OT:Rumbles from the largest democracy on earth

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At 07:19 AM 3/11/07, you wrote:

>Interesting highlight on Arundhati Roy that many do not know.

>Best wishes.

>Kisan Mehta Priya Salvi

>Prakruti and Save Bombay Committee

>102, MAUSAM, Plot No.285, Sector-28, Vashi,

>Navi Mumbai-400705 Maharashtra .

>Mobile: 0091 9223448857 (Kisan Mehta)

>Mobile: 0091 9324027494 (Priya Salvi)

>http://www.savebombaycommittee.org

>

>

>

> Sunday, March 11, 2007

>

>

>

> Published on Friday, March 9, 2007 by The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

>An Activist Returns To The Novel

>by Randeep Ramesh

>

>MANY HAD WRITTEN off the chances that Arundhati Roy would return to the

>world of fiction. Her astounding first novel, The God of Small Things, won

>the Booker in 1997. Ten years and 6 million copies later there was still

>no repeat of the lyrical, whirling debut. Instead Roy turned to lobbing

>literary Molotov cocktails at Enron, George Bush's war on terror and the

>World Trade Organisation in the form of incendiary polemics. No one could

>accuse her of having writers' block: she churned out six books,

>collections of her essays with titles such as Power Politics and An

>Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire.

>

>Author and activist Arundhati Roy.

>Photo: Getty Images

>

>Dispensing with story-writing, she pursued a career in social activism,

>appearing at anti-war rallies and using her celebrity to raise the

>profiles of unfashionable causes - Kashmiris on death row, the rights of

>tribal communities in India, hardscrabble suicides in the country's

>farming belt.

>But recently the 45-year-old quietly announced that she would be stepping

>back from the public stage to write her second novel. The last person to

>know, apparently, was her agent, David Godwin, who had negotiated for her

>a million-dollar advance for The God of Small Things. " David rang me

>saying, 'Why did you not tell me? I have had hundreds of calls from

>publishers.' I thought it was so funny, I mean let's have a bidding war

>for a non-existent book, " Roy says.

>Sitting in her Delhi rooftop flat, whose dark tiled and light wood-lined

>interior the former architecture student designed, Roy says she has

>already begun writing the new novel but has no idea when it will be

>finished. The whisper was that it would be about Kashmir, the

>revolt-scarred Himalayan state, but Roy shakes her head sending ripples

>through her grey-flecked curls. " It is not true. My fiction is never about

>an issue. I don't set myself some political task and weave a story around

>it. I might as well write a straightforward nonfiction piece if that is

>what I wanted to do. "

>A clue about where Roy is heading may be gleaned from her current reading.

>On her coffee table rests a book by Bono, while at her bedside are works

>by the radical American founding father Thomas Paine and Victorian

>novelist Charles Dickens. What these two writers share is their defence of

>the French Revolution, and an empathy with the lower classes who pulled

>down the ruling elite. " In so many ways Paris then could be Delhi now. It

>is a conceit to think that all that we say is new and original. "

>Roy says India today, like pre-revolutionary France, is poised " on the

>edge of violence " . As she sees it, the country of her birth is not coming

>together but coming apart - convulsed by " corporate globalisation " at an

>unprecedented, unacceptable velocity. " The inequalities become untenable. "

>Roy says she is not taking refuge from her politics in the world of

>literature. She answers her own door and makes guests tea herself,

>remarkable in a country where even middle-class households have servants.

>She is still married to filmmaker Pradip Krishen but the flat is " her

>space " . He lives in another house.

> " Living with my own contradictions is hard enough - forcing my political

>views on someone else, on their lifestyle and the choices they make is not

>something I want to do. It distorts a relationship beyond redemption. So,

>I decided to have my own place. "

>Roy's dire predictions about India have left her isolated when mainstream

>opinion seems convinced that the country, with its nuclear bombs and slick

>Bollywood movies, is the next superpower-in-waiting. Roy says some parts

>of the country, such as the western state of Gujarat - the scene of a

>bloody pogrom against Muslims five years ago - are off limits to her

>because of her campaigning.

>A few years ago she was briefly imprisoned for contempt of court while

>protesting against the country's controversial Narmada Dam project. The

>God of Small Things produced obscenity charges and a court case that ran

>for a decade, only to be dismissed last month.

>She first shot to prominence in 1994 with a scathing film review entitled

>The Great Indian Rape Trick, about the movie Bandit Queen, in which she

>questioned the right to " restage the rape of a living woman without her

>permission " .

>Roy has been consistent in her view that writers have a responsibility to

>their subjects. She says she could not read the blockbuster Maximum City,

>a portrait of Mumbai by expatriate Indian writer Suketu Mehta, because the

>book contains a passage in which the writer is a bystander while people in

>custody are beaten and tortured by the city's police.

> " When you witness torture you are seeing someone humiliated. In front of

>you. It is not a neutral act. Certainly you have the permission of the

>torturer, but you do not have the permission of the tortured [to record it]. "

>Unlike other Indian-born writers who have relocated to the US and Europe,

>Roy is determined to remain a thorn in the side of the establishment in

>India. " Here you see what's happening. People are driven out of villages,

>driven out of the cities, there's a kind of insanity in the air and all of

>it held down by our mesmeric, pelvic-thrusting Bollywood movies. The

>Indian middle class has just embarked on this orgy of consumerism. "

>But she admits that the kinds of non-violent protests she has taken part

>in for a decade have failed in India, a republic founded on the Gandhi-ite

>principles of peaceful resistance. " I am not such an uninhibited fan of

>Gandhi. After all, Gandhi was a superstar. When he went on a hunger strike

>he was a superstar on a hunger strike. But I don't believe in superstar

>politics. If people in a slum are on a hunger strike, no one gives a shit. "

>Roy says activists have been " exhausted " by their attempts to influence

>the courts and the press and now says she does not " condemn people taking

>up arms " in the face of state repression.

> " It would be immoral for me to preach violence unless I were prepared to

>resort to it myself. But equally, it is immoral for me to advocate

>feelgood marches and hunger strikes when I'm not bearing the brunt of

>unspeakable violence. I certainly do not volunteer to tell Iraqis or

>Kashmiris or Palestinians that if they went on a mass hunger strike they

>would get rid of the military occupation. Civil disobedience doesn't seem

>to be paying dividends. "

>Instead of the Indian state caving in to the moral righteousness of the

>numerous causes Roy supports, she says it merely moved to co-opt its

>adversaries. The power of argument, even in the world's biggest democracy,

>has been shrunk by the argument of power.

>Roy says she was aghast to learn that a fellow Indian environmental

>campaigner accepted a million-dollar award from the transnational metals

>firm Alcan, which has been accused of grabbing tribal land in eastern

>India. The tentacles of big business have learned to embrace

>non-government organisations. The result, she claims, is that the

>charitable trusts of Tata, India's largest private company, fund " half the

>activists in the country " .

>She feels frustrated by the state's ability to brush aside non-violent

>resistance movements. " This has sapped the energy from people's movements.

>The very Gandhian Narmada movement [the grassroots group which campaigned

>against big dams in India] knocked on the door of every democratic

>institution for years and has been humiliated. It has not managed to stop

>a single dam from going ahead. In fact the dam industry has a new spring

>in its step. "

>Roy says she had given ideological opponents a handy hate figure. " In

>India I'm portrayed more as a hysterical, lying, anti-national harridan.

> " In this adversarial game that goes on, you can get pinned down to spewing

>facts and numbers, but those are not the only truths ... I've done that.

>I've fought that battle, " she says. " But the distillation of those things

>into literature is a different kind of intervention. "

> 2007. The Sydney Morning Herald

>###

 

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