LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Reading Arundhati Roy's Fiction The God of Small Things
Through Her Non-Fiction

Seema Rana, M.Phil.

Arundhati Roy
From www.openesf.net

Writing - A Weapon in Arundhati's Hands

After the great success of The God of Small Things and following her Booker win, Arundhati Roy has spent the last decade in writing non-fiction and championing activism as a social and environmental activist. She has become a global dissenter against repression and globalization and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism and of the global policies of the United States. Her non-fiction works include The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Power Politics, War Talk, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire and The Shape of the Beast.

Though she now admits that she dislikes the restrictions of writing political polemics, she also says that after winning the prize, she entered into the arena of political activism. She knew that she had the platform to say serious things about her country. Since then, writing has become a weapon for her.

Activism through Fiction and Non-fiction

In Arundhati Roy, we can see the glimmering, serious writer of The God of Small Things and the fierce, incisive activist, writing the non-fiction.

In her non-fiction, she criticizes India's nuclear weapons policies and the approach to industrialization and rapid development as currently being practiced in India. She has campaigned against the Narmada Dam Project saying that the dam will displace half a million people with little or no compensation. It will just provide limited benefits to a limited number of people. In response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran (Rajasthan), Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian Government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection of essays - The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India's massive hydro-electric dam projects.

She says that if there is a nuclear war, our foe will be the Earth herself. The devastation will be indiscriminate. She fears that when nuclear technology goes on the market, not just the government but anybody can have their private arsenal. There will be a new world order. She is fundamentally opposed to violence and believes that war cannot eradicate terrorism.

She condemns rising religious fundamentalism in India. Her book War Talk, highlights the global rise of militarism and religious and racial violence.

In Power Politics, Arundhati Roy challenges the idea that only a few important people can express their views on such urgent matters as the globalization of the world economy, the privatization of India's power supply by U.S. based energy companies and the construction of huge dams that will dislocate hundreds of thousands of people. It is a satire on the government and the political policies. It portrays the pathetic plight of a large number of suffers of the big dam projects.

She has demonstrated against constru

Roy's concern for the environment and for the people inhabiting it permeates her life, the social conscience that she exhibits is reflected into the literature that she produces as a concrete embodiment of this concern.

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