Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author who is best known for her novel The God of Small Things, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997. This novel became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth24 November 1961
CountryIndia
past thinking practice
To annihilate indigenous populations eventually paves the way to our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. We think they are relics of the past, but they may be the gatekeepers to our future.
country able india
In a country like India, the British were only able to rule the country because it had completely co-opted the elite of the country, who did their work for them.
fighting india village
As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.
war water landscape
The genocide will not necessarily take the form of war, or death camps. Most likely it will take the form of ecocide, in which landscapes are devastated and the populations that live there slowly starve or turn upon each other savagely because there isn't enough food or water to go around.
writing thinking class
My writing is translated into every Indian language, it's distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it's everywhere. So it's a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.
letting-go dream government
From being a dream, dams have become a very cynical corrupt enterprise; a way of letting governments lay their hands on huge sums of money; a way of centralizing resources; a way of snatching rivers away from the poor and giving them to the rich. And so in a sense they've become monuments to corruption.
dispute farmers government suicide thousands wants
There have been tens of thousands of suicides by farmers in the country, and the government wants to dispute what a suicide is, who a farmer is.
access average everybody life natural
Everybody can't have the life of a normal, average American person in India - they can't. So, it's about egalitarianism. It's about sharing things more equally. It's about access to natural resources.
activists deal escaped fellini mile performing run
My mother is like a character who escaped from the set of a Fellini film. She's a whole performing universe of her own. Activists would run a mile from her because they could not deal with what she is.
almost created decided god people platform small trust
When I decided to write 'The God of Small Things', I had been working in cinema. It was almost a decision to downshift from there. I thought that 300 people would read it. But it created a platform of trust.
anywhere continent kicked pakistan people south
Do you think that the people of South Africa, or anywhere on the continent of Africa, or India, or Pakistan are longing to be kicked around all over again?
amorphous
Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.
expected games imprisoned
I don't want to play these games of statistics any more; I have done that. I don't want to be imprisoned by that, or by the morality that is expected of activists. I have never been that pristine person, that role model.
diet happening literature saddest
I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.