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Arundhati roy’s the greater common good: dams, development, and democracy in india.

Arundhati Roy, a contemporary writer from India, is best known globally for her Booker-Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997). In addition to being a celebrated novelist, Roy is also a passionate activist who rails against globalization, multinational corpora­tions, alleged US global hegemony, Hindu-Muslim violence, nuclear weapons, and, of course, big dams. The following essay is an account of how I use one of Roy’s works in conjunction with a variety of other materials to teach contemporary India, development issues, and, perhaps most important, critical thinking skills.

Roy’s The Greater Common Good, written in 1999, is an advo­cacy piece available free online at the Web site of the Friends of River Narmada (http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html). The essay grew out of Roy’s on-the-ground involvement fighting the construc­tion of the Narmada. River dams and, in particular, the projected 139­-meter-high Sardar Sarovar dam. Dams are, according to Roy, “India’s Greatest Planned Environmental Disaster.”

Greater Common Good is a screech against big dams and, in a broader sense, against all “Big Projects” dreamt up by government notionally to improve the lives of the people as a whole, but which impose seemingly intolerable costs on particular people. Roy dreams:

Perhaps that’s what the Twenty – first century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mista kes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Could it be?

The quotation above gives the reader a glimpse into why Roy’s piece is such an arresting addition to the curriculum. Roy marshals data but she writes with passion and a love of language in short, she argues like a novelist. Roy says she was drawn to what was happen­ing in the Narmada Valley because, as a writer, she is drawn to sto­ries “the way vultures are drawn to kills.” And she believes she found the story of a lifetime, the story of India in the twentieth centu­ry. Roy’s writing will jar some readers. This is not a sterile tale, and the author uses staccato sentences and even occasional vulgarities to move the reader. Some readers will be inspired. Roy invites: “Listen then, to the story of the Narmada Val­ley. Understand it. And, if you wish, enlist. Who knows, it may lead to magic.” Some readers will recoil. At least both sets of readers will feel some­thing, too rare with classroom material.

I use Roy’s essay each semester in my Introduction to Global Politics class at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. (It is probably suitable For advanced high schoolers as well. Younger students might watch the video Dem/Age. See the resource list at the conclusion of the article.) Often, in this survey course, I have time only for one session on development, and it is around this reading that I structure the class’ consideration, I assign the piece not to proselytize against dams, but rather because of the richness of the resource for teaching critical thinking as well as important issues surrounding India’s development and democracy.

The piece invites students to engage in a critical reading and evaluation of Roy’s argument. Who is this author? What is her argu­ment against big dams? Is the argument credible? How does she back it up? Enterprising students will search the Internet to find out more about Roy and also contrary views on India’s dams (suggested Web sites both pro and con are below).

The resource is rich as a tale of India’s development as well. The big dams against which Roy rails are pan and parcel of the develop­ment strategy fostered by Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s indepen­dence-era prime minister. To Nehru, darns were the temples of mod­em India,” typical of the government mega-projects that would allow a dispassionate and benevolent state to mastermind rational develop­ment and lift millions out of poverty. In contrast, Gandhi, India’s non­violent independence activist, would not have approved of these baubles of modernity. Gandhi favored relatively self-sufficient vil­lage-level political and economic units in which men would be con­nected to their fellows. their God, and their environment. While Nehru favored the big, to Gandhi, small was beautiful. Roy dislikes viewing the dam controversy through the “old bottle” of Nehru versus Gandhi, but the great men do hover in the background. In the tale of the Narmada, big government (Nehru) touts the many benefits the dams will bring, extolling the good of the many over the good of the few, while activists and peasants engage in non-violent resistance (ala Gandhi) on the ground to save their homes and way of life.

Beyond the Nehru/Gandhi debate, Roy’s essay speaks to one of the core issues of development. Development always involves choices. Something will be lost and gained when development occurs (teachers can draw a comparison to a development issue in their own locality, the effects of Walmart stores, for example). Roy, who insists she is no “anti-development junkie” and aware of “the isolation, the inequity and the potential sav­agery of” village life, would likely argue that when we engage in development we should at least go in with our eyes open, aware of who will win and who will lose, what costs will be paid (and by whom), and for what benefits (and for whom). In the particular case of the Narmada, Roy argues the villagers lose everything while the beneficiaries are far away in the cities and in the government. “India doesn’t live in her villages. India dies in her villages.”

Roy also questions whether the dam will even deliver the benefits promised by the gov­ernment. She details that, despite India’s fasci­nation with record keeping, there is no single figure of the number of people displaced by India’s big dams. Using what numbers are avail­able, Roy conjectures a figure of 33 million people displaced by India’s big dam building since independence. And this is likely a conservative figure, the real number probably 40 or 50 million. Thinking of that army of dis­placed people, the population of Spain or South Korea. Roy feels “like someone who’s just stumbled on a mass grave.”

In fact, Roy asserts the dams will cost more, deliver less, and displace more people than the government claims. In the case of the Sardar Sarovar on the Narmada, the govern­ment has maintained it was building the dam to deliver water to thirsty villages, a noble cause. Roy is dubious, noting that the water would have “to negotiate its way past the ten sugar mills, the golf-courses, the five-star hotels, the water parks,” the cash crops, and several big cities to get to the thirsty villages. She considers it unlikely the water will ever reach those thirsty villagers. To update Roy’s piece, indeed the thirsty cities have taken their share (and the government of the state of Gujarat has claimed that as a success as well). The canal delivering water to the parched area of Kutch is sometimes bone dry.

The Greater Common Good highlights the plight of those tens of thousands of people, many lower caste and from India’s tribal groups, who will lose the most because of the Narmada dams. The government is only obligated to provide a cash compensation in the event of displacement by an infrastructure pro­ject like a dam. But many tribal peoples have no formal title to their lands, thus making collecting compensation nearly impossible. Even where title exists, residents are often inadequately compensated or relocated to hard-scrabble areas: some have died of starvation in their new homes. Frequently, whole communities are split up and sent to different relocation sites. There is a loss of culture, language, tem­ples, archaeological record, and a once self-sufficient lifestyle. “The great majority is eventually absorbed into slums on the periphery of our great cities, where it coalesces into an immense pool of cheap construction labor (that builds more projects that displace more peo­ple).” Roy quotes a resident removed from the dam area: “Why did­n’t they just poison us? Then . . . the Government could have sur­vived alone with its precious dam all to itself.”

Embedded in the story of dams and development is also a story of India’s democracy, notionally the largest in the world. Yet, on the ground in the Narmada Valley, residents would be hard-pressed to say they control their own destiny. In Roy’s telling, the politicians and their allies in the bureaucracy, the dam-building industry, the international aid community, and India’s urban areas lord over the people of the valley. To Roy, projects like the dam take power away from the people and put it in the hands of a single authority who will decide who gets what water when, essentially the power of life and death. India’s democracy, for Roy, is “the benevolent mask behind which a pestilence flourishes unchallenged.”

“It’s time.” Roy says, “to puncture the myth about the inefficient, humbling, corrupt, but ultimately genial, essentially democratic, Indian State, Carelessness cannot account for fifty million disappeared people. Nor can Karma. Let’s not delude our­selves. There is method here, precise, relentless, and one hundred percent man-made.”

The unstoppable state builds its resources while using its powers to prevent opposition to its plans. In the case of the Narmada, Roy details the government’s use of the country’s Official Secrets Act to prevent demonstrators from gathering. Non-violent demonstrators have been beaten and arrested (Roy herself was briefly jailed for her dam activism). Protesters who vowed to remain in villages as the waters behind the dams rose were forcibly removed, to deprive the anti-dam movement of martyrs. In the end, Roy asks the most funda­mental question of all: “Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers? Its forests? Its fish?” Basically, who has the right?

The Greater Common Good is a spellbinding window into con­temporary India by a thoughtful, lucid, and passionate participant. With this story of dams, development, and democracy. Arundhati Roy has indeed told an important tale of India’s post-independence experience.

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RELATED RESOURCES

For the Dams (Pro): Sard:ir Sarovar Dam (official): http://www.sardarsarovardam.org/ Narmada Control Authority: http://www.ncaindia.org/index_.htm Minimy of Water Resources of India: http://www.wrmin.nic.in/ Narmada Valley Development Authority http://www.nvda.nic.in/ An interview with the head of Sardar Sarovar in 2000: http://www.spannerfilms.net/?lid=805 Against the Dams (Con): International Rivers Network, South Asia Campaign: http://www.irn.org/programs/india/ Non-partisan World Commission on Dams: http://www.dams.org/ Friends of River Narmada: http://www.narmada.org

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Arundhati Roy

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Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs? 

Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science? 

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept  over a million . More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the  New York governor ’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is  America !”

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered. 

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.

The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists? 

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim  citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier  Jair Bolsonaro , had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of  physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed. 

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser.

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”. 

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers. 

He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under  lockdown . Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed. 

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering. 

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual. 

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a  long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.

Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love. 

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray. 

A few days later, worried that the  fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said. 

“Us” means approximately 460m people.

State governments in India  (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear. 

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

As the lockdown enters its second week,  supply chains have broken , medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting. 

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place. 

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.

India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now. 

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Arundhati Roy ’s latest novel is ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ 

Copyright © Arundhati Roy 2020

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Azadi By Arundhati Roy

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Author-Activism: Philosophy of Dissent in the Writings of Arundhati Roy

2013, Asiatic

Related Papers

IJRCS 2456-6683

Dr. K J SIBI

This research paper focuses on the inevitable relation between a writer and her outcome through the writings. Arundhati Roy’s non-fictional writings, reflect her shadows of thought and her vision for the world. It is the gateway to understand her novels more deeply in its true sense. Humanity is the central theme of her fiction and non-fiction. For her, both are different ways of presenting the same subject. She writes like a crusader who exposes the hypocrisy of conventional society. She does not want any celebrity status so she knows very well, which award should be received and which should not. She deals with the subject of the relationship between power and powerlessness. It is an endless war, but she is optimistic in her attitude. Even though she does not have any paranoia, but she hopes that empowerment of the powerless class is possible through continuous awareness and activism by adopting non-violent and true democratic ways. She emphasizes the true power of the public in a democratic society.

Urvi Sharma

Over the years, numerous writers around the world have imbued their writings with political messages to stir a discourse in the public sphere with varying degrees of success. This paper makes an attempt to analyze how Arundhati Roy's non-fiction writings demonstrably intervenes the public sphere by drawing a link between their theoretical and linked experience in forming a public opinion. Public sphere is meant to identify and articulate the social problems which need

Dr. Paromita Bhattacharya Chakrabarti

IJMER 2277-7881

Arundhati Roy laments on the large-scale human rights violations in India and abroad as a writer and social activist as the outcome of fascism, new imperialism, globalization and privatization. Every religion and every political party have their contribution to injustices on the powerless class of the world. The nexus between elite class and governments are exposed through her writings. They together conspire against the powerless class. No one is there to protect their rights and raise voice against the wholesale violation of human rights and the right to freedom of life. The agents of the globalization have colonized knowledge. They also twist the language for their advantages to misguide the masses. For them war is peace, selling the public wealth to corporate is a development and raising voice against human rights violation is anti-national. Poor villagers in India and poor people all over the world suffer for the sake of the rich. The world is under the terror of the fangs of the beast of fascism, nationalism, terrorism, privatization etc. For saving humanity from the clutch of this new imperialism and their agents in the third world countries, there is an urgent need of unification of powerless class all over the country and abroad.

IJTSRD 2456-6470

Arundhati Roy's political essays are focused on highlighting her struggle for the powerless class of the world. She tries to make space for justice, right and freedom for the voiceless and silenced class in the society. Social justice is the foundation for peace. She does not advocate meek surrender or violent resistance but fights with a true democratic spirit and non-violent principle under the constitutional concept. There is a dangerous systemic flaw in parliamentary democracy. The system of checks and balances as the pillars of the democracy weakens. Democratic institutions become undemocratic in a democratic society and they become completely unaccountable. The relation between the powerless and powerful is like a relation between the lamb and the beast. She hopes that these two classes live together in perfect harmony in the world.

Angelo Monaco

This article adopts a transmodern approach to Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and it contends that Roy's fusion of anti-global activism, typical of her non-fiction writings, and literary imagination, reminiscent of Indian epic texts, can provide an interesting instance of a transmodern intellectual perspective. In particular, by examining gender troubles, ethnic conflicts and vulnerable ecology, my article argues that Roy's second novel refracts the decolonial/postcolonial debate by means of a hybrid narrative form. This interplay between creative writing and intellectual activism can be said to chime with transmodern ethics in that it promotes attentiveness to the perspective of the most marginalised.

SMART M O V E S J O U R N A L IJELLH

Abstract This paper has two parts – the first deals with theorization of activism as resistance and the second with the critical analysis of Arundhati Roy‘s introduction entitled ―The Doctor and the Saint‖ to B. R. Ambedkar‘s book, Annihilation of Caste. The first part explains how the space of resistance and activism emerge from the gap between the prevailing situation and promised ideal situation i.e. ‗what is‘ and ‗what ought to be.‘ It also elucidates the trajectory of the activists dwelling on the possible spheres of activism and the myriad forms of resistant activism. The second part lauds the effort of Roy in showing solidarity with the Dalit world thereby demonstrating how she misses the mark of initiating a dialogue/an interaction between the Dalits and non-Dalits on account of making Gandhi the omphalos of her work. The paper thus questions this uncalled for attention lent to Gandhi while prefacing Ambedkar. It seems to be a project of maligning Gandhi rather than denouncing and finding possible ways of annihilating caste--a social evil that has crippled our socio-political system for centuries. The expose on Gandhi exposes Roy‘s politics of activism too. Key Words: Activism, Resistance, Justice, Caste, Untouchability, Dalits.

Dr Firdous A H M A D Mir

Arundhati Roy, the winner of the Booker Prize, has, in addition to her solo novel, written a large number of socio-political essays which deal with a variety of issues faced by the global community. Casteism in India, oppression of religious minorities, gender discrimination, political dispossession, rise of Hindu fascist politics and communalism in India find a critical treatment in her writings. Her nonfiction prose has focused in detail on the connections between corporate globalization, imperialism, war on terror, neo-liberal policies, and the dispossession and oppression of millions of people in India, displaced by the construction of big dams. Similarly, she has provided a scathing criticism of the US foreign policies and military interventions in a number of countries to ‘save’ the people of those countries form themselves. Though Roy has made her voice heard on a number of important issues, the central focus and the common thread linking her fiction and nonfiction is the importance given to the subaltern individuals and groups. Representing and, thus, recentering the individual in her writings is one of the most important concerns of Roy, and it is on this aspect of her nonfiction prose that this paper focuses on, knowing fully well , and sometimes overlooking ( a limitation of this paper) , the complex issues involved in the concept of representation. I claim that by recentering the agency of individual Roy subverts the poststructuralist tendency of relegating the individual agency in favour of what Michel Foucault called discourse.

John Maerhofer

Review essay of Arundhati Roy's Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Forthcoming in Socialism & Democracy

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