My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

grace of rage.

use everything in my power to flagrantly solicit support for

blasphemous.

travesty.

Devdas, eventually worked as managing editor. So the Mahatma who promoted homespun khadi and the wooden charkha was sponsored by a mill-owner. The man who raged against the machine was kept afloat by industrialists. This arrangement was the precursor to the phenomenon of the corporate-sponsored

argument, honesty on the part of the trustee is assumed.’169 To justify the idea of the rich becoming the ‘guardians of the poor’, he argued that ‘the rich cannot accumulate wealth without the co-operation of the poor in society’.170 And then, to empower the poor wards of the rich guardians: ‘If this knowledge were to penetrate to and spread amongst the poor, they would become strong and would

Riddles in Hinduism,

reservations about India’s chosen model of ‘development’, and – with a hissy, sneering pause – even questioned the country’s nuclear tests. Now it’s true that my views on these matters are at variance with those of the ruling establishment. In better days, that used to be known as a critical perspective or an alternative worldview. These days in India, it’s called sedition.

must try and put Rape into its correct perspective. The Rape of a nice Woman (saucy, headstrong, foul-mouthed perhaps, but basically moral, sexually moral) – is one thing. The rape of a nasty/perceived-to-be-immoral woman is quite another. It wouldn’t be quite so bad. You wouldn’t feel quite so sorry. Perhaps you wouldn’t feel sorry at all. Any policeman will tell you that. Whenever the police are accused of custodial rape, they immediately set to work. Not to prove that she wasn’t raped. But to prove that she wasn’t nice. To prove that she was a loose woman. A prostitute. A divorcee. Or an Elopee – i.e.: she asked for it. Same difference. Bandit Queen, the film, does not make a case against rape. It makes its case against the rape of nice (read moral) women.

While We-the-Audience peep saucer-eyed out of our little lives. Not remotely aware of the fact that our superficial sympathy, our ignorance of the facts, and our intellectual sloth could grease her way to the gallows. We makes me sick.