On Jun 6, 2011, at 12:41 PM, guardian.co.uk wrote:
> shane mage spotted this on the guardian.co.uk site and thought you
> should see it.
>
> To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site,
> go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/05/arundhati-roy-keep-destabilised-danger
>
> Arundhati Roy: 'They are trying to keep me destabilised. Anybody who
> says anything is in danger'
>
> The Booker prize-winning novelist on her political activism in
> India, why she no longer condemns violent resistance ? and why it
> doesn't matter if she never writes a second novel
>
> Stephen Moss
> Monday June 6 2011
> The Guardian
>
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/05/arundhati-roy-keep-destabilised-danger
>
>
> This is not an ideal beginning. I bump into Arundhati Roy as we are
> both heading for the loo in the foyer of the large building that
> houses her publisher Penguin's offices. There are some authors, V S
> Naipaul say, with whom this could be awkward. But not Roy, who makes
> me feel instantly at ease. A few minutes later, her publicist
> settles us in a small, bare room. As we take our positions on either
> side of a narrow desk I liken it to an interrogation suite. But she
> says that in India, interrogation rooms are a good deal less
> salubrious than this.
>
> Roy, who is 50 this year, is best known for her 1997 Booker prize-
> winning novel The God of Small Things [http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/fiction/9780007268337/the-god-of-small-things
> " title="The God of Small Things], but for the past decade has been
> an increasingly vocal critic of the Indian state, attacking its
> policy towards Kashmir, the environmental destruction wrought by
> rapid development, the country's nuclear weapons programme and
> corruption. As a prominent opponent of everything connected with
> globalisation, she is seeking to construct a "new modernity" based
> on sustainability and a defence of traditional ways of life.
>
> Her new book, Broken Republic, brings together three essays about
> the Maoist guerrilla movement in the forests of central India that
> is resisting the government's attempts to develop and mine land on
> which tribal people live. The central essay, Walking with the
> Comrades, is a brilliant piece of reportage, recounting three weeks
> she spent with the guerrillas in the forest. She must, I suggest,
> have been in great personal danger. "Everybody's in great danger
> there, so you can't go round feeling you are specially in danger,"
> she says in her pleasant, high-pitched voice. In any case, she says,
> the violence of bullets and torture are no greater than the violence
> of hunger and malnutrition, of vulnerable people feeling they're
> under siege.
>
> Her time with the guerrillas made a profound impression. She
> describes spending nights sleeping on the forest floor in a
> "thousand-star hotel", applauds "the ferocity and grandeur of these
> poor people fighting back", and says "being in the forest made me
> feel like there was enough space in my body for all my organs". She
> detests glitzy, corporate, growth-obsessed modern Indian, and there
> in the forest she found a brief peace.
>
> There is intense anger in the book, I say, implying that if she
> toned it down she might find a readier audience. "The anger is
> calibrated," she insists. "It's less than I actually feel." But even
> so, her critics call her shrill. "That word 'shrill' is reserved for
> any expression of feeling. It's all right for the establishment to
> be as shrill as it likes about annihilating people."
>
> Is her political engagement derived from her mother, Mary Roy, who
> set up a school for girls in Kerala and has a reputation as a
> women's rights activist? "She's not an activist," says Roy. "I don't
> know why people keep saying that. My mother is like a character who
> escaped from the set of a Fellini film." She laughs at her own
> description. "She's a whole performing universe of her own.
> Activists would run a mile from her because they could not deal with
> what she is."
>
> I want to talk more about Mary Roy ? and eventually we do ? but
> there's one important point to clear up first. Guerrillas use
> violence, generally directed against the police and army, but
> sometimes causing injury and death to civilians caught in the
> crossfire. Does she condemn that violence? "I don't condemn it any
> more," she says. "If you're an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a
> forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and
> surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to
> do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a
> hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an
> audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the
> right to resist annihilation."
>
> Her critics label her a Maoist sympathiser. Is she? "I am a Maoist
> sympathiser," she says. "I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the
> communist movements in history have been just as destructive as
> capitalism. But right now, when the assault is on, I feel they are
> very much part of the resistance that I support."
>
> Roy talks about the resistance as an "insurrection"; she makes India
> sound as if it's ripe for a Chinese or Russian-style revolution. So
> how come we in the west don't hear about these mini-wars? "I have
> been told quite openly by several correspondents of international
> newspapers," she says, "that they have instructions ? 'No negative
> news from India' ? because it's an investment destination. So you
> don't hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it's not just
> a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are
> fighting." I find the suggestion that such an injunction exists ? or
> that self-respecting journalists would accept it ? ridiculous.
> Foreign reporting of India might well be lazy or myopic, but I don't
> believe it's corrupt.
>
> She sounds like a member of a religious sect, I say, as if she has
> seen the light. "It's a way of life, a way of thinking," she replies
> without taking offence. "I know people in India, even the modern
> young people, understand that here is something that's alive." So
> why not give up the plush home in Delhi and the media appearances,
> and return to the forest? "I'd be more than happy to if I had to,
> but I would be a liability to them in the forest. The battles have
> to be fought in different ways. The military side is just one part
> of it. What I do is another part of the battle."
>
> I question her absolutism, her Manichaean view of the world, but I
> admire her courage. Her home has been pelted with stones; the Indian
> launch of Broken Republic was interrupted by pro-government
> demonstrators who stormed the stage; she may be charged with
> sedition for saying that Kashmiris should be given the right of self-
> determination. "They are trying to keep me destabilised," she says.
> Does she feel threatened? "Anybody who says anything is in danger.
> Hundreds of people are in jail."
>
> Roy has likened writing fiction and polemic to the difference
> between dancing and walking. Does she not want to dance again? "Of
> course I do." Is she working on a new novel? "I have been," she says
> with a laugh, "but I don't get much time to do it." Does it bother
> her that the followup to The God of Small Things has been so long in
> coming? "I'm a highly unambitious person," she says. "What does it
> matter if there is or isn't a novel? I really don't look at it that
> way. For me, nothing would have been worth not going into that
> forest."
>
> It's hard to judge whether there will be a second novel. The God of
> Small Things drew so much on her own life ? her charismatic but
> overbearing mother; a drunken tea-planter father whom her mother
> left when Roy was very young; her own departure from home in her
> late teens ? that it may be a one-off, a book as much lived as
> written. She gives ambiguous answers about whether she expects a
> second novel to appear. On the one hand, she says she is engaged
> with the resistance movement and that it dominates her thoughts. But
> almost in the same breath she says others have "picked up the baton"
> and she would like to return to fiction, to dance again.
>
> What is certain is that little of the second novel has so far been
> written. She prefers not to tell me what it is about; indeed, she
> says it would not be possible to pinpoint the theme. "I don't have
> subjects. It's not like I'm trying to write an anti-dam novel.
> Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be
> about everything." Has she been blocked by the pressure of having to
> follow up a Booker winner? "No," she says. "We're not children all
> wanting to come first in class and win prizes. It's the pleasure of
> doing it. I don't know whether it will be a good book, but I'm
> curious about how and what I will write after these journeys."
>
> Are her agent and publisher disappointed still to be waiting for the
> second novel? "They always knew there wasn't going to be some novel-
> producing factory," she says. "I was very clear about that. I don't
> see the point. I did something. I enjoyed doing it. I'm doing
> something now. I'm living to the edges of my fingernails, using
> everything I have. It's impossible for me to look at things
> politically or in any way as a project, to further my career. You're
> injected directly into the blood of the places in which you're
> living and what's going on there."
>
> She has no financial need to write another novel. The God of Small
> Things, which sold more than 6m copies around the world, set her up
> for life, even though she has given much of the money away. She even
> spurned offers for the film rights, because she didn't want anyone
> interpreting her book for the screen. "Every reader has a vision of
> it in their head," she says, "and I didn't want it to be one film."
> She is strong-willed. Back in 1996, when The God of Small Things was
> being prepared for publication, she insisted on having control of
> the cover image because she didn't want "a jacket with tigers and
> ladies in saris". She is her indomitable mother's daughter.
>
> I insist she tell me more about her Fellini-esque mother. She is,
> says Roy, like an empress. She has a number of buttons beside her
> bed which, when you press them, emit different bird calls. Each call
> signals to one of her retinue what she requires. Has she been the
> centre of her daughter's life? "No, she has been the centre of a lot
> of conflict in my life. She's an extraordinary women, and when we
> are together I feel like we are two nuclear-armed states." She
> laughs loudly. "We have to be a bit careful."
>
> To defuse the family tensions, Roy left home when she was 16 to
> study architecture in Delhi ? even then she wanted to build a new
> world. She married a fellow student at the age of 17. "He was a very
> nice guy, but I didn't take it seriously," she says. In 1984 she met
> and married film-maker Pradip Krishen, and helped him bring up his
> two daughters by an earlier marriage. They now live separately,
> though she still refers to him as her "sweetheart". So why separate?
> "My life is so crazy. There's so much pressure and idiosyncrasy. I
> don't have any establishment. I don't have anyone to mediate between
> me and the world. It's just based on instinct." I think what she's
> saying is that freedom matters more to her than anything else.
>
> She chose not to have children because it would have impinged on
> that freedom. "For a long time I didn't have the means to support
> them," she says, "and once I did I thought I was too unreliable. So
> many of the women in India who are fighting these battles don't have
> children, because anything can happen. You have to be light on your
> feet and light in your head. I like to be a mobile republic."
>
> Roy has in the past described herself as "a natural-born feminist".
> What did she mean by that? "Because of my mother and the way I grew
> up without a father to look after me, you learned early on that rule
> number one was look out for yourself. Much of what I can do and say
> now comes from being independent at an early age." Her mother was
> born into a wealthy, conservative Christian community in Kerala, but
> put herself outside the pale by marrying Ranjit Roy, a Hindu from
> West Bengal. When she returned to her home state after her divorce
> she had little money and was thus doubly marginalised. The mother
> eventually triumphed over all these obstacles and made a success of
> the school she founded, but growing up an outsider has left its mark
> on her daughter.
>
> Roy says she has always been polemical, and points to her run-in
> with director Shekhar Kapur [http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/nov/01/1
> " title="Shekhar Kapur] in the mid-1990s over his film Bandit Queen [http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/apr/25/drama.worldcinema
> " title="Bandit Queen] ? she questioned whether he had the right to
> portray the rape of a living person on screen without that woman's
> consent. It may be that the novel is the exception in a life of
> agitation, rather than the agitation an odd outcrop in a life of
> fiction-writing. But has she sacrificed too much for the struggle ?
> the chance to dance, children, perhaps even her second marriage? "I
> don't see any of these things as sacrifices," she says. "They are
> positive choices. I feel surrounded by love, by excitement. They are
> not being done in some martyr-like way. When I was walking through
> the forest with the comrades, we were laughing all the time."
>
>
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