The Gypsy Goddess Quotes

“The problem with thinking up a new and original idea within a novel is that you have to make sure that Kurt Vonnegut did not already think of it.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“Just because this is a novel set in rural India, do not expect a herd of buffalo to walk across every page for the sake of authenticity.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“Everything is so precariously held together here that you might want a helping hand. Nobody is going to teach you that right after a harvest, poorly paid labourers were hungry enough to smoke out rodent holes and steal back the grains of paddy pilfered by rats. But you will manage. You will learn to relate without family trees. You will learn to make do without a village map. You will learn that criminal landlords can break civil laws to enforce caste codes. You will learn that handfuls of rice of rice can consume half a village. You will loafer learn that in the eyes of the law, the rich are incapable of soiling their hands with either mud or blood. You will learn to wait for revenge with the patience of a village awaiting rain.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“..Meanwhile, remember this: nobody lived happily. Nobody outlived the ever-after.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“They said even hawks could not carry away the sky, so scavenger crows like us should not have lofty dreams.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“You have a big man's never she tells him. You need a old man's patience.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“My heart swims in a restless sea of blood, and my speechlessness is a result of listening to this landlord asking me to prove that the Indian interpretation of a Communist dream of revolutionary reconstruction and reconstitution of society within the generous ambit of the system of parliamentary democracy poses a direct death threat to him.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“I was also informed by this kind lady that the Pallars and Paraiyars and other lowered castes are not allowed to walk past the street where he lives. She suggested, unlike Google Maps, that in the interests of my own safety, I take a one-foot-wide, worn-out path that snakes around his backyard. Being a half-caste, quarter-caste, quarter-quarter-caste of dubious multi-casteness, I lost all opportunity for transgression when I was fetched to his home in his own ash-coloured Ambassador.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“Remember, dear reader, I write from a land where people wrap up newborn babies in clumsy rags and deck the dead in incredible finery.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“The party had seen glorious days. But the red salute could only unite up to a certain point. Fault-lines began to appear along the issue of untouchability. People started choosing convenient options that kept their caste codes intact.
Some deserted the party because the Indian National Congress made no ideological demands of them. Others deserted the party because the DMK had emerged as a new alternative to the Congress. Even the black-shirted Self-Respecters who did not contest elections started treating communism as though it were nothing more than a superstition. In East Tanjore, the party was patronized only by the Pallars and Paraiyars and other outcastes.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“Revolutions are usually verbose and, sometimes, they make too many promises.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“He believed this fifteen-year-old fledging movement would fight and uproot centuries of caste and feudalism.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“And then these women said that if the men wanted their mothers and wives and sisters and daughters to live with some honour and dignity, they should stay by the Communists and continue to fight these rowdy landlords.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“They have a simple answer: ‘You cannot ask us for a fine, you should not ask us for a fine, and even if you did ask us for a fine, we cannot pay. We simply don’t have that kind of money.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“The proletariat will never forgive a tyrant who forces them to bury their children. You are in power only because your party’s election manifesto promised one measure of rice for one rupee.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“They refuse to understand that the anger of the proletariat will rectify every injustice in this world. We should be angry that we are not angry enough.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“The middle class, just like the ruling class, conveniently believes that those who die are the surplus people, the ones who took up space, the nation’s disgrace. Does the middle class have enough conscience to feel rattled when, every time the monsoon fails, the parched lands grow soup kitchens?”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“To put it in simple numbers, 60 per cent of the land lies with 5 per cent of the people at the top; at the bottom, 60 per cent of the people own only 5 per cent of the land. And below this are the wretched of the earth: the landless agricultural labourers of Tanjore, who own nothing, not even the land on which their tiny, mud-walled hut stands, not even metal vessels, not even a change of clothing.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“This time, in protest, they plan a funeral for the landlord. They prepare his pyre, they lament his effigy corpse on its final farewell. The women beat their breasts and break their bangles. They sing the dirges of disgust, they mourn a monster, who, being alive, understands what awaits him after death. They curse, and it is written in their blood that their curses will come true. They call upon death to visit him at the earliest and, sometimes, the Buffalo Rider keeps his appointment. When women take to protest, there is no looking back.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“But the peasant struggle spreads like an infection, it catches the landlords unawares, takes them on from unsuspecting quarters. The threat of a protracted fight brings the landlords to the negotiation table. The proletariat is united and powerful and radiantly angry, but the landlords gain strength from the guns they carry. The landlords know that the comrades know that at least six men would have to die before they are close enough to attack a gun-wielding mirasdar . Fear of facing the bullets prevents a spontaneous blood bath. So protests take democratic forms: hunger strikes, hartals and road-blocking rokos , demonstrations and processions.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“The Communists know that the police have sworn to shoot them like dogs. They know the witch hunting that awaits them. They know the perils of the underground. They have to fight several forces: the landlords, the landlords’ rowdies and henchmen, the police, the caste mentality that divides the working classes, the slackness of their party’s high command, the gossip that threatens to ruin the years of hard work.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“How long will a people hold their patience when they earn their daily meal after sunset and have to hurry home to drop the handfuls of paddy into smouldering ash, wait for its wetness to waft away and then pound the grains and cook the dehusked rice into a formless congee that is never enough to douse their endless hunger?”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“The police, as puppets of the ruling classes, will not make the law work for the poor.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“When women take to protest, there is no looking back.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“The gods in these lands outnumber the people. The demons in these lands outperform Satan.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“Thread One : communism thrived in East Tanjore because this place had the highest number of discussion-inducing tea stalls in the province. It was often suggested, by none other than the decaffeinated bourgeoisie, that communism would be eradicated if tea ceased to exist.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“Labour export, communism import – it is too early to fetishize a foreign commodity that springs out of slave trade.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“Can we use a big word that will rock the boat? Slavery . It feeds White guilt and it deprives Brown folk of a golden opportunity to take pride in being treated better than Blacks.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“Everyone stole her rice, and left religion as a souvenir.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“It is common knowledge that no land would ever be found interesting until a white man arrived, befriended some locals, tried the regional cuisine, asked a lot of impertinent questions, took copious notes in his Moleskine notebook and then went back home and wrote something about it.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess