Since 2014, the crisis within India’s liberal ecosystem has resulted in the marginalisation of far-left activists, while non-extremist liberals maintain a decaying hold over some sections of the national narrative. Therefore, while the voice of liberals is often heard on social and electronic media, the opinions of far-left pro-Balkanisation activists often end up on deaf ears. Far-left activists are either in jail for their support towards Naxals, or the ones that remain out satiate themselves by giving out time-killing interviews to propaganda portals like the Wire.
This is what has happened to Arundhati Roy, whose Booker Prize has only been able to take her to the Wire’s office for an hour-long interview with an irrelevant journalist – Karan Thapar. Both these individuals have a lot of idle time, and therefore, it makes sense for both to spend it talking to each other. So, with a serious look on his face, and a sense of conviction that India was being destroyed by the Modi government, Karan Thapar chose to ask the most difficult questions of Arundhati Roy.
In an alliterated line, Thapar asked, “Amidst the confusion, chaos and cacophony of Indian politics, what sort of country are we becoming?” Arundhati Roy, who predicted the Balkanisation of India during the interview, said Hindu nationalism could break India into little pieces, as has happened earlier with Yugoslavia and Russia.
Almost as if convincing herself that her fantasy will be stopped in its heels, Roy added that the Indian people will resist what she called Narendra Modi and the BJP’s fascism. Roy also copied the infamous “signs of Fascism” script from Google and read it out during the interview. Karan Thapar decisively agreed as the points were being read out. He was astonished.
Arundhati Roy had a lot of questions. She asked, “What have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens…when it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasised into something dangerous?”
Then, she went on to claim, “Over the last five years, India has distinguished itself as a lynching nation. Muslims and Dalits have been publicly flogged and beaten to death by vigilante Hindu mobs in broad-daylight, and the ‘lynch videos’ then gleefully uploaded to YouTube.”
Arundhati Roy, who is an open supporter of Kashmir’s secession from India, told Karan Thapar, “Why should they want to be a part of India? For what earthly reason? If freedom is what they want, freedom is what they should have.” According to Roy, India should be afraid of Kashmir, because according to her, “Kashmir may not defeat India, but it will consume India.”
Arundhati Roy also lamented how activists, lawyers, and academicians are supposedly languishing behind bars, while saffron-laden individuals like Yati Narsinghanand, who allegedly called for violence against Muslims, roam around freely on bail. She forgot to mention that while the participants of the controversial event at Haridwar are accused of calling for violence, far-left radicals currently in prison are actually there for orchestrating violence against the Indian state in cahoots with Naxals.
Roy compared the impact of Hindu nationalism in India with an attempt to squeeze an ocean into a ‘Bisleri bottle.’ She said, “The infrastructure of fascism is staring us in the face…and yet we hesitate to call it by its name.” Roy claimed that institutions like the judiciary, intelligence agencies, media and parliament have all become puppets in the hands of the Modi government. She made it a point to start the interview with a jibe at Gujaratis.
She said four Gujaratis are running India; two are selling it, while two are buying it. Arundhati’s mind has visibly begun decaying. From once being a famed author who was accustomed to setting the narrative against India, she has today become a person forced to do never-ending interviews with the likes of Karan Thapar – who himself has become much of an outcast within the media fraternity.
It is for this reason that Arundhati Roy began a rant with Thapar against the Modi government. Eventually, it became a forum for her to attack India and its culture itself, and Thapar was more than willing to indulge.
The author of this article should at least try to camouflage his open love for his PM and sheer hatred for the Thapar and A. Roy. We are looking for facts here, not “your” one-sided judgement. Let the readers make their own analysis
Why can’t you hide your hatred against Hinduism ? you are most like #Pappu_Khan whose age is > 50 yrs but still behaving like a todler in hands of her imported mother who loooted India with both hands.
Hello Leena, When your community is hounded for centuries and constantly threatened with Genocide, Force Conversion, coerced conversion. They start to snap, slowly but surely. They will support people, communities and media outlets that support their POV. Do not be surprised if you start seeing more and more militant Hinduism, and the only people to blame will be those who have hounded us.
fcuk off ricebag
there is a saying if you lie down with dogs you get fleas….these BJP bhakths will defend any hypocrisy modi does or their double standards …no need to waste our time by arguing with them!!
This site quite literally identifies as being right-wing. Maybe you should go to the quint or the wire for unhyphenated “real” news.
Totally agree with Leena here. This site has become an unofficial mouthpiece for Modi and the government.
There are many things to disagree with folks like Arundhati Roy. But if you really want to dispute her opinions, do so with facts and figures. You talk about lynching, please provide the lynching cases in India pre and post 2014. If there is no tangible change in case load, you can then talk of how things remain same. Else there is merit to discuss what she has said.
Please improve your journalistic standards.
It is she who said there are plenty of Youtube videos posted by the Hindus who lynched Muslims. So ask her to provide such videos and we would provide proof of the Hindus who were lynched in Bengal and other places, including Dalits lynched by the Muslims. She suggested possibilities of the Balkanization of India. Does any sane person see that possibility? Year after year Narendra Modi’s popularity is above 70 percent. Does she see Kashmiri people from POK are better off than the Kashmiris from our side? Just compare schools, colleges, hospitals, infrastructures, etc. on both sides.
Ehat was kashmiri hindu genocide. What was the Sikh massacre by Congress hoodlums. Please do some reading.
This site quite literally identifies as being right-wing. Maybe you should go to the quint or the wire for unhyphenated “real” news.
Roy, Thaper, Dutt , Nair and many appear to think alike and have common script with doomsday predictions. Very likely they would be nostalgic of earlier regime and the dole outs.
we are not discussing on A.Roy or Thapar, but the journalist’s views, that he is trying to impose on the readers. Each of us, have our own views and can definitely express. But a true journalist has no business to report his view, only facts…
Spot on mate
@Harry: We are not referring to your emotional attachments nor mine nor the world’s. As a journalist, your duty is to report facts and let the readers decide so stop discussing on irrelevant points, if you have nothing constructive to comment on. Regarding my love for hinduism, it’s obvious we need to follow our own will…and not something a secular or democratic government is wrongly trying to impose upon its people. I neither love nor hate hinduism. I have no connection to it
Leena, you are right about journalists’ bias, but if we are so much concerned about the journalists’ bias, we should have never read or listened to Karan Thaper (and Sardesai, Barkha Dutt, and so many others) as he also describes him as a journalist.
@leena So if you are not a Hindu, you are noone to comment on what Hindus should do…
So TFI Post has become important enough for these leftist loonies to start commenting on its articles. Well done, TFI Post!
The leftist loonies who commented here are unable to digest the present day reality that the anti Hindu era is as good as finished.
Good lord nsrk and S Nath!
I’m not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination. I have all the time in the world for the Indic views of intellectuals like J Sai Deepak or Sanjeev Sanyal or Dr Gurumurthy
These blokes claim to represent the “right”. My only submission is not not come across as a dolt which would then be used to airbrush all us “bhakts” who are no different to the idiots running around supporting the left.
Stop becoming a government mouthpiece. Improve you’re journalistic standards else you’re no different to the folks you routinely bash on this site
GL From slate.com Booker Snooker
The God of Small Things has been good to the South Indian novelist Arundhati Roy. The past year has brought many blessings: the fairy-tale arrival at her door of the eager publisher with the fat check (a $1.6-million advance–unheard of for a debut novel); landmark sales (600,000 copies in hardcover); multiple translations (23 languages); much feting and fanfare (global book tours, interviews, pride of place in “India” specials in Granta and The New Yorker); and finally, the announcement, last Tuesday, that Roy had won the Booker Prize for Fiction, which is awarded annually to a writer from Britain or the Commonwealth and brings with it a cash prize of more than $30,000.
Though Roy’s victory seems to validate the ubiquitous comparisons to the ubiquitous Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, there is cause for pause. Sure, The God of Small Things is a cozy read. But so are many of those books that go straight to the remainder pile. So why did Roy win the Booker? Why all the hype? The answer is simple: The Zeitgeist was ripe for Roy and Roy for it. Her book hit an English-speaking market that craves all things Indian: tandoori food, yoga, Deepak Chopra, the altie-hip-hop of Cornershop, chai, Homi Bhabha. And while it would be ridiculous to suggest that Roy incubated this book for the better part of five years and then released it to capitalize on India chic just as it crested, it is also true that she has played to that market in terms it understands and swallows whole.
Nothing wrong with that–but Roy is strenuous in her denials. She claims that 1) she doesn’t want “Brownie points because I’m from India” and 2) her book “doesn’t trade on the currency of cultural specificity.” But of course 1) she does and 2) it does. Roy’s book–a humid tale of a pair of twins whose divorced mother has an affair with an untouchable–is the sum of its othernesses. The family at the center of the novel belongs to a small, insular community whose inner workings are foreign even to most Indians. Their family home, Ayemenem, is located in the comparatively remote southern state of Kerala, a region that Westerners who might know Rushdie’s Delhi or Naipaul’s Bombay from reading their fiction might not recognize. Roy’s descriptions, therefore, can be safely lush, richly runny: “The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum … and die, fatly baffled in the sun.”
No one cares that Roy’s prose is a breath-defying crush of run-together words and run-on sentences; strategically random capitalization and italicization; numbered lists; reversed words; adjectival clusters; acronyms; quotations from songs and poems; repeated images; and abrupt endings. The sensory overload–the weight and range of devices, some more clunky than clever–fragments the narrative more than it enhances it, forcing the reader to keep pace. (Click here for a sample.)
But nowhere is the self-indulgent circling as pointed–or annoying–as in the image of Rahel, the girl-woman protagonist who is a dead ringer for Roy: “jeans and white T-shirt … wild hair tied back to look straight, though it wasn’t … tiny diamond in one nostril … absurdly beautiful collarbones and a nice athletic run.” It is this image of the exotic-familiar, the combination of diamond stud and bluejeans, that has made U.S. reviewers go light on Roy. She’s the Indian babe who led that Eastern Religions seminar you took: different enough to charm, similar enough not to intimidate. And the fact that she’s clearly smart and literate makes everyone feel good–and safe–about gushing. How glossy, therefore, is the praise, how insubstantial the contact, in the U.S. reviews I’ve read. “Roy gives us a richly pictorial sense of these characters’ daily routines and habits,” said Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, “and she delineates their emotional lives with insight and panache, revealing the fatal confluence of jealousy, cruelty and naivete that shapes their destinies forever.” No mention of the flabby plot with its contrived deaths, no taking to task for the overworked prose–Ayemenem is just too far away.
So Roy rode the wave here in the United States. Book clubs met and raved, and timorous, tingling questions (“How deep did you have to reach to release those wonderful twins?”) were asked during the author’s tours. The public invited magnificent pronouncements from Roy, a sense, somehow, that this woman felt things more deeply, more creatively, more spiritually. And she responded. Asked about her language, she said it is “the skin on my thoughts,” traceable only to private rhythms. So deeply felt, so minutely realized were these rhythms, it seems, that she rewrote nary a word of her book (remarkable, given its length–321 pages–and the fact that a word processor is quick to forgive errors). The narrative structure was “crafted and designed … obsessively for four-and-a-half years.” The story, too, was mine, mine, so what if Rushdie’s latest was also set in Kerala: “I grew up in that village in my grandmother’s pickle factory. Rushdie didn’t invent that.”
Some of her British critics would agree that Roy and Rushdie indeed have little in common. Only in the “fantasies of publicists,” moaned the Guardian, can such comparisons be made. The Brits feel they know India, and several members of the press, at least, appear unimpressed. “Arundhati Roy’s victory left me close to despair,” said David Robson in the SundayTelegraph. “If this is the novel of the year, then the novel is dead.” Carmen Callil, who chaired last year’s prize committee, called The God “execrable” and said it shouldn’t have made the list.
Does the skepticism mean that The God got a more thorough going-over in Britain? Not really. Americans think of the Booker committee as the Protectors of the Literary Flame. In fact, Booker politics are no less clubby and sordid than Oscar politics. Prize and process are widely reviled by British readers and critics. By giving Roy the prize, the committee has confirmed the darkest suspicions of its critics: Yes, it’s sold out quality literature for pop accessibility. Also: The queen’s recent visit to India put the spotlight back on the issue of colonial guilt. Her refusal to apologize publicly for a 1919 massacre was badly received; Roy’s win has been spun as a compensatory gesture from the colonialists to the former colony.
Roy herself was predictably modest about The God’s success–“not the best novel, the luckiest,” she said. The win brought tears to her eyes, of course, and prompted a phone call to Mom in India. The God of Small Things is dedicated to Mary Roy, who, like the twins’ mother, married outside her community before returning divorced and in disgrace. Mother and daughter were estranged for six years, if the stories circulating here are to be believed. Kicked out of the house when she was only 16 (she was called “Suzie” in those days), Roy went to Delhi and then to architecture school, supporting herself by selling empty milk bottles (some say beer bottles). She bummed around the beaches of western India with a husband (some say a lover) before settling down in Delhi’s comfy Press Enclave, where all the newsies live (one review claims a “cottage … deep in the jungle in central India”). The stuff of a novel, but don’t expect the 37-year-old Roy to write it. The Booker, and all the laurels, are “about my past, not my future,” says this ace of the apothegm. “I will only write another novel if I have another novel to write. I don’t believe in professions.”
At a book reading in Seattle some months ago, Roy told her audience that she’d allowed The God to be published on the condition that it never be optioned. Last week, the Daily Telegraph reported that HarperCollins had finished recording an audio version of the novel, using the voice of British actress Diana Quick, who, though she had been chosen because her British accent would not “distract” listeners, was “directed to imitate Indian accents for some dialogue.” Earlier this week, Roy confessed that she’d stuffed some “movie-related” faxes into books, saving them for a calmer time … perhaps for when she repairs to that quiet cottage in the central Indian jungle.
Ah …. you wrote a long essay in the comments section.
Very interesting and insightful read. Thanks for taking the time and effort to share this here.
Arundhati is often in a constipated state… and when she talks or writes to relieve her constipation, it stinks!
Reading some of the comments make me think that the keywords in the title has attracted few Left-Liberal fleas to TFI. Now, TFI has the onerous task of living up to their expectations too :-)
The people mentioned in the article are rotten to their core…but so is the authors writing and TFIs standards.
I love this website, nothing pleases me more than hearing fake liberals/commies screaming and screeching
as their dreams of destroying a great civliization fade… HA HA.
Hope their elimination is complete and total… Go go go Hindu civilization…
I wish PM Modi could rule for 100 years..
LOL I am not even in India or a Hindu….
But I know trash when I see it… Nothing under the sun is as trashy as self loathing Injuns..
who are high on western trash such as communism and fake liberalism.
I cannot wait for the Brits to pull the plug on the BBC….
another platform and sponsor of rubbish like this lady goes down the toilet bowl.
Only question I want to ask A Roy is that if she is so optimistic that people of India will oppose RSS and Modi and his fascist ideas, then why are they choosing him again and again? And apart from that her whole interview is bigotry so people in comment section asking for facts to prove her wrong must remember she has to produce some evidence that what she said is true in the first place. Its just her imagination that only Dalits and muslims are being lynched, she is impervious about other things…
Roy and Thappar useless people. Will not disgrace the word journalists by calling them that. Never heard so much hatred from 2 more nasty people. Hopefully they disappear and we don’t have to ever listen to them. Leftist, you can please stay with the print instead of wasting our time by commenting here. Bye.
MAINE-HAZRAT-MOHAMMED-KE-MUH-MEIN-HAGOOO-KAR-DIYA