Writing as a weapon

Tim Adam's writes in The Observer about how, since winning the Booker prize in 1997, Arundhati Roy has "put fiction on hold to become a global dissenter against repression, economic 'progress' -- and dams."

Roy has not written fiction since The God of Small Things, a book that many loved and hated with equal passion -- both for the wrong reasons. I remember that period. She was possibly the first and the most famous purveyor of the Novelus Indiana exoticus, that most exotic of animals. Salman Rushdie attracted the attention of the world literary community towards the subcontinent, but his writings were too dizzy for many. Vikram Seth, too urbane. Naipaul, too English. Arundhati Roy had all the right ingredients -- caste violence, rape, incest, all that is down and dirty about India, like a train wreck one is attracted to but is afraid to get close to and, to top it all, she was pretty and her prose was good. After that no book by an Indian writer would survive in the market without at least one arranged marriage, but preferably with accounts of caste violence ending in rape, communal conflicts with plenty of looting, burning and mass emasculation, wretched injustice and abject poverty with people (literally) wallowing in shit , all in close-up and slowmo, like the lingering cum shots in a hard-core porn movie. That was the period when I first started publishing, and that was when everyone thought they could write, and everyone wanted to write just like her. (That was the period when writers from India would demand hefty advance with mere outlines of their 'novels').

She was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in 1961, in Meghalaya in India to her Syrian Christian mother from Kerala, and a Bengali tea-planter father. She studied at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Her latest book Listening to Grasshoppers : Field Notes on Democracy was published by Hamish Hamilton recently.


The Observer