The Crusader of ‘Truth’: Arundhati Roy and the Hyperbolic Howl

Everybody loves a good drought.Everybody loves what comes after a good drought.After the stench from the carcasses fades away, the literateur’s pen finds the flow of ink. Yes, some of the greatest stories are born out of conflicts and disasters. What is remarkable, however, is some writers’ virtuosity in making those stories about themselves. Arundhati Roy is one amongst them.The Hyperbole of Howl In the introduction to Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, Roy states the need for “a feral howl –the transformative power and real precision of poetry” to build a resistance movement that stuns the state sponsored capitalism in its tracks.A war-cry of the disenfranchised. Too bad, then, that in a bid to make the howl imposing, a hyperbolic pitch is used, which ends up damaging the larynx. Whether the ‘enemy’ is stunned or not, the whimpering masses lose something else other than their voice –their credibility.The factual inaccuracies in Roy’s non-fiction perhaps are a manifestation of her seeming disregard for the accountability of an ally. When you anoint yourself with the oil of social justice, what follows is a crown of thorns – each prick reminding you of the consequences of your actions. Roy’s crown of thorns, however, becomes her tiara –an ornament. The hyperbole of Roy –the novelist engulfs Roy –the activist.That her polemical, and passionate, assertions during the Parliament attack trials and the eventual execution of Afzal Guru lacked, and distorted, even the basic facts is no secret. Her evasions and selective readings of the situation do not make her a traitor or anti-nationalist, as the right-wing zealots would have us believe, but reveal a basic flaw in her activist persona.When she picks a cause, she cherry-picks the facts around it.An Eye for an I In Listening to Grasshoppers, Roy invokes the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians by hailing Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian editor who was assassinated in 2007 soon after the screening of his genocide documentary Screamers.In one fell swoop, she not only establishes herself as a similar crusader of ‘truth’, she may have overestimated the ‘truth’ she sets out to reveal. Comparing the Muslim killings across Gujarat in 2002 to a genocide that claimed a million-and-a-half lives perhaps is a bit of a stretch. And this fanciful flourish is what has irked even her allies. Does everything have to be elevated to a dramatic level to seek change in status quo? Does ‘truth’ have to be given steroid shots before it can come out?In the process of establishing herself as a crusader, Roy has committed a grave disservice to those she claims to represent. When she calls herself “a subject of the American Empire, a slave who presumes to criticise her king” at an acceptance speech for the 2002 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, she makes small of her privileges — of which she, ironically, speaks about in Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?By clubbing herself alongside those who really lack agency, Roy cracks a cruel joke. A true ally does not fight for her share in the pathos pie.While ‘walking with comrades’ in Dantewada, Roy, yet again, makes it about herself. An orchestrated visit, replicating the colonisers’ adventures in the exotic heart of darkness. Just like her debut novel that catered to an urbane neo-colonial literary scene — still seeing the East through a western prism. The Outlook cover story became her story instead of about the men and women of Dandakaranya. It also became a story with stock black and white characters.Roy has had her share of accolades and abuses, as is the lot of any thinking mind in most societies. Her tardiness with facts, her blinkered worldview do not diminish her as a wordsmith. The arabesque expression of her fiction, constantly dripping into her pamphlets and essays, however, does not bring her any credit as an activist. In a scenario when civil society resistance needs to up its game, Roy’s one-sided polemics breeds uncertainties about it.

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The Crusader of ‘Truth’: Arundhati Roy and the Hyperbolic Howl

Arundhati Roy’s fiction dovetails into her activism and this is a bit problematic

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