Good resource of Arundhati Roy …the conscientious genius of writig in English …without formal british or Weatern Education …
She is most unpredictable in her passion for fighting for most unusual causes unpopular but has been correct in ALL of them The most recent being her fight against ENRONS exploitative business in India which by now everybody knows has caused pain to millions here in USA & tens of millions in India with India govt itself left holding the bag for Enron worth 64Million$…
the star.com.my
Tuesday, August 21, 2001
http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/roy/mystar01.htm
Rebel with a big cause
Arundhati Roy refuses to plead guilty or apologise over a contempt of court charge. She risks a six-month jail sentence. From being the darling of India’s middle class, celebrity author Arundhati Roy has become a thorn at its side, writing a series of savage critiques on her country’s development. Undaunted even by the prospect of going to jail, the prize-winning novelist and intrepid activist talks to MADELEINE BUNTING. ARUNDHATI Roy burst on to the Indian national stage from nowhere in 1997. A drop-out architecture student and one-time aerobics ins-tructor, she had turned her hand to writing a novel. It was The God Of Small Things, and it earned her one of India’s biggest ever advances before going on to win the Booker Prize and sell six million copies. The rebellious outsider had trumped the coterie of men who dominate India’s literary world, and the reward was an insatiable international fascination. She found herself cast in the role of Indian national mascot, adored and feted for her global success. Four years later, there have been no more novels, and the now 39-year-old darling of India’s middle class has become a painful thorn in its side, writing a series of savage critiques of India’s development - its nuclear tests, its huge dam-construction projects and its cringing obeisance to western corporate power. These are home truths that powerful interests in India do not want to hear, and Roy has made herself many enemies. Irritated by her criticisms and the publicity they invariably attract in the west, the Indian establishment has set about trying to cut this awkward rebel down to size. Roy also faces a contempt of court charge before the Indian Supreme Court. Her alleged crime is to have attended a demonstration against the court’s decision last autumn to give the go-ahead to the country’s most controversial dam project, the Sardar Sarovar in the Narmada valley, central India. Roy is accused of inciting violence and attacking a court official.
Arundhati Roy refuses to plead guilty or apologise over a contempt of court charge. She risks a six-month jail sentence.
Ludicrous though many aspects of the case appear to be, the lawyers Roy consulted advised her to plead guilty and apologise. When she refused, none would risk his career to represent her. Undeterred, she wrote her own affidavit and defiantly had it published in a mass-circulation magazine on the day of her first court appearance, much to the fury of the court, which has threatened further proceedings. Roy risks a six-month jail sentence. How did the writer of an intensely lyrical novel become a committed activist with an analytical prose worthy of a barrister? What induced her to swap her status as Delhi’s most-favoured dinner party guest for night marches and sit-ins at the dam sites, and even, possibly, jail? Why did the whimsical chronicler of “small things” - the beetles and creeping, lush greenery of Kerala - turn to fighting big things such as nuclear bombs, dams, the Indian state and globalisation? Roy comes down four flights of stairs to open the door to her apartment block. Here, where she writes and spends most of her day, she has none of the small army of servants considered necessary by middle-class Delhi. Her flat is surrounded by the contradictions of Indian development, which she analyses in her essays: a comfortable suburb of New Delhi, where cows rummage in the rubbish piled up in the open gutters, and where a man has set up shop in the shade of a tree, ironing the neighbourhood’s washing, probably earning in a day just enough to buy one cafe latte in the new, empty, air-conditioned coffee shop. We sit in a crepuscular gloom, the fierce Delhi summer requiring that all the blinds be drawn, and the air-conditioning is on in Roy’s small apartment of strong primary colours, books, a big television and computer. She talks in a low, gentle voice. It’s a sharp contrast to the vehemence and coruscating wit of her writing. “I like the fact that my rage goes into bigger things, not into small, petty things with people around me,” she says. “I am surrounded by people I love, and what I crave is gentleness.” Friends come and go, and the telephone rings frequently. We get off to a bad start, because Roy hates the “writer activist” label with which she is saddled - it reminds her of “sofa-bed”. She writes what she sees, she says, and she sees no great distinction between fiction and non-fiction; all she does is keep her “aching eyes open”. She refers me to an address on writing that she gave earlier this year in the United States: “In the midst of putative peace, a writer can, like I did, be unfortunate enough to stumble on a silent war. The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out.” She stumbled on a silent war in 1998, after a giddy year of international celebrity which, she admits, she enjoyed “immensely” (all those hotel towels, she enthuses in one essay), but she knew, in the end, that the “good manners and hygiene” would kill her. What anchored her as she spun around the globe was home, and she resisted the temptations of emigration. “I’m not the sort of person who can buy a life.” She came to see fame much like a tin can trailing noisily behind her wherever she went: eventually, it would drop off and she would then write some “worstsellers” and eat mangoes in the moonlight. But the prospect of such leisure vanished as she returned home to look at her country with new eyes: India was jubilant at its first nuclear test, and Roy penned The End Of Imagination, a furious attack on this symbol of national pride. The title was misplaced, however, because what then captured her imagination, and has done ever since, was that the biggest mass non-violent movement since Indian independence - the campaign against the Narmada valley dams - was then on the brink of victory. She set aside the novels she had been planning to read and threw herself into the detail of technical subjects such as irrigation and drainage. Since then, her voracious curiosity has ranged from export credit guarantees to electricity distribution rates and resettlement programmes for those displaced by the dams. The struggle has rooted her, intellectually and emotionally, after the upheaval of celebrity. It also helped assuage the guilt over her sudden wealth, which she once described as making her feel she had “perforated the huge pipeline that circulates the world’s wealth … and it is spewing money at me, bruising me with its speed and strength. I began to feel as though every emotion, every little strand of feeling in The God Of Small Things, had been traded in for a silver coin.” Her interest in the dam is less personal, she says. Like any writer, she wants to understand and tell stories, and dams sum up, like nothing else, the story of modern India: its greed, its wanton violence and its centralisation of power. Roy’s political essays, powerful though they are, have not so far achieved their objectives. The End Of Imagination in 1998 won her many admirers in the West, but in India it failed to dent the extraordinary consensus behind the nuclear bomb. The Greater Common Good in 1999, on India’s preoccupation with dam-building in the 50 years since independence, pointed out that the dams had woefully failed to meet targets for either power generation or irrigation, while at the same time displacing at least 33 million people. Roy argued that the bulk of those displaced were untouchables or tribal peoples, and that this amounted to a form of genocide. The essay won her more admirers in the west and lent weight to the international campaigns against dams. The worldwide publicity that Roy has attracted by campaigning against the dams has succeeded in scaring off several western contractors of the huge Narmada project - it involves building 3,200 dams, including 30 major ones. But despite all her eloquence, and despite the mass protest movement, the Supreme Court ruled last October that work on the huge Sardar Sarovar dam could resume. Joy features prominently in Roy’s description of the politics of opposition - against all the odds, you defy your critics simply by having too much fun. That’s why they couldn’t forgive her and her mother when she was growing up in Kerala, she remembers; they simply weren’t as unhappy as a single mother and her “thin, black, clever” daughter should have been. “The whole point of the feminist fight was that there has to be fun at the end of the tunnel. You don’t want this image of beaten, oppressed, moaning women. You think about things, engage with the world, and you’re aware of the terrible suffering that is happening around you, and the way to be with all of that is to enjoy the process of what you are doing and to speak joy in the saddest places. If you’re living in a world that is telling you that only if you have hamburgers, buy diamonds and have a Rolls-Royce can you be happy, then you’re saying in the happiest possible way that that is completely wrong.” She adds: “It’s a game of survival, and if you allow yourself to become unhappy, you will lose everything. I remember what my mother said to me: ‘I’ve never known anyone who guards their happiness so fiercely.’ I think it’s important to patrol the borders of your happiness, to understand your sources of joy and to protect them, and to know that, so often, it’s only when that happiness has gone that you know what it was. But you can be cooking or listening to music and think, I don’t need anything else to happen or anyone else to be any other way in order to be happy.” Happiness for her, she says, might be going to the market and choosing glass beads after weeks of late nights drafting an affidavit, or just lying on the floor all day with friends under a ceiling fan in the Delhi summer. Even gossiping with friends about relationships as the police move in to break up a demonstration at a dam site. These are what Roy describes as the “small delights” of her life, a source of the strength that has seen her through the turbulence of her meteoric rise to global fame and, now, the anxiety of the court cases. She describes her friends as “extraordinary people” for dealing with her sudden fame and money, and managing to maintain the “democratic nature of our friendships”. None of them had money before, now she gives hers away, “and I know that it is as sophisticated an act to receive as to give it”. She has probably made enough from the one novel to live on for the rest of her life; she eschewed more, refusing to sell the film rights, arguing democratically that six million readers had their own version of the film in their heads and she didn’t want a single filmmaker to replace them all. The fame has been burdensome, although she claims (somewhat implausibly, since she had her hair cut, a symbol of rare defiance in a culture that fetishises long hair) that she has some anonymity in India (when asked if she is Arundhati Roy, she says her standard reply is that she wishes she were). The causes in need of her celebrity are endless, and she turns down most of the requests that come in from all over the world: The most important thing, she says, is to keep in mind your own insignificance; she can’t speak about every issue and do them all justice. She adds thoughtfully, “Sometimes it’s hard, because fate has conspired to make my voice heard, so you have the illusion, or other people have, that you can do a lot.” Roy is wary of the fickleness of fame, and likens it to a wind blowing through a house and all the shutters banging: “There were moments when I was so unhappy that I wished I hadn’t written the book and I hadn’t won the Booker.” The “huge public fairytale” had “another, equal, opposite version in my private life, a terrible dark side”. She refuses to expand, preferring to answer questions with general reflections on the nature of relationships between men and women, which perhaps supports rumours in Delhi that her marriage has broken down. In any case, the upheaval in her life has now been resolved. She lambasts the pact of mediocrity to which the vast majority of people subscribe in their marriages, and confesses herself bewildered as to why so many women have children. She has none herself by her marriage to a filmmaker 10 years her senior, and has no plans to have any: “Until recently, I was never secure financially or sure enough about my life to think of having children. I’m so scared of the vulnerability of children. I suppose, in some deep way, I have not been able to cope with my own childhood. I wouldn’t know how to protect the child’s magic. Now, I want to live my life backwards, I want to be free to change my mind, to think my thoughts, and not to be responsible for moulding somebody and for teaching them what is right.” Living backwards means that Roy is now looking forward to living out her teenage years and growing old, becoming a “fit, old witch”; a form of liberation that means being irresponsible, keeping everybody she loves feeling loved (that’s not a matter of luck but hard work, she maintains) and depending on no one for anything - dependence is a form of selfishness, she insists. Roy admits there is a great struggle between political engagement and her desire to concentrate on her writing. Her enthusiasm for the latter is undiminished: “I think writing is such a beautiful thing to play with all the time, having your hands in that stuff. I use it to live my life in the most public and the most private way, and I love all different kinds of writing: a novel, an affidavit, a letter. Writing leads me through my life, and I trust my writing so much more than anything else about myself.” - Guardian News Service
Mausam ke tarah tum bhi badal tou na jao ge
[This message has been edited by Simran (edited January 20, 2002).]