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.

Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/05/arundhati-roy-keep-destabilised-danger

Arundhati Roy about Kashmir on MTV Iggy.

http://www.mtviggy.com/author/Arundhati%20Roy

Arundhati Roy

By Amy Kazmin
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’

Maoists have organised tribal communities since the late 1970s, helping them fight forest officials and exploitative contractors who buy forest leaves for traditional, hand-rolled cigarettes. Now, the rebels are leading the resistance to the expropriation of tribal land. New Delhi has dubbed the ­guerrillas India’s biggest internal security threat.

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

She insists she does not endorse violence, or armed struggle, yet she feels that tribal communities have few options to protect their way of life, as they confront the concerted efforts of state officials and large corporations to displace them. “If you are going to treat unarmed Gandhian struggles the way the [anti-] Narmada [dam] struggle [protesters] were treated, people are going to move into another zone,” she says. “It’s not as if they are sitting around saying, ‘Should we struggle or should we not?’ They don’t have a choice. They have nowhere to go.”
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

When her debut novel, The God of Small Things, was published in 1997, she became an object of adulation for India’s middle classes, less for the quality of her book – which many never read – than for her £500,000 advance, and later her Booker Prize. With her success, she was embraced as a living symbol of India’s arrival on the global stage. But following her strong condemnation of the country’s nuclear weapons tests in 1998, defying the mood of national euphoria and pride, attitudes towards her began to change.

“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.

Roy says she is ready to make a change, perhaps return to fiction, which has been interrupted by her political engagement. “I feel like I’ve done a very interesting journey over the last 11 years, but now I’m ready to do something different. Two years ago, I told myself, ‘no more, enough of this’, and I was working on some fiction. Then this huge uprising happened in Kashmir.”

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

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

Arundhati Roy: "Stop the waste. Recapture the imagination. "

Interview with Indian author and activist

In 2011 India will likely grow faster than China. Yet not everything chapati and egg in the land of Tata, Infosys and Reliance. MO * talked about this in Delhi with world-renowned author and activist Arundhati Roy.

Arundhati Roy's only home when I call her, returned early from Japan, earthquake, tsunami and the growing nuclear disaster still in her voice. When I next day at her apartment for hours talking to her about the state of things in India, remains the violence of the universe clearly bouncing in her answers. The realization that they themselves could disappear into the spectacular nature of violence, is increasing its focus on the everyday details of life: the white lilies in a vase, a green beard bird suddenly to the window and believes the spring, the silence. That silence, looking them in the classical Indian music in which she was not so long engrossed.
 
Arundhati Roy is in a meditative mood. In Japan, she saw that "we build a civilization on the thin layer of ice on the constant availability of electricity. Her own life is at a turning point: "I feel that I, as a writer, did a full circle," she says. "I have a wide range of major social issues raised, and threatening to repeat myself as I continue on the path I have walked the last ten years. It is time for reflection, for a new phase in my life, for another letter. " But first she wants to answer my questions about the great social debates in India. We start at the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, a major social programs that the poor of rural India a minimum employment and therefore a minimal income. India 2011, a 1233-page compendium of public sector, states that the program no less than in 2009 reached 45.1 million families. Impressive, right?
 
Arundhati Roy: That is indeed impressive as a collection action for the millions who fall by the wayside of economic growth. Meanwhile the government has continued with its economic policies, even if this leads to more and more people no longer own or maintain their income because they can take care of their land or driven from their forests, or as water and energy privatized. This injustice can not be rectified by giving them a handful of rupees for breaking rocks and digging wells. Moreover, there are increasing reports of corruption, of which the large flow of funds intended for the poorest prime purpose of the accounts of local politicians, contractors and brokers to marshmallows.
 
Economic growth is still well taken millions out of poverty?
Arundhati Roy: The economic liberalization, the Indian society in turmoil. The feudal society with its traditions rooted in inequality was the mixer of the neoliberal growth removed, creating a new consumer class-was given a very attractive global markets. You also have a massive underclass that is considered redundant because it has no means to consume. The only thing that underclass offered is the promise that they can later be part of the dream as they are today major consumer policy accepts that disowns them. The first thing to do is destroy that dream consumption, because it creates an intolerable rapid destruction of the earth and its natural resources.
 
You want the hundreds of millions of poor people do not return to a sober lifestyle "?
Arundhati Roy: Of course not, I just want the consuming class know they are talking about a different strategy to throw. I want to expose the lies of the middle class. Whenever there is a dammed river, a forest cut down or expropriated a village, one comes away with the argument that it is necessary to develop the country and fight poverty. In reality, this destructive development only in the short-term interests of those who consume more electricity and stuff. Who really wants to do something in the name of the poor, but should not consume the waste stop. That would create room for development by the poor themselves can be selected and managed. Such a radical change does not arise as an individual to eat organic or natural cotton wear. This obsession with personal correctness is a form of social anorexia: because you did not get control of the system outside yourself, you obsessively monitor your own behavior. There will always be contradictions in our lives. Gandhi was also supported by the industrialists of his day, the Birlas and the Tatas. It is never a pure matter of personal virtue, but of policy.
 
How would you describe the current economic policy of the Indian government to characterize?
Arundhati Roy: If internal colonization. Europe justified the colonization of the rest of the world with beautiful concepts of civilization and progress, while in reality was a way to get a handle on the natural resources of other nations. I must not tell you as a Belgian. India, which sees itself as a twenty first-century superpower, such a possibility has not, so colonizes itself. In places where the rich in the soil, colonize India's own population and territory. To justify the concepts of civilization are also here, happiness and progress redefined. Yet success is the poorest in recent years in projects of the largest companies in the world to stop when they are vulnerable to further undermined.
 
Those successes stop the companies, but also create any progress for the poor and tribal groups.
Arundhati Roy: For each megadam which was built, there were other options not chosen or realized. Progress is not a one way street, but a question of choosing between alternatives. This presupposes that the monopoly of the capitalist imagination is broken and that different representations requalify and space. The tribal imagination and worldview it crucial, but the Gandhian vision a sustainable perspective than the current consumerism. And I do not mean that all cotton woven to be. It often has more to do with self-affirmation than an economic alternative. But textile deserves a new approach, a synthetic alternative to the giant machine that has become today.
 
India is the world's largest democracy, but is increasingly faced with armed uprisings. Progress is not a one way street, but a choice between alternatives. 
 
How do you explain this contradiction?
Arundhati Roy: India is a democracy in the better neighborhoods of Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore. But if you look at the interior of Manipur, Orissa or Chhattisghar, then it is unlikely that people will you talk about a democracy. Democracy, like development was synonymous with neoliberal free trade. In the fifties fought imperialism even democracy in Iran and the Arab countries, today they try to introduce democracy in arms because one has learned to manipulate her. In India it is almost impossible for a political campaign without the support of big business. A majority of the parliamentarians themselves have been a millionaire. Big business has all the democratic space, with its parties, media and legal institutions over-bought. Of course even this democracy preferable to dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, yet it is clear that the current form is not equal to the task of the current crises to address. Only when we face that problem and articulate, we can begin to formulate alternatives.
 
Which alternative is you have in mind?
Arundhati Roy: We should think not so much a blueprint for a future form of government, but a modified form of opposition to the dominant structures and stories of today. In recent months the Indian newspapers have been filled over the Radia Tapes [intercepted telephone conversations of an industrial lobbyist, showing how great the influence of big bosses on the composition of government and private offices, gg]. These recordings confirm what we have been saying for years: that the politics represents the people but the business interests of a small elite. Even the middle class no longer benefit from this way of working. There continue to talk about is a form of resistance.
 
Which brings us back to the armed resistance. Is that an "appropriate form" of resistance?
Arundhati Roy: We moralize quickly as marginalized people take up arms. Their lives and their environment is destroyed to make our lifestyle possible, but if they are armed resistance, we find it inappropriate. Is an economic policy that makes 820 million people survive on less than twenty rupees (thirty cents) per day may be no violence? Are the two hundred thousand farmers who committed suicide not an expression of structural violence? As long as I do not pick up arms, I will not preach the armed resistance. But I would ask what the adivasis (original inhabitants of India, gg) to do that live in a village that four-day march away from the nearest city, when their village is surrounded by a thousand soldiers who want them off their land drive so that industrial development can take place. Should they go on hunger strike? Nonviolent actions have an audience that can respond to the unjust violent confrontation between government and non-violent response. I think that adivasis themselves should decide how they react and what kind of resistance to them can be productive.
 
In Kashmir in recent years, elected to the armed struggle to omit because it only resulted in increasing militarization of the valley. You have firmly supported the requirement for a free ranged Kashmir, which was heavily against you.
Arundhati Roy: How the power elite so worried is that there are cracks in the wall of propaganda for years Kashmir was built. And the young Kashmiris themselves who have caused them through stories and images of their nonviolent resistance and the brutal military response thereto via Facebook and YouTube to spread. The youth of Kashmir have been three summers in a row held their own Tahrir rebellion, but the rest of the world remains blind to it. The hopeless conflict in Kashmir increasingly corrupts the whole political and social system of India. The permanent presence of more than half a million soldiers in Jammu & Kashmir has created enormous interest in continuing the conflict, and that comes at the expense of other priorities in India. The entire nation slips into a state where violence is acceptable as long as it provides a constant increase in the gross national product.
 
Are there ever times when you are glad to be Indian?
Arundhati Roy: I particularly appreciate the Indian heritage, the wilderness of the mind that this is real. For me, India is not a nation but a way of life that allows to color outside the lines, not all attempts to control disorder. I've never encountered women so free and powerful as here in India, though this time the country where babies are killed because they are female. The complexity of India is so large that you are all emotions and human capabilities need to understand it and made you one hundred percent live intensely. That leaves both admiration and disgust, and so I know.

From 'beautiful curls' to 'poison pen'

Arundhati Roy gained international stardom with her novel The God of Small Things. The Indian middle class wore on her hands because she thought her own ambitions Roy imagined and realized. In the nineties wanted to say two to three hundred million middle class Indians' status as a developing and join as soon as possible a full role to play globally. The love that the writer was translated into forty languages, ended with a loud bang when Arundhati Roy in 1998 the Indian nuclear weapons, by the same middle class with much show of national pride-received mercilessly condemned in her essay The End of the imagination.
 
Roy said since no novel, but many critical essays, on the Narmada dam, the violent Hindu nationalism, India's energy policy ... The love Arundhati-in-the pretty-curls hit into hatred for Arundhati-with-the-toxic pen. In 2010 published a long report that her week with the Maoist guerrilla's in Chhattisgarh described in a way that yielded very much sympathy for the armed uprising in the heart of India. And when they end 2010 in which she made two speeches in the cause of the Kashmiri separatists argued, was the final gate of the dam. If it is the Indian media had been lying, she was indicted for treason.


Courtesy: Gie Goris

Arundhati on Arundhati

Sunina Karki/Bibek Bhandari
Kathmandu, April 19:

“Thin, black, clever” in her words, Sryian Christian from Kerala, Arundhati Roy thought she was the “worst that a Christian girl could be.”

In the village of Aymanam in Kerala, Roy observed that she was one of the girls who hadn’t been indoctrinated. She rather spent time catching fish and knew every insect, grass and dragonfly.

The 1997 Booker Prize Winner for The God of Small Things, Roy was in Kathmandu to attend a conference “Count Me IN’ organized by CREA, a feminist human rights organization.

“I had to get out of here (the village). To be a woman and to be married into the community was like being buried alive,” she said during a two-hour session on Monday that was part of a three-day conference. Moderated by Shohini Ghosh, an essayist and documentary filmmaker, Roy shared her childhood experiences of being a woman – and that too, a rebellious one – and the moments that made her strong.

The talk mainly delved into her personal life. Listening to Roy’s life ordeals, euphemized by her signature wit, it seemed as if the writer had channelized the low moments of her life to boost her self-esteem.“I didn’t see much complexities, I just saw a simple terror of being a normal woman,” recounted Roy who ran away from home at the age of 16. And in fact, years later, she seems to have succeeded for she is nothing like a ‘normal’ woman.  She has proved to be an exceptional one usually clouded by controversies for her political write-ups ranging from India’s nuclear issue, separation of Kashmir and the growing Naxalite movement to global topics like the United States’ war in Afghanistan.

For Roy, the inclination toward political writing started during her student years at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi.“By third year I started questioning about cities, urbanization and who are they for, among other topics.”After graduation, Roy went to Goa, sold cakes on the beach and later returned to Delhi where she lived amongst the underprivileged strata of society in the Nizamuddin Basti. It was during this time, before she started working on The God of Small Things, that she met her husband Pradip Krishnen, wrote scripts for movies and penned a series of political essays on the movie Bandit Queen which raised a series of debates.

“I was shocked that they had changed India’s most famous bandit into history’s most famous case of rape,” Roy said.Though the controversy was covered – momentarily- because of her famed novel The God of Small Things, she noted that a lot of people quite didn’t understand the book.

“A lot of people were looking at me like I had won the World Cup without knowing what the book was all about,” added the 49-year-old writer. Her award-winning novel, however, also turns to be the pages from her past.  Some of the characters are, thus, inspired by her family members, her brother to name one. Another influential figure in her life is her mother, Mary, who is also a woman’s rights activist.

“My mother and I have a very complicated and a conflicted relationship. My mother was, is and has been a huge influence in good and bad ways,” she revealed. The conversation was paused by laughter, triggered by her humor.

Moderator Ghosh didn’t miss talking about Roy’s essay ‘Walking with the Comrades’ that appeared in Outlook India, an Indian magazine, in March 2010 and her trip to Chattisgargh. ( In February 2010, quietly, unannounced, Roy decided to visit the forbidding and forbidden precincts of Central India’s Dandakaranya Forests, home to a melange of tribespeople many of whom have taken up arms to protect their people against state-backed marauders and exploiters.)

Informing about the women ‘s status in the tribal group, Roy added on how she went with a firm prejudice that in an armed struggle women were going to be sufferers and at the receiving end of violence.  However, she was completely disabused by the fact that the Maoist armed forces comprised 48 percent women.
“I interacted with many of them and also learnt the reasons behind their joining the movement.  They had watched their mothers and sisters being raped and killed, their houses being burnt down by the police” observed the writer. However, according to Roy, women’s struggle and revolt was not only the struggle with the state demanding their rights but also to break out from the boundaries of the patriarchal society.

Thus writing about these issues, the questions she often faces is if she is a feminist, to which Roy rhetorically questions back,” Writing about millions of women being displaced isn’t a feminist issue.” But being termed a feminist, another adjective that finds its way toward her is – romantic.

While walking with the comrades, Roy was frequently branded as romantic to which she reiterated”"Often when you’re in the middle of a huge and dangerous argument, one of the strategies is to use labels as missiles in order to not deal with questions. I have no problem with romance but what do they mean by that?

And amid different labels and loathing that Roy has come in for because of her writing, especially that with political connotations, she has underscored issues sidelined by the urbanites in her home country. She added that one doesn’t have to belong to a particular caste, creed, religion or any affiliation to write about issues surrounding them.

“For me the idea of being a writer is someone who tries to break out of that and who believes that eventually all of us must reach out and be able to have relationships outside our own little cocoons.”

‘Count me In’ conference held from April 16 to 18 brought together marginalized women from South Asia – India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – to discuss violence against women and strategies of resistance.


Source: My republica

Why I am committed - Exclusive interview with Arundhati Roy

It may well be that one day is extraordinary, the Nobel award to Arundhati Roy two of their most prestigious awards: one for peace and that of literature. Although, in his first book, "The God of Small Things," his name in the rankings very closed, very envious, stars of world literature, earning a contract of one million dollars and the Booker Prize In 1997, the lovely queen of Indian novel (it was also listed by People magazine among the 50 beauties of the year 1998), immediately turned his back on the career easy, and international glamourisée, who offered to it. Ceasing to write novels, she chose to defy rather, with a courage that no one denies it, and risking his life, the government of his country to denounce not only the great injustices of our time, but especially horror economic, ecological, and social policy of a country, India, passing yet for any of the civilized democracies of the planet.
 
Where does this fire, this determination, married to the greatest kindness? It should probably seek the origins far her in her childhood in India, with his father, a tea planter Bengali, and her mother, Mary Roy, a headmistress of Kerala is also known for his activism. This Kerala which Arundhati tell the poetic beauty in his first novel, inspired by his very own experience. After a perfect architect and designer and screenwriter, she joined the protest against the construction of huge dams in the valley of the Narmada dams forcing entire populations to leave an ancestral home, in the name of self- called "economic progress". She became involved with this writer the Indian government is afraid.
 

In "Democracy: field notes," she protests against American imperialism, argues against the "occupation" of Indian Kashmir, it claims independence, denounced the stranglehold of multinational corporations on local economies. She castigates a visit to India of President Bush and screams when the genocide of Muslims are being massacred in Gujarat. Against all intimidation, she visited last year, in February 2010 into a forbidden zone, where the tribes in the heart of Dandakaranya forests in the state of Chhattisgarh, took up arms against the mining conglomerates international, hand in hand with the Indian state, began to devastate their territory. She spent several weeks together with the Maoist guerrillas who have vowed to overthrow the Indian state at risk of being killed in a raid by hostile forces, or move backward for a Maoist official media did not deprive caricature of the commitment of the novelist. But can we in any way, stop Arundhati?
Nothing is more urgent, as we have understood, that to read, and to read the manual of indignation which the first qualities is not to have been designed in a comfortable club chair, but have known, the small notebook where passionaria usually registered his impressions, the dust of the road, tears of impotence, a notebook stained, crumpled, and where it seems that, for ink, Arundhati Roy has spent the most fabulous containers: his rage and hope - that make life a little better one day for all.
 
What do you think of U.S. policy since the election? Obama is better than Bush?
The problem is no longer, I believe, think international politics, wars, military occupations or ecological suicide in terms of good or evil. The irony is rather that every man, good or bad, when it becomes, as U.S. President, the most powerful man on earth, immediately lost all power, and becomes the slave of a system which is supposed to control the operation yet. The real question is it not, rather, the civilized world we call Will it save us, or will it destroy life on Earth and the Earth itself?
 
You were not happy with the victory of Obama?
Obama has widened the scope of the wars in Asia. With the blessing of the Pakistani government, he is now bombing Pakistan. Meanwhile, the economy continues to sink. When he became president, a satirical newspaper in New York as in essence: "A black posted the worst job." It was true. He was appointed to endorse the end of the American Empire.
 
What is your feeling about the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya?


Protesters have shown real courage. But I think the stakes today are elsewhere: this is for big powers to divert the energy of these revolutions by using them for their cynical purposes. When we read in the press things like: "Egypt is free, the military took power," one can not help but smile! It is well known that the Egyptian army and the U.S. government go hand in hand. Hosni Mubarak was not a scoop, sick, close to the end. The transition would have been risky. Does it has not given a little air to the Egyptian people, oppressed and angry, before tying up again? Without control of Egypt, Israel can no longer organize the siege of Gaza. The United States can they accept that? When the major Western media enthusiastically celebrate the Revolution, it still worries me. After all, Palestinians are rebelling, we may kill millions in the Congo, it does not raise the same reactions. In Kashmir, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators braved the streets for years, Indian security forces, which were far from peaceful: courage is it yet one of the Western press?
 
What about the situation in the Narmada valley, where you intensely protested against the construction of huge dams, to the detriment of local people?


All dams in the valley are being built. The great anti-dam movement, which was based on arguments and just deep, is now limited to the pleadings of a small group of lawyers trying to get compensation for displaced populations. It is a monumental tragedy. There are hundreds of dams that are being constructed in the high Himalayas. The consequences will be catastrophic for the environment. But these areas are sparsely populated. Nobody complains.
 
You are also very sensitive to the situation in Kashmir. Were you there recently?
Yes, I go there often. This is the area most heavily militarized in the world. The Indian security forces stationed there amounted to 700 000 soldiers. Even at the height of the war in Iraq, American units had never exceeded 200,000 items. There are countless more, in this valley, army camps, checkpoints, torture chambers, and graveyards. 68 000 people have been killed since 1990. Living there is equivalent to live without oxygen and dignity. It is an absolute hell. A huge open-air prison.
 
What should I expect you believe in international terrorism? Do you believe a worsening situation in the future?


Much of the economic power of rich countries is based on the arms market: missiles, warplanes, torpedoes, helicopters, nuclear bombs. In India, where 800 million people live on less than 20 rupees a day (30 cents), the government is spending billions to buy weapons like this. Like Pakistan, whose economy is in tatters. Yet all these weapons are of any efficacy against the terrorist threat? I would say that most of these countries amass weapons of war, and pay correspondingly the most boastful nationalism, the more they make them vulnerable to terrorism that may completely destroy them. We saw in the attacks in Bombay in 2008, how a handful of teen suicide have put an entire country to its knees for days. And he does not even touch the leaders of our country that the only valid response to terrorism is to resolve the injustices that engender.
 
What about writing fiction? You will come back?
Yes, it's been a while since I started writing a novel. But I advance slowly. I am often disturbed ...
 
What is your life like everyday 
My life has, thank you god, nothing of everyday life.
 
Can you describe the room where you work?
This is not always the same. I'm moving a republic. But I often write in my flat in Delhi. I love working there. I sometimes kiss the walls, to thank them for giving shelter to a girl like me. Someone not easy, as many people will tell you.




Courtesy :  Didier Jacob Blog (Translated from French)