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ARUNDHATI ROY
(know the Author and her works)
Have you ever wondered about making your Sunday productive? Like reading something or someone who fascinates you so deeply that you like to jump into it with all your collective consciousness! It happened to me this time. Every Sunday our Professor Dr. Dilip Barad Sir assigns us all some reading tasks and we have to reflect our thoughts regarding the given task in the form of the blog post and submit it in Google classroom. We often get this kind of digital homework which not only enhances our critical skills but also our digital skills.
Well, this time, as a part of Sunday reading activity, Sir had mentioned the well-acclaimed author ‘Arundhati Roy- one of the most original thinkers! Click here to navigate to Sir's blog on Arundhati Roy.
So, without a doubt, you must have sensed to whom this blog is dedicated! In the ocean of India Writing in English, the most modern and fresh wave is Arundhati Roy. And this very name often sparks to us when we here “The God of small things!”
"The woman writer hemmed in by patriarchal structure of language and culture finds herself compelled to get along with it and give in to it sufficiently in order to make it give into her at least some of the time. The sense of a women's peripheral yet invested position within a male-dominated culture leads her to thematic and stylistic experimentations and innovations, so as to make herself heard." (George C. Jacob)
Originally named as Suzanna Arundhati Roy was born on 24th November 1961, at Shillong, Meghalaya. Apart from being an author, she is an activist also.
The events and incidents of her life can be observed in her semi-autobiographical novel "The God of Small things!" Her early childhood was spent in Aymanam in Kerela. This place had influenced her in her first novel which captured the attention of readers so soon that the work received the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction and was listed as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year.
A. Roy is also best known for her involvement in environmental and human rights causes. She captures her time and age so perfectly in her works that rarely can be observed by a layman.
Arundhati met her film-maker husband in 1984, under whose influence she moved into films. She acted in the role of a village girl in the award-winning movie Massey Sahib, and wrote the screenplays for Anne and the ElectricMoon.
Here is the list of some of her works-
Sr. No.
|
Name of Books Published
|
Year of Publication
|
1
|
The God of Small Things
|
1997
|
2
|
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
|
2017
|
3
|
My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction
|
2019
|
4
|
The End of Imagination
|
1998
|
5
|
Power politics
|
2001
|
6
|
Capitalism a Ghost Story
|
2015
|
7
|
Algebra of Infinite Justice
|
2001
|
8
|
Listening to Grasshoppers
|
2009
|
9
|
War is Peace
|
2001
|
10
|
The Cost of Living
|
1999
|
11
|
War Talk
|
2003
|
12
|
The Shape of the Beast
|
2008
|
THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS-
“The God of Small things” eliminates sentimentality and reflects realistic essential features. The novel strikes a balance between feminist and female humor and resorts to many of the conventional devices such as irony, exaggeration, sarcasm, and wit. The focus is laid on the irrationalities and injustices of domestic and social life. Roy attacks the double standard that that one sex is to be sheltered and judged and kept from power- while the other, regardless of behavior, run the world.
Arundhati’s assaults, on the lopsided values of a male-dominated society, are characterized by their humor seasoned with irony and sarcasm which tends to avoid extremities of aggression and hostility.
The video attached below describes the synopsis of “The God of small things” in detail.
“The God of small things” despite its preoccupation with personal trauma, horror, and impending tragedy, allows natural and spontaneous wit to supersede sentimentality.
Praise for her novel was extravagant—she was compared to Faulkner and García Márquez—but it was also frequently patronizing. “There is something childish about Roy. She has a heightened capacity for wonder”—this from one of the judges who awarded her the Booker Prize.
THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the second novel, written twenty years later after her first novel. The novel presents in every turn, hyperaware of power, advancing a complicated dramatic argument on behalf of everyone whose identities are slippery.
It’s a novel of a Hijra who is in search of a sense of belonging and when he finds the place where the similar people are living, one of them asks if he knows God’s reason behind making Hijra-
“He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.”
Here is a noteworthy excerpt from the Los Angeles Review of Books-https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/outside-language-and-power-the-mastery-of-arundhati-roys-the-ministry-of-utmost-happiness/
“The Ministry of Utmost Happiness opens in a graveyard full of flying foxes, bats, crows, and sparrows. Lest the reader mistakes it for a place of romantic wildness, it is also a place where the vultures have died of diclofenac poisoning, which is used to ease the pain of cows so that they’ll produce more milk. In the graveyard is Anjum, born a hermaphrodite, not technically a Hijra — a female trapped in a male body, as a doctor in the novel describes it.
It is precisely this aliveness of every human as well as every little animal and thing (a feature of the book that is influenced by Hinduism) that makes this novel so remarkable. There’s a common misconception in the United States that the political novel is somehow unartistic — didactic or simplistic or polemical — and this novel gives lie to that idea. It’s bursting with artistry, if not the artistry of the bourgeois.
Arundhati Roy has been described as “anti-India” by rightwing Hindu nationalists determined to portray India as a monoculture, the singular culture of well-off upper-caste Hindu Anglophiles, while simultaneously trying to claim a higher status in the world by calling itself a secular democracy. Ironically, she’s written a loving novel that genuinely engages with the polyglot, polymorphic character of India.”
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey across the Indian subcontinent—from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war. Braiding together the lives of a diverse cast of characters who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love—and by hope, here Arundhati Roy reinvents what a novel can do and can be.
STYLE OF HER WRITINGS-
“Arundhati Roy often uses a highly symbolic language to describe her conceptions in her writings.”
Roy’s use of English reflects the Postcolonial writers’ attempts to abrogate and appropriate Standard English, in order to examine and scrutinize the native history of the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial times, its Spatio-temporal coordinates, its cultural shifts, its repressions and oppressions, its struggle for the subjective space and most pressingly its own unique existence. Roy has used the language as a tool to consciously decentralize and decolonize the language. The matchless power with which she has blended the English language with Indian sensibility is quite remarkable.
By abrogating the Queen’s English, “Roy appropriates it with flamboyant confidence of style, making language sing, sigh, scream, weep and grimace on her own terms” (Raveendran 100).
What Roy recognizes in both her books is that language is often a source of power, and that naming — the act of identifying something as “man” or “woman” or “India” or “Pakistan” or “Kashmir” — is a way of exerting dominion.
Thank you.
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