On one of India’s most important literary voices, and Booker Prize-winning novelist, Arundhati Roy’s birthday, here are our picks to celebrate her contribution to literature
Arundhati Roy during 2022 Craft Talk. Pic courtesy/Youtube
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2022 Craft Talk with Arundhati Roy: IN this conversation, Roy speaks about her writing process. She discusses the role of language in literature, and believes it is important for writers to find a language that is reflective of the way they think. Language of writing, she says, is more than a single language like English, Hindi, or Urdu.
It is one that embraces all other languages as well. She also explores her emotional place while writing non-fiction — how her essays come from a layered negotiation with her own ideas on the subjects. The conversation further delves into the role of landscape in her novels, addressing difficult issues, and the importance of holding on to hope.
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The God of Small Things: Roy’s debut novel is the story of Ammu and her twin children Rahel and Esthappen. At the time of the novel’s publication, Ammu’s character stood apart from other mothers featured in Indian literature. She marries a man she had briefly met to escape her father, but he turns out to be abusive and alcoholic, and she, therefore, divorces him.
Arundhati Roy in conversation with Sam Fragoso during the podcast. Pic courtesy/Youtube
As the family develops a close relationship with Velutha, a man from the oppressed caste, Roy explores how the tragic laws of love shape the lives of the family members over generations. The novel is written against the backdrop of growing tensions in 1960s Kerala, which plays a significant role in how the twins try to make sense of the world.
Mother Mary Comes to Me: Roy’s memoir, published earlier this year, is a deeply personal account of her complex relationship with her mother Mary Roy. She tries to grapple with the various aspects that made her mother who she was, her “shelter” as well as a terrifying “storm”.
We also learn about her brother, and her mother’s bitter relationship with him, as she poured her rage against all men on to him and left him with a traumatic childhood. Many subjects, questions, and characters from Roy’s novels and essays return as we travel from her adolescence into her present. Simultaneously, we travel through postcolonial India, witnessing its fractures and fault lines through Roy’s eyes.
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Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso: Roy and host Sam Fragoso speak about her new memoir. They also look for the “nerve centres” of her various writing endeavours — the point from where the story emerges. Roy further explains how studying architecture informed her way of thinking and writing. She probes into her past and the two discuss the adulations she received as well as criticisms.
They also speak about ‘the powerless’, what the term meant 20 years ago, and what it does now. “Solidarity is all that we have,” she says, as she reflects on world politics. “We have to keep doing what we do, writing what we write, creating the culture even in these moments when we feel helpless with anger,” she concludes.
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