Arundhati roy

No stranger to controversy, this choice of subject matter, poking around in the hinterlands and shadowlands of 21st-century India, has kept her on a path of constant collision with the establishment at home. Roy’s engagement with Kashmir in particular, including her explicit support for Kashmiri separatism, for example, led to her being In spite of what she describes in Azadi, her latest collection of essays, as an atmosphere of “continuous, unceasing threat”, Roy has refused to back down and this volume, which takes its title from the Urdu word for “freedom” – azadi is the chant of Kashmiri protesters against the Indian government – serves to keep the Kashmiri situation in the minds of her global readership. Roy reads the growing popularity of Hindutva as a kind of fascism that resembles Nazi Germany “What India has done in Kashmir over the last 30 years,” she writes in the essay The Silence Is the Loudest Sound, “is unforgivable. An estimated 70,000 people – civilians, militants and security forces – have been killed in the conflict. Thousands have been ‘disappeared’, and tens of thousands have passed through torture chambers that dot the valley like a network of small-scale Abu Ghraibs.” Azadi, which builds on the 1,000-page edition of Roy’s collected nonfiction, A Kashmiri woman asks a police officer to let her cross a street. ‘What India has done in Kashmir over the last 30 years is unforgivable,’ writes Roy. Photograph: Mukhtar Khan/AP In In timations of an Ending: T...

For Arundhati Roy, her mother Mary Roy, who passed Thursday, was a miracle. But the celebrated author was also generous enough to share the goodness of her mother -- to whom she offered the last kiss Friday afternoon -- with everyone that mattered. Mary Roy, the renowned educationalist was cremated on the premises of 'Pallikoodam', the school that she founded. Arundhati had dedicated her debut novel, 'The God of Small Things' to her mother: For Mary Roy, who grew me up. Who taught me to say 'excuse me' before interrupting her in Public. Who loved me enough to let me go. A copy of the book that fetched her the Man Booker Prize for fiction had been placed by the side of Mary before she was cremated. "All people have spoken about my mother, what an extraordinary person she is and I don't need to explain that to anyone because all of us know what a miracle she was," Arundhati told a small gathering of friends and family that grieved the death of Mary Roy. "She was one of the fiercest, most fabulous person that ever walked this earth. But the reason I wanted to speak now was to say that she didn't do it alone. "All of you, all of you, your faith and your love in her, especially at a time she was a single, divorced woman with two little children, with no backing." Mary Roy's Pallikoodam had a humble beginning before it revolutionalised the education system in Kerala. It is known how Arundhati had suggested that name to her mother, who had been the institution's head for 42 years...

Arundhati Roy September 18, 2003: Arundhati Roy discusses India’s dams with host Mishal Husain. Mishal Husain: Arundhati Roy, welcome to WIDE ANGLE. Arundhati Roy: Thank you. Mishal Husain: Now you’ve come to be very much identified with the issues that we’ve seen in the film. Why was it that you chose to get involved? Arundhati Roy: Because I think that the story of the Narmada Valley is the story of modern India — and not just modern India, but the story of the powerful against the powerless and the whole world, really. And it isn’t a story that works itself into the conventional divisions of the left and the right and the working class and the bourgeoisie and so on. It’s a story that somehow is so complex that it involves the river, the ecology, the caste system in India, the class system, too. [ItÕs] sort of a peg, or a keyhole, to use to open a very big lock, you know? I thought this was that story. And in 1999, when the Supreme Court lifted its stay on the construction of the dam after six and a half years, that decision was what pushed me into the valley. Because suddenly it appeared that this fight that we thought had been won — the Bank had been pushed out, [which was] unprecedented in the history of the bank, and the six year stay given by the Supreme Court seemed to point in the direction of a victory — and, suddenly, it was all reversed. Mishal Husain: The history of dams in India is a very long one. I mean, this is a well-established way that India’s pursued d...

New Delhi: Award-winning author Arundhati Roy apologised Wednesday for her nearly decade-old remarks comparing the Indian and Pakistani armies, saying what she said then in no way represents what she believes now, or has written over the years. A 2011 video clip of Roy speaking at a panel surfaced on social media, in which she says the Indian state has deployed its Army against people in regions including Kashmir, the northeast, Telangana, and Goa. “…Pakistan has not deployed its army against its people the way India has…”, she goes on to add. In a statement shared with ThePrint, Roy clarified that at some point in their lives, people inadvertently “say something thoughtless or stupid”. “Still, it is a matter of enormous consequence and I apologise for any momentary confusion the clip may have caused.” She added that she has been clear about her views on Pakistan’s actions through her writings. Roy had come under a wave of criticism for her “double standards”, with Twitter users in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh making the hashtag #ArundhatiRoy trend. Many Pakistanis, who claimed to be admirers of Roy, said her remarks had disappointed them. Shame on Arundhati Roy! I used to have huge respect for her, but not anymore! Not only is she insulting my India, she is praising the Pakistani army which, apart from directly supporting terrorism in India, also killed 3 million of its own people during the 1971 Bangladeshi war! — Shama Mohamed (@drshamamohd) The Read Arundhati Roy’s f...

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” ― Arundhati Roy, “...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.” ― Arundhati Roy, “But what was there to say? Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they share...

Roy’s second novel, coming twenty years after the first, is steeped in her politics. Photograph by Bharat Sikka for The New Yorker Arundhati Roy’s “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” (Knopf) is a book that people have been waiting twenty years for. In the late nineteen-nineties, when Roy was in her thirties, she did some acting and screenwriting—she had married a filmmaker, Pradip Krishen—but mostly, she says, she made her living as an aerobics instructor. She had also been working on a novel for five years. In 1997, she published that book, “The God of Small Things.” Within months, it had sold four hundred thousand copies and won the Booker Prize, which had never before been given to a non-expatriate Indian—an Indian who actually lived in India—or to an Indian woman. Roy became the most famous novelist on the subcontinent, and she probably still is, which is a considerable achievement, given that, after “The God of Small Things,” she became so enmeshed in the politics of her homeland that, for the next two decades, she didn’t produce any more fiction. Now, finally, the second novel has come out, and it is clear that her politics have been part of its gestation. “The God of Small Things” was about one family, primarily in the nineteen-sixties, and though it included some terrible events, its sorrows were private, muffled, personal. By contrast, “The Ministry of the Utmost Happiness” is about India, the polity, during the past half century or so, and its griefs are national....

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a journey of many years – the story spooling outwards from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis and beyond, to the Valley of Kashmir and the forests of Central India, where war is peace and peace is war, and where, from time to time, ‘normalcy’ is declared. Anjum, who used to be Aftab, unrolls a threadbare carpet in a city graveyard that she calls home. A baby appears quite suddenly on a pavement, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. The enigmatic S. Tilottama is as much of a presence as she is an absence in the lives of the three men who love her. Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer who is also an activist who focuses on issues related to social justice and economic inequality. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays. For her work as an activist she received the Cultural Freedom Prize awarded by the Lannan Foundation in 2002. I, like many people, have heard of the success of Roy's At first, I thought the story was slow, dense and hard to follow. It took me a couple hundred pages of squinting hard to see the truth: there is no story. These kind of books have a special place in the heart of a certain type of reader. A reader who puts beautiful, complex writing over plot and emotional pull; a reader who doesn't mind looking back over almost 500 pages and realizing very little has happ...

On the night she won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy had a strange and frightening dream. She was a fish being ripped from the water by a bony emerald hand. A voice instructed her to make a wish. Put me back, she responded. She knew she was on the cusp of cataclysmic fame, she later said an interview. She knew her life would explode—“I’d pay a heavy price.” She has. It is almost impossible to see Roy clearly through the haze of adulation, condescension, outrage, and celebrity that has enveloped her since the publication of The God of Small Things, a gothic about an illicit intercaste romance in South India. She was feted as a symbol of an ascending India, paraded along with bomb makers and beauty queens. Much was made of the author’s looks—she was named one of People magazine’s most beautiful people—and lack of literary background; there was titillated interest in her days living in a slum and working as an aerobics instructor. Praise for her novel was extravagant—she was compared to Faulkner and García Márquez—but it was also frequently patronizing. “There is something childish about Roy. She has a heightened capacity for wonder”—this from one of the judges who awarded her the Booker Prize. (Meanwhile, a writer who had judged the Booker the previous year publicly called the book “execrable,” and the award a disgrace.) The world Roy conjures is often brutal, but never confusing or even very complex. Roy appeared to want no par...