arundhati roy political essays

Lit. Summaries

• Biographies

The End of Imagination: A Critical Review of Arundhati Roy’s Essays from 2016

• Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is a renowned Indian author and political activist whose essays have been widely read and debated. In this article, we critically review her essays from 2016 and analyze their impact and relevance in today’s world. We examine her views on issues such as nationalism, democracy, and social justice, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of her arguments. Through this analysis, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of Roy’s work and its significance in contemporary discourse.

Background Information

Arundhati Roy is an Indian author, political activist, and a recipient of the prestigious Booker Prize for her novel “The God of Small Things.” She is known for her outspoken views on social and political issues, particularly those related to India and its government. In 2016, she published a collection of essays titled “The End of Imagination,” which delves into topics such as the Kashmir conflict, the rise of Hindu nationalism, and the impact of globalization on India’s economy and society. The essays have been widely discussed and debated, with some praising Roy’s boldness and others criticizing her for being too radical. This critical review aims to examine the arguments presented in “The End of Imagination” and evaluate their validity and relevance in today’s world.

Arundhati Roy’s Essays in 2016

Arundhati Roy, the acclaimed Indian author and activist, has been known for her powerful and thought-provoking essays on a range of social and political issues. In 2016, she continued to make waves with her writing, publishing several essays that tackled some of the most pressing issues of our time. From the rise of Hindu nationalism in India to the refugee crisis in Europe, Roy’s essays were a sharp critique of the status quo and a call to action for those who seek a more just and equitable world. In this article, we will take a closer look at some of Roy’s most notable essays from 2016 and explore the themes and ideas that she presented.

The Themes Explored in Roy’s Essays

In her essays, Arundhati Roy explores a wide range of themes, from political corruption and social inequality to environmental degradation and the impact of globalization on local communities. One of the recurring themes in her work is the struggle for justice and human rights, particularly in the face of oppressive regimes and systems of power. Roy is a vocal critic of the Indian government and its policies, and she has been outspoken in her support for marginalized communities and their struggles for autonomy and self-determination. Another important theme in her essays is the need for environmental sustainability and the protection of natural resources. Roy is a passionate advocate for the preservation of India’s forests and rivers, and she has written extensively about the devastating impact of industrialization and urbanization on the country’s ecosystems. Overall, Roy’s essays are a powerful call to action, urging readers to confront the injustices and inequalities that exist in our world and to work towards a more just and sustainable future.

The Writing Style of Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is known for her unique writing style that blends fiction and non-fiction seamlessly. Her essays are often poetic and lyrical, with vivid descriptions that transport the reader to the heart of the issue she is discussing. She is unafraid to use strong language and imagery to convey her message, and her writing is often deeply emotional and passionate. At the same time, she is a master of research and analysis, and her essays are always well-researched and backed up by facts and figures. Overall, Roy’s writing style is both powerful and beautiful, making her essays a joy to read even as they tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time.

The Impact of Roy’s Essays on Indian Society

Arundhati Roy’s essays have had a significant impact on Indian society, particularly in terms of raising awareness about issues such as caste discrimination, environmental degradation, and government corruption. Her writing has been praised for its boldness and honesty, as well as its ability to challenge the status quo and inspire social change. Many readers have been moved by Roy’s passionate advocacy for the marginalized and oppressed, and her willingness to speak truth to power. However, her work has also been criticized by some for being too radical or divisive, and for promoting a negative view of India and its people. Despite these criticisms, it is clear that Roy’s essays have had a profound impact on Indian society, and will continue to shape public discourse and debate for years to come.

The Role of Activism in Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays are known for their strong political and social commentary, and activism plays a crucial role in her writing. Throughout her essays, Roy advocates for marginalized communities and speaks out against injustices such as corporate greed, government corruption, and environmental destruction. She uses her platform to raise awareness and inspire action, encouraging readers to become involved in activism themselves. Roy’s writing is a call to action, urging readers to take a stand and fight for a better world. Her activism is not just a theme in her essays, but a driving force behind her writing.

The Criticism of Roy’s Essays

Despite the acclaim that Arundhati Roy’s essays have received, there has been criticism of her work. Some have accused her of oversimplifying complex issues and presenting a one-sided view of events. Others have argued that her writing is too polemical and lacks nuance. In particular, some critics have taken issue with her portrayal of India as a country plagued by corruption and inequality, arguing that she ignores the progress that has been made in recent years. Despite these criticisms, however, Roy’s essays continue to be widely read and discussed, and her voice remains an important one in contemporary political discourse.

The Reception of Roy’s Essays

The reception of Roy’s essays has been mixed, with some praising her bold and unapologetic critiques of the Indian government and its policies, while others have criticized her for being too radical and divisive. Many have also questioned her credentials as a political commentator, arguing that her background as a novelist does not qualify her to speak on complex political issues. Despite these criticisms, Roy’s essays have sparked important conversations about the state of democracy and human rights in India, and have inspired many to take action and speak out against injustice.

The Influence of Roy’s Essays on Contemporary Indian Literature

Arundhati Roy’s essays have had a significant impact on contemporary Indian literature. Her writing style, which is both poetic and political, has inspired many writers to explore similar themes in their own work. Roy’s essays have also challenged the dominant narratives of Indian society, particularly with regards to issues of caste, gender, and environmental justice. Many writers have been influenced by Roy’s commitment to social justice and her willingness to speak truth to power. In this way, Roy’s essays have helped to shape the direction of contemporary Indian literature, encouraging writers to engage with the pressing issues of our time.

The Significance of Roy’s Essays for the Global Community

Arundhati Roy’s essays have been a significant contribution to the global community, especially in the context of social and political issues. Her writings have been a voice for the marginalized and oppressed, and have brought attention to the injustices and inequalities that exist in our world. Roy’s essays have also been a call to action, urging readers to take a stand and fight for a more just and equitable society. Her work has inspired many to become more engaged in social and political activism, and has helped to create a more informed and aware global community. Overall, Roy’s essays have been a powerful force for change, and will continue to be an important resource for those seeking to create a better world.

The Future of Roy’s Essays in Indian Literature

As Arundhati Roy’s essays continue to spark controversy and debate in Indian literature, it is clear that her work will have a lasting impact on the literary landscape. While some may criticize her for being too political or too radical, others see her as a necessary voice in a society that often silences dissenting opinions. As India continues to grapple with issues of social justice, inequality, and political corruption, Roy’s essays will undoubtedly remain relevant and important. Whether or not her ideas are embraced by the mainstream, her work will continue to inspire and challenge readers for years to come.

The Political Implications of Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays have always been politically charged, and her latest collection, The End of Imagination, is no exception. In fact, the political implications of her essays are perhaps more significant now than ever before. Roy’s writing is a powerful critique of the current political climate in India, and her essays offer a scathing indictment of the ruling party and its policies. She is unafraid to speak truth to power, and her words have the potential to inspire change. However, her essays are not just relevant to India; they have global implications as well. Roy’s writing is a reminder that the fight for justice and equality is ongoing, and that we must remain vigilant in the face of oppression. Her essays are a call to action, urging readers to take a stand against injustice and to fight for a better world.

The Societal Implications of Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays from 2016 have significant societal implications that cannot be ignored. Her critiques of the Indian government’s policies towards Kashmir and the Narmada dam project shed light on the human rights violations and environmental destruction that have been perpetuated in the name of development. Roy’s essays also challenge the dominant narratives of nationalism and patriotism, urging readers to question the legitimacy of the state and its actions. These ideas have the potential to inspire social movements and activism, as well as provoke important conversations about the role of the state in society. However, they also face resistance from those who are invested in maintaining the status quo. The societal implications of Roy’s essays are complex and multifaceted, but they cannot be ignored in the current political climate.

The Cultural Implications of Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays have had a significant impact on the cultural landscape of India. Her critiques of the government’s policies and actions have sparked important conversations about democracy, human rights, and social justice. Roy’s writing has also challenged traditional notions of gender and sexuality, and has given voice to marginalized communities. Her work has been both celebrated and criticized for its political and cultural implications, but there is no denying that it has had a profound effect on the way we think about India and its place in the world.

The Ethical Implications of Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays have always been a source of controversy and debate. While some praise her for her bold and unapologetic stance on issues such as human rights, environmentalism, and social justice, others criticize her for being too radical and divisive. However, beyond the political and ideological debates, there are also ethical implications to consider when reading Roy’s essays.

One of the main ethical concerns is the way Roy portrays her opponents. In many of her essays, she uses strong language and harsh criticism to denounce those who disagree with her views. While it is understandable that she feels passionate about her causes, some argue that her tone can be dismissive and disrespectful towards those who hold different opinions. This raises questions about the ethics of public discourse and the importance of respecting diversity of thought and opinion.

Another ethical issue that arises from Roy’s essays is the way she uses her platform to promote her own agenda. While it is admirable that she uses her voice to raise awareness about important issues, some argue that she can be too self-promoting and self-righteous in her writing. This raises questions about the ethics of activism and the importance of humility and collaboration in social movements.

Overall, while Roy’s essays are thought-provoking and challenging, they also raise important ethical questions about the way we engage in public discourse and activism. As readers, it is important to critically examine not only the content of her essays but also the ethical implications of her writing.

The Historical Implications of Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays have had a significant impact on the historical and political discourse in India. Her writings have challenged the dominant narratives of the Indian state and its policies, particularly in relation to issues of caste, gender, and environmental justice. Roy’s work has also been instrumental in highlighting the struggles of marginalized communities and bringing their voices to the forefront of public discourse. Her critiques of neoliberalism and globalization have been particularly influential in shaping the political consciousness of a generation of activists and intellectuals. Overall, Roy’s essays have played a crucial role in shaping the historical and political landscape of contemporary India.

The Literary Implications of Roy’s Essays

Arundhati Roy’s essays from 2016 are not only politically charged but also have significant literary implications. Roy’s writing style is poetic and evocative, and she often uses metaphors and imagery to convey her message. Her essays are not just political commentary but also works of art that challenge the reader’s imagination. Roy’s use of language is powerful and emotive, and she has a unique ability to capture the essence of a moment or an idea in a few well-chosen words. Her essays are a testament to the power of literature to inspire and provoke change. Roy’s work is a reminder that literature can be a tool for social and political transformation, and that writers have a responsibility to use their craft to speak truth to power.

The Philosophical Implications of Roy’s Essays

Roy’s essays from 2016 have significant philosophical implications that are worth exploring. One of the most prominent themes in her writing is the idea of power and its corrupting influence. She argues that those in positions of power often abuse their authority and exploit the less privileged for their own gain. This raises important questions about the nature of power and its relationship to morality. Is power inherently corrupting, or can it be wielded in a just and ethical manner? Roy’s essays suggest that the answer is not clear-cut and that we must be vigilant in holding those in power accountable for their actions. Another philosophical implication of Roy’s writing is the importance of empathy and compassion. She frequently highlights the suffering of marginalized communities and calls for greater empathy and understanding towards their struggles. This raises questions about the nature of morality and our obligations to others. Should we prioritize the well-being of others over our own self-interest, or is it possible to strike a balance between the two? Roy’s essays suggest that empathy and compassion are essential for creating a more just and equitable society. Overall, Roy’s essays offer important insights into some of the most pressing philosophical questions of our time.

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts
• Currently reading: Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ | Free to read 
• Will America tear itself apart? The Supreme Court, 2020 elections and a looming constitutional crisis
• Loneliness and me
• Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus | Free to read
• America the beautiful: three generations in the struggle for civil rights | Free to read
• Splendid isolation: the long way home
• The rise and fall of the office

Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ | Free to read 

• Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ | Free to read  on x (opens in a new window)
• Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ | Free to read  on facebook (opens in a new window)
• Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ | Free to read  on linkedin (opens in a new window)
• Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ | Free to read  on whatsapp (opens in a new window)

Arundhati Roy

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox.

Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs? 

Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science? 

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept  over a million . More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the  New York governor ’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is  America !”

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered. 

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.

The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists? 

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim  citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier  Jair Bolsonaro , had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of  physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed. 

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser.

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”. 

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers. 

He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under  lockdown . Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed. 

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering. 

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual. 

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a  long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.

Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love. 

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray. 

A few days later, worried that the  fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said. 

“Us” means approximately 460m people.

State governments in India  (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear. 

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

As the lockdown enters its second week,  supply chains have broken , medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting. 

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place. 

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.

India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now. 

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Arundhati Roy ’s latest novel is ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ 

Copyright © Arundhati Roy 2020

Follow  @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Listen to our podcast,  Culture Call , where FT editors and special guests discuss life and art in the time of coronavirus. Subscribe on  Apple ,  Spotify , or wherever you listen.

Letter in response to this article:

Indian government must support the apparel sector / From Rajendra Aneja, Aneja Management Consultants, Mumbai, India

Promoted Content

Explore the series.

Follow the topics in this article

• Life & Arts Add to myFT
• Coronavirus Add to myFT
• India Add to myFT
• Arundhati Roy Add to myFT

International Edition

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Arundhati Roy, the Not-So-Reluctant Renegade

By Siddhartha Deb

• March 5, 2014

“I’ve always been slightly short with people who say, ‘You haven’t written anything again,’ as if all the nonfiction I’ve written is not writing,” Arundhati Roy said.

It was July, and we were sitting in Roy’s living room, the windows closed against the heat of the Delhi summer. Delhi might be roiled over a slowing economy, rising crimes against women and the coming elections, but in Jor Bagh, an upscale residential area across from the 16th-century tombs of the Lodi Gardens, things were quiet. Roy’s dog, Filthy, a stray, slept on the floor, her belly rising and falling rhythmically. The melancholy cry of a bird pierced the air. “That’s a hornbill,” Roy said, looking reflective.

Roy, perhaps best known for “The God of Small Things,” her novel about relationships that cross lines of caste, class and religion, one of which leads to murder while another culminates in incest, had only recently turned again to fiction. It was another novel, but she was keeping the subject secret for now. She was still trying to shake herself free of her nearly two-decade-long role as an activist and public intellectual and spoke, with some reluctance, of one “last commitment.” It was more daring than her attacks on India’s occupation of Kashmir, the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or crony capitalism. This time, she had taken on Mahatma Gandhi.

She’d been asked by a small Indian press, Navayana, to write an introduction to a new edition of “The Annihilation of Caste.” Written in 1936 by B. R. Ambedkar, the progressive leader who drafted the Indian Constitution and converted to Buddhism, the essay is perhaps the most famous modern-day attack on India’s caste system. It includes a rebuke of Gandhi, who wanted to abolish untouchability but not caste. Ambedkar saw the entire caste system as morally wrong and undemocratic. Reading Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s arguments with each other, Roy became increasingly dismayed with what she saw as Gandhi’s regressive position. Her small introductory essay grew larger in her mind, “almost a little book in itself.” It would not pull its punches when it came to Gandhi and therefore would likely prove controversial. Even Ambedkar ran into difficulties. His views were considered so provocative that he was forced to self-publish. The more she spoke of it, the more mired in complications this last commitment of hers seemed.

Roy led me into the next room, where books and journals were scattered around the kitchen table that serves as her desk. The collected writings of Ambedkar and Gandhi, voluminous and in combat with each other, sat in towering stacks, bookmarks tucked between the pages. The notebook in which Roy had been jotting down her thoughts in small, precise handwriting lay open on the table, a fragile intermediary in a nearly century-old debate between giants.

“I got into trouble in the past for my nonfiction,” Roy said, “and I swore, ‘I’m never going to write anything with a footnote again.’ ” It’s a promise she has so far been unable to keep. “I’ve been gathering the thoughts for months, struggling with the questions, shocked by what I’ve been reading,” she said, when I asked if she had begun the essay. “I know that when it comes out, a lot is going to happen. But it’s something I need to do.”

In her late 30s , Roy was perhaps India’s most famous writer. The publication of “The God of Small Things” in 1997 coincided with the 50th anniversary of India’s independence. It was the beginning of an aggressively nationalist, consumerist phase, and Roy was seen as representative of Brand India. The novel, her first, appeared on the New York Times best-seller list and won the Booker Prize. It went on to sell more than six million copies. British tabloids published bewildering profiles (“A 500,000-pound book from the pickle-factory outcast”), while magazines photographed her — all cascading waves of hair and high cheekbones — against the pristine waterways and lush foliage of Kerala, where the novel was set and which was just beginning to take off as a tourist destination.

Roy’s tenure as a national icon came to an abrupt end when, a year later, the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) government carried out a series of nuclear tests. These were widely applauded by Indians who identified with Hindu nationalism, many of them members of the rising middle class. In an essay titled, “The End of Imagination,” Roy accused supporters of the tests of reveling in displays of military power — embracing the jingoism that had brought the B.J.P. to power for only the second time since independence — instead of addressing the abysmal conditions in which a majority of Indians lived. Published simultaneously in the English-language magazines Outlook and Frontline, the essay marked her beginning as an overtly political writer.

Roy’s political turn angered many in her upper-caste, urban, English-speaking audience, even as it attracted another. Most of her new fans had never heard of her novel; they often spoke languages other than English and felt marginalized because of their religion, caste or ethnicity, left behind by India’s economic rise. They devoured the essays Roy began writing, which were distributed in unauthorized translations, and flocked to rallies to hear her speak. “There was all this resentment, quite understandable, about ‘The God of Small Things,’ that here was this person writing in English winning all this money,” Roy said. “So when ‘The End of Imagination’ came out, there was a reversal, an anger among the English-speaking people, but also an embrace from everyone else.”

The vehemence of the response surprised her. “There is nothing in ‘The God of Small Things’ that is at odds with what I went on to write politically over 15 years,” Roy said. “It’s instinctive territory.” It is true that her novel also explored questions of social justice. But without the armature of character and plot, her essays seemed didactic — or just plain wrong — to her detractors, easy stabs at an India full of energy and purpose. Even those who sympathized with her views were often suspicious of her celebrity, regarding her as a dilettante. But for Roy, remaining on the sidelines was never an option. “If I had not said anything about the nuclear tests, it would have been as if I was celebrating it,” Roy said. “I was on the covers of all these magazines all the time. Not saying anything became as political as saying something.”

Roy turned next to a series of mega-dams to be built on the Narmada River. Villagers likely to be displaced by the project had been staging protests, even as India’s Supreme Court allowed construction to go forward. Roy traveled through the region, joining in the protests and writing essays criticizing the court’s decision. In 2001, a group of men accused her and other activists of attacking them at a rally outside the Supreme Court. Roy petitioned for the charges to be dismissed. The court agreed but was so offended by the language of her petition (she accused the court of attempting to “muzzle dissent, to harass and intimidate those who disagree with it”) that it held her in contempt. “Showing the magnanimity of law by keeping in mind that the respondent is a woman,” the judgment read, “and hoping that better sense and wisdom shall dawn upon the respondent in the future to serve the cause of art and literature,” Roy was to be sentenced to “simple imprisonment for one day” and a fine of 2,000 rupees.

The 2002 BBC documentary “Dam/Age” captures some of the drama around Roy’s imprisonment at the fortresslike Tihar Jail. When she emerged the next day, her transformation from Indian icon to harsh national critic was complete. Her hair, which she had shorn into a severe cut, evoked, uneasily, both ostracized woman and feisty feminist. The English-language Indian media mocked Roy for criticizing the dams, which they saw as further evidence of India’s rise. Attacks followed each of her subsequent works: her anguished denunciations of the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the plans for bauxite mining in Orissa (now Odisha) by a London-based corporation called Vedanta Resources, the paramilitary operations in central India against indigenous tribal populations and ultraleft guerrillas known as Naxalites; and India’s military presence in Kashmir, where more than a half million troops hold in check a majority Muslim population that wants to secede from India.

Kashmir, over which India has fought three of its four wars against Pakistan, would become one of Roy’s defining issues. In 2010, after a series of massive protests during which teenage boys faced off against soldiers, Roy publicly remarked that “Kashmir was never an integral part of India.” In suggesting that the state of India was a mere construct, a product of partition like Pakistan, she had crossed a line. Most progressives in India haven’t gone that far. Roy soon found herself the center of a nationwide storm. A stone-throwing mob, trailed by television vans, showed up at her front door. The conservative TV channel Times Now ran slow-motion clips of her visiting Kashmir in which she looked as if she were sashaying down a catwalk, refusing to answer a reporter’s questions. Back in Delhi, Times Now convened a panel moderated by its immensely popular host, Arnab Goswami, to discuss — squeezed between headlines and a news crawl in which “anger” and “Arundhati” were the most common words — whether Roy should be arrested for sedition. When the sole Kashmiri Muslim panelist, Hameeda Nayeem, pointed out that Roy had said nothing not already believed by a majority of Kashmiris, she was cut off by Goswami. Cases were filed against Roy in courts in Bangalore and Chandigarh, accusing her of being “antinational,” “anti-human” and supposedly writing in one of her essays that “Kashmir should get freedom from naked, starving Indians.”

The apartment where I met Roy in July occupies the topmost floor of a three-story house and has all the trappings of an upper-class home — a sprawl of surrounding lawn, a high fence and a small elevator. There are few signs of her dissenter status: the stickers on her door (“We have to be very careful these days because . . .”); the books in the living room (Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano); and, particularly unusual in the Indian context, the absence of servants (Roy lives entirely alone). Perhaps what is most telling is how Roy ended up in this house, which she used to ride past every day on her way to work, on a bicycle rented for a rupee.

Roy was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in 1959 in Shillong, a small hill town in the northeastern fringes of India. Her mother, Mary, was from a close-knit community of Syrian Christians in Kerala. Her father, Rajib, was a Bengali Hindu from Calcutta, a manager of a tea plantation near Shillong and an alcoholic. The marriage didn’t last long, and when Roy was 2, she and her brother, Lalith, a year and a half older, returned to Kerala with their mother. Unwelcome at the family home, they moved into a cottage owned by Roy’s maternal grandfather in Ooty, in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu.

“Then there are a lot of horrible stories,” Roy said and began to laugh. “My mother was very ill, a severe asthmatic. We thought she was dying. She would send us into town with a basket, and the shopkeepers would put food in the basket, mostly just rice with green chilies.” The family remained there until Roy was 5, defying attempts by her grandmother and uncle to turn them out of the house (inheritance laws among Syrian Christians heavily favored sons). Eventually, Roy’s mother moved back to Kerala and started a school on the premises of the local Rotary Club.

As the child of a single mother, Roy was ill at ease in the conservative Syrian Christian community. She felt more at home among the so-called lower castes or Dalits, who were kept at a distance by both Christians and upper-caste Hindus.

“Much of the way I think is by default,” she said. “Nobody paid enough attention to me to indoctrinate me.” By the time she was sent to Lawrence, a boarding school founded by a British Army officer (motto: “Never Give In”), it was perhaps too late for indoctrination. Roy, who was 10, says the only thing she remembers about Lawrence was becoming obsessed with running. Her brother, who heads a seafood-export business in Kerala, recalls her time there differently. “When she was in middle school, she was quite popular among the senior boys,” he told me, laughing. “She was also a prefect and a tremendous debater.”

Roy concedes that boarding school had its uses. “It made it easier to light out when I did,” she said. The child of what was considered a disreputable marriage and an even more disgraceful divorce, Roy was expected to have suitably modest ambitions. Her future prospects were summed up by the first college she was placed in; it was run by nuns and offered secretarial training. At 16, Roy instead moved to Delhi to study at the School of Planning and Architecture.

Roy chose architecture because it would allow her to start earning money in her second year, but also out of idealism. In Kerala, she met the British-born Indian architect Laurie Baker, known for his sustainable, low-cost buildings, and was taken with the idea of doing similar work. But she soon realized she wouldn’t learn about such things at school. “They just wanted you to be like a contractor,” Roy said, still indignant. She was grappling, she said, with questions to which her professors didn’t seem to have answers: “What is your sense of aesthetic? Whom are you designing for? Even if you’re designing a home, what is the relationship between men and women assumed in that? It just became bigger and bigger. How are cities organized? Who are laws for? Who is considered a citizen? This coalesced into something very political for me by the end of it.”

For her final project, Roy refused to design a building and instead wrote a thesis, “Postcolonial Urban Development in Delhi.” “I said: ‘Now I want to tell you what I’ve learned here. I don’t want you to tell me what I’ve learned here.’ ” Roy drew sustenance from the counterculture that existed among her fellow students, which she would represent years later in the film “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones” (1989). She wrote, designed and appeared in it — an elfin figure with a giant Afro playing the character of Radha, who gives up architecture to become a writer but drowns before completing her first novel.

By this time, Roy had broken off contact with her family. Without money to stay in the student hostel, she moved into a nearby slum with her boyfriend, Gerard da Cunha. (They pretended to be married in deference to the slum’s conservative mores.) “It’s one thing to be a young person who decides to slum it,” Roy said. “For me, it wasn’t like that. There was nobody. There was no cuteness about it. That was my university, that period when you think from the point of view of absolute vulnerability. And that hasn’t left me.”

After graduation, she briefly lived with Da Cunha, in Goa, where he was from, but they broke up, and she returned to Delhi. She got a job at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, and met Pradip Krishen, an independent filmmaker who offered Roy the female lead in “Massey Sahib” (1985), a film set in colonial India in which Roy played a goatherd. Roy and Krishen, who later married, collaborated on subsequent projects, including “Bargad,” a 26-part television series on India’s independence movement that was never completed, as well as two feature films, “Annie” and “Electric Moon” (1992).

Krishen’s background could not have been more different from Roy’s. A Balliol scholar and former history professor, Krishen, a widower, lived with his parents and two children in a sprawling house in the posh Chanakyapuri neighborhood. When Roy joined him, they moved to a separate apartment upstairs. Roy immersed herself in Delhi’s independent-filmmaking world. The movies’ progressive themes appealed to her, but it was a world dominated by the scions of elite families, and it soon came to seem out of touch and insular to her. She spent more and more time teaching aerobics, to earn her own money, and hanging out with artists she met in school.

She had already begun work on her novel when “The Bandit Queen,” a film, based on the life of the female bandit Phoolan Devi, was released. Devi was a low-caste woman who became a famous gang leader and endured gang rape and imprisonment. Roy was incensed by the way the film portrayed her as a victim whose life was defined by rape instead of rebellion. “When I saw the film, I was infuriated, partly because I had grown up in Kerala, being taken to these Malayalam films, where in every film — every film — a woman got raped,” Roy said. “For many years, I believed that all women got raped. Then I read in the papers how Phoolan Devi said it was like being raped again. I read the book the film was based on and realized that these guys had added their own rapes. . . . I thought, You’ve changed India’s most famous bandit into history’s most famous rape victim.” Roy’s essay on the film, “The Great Indian Rape Trick,” published in the now-defunct Sunday magazine, eviscerated the makers of “Bandit Queen,” pointing out that they never even bothered to meet Phoolan Devi or to invite her to a screening.

The piece alienated many of the people Roy worked with. Krishen, who gives the impression of a flinty loyalty toward Roy even though the couple split up, says it was seen as a betrayal in the tightknit film circles of Delhi. For Roy, it was a lesson in how the media worked. “I watched very carefully what happened to Phoolan Devi,” she said. “I saw how the media can just excavate you and leave a shell behind. And I was lucky to learn from that. So when my turn came, the barricades were up.”

When I met Roy at the New Delhi airport a few days after we first talked, she hung back from the crowd, ignoring the stares coming her way. She had turned down a request to address a public gathering in Kashmir, but there still seemed something political about traveling there just a week after eight Indian soldiers were killed in an ambush. The passengers on the flight Roy and I took, Hindu pilgrims visiting the Amarnath shrine, certainly thought so. Periodically, they filled the small aircraft with cries of “Bom Bhole,” or “Hail Shiva,” their right fists rising in unison. Once in Srinagar, the capital, Roy was stopped often by Kashmiris who wanted to thank her for speaking up against the Indian state. They also hoped she would agree to have her picture taken with them. She usually did.

But for the most part, she kept out of the public eye. Roy was staying at the house of a journalist friend, and as he and another journalist talked on their mobile phones, following a story about a fight that had broken out between Amarnath pilgrims and Kashmiri porters, she distributed packs of Lavazza coffee brought from Delhi, only half listening. Later, she declined to attend the screening of a new documentary about the Naxalite guerrillas, preferring to work on her novel.

Roy had come to Kashmir mainly to see friends, but it was hard to escape the strife altogether. A few days later, we drove through the countryside, a landscape of streams sparkling through green fields and over cobblestones, punctuated by camouflaged, gun-toting figures. Sometimes they were a detachment of the Central Reserve Police Force, sometimes the local police and, every now and then, distinctive in their flat headgear, soldiers of the counterinsurgency Rashtriya Rifles. “There were bunkers all over Srinagar when I first began coming here,” Roy said. “Now they use electronic surveillance for the city. The overt policing is for the countryside.”

In Srinagar earlier that week, the policing had seemed overt enough. Roy had been invited to speak at a gathering organized by Khurram Parvez, who works for the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, an organization that has produced extensive reports on mass graves and extrajudicial killings in Kashmir. As 40 or so people sat cross-legged on the floor — activists, lawyers, journalists and students — Parvez asked that cellphones be turned off and placed in “thighland” in order to prevent surreptitious recordings that could be passed on to authorities.

Roy put on reading glasses, and these, along with the stack of books in front of her, a selection of the nonfiction she has written over the past 15 years (just brought out by Penguin India as a box set of five candy-colored volumes), gave the gathering the air of an impromptu seminar. Roy began by asking audience members to discuss what was on their minds. A young lawyer who grew up in a village about 30 miles from Srinagar told a story of two women, who, after being raped by soldiers, spent the night shivering in separate bathing cabins, too ashamed to go home, hearing only each other’s weeping. Roy listened carefully to this and similar accounts, occasionally nudging the conversation beyond Kashmir, to the rifts and fractures within India itself, including the forests of central India, where she spent more than two weeks in 2010 with ultraleft guerrillas and their tribal allies for her last book, “Broken Republic” (2011).

“I feel sad, you know, when I’m traveling in India and see Kashmiris who’ve been recruited into the Border Security Force,” she said. “It’s what this state does, hiring from one part of the country and sending them to fight in other parts, against people who on the surface might seem different but who are actually facing the same kind of oppression, and this is why perhaps it’s important to be able to talk to each other.”

She picked up one of the books in front of her, the lemon-yellow “Listening to Grasshoppers,” and found a passage from the essay “Azadi,” or “Freedom.” In it, she describes attending a 2008 rally in Srinagar demanding independence from India. “The slogan that cut through me like a knife,” she read in a quiet, clear voice, “was this one: Nanga bhooka Hindustan, jaan se pyaara Pakistan ” — India is a naked, starving country; Pakistan is more precious to us than life itself. “In that slogan,” she said, “I saw the seeds of how easily victims can become perpetrators.”

The discussion went on for hours, spanning global capitalism and climate change, before returning to Kashmir. Did Kashmiris identify with Pakistan? Some did, some emphatically did not. What about the role of women in the struggle for Kashmiri self-determination? How could they make themselves heard when they found it so difficult to make themselves heard in this room? In the fierce summer heat, the group, splintered into factions, growing tired and agitated. Roy decided to bring the proceedings to a close with a joke from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.”

“In the movie, this man, Brian, asks a band of guerrilla fighters, ‘Are you the Judean Peoples’ Front?’ ” Roy said, mimicking a British accent. “And the reply he gets from this really offended group is: No, absolutely not. ‘We’re the Peoples’ Front of Judea.’ ” The joke, an elaborate parody of radical factionalism, made Roy laugh heartily. It also changed the emotional temperature of the room. As we came out of the house and milled around in the alley, the various groups seemed easier with each other. Later, a young man who had just completed a degree in fiction would express to me his disappointment that the conversation had never turned to writing at all.

Beyond the Gandhi book , there has been much to pull Roy away from fiction. In May, when Naxalite guerrillas killed at least 24 people, including a Congress politician who had formed a brutal right-wing militia and whom Roy criticized in her last book, she was immediately asked for a comment but declined to talk. “So they just republished an old interview I had given and tried to pretend it was a new interview,” she said.

“The things I’ve needed to say directly, I’ve said already,” she said. “Now I feel like I would be repeating myself with different details.” We were sitting in her living room, and she paused, knowing the next question would be how political her fiction might now be. “I’m not a person who likes to use fiction as a means. I think it’s an irreducible thing, fiction. It’s itself. It’s not a movie, it’s not a political tract, it’s not a slogan. The ways in which I have thought politically, the proteins of that have to be broken down and forgotten about, until it comes out as the sweat on your skin.”

But publishing is a risky venture in India these days; court orders are used to prevent books from coming out or to remove them from circulation, even when they are not explicitly political. Most recently, Penguin India pulped all existing copies of “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” by Wendy Doniger, after a conservative Hindu pressure group initiated a case against the book. Penguin also publishes Roy, and she felt compelled to protest.

Although Roy won’t divulge, even to her closest friends, what her new novel is about, she is adamant that it represents a break from both her nonfiction and her first novel. “I’m not trying to write ‘The God of Small Things’ again,” she said. “There’s much more grappling conceptually with the new novel. It is much easier for a book about a family — which is what ‘The God of Small Things’ was — to have a clear emotional heart.” Before she became caught up in her essay on Ambedkar and Gandhi, she was working on the novel by drawing, as she tends to do in the early stages, trying to figure out the structure. She then writes longhand. What she calls the “sandpapering” takes place on a laptop, at her kitchen table.

“I’m not attached to any particular space,” she said when I asked her how important the routine was to her writing. “I just don’t need to feel that someone’s breathing over me.”

After “The God of Small Things” was published, she began to give some of the money she made from it away. She sent her father, who resurfaced after she appeared in “Massey Sahib” and was not above trying to extort money from her, to a rehab center. (He died in 2007.) In 2002, when Roy received a Lannan Foundation award, she donated the $350,000 prize money to 50 small organizations around India. Finally, in 2006, she and her friends set up a trust into which she began putting all her nonfiction earnings to support progressive causes around the country.

“I was never interested in just being a professional writer where you wrote one book that did very well, you wrote another book, and so on,” Roy said, thinking of the ways in which “The God of Small Things” trapped her and freed her. “There’s a fear that I have, that because you’re famous, or because you’ve done something, everybody wants you to keep on doing the same thing, be the same person, freeze you in time.” Roy was talking of the point in her life when, tired of the images she saw of herself — the glamorous Indian icon turned glamorous Indian dissenter — she cut off her hair. But you could see how she might say the same of the position in which she now finds herself. The essay on Gandhi and Ambedkar was meant to complete one set of expectations before she could turn to something new. “I don’t want that enormous baggage,” Roy said. “I want to travel light.”

Published August 22nd, 2022

The Ministress of the Political Essay — A Review of Arundhati Roy’s "Azadi"

by Sam Dapanas

In her 2020 collection of essays, Indian novelist, activist and essayist Arundhati Roy takes up questions of language, cultural belonging, literature and politics, up to the 2020 COVID pandemic. While taking the form of political essays, a form of writing with a long tradition in the English language, Roy’s pieces weave in and out of genres, chasing hard questions and suggesting provocative answers, in a never-ending confrontation between the colonial legacy of the Empire and the rich and multi-faceted identities of post-colonial countries.

I first read Arundhati Roy in a postcolonial literature class as an undergraduate English major, thanks to my Asianist professor back then who is a dramaturgist, theater director, and cultural studies scholar. Despite the grueling experience of reading  The God of Small Things ’ first 100 pages (god, yes it was!), I loved it so much that I wrote a lengthy book review — one of the class’s final requirements — about it. Years later, her second novel would come out. I bought one of the first copies that arrived at the local bookstore. Reading Arundhati Roy’s nonfiction and essays in  Azadi  (which means ‘freedom’ in several Persian languages) and in  My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction  (2019), I must say it made me understand further where the characters from her fiction, some nitpicked from real people in her life, are coming from. “In What Language Does Rain Fall In Tormented Cities?” the essay, a homage to a line from Pablo Neruda’s  Libro de Preguntas  (or  The Book of Questions ), which serves as the first chapter of  Azadi: Fascism, Freedom, Fiction , Roy gives us a glimpse of her creative process, pre- and post-writing, behind  The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , her second novel, which was published in 2017. 

Said piece was possibly the essay that stroke the strongest chord in me and that had resonance in me as a reader. Coming from a multilingual, if not translingual, community — outside the capital Manila, a typical Filipino child would learn English and (Tagalog-based) Filipino in school and the media, the native tongue at home, and because of the well-intentioned, poorly executed Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB MLE) policy, possibly another non-Tagalog language taught in school if one’s mother language is not the same dominant one in the region where one lives in — I know exactly the ‘slow violence’ of linguistic genocide. Perhaps as a rumination on her case, Roy wrote: 

I fell to wondering what my mother tongue actually was. What was — is — the politically correct, culturally apposite, and morally appropriate language in which I ought to think and write? It occurred to me that my mother was actually an alien, with fewer arms than Kali perhaps but many more tongues. English is certainly one of them. My English has been widened and deepened by the rhythms and cadences of my alien mother’s other tongues. I say alien because there’s not much that is organic about her. Her nation-shaped body was first violently assimilated and then violently dismembered by an imperial British quill. I also say alien because the violence unleashed in her name on those who do not wish to belong to her (Kashmiris, for example), as well as on those who do (Indian Muslims and Dalits, for example), makes her an extremely unmotherly mother.

In  A Brief History of the Political Essay ,  David Bromwich, himself a scholar of Western literary and philosophical canon, locates the political essay within the Euro-American tradition, from Jonathan Swift’s satires to Virginia Woolf’s memoirs, as having “never been a clearly defined genre.”  Never been . A body of writings across cultures and eras exists but there is no strict definition of what works are confined within it and what works on the outside are not. But in  Azadi,  Arundhati Roy shows us, in the words of another novelist from the Indian subcontinent, Salman Rushdie, how “the empire writes back.” Her essays are incisive and at the same time, insightful and provocative, dissecting through the heart of the issue, asking the right questions with precision. In “The Language of Literature,” for instance, Roy asks, “What’s the place of literature?” Or what is its role in our current times which is heavily fraught with religious fundamentalism, the strengthening of the alt Far Right, socioeconomic inequalities and unrest, and even state-funded online disinformation which is prevalent in India and in my country, and possibly everywhere? Come 2020, all these have become layered with the Covid-19 pandemic, i.e. the hoarding of vaccine supply by the Global North, corruption in the midst of pandemic response, racism as evidenced by selective travel bans, as Roy has written in “The Pandemic Is A Portal,” the last essay in the collection. True to her introduction, “Some of the essays in this volume have been written through the eyes of a novelist and the universe of her novels.” 

In the larger context of “self against fact” in contemporary nonfiction writing particularly in its subgenres of literary journalism and political essays, Roy shapes and reshapes her position as a witnessing “writer-activist” (which she says people label her) foregrounded by, quoting Nicole Walker in her  Creative Nonfiction  magazine article  The Braided Essay as a Social Justice Action , “new facts, and the facts of your personal story cut into the hard statistics of your paragraph” about political upheavals and ethnoreligious violence in India. I cite Walker because to me, the essays here, a few of them reworked versions of speeches and lectures she gave for the British Library and PEN America, to me, are in the braided form, the “most effective [form] when the political and the personal are trying to explain and understand each other … to [pull] together two disparate ideas … [a] form … of resistance … a form that expands the conversation, presses upon the hard lines of ideology.” In  Azadi , Roy critiques across the political spectrum, from the fascist Right (the Hindi ultranationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) to the “casteist” Left (the Maoist Communist Party of India). 

Despite, however, the bleakness of the textual realities of the essays and the lived experiences they portray, Roy, as in her novels  The God of Small Things  and  The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,  gives us a glimpse of hope, some sort of light at the end of a pitch-dark tunnel. “What lies ahead?” Roy asks and to which she answers, “Reimagining the world. Only that.”

Sam Dapanas

Nationality: Filipinx

First Language(s): Cebuano Binisaya Second Language(s): English, Tagalog-based Filipino

More about this writer

Our Mission

Our Writers

Submit & Support

Submission Guidelines

Call for Submissions

Wall of Fame

Supported by:

Get involved!

Support tint — support translingual literature.

If you like what Tint Journal does and want us to keep producing literary issues and organizing literary events for ESL writers, support us now with a subscription on Patreon. Thank you for your interest in translingual writing!

Close Subscribe now

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Arundhati Roy extract: 'The backlash came in police cases, court appearances and even jail'

Arundhati Roy reflects on her journey from novelist to activist in this extract from her new collection of political essays, My Seditious Heart

• Interview: Arundhati Roy

In the winter of 1961 the tribespeople of Kothie, a small hamlet in the western state of Gujarat, were chased off their ancestral lands as though they were intruders. Kothie quickly turned into Kevadiya Colony, a grim concrete homestead for the government engineers and bureaucrats who would, over the next few decades, build the gigantic 138.68metre-high Sardar Sarovar Dam. It was one of four mega dams – and thousands of smaller dams – that were part of the Narmada Valley Development Project, planned on the Narmada river and her 41 tributaries. The people of Kothie joined the hundreds of thousands of others whose lands and homes would be submerged – farmers, farmworkers, and fisherfolk in the plains, ancient indigenous tribespeople in the hills – to fight against what they saw as wanton destruction. Destruction, not just of themselves and their communities, but of soil, water, forests, fish, and wildlife – a whole ecosystem, an entire riparian civilisation. The material welfare of human beings was never their only concern.

Under the banner of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), they did everything that was humanly and legally possible under the Indian constitution to stop the dams. They were beaten, jailed, abused and called “anti-national” foreign agents who wanted to sabotage India’s “development”. They fought the Sardar Sarovar as it went up, metre by metre, for decades. They went on hunger strike, they went to court, they marched on Delhi, they sat in protest as the rising waters of the reservoir swallowed their fields and entered their homes. Still, they lost. The government reneged on every promise it had made to them. On September 17, 2017, the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the Sardar Sarovar Dam. It was his birthday present to himself on the day he turned 67.

Even as they went down fighting, the people of the Narmada taught the world some profound lessons – about ecology, equity, sustainability and democracy. They taught me that we must make ourselves visible, even when we lose, whatever it is that we lose – land, livelihood, or a worldview. And that we must make it impossible for those in power to pretend that they do not know the costs and consequences of what they do. They also taught me the limitations of constitutional methods of resistance.

Today, even the harshest critics of the Narmada Bachao Andolan have had to admit that the movement was right about almost everything it said. But it’s too late.

In the last 20 years, the opening of the Indian markets to international finance has created a new middle class – a market of millions – and has had investors falling over themselves to find a foothold. The international media, for the most part, was at pains to portray the world’s favourite new finance destination in the best possible light. But the news was certainly not all good. India’s fleet of brand new billionaires and its new consumers were being created at an immense cost to its environment and to an even larger underclass. Backstage, away from the razzle-dazzle, labour laws were dismantled, trade unions disbanded. The state was withdrawing from its responsibilities to provide food, education and health care. Public assets were turned over to private corporations, massive infrastructure and mining projects were pushing hundreds of thousands of rural people off their lands into cities that didn’t want them. The poor were in freefall.

For me personally it was a time of odd disquiet. As I watched the great drama unfold, my own fortunes seemed to have been touched by magic. My first novel, The God of Small Things , had won a big international prize. I was a frontrunner in the line-up of people who were chosen to personify the confident, new, market-friendly India that was finally taking its place at the high table. It was flattering in a way, but deeply disturbing, too. As I watched people being pushed into penury, my book was selling millions of copies. My bank account was burgeoning. Money on that scale confused me. What did it really mean to be a writer in times such as these?

As I thought about this, almost without meaning to, I began to write a long, bewildering, episodic, astonishingly violent story about the complicated waltz between corporate globalisation and medieval religious fundamentalism and the trail of destruction they were leaving in their wake. And of the remarkable people who had risen to resist them.

The backlash to almost every one of the essays when I first published them – in the form of police cases, legal notices, court appearances, and even a short jail sentence – was often so wearying that I would resolve never to write another. But equally, almost every one of them – each a broken promise to myself – took me on journeys deeper and deeper into worlds that enriched my understanding, and complicated my view, of the times we live in. They opened doors for me to secret places where few are trusted, led me into the very heart of insurrections, into places of pain, rage and ferocious irreverence. On these journeys, I found my dearest friends and my truest loves. These are my real royalties, my greatest reward.

Although writers usually walk alone, most of what I wrote rose from the heart of a crowd. It was never meant as neutral commentary, pretending to be observations of a bystander. It was just another stream that flowed into the quick, immense, rushing currents that I was writing about. My contribution to our collective refusal to obediently fade away.

My collection of essays goes to press around the time that an era we think we understand is coming to a close. Capitalism’s gratuitous wars and sanctioned greed have jeopardised the life of the planet and filled it with refugees. It has done more damage to the Earth in the last 100 or so years than countless millennia that went before. In the last 30 years, the scale of damage has accelerated exponentially. The World Wildlife Fund reports that the population of vertebrates – mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles – has declined by 60% in the last 40 years. We have sentenced ourselves to an era of sudden catastrophes – wild fires and strange storms, earthquakes and flash floods. To guide us through it all, we have the steady hand of new imperialists in China, white supremacists in the White House, and benevolent neo-Nazis on the streets of Europe.

In India, Hindu fascists are marching to demand a grand temple where the mosque they demolished once stood. Farmers deep in debt are marching for their very survival. The unemployed are marching for jobs. More temples? Easy. But more jobs? As we know, the age of Artificial Intelligence is upon us. Human labour will soon become largely redundant. Humans will consume. But many will not be required to participate in (or be remunerated for) economic activity.

So, the question before us is, who – or what– will rule the world? And what will become of so many surplus people? The next 30 years will be unlike anything that we as a species have ever encountered. To prepare us for what’s coming, to give us tools with which to think about the unthinkable, old ideas – whether they come from the left, the right, or from the spectrum somewhere in between – will not do. We will need algorithms that show us how to snatch the sceptres from our slow, stupid, maddened kings. Until then, beloved reader, I leave you with … my seditious heart.

Live @ Lippmann

February 26, 2021.

Arundhati Roy: “We Live in an Age of Mini-Massacres”

The man booker prize-winning author of “the god of small things” on the state of india’s democracy, violence against women and minorities, the role of the media, and more.

Internationally acclaimed author and activist Arundhati Roy speaks during a press conference, where the panel condemned the criminalization of the right to peaceful public protest in a democracy, in New Delhi in October 2020 Mayank Makhija/NurPhoto via AP

Arundhati Roy’s first novel, “The God of Small Things,” won the Man Booker Prize in 1997. Her second, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” was shortlisted for it. These books, written two decades apart, capture how India has changed. In addition to her fiction, though, Roy’s political essays taught a generation of young Indian writers to think incendiary thoughts. Her recent New Yorker profile says her essays on India ’ s nuclear policies are not so much written as breathed out in a stream of fire.

Years of increasing repression towards journalists from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government have come to a head in recent weeks , as the country is roiled by the ongoing farmers’ protest against three farm bills passed in September 2020. Numerous journalists reporting on the protests have faced criminal charges and, in early February, some 100 journalists, publications, and activists were temporarily blocked by Twitter at the request of India’s Ministry and Electronics and Information Technology.   

Related Reading

In India, Journalists “Are Fighting For Whether Truth is Meaningful or Not” By Madeleine Schwartz

At a time when democratic values are under siege in her home country of India, as they are elsewhere around the world, including in the U.S., Roy’s analysis of issues like nuclear weapons, industrialization, nationalism, and more is essential to this moment. She is unapologetic about the stakes. Once, when a historian criticized her for passionate rhetoric, she responded, “I am hysterical. I’m screaming from the bloody rooftops … I want to wake the neighbors. That ’ s my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes.”

Roy’s work has been translated into more than 45 languages and, in 2019, her nonfiction was collected in a single volume, “ My Seditious Heart .” A new collection of essays, “ Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. ” was published last year. Roy spoke with the Nieman Foundation and shared her thoughts with Nieman Reports in February. Edited excerpts:

On whether India can still be called a democracy

Of course not. Apart from the laws that exist, like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act [1967 anti-terrorism legislation to prevent unlawful activities and associations and “maintain the sovereignty and integrity of India”], under which you have hundreds of people now just being picked up and put into jail every day, apart from that fact, every institution that is meant to work as a check against unaccountable power is seriously compromised.

Also, the elections are compromised. I don’t think we have free and fair elections because you have a system now of secret electoral bonds, which allows business corporations to secretly fund political parties. We have today a party that is the richest political party in the world, the BJP. Elections in India have become a spectator sport — it’s like watching a Ferrari racing a few old bicycles.

In any case, a democracy doesn’t mean just elections. First of all, India hasn’t been a democracy in Kashmir. It hasn’t been a democracy in Bastar [a district in the state of Chhattisgarh in central India]. It hasn’t been a democracy for the poorest of the poor who have no access to institutions of justice, who live completely under the boot of police and the justice system that crushes them with violence and indifference.

Now the oxygen is being taken away, sucked out of the lungs of even the middle class and even the big farmers, the agricultural elite.

On violence against women and Dalit and Muslim citizens, including lynchings of minorities by Hindu nationalist mobs

The thing is that when it comes to women, the fact that the caste system exists has meant that dominant castes in many many villages in India still feel that they have the right to oppressed caste woman’s body. That is how it has been traditionally.

This is why in India only certain rapes create outrage, whereas others are accepted as part of how things go. Look at what has happens to women in the northeastern states—Manipur for example, or women in Kashmir. Places that are literally administered by the security forces. You can imagine what goes on with that kind of imbalance of power. But the outrage doesn’t manifest itself on India’s streets. So you ’ re left wondering which rapes are considered outrageous in a society like this, and which are not.

When people feel that they have a license to lynch — permission from the top, then the reasons for lynching are not just to keep a community in fear. A whole ecosystem of fear kicks in, and not just fear, bullying, avarice — how one set of people can gain advantage over another — by frightening them , chasing them away from their land, from their villages. There’s a kind of lynching economy also that establishes itself through all this. We live in an age of mini-massacres. Very atomized, localized. You don’t need the old-style mega massacres like Gujarat 2002 or Mumbai 1993 any more.

The most dangerous thing that has happened is that, [as] the last few elections have shown, the BJP has proved that it can win elections without the Muslim vote. That creates a situation, where you have a minority which actually is made up of millions of people who are virtually disenfranchised. That’s a very, very dangerous situation.

On the role the media has played in the decline of India’s democracy

None of this could have happened if it wasn’t the media. Here you see the confluence of corporate money, corporate advertisement, and this vicious nationalism. You can’t even call them media or journalists anymore. It would be wrong.

The only [legitimate] media that there is now is a few people who are online who are managing very bravely to carry on and a few magazines like Caravan. I was recently listening to a very moving talk by this young journalist called Mandeep Punia who had just been arrested and beaten up. He was talking about how so many of his fellow journalists cannot be called journalists any more.

They’re just people who act out a script every day. If you look at the media, the police — I’m sorry to say this, but it’s almost diseased. I keep joking that I can’t put on the TV in my house because it feels like that girl in “The Exorcist,” this green bile pouring forth from the TV screen and spilling onto the floor. I feel like I need to clean it up. I don’t put it on anymore.

On the role of the writer or the artist in democracies in crisis

I often think that writers are no different from plumbers or carpenters. Some service the fascists. Some service the others. It’s not that writers are in any way politically better people. You see plenty of writers completely being part of this Hindu fascist project.

It’s been a question that’s very interesting to me for as long as I’ve ever been a writer. During the Freedom struggle against the British it was easy to delineate the battle., “The colonizer’s bad and they’re white. The freedom fighters are local, and they’re brown.” There’s a way in which passions could be comparatively at least, clear. Now, it’s all so murky. The river’s full of mud and silt.

To me, it’s always been the case that I feel like you need to have eyes around your head. For example, if you look at what’s happening with the farm protests now, how do you understand it, as a writer or as a human being? The government is under pressure because it’s the first time they’re faced with people who have not necessarily always been their ideological opponent. It’s hard to portray farmers as terrorists and anti-nationals, though God knows they’ve tried.

The agriculture crisis is a real crisis. It wasn’t created by Hindu fundamentalism. It was created by the Green Revolution when capital-intensive farming was introduced. It was created by the over‑mining of water, by the over-use of pesticides, by hybrid seeds, by putting in massive irrigation projects and not thinking about how to drain the water. So how do I make literature out of irrigation problems, or drainage, or electricity?

It’s been something that I’ve been pretty obsessed with, understanding things which are not normally considered a fiction writer’s business. To me, I can’t write fiction unless I make it my business.You have to know how all these things intersect with each other. How does caste, or race, or class, or irrigation, or bore-wells affect what might seem like a clash between two communities?  How does the harnessing of rivers in Kashmir affect that conflict?

On the writing process

I am a structure nerd myself. A lot of it does have to do with the fact that I studied architecture, the fact that I am very and always have been very interested in cities and how they are structured and how they work, and how institutions in the city are built for citizens, and the non‑citizens live in the cracks.

To me, if you look at my fiction or the non‑fiction, even almost every non‑fiction essay, it is a story. It seems to be the only way I can explain things to myself. There is a mathematics to the way the structure works. In fiction, to me, the structure and the language is as important as the story or the characters.

I don’t think I’m capable of writing something from A to B. It has to take a walk around the park, and then come back to certain places, and then have these reference points. Whether it’s “The God of Small Things” or “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” structure’s everything.

On the dangers to journalists, intellectuals, and activists in India

The thing is, what we first have to understand is how ordinary people — ordinary villagers, indigenous people, women guerillas who’ve been fighting mining corporations, people whose names we don’t know — have been dragged into prison, have been humiliated, even sexually humiliated. Those who have humiliated them have been given bravery awards. Look at the number who have been imprisoned, executed, buried in mass graves in Kashmir. All that violence that many Indians have accepted quite comfortably, even approved of, has now arrived at their doorsteps.

When you’re a journalist, a writer, anybody whose head is above the water, you’re already privileged in terms of someone’s looking out for you. You have a lawyer. Meanwhile, we have thousands of people who are in prison who don’t have any access to legal help, nothing.

Then you have a situation where, I’d say, the best of the best — I mean journalists, trade unionists, lawyers who defend them — are in jail. We know a lot of them are in jail for entirely made‑up reasons. There are students in jail. The latest police trick is to make a charge-sheet that is 17,000 pages, 30,000 pages. You’d need a whole bloody library shelf in your prison cell to accommodate your own charge-sheet.

A lawyer or a judge can’t even read it, let alone adjudicate upon it, for years maybe. They are continuously arresting people, or threatening people with arrest. The harassment, even if you are not actually in prison is unbelievable. Your life comes to a standstill. And once people are jailed then the ones who aren’t spend all their time running to lawyers, attending court hearings…The other trick is to have non-internet trolls file cases against you in many cities and towns. Then you spend your time running around. Who can afford it? Who can hold a job if they have to worry about court appearances?

This kinds of harassment flourishes because  institutions in India are dominated by Hindutva apparatchiks, it’s really, really worrying. Of course, now, there seems to be a pretty focused attack on women, young women, women activists.

The Chief Justice recently said, “Why are women being kept in the protests?” He’s talking about women who are the backbone of the farming world. Why are they being “kept” in protests?

On the role of tech platforms

Initially, when the 2002 Gujarat pogrom [in which a Godhra train burning that killed nearly 60 Hindu pilgrims incited three days of inter-communal violence in the western state of Gujarat, resulting in more than 1,000 deaths] happened, in fact, for a whole set of reasons, Narendra Modi was banned from travelling to the U.S. A lot of activist groups had successfully campaigned to have him banned. When he became prime minister, that ban was removed.

As I said, at that time, India was at the time a very attractive finance destination. Today, that’s less true but then India is seen as the region that is going to be the bulwark against China and Chinese expansionism. So it’s going to be given a broad pass for these strategic reasons.

The role of big tech is interesting because from 2014 and pre‑2014, let’s say a few years before that, right up to now, the Hindu nationalists had figured out how to use social media to their advantage. You have these things called WhatsApp farms. You have trolls. You have disinformation and lies. All of it spreading like a bushfire.

But recently, you see that the other side has begun to gear up and fight back. Now, there’s a lot of tension on social media and the fact is that, in Kashmir, when 370 was abrogated [revoking the limited autonomy, or “special status,” of the Jammu and Kashmir region], you had an Internet ban that lasted for months and months. The Internet has been banned on the borders of Delhi. The Internet has been banned all over the place.

It should be considered a human rights violation, legally and properly. A crime against humanity actually — if you look closely at the consequences of an almost year-long ban. You cannot, on the one hand, push the entire country into digital transactions, unique IDs, Aadhar cards, iris scans, and then ban the Internet.

You have that situation right now where all of us are being pushed into some form of radical digital transparency, while the only thing that’s opaque is how elections are funded and how political parties make their money and keep their money secret.

On what gives hope

I’m not that  fairy princess who’s going to hold out this false hope. I have days of utter desolation and hopelessness, of course I do, like millions of others here. But the fact is that when we develop a way of thinking and a way of seeing, we end up, many of us, certainly me, being people who know that we’ve got to do what we have to do. Whether we win or lose, we’re going to do it because we’re never going to go over to the other side.

You’ve got to keep holding on to that,  because that is what puts the oxygen in our lungs, that way of thinking, that way of writing, that way of not aggrandizing yourself to an extent where you think you can solve all the world’s problems. You can’t, but you can do something. And so you just keep doing that something.

In the most stressful situations, whether it’s in the forest where I spent some time with the armed guerrillas in Bastar, or whether it’s friends in Kashmir, or whether it’s in the deepest, darkest places, there’s always humanity. There’s always humor. There’s always literature. There’s always music. There’s always something beautiful.

That’s life. There isn’t ever going to be an end to the chaos. Everything is never going to work out just fine. It’s not going to happen. But we have to be able to accommodate that chaos in our minds and be part of it, swim with it, absorb it, influence it, turn it to our purpose. The wind will change direction at some point, won’t it?

Further Reading

In india, journalists “are fighting for whether truth is meaningful or not”, by madeleine schwartz, international reporting must distinguish hindu nationalism from hinduism, by kalpana jain, amidst crackdowns, kashmiri journalists struggle to report, by toufiq rashid.

• Register / Login

• International
• Photo Stories
• Interactives
• Himachal Pradesh
• Jammu and Kashmir
• Madhya Pradesh
• Uttar Pradesh
• Uttarakhand
• Andhra Pradesh
• Chhattisgarh
• West Bengal
• Maharashtra
• Arunachal Pradesh
• Entertainment
• Election 2019
• Assam Elections 2021
• Assembly Elections 2023
• Elections 2024
• Elections - Interactives
• World Cup 2023
• Budget 2023
• Flight Insight
• Economy Series
• Kashmir’s Frozen Turbulence
• The legend of Ramjanmabhoomi
• Liberalisation@30
• How to tame a dragon
• Celebrating biodiversity
• Farm Matters
• 50 days of solitude
• Bringing Migrants Home
• Budget 2020
• Jharkhand Votes
• The Federal Investigates
• The Federal Impact
• Vanishing Sand
• Gandhi @ 150
• Andhra Today
• Field report
• Operation Gulmarg
• Pandemic @1 Mn in India
• The Federal Year-End
• The Zero Year
• Brand studio

Arundhati Roy: How a novel symbolises freedom and essay ‘a form of combat’

To arundhati roy, winner of the 2023 european essay prize, a novel is ‘real, unfettered azadi’. and essay a tool to fight against fascism and injustice..

When Arundhati Roy was thinking of the title of her 2020 collection of essays, AZADI: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction (Penguin India), which recently earned her the 2023 European Essay Prize, her publisher in the UK, Simon Prosser, asked her what she thought of when she thought of azadi (freedom). “I surprised myself by answering, without a moment’s hesitation, ‘A novel.’ Because a novel gives a writer the freedom to be as complicated as she wants — to move through worlds, languages, and time, through societies, communities, and politics,” she writes in the introduction to the book, a compilation of her lectures and essays written between 2018 and 2020, described by the publisher as “a pressing dispatch from the heart of the crowd and the solitude of a writer’s desk.”

In analysing the essence of a novel, Roy (61) posits that its complexity and intricacy should not be confused with it being ‘loose, baggy, or random’. “A novel, to me, is freedom with responsibility. Real, unfettered azadi” , she writes, pointing out how azadi , the slogan of the ‘freedom struggle’ in Kashmir, has also become a chant of millions against the project of Hindu nationalism. While some essays in the volume have been written through the lens of a novelist delving into the very universe of her novels, others explore the symbiotic relationship between fiction and reality, shining light on how fiction seamlessly integrates into the world and, in many ways, becomes the world itself. Like it does in her two novels: the lyrical and exquisitely written The God of Small Things (1997), for which she received the Booker Prize, and her long-awaited second work of fiction, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) .

Charles Veillon Foundation, the instituting body that confers the prize, said in a statement, ‘Roy uses the essay as a form of combat.’ The publication of The God of Small Things coincided with the 50th anniversary of India’s independence from British colonialism. This period marked India’s pivot toward the global stage, during which the country aligned itself with the United States, embracing corporate capitalism, privatisation, and structural adjustments. However, a shift occurred the Indian political landscape in 1998 with the ascent of a BJP-led Hindu nationalist government, which conducted nuclear tests, altering the public discourse dramatically.

Roy, who had just won the Booker Prize, found herself thrust into the role of a cultural ambassador for the emerging New India. She began her journey of speaking out through her writing lest her silence was seen as complicity. Her powerful essay, ‘The End of Imagination’, which rails against the nuclear weapons as an affirmation of statehood, identity and defence, led to her being labelled ‘a traitor and anti-national’. However, she took these insults as badges of honour, realising well that speaking out was a political act in itself. In her subsequent essays, she wrote about dams, rivers, displacement, caste, mining, and civil war.

Literature and freedom

In her acceptance speech, Roy articulated her perspective on the notion of freedom. She made it clear that her happiness, as a writer, stems from the world of literature and the craft of writing. Over the past 25 years, she has penned essays that serve as a warning about the direction the country has been headed. Yet, these warnings have often fell on deaf ears, with liberals and self-proclaimed progressives often dismissing her writing. “But now the time for warning is over. We are in a different phase of history. As a writer, I can only hope that my writing will bear witness to this very dark chapter that is unfolding in my country’s life. And hopefully, the work of others like myself lives on, it will be known that not all of us agreed with what was happening,” she said.

Ahead of the 2024 General elections, Roy fears that if Narendra Modi comes back to power, there might be a new Constitution which will only curtail her ability to speak candidly. The irony lies in the fact that she receives the prize for her work, which essentially forewarned the country about its current trajectory. Much of her first essay, written for the W. G. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation which she delivered in the British Library in London in June 2018, is about the divisive partitioning of Hindustani into Hindi and Urdu, a schism that eerily foreshadowed the rise of Hindu Nationalism in India by more than a century. She delves into the historical roots of a project that would later reshape India’s political landscape. Scathing and incisive and trenchant and courageous and piercing and perspicacious — words that have come to define her style — these essays reflect the collective hopes, fears and despair of the people of India, minus the saffron brigade.

The early essays reflect the hope that many of us had in 2018: that Modi's reign would come to an end. “As the 2019 general election approached, polls showed Modi and his party’s popularity dropping dramatically. We knew this was a dangerous moment. Many of us anticipated a false-flag attack or even a war that would be sure to change the mood of the country,” she writes. In one of the essays, “Election Season in a Dangerous Democracy” (2018) she also underscores this fear: “We held our collective breath. In February 2019, weeks before the general election, the attack came. A suicide bomber blew himself up in Kashmir, killing forty security personnel. False flag or not, the timing was perfect. Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept back to power.”

As she was writing the introduction to the book in February 2020, then US President Donald Trump was on an official visit to India, and the first case of COVID-19 had been reported. It was a time when India was grappling with the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, widespread protests against an anti-Muslim citizenship law, and the horrifying communal violence in Delhi. “In a public speech to a crowd wearing Modi and Trump masks, Donald Trump informed Indians that they play cricket, celebrate Diwali, and make Bollywood films. We were grateful to learn that about ourselves. Between the lines he sold us MH-60 helicopters worth $3 billion. Rarely has India publicly humiliated herself thus,” she writes.

Literature in the Dark Times

Roy uses her words as both a shield and a sword in the face of an increasingly polarised world. In an essay titled ‘The Language of Literature,’ she grapples with the state of the world, dissecting the impact of capitalism, war, and government policies on our planet and its people. She doesn’t mince words when pointing out that much of the blame for the global chaos rests on the shoulders of the United States. She writes how after 17 years of the US invasion of Afghanistan, the conflict led to negotiations with the very Taliban they sought to overthrow. In the interim, Iraq, Libya, and Syria fell victim to the chaos of war, causing countless casualties and turning ancient cities into ruins. The rise of groups like Daesh (ISIS) further added to the turmoil. In her characteristic candour, she describes the US as ‘a rogue state’ that flouts international treaties and engages in aggressive rhetoric.

Roy believes that the place for literature is not predefined but rather built by writers and readers. It’s a fragile yet indestructible sanctuary that provides shelter in the face of chaos. She values the idea of literature that is necessary, literature that offers refuge: “It’s a fragile place in some ways, but an indestructible one. When it’s broken, we rebuild it. Because we need shelter. I very much like the idea of literature that is needed. Literature that provides shelter. Shelter of all kinds.” Her own journey as a writer has seen her straddle the worlds of fiction and nonfiction, with no clear boundary between the two.

She rejects the notion that fiction and nonfiction are at odds, stating that both are equally true, equally real, and equally significant: “I have never felt that my fiction and nonfiction were warring factions battling for suzerainty. They aren’t the same certainly, but trying to pin down the difference between them is actually harder than I imagined. Fact and fiction are not converse. One is not necessarily truer than the other, more factual than the other, or more real than the other. Or even, in my case, more widely read than the other. All I can say is that I feel the difference in my body when I’m writing.”

Acknowledging the risks that writers face today, she speaks of the perilous position of journalists in India, where threats to free expression have led to the country’s ranking just below conflict zones like Afghanistan and Syria. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , she navigates a complex map of languages, reflecting the linguistic diversity and complexity of India. She delves into the stories of characters who speak different tongues, showing how language can be both a bridge and a barrier. Her characters’ experiences demonstrate the challenges of living in a multilingual society, where slogans and chants may be in languages that people neither speak nor understand. Yet, they become tools of both resistance and assimilation.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , she writes, can be read as a conversation between two graveyards: “One is a graveyard where a hijra, Anjum — raised as a boy by a Muslim family in the walled city of Delhi — makes her home and gradually builds a guest house, the Jannat (Paradise) Guest House, and where a range of people come to seek shelter. The other is the ethereally beautiful valley of Kashmir, which is now, after thirty years of war, covered with graveyards, and in this way has become, literally, almost a graveyard itself. So, a graveyard covered by the Jannat Guest House, and a Jannat covered with graveyards. This conversation, this chatter between two graveyards, is and always has been strictly prohibited in India. In the real world, all conversation about Kashmir with the exception of Indian Government propaganda, is considered a high crime — treasonous even. Fortunately, in fiction, different rules apply.”

Similar Posts

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Prescient Anger of Arundhati Roy

By Samanth Subramanian

Nine months can make a person, or remake her. In October, 1997, Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her first novel, “ The God of Small Things .” India had just turned fifty, and the country needed symbols to celebrate itself. Roy became one of them. Then, in July of 1998, she published an essay about another such symbol: a series of five nuclear-bomb tests conducted by the government in the sands of Rajasthan. The essay, which eviscerated India’s nuclear policy for placing the lives of millions in danger, wasn’t so much written as breathed out in a stream of fire. Roy’s fall from darling to dissident was swift, and her landing rough. In India, she never attained the heights of adulation again.

Not that she sought them. Through the decades since, Roy has continued to produce incendiary essays, and a new book, “ My Seditious Heart ,” collects them in a volume that spans nearly nine hundred pages. The book opens with her piece from 1998, “The End of Imagination,” but India’s nuclear tests were not Roy’s first infuriation. In fact, in 1994—after she had graduated from architecture school, and around the time that she was acting in indie films, teaching aerobics, and working on her novel—she wrote two livid articles about a Bollywood movie’s unscrupulous depiction of the rape of a real, living woman. That tone has never faltered. Every one of the essays in “My Seditious Heart” was composed in the key of rage.

Roy is often asked why she turned her back on fiction. (Her second novel, “ The Ministry of Utmost Happiness ,” wasn’t published until 2017.) “Another book? Right now?” she once told a journalist. “This talk of nuclear war displays such contempt for music, art, literature and everything else that defines civilization. So what kind of book should I write?” The more interesting question, of course, is why Roy clung to nonfiction, and how she engages within it—the timbre of her reaction to demagoguery, inequality, corporate malfeasance, and the spoliation of the environment. The West’s liberal citizens are beginning to think afresh about how they ought to respond to such provocations: about whether there is virtue in cool balance, or dishonor in uninhibited anger, or utility in mustering a radical Left to counter a hostile Right. They could look to Roy for some answers. She has been ploughing this field for twenty-five years.

In “My Seditious Heart,” Roy rides to battle against a host of troubles. Most frequently, she criticizes India’s fondness for big dams, and its cruelty to the people displaced by them. She lambasts the American imperium and its souped-up capitalism, multinational institutions like the World Bank, and corporate greed. She flays the Hindu supremacists in India , who have sparked pogroms, divided communities, and tightened their hold on power, and she writes with sympathy about Maoists, the militant insurgents in central India who are fighting a state that is plundering the earth of ore and coal. Roy’s preoccupation with these topics has been so absolute that her second novel, when she finally produced it, was stocked with characters personifying her causes. One has a name, Azad Bhartiya, that translates as “Free Indian.” Bhartiya has been fasting for eleven years against assorted evils, and at the site of his protest he lists some of them on a laminated cardboard sign:

I am against the Capitalist Empire, plus against US Capitalism, Indian and American State Terrorism / All Kinds of Nuclear Weapons and Crime, plus against the Bad Education System / Corruption / Violence / Environmental Degradation and All Other Evils. Also I am against Unemployment. I am also fasting for the complete obliteration of the entire Bourgeois class.

If Roy ever begins a hunger strike, one feels that she will place herself behind just such a placard.

When Roy’s essays appeared individually, in magazines or newspapers, they functioned as little jabs of electricity, shocking us into reaction. Collectively, in “My Seditious Heart,” they remind us that many of the flaws in her nonfiction recur and persist. Her instinct to condemn becomes wearisome, and she gives us only the vaguest prescriptions for the systems she wishes would replace market-driven democracy, or dams, or globalization. She is prone to romanticizing the pre-modern, prompting us to wonder if she speaks too glibly for others. (“In their old villages,” she writes of displaced tribes, “they had no money, but they were insured. If the rains failed, they had the forests to turn to. The river to fish in. Their livestock was their fixed deposit.”) In stretches, the text is burdened by rhetorical questions and metaphors. (An essay titled “Democracy: Who is She When She’s at Home?” features three images in two successive sentences to describe how political parties treat Indian democracy: they till its marrow, mine it for electoral advantage, and tunnel under it like “termites excavating a mound.”) And her presentation of data can be self-serving. Repeatedly, she writes that around eight hundred million Indians live on less than twenty rupees (about thirty cents) a day. That statistic, from a 2005 government report, changed with time; by 2011 , when she was still using the figure, the government estimated that nearly two hundred and seventy million people lived on less than thirty rupees a day. Admitting to that reduction would have complicated her arguments, which may explain why she never updated her numbers.

When the dial isn’t tuned to high fulmination, Roy is easier and more moving to read. To form her opinions, or perhaps to confirm them, she travels widely across India. Her narrations of her encounters with people are tender, and her prose becomes marked by rare stillness. In Kashmir, in 2010, it was apple-packing season: “I worried that a couple of the little red-cheeked children who looked so much like apples themselves might be crated by mistake.” In Undava, a village pauperized by a dam and canal project, Roy meets Bhaiji Bhai, from whom the government had snatched seventeen of his nineteen acres. She recalls his story from an old documentary. “It broke my heart, the patience with which he told it,” she writes. “I could tell he had told it over and over again, hoping, praying, that one day, one of the strangers passing through Undava would turn out to be Good Luck.” Of the town of Harsud, in 2004, soon to be drowned by a reservoir: “A town turned inside out, its privacy ravaged, its innards exposed. Personal belongings, beds, cupboards, clothes, photographs, pots and pans lie on the street. . . . The people of Harsud are razing their town to the ground. Themselves.” That final word conveys the absurd tragedy of it all—of the poor hurrying to dismantle their lives, preferring that to having their lives dismantled for them.

The prototypical Roy essay is “Walking with the Comrades,” which holds both a fluid sense of discovery and a stubbornness of moral purpose. When it was first published, in 2010, it occupied most of an issue of Outlook , an Indian newsweekly. In it, Roy is invited to travel for a few weeks with a squad of Maoists through the forests of central India. The Prime Minister has called Maoists the greatest internal threat to the country’s security, but Roy finds men and women who have been repeatedly dispossessed, and who are trying to organize villagers and local tribes into some form of struggle. The government, for its part, has assembled a militia that wounds or kills those it suspects of supporting the Maoists, so that corporations may better mow down their forests and mine their land.

These are real, grievous cruelties. But, when Roy considers the Maoists’ own use of force, she adopts a gentler perspective. She describes the People’s Courts, where insurgents stage show trials before executing police officers. “How can we accept them? Or approve this form of rude justice?” she writes. Then she does approve it, by invoking the state’s own shoddy trials and executions. At least, in the case of a People’s Court, she writes, “the collective was physically present to make its own decision. It wasn’t made by judges who had lost touch with ordinary life a long time ago, presuming to speak on behalf of an absent collective.” This is a strange way to regard the judiciary, a pillar of the representative democracy she wants so much to restore to health.

Many of Roy’s positions have this kind of hard moral clarity. She declares that the free market undermines democracy, allowing for no complexity in the relationship between them. Grant-making institutions funded by companies are automatically suspect, their agendas serving only as tools to pry open markets and convert people into consumers. She has harsh words for the Ford Foundation—and then, through guilt by association, for any Indian nonprofit that has accepted a Ford grant, without weighing for us, on the page, the work that nonprofit may have done. (She did not, it should be noted, turn down her Booker purse, when it was still being sponsored by a British company that grew rich by using indentured labor in its Guyanese sugarcane plantations.) All big dams are ruinous, she insists, before comparing them to nukes: “They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons governments use to control their own people.”

Her essays tend to close on a call to action. “The borders are open. Come on in,” she writes, summoning us to protest at the site of India’s most controversial dam. In a piece titled “Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?,” she writes, “Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the US occupation of Iraq.” Go after the companies that benefit from the occupation; refuse to fight this immoral fight. She finds herself almost bewildered that those who suffer most stay silent. It strikes her—as it has struck me and no doubt many others who have lived in India—as something of a wonder that the country, ridden with injustices, has not witnessed a revolution. “Bhaiji Bhai, Bhaiji Bhai, when will you get angry?” she writes. “When will you stop waiting? When will you say ‘That’s enough!’ and reach for your weapons, whatever they may be?”

In their bare-knuckle approach, these essays descend directly from those of William Hazlitt, who advised his fellow-progressives to pull no punches. Like Roy, Hazlitt reflexively distrusted power, “the grim idol that the world adore.” In a polemic titled “On the Connexion between Toad-Eaters and Tyrants,” published in 1817, he offered a template for writerly resistance. First, “be a good hater.” Keep your memory long and your will strong. For the true lover of liberty, a hatred of wrongdoing “deprives him of his rest. It stagnates in his blood. It loads his heart with aspics’ tongues.” (“Aspic,” as he used it, was another word for “asp.”) All his life, Hazlitt railed against the formal dullness of political prose. The language of progressives must be inflamed, he thought, and their imaginations whipped by anger. “Abstract reason, unassisted by passion,” he wrote, “is no match for power and prejudice.”

These qualities, though, have earned Roy the disapproval of her own teammates. She was always certain to rile the nationalists, corporate India, and the state. (In 2002, she paid a fine and spent a day in prison after India’s Supreme Court classified her criticisms of the judiciary as criminal contempt.) But within the Indian left, too, you could detect a lack of warmth for her methods, and doubts that are now familiar. Roy’s brush was too broad, some said. She made convenient moral elisions, as with the Maoists’ violence. Her equation of big dams and nuclear bombs—couldn’t she have been more nuanced about that? Her habit of decrying capitalism, even as some market reforms lifted Indian people out of poverty—didn’t that paint the left as unempirical? Roy spared very few people, and very few institutions, at a time when the left needed everyone it could attract.

Then, while these worries were being nursed, the world made itself more deserving of Roy’s anger. Large companies, particularly in finance and technology, were exposed to be so corrupt that they deformed the nature of democracy. States placed their citizens under surveillance. Economic inequality grew, and the environmental crisis spiked. Nativists and right-wing ideologues lied their way into office, exploiting and widening the divisions of class and race. Reading “My Seditious Heart,” you feel as if Roy has been hollering as extravagantly as possible for years, trying to grab our attention, and we’ve kept motoring on toward the edge of the cliff.

The book emerges into an especially disheartening time in India. In its titular essay, published in 2016, Roy permitted herself a faint glow of hope about the resistance to the “manifesto of hate” enacted by the Hindu right. “Little by little, people have begun to stand up to it,” she wrote. But, in May, the Bharatiya Janata Party returned to power with an even greater mandate, its campaign a multibillion-dollar production of minority-baiting and sabre-rattling. This triumph doesn’t redeem Roy’s elisions and reductions, but it does make her anger the most indispensable part of her writing. Her fury is suited to these horrible and therefore simpler times; it’s more tuned to the reality on the ground than restraint and statistics. Roy started writing nonfiction when the world felt better. “My Seditious Heart” arrives to tell us not that the world has deteriorated but that it was never as fine as we once believed.

Books & Fiction

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Joan Acocella

By Pankaj Mishra

By Neal Katyal

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Arundhati Roy’s Non-Fiction: Examining Its Discourse

Abstract: Arundhati Roy, a representative writer of the present time has identified herself with non-fiction immediately after Booker Prize winning lone novel The God of Small Things. She began to try and understand the endless conflict between power and powerlessness, which has remained the central theme of much of her writings. Roy is one of the most consistent writers who has not changed her beliefs, ideas and faith. She has only changed the forms of writing by telling the story in different ways. From exposing the nefarious designs of controlling the hearts and minds of the people, and the will of governments across the globe that informs the functioning of US imperialism, to hammering at the conspiracy of dispossessing the naturally lawful owners of lands and resources in the tribal areas through the bogie of Naxalism, from shattering the self-righteous patriotic myths about Kashmir to unrelenting war against monopolization of wealth in the private sector under the garb of neo-liberalism and globalization are the themes that Roy has selected. It requires the clarity of thought and expression in equal measure which is evident in the course of examining its discourse. Key words: environment, globalisation, capitalism, monopolisation, imperialism

Related Papers

SMART M O V E S J O U R N A L IJELLH

Arundhati Roy, a representative writer of the present time has identified herself with non-fiction immediately after Booker Prize winning lone novel The God of Small Things. She began to try and understand the endless conflict between power and powerlessness, which has remained the central theme of much of her writings. Roy is one of the most consistent writers who has not changed her beliefs, ideas and faith. She has only changed the forms of writing by telling the story in different ways. From exposing the nefarious designs of controlling the hearts and minds of the people, and the will of governments across the globe that informs the functioning of US imperialism, to hammering at the conspiracy of dispossessing the naturally lawful owners of lands and resources in the tribal areas through the bogie of Naxalism, from shattering the self-righteous patriotic myths about Kashmir to unrelenting war against monopolization of wealth in the private sector under the garb of neo-liberalism and globalization are the themes that Roy has selected. It requires the clarity of thought and expression in equal measure which is evident in the course of examining its discourse. Key words: environment, globalisation, capitalism, monopolisation, imperialism

Equebal hussain

The proposed paper seeks to examine how Arundhati Roy has used her more than half a dozen collections of hard-hitting political and social essays as a tool to express her deep social concern and to expose the myth of globalization. These essays contained in collections like The End of Imagination, Algebra of Infinite Justice, Listening to Grasshoppers, The Broken World etc. may be read as a supplement to her soulful cry of concern for the gods of small things – untouchables, women, children and environment as expressed in her novel. Her non-fictional writings discuss issues such as the plight of Dalits, Adivasis & Tribals; displacement of the poor populace and plundering of Nature caused by the construction of big dams; nuclear weapons; Naxalism etc and above all, contain her threadbare analysis of the neo-colonial design in the shape of globalization. Her strong social commitment is reflected from the fact that she has stopped writing fiction to pursue her social activism. Yet she continues to stun her friends and foes alike with her radical and unconventional views through her razor sharp remarks in her non-fictional prose writings. As she herself says, " Fiction dances out of me and non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up every morning. " While an enormous mass of writing has been done on Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things her non-fictional work still remains unexplored. Therefore, it would be interesting and worthwhile to make a critical study of her non-fictional work which also establishes her as a master prose writer.

Angelo Monaco

Even if Roy employs some magic realist elements drawn upon her Booker-winning debut novel, The God of Small Things (1997), the use of fantasy and realism in her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), is less concerned with an aesthetic function than with anti-global one. In the novel, tropes of vulnerability affect individuals and environments alike, promoting not only a poetic of loss but also a radical critique of such social questions as anti-globalisation, environmentalism, anti-nuclear campaigns and land rights in Kashmir. This article then explores the juxtaposition of Bharati fantasy and historical realism in Roy’s last novel and it investigates the ways in which a hybrid narrative format manages to convey a complex and rich plot of contemporary India, where gender questions, caste discriminations, wounded landscapes and religious conflicts animate a tale of decay and hope. By resorting to Hindu epics, on the one hand, and to the intellectual activism typical of her non-fiction works, on the other, Roy issues both a warning and an invitation to take into account the contradictions of present-day postcolonial India. Keywords: anti-globalisation, postcolonialism, Bharati fantasy, historical realism, Arundhati Roy

South Asian Review

Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey

IJRCS 2456-6683

Dr. K J SIBI

This research paper focuses on the inevitable relation between a writer and her outcome through the writings. Arundhati Roy’s non-fictional writings, reflect her shadows of thought and her vision for the world. It is the gateway to understand her novels more deeply in its true sense. Humanity is the central theme of her fiction and non-fiction. For her, both are different ways of presenting the same subject. She writes like a crusader who exposes the hypocrisy of conventional society. She does not want any celebrity status so she knows very well, which award should be received and which should not. She deals with the subject of the relationship between power and powerlessness. It is an endless war, but she is optimistic in her attitude. Even though she does not have any paranoia, but she hopes that empowerment of the powerless class is possible through continuous awareness and activism by adopting non-violent and true democratic ways. She emphasizes the true power of the public in a democratic society.

International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

Gaurav Mishra

In the contemporary world physical, social and cultural environmental issues are growing and prevailing everywhere. In such a scenario India is also witnessing huge degeneration in its physical, social and cultural environments. Hence, it becomes imperative to observe how much awareness regarding the continuous above-mentioned issues has been spread among the masses. The present study aims to investigate whether Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is acting as a vehicle to raise awareness concerning physical, social and cultural environmental issues. The critical tool applied in the paper is postcolonial ecocriticism.

THE LITERARY HERALD 2454-3365

This research paper focuses on the intellectual thread between the fiction and non-fiction of Arundhati Roy. Both fiction and non-fiction deals with the same theme, power politics. However, fiction presents with artistic sense but non-fiction presents the plain truth. Her mission is to open the eyes of the common masses towards truth, which always twisted as per the convenience of the powerful class. Powerless class becomes non-citizens and melting like Mombattis and disappears without ripples on the history. The state and its apparatus are always against its own subject and instead of delivering justice; it delivers injustice in the name of justice. Both fiction and non-fiction deals with the power struggle between powerful and powerless classes. Arundhati Roy always raises the most fundamental questions about democracy and its hollowness in India and abroad.

Postcolonial Text

Alex Tickell

This essay compares Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) with Rumer Godden’s mid-twentieth-century fictions set in India—Black Narcissus (1939), The River (1946), and a later work, The Peacock Spring (1975)—and suggests that Roy's writing shares an unrecognised 'metaphorical economy' with Godden's work. The essay goes to to use this comparison to ask broader questions about critical paradigms of influence and intertextuality in postcolonial studies.

Budapest International Research and Critics Institute (BIRCI-Journal) : Humanities and Social Sciences

Sayyed Rahim Moosavinia

This paper attempts to analyze the mentioned novel based on postcolonial studies in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. The concepts that can be mentioned in this novel are history, diaspora, hybridity, the role of women in Indian society, globalization, resistance and orientalism. These concepts are used from postcolonial theorists, Edward W. Said and Homi K. Bhabha.Prominent issue is the role women in Indian society, because there are several female characters, such as Ammu, Rahel, and so on in TGST. Economic growth causes change in Ayemenem. It becomes a globalized community. Postcolonial resistance is an important issue in the novel. When Roy uses English language which it is a colonial language, she does a kind of resistance against colonization itself. Roy refers to the children’s life as a means of resistance.

Supriya Mandal

The growing interest behind the affinity between human and nature is the result of increasing environmental dangers. The emergent Ecocritical study presents the connection between ecological concern and literature. Literature functions as a manifesto to create environmental consciousness in human beings. Arundhati Roy's fictional and non-fictional works are projected as the manifesto of environmentalism in Indian socioeconomic matrix. The present paper deals with Roy's eco-consciousness in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and The God of Small Things. This paper draws out the issues of the wiping out of endanger species, the impact of dam on environment and human life, the shrunken condition of river Meenachal due to toxic waste, unplanned urbanization, excessive scientific manifestation that have harmed animals, birds and fishes, the abolition of forest for the steel and mining factories and the uselessness of nuclear testing. Roy unswaddles Euro-American 'development' policy which is a disguised form of neo-colonialism. The objective of this paper is to amplify Roy's ecological concern from postcolonial perspectives.s

RELATED PAPERS

mihai cristina

Journal of Coloproctology

Danilo Kanno

Journal of Sol-Gel Science and Technology

African Biodiversity

Mamadi Camara

Journal of Applied Physiology

Aleksander S Popel

The Journal of Physical Chemistry B

Hosne Ara Begum

Free Radical Research

Paolo Di Mascio

Current Developments in Nutrition

Jacqueline Hernandez

Benoît Lévesque

Revista Cientifica De La Facultad De Ciencias Quimicas Y Farmacia

Hilda Mareta

Duy Dat Bui

Nursing and Midwifery Studies

vahid zamanzadeh

rachel o'brien

The Medical Journal of Australia

Brian Collopy

American Journal of Science

Cees Van Staal

eprints.utm.my

Zulkarnaini Mat Amin

Serkan Demiral

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

Elena Conde Montero

fernando jose gomes landgraf

María Redondo

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

A Novelist with a Fury: Reading Arundhati Roy in the Present

By yogita goyal may 20, 2024.

the exhausted, quarreling opposition, the vain, nitpicking Left, the equivocating liberals who spent years building the road that has led to the situation we find ourselves in, and are now behaving like shocked, righteous rabbits who never imagined that rabbits were an important ingredient of the rabbit stew that was always on the menu.

LARB Contributor

LARB Staff Recommendations

You mustn’t pretend you didn’t know: arundhati roy on the condition of india under modi.

Arundhati Roy accepts the Charles Veillon Foundation’s 45th European Essay Prize for lifetime achievement.

Arundhati Roy Oct 21, 2023

Politics and Economics

Delightful Listening: A Conversation Between Viet Thanh Nguyen with Arundhati Roy

Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose novel “The Sympathizer” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, speaks to novelist Arundhati Roy.

Viet Thanh Nguyen Jul 31, 2018

Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?

LARB  publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!

Paperback , 320 pages

ISBN: 9781642597066

$19.95 $15.96 20% off

ISBN: 9781642593808

Read on any device

September 2020

$9.99 $5.99 40% off

Hardback , 240 pages

ISBN: 9781642592603

$22.95 $20.66 10% off

Winner of the European Essay Prize 2023 The chant of "Azadi!"—Urdu for "Freedom!"—is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it also became the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism. Even as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for Freedom—a chasm or a bridge?—the streets fell silent. Not only in India, but all over the world. The coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of Azadi, making a nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could. In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world.

"Arundhati Roy uses the essay as a form of combat, analysing fascism and the way it is being structured.... Her essays offer shelter to a multitude of people. In awarding the prize for her literary work, the jury is also acknowledging the author’s commitment to political action."   —2023 Prix Européen de l’Essai jury “Arundhati Roy's Azadi is a collection of essays and speeches describing India's recent descent into totalitarianism that speaks to the heart and the mind. Intelligent and thoughtful and written with empathy, it brings the reality of the situation home in way few other writers can.” — Seattle Post - Intelligencer

 "Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time." —Naomi Klein "Roy’s ... nonfictional engagement with the conflicts and traumas of a heedlessly globalized world has manifested the virtues of an unflinching emotional as well as political intelligence.... In an age of intellectual logrolling and mass-manufactured infotainment, she continues to offer bracing ways of seeing, thinking and feeling." —Pankaj Mishra "No writer today, in India or anywhere in the world, writes with the kind of beautiful, piercing prose in defense of the wretched of the earth that Roy does.... Roy the essayist embodies the legalistic but humanistic ruthlessness of a public defender, the wit and wordplay of a poet, a comrade who takes no injustice as a given."

Related blog posts View all related posts

Arundhati roy: “the pandemic is a portal”.

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” Watch the video of our online teach-in with Arundhati Roy, hosted by Imani Perry. 

Continue Reading

By Jim Plank / April 23 2020

Learning Together (while staying apart): Online Event Schedule

Join Haymarket Books for a series of online events hosted in the context of the current crisis, and watch past events.

By Haymarket Books / April 7 2020

Other books by Arundhati Roy

The architecture of modern empire, my seditious heart, the doctor and the saint, things that can and cannot be said, the end of imagination, field notes on democracy, other books of interest, freedom is a constant struggle, border and rule, on edward said, struggle makes us human, abolishing state violence.

• News & Politics
• The Right Wing
• Election ’20
• Documentaries
• Immigration
• Hot Topics >>
• Corrections
• GET OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER!
• GO AD FREE!
• MAKE A ONE-TIME DONATION

Infamous Joseph McCarthy lawyer motivates Trump 38 years after death: author

The controversial attorney Roy Cohn, who served as chief counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) and the House Unamerican Activities Committee during the 1950s and went on to represent a young Donald Trump during the 1970s, died of AIDS-related complications on August 2, 1986. But 38 years later, Cohn remains a major inspiration to Trump, now 77, at a time when he is facing four criminal indictments.

Author Kai Bird, who is writing a book on Cohn, discusses that inspiration in an essay/op-ed published by the New York Times on Tuesday, May 28 — the day closing arguments in Trump's criminal hush money/falsified business records trial are scheduled to begin.

"It was Mr. Cohn who taught Mr. Trump how to manipulate the law, and other people, to his advantage," Bird explains . "His ghost now hovers over the former president's entire legal outlook, influencing proceedings in ways large and small. The outcome in this case may be the final verdict on Mr. Cohn's brilliant, sinister strategies."

READ MORE:   ' Womp womp': CIA lawyer explains why popular claim about Jack Smith's Trump FL case is 'not true'

Bird adds , "Mr. Trump always admired Mr. Cohn's bravado and belligerence. Mr. Cohn's whole worldview seemed to validate the young developer's crassest instincts."

Trump, Bird notes , once said of the lawyer, "If you need somebody to get vicious, hire Roy Cohn."

"Most recently, we learned that the former president would not be taking the witness stand and exposing himself to cross-examination, choosing instead to let a stream of prominent Republicans visitors make his case for him on the courthouse steps," the author observes . "That is the strategy that Mr. Cohn lived by. Roy Cohn was indicted four times by Manhattan’s legendary prosecutor Robert Morgenthau."

Over the years, Trump has made it clear that the attorneys he admires the most are Cohn-like in their approach.

READ MORE: 'It only gets worse': Political science professor details what a second Trump presidency would mean

"Of all the lessons Mr. Trump learned from his mentor," Bird points out , "the value of treating people transactionally may have been the most important. The former president has run through countless lawyers in his decades of legal proceedings. Many were discarded. Some were not paid. But he held Mr. Cohn in high regard and took his lessons to heart."

READ MORE: ' On day one': Trump vows to end protections for LGBTQ students

Kai Bird's full New York Times op-ed/essay is available at this link (subscription required).

• Trump lawyers aim to block release of film that includes scene of him assaulting first wife ›
• 'May be their downfall': Ex-prosecutor details Trump lawyers’ 'baffling missteps' at trial ›
• Trump privately fuming that his top lawyer 'doesn’t share the same contempt for the rule of law' ›
• How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn's Ruthless Symbiosis Changed ... ›
• Who Was Roy Cohn? - Donald Trump's Connection to Roy Cohn ... ›
• Roy Cohn: The mysterious US lawyer who helped Donald Trump ... ›

Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

Understand the importance of honest news .

The past year has been the most arduous of our lives. The Covid-19 pandemic continues to be catastrophic not only to our health - mental and physical - but also to the stability of millions of people. For all of us independent news organizations, it’s no exception.

We’ve covered everything thrown at us this past year and will continue to do so with your support. We’ve always understood the importance of calling out corruption, regardless of political affiliation.

We need your support in this difficult time. Every reader contribution, no matter the amount, makes a difference in allowing our newsroom to bring you the stories that matter, at a time when being informed is more important than ever. Invest with us.

Make a one-time contribution to Alternet All Access , or click here to become a subscriber . Thank you.

Click to donate by check .

The 19 worthless things Trump will give you for your money

Nyt finds holes in their polls, what trump's weird wwe hall of fame speech tells us about his presidential debate strategy, 'falling off the cliff': dementia expert shows 4 ways trump is exhibiting 'shocking decline', 'biggest felony in american history': prosecutor’s closing argument against trump praised, 'wildly lawless': judge cannon’s removal predicted by top legal scholar, 'dramatic reversal' for biden campaign displayed in 'guerilla-style' event at trump trial: report, 'happy dance': analyst says prosecutors celebrating after blunder from trump attorney, why jack smith may have a shot at getting judge removed from mar-a-lago docs case, 'silent and tired trump' is 'barely a witness to his own trial': reporter, trump-appointed judge slammed as a 'menace' after denying jack smith’s gag order request, former fbi officials settle privacy suit related to trump-russia investigation: reports.

• george conway
• noam chomsky
• Kayleigh mcenany
• Melania trump
• drudge report
• paul krugman
• Lindsey graham
• Lincoln project
• al franken bill maher
• People of praise
• Ivanka trump