Arundhati Roy: A Troublemaker Needed for our Troubled Times
Arundhati Roy’s storytelling illuminates the desires to split open the human grids that characterize our world, and fulfil her yearning for a particular kind of homeland: a gentler, stiller, less hypocritical, and less transactional place.
To some, Arundhati Roy is a troublemaker, the sort who makes good kinds of trouble, who digs up dirt and graves, rather than letting things stay buried. To others, she is a troublemaker in the more cliched sense, “unapologetically complicated, unapologetically political”, never hesitant to pose the thorny and uncomfortable questions, or say it like it is.
Honesty, however, comes at a cost.
Roy’s storytelling illuminates the desires of a thinker, writer and foremost, a human being, to split open the human ‘grids’ that characterize our world, and fulfill her yearning for a particular kind of homeland: a gentler, stiller, less hypocritical, and less transactional place. She writes with reflection and critical thought to interrogate these grids, and question our fetish for imagined forms of human purity.
When Roy’s debut novel The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997 and catapulted her to fame, readers came to expect a certain brand of stories from her (audiences tend to do that, pigeon-hole storytellers into an archetypal form of storytelling, followed by normative storytelling expectations from them). In Roy’s case, readers anticipated more of the glittering prose about family and lingering love, suppressed memories, “hideous grief” and loss, and the everyday contention and othering that cages such as the caste system evoke—all the while saturated in the temperatures, tensions, and terrains of Kerala’s wilderness, convents, and mobs.
Roy has debunked the misconception that one must stay in a lane; instead, the distinctions between reportage, imagination and resistance could be complemented under the aegis of creative storytelling.
Roy, though, turned out to be anything but predictable. After the acclaim received for The God of Small Things, she seamlessly switched gears to crafting non-fiction essays in a style as seductive and lyrical as her fiction prose had been. In her first essay, “The End of Imagination” (1998), she wrote against India’s nuclear tests. Over two decades of non-fiction writing has followed. Roy has written and spoken about environmental alarm, surveillance and compromised intimacy, and corporate back stages. She has probed corridors of power, constructions of faith and purity, and the visceral experiences of those having to live in open prisons and constantly glance over their shoulder.
Her non-fiction storytelling proved to be as penetrating as it was poignant, perhaps because it is still precisely that: storytelling rather than dull and hardened opinion. Roy’s non-fiction essays are experimental, empathetic, and groundbreaking, yet accessible, in terms of style and content. By striking a seamless confluence between argument, vernacular and emotive appeal, her writing brought into sharp focus, the disconcerting veracities of the world which we occupy, whilst simultaneously encapsulating “lessons about human substance” and possibly restorative ways of living. Her 2019 collection My Seditious Heart assembled twenty years of her outing with non-fiction writing and were seeded by the honest, versatile and astute observations, imaginative provocations and worldly experiences that had fuelled her creativity from the beginning.
As multitudes have celebrated Roy’s dazzling voice, however, there are other circles which believe that she has not only taken sides, as she calls it, but also bent an unspoken rule in storytelling. In her work, the borders which neatly separate fiction from non-fiction, imagination from activism, and place them in silos, have dissolved. You could be one, or the other, but to master storytelling as a form, agnostic to whether the words were fact or fiction, or even attempt to blur the boundaries in writing, was unsettling to some.
Given the twenty-year gap between the publishing of her debut novel, The God of Small Things and her second fiction book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), some even felt that political non-fiction writing had deposed Roy’s literary proclivities. For example, one piece about Roy’s work and her critics stated that “The distaste for Roy’s tone recalls Virginia Woolf’s complaint that Charlotte Brontë was too angry to write good fiction. As this argument goes, fury disfigures form.”
On the contrary, Roy has debunked the misconception that one must stay in a lane; instead, the distinctions between reportage, imagination and resistance could be complemented under the aegis of creative storytelling. Whether she wrote about human indignities or longings, India’s forests, forbidden love or tender friendships, global epidemics, political tribalism or digital rights, Roy’s endeavor has been driven by a universal stimulus: to create a storytelling architecture—equally gripping in the form of a novel or an opinion piece—comprised of narrative, characters and conflict; to produce literature that elbowed its way out of echo-chambers.
She calls it “‘literature for everybody’, including for people who couldn’t read and write, but who had taught me how to think, and could be read to”. Most importantly, she has crafted fiction and non-fiction which allows us to proctor an empathetic cure for the present, and imagine more illuminated futures. This month, Roy won the 45th Prix Européen de l’Essai for Lifetime Achievement award for her essay collection, Azadi. The jury statement for the award read: “Arundhati Roy uses the essay as a form of combat, analysing fascism and the way it is being structured. This is an issue that is increasingly occupying our lives. Her essays offer shelter to a multitude of people”, bolstering how her non-fiction writing caters to a remarkably inclusive range of people.
Agnostic to genre, form and medium, underpinning Roy’s storytelling lies an existential query: What does it mean to be a writer in these times and how do stories allow us to unpack and untangle our imbalanced world? Whether with fiction or non-fiction writing (the latter often being truer than reality), her passion and articulation appear to flow from the same spirit, sparked by and serving a similar purpose: to leave the reader feeling more disrupted, more alive, and more inspired.
In a world where, as Roy puts it, “the orbits of the powerful and the powerless” are “spinning further and further apart from each other, never intersecting, sharing nothing”, where quiet desperation rather than critical thinking is in abundance, and where “The Unconsoled” (to whom she dedicates The Ministry of Utmost Happiness) are fast adding up, her ideas and writing offer a wake-up call that is timely and timeless—at the least, to think or even better, to act; an invitation to end or attempt to mitigate our isolation and despair—to connect; an antidote, whether rational or irrational, to the hopelessness of our times—of brighter possibilities. Such consolation, especially today, can hardly be over-emphasized.
Roy calls her fiction, the creation of a universe “through which you invite a reader to walk”. I find such an invitation extendible to the rest of her storytelling, which compels us equally to introspect, appraise, interrogate and co-create; storytelling which, despite its realism, rarely leaves the reader without a thread of hope. Whether she is writing about the pandemic and describing it as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next”, which we can either “choose to walk through…dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred” or enter “with little luggage, ready to imagine another world”; or her poem, “To Love”, in which she shares hope for change for the people in Afghanistan. The idea of a light shining somewhere, albeit in the distance, appears to be a constant in Roy’s writing.
You might ask though, where does one goes about finding such hope, in times that appear blindingly bleak? Nowhere or anywhere. You might find it at a jam factory or in a rain forest, behind a book, or in a labour ward; you might find it on a metallic screen, in a street square or atop a container or public bus; or you might even find it within a prison camp or a school classroom. Ultimately, what engaging with Roy’s work propels us to do is to keep looking; to try to cultivate “real courage”, which we know isn’t a “man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” It is being a troublemaker.
Such courage and such troublemaking eventually offer humans the possibility of transcendence, something that fatalism and apathy simply can’t achieve. In Roy’s writing, we thus realize that it is hope—rather than romanticized nostalgia or total despair—which remains permanent. It is no wonder then that when accepting the recent award, she said, “It would be presumptuous, arrogant, and even a little stupid of a writer to believe that she could change the world with her writing. But it would be pitiful if she didn’t even try.” And try, Roy certainly does.
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Saba Karim Khan is an author, award-winning documentary filmmaker and educator. Her debut novel, Skyfall, was published by Bloomsbury and she is a contributor to the recently launched anthology, Ways of Being: Creative Non-fiction by Pakistani Women. She is a columnist for Khaleej Times and her writing, interviews and talks have appeared in The Guardian, BBC, The Independent, the Emirates Literature Festival, Lahore Literary Festival, NYUAD Institute, Gulf News, The National, Wasafiri, Huff Post, Verso, LUMS, and more. You can find her on Twitter: @SabaKarim and Instagram: @saba.karim.khan.
