Arundhati Roy: Indian novelist, essayist and activist
I recently blogged about my discovery of Arundhati Roy from India , a winner of the Mann Booker Prize for outstanding fiction in 1997 and since then known for her extraordinary activism in fighting for the rights of the powerless in her India that flaunts a rapidly and explosively expanding economy; India is a nascent, emerging global superpower.
Here is a sampling of the resonant, often poetic, prose of Arundhati Roy:
"You know The God of Small Things became more and more successful. And I watched as the city I lived in the air became blacker and the cars sleeker, the gates grew higher and the poor were being stuffed like lice into the crevices and all the time my bank account burgeoned and I began to feel as though every feeling in The God of Small Things was traded in for a silver coin and if I wasn't careful, I would become a little silver figurine with a cold heart."
(quoted from the documentary Dam/Age.)
"I stood on a hill and laughed out loud.
I had crossed the Narmada [River] by boat from Jalsindhi and climbed the headland on the opposite bank where I could see, ranged across the crowns of low, bald hills, the Adivasi [tribal] hamlets of Sikkra, Surung, Neemgavan and Domkhedi. I could see their airy fragile, homes. I could see their fields and the forest behind them. I could see little children with littler goats scuttling across the landscape like motorised peanuts. I know I was looking at a civilization older than Hinduism, slated-sanctioned (by the highest court in the land)- to be drowned this monsoon when the the waters of the Sardar Sarovar resevoir will rise to submerge it.
Why did I laugh?
Because I suddenly remember the tender concern with which the Supreme Court judges in Delhi (before vacating the legal stay on further construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam) had enquired whether tribal children in the resettlement colonies would have children's parks to play in. The lawyers representing the Government had hastened to assure them that indeed they would, and , what's more, that there were seesaws and slide and swings in every park. I looked up at the endless sky and down at the river rushing past and for a brief, brief, moment the absurdity of it all reversed my rage and I laughed. I meant no disrespect. "
(from an essay, The Greater Common Good and recited in part by Roy at the beginning of the documentary, Dam/Age)
The minister says that for India’s sake people should leave their villages and move to the cities. He’s a Harvard man. He wants speed. And numbers. Five hundred million migrants, he thinks, would make a good business model.
Not everybody likes the idea of their cities filling up with the poor. A judge in Mumbai called slum-dwellers pickpockets of urban land. Another said, while ordering the bulldozing of unauthorised colonies, that people who couldn’t afford it shouldn’t live in cities.
When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and quarries. Their homes were occupied by hunger, and policemen. The forests were filling up with armed guerrillas. War had migrated too. From the edges of India, in Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, to its heart. So the people returned to the crowded city streets and pavements. They crammed into hovels on dusty construction sites, wondering which corner of this huge country was meant for them.
( an excerpt from the Introduction The Penumbrates)
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