Arundhati Roy's Blog, page 6

Arundhati Roy on the Leonard Lopate Show

Arundhati Roy discusses the Maoist insurgency in India and the fight against corporations looking to exploit the rare minerals buried in tribal lands. In Walking with the Comrades, Roy takes readers to the unseen front lines of this ongoing battle, chronicling her months spent living with the rebel guerillas in the forests. In documenting their local struggles, Roy addresses the larger question of whether global capitalism will tolerate any societies existing outside of its control.

Copyright : The Leonard Lopate Show

Arundhati Roy at CUNY - 10 November, 2011

 Photos courtesy: John @jboy

Photo courtesy: Rajeev @

Transcript: Arundhati Roy Q&A at CUNY Graduate Center

By Sarahana » Gandhi, get your gun!
[image error]
Arundhati Roy at CUNY Graduate Center. All photos by Sarahana
14 years ago, Indian author Arundhati Roy made her debut with The God of Small Things, a novel that won the Booker prize and went on to sell more than 6 million copies worldwide. But the world of fiction was quickly abandoned when she turned to full time activism, churning out fiery political essays, and generally getting into trouble with the Indian government and religious fundamentalists.

Most recently, she spent time with Indian Maoist insurgents — at their invitation — in the jungles from which they operate. The essay she's brought back has been published as Walking with the Comrades, from which she read a few excerpts at an event hosted at City University of New York's Graduate Center (despite the center's further slashed, and quickly depleting, funds).

This is a transcript of the Q&A that followed the reading.
Some redundancies have been removed and friendly titles have been added. Transcript of the reading portion will be posted next.
.
----- TRANSCRIPT OF Q&A -----
.
(Love Makes Our Battle Ferocious)

Ruth Gilmore (CUNY): Thank you Arundhati for that amazing reading and the thoughts that you brought to my mind and all of our minds as you described this war against the forest people. One thing that I've been thinking about a lot having read some of your work over the years and listening to you read now is how much beauty you put into a story [..?] and I think all the time about how you help people to think about the worst things that are happening in the world so that we can do something about it. And I wonder if you would talk, if you'd be interested in talking, a little bit about the sort of political project and the aesthetic project and finding all of the beauty in moments of the greatest hurt[?].

Arundhati Roy: Well I don't actively look for it because it's there. You know if you read the rest of the essay that I read from, actually we spent so much of our time just laughing, you know, inside [the forest], because I always sense that when you're outside the immediate area of resistance, it's much easier to feel despair because you have that choice. You can always say, "Okay, doesn't matter, I won't study politics, I'll do interior design" or something whereas people who are in there, they don't have a choice, you know. Even despair is not a choice because whether you're a pessimist or whether you're an optimist, no one is asking you, like you have to fight that battle some way or the other and there's a sort of clarity there. And a lot of beauty, and a lot of hope.

I think for me it's not a strategy, the way I write. It's just the way I write. Or it's just the way I think. I mean 10, 20, 30 years ago when I began to write about these things, this was at a time when the elite of India was so optimistic about the project of free market and they would say "this woman needs to be sent to have her head examined", you know, "she's crazy" and so on. Whether we win or lose or whatever it is, this is the side we're on. And the truth is if you live in India, or in Kashmir, you will know that there's so much to be said, there's so much wilderness, there's so much imagination that hasn't been enclosed, and that I think is what makes our battle so ferocious; because there is so much that we love. It's not that we have to retrieve it, we have it. And it hasn't been destroyed yet, though the project is on. It hasn't been destroyed yet. And so I think we only fight if there's something we love that we have to save, otherwise what's the point.

(Not the Voice of the Voiceless, Or Any Nonsense Like That)

Peter Hitchcock (CUNY): One of the things we do at the center  is we have a year-long seminar with faculty fellows and graduate student fellows and coincidentally today we were discussing your work. One of the questions was about audience because I think it surprised many of us reading this work just how little of the state of affairs is actually being discussed within the transnational media conglomerates. And so I guess my question is about whether you see your primary role as bringing these stories, this reporting, as it were, to the world. Or do you see the primary apex of your activism actually within what is extant in the Indian state?

Arundhati Roy: Well, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my role in that I think a lot of what I do is not necessarily aimed at trying to persuade people to my point of view or anything. It's more about... how can I say it. For example, about 2 or 3 months ago, I got a message from the forest. And it said, "Didi, aap ke likhne ke baad, jungle mey khushi ki laher pheilithi," which means, "After you wrote, a wave of happiness went through the forest." And for me, that's why I write, to be part of the resistance because I don't necessarily see the transnational media or the idea of having to build bridges of solidarity — I did, at one time; I used to say that India's best export is dissent. But now I feel very much that people really have to fight their own battles. You know, we can't spend all our energy trying to build transnational solidarities because those are very fragile. If they come, it's great, but I never... I mean, let's say when I wrote Walking with the Comrades, a 20,000-word piece, I had no idea who the hell would want to publish it. But you just have to write it. I wrote it, and then it was published in a big magazine, and it really did in some ways change the nature of the discourse because otherwise these were just faceless terrorists and so on.

But I think I always see it as an act of solidarity with the people whose struggle I'm a part of. I never see myself as representing somebody or being the voice of the voiceless or any nonsense like that, you know. I am very much part of the whole thing. I'm just doing my part in it.


(The Paradox of China)
Peter Hitchcock (CUNY): Speaking of solidarity, you mentioned in the piece that you read about the export of ore to China. It must be one of the paradoxes of history, right, that as part of the operation against Moaists in India, ore is going to the Maoists in China.

Arundhati Roy:  I was in China some time ago and at some meeting, we were talking about the three gorgeous dams, and I said, you know, if you object to a dam or [?] project in China, then what do you do? They said you write a letter to the Letters & Petitions department, after when you get arrested. I said, "Well clearly you need some Indian Maoists now".

But China's interesting isn't it? That in some ways it's becoming like a capitalistic economy run by a Communist state. So in India they look to China with a great deal of envy, thinking, you know, "Why are we sagging with this democracy, however tattered it is?"; because you can't, in India, actually you cannot push through this free market project without militarizing. And yet in order to be the favored finance destination, you have to pretend to be a democracy. So all that is going on.

But, just, since you mentioned China, I recently read Kissinger's book on China, and there's a delightful part in it, where he talks about how after Tiananmen Square, the Chinese couldn't understand the cooling off of the relations with the United States. They couldn't understand how a country could place human rights at the center of its foreign policy [laughs]. That's Kissinger's idea of U.S. foreign policy: human rights at the center.

(Anna Harazre and the Middle Class' War Against the Poor)

Peter Hitchcock (CUNY): On that question of how this situation appears in the foreign press, recently, somebody like Anna Hazare has seen a lot more press than the economic and political crisis in Central India. Do you have an explanation for that?

Arundhati Roy: Anna Hazare [laughs]. I suppose the closest explanation to that movement is the Tea Party here. It's really very interesting what happened in India. Basically, just before that movement sort of bubbled up to the surface, the government and the corporations and the media were reeling under a scandal, which was known as 2G, which was basically the selling of spectrum for mobile phones, and basically corporations, media lobbyists, the Information Minister, and all the way up to the Prime Minister, people were involved in selling billions of dollars worth of this spectrum to private corporations at very cheap rates, and then they resold them and made huge profits; and a whole lot of phone conversations had been taped; and big media journalists, the major corporations in India, and all these people were involved.

Suddenly, for the first time, the whole gloss of, "Corporates are honest and efficient" fell apart; it was shattered. And suddenly this anti-corruption movement came up, supported by the — surreptitiously supported by the — extreme right, by the fascists, by the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or National Patriotic Organization]; but not really showing their hand. And they only spoke about government corruption and their movement was supported by the corporate media, 24/7. There was not one, single, minor slogan against any corporation. It was all just about... not just even government, but just about the ruling party, which is the Congress, because, you know, there was so much of the right wing behind it.

And this bill itself, which they are trying to pass, very few people have read it, but I have, and it's crazy; because it basically suggests that there should be a panel of people who are pure and virtuous and picked in quite complicated ways, but they should run a kind of super cop, where there are 40,000 policemen overseeing corruption; how these 40,000 people are not going to be corrupt themselves you don't know.

And actually eventually what happens in India is that we have a country where it isn't possible for people to be legal. You have hundreds of thousands, millions of people living in slums, you have roadside vendors, you have everybody who's just being preyed upon by the state because they are illegal; I mean they are living in illegal places, they are pavement dwellers; and you suddenly have the middle class turning on them and saying "It's corrupt politicians that are allowing these dirty slums there and these filthy people selling samosas on carts, and everybody should be moved into the malls or moved out of the cities." Any anti-corruption movement has to be nailed to an accepted legality, and that accepted legality is going to belong to the middle class, and there's a huge support of the middle class for this anti-corruption movement for this reason.

So you have exactly the opposite of Occupy Wall Street, you know? So you have a huge middle class support of people who are saying that it's corruption that's preventing us from becoming a super power, you know? It's the poor that are getting in the way.
(Gandhi, Get Your Gun!)

Ruth Gilmore (CUNY): I have a follow-up question to something you said earlier that gets to a question folks here in the audience have put to you. You said earlier in response to what I asked you about that you were maybe skeptical about building bridges and solidarity. And yet the notion of what their [?] means [?] all these different qualities to it, so in some ways they're going to be a battle of that people in that particular forest [?]. But there's of course a raid against the hugest global forces imaginable; and while I certainly don't think that we should put on our green fatigues and run there since there are all these battles to fight here, I'm just curious about how you hope things might turn out in the end if all the battles are [?]. So let me follow with a question here: "Dear Arundhati," writes one of your admirers, "There was a part in Walking with the Comrades where you cite Gandhi's ideas on stewardship, which is basically a defense of private property. How does or should the Indian public square away the moral imperatives of non-violence and property when there's so much violence and dispossession waged in the very name of 'security' and 'development'?" — our writer likes the quotation marks.

Arundhati Roy: Well, I actually got into quite a lot of trouble and quite a few arguments because there's a part in the essay where I talk about the fact that, just in terms of consumption, the guerilla army is more Gandhian than any Gandhian. And, that one day I should write a play called "Gandhi, get your gun" because, as you can imagine, non-violence, or the idea of non-violence has been co-opted by the elite in ways that suit them. So my question is, to people who — you know, if it's Anna Hazare who's on a fast supported by the corporate media and supported by the middle class, that's fine; but non-violence is a form of political theatre that can be extremely effective provided you have a sympathetic audience; but if you're deep in the forest, surrounded by 1,000 policemen who are burning your village, I mean you can hardly go on a hunger strike, right?

And, I ask: Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Can people who have no money boycott goods when they don't have any goods or any money at all? And Gandhi believed in this idea of trusteeship that rich people should be allowed to hold on to what they have and be persuaded to be nice about it, you know? And obviously I don't believe in that.

I... to come back to the question you were asking about solidarity: see, what I meant was, I didn't mean that there shouldn't be solidarity, but I think that those solidarities will happen when people understand what are these battles, what is the connection between Wall St. occupation and the people fighting in the jungle? Right now that might be a little muddled because are we really clear about what we're asking for, what we're fighting for? You know, even in the last essay in this book, which I'll read a part out at the end; the last essay is called "The Trickle-Down Revolution", in which I say, yes, right now the Maoists are fighting against the corporate takeover, but will they leave the bauxite in the mountain? Do they have a different way of looking at the world? A different development model; because the western world, and particularly the United States, has managed to brainwash everyone into believing that this is progress, this is civilization, this is paradise, you know?; whereas what I'm saying is that really what we're asking for, and what this battle in the forest is about, is a different idea of happiness, a different idea of fulfillment, a different idea of civilization; and we mustn't be frightened to articulate our demands, our dreams, our need for change very clearly.


(Capists & Liddites)

The time really has come for that, and if you think of a society in which 400 people own more than half of all of Americans, clearly, you don't have to be a philosopher or a huge intellectual to say this has to stop, and that today I think that we have to say that no individual, no corporation can have unlimited amounts of money. There has to be a cap on it, there has to be a lid on it; so we call ourselves capists and liddites, if you like.

But, like for example, in India, there's a mining company that owns steel plants, it does iron ore mining, it makes millions from it, called the Jindals. And there's a resistance to their projects all over the place; so when you're mining iron ore, you just pay a small royalty to the government, and you make all those millions. With all those millions, all these mining companies, they can buy judges, they can buy journalists, they can buy TV stations, they can buy everything. The CEO is a member of the parliament, he's won the right to fly the national flag on his house with the Chairman of the Flag Foundation. They have a law school — like this beautiful campus in the heart of some kind of squalor outside Delhi — where the faculty comes from all over the world because they are paid so well, and they teach environment law, all kinds of other kindnesses. And, they recently even ran a protest workshop. They had all the activists and poets and singers coming and talking about protest and music. So these guys own everything. They own universities, they own protests, they fund activists, they have the mines, they are in parliament, they have the flag; they have everything. The Tata's [Indian multinational conglomerate] have mines, they have foundations, they fund filmmakers, they make salt, they make trucks, they make internet cables. You can't get away from them, and they're not accountable. So, other than being capists and liddites, we demand that no corporation can have this sort of cross ownership. If you have a mine, stick with the mine, you can't own a television company and the flag and be in parliament and run the universities, you can't, you know? So, we need regulations like this, otherwise you end up like Italy where Berlusconi owns 99% of the TV outlets.

Someone in audience: In New York, Mayor Bloomberg.

Arundhati Roy: So there are some pretty simple things. Frankly, I also believe that children shouldn't inherit their parents' wealth. There has to be a way of limiting what people can have because we can't depend on people's saintliness. [?] Nice people, and eat organic vegetables. It doesn't work.

(When Animals Begin to Lose Their Mind)

Peter Hitchcock (CUNY): I'll try to follow that up by combining two questions. Given, again, the situation that you just described, is it possible for this insurgency to win without some form of transformation at the level of government in India as a whole? In other words, can there be a compromise of some sort, or can they only win with a different government?

Arundhati Roy: No, first of all, I think it would be foolhardy to believe that anybody can actually win a military victory against the Indian army. At the same time, we remember that in Kashmir there are 700,000 soldiers who've been posted there to deal with what they [?] something like 300 militias. Once a whole population is against you, you can't hold down, so if 12 million people in Kashmir need 700,000 soldiers, then what do, you know, 600 million need? The math doesn't work out. In fact, nobody can win that, then there's just devastation.

I think that is not a question of the government transforming. I think it's a question of other movements and people in India realizing that it is for their own good that they better stand up for this battle; because, eventually, even in the terms of the free market, even in their own terms, earning a 5% royalty and selling of your mountains, rivers and forests; you're really paying for other people's economies with your ecology; it's only when animals begin to lose their mind do they soil their own nests. So, there is no logic to say that this is good for the country; not even the logic of the free market.



(Trading in Every Feeling for a Silver Coin)

Peter Hitchcock (CUNY): One of the questions that you've filled in many times obviously is that The God of Small Things sold 6 million copies around the world. And then you embark upon a non fiction career of criticizing the government that can imprison you. So, the question basically — I know that you're not into that kind of careerism which says you must write for the dollar — but do you ever feel that pull, that you could write fiction again? Are you writing fiction?

Arundhati Roy: First you have to rephrase your question, and remove and separate the talk about money from the talk about literature.

Peter Hitchcock (CUNY): I'm a professor at CUNY, I have to.

Arundhati Roy: No, to be honest, I really... I'm even speaking for myself when I say people should not have unlimited amounts of money. I so often have said that it took me 4 years to write The God of Small Things and by the time I finished writing it, I had no idea what I had done; you know, whether it would make any sense to anybody or whatever; and suddenly it became this big success, and I used to feel like every feeling in The God of Small Things had been traded in for a silver coin. It was, you know there's something ugly about being rewarded in that way. I mean a little bit was okay but it was really too much.

To answer your question about fiction, yes, today I really do feel now that I've said, in some urgent sense — there was a sense of urgency about my non fiction; and there's absolutely no sense of urgency when I write fiction; I just like to really take my time over it. And I feel that I've said all I've needed to say directly. So I do feel like returning to that other place where I can tell it as a story, you know? But because I'm not a careerist and I'm not particularly ambitious and I'm not going anywhere, I find it difficult, especially if you live in India now, there's such a lot of horrendous things happening all the time, and I just keep getting sort of dragged into it; and as I've said before, fiction is such a delicate thing, such a ambiguous thing; and to do that, to kind of build a sort of steel wall around a very ambiguous thing, is difficult. But I hope it happens.
.
--- END OF TRANSCRIPT --

Source:
 http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/transcript-arundhati-roy-qa-at-cuny-graduate-center

Nov. 13th – Arundhati Roy Speaks in Berkeley

Earth at Risk 2011November 13th | Berkeley, CA
Reduced Prices Now Available: $10.00 Regular / Low Income $5.00Don't miss a rare opportunity to hear Arundhati Roy speak in person in the United States.
Derrick Jensen Interviews: Arundhati Roy, Chris Hedges, Thomas Linzey, Waziyatawin, Aric McBay, Stephanie McMillan, and Lierre Keith.
Deep Green Resistance organizers will be present with literature and available to chat and answer questions.
Derrick Jensen has been called "the philosopher-poet of the environmental movement." During this day-long event, Derrick will interview seven people who each hold an impassioned critique of this culture and can offer ideas on what can be done to build a real resistance movement.
Our planet is under serious threat from industrial civilization. Yet activists are not considering strategies that might actually prevent the looming biotic collapse the Earth is facing. We need to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. We need a serious resistance movement that includes all levels of direct action–action that can match the scale of the problem. http://earthatrisk.net
Can't make it to Berkeley? This event will be livestreamed.

Source:  http://deepgreenresistance.org/earthatrisk2011/

FROM LITERARY DAR LING TO GLOBAL ACTIVIST

Presented by: OCC Professor Jayanti Tamm

The award-winning author Arundhati Roy has transformed her focus from writing fiction to raising awareness of global health, security, and human rights issues. Prof. Tamm will discuss why Roy is one of the leading voices against the harmful aspects of human displacement, globalization, and modern warfare.

 November 18, 2011. 11:00 am –12:00 noon • College Center Solar Lounge
All Events are Free and Open to the Public!
No pre-registration is needed.

Source:
http://www.ocean.edu/GlobalEduc_Week_Events_Nov_14-18_2011.pdf

Arundhati Roy on 'Walking with the Comrades'

November 1, 2011 | by Anderson Tepper



Arundhati Roy's 1997 Booker Prize–winning debut novel, The God of Small Things, helped transform her into an overnight literary celebrity and something of a poster author for the boom in Indian writing. (Billboards across the country trumpeted her Booker victory.) She followed up the novel, however, with a stinging essay condemning India and Pakistan's nuclear showdown, entitled "The End of Imagination," and set off, as she's said, "on a political journey which I never expected to embark on." She was soon taking up the pen on a range of issues—big dam projects that were displacing communities, India's occupation of Kashmir, political corruption, and Hindu extremism. Suddenly, she was seen in a very different light at home: a voice of conscience, perhaps, but also a shrill and uncomfortable reminder of what lurked behind India's democracy.
But perhaps nothing quite prepared her for the virulent response to her March 2010 cover story for the Indian newsweekly Outlook, an inside report from the jungle camps where Maoist insurgents (and tribal villagers) were locked in a deadly and drawn-out battle with government forces over mineral-rich land. "Here in the forests of Dantewada [in central India]," she writes, "a battle rages for the soul of India." That article forms the centerpiece of her new collection, Walking with the Comrades, from Penguin Books; while Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, out now from Verso, also includes pieces by Roy as well as Tariq Ali, Pankaj Mishra, and others. She'll be making two rare appearances in New York next month, at the CUNY Graduate Center on November 9th and the Asia Society on November 11th. I recently spoke with her by phone in Delhi.
 
Tell me about the reaction in India to your article "Walking with the Comrades." I know it caused quite a stir and, as you say, landed in the flight path of a whole slew of debates, on both the left and the right.

Whenever my essays are collected into a book what is missing is the atmosphere in the country at the time when the original pieces were published. These essays came at a time when the government had announced Operation Green Hunt, calling on paramilitary forces to go into the jungle and very openly branding all resistance—not just the guerrillas, but really all across the board—as Maoist. They were picking up people by using laws such as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and Special Securities Act, in which thinking an anti-government thought is a almost a criminal offense. So when I went into the forest, my idea was that nobody really knew what was going on in there. These places were choked off; there was a siege on reporting. But what was real and what was not? I wanted to go in and deepen the story, to make it more human. But, of course, the idea that there are masses of people taking up arms caused a lot of anxiety among the right-wing. Among the people on the left—and India has a very long, complicated, and strong legacy of political and intellectual left-wing activity—many were absolutely outraged for a lot of reasons, mostly to do with old debates about whether organizing indigenous people qualified as Maoism, whether they are truly a revolutionary class, about the ideas of armed action versus entering the mainstream and standing for elections.

You make a point to contrast the guerrillas' situation with that of Gandhi, for example. You even jokingly consider writing a play for their cultural wing called Gandhi Get Your Gun.

[Laughs] Well, I got into trouble for saying that, too! But it's true that when intellectuals and academics debate the different kind of resistance movements, they don't take into account the landscapes of these struggles. When I went into the forest, one of the things that struck me was that Gandhian nonviolence can be a very effective form of political theater but it can't succeed without an audience. So whether it's the occupation of Wall Street or somewhere in India, it has to have an audience. Deep inside these forests there was no one to bear witness.

You describe how you were personally invited by the Maoists to join them on their march through the forest and to see for yourself what was happening. As a writer, it was certainly a rare opportunity, though dangerous and even grueling. Tell me about what you discovered, what surprised you.

Perhaps what surprised me most was that I found that almost half of the guerrilla army was made up of women. It was a very interesting story, how the Maoists had first approached the tribal women when they went into these areas more than thirty years ago. I spoke to the women and they told me about why they had joined—most had witnessed the most horrible crimes against women by either paramilitary or vigilante organizations, while others had joined to escape patriarchal traditional societies. What was really interesting to me was how much, over many years, Maoism had influenced the indigenous people and indigenous culture had influenced the Maoists.

I want to ask you about your "political journey" of the past decade or more. Among Indian writers, you've come to occupy a unique place—not only have you remained in India, you've been extremely vocal and critical on a variety of national subjects. Is this a role you've embraced?

Yes, I have, but only reluctantly. You see, when you live here, inside of all of this, you end up writing to refuse to be humiliated.

In "Trickledown Revolution," the book's final essay, you describe a street protest in Delhi by pavement dwellers whom you call "shadow people" and "refugees of India Shining." You are one of the few writers, it seems, who speaks up for them.

Well, I personally find it very embarrassing when people say things like, "She's the voice of the voiceless." We all know there's no such thing as the voiceless. Everybody is quite capable of telling you what is happening to them in this country. The dilemma for the writer, I think, is how to spend your life honing your individual voice and then, at times like this, to declare it from the heart of a crowd. That tension, that balance, is something I think about quite often.

This book, like much of your work, can be seen as act of imagination, a vision of other possibilities. You write: "If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them."

I always find it interesting that when you're with people who are really at the receiving end of oppression, you find a lot less despair than you do in middle-class drawing rooms. In these situations, despair is not an option. I wonder if the amount of information that is hammered into our heads day and night leads people to think that the world's problems are so huge they're insurmountable. Whereas people who are fighting against something in a more or less localized way are far clearer about what they have to do and how they have to do it.

You've said before that it is a struggle to find the time and space to write fiction and that you feel you need to invent a language to bridge your political and creative concerns.

Yes, what is most difficult for me is that just as certain and as real as these battles are right now, writing fiction is proportionately uncertain. Fiction is such an amorphous thing, you can't be sure that you're doing something important or wonderful until you've done it. So, because of the position I am in now, to work on fiction I have to create some sort of steel barriers around it. Fiction is something that involves so much gentleness, so much tenderness, that it keeps getting crushed under the weight of everything else! I still haven't figured it out entirely—but I will, I will.

Source:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/11/01/arundhati-roy-on-walking-with-the-comrades/

Arundhati Roy at Ferrara 2011 - entire event on video

Livia Firth and her encounter with Arundhati Roy

The Indian writer and activist reveals the secret of her tenacity.Wednesday 26 October 2011I always thought that a typically feminine qualities was his tenacity. Now that I Arundhati Roy known are even more convinced. Indiana, fifty years, irreducible political activist, Arundhati has become famous throughout the world in 1997, when he won the Booker Prize with the God of small Things (Guanda). For strength, is an unforgettable novel that recounts his ground and the impossible love between a woman and a privileged divorced "pariah", an untouchable. Then came the publication of a collection of essays Guide to the Empire for the common people, and now we are waiting for the next book, due out in January 2012.

I'm not surprised that Arundhati has become one of the most important voices in the contemporary debate: when not writing, tours the world to study and speak passionately of different topics, and all tosti, neo imperialism, the problems of the dam on the Narmada River in India (responsible for the forced exodus of millions of inhabitants), or the recent revolutions in Egypt, Tunisiain the Philippines. But perhaps the question that is more to heart is this: for years, Arundhati Kashmirwork in the region which is disputed between India and Pakistan that has a sad record, one of the most militarized area in the world, with almost 500,000 Indian soldiers to garrison.

Thousands of people have been killed since 1947 to today, and still must be subject to the curfew and the violent repression of any form of protest. Yet the case does not receive the attention it deserves, at the international level. The writer has a clear idea on the subject: «when you started the revolution in Egypt I wondered why the media give prominence to that so great news, taking the spotlight far from other areas. The answer is: are political choices. The establishment and Use of the Western world, matter have control of Egypt at all costs, to control Gaza. With India, however, the priorities are different: represents a huge market, and the only contestant able to keep the growth of China. Then: the Government should keep good Indian. And who wants to have him as an ally, avoids irritate him bringing to the fore the prickly issue of Kashmir ".

When I asked her how face to be so informed, Arundhati has laughed: "always ask Me! And I explain that I don't do searches, read only, because they are disgusted by the excess of propaganda. I understand what and when is the truth, I am so angry that I have to write something. " And if we all get even just a pinch of tenacity of Arundhati Roy?

Livia Firth was born in Rome but feels little town in the world. Creative director of Eco-age.com, special mission is to make sexy ecology, social justice and (slightly) in everyday life. Lives in London, is married to a certain actor, has 3 sons, about 4 fish and a cat. Every month on Marie Claire tells of extraordinary women around the world.
Livia Firth

Source:
http://www.marieclaire.it/Attualita/Livia-Firth-per-Marie-Claire-l-incontro-con-Arundhati-roy

 Article translated automatically from Italian. Mistakes any is result of that.

Arundhati Roy: 'I know I have to finish my next novel – one day'

Ahead of the Booker Prize tomorrow, Arundhati Roy tells Peter Popham how the award led her to a new life, and away from fiction
Monday, 17 October 2011
[image error]


Arundhati Roy, winner of the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God Of Small Things, is not in the frame this year. Again. In fact, she has yet to follow up on that first book, what John Updike described as her "Tiger Woodsian debut".

It's not for want of trying: it is no secret that she has a second one on the stocks. "Everybody has known that for many years!" she laughs. Few people have had a glimpse of it, however, one exception being her friend John Berger, the octogenarian novelist and art critic. He was so impressed that he urged her to drop everything and finish it. "About a year and a half ago I was with John at his home," she recalls, "and he said, 'You open your computer now and you read to me whatever fiction you are writing.' He is perhaps the only person in the world that could have the guts to say that to me. And I read a bit to him and he said, 'You just go back to Delhi and you finish that book.' So I said 'ok...'"

But her good intentions were derailed. "I went back to Delhi," she says, "and in a few weeks this note was pushed under my door: just an anonymous typewritten note asking me to visit the Maoists in the jungles of central India..."

It was a tough invitation, to enter the dark heart of India's secret war zone. But not one that Arundhati Roy could refuse. Since her stunning Booker success, her real passion has been for politics, not fiction.

Today India is going down the same path travelled centuries back by the European colonial powers: identifying sources of strategic minerals, driving off the people living on top of them, and using it to industrialise and grow rich. The difference is that India has no Australia or Latin America to plunder. Instead, as Roy says, "It is colonising itself, turning upon its own poor to extract raw materials."

Centuries after the plunder of mineral resources began, some people living in countries like Britain began to understand the horrors that had been committed along the way: the indigenous peoples massacred, their traditions erased, the survivors reduced to penury. But by then, remorse came cheap: the damage had been done, the great fortunes made.

But in India all this is happening now, in real time. As a result, remorse is far more expensive: if sincerely meant, it could really throw a spanner in the happiness machine.

When Arundhati Roy accepted the Maoists' invitation, she was aware that what is being done to millions of adivasis, India's tribal people, in their villages in the forests of central India was an uncomfortable subject for the Indian middle class.

India's Naxalite rebellion started back in the 1960s, in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari, and through innumerable splits and spats, eruptions and retreats, has been sputtering on ever since. But in 2005 the new Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, raised its profile dramatically when he described it as "India's greatest internal security threat".

Roy believes the timing was significant. "It coincided with the government signing hundreds of secret Memorandums of Understanding with several mining companies and infrastructure corporations," she says. "They basically sold the rivers, the mountains, the forests, they signed them over to private companies. And they needed to wage war against these indigenous people to get them out of their villages, so the mining companies could move in."

Hundreds of thousands of paramilitaries were deployed in the forests to do the job; there followed the burning of hundreds of villages "infested" by Maoists, the setting up of roadside camps for villagers flushed out of them, and a great deal of bloodshed on both sides.

Yet by walking through the forest and listening to the Maoists' stories, Roy exposed a reality that the Indian media had worked overtime to conceal. Forty-five per cent of the rebels, she says, are women; 99 per cent are tribal villagers, the traditional inhabitants of these forests who have taken up the gun in a last, desperate attempt to protect their homes and their land.

When her essay about the trip, Walking With The Comrades, appeared in India last year, Roy was criticised for humanising the rebels. For the Indian middle class, wedded to Gandhian ideas of non-violence, their adherence to the gun put them beyond the pale. But, says Roy, what other option did they have?

"I believe that Gandhian resistance is an extremely effective and moral form of political theatre, provided you have a sympathetic audience," she says. "But what happens when you are a tribal village in the heart of the forest, miles away from anywhere? When the police surround your village, are you going to sit on a hunger strike? Can the hungry go on hunger strike?"

In the years since the triumph of her novel, Roy has become expert at touching the nerve of the Indian middle class. It's a gift that reflects her own hyper-sensitivity. "I feel sometimes that I live without a skin," she says. "I live without a protection. And when you live without a skin you actually are all the time living in an ocean of things that ask to be told.

"The country that I live in is becoming more and more repressive, more and more of a police state... India is hardening as a state. It has to continue to give the impression of being a messy, cuddly democracy but actually what's going on outside the arc lights is really desperate."

But at the same time it remains an open society, and the arguments are there to be won. "This is a very interesting time where I think the debates are being cracked open. Real intervention at a real moment can change the paradigm of the debate, even if it doesn't instantly cause a revolution."

The novel will just have to wait: her political writing, she says, "gives people a bit of space to breathe. What I love most is that the minute it's written it's translated into [the Indian regional languages] Oriya and Kannada and Telugu... People ask me if I feel isolated: I can't tell you how un-isolated I feel. If somebody said, how do you get feedback from your writing, I'd say I just have to stand at a traffic light! It's like a dynamic exchange of love, anger and argument, unfolding every minute of the day."

A life in brief

Born 24 November, 1959, in Shillong, India, near border with Bangladesh.

Education Aged 16, she moved to New Delhi to study architecture. She still lives in the city.

Family In 1984 she married second husband, the filmmaker Pradip Krishen, spending the next few years working in a series of odd-jobs while writing screenplays for Indian films.

Career Her semi-autobiographical debut novel from 1997, The God of Small Things, earned a £500,000 advance and won the Booker Prize. Has since used profile to campaign on environmental issues and against the caste system. This year's Broken Republic: Three Essays, attracted controversy for its defence of tribal Maoist rebels.





Source:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/arundhati-roy-i-know-i-have-to-finish-my-next-novel-ndash-one-day-2371609.html

Many imitators too many dishonest

Angiola Codacci-Pisanel The writer Arundhati Roy: "you are corrupting Gandhi's ideas to make a violent use of non-violence. It is immoral to allow a State to commit violence, and claim a non-violent reaction by the victims '


[image error]    Arundhati Roy"Those who have nothing to eat can do a hunger strike. And if there are no spectators does not make sense to do a sit-in ". And ' pithy Arundhati Roy in indicating the limits of non-violence and the risk of "gandhism forced". Behind a hugely successful novel ("the God of small things") followed by a non-fiction increasingly engaged and anti-Government, Indian writer is coming to present at Ferrara, at the Festival of "International", along with his "spiritual father" John Berger, the collection of essays "Broken Republic" (in Italy by Guanda due out in January): a book with hatred in India because it supports the armed resistance of the indigenous peoples who seek to defend their forests by the appetites of the multinationals supported by the Government. People, writes Roy, for the media are "Maoist rebel violence and blood-thirsty" and "from the point of view of consumption are more of a Gandhian Ghandian protesters".

Non-violent manifestations of Arab spring they did talk about a return of the ideals of Mahatma. Would you agree?
"We cannot talk about gandhism just because there are mass demonstrations. Gandhi was a politician, very complex and interesting. He had a philosophy of life, a particular attitude towards consumerism. I'm not an unconditional fan of Gandhi but admire and wouldn't ever mistake of confusing what has been called Arab spring with a Gandhian movement. The revolts of Arab countries have complex policies components: in Egypt have an important role in the Muslim Brotherhood, which certainly cannot be called valorises local traditions. We must see how the situation evolves before Judge ".

Meanwhile, in India the politician of the moment is Anna Hazare, the "new Gandhi" that she disapproves of everything, right?
"Yes, because he really has little to do with Gandhi. Says that the corrupt should be hanged and that they must cut off the hands of the thieves: looks more like a supporter of the sharia that a Gandhian. In addition to a centralized democracy, an oligarchy formed by 30 thousand people responsible for weeding out corruption at all levels, while Gandhi believed in decentralisation. I think you atteggi to Gandhian for reasons and to inspire sympathy, but it has nothing to do with him. "

Behold, the Theatre: you write that non-violence makes no sense if it does not have an audience.
"When you decide to start a hunger strike or a sit-in need of an audience that shares. Then in the forests of central India, where police and paramilitaries encircle the poorest and burning houses and rape women, when your village is surrounded by a thousand policemen without organs information knowing nothing, what kind of Gandhian politics can do? View Hazare: When did the hunger strike was in the heart of Delhi, surrounded by journalists and supporters. This is very dishonest. "

The hunger strike so it is for the rich and famous?
"The part of Gandhi who admire more his approach to sustainability, ecological life, which was really ahead of its time-is the part of which no one speaks. The so-called Gandian protesters today want to maintain a consumerist behavior and have the free market, and meanwhile you fill your mouth with non-violence. Sure Gandhi would not have been backed by multinational companies such as Tata ".

Think you can bribe Gandhi's ideas to make a violent use of non-violence?
"It's what's going on. When I see people in India who claim non-violence by the poorest of the poor while their villages were under attack, when they preach to the people of Kashmir living under the occupation of 700 thousand soldiers, I feel that is deeply immoral. It is unethical to allow a State to commit violence, and claim a non-violent reaction by the victims. " Source : http://espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio/molti-imitatori-troppi-disonesti/2164016/9

*This article has been automatically translated from Italian