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Arundhati RoyPaul KingsnorthPublished online: 19 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Paul Kingsnorth (2001) Arundhati Roy, Peace Review: A Journalof Social Justice, 13:4, 591-595, DOI: 10.1080/10402650120100990

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Peace Review 13:4 (2001), 591–595

Peace Pro� le: Arundhati Roy*

Paul Kingsnorth

Arundhati Roy is tired. Tired of being who she is expected to be. Tired of beinglauded and condemned at the same time. Tired of the way her country is going.Tired of having to explain herself. Maybe this isn’t surprising, given where herlife has taken her in recent years. The writer and activist (not a word she likesto use about herself, but accurate nonetheless) is on a journey that began in 1997with the publication of her debut novel, The God of Small Things. It has sent herin directions she probably never expected to travel, for reasons she is still tryingto make clear.

As Roy herself has written, her story has “a sort of cloying Reader’s Digest ringto it—an unknown writer spent years writing her � rst novel, which wassubsequently published in 40 languages, sold several million copies, and went onto win the Booker Prize.” Or so it begins.

The tremendous success of The God of Small Things, a lyrical and tragic tale ofthe interlocking generations of an Indian family, loosely based on Roy’s ownchildhood, turned this previously unknown architect and former screenwriterinto a global celebrity. Roy, then 36, left behind her quiet life in Delhi for ayear-long world tour and was feted everywhere she went. Indian politicians wereespecially eager to be associated with this “Pride of India,” the winner ofBritain’s highest literary award.

Most famous writers are content to play the part, going to book signings andceremonies, appearing on TV, basically, doing the literary thing. But this iswhere Roy’s story diverges from the rest. After her year away, she returned toa country that had changed for ever. What had happened in her absencechanged Roy, too, and changed the way people saw her.

In May 1998, the Indian government conducted its � rst of� cial nuclear tests inthe Thar desert, a region close to the country’s tense northwest border with

Pakistan. In July 1998, Roy expressed her outrage in “The End of Imagination,”an essay published in two major national magazines. The essay was a blast of wit,fact, and fury aimed at India’s government for spending its money and energyon bombs while its people starved and its land decayed. “The air is thick withugliness,” she wrote, “and there’s the unmistakable smell of fascism on thebreeze … India’s nuclear bomb is the � nal act of betrayal by a ruling class thathas failed its people.”

* This article � rst appeared in The Ecologist, Volume 30, Number 6. www.theeclogist.org

ISSN 1040-2659 print; ISSN 1469-9982 online/01/040591-05 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1040265012010099 0

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Roy had done what few celebrity writers do: she had taken an outspokenpolitical stand. She had also made powerful enemies. The same politicians whohad praised Roy only months before now condemned her for betraying herhomeland. Now she sits—small, slight, and quiet—cross-legged on the � oor ofher New Delhi � at and dares anyone to tell her how a novelist should behave.

“People ask me all the time, am I a writer or an activist,” she says, “but it’ssuch a bad comment on our times that you even be asked that question. BecauseI thought that’s what writers do, you know—they write about the society thatthey live in. And I want to say, ‘Do you think it’s my job just to be some cheapentertainer? Why should you even ask me that question?”’ And Roy’s polemicalwriting did not end with her criticism of India’s display of nuclear might. Shewas just warming up.

In February 1999, the Indian Supreme Court lifted a four-year legal stay thathad stopped construction of the vast Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada

river, which � ows westward through the central states of Madhya Pradesh,Maharashtra, and Gujarat into the Arabian Sea. The dam is a major feature inthe Narmada Valley Development Project, a grandiose plan to build as many as3,200 dams, both large and small, along the Narmada and its tributaries. Despitewhat Roy has called one of the most spectacular nonviolent resistance move-ments since Gandhi’s time, work on the most controversial dam project in thecountry’s history was about to resume.

The Narmada dams have been fought over for decades. Politicians of allparties say they are necessary for irrigation, for power, and for drought relief.Dams are development. Dams are progress. Opponents, spearheaded by theNarmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), the local movement against the developmentplan, say the dams will drive hundreds of thousands from their homes. It willprovide minimum power for at most a few decades, and will cost billions ofrupees that the Indian government doesn’t have.

A miserably familiar story, in other words, of dams versus people, develop-ment versus democracy. A story that Roy the novelist soon began trying to helprewrite.

Roy visited Narmada valley in March 1999. In June that year she publishedan essay that was to eclipse the controversy of her anti-nuclear piece. “The

Greater Common Good” is a passionate disection of the scandal that hasunfolded in the Narmada valley over the past two decades. (“The GreaterCommon Good” was later published along with “The End of Imagination” inThe Cost of Living (Modern Library, 1999), a slender volume that brought theNarmada valley story to the wider world.) It ranges across the politics, ecology,economics, and, most signi� cantly for Roy the novelist, the personal andemotional stories behind the development plan and the damage it is doing—notonly to the people of the Narmada valley, but also, according to Roy, the entirecountry. “The story of the Narmada valley,” she wrote, “is nothing less than thestory of modern India. Like the tiger in the Belgrade Zoo during the NATObombing, we’ve begun to eat our own limbs.”

“You know, its such a scam,” she says. Outside, in the muggy, smoggy streets

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of New Delhi, the monsoon has arrived. But it has come too late for many ofthe people living in Gujarat, who recently suffered one of the worst droughts indecades. People, cattle, and crops died. The tragedy was a political gift for thedam’s proponents.

“It’s so shocking, what they are doing,” says Roy. “Of course they immedi-ately use it [the drought] to say, ‘Look, you guys, if you’d allowed this dam tobe built there would not have been this drought.’ And you look at their ownmaps of … where the dam’s water is supposed to go and where the droughtis—there’s no overlap. And you know, they used 85 percent of Gujarat’sirrigation budget for the project.”

Figures like these are common in the battle of words over the Narmada river.The NBA and its allies have amassed a formidable array of facts and statisticsthat highlight just how weak the case for the dam project has become. Activistssay the dam project will displace more than 320,000 people and affect the livesof at least a million. It will submerge more than 988,000 acres of forest. Tenthousand � shing families who depend on the Narmada estuary for a living arelikely to lose their livelihood when the dams are raised—though in the project’s20-year history the government has conducted no study of how the dams willaffect the environment downstream.

The arguments for and against the dams are complex, but Roy insists that theissue cannot be left to the experts. That, she says, was one of the reasons she

got involved in the � rst place. She came back from her visit to the Narmadaregion “convinced that the valley needed a writer.” Meaning a novelist, a � ctionwriter, not a journalist.

“As a writer, I have the license and the ability to move between feelings andnumbers and technical stuff and to tell the whole story in a way which an expertdoesn’t seem to have the right to do,” she explains. Roy sees the connectionsbetween the economics, the politics, the ecology, and the human story of theNarmada as crucial. “When I went to the valley,” she says, “I realized that whathas happened is that all these experts had come in and hijacked various aspectsof it, and taken it off to their lairs. They didn’t want the people to understand.”Roy did want them to understand, and believed her role, the writer’s role, wasto tell the whole story.

Later in 1999, Roy traveled abroad again, speaking out against the dams atEngland’s Cambridge University and at the World Water Forum in The Haguein The Netherlands. In India, her visits to the Narmada valley often end inmedia scrums and, once, her own arrest, as she struggled to highlight the plightof the villagers and activists—who are still promising to drown themselves in therising waters if the dam walls are built any higher. Meanwhile, in Gujarat, somegovernment supporters and “patriotic” citizens furiously burned copies of TheGod of Small Things for what they took to be Roy’s anti-Indian insolence.

When she � rst spoke out against the dams, other writers and even readersseemed surprised. Roy wrote � ction. What did she think she was doing

playing around with fact? These sentiments may linger, but she doesn’t care.

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“There’s no division on my bookshelf between � ction and non� ction,” she says.“As far as I am concerned, � ction is about the truth.”

More recently, though, this criticism has been � ipped around. Roy is now seenas a “campaigning novelist,” and this infuriates her, too. All she is doing, sheinsists, is what any good novelist should do—make connections between � ctionand reality. Instead, she � nds that people put her in a box. She tells the storyabout a phone call she got when “The Greater Common Good” was published.“This society editor rang me up and said, ‘Oh, darling, that was such a lovelyessay. Now I want you to do a piece for me on child abuse.’ So I said, ‘Sure.For or against?’ She put down the phone.”

The point, she says, is that both supporters and critics have been too quick tocategorize her views. Though she opposes India’s building of nuclear arms andbig dams, she is “not an anti-development junkie, nor a proselytizer for theeternal upholding of custom and tradition.” She does believe, however, that thegrowing urban–rural divide is killing India, and that the country’s legions oftechnocratic experts are far more dangerous to its future than its illiteratepeasantry could ever be. Though this political perspective clearly informs Roy’sessays, it also weaves more subtly through The God of Small Things—a book thatcould never be called a “political” novel in the conventional sense.

As Roy explains, the novel is “not just about small things. It’s about how thesmallest things connect to the biggest things—that’s the important thing. Andthat’s what writing will always be for me … I’m not a crusader in any sense.”Her opponents might dispute this, but Roy sees her place in the Narmadastruggle as that of a writer and, ultimately, an outsider. “I can’t � ght their � ght,”she says. “I can � ght as a writer to prevent it, but my house isn’t drowning, myland isn’t being submerged, and my anger shall never be more than theirs. Theyhave to � ght. I don’t.”

A paragraph in “The Greater Common Good” explores the link betweenRoy’s two chosen emblems of national disaster: the big bomb and the big

dam. “They’re both weapons of mass destruction,” she writes. “They’re boththeir own people … They represent the severing of the link, not just the humanbeings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connectseggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and theearth to human existence.”

Again, the message is about connections. Failure to make connections, shesays, is what is leading India—and the West, upon which it increasingly modelsitself—astray. “I have to believe,” she says, “that what is being done—the damsand the nuclear bombs, the whole development model—are the symptoms of aterrible malaise, and that lies inside people’s heads. I don’t know how youaddress that … but the idea that you just accept it all makes me angry.”

What, then, is the solution? “I’m not an economist,” she says, “so I can’treally give you an alternative that works.” Nevertheless, Roy is clear that thebest option is local power. This, she believes, has to be the future for India—decentralized economics, decentralized control; handing some measure of powerback to the people. “Unless that happens,” she says, “however far into the

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information age three percent of the population goes, they’re always going to bepulled back by what they’re doing to everybody else.”

Arundhati Roy is convinced that Indians, allowed to choose for themselves,will fashion a society informed by the ways Indians have always lived,

attuned to everyday existence, community life, and the patterns of nature. Thealternative is there for all to see, in the increasingly atomized, mechanized, anddisconnected West.

“When you go to Europe or America for the � rst time,” she says, “you arrivein a city where you don’t see any mud, and everything looks really nice, all thecars and the steel and the glass. But I look at a car and I think, ‘Somehow thiscame from earth and water and forest.’ How? I don’t know. But you need toknow—you need to know what the connection is; who paid the price of what.If you at least know that, there’ll be some balance.” She smiles slightly, as if thepoint was almost too obvious to be worth making. “There has to be somebalance.”

RECOMMENDED READINGS

Roy, Arundhati. 1997. The God of Small Things. New York: Random House.Roy, Arundhati. 1999. The Cost of Living. New York: Modern Library.

Paul Kingsnorth is a writer for The Ecologist. Correspondence: www.theecologist.org

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