The constant gardener
Arundhati Roy (1961- )
Kathleen MacKeracher,
McMaster University
Indian writer and global public intellectual Arundhati Roy received the
Booker Prize for her novel God of Small Things
(1997), and has since written and spoken extensively on matters of
international concern. Raised in a village in Kerala, India, Roy left home
for a squatters' camp outside Delhi at the age of sixteen. She studied
architecture and wrote screenplays, before the extremely successful
publication of God of Small Things brought her to international
attention. The novel proved controversial in India, earning Roy a lawsuit
for its explicit inter-caste love affair. Taking the opportunity provided by
her literary acclaim and financial independence to address a world audience,
Roy has employed her storytelling expertise to become a powerful voice in
the global civil dissent movement.
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| Arundhati Roy |
(Photo: Free Use Image, Wikipedia)
Accordingly, her first publication after God of Small Things
was "The Death of Imagination" (1998), an essay condemning India's nuclear
weapons testing. She has spoken at the World Social Forum, protested
against large dam construction on the Narmada river with the Narmada Bachao
Andolan (an Indian non-governmental organization to which she donated her
Booker Prize money), and addressed issues ranging from global dissent, to
corporate globalization, to privatization of public resources. "The Greater
Common Good" (1999), which exposes the human and environmental costs of
large dams, is perhaps her best known essay. More recently, Roy chaired a
jury of public intellectuals for the World Tribunal on Iraq (see
www.worldtribunal.org/main.htm), a role evolving from her
longstanding criticism of the "war on terror," which began with the essay
"The Algebra of Infinite Justice" (September 2001).
Both her novel and later works investigate the struggles of "the Small" to
cope with vast impersonal forces that "strangle stories." Roy argues the
displacement of millions due to large dam construction, the exclusion of the
rural Indians from informed debate about nuclear weapons, and the
encroaching privatization of the commons weaken people's control over their
lives and natural resources, eroding the autonomy of individuals and small
communities. Viewing economic globalization as faceless and dehumanizing,
she seeks to infuse debates with specificity and personality: "It's very
important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real, to draw a
link between a man with his child and what fruit he had in the village he
lived in before he was kicked out, and how that relates to Mr. Wolfensohn at
the World Bank" (www.the-south-asian.com/Sept2001/Arundhati_Roy-Interview3.htm). Critics charge Roy with simplifying and emotionalizing
complex issues, and with attacking the very globalization framework that
gives her literature a world audience and her opinions a global voice.
Deeply skeptical of governments' ability to orchestrate change, Roy promotes
the power of a world civil society to bind global decision-makers of
developed countries to the consequences of their decisions in the developing
world.
Suggested Readings:
Roy, Arundhati. 1997.
The god of small things. Toronto:
Random House.
Roy, Arundhati.
The greater common good,
www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html (accessed 24 June 2005).
Roy, Arundhati. 2001.
Power politics. Cambridge, MA:
South End Press.
Roy, Arundhati. 2003.
War talk. Cambridge, MA:
South End Press.
Roy, Arundhati. 2004.
An ordinary person's guide to empire. Cambridge, MA:
South End Press.
Simmons, Jon.
Arundhati Roy,
http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/roy (accessed 27 May 2005). The website has links to several essays by
Arundhati Roy.