Arundhati Roy might just be one of the greatest writers of our times. She is a prolific observer and a thriving activist who is unafraid to take on unpopular causes or challenge the ruling elite, one word at a time.
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In 1961, in the lovely town of Meghalaya, north-east India, Arundhati Roy was born to a tea plantation manager and a women’s rights activist. When she was a two years old, her parents went through a nasty divorce and Roy’s mother got the custody of her and all her siblings. Roy’s mom moved back to her hometown of Kerala and started the lonely journey of raising all her children there. At 16, Arudhati Roy left the south for New Delhi where got the chance to study design and architecture.
Though trained as an architect, Roy had little interest in design; she dreamed instead of a writing career. After a series of odd jobs, including as an artist and a private aerobics instructor, she wrote and costarred in the film In Which Annie Gives It to Those Ones (1989) and later penned scripts for the film Electric Moon (1992) and several television dramas. Her short stint in films earned Roy a devoted following, but her literary career was yet to take off.
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Fast-forward to the time her first novel was published in 1997. Titled, The God of Small Things, it was a commercial and critical sensation. The revolutionary story of a doomed South Indian family managed to sell six million copies and won the Booker Prize. It became a sort of legend — both for its quality and for its unconventional writer, the world had never read. The reason the story captured the hearts of readers all over the world was that it told the devastating story of twins Rahel and Estha and in doing so, examined India’s caste system, its history and social mores. It explored the ways in which the ‘Untouchable’ caste is derogated from society, and the consequences of breaching the caste’s codes.
But soon after, something changed for Arundhati Roy. She stopped writing fiction and began protesting against the Indian state, which, she felt, was abolishing the rights of the poor, and collaborating with capitalist lords. What followed was a book of essays that showed the world that she wasn’t afraid to write the truth.
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In an essay for Outlook magazine in 1998, she wrote of the terrible consequences of nuclear fall-out: “If there is a nuclear war, our foes will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the earth herself. The very elements – the sky, the air, the land, the wind and water – will all turn against us. Their wrath will be terrible. Our cities and forests, our fields and villages will burn for days. Rivers will turn to poison. The air will become fire.”
Her political campaigning has caused clashes with the state on a number of occasions. In 2002, she served an imprisonment of one day due to her opposition to the contentious Narmada dam project, the largest river development scheme in India which was set to potentially displace 1.5 million people at great environmental cost. In 2010, she faced threat of arrest, and charges of sedition, after she remarked that Kashmir, a disputed territory, was not an integral part of India. In 2015, she received a contempt notice from the Bombay High Court on writing an article in support of Professor Saibaba, a severely disabled academic at Delhi University, imprisoned for ‘anti-national activities’.
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In 2018, all of Arundhati Roy’s readers were in for a surprise. After a long long wait of 20 years later, we encountered her new book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Most readers feared Arundhati would lose mastery over her skill, but it was outstanding to witness that Roy, the artist, was fully and brilliantly intact. The story concerns several people who converge over an abandoned baby at an anti-corruption protest in Delhi in 2011. There is a hijra named Anjum who has survived the anti-Muslim Gujarat riots of 2002. There is her sidekick, a former mortuary worker who calls himself Saddam Hussain because he is obsessed with the “courage and dignity” of Saddam “in the face of death.” And there is an enigmatic middle-class woman called S. Tilottama who ferries the abandoned baby to her home. Tilottama, who shares biographical details with Roy, is perhaps the central node of the book; she connects everyone.
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Roy has a wealth of fiction and non-fiction credited to her and career. When you strip it down and analyse her work and her aura, you see a battle. A writer’s batlle between the power and powerlessness. And a few writers can make such a claim. She wants the world to be a fair place and has contributed enough to it. But one thing is for sure, whenever Arundhati Roy will hold a pen, the world will take notice.