Arundhati Roy's Blog, page 7

Arundhati Roy and Pankaj Mishra - Kashmir: The Case for Freedom

Kashmir is one of the most protracted and bloody occupations in the world — and one of the most ignored. Under an Indian military rule that, at half a million strong, exceeds the total number of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, freedom of speech is non-existent, and human rights abuses are routine.

Exploring the causes and consequences of the occupation, Kashmir: The Case for Freedom is a passionate call for the end of occupation, and for the right of self-determination for the Kashmiri people.
Join author/activist Arundhati Roy and writer Pankaj Mishra with invited guests for a discussion on Kashmir's tragedy.


Followed by a book sale and signing on November 11, 2011, 6:30pm - 8:30pm. 725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street), New York, NY


Can't make it to this program? Tune in to the free webcast from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm on asiasociety.org/live. Online viewers are encouraged to send questions to moderator@asiasociety.org

Arundhati Roy pays tribute to Punjabi theatre legend Gursharan Singh

Her speech in Kussa 9 October, 2011

Arundhati Roy speaks at Ferrara 2011

Arundhati Roy - Why exercising freedom of speech, of thinking, of writing? maybe because some justice perhaps will come, but the first thing is to avoid the humiliation of not writing, of not telling that you know what have been done to you, not to be reduced to silence, writing is a way of preserving your personal dignity.

Source: freeflor

Arundhati: Joint fight against forced land acquisition

Neel Kamal, TNN | Oct 10, 2011, 07.07AM IST

KUSSA (MOGA): The fight of Punjab farmers and labourers facing forced land acquisition got an unexpected boost, with Booker winner Arundhati Roy advocating a joint struggle to stop this, whether it is in Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bengal or Punjab.

Talking to The Times of India, Roy also condemned the cane charge on farmers at Gobindpura village. Arundhati said she has come to know that some women resisting forced acquisition have sustained injuries. ''I salute their spirit.''

She also stressed on the need to organize a renewed and sustained struggle for ensuring equality, irrespective of caste, creed and financial position, to get rid of the ills afflicting civil society.

Roy, who had come to this dusty village to pay tributes to eminent playwright Gursharan Singh, said, ''He fought all his life against imperialistic forces which can only be defeated by joint efforts.''

Referring to usurping of vast natural resources by multinational companies, Arundhati said if the poorest people in the world, residing in Orissa and Chhattisgarh could keep the big companies at bay for more than five years, why can't those in other places (states) do so. She said the world takes inspiration from poor people's fight against the mighty.

Arundhati, her Hindi peppered with English words, said, ''Gursharan showcased people's anger against anti-people regimes. There is dire need for thousands of small stones (people) to join together to form a formidable wall, which could not be torn apart by big concerns or regimes. And writers, people in art and culture could work as cement in the building of this wall.''

She said lakhs of people from Punjab to Kerala, and Chhattisgarh to Orissa, are undertaking different struggles for their survival and well-being. But a bigger, collective fight is needed.

Roy pointed out that Punjab has 30% dalit population, out of which and 90% are landless, but the leftist forces have failed to fight for their cause altogether.

Earlier, paying rich tributes to Gursharan Singh, Roy, Sangeet Natak Akademi and Sahitya Akademi award winner playwrights Atamjit, Ajmer Aulakh, Gursharan's daughter Areet, Desh Bhagat Yadgar hall committee member Amolak Singh, playwrights Kewal Dhaliwal, Sahib Singh and others stressed on the need to carry forward Gursharan's legacy.

Source:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chandigarh/Arundhati-Joint-fight-against-forced-land-acquisition/articleshow/10296525.cms

Roy joins in, slams govt over land row

 Ludhiana:
Stating that only people should have the right to decide whether to sell their land or not, Booker prize winning author and activist Arundhati Roy slammed the Punjab government for forcibly acquiring land at Gobindpura near Mansa. The author was in Kussa village in Moga on Sunday where a function was held to pay tribute to theatre activist Gursharan Singh who died last week.

Addressing a huge gathering Roy said: " The state government does not have any right to forcibly remove people from the land in which people earn their livelihood. This land (Gobindpura) belongs to the farmers and they should decide whether they want to sell it or not". Roy also hit out at the Centre's policies. "In Punjab land holdings are dwindling and in a situation like this the state government should ensure that the land stays with the farmers and not acquire land from them. It is sad to see that a nation where a large majority is poor and marginalised, the policies and welfare schemes are made for a small minority. This skewed vision of the central government has created a huge divide between the haves and the have nots," she went on to add.

Meanwhile farmers, writers, civil society groups and artistes paid rich tributes to theatre activist Gursharan Singh who passed away on September 28 after a prolonged illness. Paying homage to Singh, Roy said: " Gursharan was not merely a theatre personality but an activist who bonded art with the social sentiments of the people".

Dr Areet, Gursharan Singh's daughter also paid a tearful tribute to her father. "My father educated and inspired the people to fight for their rights through theatre at the village level that touched the common masses to a great extent", Areet said.

Source:
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/roy-joins-in-slams-govt-over-land-row/857715/

Bookclub: Arundhati Roy on The God of Small Things - Radio4 Extra Blog

Arundhati Roy with Jim and the Bookclub audience
I do hope those of you who have heard the Arundhati Roy discussion on The God of Small Things enjoyed it. There are very few books of this kind that come our way, so it was a natural for us. Sooner or later we had to come to it. Listen to it HERE

The God of Small Things is unusual in so many ways. As Arundhati Roy puts it, the story begins at the end and ends in the middle, and she is determined that she was never going to write a linear story.

In our discussion she made it clear that the feeling of a book that has a circular wholeness, so that you can start the story almost anywhere with the same effect, springs from that part of her mind that made her want to be an architect, which is how she was trained.

The result is that the book's power comes not so much from the development of a story along conventional lines - a beginning in the first pages, and an end on the last page - but from the conception of the world in which the action (concentrated in a few days) is happening around you.

The book that obviously springs to mind is Ulysses, but I find it hard to think of settings that are more different than James Joyce's Dublin and Roy's Kerala, where the texture of life is built up of an impossible vast range of smells, colours, tiny objects and competing cultures and religions. Your senses are assailed by the vividness of the world she describes.

And of course it is a story of love and loss, and therefore tragedy. But when we asked her if it was therefore a pessimistic novel, she said that she thought that the fact the kind of love she describes could have come about in a feudal society was in itself "a fantastically hopeful thing".

At the centre of the story, recollected by Rahel as an adult woman, is the love between her Christian mother and a carpenter who, by the rules of caste, is an Untouchable.

In her conversation, especially when we asked her why she had not written another novel since The God of Small Things was first published in 1997, Arundhati Roy revealed the depth of her political commitments: the extent to which she wants her story to reveal not just the intoxicating feel of India, and the way that the mystical and the practical are woven together in everyday life, but the unfairness and cruelties of a system that pitches different religions and cultures against each other.

Since she wrote the book, which became a worldwide bestseller and won prizes, including the Booker, she's devoted most of her energy to various campaigns which she feels to be more important that the writing of another story.

She told us: "I hope I will return to fiction. I don't want to write books because that's what the world expects me to do. I want to write a book when I have a book that needs to be written or wants to be written; not just because that's a profession." That moment has not yet come.

About her writing technique, which has dazzled so many critics and readers, she says that she knows no rules. She thinks or herself neither as a linear nor hierarchical thinker, and in describing the way she tried to capture the society in which her characters were caught, and the way they lived their lives, it became clear that she wanted to paint a picture of how difficult it is to pursue love - which always produces, she believes, vulnerability - in a society where class and caste impose rigid boundaries and exert hard punishment on anyone who tries to stray across them.

Just as she says that pessimism and optimism aren't in a binary relationship - being opposites between which you have to choose - so she sees the pain of love as something that's inevitable if the joy of it is going to be appreciated. She refused to choose between gloom and hope: they're both there in the book.

I suspect that the reason why it was such a success is that the style in which she tells the story - its layers, the overlapping of time, the back-and-forth twists of the narrative, the idea of the compression of a long story into a brief moment in history - is utterly original.

When you put that together with the sheer exultation in the physical presence of India - especially the smells and the colours - you have a powerful mix.

One of our readers who had grown up in India said that when he read the passages in the pickle factory it made him want to go and wipe his hands afterwards.

The emotions in the book are very powerful - it deals with death, love that has to struggle to be fulfilled, and a touch of incest (because of a shared feeling of desolation) - yet they seem to sit naturally in a society where the natural world always seems about to overwhelm the people, and the rules that are forced upon them are often impossible to obey.

I'm glad we have come to The God of Small Things because in the end I think we had to.

Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio4/201...

Photos from Ferrara 2011, Italy

1-2 October 2011








Photo credits : Sarasx, Internaz

Arundhati Roy: Walking with the Comrades, followed by a discussion with David Harvey

THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE AND POLITICS PRESENTSWalking with the Comrades Deep in the forests, under the pretense of battling Maoist guerillas, the Indian government is waging a vicious total war against its own citizens—a war undocumented by a weak domestic press and fostered by corporations eager to exploit the rare minerals buried in tribal lands. Chronicling her months spent living with the rebel guerillas in the forests, Roy addresses the much larger question of whether global capitalism will tolerate any societies existing outside of its colossal control.A reading by Arundhati RoyFollowed by a discussion with David Harvey [image error]
Arundhati Roy (c) Sanjay Kak
Wednesday November 9th 20117.00 PM – 9.00 PMThe Proshansky AuditoriumCuny Graduate Center365 Fifth Ave at 34th Street Free and open to the public
Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things , for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages worldwide.
She has written several non-fiction books, including The Cost of Living, Power Politics, War Talk, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, and Public Power in the Age of Empire . Roy was featured in the BBC television documentary Dam/age, which is about the struggle against big dams in India. A collection of interviews with Arundhati Roy by David Barsamian was published as The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile . Her recent work includes Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers , and a contribution to the forthcoming anthology Kashmir: The Case for Freedom . Her latest book,  Walking with the Comrades was just published by Penguin Books. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize.
[image error]  David Harvey , a leading theorist in the field of urban studies whom Library Journal called "one of the most influential geographers of the later twentieth century," earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge University, was formerly professor of geography at Johns Hopkins, a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford. His reflections on the importance of space and place (and more recently "nature") have attracted considerable attention across the humanities and social sciences. His highly influential books include The New Imperialism; Paris, Capital of Modernity; Social Justice and the City; Limits to Capital; The Urbanization of Capital;The Condition of Postmodernity; Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference;Spaces of Hope; and Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. His numerous awards include the Outstanding Contributor Award of the Association of American Geographers and the 2002 Centenary Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his "outstanding contribution to the field of geographical enquiry and to anthropology." He holds honorary degrees from the universities of Buenos Aires, Roskilde in Denmark, Uppsala in Sweden, and Ohio State University.
Co-sponsored by the CUNY Committee on Globalization and Social Change and the Center for Humanities

Arundhati Roy discusses The God of Small Things on Bookclub (BBC Radio4)

Arundhati Roy talks to James Naughtie and readers about her Booker prize winning novel The God of Small Things. Roy's first and so far only book of fiction, it took the literary world by storm, winning the Booker Prize in 1997.


Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/openbook

Into the Woods

By Arundhati Roy and Parul Sehgal

In Walking with the Comrades, novelist and activist Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) travels into the forest with India's Maoist indigenous communities at war with the government. How did you earn the guerrillas' trust? When the Indian government declared war against the Maoists, Indian liberals, for the most part, took a very safe, neutral position: "The government is bad, the Maoists are bad, the poor people are sandwiched in the middle." I am no Maoist, but I thought that was a profoundly dishonest position. It elided the fact that the government had secretly sold lands belonging to indigenous tribes to mining and infrastructure companies. This is illegal and unconstitutional, and yet it was being done brazenly. Hundreds of thousands of paramilitary police were closing in on forest villages to clear the land for the corporations. About 600 villages had been emptied; some 300,000 people had fled their homes and had either moved to police camps or were hiding, terrified, in the forest. Many had joined the guerrilla army and were fighting back. The government and the media, campaigning for corporations, labeled them terrorists and called for them to practice Gandhian nonviolence. I wrote that Gandhian nonviolence was political theater that could be effective provided it had a sympathetic and empowered audience; how could people in remote forest villages, far from the gaze of the media or a hostile middle class be Gandhian while they were being raped and murdered? How could the starving go on hunger strike? How could those with no money boycott goods? My writings made their way into the forest, and one day a note was slipped under my door, inviting me to walk with the comrades. What surprised you most about them? I believed that when people take up arms, the violence would inevitably turn against the women in the community. In the forest I was disabused of this notion—45% of the Peoples Liberation Guerrilla Army is made up of women. Many of them joined after watching the brutal attacks of the police and the government sponsored vigilante groups on their villages. Others joined to escape the patriarchal practices of their own tribal society. The Maoist party has been a very patriarchal organization; the women within it still have major battles to fight (like women everywhere), but in the forest, I was in complete awe of the women I met. There was a lovely moment when I went down to a river with some women guerillas to bathe, while others kept guard. I remember thinking to myself, "Look at the women in this river—writers, guerrillas, farmers—how very wonderful." You write about India's poor and disenfranchised, but you do so in English (and with a fairly sophisticated style, to boot)? Who do you write for? Language is such a volatile and political issue in India. We have hundreds of languages and each has its own history of oppression and exclusion. So whatever language you write in, you're excluding the majority of people in the country. Yes, I write in English, but my writing is immediately translated into Hindi, Bengali, Odiya, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam. Still, it is a huge irony to be a writer, in any language, in a country where so many are illiterate. Who do I write for? For everybody and nobody. I write when my body cannot accommodate my silence any more. I do what I can to use language and not let it use me. One of the pleasures of reading your writing is your irreverence and exuberance—a tone not commonly found in analyses of this sort. Is this a voice that you've had to hone?I don't spend a moment thinking about my style. But I do spend a fair amount of time structuring the argument and narrative. It takes a few drafts for me to moderate the fury I feel. As for irreverence, I've always found so much laughter, so much cutting humor amongst people even in the most deadly moments. When I think back on my time in the forest, more than anything else I remember laughing till tears were streaming down my face. You invite our admiration for how "the poorest people in the world have managed to stop some of the richest corporations in their tracks." How can readers support these communities? The Maoists are only the militant end of a bandwidth of resistance movements in India—all of them are posing a radical challenge to accepted ideas of what constitute progress, "development," and civilization itself. The main thing readers can do is to not think of this conversation as a conversation about others, but to look at their own "civilizations" and ask: "What can we do to help ourselves, to open our imaginations to another way of thinking?"

Source:  
http://www.zcommunications.org/into-the-woods-by-arundhati-roy