing it only because of a river in Ayemenem, where she grew up. As she described how she wrote it, a smile lit up her face, and she lyrically described a beautiful river lit by a 'broken yellow moon'. Right at the beginning, it was evident that Roy was a woman who used language to empower. Her easy yet refined rhetoric exuded a calm confidence.

Arundhati Roy wants to be the voice of the downtrodden. She has been working actively to eliminate the caste system in India. She said, “the caste system continues to be the engine that drives Indian politics.” 

In her own words, she writes about 'incredible bravery and profound struggles'. In the interview, Roy emerges as a deeply sensitive human being who cares about people and issues that others hardly even notice. And her cause is very personal. She has spent two and a half weeks in the forest with guerrillas, to write about them of the experience, she said that there was the expected fighting, but she spent most of her time with them just ‘cracking up’.

Writing fiction for her was a lonely affair. Maybe that’s why she enjoys writing about real issues and real people. She feels connected to the people of her country when she writes. But is she happy doing this? The answer is thought-provoking. “Happiness is a weapon,” and she doesn’t want to be a victim.

Roy’s opinions extend beyond India as well. As expected, she was asked for her opinion Obama’s second term. Contrary to all the cries of ‘better change’ that the world has been screaming, she doesn’t think that there will be any change – for the better. According to her, Obama increased attacks in Afghanistan two-fold. How, she wonders, could he stand on that stage, hugging his daughters and wife even as he rips apart thousands of families in other parts of the world?

There were many memorable moments during Roy’s talk. One of them was when she was asked what she thinks of wearing the hijab. Her response was received with a round of applause. “Removing the hijab off women who want to wear it is not liberating them, it’s undressing them.”

So who is Arundhati Roy? Is she a human rights activist? “I don’t believe in human rights,” she is quick to respond. For her, it is jargon – a term coined by NGOs and governments to ‘evade the real issue’. 

Is she a writer? Yes, but she is much more. She is an empathetic human being who takes other people’s problems seriously. And for the rest of us, she is a picture of hope. 

Someone who doesn’t make empty promises for a better world. Someone who acknowledges that there are many more unseen, unheard people working harder than she is. Someone who we can trust – because she is more about ‘doing’ than ‘talking. She isn’t a larger than life celebrity. Arundhati Roy is simply a passionate believer in change.

By Georgina Paul

The writer is a MA Media and Communications student specializing in Journalism at Manipal University, Dubai.

‘Fairy princess’ to ‘instinctive critic’

If you ignore her legion of detractors and her yearn for criticism, Indian author Arundhati Roy can be an interesting, even affable person. Seldom does her reputation fail to precede her before she walks into a room. But she says the reputation of being an instinctive critic has been crafted for her by what she calls a “corporate controlled press” The author was present at the Sharjah International Book Fair and spoke to a crowded hall of book lovers on Friday.

Though she says that she finds it hard to understand the term ‘‘human rights activist’’, Roy is known across the globe to be one of India’s most controversial writers, environmentalist and human rights campaigners.

Before turning to activism and being a staunch critic of India’s political structure, the now 50-year-old author won the Man Booker prize for her first and only fictional title The God of Small Things in 1997. Overnight, her novel became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author and catapulted her to a status of what she calls being “India’s fairy princess”. The novel is a tragic love story, which revolves around topics like politics, class relations, cultural tensions and social discrimination, which are issues still prevalent in India.

Fifteen years later, when Roy is asked if she would change anything about the book, her response is: “When I read it now, I do not have that urge to re-write or correct it. That isn’t because it’s a perfect book but it’s because I am not that kind of a person who wants to keep fiddling with something that I’ve already done.”

“But what I find myself constantly surprised by is the fact that the book which was written all those years ago deals with certain aspects of Indian life and society and these are things which continue to haunt me and enrage me. Here I am speaking of issues like caste system, poverty, the growing communist movement in India, the extreme left, and the naxalite movement.”

However, Roy believes that not much has changed with the political state of the country that was reflected in the book 15 years ago.

I have spent the last 15 years writing overtly political essays, but those concerned have not been able to deal with what is going on with the Dalit movement in India. Caste, ethnicity and religion continue to be the engine that drives Indian politics. These are things that continue to be uppermost on my mind,” said Roy.

Since her first book, Roy has gone on to write essays on several important issues that shaped India’s political, environmental and social history.

She is a strong critic of India’s nuclear policies, the Narmada dam project, the 2002 violence in Gujarat, and more recently she voiced her opinion against anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare.

Speaking about as to why she never forayed into writing fiction again, she said: “It took me four and half years to finish the God of Small Things and I’ve never been a particularly ambitious person.” After the release of the book in 1997, she said that she had become part of the ‘Miss Universe parade’.

“But I had the space to raise a dissenting voice and if I had kept quiet, I would not be able to write with any degree of honesty again. So, I stepped off the pedestal and overnight turned from being a Fairy Princess into a seditionist. How is it possible that Indian liberal intellectuals cannot stand up and take a moral position?”

Roy believes that she is far from being a hated figure that the media would like to portray her as. “I feel embraced, I feel loved and I feel I can go almost anywhere and say ‘can you give me lunch?”

However, Roy remained stubbornly tight-lipped about her next work of fiction saying only that she “hope(d) to finish a second book”.

Roy blames her instinctive writing tendencies in her DNA and said that she does not consider herself to be a “great, courageous person”.

“I cannot be preening and accepting accolades about my courage. I am doing what I do and I enjoy what I do, I don’t have a choice. I am a person of instinct. But when everything around is sizzling, bubbling and boiling and I feel like there is no space in my body for my organs anymore. I feel that it is harder to keep quiet than not to write.”

Roy said that through her non-fictional writing, she felt like she was a part of the people of her country. “Fiction is a lonely affair. But when I write non-fiction, I feel like I am a part of the people of my country, but not in a nationalistic way. I am not a nationalist in that sense.”

But yet, when she was asked to suggest an alternative state to India’s problems, she skirted around the issue and said that there was a structural flaw in the way Indians imagine themselves. “We need building blocks for a kind of intellectual honesty.”

The author interacted with the crowds and signed copies of her books for fans over the weekend at the event organised by DC Books and was also attended by Shaikha Bodour bint Sultan Al Qasimi, president of the Emirates Publishers Association, and Counsul-General of India Sanjay Verma among other dignitaries.

Source :
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?xfile=data/todayevent/2012/November/todayevent_November12.xml&section=todayevent

God of Small Things has a Tamil avtar

CHENNAI: Fifteen years after it was published in English, Arundhati Roy's Booker prize-winning novel 'God of Small Things' appears in a Tamil translation for the first time as 'Chinna Visaiyangalin Kadavul'. In a function at Chennai on Sunday, the translation by G Kuppuswamy was released by Roy. Tamil is the 39 language in which the book has been published.

Kuppuswamy, an inspector with the local fund audit department of the Tamil Nadu government, said he read the book 30 times as he set out to translate the work. Though he completed his translation book in 2005, it was only in January this year that Kalachuvadu, the publisher, got Roy's permission to release the book.

Source :
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-07-29/coimbatore/32923293_1_translation-god-chennai

Arundhati Roy on ‘Walking with the Comrades’

November 1, 2011 | by Anderson Tepper

Arundhati Roy’s 1997 Booker Prize–winning debut novel, The God of Small Things, helped transform her into an overnight literary celebrity and something of a poster author for the boom in Indian writing. (Billboards across the country trumpeted her Booker victory.) She followed up the novel, however, with a stinging essay condemning India and Pakistan’s nuclear showdown, entitled “The End of Imagination,” and set off, as she’s said, “on a political journey which I never expected to embark on.” She was soon taking up the pen on a range of issues—big dam projects that were displacing communities, India’s occupation of Kashmir, political corruption, and Hindu extremism. Suddenly, she was seen in a very different light at home: a voice of conscience, perhaps, but also a shrill and uncomfortable reminder of what lurked behind India’s democracy.
But perhaps nothing quite prepared her for the virulent response to her March 2010 cover story for the Indian newsweekly Outlook, an inside report from the jungle camps where Maoist insurgents (and tribal villagers) were locked in a deadly and drawn-out battle with government forces over mineral-rich land. “Here in the forests of Dantewada [in central India],” she writes, “a battle rages for the soul of India.” That article forms the centerpiece of her new collection, Walking with the Comrades, from Penguin Books; while Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, out now from Verso, also includes pieces by Roy as well as Tariq Ali, Pankaj Mishra, and others. She’ll be making two rare appearances in New York next month, at the CUNY Graduate Center on November 9th and the Asia Society on November 11th. I recently spoke with her by phone in Delhi.
 
Tell me about the reaction in India to your article “Walking with the Comrades.” I know it caused quite a stir and, as you say, landed in the flight path of a whole slew of debates, on both the left and the right.

Whenever my essays are collected into a book what is missing is the atmosphere in the country at the time when the original pieces were published. These essays came at a time when the government had announced Operation Green Hunt, calling on paramilitary forces to go into the jungle and very openly branding all resistance—not just the guerrillas, but really all across the board—as Maoist. They were picking up people by using laws such as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and Special Securities Act, in which thinking an anti-government thought is a almost a criminal offense. So when I went into the forest, my idea was that nobody really knew what was going on in there. These places were choked off; there was a siege on reporting. But what was real and what was not? I wanted to go in and deepen the story, to make it more human. But, of course, the idea that there are masses of people taking up arms caused a lot of anxiety among the right-wing. Among the people on the left—and India has a very long, complicated, and strong legacy of political and intellectual left-wing activity—many were absolutely outraged for a lot of reasons, mostly to do with old debates about whether organizing indigenous people qualified as Maoism, whether they are truly a revolutionary class, about the ideas of armed action versus entering the mainstream and standing for elections.

You make a point to contrast the guerrillas’ situation with that of Gandhi, for example. You even jokingly consider writing a play for their cultural wing called Gandhi Get Your Gun.

[Laughs] Well, I got into trouble for saying that, too! But it’s true that when intellectuals and academics debate the different kind of resistance movements, they don’t take into account the landscapes of these struggles. When I went into the forest, one of the things that struck me was that Gandhian nonviolence can be a very effective form of political theater but it can’t succeed without an audience. So whether it’s the occupation of Wall Street or somewhere in India, it has to have an audience. Deep inside these forests there was no one to bear witness.

You describe how you were personally invited by the Maoists to join them on their march through the forest and to see for yourself what was happening. As a writer, it was certainly a rare opportunity, though dangerous and even grueling. Tell me about what you discovered, what surprised you.

Perhaps what surprised me most was that I found that almost half of the guerrilla army was made up of women. It was a very interesting story, how the Maoists had first approached the tribal women when they went into these areas more than thirty years ago. I spoke to the women and they told me about why they had joined—most had witnessed the most horrible crimes against women by either paramilitary or vigilante organizations, while others had joined to escape patriarchal traditional societies. What was really interesting to me was how much, over many years, Maoism had influenced the indigenous people and indigenous culture had influenced the Maoists.

I want to ask you about your “political journey” of the past decade or more. Among Indian writers, you’ve come to occupy a unique place—not only have you remained in India, you’ve been extremely vocal and critical on a variety of national subjects. Is this a role you’ve embraced?

Yes, I have, but only reluctantly. You see, when you live here, inside of all of this, you end up writing to refuse to be humiliated.

In “Trickledown Revolution,” the book’s final essay, you describe a street protest in Delhi by pavement dwellers whom you call “shadow people” and “refugees of India Shining.” You are one of the few writers, it seems, who speaks up for them.

Well, I personally find it very embarrassing when people say things like, “She’s the voice of the voiceless.” We all know there’s no such thing as the voiceless. Everybody is quite capable of telling you what is happening to them in this country. The dilemma for the writer, I think, is how to spend your life honing your individual voice and then, at times like this, to declare it from the heart of a crowd. That tension, that balance, is something I think about quite often.

This book, like much of your work, can be seen as act of imagination, a vision of other possibilities. You write: “If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.”

I always find it interesting that when you’re with people who are really at the receiving end of oppression, you find a lot less despair than you do in middle-class drawing rooms. In these situations, despair is not an option. I wonder if the amount of information that is hammered into our heads day and night leads people to think that the world’s problems are so huge they’re insurmountable. Whereas people who are fighting against something in a more or less localized way are far clearer about what they have to do and how they have to do it.

You’ve said before that it is a struggle to find the time and space to write fiction and that you feel you need to invent a language to bridge your political and creative concerns.

Yes, what is most difficult for me is that just as certain and as real as these battles are right now, writing fiction is proportionately uncertain. Fiction is such an amorphous thing, you can’t be sure that you’re doing something important or wonderful until you’ve done it. So, because of the position I am in now, to work on fiction I have to create some sort of steel barriers around it. Fiction is something that involves so much gentleness, so much tenderness, that it keeps getting crushed under the weight of everything else! I still haven’t figured it out entirely—but I will, I will.

Source:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/11/01/arundhati-roy-on-walking-with-the-comrades/

Livia Firth and her encounter with Arundhati Roy

The Indian writer and activist reveals the secret of her tenacity.

Wednesday 26 October 2011

I always thought that a typically feminine qualities was his tenacity. Now that I Arundhati Roy known are even more convinced. Indiana, fifty years, irreducible political activist, Arundhati has become famous throughout the world in 1997, when he won the Booker Prize with the God of small Things (Guanda). For strength, is an unforgettable novel that recounts his ground and the impossible love between a woman and a privileged divorced "pariah", an untouchable. Then came the publication of a collection of essays Guide to the Empire for the common people, and now we are waiting for the next book, due out in January 2012.

I'm not surprised that Arundhati has become one of the most important voices in the contemporary debate: when not writing, tours the world to study and speak passionately of different topics, and all tosti, neo imperialism, the problems of the dam on the Narmada River in India (responsible for the forced exodus of millions of inhabitants), or the recent revolutions in Egypt, Tunisiain the Philippines. But perhaps the question that is more to heart is this: for years, Arundhati Kashmirwork in the region which is disputed between India and Pakistan that has a sad record, one of the most militarized area in the world, with almost 500,000 Indian soldiers to garrison.

Thousands of people have been killed since 1947 to today, and still must be subject to the curfew and the violent repression of any form of protest. Yet the case does not receive the attention it deserves, at the international level. The writer has a clear idea on the subject: «when you started the revolution in Egypt I wondered why the media give prominence to that so great news, taking the spotlight far from other areas. The answer is: are political choices. The establishment and Use of the Western world, matter have control of Egypt at all costs, to control Gaza. With India, however, the priorities are different: represents a huge market, and the only contestant able to keep the growth of China. Then: the Government should keep good Indian. And who wants to have him as an ally, avoids irritate him bringing to the fore the prickly issue of Kashmir ".

When I asked her how face to be so informed, Arundhati has laughed: "always ask Me! And I explain that I don't do searches, read only, because they are disgusted by the excess of propaganda. I understand what and when is the truth, I am so angry that I have to write something. " And if we all get even just a pinch of tenacity of Arundhati Roy?

Livia Firth was born in Rome but feels little town in the world. Creative director of Eco-age.com, special mission is to make sexy ecology, social justice and (slightly) in everyday life. Lives in London, is married to a certain actor, has 3 sons, about 4 fish and a cat. Every month on Marie Claire tells of extraordinary women around the world.
Livia Firth

Source:
http://www.marieclaire.it/Attualita/Livia-Firth-per-Marie-Claire-l-incontro-con-Arundhati-roy

 Article translated automatically from Italian. Mistakes any is result of that.

Arundhati Roy: 'I know I have to finish my next novel – one day'

Ahead of the Booker Prize tomorrow, Arundhati Roy tells Peter Popham how the award led her to a new life, and away from fiction

Monday, 17 October 2011

Arundhati Roy, winner of the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God Of Small Things, is not in the frame this year. Again. In fact, she has yet to follow up on that first book, what John Updike described as her "Tiger Woodsian debut".

It's not for want of trying: it is no secret that she has a second one on the stocks. "Everybody has known that for many years!" she laughs. Few people have had a glimpse of it, however, one exception being her friend John Berger, the octogenarian novelist and art critic. He was so impressed that he urged her to drop everything and finish it. "About a year and a half ago I was with John at his home," she recalls, "and he said, 'You open your computer now and you read to me whatever fiction you are writing.' He is perhaps the only person in the world that could have the guts to say that to me. And I read a bit to him and he said, 'You just go back to Delhi and you finish that book.' So I said 'ok...'"

But her good intentions were derailed. "I went back to Delhi," she says, "and in a few weeks this note was pushed under my door: just an anonymous typewritten note asking me to visit the Maoists in the jungles of central India..."

It was a tough invitation, to enter the dark heart of India's secret war zone. But not one that Arundhati Roy could refuse. Since her stunning Booker success, her real passion has been for politics, not fiction.

Today India is going down the same path travelled centuries back by the European colonial powers: identifying sources of strategic minerals, driving off the people living on top of them, and using it to industrialise and grow rich. The difference is that India has no Australia or Latin America to plunder. Instead, as Roy says, "It is colonising itself, turning upon its own poor to extract raw materials."

Centuries after the plunder of mineral resources began, some people living in countries like Britain began to understand the horrors that had been committed along the way: the indigenous peoples massacred, their traditions erased, the survivors reduced to penury. But by then, remorse came cheap: the damage had been done, the great fortunes made.

But in India all this is happening now, in real time. As a result, remorse is far more expensive: if sincerely meant, it could really throw a spanner in the happiness machine.

When Arundhati Roy accepted the Maoists' invitation, she was aware that what is being done to millions of adivasis, India's tribal people, in their villages in the forests of central India was an uncomfortable subject for the Indian middle class.

India's Naxalite rebellion started back in the 1960s, in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari, and through innumerable splits and spats, eruptions and retreats, has been sputtering on ever since. But in 2005 the new Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, raised its profile dramatically when he described it as "India's greatest internal security threat".

Roy believes the timing was significant. "It coincided with the government signing hundreds of secret Memorandums of Understanding with several mining companies and infrastructure corporations," she says. "They basically sold the rivers, the mountains, the forests, they signed them over to private companies. And they needed to wage war against these indigenous people to get them out of their villages, so the mining companies could move in."

Hundreds of thousands of paramilitaries were deployed in the forests to do the job; there followed the burning of hundreds of villages "infested" by Maoists, the setting up of roadside camps for villagers flushed out of them, and a great deal of bloodshed on both sides.

Yet by walking through the forest and listening to the Maoists' stories, Roy exposed a reality that the Indian media had worked overtime to conceal. Forty-five per cent of the rebels, she says, are women; 99 per cent are tribal villagers, the traditional inhabitants of these forests who have taken up the gun in a last, desperate attempt to protect their homes and their land.

When her essay about the trip, Walking With The Comrades, appeared in India last year, Roy was criticised for humanising the rebels. For the Indian middle class, wedded to Gandhian ideas of non-violence, their adherence to the gun put them beyond the pale. But, says Roy, what other option did they have?

"I believe that Gandhian resistance is an extremely effective and moral form of political theatre, provided you have a sympathetic audience," she says. "But what happens when you are a tribal village in the heart of the forest, miles away from anywhere? When the police surround your village, are you going to sit on a hunger strike? Can the hungry go on hunger strike?"

In the years since the triumph of her novel, Roy has become expert at touching the nerve of the Indian middle class. It's a gift that reflects her own hyper-sensitivity. "I feel sometimes that I live without a skin," she says. "I live without a protection. And when you live without a skin you actually are all the time living in an ocean of things that ask to be told.

"The country that I live in is becoming more and more repressive, more and more of a police state... India is hardening as a state. It has to continue to give the impression of being a messy, cuddly democracy but actually what's going on outside the arc lights is really desperate."

But at the same time it remains an open society, and the arguments are there to be won. "This is a very interesting time where I think the debates are being cracked open. Real intervention at a real moment can change the paradigm of the debate, even if it doesn't instantly cause a revolution."

The novel will just have to wait: her political writing, she says, "gives people a bit of space to breathe. What I love most is that the minute it's written it's translated into [the Indian regional languages] Oriya and Kannada and Telugu... People ask me if I feel isolated: I can't tell you how un-isolated I feel. If somebody said, how do you get feedback from your writing, I'd say I just have to stand at a traffic light! It's like a dynamic exchange of love, anger and argument, unfolding every minute of the day."

A life in brief

Born 24 November, 1959, in Shillong, India, near border with Bangladesh.

Education Aged 16, she moved to New Delhi to study architecture. She still lives in the city.

Family In 1984 she married second husband, the filmmaker Pradip Krishen, spending the next few years working in a series of odd-jobs while writing screenplays for Indian films.

Career Her semi-autobiographical debut novel from 1997, The God of Small Things, earned a £500,000 advance and won the Booker Prize. Has since used profile to campaign on environmental issues and against the caste system. This year's Broken Republic: Three Essays, attracted controversy for its defence of tribal Maoist rebels.





Source:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/arundhati-roy-i-know-i-have-to-finish-my-next-novel-ndash-one-day-2371609.html

Bookclub: Arundhati Roy on The God of Small Things - Radio4 Extra Blog

Arundhati Roy with Jim and the Bookclub audience

I do hope those of you who have heard the Arundhati Roy discussion on The God of Small Things enjoyed it. There are very few books of this kind that come our way, so it was a natural for us. Sooner or later we had to come to it. Listen to it HERE

The God of Small Things is unusual in so many ways. As Arundhati Roy puts it, the story begins at the end and ends in the middle, and she is determined that she was never going to write a linear story.

In our discussion she made it clear that the feeling of a book that has a circular wholeness, so that you can start the story almost anywhere with the same effect, springs from that part of her mind that made her want to be an architect, which is how she was trained.

The result is that the book's power comes not so much from the development of a story along conventional lines - a beginning in the first pages, and an end on the last page - but from the conception of the world in which the action (concentrated in a few days) is happening around you.

The book that obviously springs to mind is Ulysses, but I find it hard to think of settings that are more different than James Joyce's Dublin and Roy's Kerala, where the texture of life is built up of an impossible vast range of smells, colours, tiny objects and competing cultures and religions. Your senses are assailed by the vividness of the world she describes.

And of course it is a story of love and loss, and therefore tragedy. But when we asked her if it was therefore a pessimistic novel, she said that she thought that the fact the kind of love she describes could have come about in a feudal society was in itself "a fantastically hopeful thing".

At the centre of the story, recollected by Rahel as an adult woman, is the love between her Christian mother and a carpenter who, by the rules of caste, is an Untouchable.

In her conversation, especially when we asked her why she had not written another novel since The God of Small Things was first published in 1997, Arundhati Roy revealed the depth of her political commitments: the extent to which she wants her story to reveal not just the intoxicating feel of India, and the way that the mystical and the practical are woven together in everyday life, but the unfairness and cruelties of a system that pitches different religions and cultures against each other.

Since she wrote the book, which became a worldwide bestseller and won prizes, including the Booker, she's devoted most of her energy to various campaigns which she feels to be more important that the writing of another story.

She told us: "I hope I will return to fiction. I don't want to write books because that's what the world expects me to do. I want to write a book when I have a book that needs to be written or wants to be written; not just because that's a profession." That moment has not yet come.

About her writing technique, which has dazzled so many critics and readers, she says that she knows no rules. She thinks or herself neither as a linear nor hierarchical thinker, and in describing the way she tried to capture the society in which her characters were caught, and the way they lived their lives, it became clear that she wanted to paint a picture of how difficult it is to pursue love - which always produces, she believes, vulnerability - in a society where class and caste impose rigid boundaries and exert hard punishment on anyone who tries to stray across them.

Just as she says that pessimism and optimism aren't in a binary relationship - being opposites between which you have to choose - so she sees the pain of love as something that's inevitable if the joy of it is going to be appreciated. She refused to choose between gloom and hope: they're both there in the book.

I suspect that the reason why it was such a success is that the style in which she tells the story - its layers, the overlapping of time, the back-and-forth twists of the narrative, the idea of the compression of a long story into a brief moment in history - is utterly original.

When you put that together with the sheer exultation in the physical presence of India - especially the smells and the colours - you have a powerful mix.

One of our readers who had grown up in India said that when he read the passages in the pickle factory it made him want to go and wipe his hands afterwards.

The emotions in the book are very powerful - it deals with death, love that has to struggle to be fulfilled, and a touch of incest (because of a shared feeling of desolation) - yet they seem to sit naturally in a society where the natural world always seems about to overwhelm the people, and the rules that are forced upon them are often impossible to obey.

I'm glad we have come to The God of Small Things because in the end I think we had to.

Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio4/2011/10/bookclub_arundhati_roy_on_the.html

Arundhati Roy discusses The God of Small Things on Bookclub (BBC Radio4)

Arundhati Roy talks to James Naughtie and readers about her Booker prize winning novel The God of Small Things. Roy's first and so far only book of fiction, it took the literary world by storm, winning the Booker Prize in 1997.

Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/openbook

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

‘Success devastated my life. It changed all the equations’ Arundhati Roy

It’s 10 years since Arundhati Roy wrote The God of Small Things, won the Booker, and was shot out of a cannon into a mega-space that has few literary equals. Sitting against the fading light of a window in her beautiful wood and stone barsati in New Delhi, in one of her most personal interviews ever, she revisits the journey — its elations and its ambiguities — with SHOMA CHAUDHURY

It’s ten years now. Looking back, what did the Booker do to you?
It’s a little difficult for me to say because the Booker is conflated with so much else. From the moment I finished the manuscript, everything took off at such a trajectory — the Booker was just a part of it. I suppose it formalised it all, in a way. It was simultaneously a release and a burden. On the one hand, there was this artificiality that got me. It was almost as if we were all boy scouts saying, let’s go home with the big prize and show mummy. On the other hand, it became my middle name. Now I don’t think about it much.

But didn’t it open up your world and forge new platforms?
Do you think so? I don’t know how much of that was the Booker, and how much The God of Small Things (GOST). In my mind, they’re very separate. What’s incredible for me is that after 10 years of a very intense political journey, my political instincts are the same as they were in GOST. And that has to do with what the book was grappling with in itself. The Booker is an Anglo-centric prize, it means something in the English-speaking world, but the GOST is in 40 lang– uages. India, of course, has bec– ome such a success-oriented and prize-thirsty culture, in all the ads and in everyone’s dreams everyone’s always winning a prize, and so, it mattered here to the middle class. But I feel vaguely humiliated in having to discuss a prize in more depth than my own book.

Yes, the real magic carpet was the book. So across continents, what did people respond to?
It is remarkable. It was exactly the opposite of what nuclear weapons do. It vaulted over so many cultures. In Estonia, my translator said, “You know, this was my childhood too.” In America, this bank of cool women editors would say with a drawl, “You know, we’ve all got aunts like Baby Kocham– ma.” (mimicking) People tell me they’ve read out passages at their weddings... One of the sweetest things that happened was while I was sitting in Kautilya Marg one day. This little man came up the stairs like some tropical Santa Claus with a lot of presents and said, “Mai Eagle flasks se aya hoon”. And he had all these Eagle products and this brochure with all the parts of GOST where Eagle flask is mentioned! (laughs) I was particularly touched because I remember when I wrote the sentence: “Esthappan and Rahel walked across the airport car park with their Eagle flasks bumping on their hips and the twins knew the eagles watched the world by day and flew around their flasks at night…” — for some reason it delighted me. I waltzed around the room for hours because I was so happy at thinking this thought. I was sure no one would notice it; it would mean nothing to the world, but it made me happy and that was enough. And now, here was this man!

There have been many unusual receptions like that. Even today I get letters that just turn my heart. Someone wrote to me from Croatia talking about the NATO bombing and said, “My hair turned white in this horror and then I read your book and it helped me through the war…” Things like that. Sometimes it’s not GOST, sometimes it’s the political writing. But it’s all something for people to have; it’s not meant for anything else. It’s for people to have and to hold and to read and go to sleep at night, it’s for people to be with themselves. Very often, I get taken aback by people who come and start telling me the most intimate things about their lives. It throws me because I don’t know them. But it’s to do with the writing. They feel they know you. It’s different from being a star; it’s very, very deep. Very, very wonderful. And it’s not about me, but about writing itself and ideas and stories. As a writer, the clay you work with is so intimate...

It spawns a million relationships with itself —
Yes, and till today it fills me with delight because oddly enough, however I might appear to people, I did grow up in a little village like the one in the book, and the fact that that story has such a universal resonance means a lot to me. Some people resonate to the political stuff, the caste politics, the naxalism; others fix on the children’s world; some resonate to all of it. And I love that. But I always used to say, I wish I could’ve been paid back in meals or something because the thing that complicated my life very deeply — far more than the Booker prize — was the commercial success of the book. That made me have to deal with something I never anticipa– ted or sought, and being as political as I am, it was very difficult.

But didn’t it free you too?
Of course, part of the reason I can write and think the way I do is because I don’t really have to earn my keep anymore. Even my political writing has certainly been informed or emerged from that — that sense that I can be a mobile republic. But you have to be very careful about being that free because everybody isn’t, and you have to understand that. I do try and understand that I have a freedom that isn’t available to other people. I see it as a very delicate thing, because it can make you arrogant or stupid or disconnected.

If you see things politically though, you run less of a risk. I think it was very important that GOST came out in ‘97, and in ‘98, there were the nuclear tests and so that whole trajectory coincided with something dark that began here. The two together put me on a path that I didn’t entirely control. You would imagine that if you had written a book that won a big prize and earned a lot of money that you’d be in control of your life, but I’m still very ambiguous about what I’ve done. I can’t settle on it in any way.

Because the flight was so stupendous, was there any point when you lost your bearings or were pulled out of yourself?
I was lucky on several counts. I wasn’t a teenager when it happe - ned. I had been through quite a lot. So I wasn’t willing to blush when everyone was clapping. I was already skeptical and embarrassed and ambiguous about it. I never walked out and embraced it. Sometimes I wish I had —

More frothily enjoyed it —
Yes. (laughing) I was always prickly about it, always looking at it sideways and laterally. No, it devastated my life in many ways which was not nice. I am somebody who doesn’t — I don’t come from the bosom of some stable family, I didn’t have any stability. All I had were relationships I have forged myself, in many of which I was the waif, the most vulnerable person. And suddenly, I was loaded with all of this and it just changes your equation. On top of this came the fact that I never really had a choice of not coming out and saying the things I said politically because the nuclear tests happened. And as I’ve said a million times — to not say something is as political as to say something. But the moment you do that, you are in another universe, you are spinning away. I remember having a dream once — this hand coming and picking me out of the water and holding me up and saying, “You can have anything that you want, what do you want?” And me saying, “Just let me go, I don’t want to be this.” Because you are scared of everything moving around you. Every - thing. Every intimate relationship. Yet because those relation ships were forged in art and politics and so on, they are all wise people. Everybody in my life had to deal with all this, not just me. And I did manage. All my old friends are still my friends. I was shot out of a cannon but I came and landed right back here. It’s not like I wanted to live in LA.

At the same time, a whole new universe of friends and deep relationships have been formed. But it took a lot out of me. It took a lot of balancing. To be suddenly that public and that scrutinized, you have to be that hard on yourself. And the more political you are, the more difficult it is. You have to search inside yourself for your own levels of what is acceptable, not live by other people’s.

Also, there was this other interesting combination of being a writer and — what does a writer do? A writer hones his or her language, makes it as clear and private and individual as possible. And then you are looking around and talking about what’s going on with millions of people, and you are in that crowd saying things that millions of people are saying and it’s not at all individual. How do you hold those two things down? These are very fundamental questions. This is why so many writers are frightened of political engagement. They feel it is a risk, and it is a risk, and yet I would rather do it than not do it.

But sometimes it’s a big struggle. There’s always something happening, and I run the risk of becoming someone more responsible than I ought to. Before I wrote on the Parliament attack, I had literally told myself a hundred times to pull back and work on something else. But as I watched the news and the glee with which people were talking about the rope and how much it weighed, I thought, I know all this is a lie, and they’ll hang him and I’ll never be able to live with it. John Berger once said to me, something is gathering in our world, something dark, but you have to get off the tiger. I have failed to do that. It’s a very big dilemma for me. Very, very big dilemma. I know the urgent intervention is important. So is the other thing. How do you handle it? I am at a loss to know.

Speaking of loss, did you outgrow any key relationships?
No. I am a loyalist. Some of the most profound conversations I’ve had have to do with the fact that if you grow and burst out of the confines of whatever was prepar - ed for you and yet none of those things were superficial, none of those affections were superficial, how do you find a way of holding on to that and yet free yourself? To me, that’s a very fundamental thing, because it’s very easy to just walk away from everything.

But I struggled to find ways. I said, why does it have to be so conventional? Why must we be so consumerist even about our relationships? (laughs) I could’ve gone anywhere — I’m not totally unhedonistic, but I would like to look for it here, I would like to look for happiness — in whatever brief moments that it comes to anybo - dy — I would like it to be here. It’s important to recognise what are the sources of that. Even political - ly when I write, it’s very important to place yourself and to be unco - mfortable and to know that there isn’t anything that’s pristine about anybody. People who act most pristine are the most suspect.

What did GOST mean for you personally? What did you take pleasure in?
You know, when you’re writing fiction, the world is different because you, sort of, come home with sentences like other people come home with shopping. (laughs) The process of writing is the process of sharpening your thought and that’s the only thing that makes me really happy, regardless of what effect it has or what people think about it. And because writing is the same as thinking, everything in your body settles when you write. Eventually it’s about something settling inside yourself. I am a person who’s always slightly fearful of what might happen because, I think, when you have an unsafe childhood you never really settle, no matter how old you get. So for me, there are some things — like the four years when I wrote GOST — nobody can take that away from me, no matter what happens now, nobody can say those four years didn’t happen. Or that that book wasn’t written. So for a long time, I didn’t feel the need to come back home with sentences. But now again I feel that. I feel life has been lived for 10 years at some reckless, breakneck, rockstar speed, in terms of experiences and stimulus and understanding and looking at something till your eyeballs hurt and internalising that politics and living enough to write again.

Is the “lived life” important in writing fiction? Is it important to process the personal?
If we didn’t, it would be tragic. But I am not talking about gratuitous confession. The kind of writing I would respect is not about gratuitous individualisation where each person is special and we all wear baby t-shirts saying, I am special. I think if you can see the world through a person, if you can see that there isn’t anybody who is really not a product of their history and culture and who is not at the focus of so many big guns that are booming — I would respect a writer who can see that, a writer who can scale from the personal to the other stuff. Every book doesn’t have to be about everything. The point is, can you take a risk? When I wrote GOST, I didn’t think it would make sense to anybody, but whether it makes sense to 300 people or 6 million people, it was still the same book.

Did it release you from some of the demons of your childhood?
The first time my brother read it, he said, “What happened to all the monsters? Why are they missing?” So it wasn’t really about my childhood, I haven’t really written about that — maybe sometime one will. The idea wasn’t to be therapeutic. For me, it was more important to see each person has got this trajectory behind — there’s history at work, politics at work, and yet there’s tenderness and it’s totally personal.

There was such a detailed sense of place in GOST. Do you still think of it as home?
There is a very particular sense of place in the book, but it is imbued with dread. I don’t think that can ever change. Someone remarked to me that everyone in the book is somehow homeless, spewed out from somewhere else. That sort of dysfunctionality is very much part of my make-up.

Is there a very different you that’s writing the new novel?
I wonder in the new fiction what will change and what will stay. I don’t want to write GOST again (laughs). But I’m not one of those people who radically change. I function on instinct and those don’t change. I suppose the sense of loss is relocated. It’s not the village I grew up in and was terrori - sed by. That sense of dislocation has been relocated to another place. (laughs) There’s such a polarisation and hardening of things in the world around. There are other languages in my head now. It is not the English-speaking world I move in all that much anymore, even though I do think it’s necessary to engage with it and not lose that feeling of continuing to journey between these worlds.Less and less of us are doing that. But I’m uncomfortable talking about the new book in any specific way.

Last question. About sense of place: is it people who keep you here, or for all your being a “mobile republic”, does something really connect you to India?
By most standards, I probably qualify for being anti-national. I don’t have a nationalistic bone in my body. It’s just not my instinct. Yet it’s incon ceivable for me to not be here, because it’s everything that I love. And it’s not to do with flags or constitutions or any of that. But if I go away for one week and I come back and see some ZEE TV in the immigration lounge and the mouldering ceiling, I just feel so happy. It’s just so many things —even the quality of light, the rag g e dness of things around, the environment, the food, the colour, ever ything — it’s not even external. I’m just a full desi — full-time desi in that way. I just feel, where else can you be? Where else can you interpret the darkness and all its layers? There’s all the coded jokes and the whole sense of history... It’s not like one is looking for a new life in a supermarket.


Source:
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main38.asp?filename=hub080308success_devastated.asp