Man Booker Prize-winning author and political activist Arundhati Roy was born on November 24, 1961, in Shillong, Meghalaya. Her father, Ranjit Roy, was a tea planter, and mother, Mary, a women’s rights activist from Kerala. Roy spent her childhood in Kerala’s Aymanam village, a place which she would revisit in her acclaimed debut novel, The God of Small Things.
Speaking about the ways in which her mother (who had divorced her husband) influenced her, Roy said in an interview to The Progressive magazine in April 2001: “I sometimes think I was perhaps the only girl in India whose mother said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t get married.’… She [Mary] is like someone who strayed off the set of a Fellini film. She’s completely nuts. But to have seen a woman who never needed a man, it’s such a wonderful thing, to know that that’s a possibility, not to suffer.”
After her school education, Roy studied architecture at Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture. She then played the role of a village girl in the critically acclaimed film, ‘Massey Sahib’, which was directed by her husband, Pradip Krishen. Her involvement with films continued for several years, and she wrote screenplays for ‘In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones’ and ‘Electric Moon’, both directed by Krishen. The former, a part autobiographical account of her experiences at the School of Planning and Architecture, won her a National Film Award for best screenplay. Roy did other jobs too, including teaching aerobics at five-star hotels in Delhi.
One of her earlier writings which was noticed and generated a lot of debate, was an article titled ‘The Great Indian Rape Trick’ in which she slammed the makers of the 1994 film Bandit Queen, which was based on the life of the dacoit Phoolan Devi. “If it were a fictional film, where rape was being examined as an issue, if it were a fictional character that was being raped, it would be an entirely different issue. I would be glad to enter into an argument about whether showing the rape was necessary, whether or not it was ‘exploitative’,” she wrote. “[But] Bandit Queen…has nothing intelligent to say about the subject beyond the fact that Rape is degrading and humiliating. Dwelling on the Degradation and the Humiliation is absolutely essential for the commercial success of the film. Without it, there would be no film.”
In 1996, she finished writing her first novel, The God of Small Things, which got an advance of Rs 35 million and propelled her to international literary stardom. In an interview to the journalist Vir Sanghvi in the Sunday Magazine, she described it as “a very fragile, personal” book. “I considered going to an Indian publisher but they tend to give advances of Rs 5,000. However, I wasn’t sure about finding a foreign publisher,” she said. “I mean, why would anyone abroad be interested in the book? I am not very well educated. I haven’t lived abroad. So it’s not as though I am like Salman Rushdie or Vikram Seth.”
The God of Small Things went on to win the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world. The novel, an “ambitious meditation on the decline and fall of an Indian family [that] is part political fable, part psychological drama, part fairy tale”, as the critic Alice Truax put it, took her four years to complete. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote: “Ms. Roy gives us a richly pictorial sense of [her] characters’ daily routines and habits, and she delineates their emotional lives with insight and panache, revealing the fatal confluence of jealousy, cruelty and naïveté that shapes their destinies forever… [A]s rendered in this remarkable novel, the ‘relative smallness’ of her characters’ misfortunes remains both heartbreaking and indelible.”
After her success as a novelist, Roy became better known as a political activist, writing and speaking strongly on issues such as the Narmada dam, India’s Kashmir policy, the Maoist insurgency and America’s global power. Through her long articles and interviews and speeches, she emerged as one of the most scathing critics of the Indian State. “The Indian State is not a State that has failed. It is a State that has succeeded impressively in what it set out to do. It has been ruthlessly efficient in the way it has appropriated India’s resources — its land, its water, its forests, its fish, its meat, its eggs, its air — and re-distributed it to a favoured few (in return, no doubt, for a few favours),” she wrote in an article titled ‘The Great Common Good’, her rallying cry against big dams and their underlying worldview. “It is superbly accomplished in the art of protecting its cadres of paid-up elite. Consummate in its methods of pulverising those who inconvenience its intentions. But its finest feat of all is the way it achieves all this and emerges smelling nice. The way it manages to keep its secrets, to contain information that vitally concerns the daily lives of one billion people, in government files, accessible only to the keepers of the flame — Ministers, bureaucrats, state engineers, defence strategists.”
In a 2009 piece in The Guardian on the Maoist movement in central India, she wrote: “If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have — their land. Clearly, they do not believe the government when it says it only wants to ‘develop’ their region. Clearly, they do not believe that the roads as wide and flat as aircraft runways that are being built through their forests in Dantewada by the National Mineral Development Corporation are being built for them to walk their children to school on. They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated. That is why they have taken up arms.”
Arundhati Roy’s critics include those who support some of the things she stands for.
“Earsplitting as she is, the nation needs her, and more like her,” wrote political commentator and clean energy pioneer Sunil Sharan in his blog. “But she would be more effective if she were less partisan, less grating, less accusatory. Only then can she hope to become India’s conscience-keeper.” However, Roy would perhaps reply, as she did to another such comment about her: “I am hysterical. I’m screaming from the bloody rooftops…I want to wake the neighbours, that’s my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes.”
Also on this day:
1963 — Marotrao Kannamwar, Chief Minister of Maharashtra, passed away
1981 Celina Jaitly, Bollywood actress and model, was born
2011 — Kishenji, Maoist leader, died
2005 — Jamuna Barua, Assamese actress, passed away
