Mar 29 2010

Arundhati Roy

Corporate propaganda for globalization in India is adequately represented by the all-singing shit-film Slumdog Millionaire, but the reality of most of India is much more accurately described by the great novelist and activist Arundhati Roy.

The publication of The God of Small Things catapulted Arundhati Roy to instant international fame. It received the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction and was listed as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year for 1997. 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; It was published in May, and the book had been sold to eighteen countries by the end of June.

The God of Small Things received stellar reviews in major American newspapers such as The New York Times (a “dazzling first novel,” “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.

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.

About the Narmada Dam, a truly monstrous construction which was gradually elevated to a height of 400 feet and displaced hundreds of thousands of villagers along the Narmada River, Ms. Ray wrote…

Big Dams are to a Nation’s ‘Development’ what Nuclear Bombs are to its Military Arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons Governments use to control their own people. Both Twentieth Century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They’re both malignant indications of civilisation turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link – the understanding – between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.

Official India was so delighted to have its own nuclear weapon that it made Prof. Dr. Abdul Kalam President of India in 2002, while Arundhati Roy was marginalized by Indian media for her opposition.

And even after India had already exploded an actual nuclear weapon at Pokhran, official India still claimed that even their 12 kiloton bomb wasn’t really a “nuclear weapon,” and their nuclear program was intended for peaceful purposes only!

In response to India’s testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government’s nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India’s massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as well as working for social causes. Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.

In June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice,’ but declined to accept it.

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  1. http://www.salon.com/sept97/00…

    If someone told me this was how I was going to write a novel before I started writing it, I wouldn’t believe them. I wrote it out of sequence. I didn’t start with the first chapter or end with the last chapter. I actually started writing with a single image in my head: the sky blue Plymouth with two twins inside it, a Marxist procession surrounding it. And it just developed from there. The language just started weaving together, sentence by sentence.

    There is no way for any publisher or writer to know what will sell and why, even though they are all looking for formula. People are asking me if I am feeling pressure now, and they ask me if I will repeat what I achieved in “The God of Small Things.” How I hope I do not! I want to keep changing, growing. I don’t accept the pressure. I don’t believe I must write another book just because now I’m a “writer.” I don’t believe anyone should write unless they have a book to write. Otherwise they should just shut up.

  2. http://www.democracynow.org/20…

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, Arundhati Roy recently had a rare journalistic encounter with the armed guerrillas in the forests of central India. She spent a few weeks traveling with the insurgency deep in India’s Maoist heartland and wrote about their struggle in a 20,000-word essay published this weekend in the Indian magazine Outlook. It’s called “Walking with the Comrades.”

    We’re joined now here in New York by the world-renowned author and global justice activist. She won the Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize in 2002 and is the author of a number of books, including the Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things. Her latest collection of essays, published by Haymarket, is Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers.

    Arundhati Roy, welcome to Democracy Now!

    ARUNDHATI ROY: Thank you, Amy.

    AMY GOODMAN: Before we go into the very interesting journey you took, you arrive here on the seventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. You were extremely outspoken on the war and have continued to be. I remember seeing you at Riverside Church with the great Howard Zinn, giving a speech against the war. What are your thoughts now, seven years in? And how it’s affected your continent, how it’s affected India?

    ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think the-you know, the saddest thing is that when the American elections happened and you had all the rhetoric of, you know, change you can believe in, and even the most cynical of us watched Obama win the elections and did feel moved, you know, watching how happy people were, especially people who had lived through the civil rights movement and so on, and, you know, in fact what has happened is that he has come in and expanded the war. He won the Nobel Peace Prize and took an opportunity to justify the war. It was as though those tears of the black people who watched, you know, a black man come to power were now cut and paste into the eyes of the world’s elite watching him justify war.

    And from where I come from, it’s almost-you know, you think that they probably don’t even understand what they’re doing, the American government. They don’t understand what kind of ground they stand on. When you say things like “We have to wipe out the Taliban,” what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.

    Iraq, the war is going on. Afghanistan, obviously, is rising up in revolt. It’s spilled into Pakistan, and from Pakistan into Kashmir and into India. So we’re seeing this superpower, in a way, caught in quicksand with a conceptual inability to understand what it’s doing, how to get out or how to stay in. It’s going to take this country down with it, for sure, you know, and I think it’s a real pity that, in a way, at least George Bush was so almost obscene in his stupidity about it, whereas here it’s smoke and mirrors, and people find it more difficult to decipher what’s going on. But, in fact, the war has expanded.

    ANJALI KAMAT: And Arundhati, how would you explain India’s role in the expanding US war in Afghanistan and Pakistan? This is a climate of very good relations between India and the United States.

    ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, India’s role is-India’s role is one of, at the moment, trying to position itself, as it keeps saying, as the natural ally of Israel and the US. And India is trying very hard to maneuver itself into a position of influence in Afghanistan. And personally, I believe that the American government would be very happy to see Indian troops in Afghanistan. It cannot be done openly, because it would just explode, you know, so there are all kinds of ways in which they are trying to create a sphere of influence there. So the Indian government is deep into the great game, you know, there, and of course the result is, you know, attacks in Kashmir and in Mumbai, not directly related to Afghanistan, but of course there’s a whole history of this kind of maneuvering that’s going on.

  3. The summer after I was a freshman in college, I visited a friend of mine at his parents’ house in Kerala, and they were the most godawful tight-assed Methodist missionaries you can possibly imagine, and that’s exactly how he described them before I got there.

    But Kerala was beautiful, prosperous, and clean! The commies have run the local government for 40 years, and it’s one of the only places in India IMHO where you can actually drink the water without fear or consequences!

    Euro-trash inevitably congregates on the beaches in nearby Goa, but Kerala is just as beautiful, and…

    Almost no euro-trash!

    And everybody can read! Americans think India is Bangalore computers, but huge stratches of it are virtually illiterate. 66% literacy mostly in the cities means that about 300,000,000 villagers cannot read.

    But not in Kerala, and the CPI has been delivering an education to every child in Kerala almost ever since partition .  

  4. adored Arundhati Roy for her irrefutable words of truth.  

    I had saved that article yesterday for reading, but if you read it, in it’s entirety, some of the things like further impoverishing the poor are happening in India, as they are here in the U.S.  Does make you wonder — a lot!

    Thank you for this, Jacob Freeze!

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