Arundhati Roy at Ferrara 2011 - entire event on video

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

Many imitators too many dishonest

Angiola Codacci-Pisanel

The writer Arundhati Roy: "you are corrupting Gandhi's ideas to make a violent use of non-violence. It is immoral to allow a State to commit violence, and claim a non-violent reaction by the victims '

 

 

 

Arundhati Roy"Those who have nothing to eat can do a hunger strike. And if there are no spectators does not make sense to do a sit-in ". And ' pithy Arundhati Roy in indicating the limits of non-violence and the risk of "gandhism forced". Behind a hugely successful novel ("the God of small things") followed by a non-fiction increasingly engaged and anti-Government, Indian writer is coming to present at Ferrara, at the Festival of "International", along with his "spiritual father" John Berger, the collection of essays "Broken Republic" (in Italy by Guanda due out in January): a book with hatred in India because it supports the armed resistance of the indigenous peoples who seek to defend their forests by the appetites of the multinationals supported by the Government. People, writes Roy, for the media are "Maoist rebel violence and blood-thirsty" and "from the point of view of consumption are more of a Gandhian Ghandian protesters".

Non-violent manifestations of Arab spring they did talk about a return of the ideals of Mahatma. Would you agree?
"We cannot talk about gandhism just because there are mass demonstrations. Gandhi was a politician, very complex and interesting. He had a philosophy of life, a particular attitude towards consumerism. I'm not an unconditional fan of Gandhi but admire and wouldn't ever mistake of confusing what has been called Arab spring with a Gandhian movement. The revolts of Arab countries have complex policies components: in Egypt have an important role in the Muslim Brotherhood, which certainly cannot be called valorises local traditions. We must see how the situation evolves before Judge ".

Meanwhile, in India the politician of the moment is Anna Hazare, the "new Gandhi" that she disapproves of everything, right?
"Yes, because he really has little to do with Gandhi. Says that the corrupt should be hanged and that they must cut off the hands of the thieves: looks more like a supporter of the sharia that a Gandhian. In addition to a centralized democracy, an oligarchy formed by 30 thousand people responsible for weeding out corruption at all levels, while Gandhi believed in decentralisation. I think you atteggi to Gandhian for reasons and to inspire sympathy, but it has nothing to do with him. "

Behold, the Theatre: you write that non-violence makes no sense if it does not have an audience.
"When you decide to start a hunger strike or a sit-in need of an audience that shares. Then in the forests of central India, where police and paramilitaries encircle the poorest and burning houses and rape women, when your village is surrounded by a thousand policemen without organs information knowing nothing, what kind of Gandhian politics can do? View Hazare: When did the hunger strike was in the heart of Delhi, surrounded by journalists and supporters. This is very dishonest. "

The hunger strike so it is for the rich and famous?
"The part of Gandhi who admire more his approach to sustainability, ecological life, which was really ahead of its time-is the part of which no one speaks. The so-called Gandian protesters today want to maintain a consumerist behavior and have the free market, and meanwhile you fill your mouth with non-violence. Sure Gandhi would not have been backed by multinational companies such as Tata ".

Think you can bribe Gandhi's ideas to make a violent use of non-violence?
"It's what's going on. When I see people in India who claim non-violence by the poorest of the poor while their villages were under attack, when they preach to the people of Kashmir living under the occupation of 700 thousand soldiers, I feel that is deeply immoral. It is unethical to allow a State to commit violence, and claim a non-violent reaction by the victims. "

 

Source : http://espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio/molti-imitatori-troppi-disonesti/2164016/9

*This article has been automatically translated from Italian 

Arundhati Roy and Pankaj Mishra - Kashmir: The Case for Freedom

Kashmir is one of the most protracted and bloody occupations in the world — and one of the most ignored. Under an Indian military rule that, at half a million strong, exceeds the total number of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, freedom of speech is non-existent, and human rights abuses are routine.

Exploring the causes and consequences of the occupation, Kashmir: The Case for Freedom is a passionate call for the end of occupation, and for the right of self-determination for the Kashmiri people.
Join author/activist Arundhati Roy and writer Pankaj Mishra with invited guests for a discussion on Kashmir’s tragedy.


Followed by a book sale and signing on November 11, 2011, 6:30pm - 8:30pm. 725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street), New York, NY


Can't make it to this program? Tune in to the free webcast from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm on asiasociety.org/live. Online viewers are encouraged to send questions to moderator@asiasociety.org

Arundhati Roy pays tribute to Punjabi theatre legend Gursharan Singh

Her speech in Kussa 9 October, 2011

Arundhati Roy speaks at Ferrara 2011

Arundhati Roy - Why exercising freedom of speech, of thinking, of writing? maybe because some justice perhaps will come, but the first thing is to avoid the humiliation of not writing, of not telling that you know what have been done to you, not to be reduced to silence, writing is a way of preserving your personal dignity.

Source: freeflor