Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian novelist. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays. Her writings on various social, environmental and political issues have been a subject of major controversy in India.
Early life and background
Arundhati Roy was born in
Shillong,
Meghalaya, India, to a
Keralite Syrian Christian mother, the women's rights activist
Mary Roy, and a
Bengali father, Ranjit Roy, a tea planter by profession.
She spent her childhood in Aymanam in Kerala, and went to school at Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by the Lawrence School, Lovedale, in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. She then studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, where she met her first husband, architect Gerard da Cunha.
Roy met her second husband, filmmaker Pradip Krishen, in 1984, and played a village girl in his award-winning movie Massey Sahib. Until made financially stable by the success of her novel The God of Small Things, she worked various jobs, including running aerobics classes at five-star hotels in New Delhi. Roy is a cousin of prominent media personality Prannoy Roy, the head of the leading Indian TV media group NDTV,. She lives in New Delhi.
Career
Literary career
Early career: screenplays
Early in her career, Roy worked for television and movies. She wrote the screenplays for
In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), a movie based on her experiences as a student of architecture, directed by her current husband, and
Electric Moon (1992); she also appeared as a performer in the first. Roy attracted attention in 1994, when she criticised
Shekhar Kapur's film
Bandit Queen, based on the life of
Phoolan Devi. In her film review titled, 'The Great Indian Rape Trick', she questioned the right to "restage the rape of a living woman without her permission," and charged Kapur with exploiting Devi and misrepresenting both her life and its meaning.
The God of Small Things
Roy began writing her first novel,
The God of Small Things, in 1992, completing it in 1996. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures her childhood experiences in
Aymanam. It reached fourth position on the
New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction. From the beginning, the book was also a commercial success: Roy received half a million pounds as an advance; "extraordinary," "at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple") and the
Los Angeles Times ("a novel of poignancy and considerable sweep"), and in Canadian publications such as the
Toronto Star ("a lush, magical novel"). By the end of the year, it had become one of the five best books of 1997 by
TIME. Critical response in the United Kingdom was less positive, and that the novel was awarded the Booker Prize caused controversy; Carmen Callil, a 1996 Booker Prize judge, called the novel "execrable," and
The Guardian called the contest "profoundly depressing." In India, the book was criticized especially for its unrestrained description of sexuality by
E. K. Nayanar, then Chief Minister of Roy's homestate
Kerala, where she had to answer charges of obscenity.
Later career
Since the success of her novel, Roy has been working as a screenplay writer again, writing a television serial,
The Banyan Tree, and the documentary
DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002).
In early 2007, Roy announced that she would begin work on a second novel.
Arundhati Roy was one of the contributors on the book We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples, released in October 2009. The book explores the culture of peoples around the world, portraying their diversity and the threats to their existence. The royalties from the sale of this book go to the indigenous rights organization Survival International.
Advocacy and controversy
Since
The God of Small Things Roy has devoted herself mainly to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays, as well as working for social causes. She is a spokesperson of the
anti-globalization/
alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of
neo-imperialism and of the global policies of the
United States. She also criticizes
India's nuclear weapons policies and the approach to industrialization and rapid development as currently being practiced in India, including the
Narmada Dam project and the power company
Enron's activities in India.
Support for Kashmiri separatism
In an interview with
Times of India published in August 2008, Arundhati Roy expressed her support for the independence of Kashmir from India after massive demonstrations in favor of independence took place—some 500,000 separatists rallied in Srinagar in the Kashmir part of
Jammu and Kashmir state of India for independence on 18 August 2008, following the
Amarnath land transfer controversy. According to her, the rallies were a sign that Kashmiris desire secession from India, and not union with India. She was criticized by
Indian National Congress (INC) and
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for her remarks.
In October 2010, at a seminar in Delhi named "Azadi – The only way" ("azadi" meaning "freedom"
Her remarks attracted criticism from the BJP leader Arun Jaitley that she was promoting secession of the Union of India, and that the central government was not acting on the issue and prosecuting Roy and others. Although it was widely speculated that she could potentially face sedition charges from the center for her remarks in Delhi, Indian Home Minister P Chidambaram said no action would be taken "unless there is direct incitement to violence".
A few days after the October, 2010, seminar, Roy traveled to Srinigar and Shopian and then reported on her visits, noting at the outset, though, U.S. President Obama's then-fresh visit to India. Roy contrasted the president's having said, a "week before he was elected in 2008 ... [that] Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination — which has led to three wars between India and Pakistan since 1947 — would be among his 'critical tasks' ..., remarks [which] were greeted with consternation in India," with his having "said almost nothing about Kashmir since then." She further noted that during his India visit, Obama "pleased his hosts immensely by saying the United States would not intervene in Kashmir," among other things. As to her own trip to Kashmir, Roy wrote that with what she saw and heard even before reaching Shopian, where she heard more of the 2009 rape and murder case, "I could not bring myself to regret what I had said in Delhi" despite the "bit of trouble" those remarks had caused. When Roy returned home from Kashmir, she reported, "in what is becoming a common political strategy, officials outsourced their displeasure to the mob; ... the women’s wing of the [BJP] staged a demonstration outside my house, calling for my arrest. Television vans arrived in advance to broadcast the event live. The murderous Bajrang Dal ... have announced that they are going to 'fix' me with all the means at their disposal, including by filing criminal charges against me in different courts across the country." Ending on a broader note, Roy wrote "Indian nationalists and the government seem to believe that they can fortify their idea of a resurgent India with a combination of bullying and Boeing airplanes. But they don’t understand the subversive strength of warm, boiled eggs." The C-17 Globemaster III aircraft were on the Obama agenda in Delhi; the eggs were a gift to Roy from the father of one of the Shopian victims in appreciation for Roy's efforts.
Sardar Sarovar Project
Roy has campaigned along with activist
Medha Patkar against the
Narmada dam project, saying that the dam will displace half a million people, with little or no compensation, and will not provide the projected irrigation, drinking water and other benefits. Roy donated her Booker prize money as well as royalties from her books on the project to the
Narmada Bachao Andolan. Roy also appears in
Franny Armstrong's
Drowned Out, a 2002 documentary about the project. Roy's opposition to the Narmada Dam project was criticised as "maligning Gujarat" by
Congress and
BJP leaders in Gujarat.
In 2002, Roy responded to a contempt notice issued against her by the Indian Supreme Court with an affidavit saying the court's decision to initiate the contempt proceedings based on an unsubstantiated and flawed petition, while refusing to inquire into allegations of corruption in military contracting deals pleading an overload of cases, indicated a "disquieting inclination" by the court to silence criticism and dissent using the power of contempt. The court found Roy's statement, which she refused to disavow or apologize for, constituted criminal contempt and sentenced her to a "symbolic" one day's imprisonment and fined Roy Rs. 2500. Roy served the jail sentence for a single day and opted to pay the fine rather than serve an additional three months' imprisonment for default.
Environmental historian Ramachandra Guha has been critical of Roy's Narmada dam activism. While acknowledging her "courage and commitment" to the cause, Guha writes that her advocacy is hyperbolic and self-indulgent, "Ms. Roy's tendency to exaggerate and simplify, her Manichean view of the world, and her shrill hectoring tone, have given a bad name to environmental analysis". He faults Roy's criticism of Supreme Court judges who were hearing a petition brought by the Narmada Bachao Andolan as careless and irresponsible.
Roy counters that her writing is intentional in its passionate, hysterical tone: "I am hysterical. I'm screaming from the bloody rooftops. And he and his smug little club are going 'Shhhh... you'll wake the neighbours!' I want to wake the neighbours, that's my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes".
Gail Omvedt and Roy have had fierce discussions, in open letters, on Roy's strategy for the Narmada Dam movement. Though the activists disagree on whether to demand stopping the dam building altogether (Roy) or searching for intermediate alternatives (Omvedt), the exchange has mostly been, though critical, constructive.
United States foreign policy, the War in Afghanistan
In a 2001 opinion piece in the British newspaper
The Guardian, Arundhati Roy responded to the
US military invasion of Afghanistan, finding fault with the argument that this war would be a retaliation for the
September 11 attacks: "The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror against the people of the world." According to her,
U.S. President George W. Bush and British
Prime Minister Tony Blair were guilty of a
Big Brother-kind of
doublethink: "When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said: 'We're a peaceful nation.' America's favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of prime minister of the UK), echoed him: 'We're a peaceful people.' So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace."
She disputes U.S. claims of being a peaceful and freedom-loving nation, listing China and nineteen 3rd World "countries that America has been at war with – and bombed – since the second world war", as well as previous U.S. support for the Taliban movement and support for the Northern Alliance (whose "track record is not very different from the Taliban's"). She does not spare the Taliban: "Now, as adults and rulers, the Taliban beat, stone, rape and brutalise women, they don't seem to know what else to do with them."
In the final analysis, Roy sees American-style capitalism as the culprit: "In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled by the same business combines." She puts the attacks on the World Trade Center and on Afghanistan on the same moral level, that of terrorism, and mourns the impossibility of imagining beauty after 2001: "Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a newborn gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear – without thinking of the World Trade Centre and Afghanistan?"
In May 2003 she delivered a speech entitled "Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free)" at the Riverside Church in New York City. In it she described the United States as a global empire that reserves the right to bomb any of its subjects at any time, deriving its legitimacy directly from God. The speech was an indictment of the U.S. actions relating to the Iraq War. In June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In March 2006, Roy criticized US President George W. Bush's visit to India, calling him a "war criminal".
India's nuclear weaponisation
In response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in
Pokhran,
Rajasthan, Roy wrote
The End of Imagination (1998), a critique of the Indian government's
nuclear policies. It was published in her collection
The Cost of Living (1999), in which she also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of
Maharashtra,
Madhya Pradesh and
Gujarat.
Criticism of Israel
In August 2006, Roy, along with
Noam Chomsky,
Howard Zinn, and others, signed a letter in
The Guardian called the
2006 Lebanon War a "war crime" and accused Israel of "state terror." In 2007, Roy was one of more than 100 artists and writers who signed an open letter initiated by
Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism and the South West Asian, North African Bay Area Queers and calling on the
San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival "to honor calls for an
international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions, by discontinuing
Israeli consulate sponsorship of the LGBT film festival and not cosponsoring events with the Israeli consulate."
2001 Indian Parliament attack
Roy has raised questions about the investigation into the
2001 Indian Parliament attack and the trial of the accused. She has called for the death sentence of
Mohammad Afzal to be stayed while a parliamentary enquiry into these questions are conducted and denounced press coverage of the trial. The
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has criticized Roy for what it alleges is defence of a terrorist going against the national interest.
The Muthanga incident
In 2003, the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha, a social movement for adivasi land rights in Kerala, organized a major land occupation of a piece of land of a former Eucalyptus plantation in the Muthanga Wildlife Reserve, on the border of Kerala and Karnataka. After 48 days, a police force was sent into the area to evict the occupants—one participant of the movement and a policeman were killed, and the leaders of the movement were arrested. Arundhati Roy travelled to the area, visited the movement's leaders in jail, and wrote an open letter to the then Chief Minister of Kerala,
A.K. Antony now India's Defence Minister, saying "You have blood on your hands."
Comments on 2008 Mumbai attacks
In an opinion piece for
The Guardian (13 December 2008), Roy argued that the
November 2008 Mumbai attacks cannot be seen in isolation, but must be understood in the context of wider issues in the region's history and society such as widespread poverty, the
Partition of India (which Roy calls "Britain's final, parting kick to us"), the atrocities committed during the
2002 Gujarat violence, and the ongoing
conflict in Kashmir. Despite this call for context, Roy states clearly in the article that she believes "nothing can justify terrorism" and calls terrorism "a heartless ideology." Roy warns against war with Pakistan, arguing that it is hard to "pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state", and that war could lead to the "descent of the whole region into chaos". Her remarks were strongly criticized by
Salman Rushdie and others, who condemned her for linking the Bombay attacks with
Kashmir and economic injustice against Muslims in India; Rushdie specifically criticized Roy for attacking the iconic status of the
Taj Mahal Palace & Tower. Indian writer
Tavleen Singh called Roy's comments "he latest of her series of hysterical diatribes against India and all things Indian."
Criticism of Sri Lanka
In an opinion piece, once again in
The Guardian (April 1, 2009), Roy made a plea for international attention to what she called a possible government-sponsored genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka. She cited reports of camps into which Tamils were being herded as part of what she described as "a brazen, openly racist war." She also mentioned that the "Government of Sri Lanka is on the verge of committing what could end up being
genocide" and described the
Sri Lankan IDP camps where Tamil civilians are being held as
concentration camps. Ruvani Freeman, a Sri Lankan writer called Roy's remarks "ill-informed and hypocritical" and criticized her for "whitewashing the atrocities of the LTTE." Roy has said of such accusations: "I cannot admire those whose vision can only accommodate justice for their own and not for everybody. However I do believe that the LTTE and its fetish for violence was cultured in the crucible of monstrous, racist, injustice that the Sri Lankan government and to a great extent Sinhala society visited on the Tamil people for decades."
Violation of forest law
In 2003, Arundhati and her husband, were according to
The Telegraph informed by
Panchmarhi district administration that "a hilltop bungalow her husband owns near
Panchmarhi stands on notified forest land and has to be pulled down...on grounds of violation of forest law.". Also named in the case was the sister of Indian novelist
Vikram Seth and two forest officials. Arundhati’s husband bought the plot in 1994. Their land in
Madhya Pradesh encroaches on a Wildlife protection zone
Views on the Naxals
Roy has criticized
Government's armed actions against the
Naxalite-Maoist insurgents in India, calling it "war on the poorest people in the country". According to her, the Government has "abdicated its responsibility to the people" While she has received support from various quarters for her views, Roy's description of the Maoists as "Gandhians" raised a controversy. In other statements, she has described Naxalites as "patriot of a kind" who are "fighting to implement the Constitution, (while) the government is vandalising it".
In an interview with
Karan Thapar on
CNN-IBN, Roy defined the "ultimate goal" of the Maoists as "overthrowing the Indian state and institution of the dictatorship of the proletariat", which she did not support because she does not believe that a solution to the problems of the world would come from either a capitalist or a communist imagination. She was repeatedly asked to clarify her views on the Maoists.
Karan Thapar: How do you perceive the Maoists?
Arundhati Roy: I perceive them as a group of people who have at a most militant end in the bandwidth of resistance movements that exist
Karan Thapar: but do you support any attempt to overthrow the Indian state?
Arundhati Roy: ..If I say that I support the Maoists' desire to overthrow the Indian State, I would be saying that I am a Maoist. But I am not a Maoist.
Karan Thapar: .. what about the tactics that the Maoists use?..
Arundhati Roy: There is already a civil war...when your village is surrounded by 800 CRPF men who are raping and burning and looting, you can't say I am going on a hunger strike. Then, I support people's right to resist that.
Awards
Arundhati Roy was awarded the 1997
Booker Prize for her novel
The God of Small Things. The award carried a prize of about US $30,000 and a citation that noted, 'The book keeps all the promises that it makes.' Prior to this, she won the
National Film Award for
Best Screenplay in 1989, for the screenplay of
In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones.
In 2002, she won the Lannan Foundation's Cultural Freedom Award for her work "about civil societies that are adversely affected by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations," in order "to celebrate her life and her ongoing work in the struggle for freedom, justice and cultural diversity."
Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and her advocacy of non-violence.
In January 2006, she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, a national award from India's Academy of Letters, for her collection of essays on contemporary issues, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, but she declined to accept it "in protest against the Indian Government toeing the US line by 'violently and ruthlessly pursuing policies of brutalisation of industrial workers, increasing militarisation and economic neo-liberalisation.'"
Works
Books
The God of Small Things. Flamingo, 1997. ISBN 0-00-655068-1.
The End of Imagination. Kottayam: D.C. Books, 1998. ISBN 81-7130-867-8.
The Cost of Living. Flamingo, 1999. ISBN 0-375-75614-0. Contains the essays "The Greater Common Good" and "The End of Imagination."
The Greater Common Good. Bombay: India Book Distributor, 1999. ISBN 81-7310-121-3.
The Algebra of Infinite Justice. Flamingo, 2002. ISBN 0-00-714949-2. Collection of essays: "The End of Imagination," "The Greater Common Good," "Power Politics", "The Ladies Have Feelings, So...," "The Algebra of Infinite Justice," "War is Peace," "Democracy," "War Talk", and "Come September."
Power Politics. Cambridge: South End Press, 2002. ISBN 0-89608-668-2.
War Talk. Cambridge: South End Press, 2003. ISBN 0-89608-724-7.
Foreword to Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State. 2003. ISBN 1-56584-794-6.
An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire. Consortium, 2004. ISBN 0-89608-727-1.
Public Power in the Age of Empire Seven Stories Press, 2004. ISBN 1-58322-682-6.
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. Interviews by David Barsamian. Cambridge: South End Press, 2004. ISBN 0-89608-710-7.
Introduction to 13 December, a Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament. New Delhi, New York: Penguin, 2006. ISBN 0-14-310182-X.
The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. New Delhi: Penguin, Viking, 2008. ISBN 978-0-670-08207-0.
Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. New Delhi: Penguin, Hamish Hamilton, 2009. ISBN 978-0-670-08379-4.
Speeches, Essays, Interviews
We 'We,' documentary featuring the works of Arundhati Roy
Come September Transcript of speech on 18 September 2002 and conversation with Howard Zinn
Arundhati Roy on India, Iraq, U.S. Empire and Dissent—interview on Democracy Now!
'We have to become the global resistance' (Abridged version of speech at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, 16 January 2004)
Tide? or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire (16 August 2004 speech in San Francisco)
ABC Radio National transcript of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture (with audio) or download the speech here
'The Most Cowardly War in History'; opening statement at the Iraq tribunal (Article dated 24 June 2005)
Podcast of Arundhati Roy and Pankaj Mishra discussing "India in the World" at the Shanghai International Literary Festival
Arundhati Roy on the Human Costs of India’s Economic Growth, the View of Obama in New Delhi, and Escalating US Attacks in Af-Pak
Audio: Arundhati Roy in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion programme The Forum
Arundhati Roy on Obama’s Wars, India and Why Democracy Is “The Biggest Scam in the World”
"In the Valley of the Tigers"; Interview with Ascent magazine on the Narmada Valley
Gandhi but with Guns – essay about the naxalites at guardian.co.uk (2010-03-27)
Fault Lines – Arundhati Roy (video) – Interview with Arundhati Roy on Al Jazeera English (retrieved 2010-05-06)
See also
Anti-globalization movement
Narmada Bachao Andolan
Indian English literature
References
Books and articles on Roy
"The Politics of Design," in
Other
We, a political documentary about Roy's words. Available online.
Arundhati Roy denounces Indian democracy by Atul Cowshish
Carreira, Shirley de S. G.A representação da mulher em Shame, de Salman Rushdie, e O deus das pequenas coisas, de Arundathi Roy. In: MONTEIRO, Conceição & LIMA, Tereza M. de O. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Caetés, 2005
Ch'ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming, "The Politics of Design" (Weird English. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004; 154–199). Essay on Roy's language. Available online.
Literary Encyclopedia (in-progress)
SAWNET biography
Bibliography
Arundhati Roy – NNDB entry
Notes
External links
Arundhati Roy Faces Arrest for Questioning India’s Claim on Kashmir - video report by Democracy Now!
Arundhati Roy on Obama’s Wars, Poverty and India’s Maoist Rebels - video interview by Democracy Now!
Category:1961 births
Category:Living people
Category:People from Meghalaya
Category:Anti-globalization writers
Category:National Film Award winners
Category:Booker Prize winners
Category:Indian activists
Category:Indian novelists
Category:Indian women activists
Category:Indian women writers
Category:Indian writers
Category:Malayali people
Category:English-language writers from India
Category:Bengali people
Category:Indian atheists
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