Arundhati Roy By Amy Kazmin

As a young girl, Arundhati Roy once raided her teacher’s garden in her native village in Kerala, the lush tropical state in the south of India. She dug up the carrots, removed the edible orange roots, then carefully replanted the green tops in the soil. It took four days for the greenery to wither and the crime to be discovered. The culprit was never identified.

Roy tells this story on a sweltering night in May in New Delhi, at the India launch of her new book, Broken Republic. She argues that India’s much-touted democratic institutions now resemble the post-raid carrots in the teacher’s garden: the green tops, or external forms, are present and visible, but the substance, or essence, is missing.

Sitting with the Booker Prize-winning novelist and political activist the next morning, in her tasteful, spacious apartment, I ask her what triggered the garden raid. Was it payback for an offence committed by the teacher? “I must have wanted carrots, and it was just like, Why not mess with power?” she says, then throws back her head and laughs.

On the cusp of turning 50, Roy, once the poster-child of the new India and now its most vociferous, high-profile critic, is still messing with power. For the past decade, India’s establishment has been selling the world its story: of an emerging superpower and vibrant democracy that is enjoying rapid economic growth. Roy, meanwhile, has used her special way with words, and her fame, to challenge that narrative, creating a picture of a state serving only a rapacious middle class, and trampling the poor in its rush for high living and global status.

Her latest book focuses on India’s newest unfolding tragedy: its hidden war against Maoist rebels, who have established a firm foothold among the neglected tribal people of India’s heartland. New Delhi has ignored the tribal belt – and the hardships of its residents – for years. Now, though, the government, and India’s corporations, want to mine the minerals buried beneath the region’s soil – and are dismayed to find the Maoists in their way.

Maoists have organised tribal communities since the late 1970s, helping them fight forest officials and exploitative contractors who buy forest leaves for traditional, hand-rolled cigarettes. Now, the rebels are leading the resistance to the expropriation of tribal land. New Delhi has dubbed the ­guerrillas India’s biggest internal security threat.

In late 2009, Roy spent three weeks with the Maoist guerrillas in their “liberated area”, in Chhattisgarh State. Her experiences travelling with them – “some of the most amazing moments of my life,” she tells me – are at the heart of her new book. Her sympathetic depiction of the Maoists has provoked angry accusations that she is too starry eyed about a violent movement with no qualms about killing Indian troops. Yet she makes no apologies.

“For me it was such a wonderful thing to see those people standing up to the most powerful forces in the world,” she says. “There is such a romance in their resistance. I believe that, and I hope I never lose the capacity to allow romance into my life, without being frightened, and without trying to protect myself.”

She insists she does not endorse violence, or armed struggle, yet she feels that tribal communities have few options to protect their way of life, as they confront the concerted efforts of state officials and large corporations to displace them. “If you are going to treat unarmed Gandhian struggles the way the [anti-] Narmada [dam] struggle [protesters] were treated, people are going to move into another zone,” she says. “It’s not as if they are sitting around saying, ‘Should we struggle or should we not?’ They don’t have a choice. They have nowhere to go.”

At the culmination of her journey with the rebels, she says she was reluctant to leave the forest. “I was so happy. I was saying, ‘Let me stay here,’ and they were saying, ‘No, you go. We can’t,’” she recalls. “I was in a forest, which I love being in, and it was real. It wasn’t some tourism, or some holiday. All the things that interest me were together there.”

We are far from the forest now, sitting face to face, curled up on the two corners of a sofa in Roy’s living room-cum-work space in one of New Delhi’s most affluent neighbourhoods. One wall is lined with books, and a large flat-screen TV. Elsewhere, the walls are adorned with a portrait of Howard Zinn, the late US historian; a poster that says “Stop Dams”; and a large photograph of a Maoist fighter, his weapon next to him.

A bowl of sliced mangos is brought out by the household help, and Roy invites me to share it with her. “Let’s eat mangos,” she says, sweetly. “There is nothing like mangoes. I once thought I would retire and eat mangoes in the moonlight and generally have a good time. Help yourself.”

Roy was raised by her mother, Mary Roy, a strong-willed, temperamental woman, who repeatedly violated the social conventions of her conservative Syrian Christian community in Kerala’s Kottayam District. First, she entered into a love marriage with a Bengali Hindu. Then she divorced him. She returned to her native village of Doty, in Kerala, with her children when Arundhati was one-and-a-half years old.

It was the early 1960s, and in the tight-knit, family-oriented Syrian Christian society, the mother’s transgressions marked out her children. “I grew up in a very frightening situation,” Roy says. “My brother and I were not accepted as members of that community … I was on the edge. It was like ‘nobody’s gonna marry you’. None of the assurances that normal families, and normal communities, offer their children was available to us. So there was always that questioning, that instinct to see things from the point of view of the most vulnerable.

“I was not indoctrinated the way normal Indian women are,” she adds. “Nobody had time to indoctrinate me. There was a direct relationship with the world; it was not mediated by any protection.”

At 16, Roy left home, coming to New Delhi to study architecture, and fend for herself in the big city. “I used to have chai with all the beggars, and they thought that I was from some drug cartel,” she tells me. “And I didn’t deny it because I thought, at least they’ll think I have some protection, I’m not just on my own. From there, you learn to ask the question from the bottom, as opposed to the top.”

When her debut novel, The God of Small Things, was published in 1997, she became an object of adulation for India’s middle classes, less for the quality of her book – which many never read – than for her £500,000 advance, and later her Booker Prize. With her success, she was embraced as a living symbol of India’s arrival on the global stage. But following her strong condemnation of the country’s nuclear weapons tests in 1998, defying the mood of national euphoria and pride, attitudes towards her began to change.

“I was shocked at how even musicians and painters were celebrating the nuclear test, and I could smell the fascism on the breeze,” she recalls. “Here was a chance to say something in a major way and, of course, to earn the hatred of everybody who had so celebrated me. I felt that if I didn’t do it, I would never really be able to write. You start censoring yourself. You start playing to some imaginary audience who you want to please, and it’s just finished.”

Since then, her fiction writing has been on the backburner, while she has dedicated herself to political activism, travelling to remote corners of the country, attending political meetings and writing essays on topics from India’s dam-building to its judicial corruption and its abuses in the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir. “You get drawn into a world where people realise, here is somebody who is not frightened of saying something. All of the last 11 years has been unplanned. It’s been a process of deepening your understanding,” she says.

In her political writing, Roy has been scathing in her description of India’s two-decade old economic liberalisation programme – which is widely credited with bringing unprecedented opportunities to many – and seemingly contemptuous of the emerging middle class.

Her diatribes have made her something of a hate figure for many Indian nationalists. There is also a feeling among a number of liberals and left-leaning activists, who have a concern for social justice – and for many of the issues she raises – that her strident polemics are too extreme. “I know I alienate people, but there isn’t any possibility of writing about these things where everybody is going to agree with you,” she says. “I am not scared of alienating the middle class. I am saying what I think. I know the entire establishment obviously disagrees with it, and would like me to shut up, or soften it or be more tactical, but I am saying things in a space that no one says.”

“When I write something, I have to spend a few days filtering out the fury,” she adds. “I don’t do anything to be deliberately provocative.”

Certainly there is plenty in India to be angry – even outraged – about. I ask tentatively whether she really feels that economic reforms have brought no benefits at all. I am thinking of the remote villages, and impoverished slum dwellers, now connected to a wider world by mobile phones. After a moment’s reflection, she answers.

“It’s as though you had this churning,” she says, slowly. “You had a feudal and very unequal society. In this churning, this thin milk separates into a thick layer of cream, and a lot of water that can be just slop. The thick layer of middle class that has been created becomes a great market. Suddenly, there are so many people who need cars and A/Cs and TV, and that becomes a universe of itself. Of course it looks great. Then there is this unseen thing that’s just being drifted off.”

Isn’t is possible that India’s growing middle class might begin to push for reforms that might make India’s democratic institutions function better – for all its citizens?

“You tell me one thing that a poor person in a village can do to get justice if something goes wrong,” she says, her voice rising slightly. “There is nothing they can do. If someone gets caught and then put into prison for five years for the wrong thing, do you think that a normal villager can do anything about it except swallow that shit and just live a life of nothing?”

Roy says she was delighted when India’s ­on-going telecommunications spectrum scandal came out, complete with leaked tapes of intercepted phone calls by a powerful corporate lobbyist showing the close interrelationship between India’s politicians, its companies and its media elite.

“It was like an MRI that confirmed our diagnosis of everything – the role of the media, the interconnectedness of judiciary, corporates and the ­politicians – it was laid bare,” she says. “While everyone was expressing shock, we were stretching out on the beach saying, ‘Wow, now we don’t have to work that hard.’” And then she giggles.

Roy says she is ready to make a change, perhaps return to fiction, which has been interrupted by her political engagement. “I feel like I’ve done a very interesting journey over the last 11 years, but now I’m ready to do something different. Two years ago, I told myself, ‘no more, enough of this’, and I was working on some fiction. Then this huge uprising happened in Kashmir.”

Extricating herself from activism won’t be easy. India’s army is building up its presence in the tribal areas and conflict is likely to intensify. After a relative lull in violence, two recent Maoist ambushes have killed 20 Indian troops. The government’s answer won’t be long in coming. Even now, as the interview winds up, Roy is preparing to rush off to a public meeting to speak on the growing crisis.

“I can’t stop thinking about that place, the people I met and what I saw – the violence and the hope – all of it together,” she says. “And I can’t easily tell myself that it’s very important for me to write another novel and give up on all this. It is not an easy thing to do – to just look away.”

Amy Kazmin is the FT’s South Asia correspondent. Arundhati Roy’s book ‘Broken Republic: Three Essays’ (Hamish Hamilton) is published on June 13.

Source: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1ed76814-8bf2-11e0-854c-00144feab49a.html#axzz1OFGV5Ci7

The Penumbrates On the shining flanks of New India, its poverty is a tableau of reflections ARUNDHATI ROY

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.

The minister said that migrants to cities were mostly criminals and “carried a kind of behaviour which is unacceptable to modern cities”. The middle class admired him for his forthrightness, for having the courage to call a spade a spade. The minister said he would set up more police stations, recruit more policemen and put more police vehicles on the road to improve law and order.

To make Delhi a world-class city for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, laws were passed that made the poor vanish, like laundry stains. Street vendors disappeared, rickshaw-pullers lost their licences, small shops and businesses were shut down. Beggars were rounded up, tried by mobile magistrates in mobile courts and dropped outside the city limits. The slums that remained were screened off, with vinyl billboards that said DELHIciously Yours.

New kinds of policemen patrolled the streets, better armed, better dressed and trained not to scratch their privates in public, no matter how grave the provocation. There were cameras everywhere, recording everything.

***

Two young criminals carrying a kind of behaviour which was unacceptable to modern cities escaped the police dragnet, and approached a woman sandwiched between her sunglasses and the leather seats of her shiny car at a traffic crossing. Shamelessly, they demanded money. The woman was rich and kind. The criminals’ heads were no higher than her car window. Their names were Rukmini and Kamli. Or maybe Mehrunissa and Shahbano. (Who cares?) The woman gave them money and some motherly advice. Ten rupees to Kamli (or Shahbano). “Share it,” she told them, and sped away when the lights changed.

Rukmini and Kamli (or Mehrunissa and Shahbano) tore into each other like gladiators, like lifers in a prison yard. Each sleek car that flashed past them, and almost crushed them, carried the reflection of their battle, their fight to the finish, on its shining door.

Eventually, both girls disappeared without a trace, like thousands of children do in Delhi. The Games were a success.

***

Two months later, on the sixty-second anniversary of India becoming a Republic, the armed forces showcased their new weapons at the Republic Day parade. Russian multi-barrel rocket launchers, combat aircraft, light helicopters and underwater weapons for the navy. The new T-90 battle tank was called Bhishma. (The older one was Arjun.) Varunastra was the name of the latest heavyweight torpedo, and Mareech was a decoy system to seduce incoming torpedoes. (Hanuman and Vajra are the names painted on the armoured vehicles that patrol Kashmir’s frozen streets.) That the names were drawn from Hindu epics was just a coincidence. If India is a Hindu nation, it’s only an accident.

Dare Devils from the Army’s Corps of Signals rode motorcycles in a rocket formation. Then they formed a cluster of flying birds and finally a human pyramid.

Overhead, Sukhoi fighter jets made a trishul, a trident in the sky. Each jet cost more than a billion rupees. Four billion then, for Shiva’s Trident.

The thrilled crowd turned its face up to the weak winter sun and applauded. High in the sky, the winking silver sides of the jets carried the reflection of Rukmini’s and Kamli’s (or Mehrunissa’s and Shahbano’s) fight to the death.

The army band played the national anthem. The President drew the pallu of her sari over her head and took the salute.

Source: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?271908

Why I am committed - Exclusive interview with Arundhati Roy

It may well be that one day is extraordinary, the Nobel award to Arundhati Roy two of their most prestigious awards: one for peace and that of literature. Although, in his first book, "The God of Small Things," his name in the rankings very closed, very envious, stars of world literature, earning a contract of one million dollars and the Booker Prize In 1997, the lovely queen of Indian novel (it was also listed by People magazine among the 50 beauties of the year 1998), immediately turned his back on the career easy, and international glamourisée, who offered to it. Ceasing to write novels, she chose to defy rather, with a courage that no one denies it, and risking his life, the government of his country to denounce not only the great injustices of our time, but especially horror economic, ecological, and social policy of a country, India, passing yet for any of the civilized democracies of the planet.
 
Where does this fire, this determination, married to the greatest kindness? It should probably seek the origins far her in her childhood in India, with his father, a tea planter Bengali, and her mother, Mary Roy, a headmistress of Kerala is also known for his activism. This Kerala which Arundhati tell the poetic beauty in his first novel, inspired by his very own experience. After a perfect architect and designer and screenwriter, she joined the protest against the construction of huge dams in the valley of the Narmada dams forcing entire populations to leave an ancestral home, in the name of self- called "economic progress". She became involved with this writer the Indian government is afraid.
 

In "Democracy: field notes," she protests against American imperialism, argues against the "occupation" of Indian Kashmir, it claims independence, denounced the stranglehold of multinational corporations on local economies. She castigates a visit to India of President Bush and screams when the genocide of Muslims are being massacred in Gujarat. Against all intimidation, she visited last year, in February 2010 into a forbidden zone, where the tribes in the heart of Dandakaranya forests in the state of Chhattisgarh, took up arms against the mining conglomerates international, hand in hand with the Indian state, began to devastate their territory. She spent several weeks together with the Maoist guerrillas who have vowed to overthrow the Indian state at risk of being killed in a raid by hostile forces, or move backward for a Maoist official media did not deprive caricature of the commitment of the novelist. But can we in any way, stop Arundhati?
Nothing is more urgent, as we have understood, that to read, and to read the manual of indignation which the first qualities is not to have been designed in a comfortable club chair, but have known, the small notebook where passionaria usually registered his impressions, the dust of the road, tears of impotence, a notebook stained, crumpled, and where it seems that, for ink, Arundhati Roy has spent the most fabulous containers: his rage and hope - that make life a little better one day for all.
 
What do you think of U.S. policy since the election? Obama is better than Bush?
The problem is no longer, I believe, think international politics, wars, military occupations or ecological suicide in terms of good or evil. The irony is rather that every man, good or bad, when it becomes, as U.S. President, the most powerful man on earth, immediately lost all power, and becomes the slave of a system which is supposed to control the operation yet. The real question is it not, rather, the civilized world we call Will it save us, or will it destroy life on Earth and the Earth itself?
 
You were not happy with the victory of Obama?
Obama has widened the scope of the wars in Asia. With the blessing of the Pakistani government, he is now bombing Pakistan. Meanwhile, the economy continues to sink. When he became president, a satirical newspaper in New York as in essence: "A black posted the worst job." It was true. He was appointed to endorse the end of the American Empire.
 
What is your feeling about the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya?


Protesters have shown real courage. But I think the stakes today are elsewhere: this is for big powers to divert the energy of these revolutions by using them for their cynical purposes. When we read in the press things like: "Egypt is free, the military took power," one can not help but smile! It is well known that the Egyptian army and the U.S. government go hand in hand. Hosni Mubarak was not a scoop, sick, close to the end. The transition would have been risky. Does it has not given a little air to the Egyptian people, oppressed and angry, before tying up again? Without control of Egypt, Israel can no longer organize the siege of Gaza. The United States can they accept that? When the major Western media enthusiastically celebrate the Revolution, it still worries me. After all, Palestinians are rebelling, we may kill millions in the Congo, it does not raise the same reactions. In Kashmir, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators braved the streets for years, Indian security forces, which were far from peaceful: courage is it yet one of the Western press?
 
What about the situation in the Narmada valley, where you intensely protested against the construction of huge dams, to the detriment of local people?


All dams in the valley are being built. The great anti-dam movement, which was based on arguments and just deep, is now limited to the pleadings of a small group of lawyers trying to get compensation for displaced populations. It is a monumental tragedy. There are hundreds of dams that are being constructed in the high Himalayas. The consequences will be catastrophic for the environment. But these areas are sparsely populated. Nobody complains.
 
You are also very sensitive to the situation in Kashmir. Were you there recently?
Yes, I go there often. This is the area most heavily militarized in the world. The Indian security forces stationed there amounted to 700 000 soldiers. Even at the height of the war in Iraq, American units had never exceeded 200,000 items. There are countless more, in this valley, army camps, checkpoints, torture chambers, and graveyards. 68 000 people have been killed since 1990. Living there is equivalent to live without oxygen and dignity. It is an absolute hell. A huge open-air prison.
 
What should I expect you believe in international terrorism? Do you believe a worsening situation in the future?


Much of the economic power of rich countries is based on the arms market: missiles, warplanes, torpedoes, helicopters, nuclear bombs. In India, where 800 million people live on less than 20 rupees a day (30 cents), the government is spending billions to buy weapons like this. Like Pakistan, whose economy is in tatters. Yet all these weapons are of any efficacy against the terrorist threat? I would say that most of these countries amass weapons of war, and pay correspondingly the most boastful nationalism, the more they make them vulnerable to terrorism that may completely destroy them. We saw in the attacks in Bombay in 2008, how a handful of teen suicide have put an entire country to its knees for days. And he does not even touch the leaders of our country that the only valid response to terrorism is to resolve the injustices that engender.
 
What about writing fiction? You will come back?
Yes, it's been a while since I started writing a novel. But I advance slowly. I am often disturbed ...
 
What is your life like everyday 
My life has, thank you god, nothing of everyday life.
 
Can you describe the room where you work?
This is not always the same. I'm moving a republic. But I often write in my flat in Delhi. I love working there. I sometimes kiss the walls, to thank them for giving shelter to a girl like me. Someone not easy, as many people will tell you.





Courtesy :  Didier Jacob Blog (Translated from French)