Friday, 24 November, marks the 56th birthday of Arundhati Roy. Few, if any, will contest her status as a literary powerhouse. The astounding critical and commercial success of The God of Small Things won her a permanent seat in the pantheon; no account of modern Indian fiction is untouched by the neon glow of her name and work.
When Roy decided to wade into the murky waters of make-believe again after a gap of 20 years, all of us sat up and cheered. While its reception might have been mixed, it drove home the fact of Roy’s celebrity.
It seems like those of us who loved and mourned ‘Ammu’ and ‘Velutha’ and ‘Estha’ and ‘Rahel’ all those years ago, will always be starved for her gorgeous, lush prose, her witch-like ability to condense difficult questions of identity, politics, history and love into a story.
Twenty Years an Activist
What Roy is much less beloved for is her political activism. Almost immediately after her book won her the sun and stars in 1997, she gave up writing fiction to concentrate on activism, and the list of her political engagements is a real doozy.
She began this long, difficult career by voicing her support for Kashmiri separatism. In the wake of a 2010 speech entitled “Azadi: The Only Way,” she was charged with sedition by the Delhi Police and critiqued jointly by the BJP and Congress.
Next, her opposition to the Narmada Dam project, which entailed the displacement of half a million people, got her a contempt notice from the Supreme Court and one night in jail. There has been no hornet’s nest that Roy hasn’t kicked in her two decades of fighting, whether that involves slamming US foreign policy and its invasion of Iraq, opposing India’s nuclear weaponisation, critiquing the government’s armed action against Naxalite-Maoist insurgency, or verbally eviscerating PM Narendra Modi.
Her most recent act of dissent involved meeting Edward Snowden, the NSA analyst dubbed a traitor by the US government, in Moscow for what must have been a truly scintillating anti-status quo conversation.
Slammed (by) Left and Right
It will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone alive in 2017 that the Man – whether government institutions or corporate interests or other pro-establishment voices – is not the biggest fan of Roy. In this age of unprecedented levels of polarisation and coordinated attack campaigns by armies of trolls, there is nothing easier than dismissing Roy as just another anti-national “libtard,” out to destroy our ancient sanskriti.
What is perhaps a little more surprising is how often Roy has been condemned by people of her own ilk, as it were. Scholar Ramachandra Guha took issues with Roy’s campaign against Narmada dam, calling her advocacy hyperbolic and self-indulgent. Salman Rushdie slammed her take on the Mumbai attacks of 2008. Writer Tavleen Singh charged her with hatred for India and all things Indian.
A Small God Against the Tide
Perhaps we have always been a culture of ji huzoori, but our servility has never been quite as much on display as in the last few years. We willingly sign up for a surveillance program masquerading as a social security measure. We learn to take the assassination of journalists and communal lynching in our stride. We let goons dictate what we can eat, what we can watch.
In the face of such bitter everyday conformism, Roy’s relentless struggle against this bulldozing tide of “progress” is intensely admirable. Her genuine commitment to a more egalitarian world shines through both her stories and her real-life engagements. As for the ridiculous charge that her activities are anti-national, this is what Roy told William Dalrymple in an interview in 2005:
I grew up on the banks of a river in Kerala. I spent every day from the age of three fishing, walking, thinking, always alone. If you read other Indian writers, most of them are very urban: They don’t have much interest in, you know, air or water. They all went from the Doon School to St Stephen’s and then on to Cambridge. Most of those who are called Indian writers don’t even live here: Rushdie, Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Mistry: They’re all abroad, while I’ve never lived anywhere else.
What is a greater act of love than staying?
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