Arundhati Roy aka Suzanna Arundhati Roy
“…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories, you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.”
-The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy, full name Suzanna Arundhati Roy is Indian author, actress, and political activist who is best known for the award-winning novel The God of Small Things and for her involvement in environmental and human rights causes.
Her novel presents a realistic picture of her broken family village and the other villages nearby. Most of her attention is focused on Indian society because she is born, educated, and brought up in India. She knows well that untouchability is a curse and a great crime against man and god. This dangerous disease kills the people or keeps a great difference among the people of a country. Roy portrays to her readers an India hanging onto the traditions of the past with a slight glimpse of her future.
Roy’s rich language and masterful storytelling has earned her the prestigious Man Booker Prize for The God of Small Things in 1997. It was her debut novel and it contains some autobiographical elements. Composed in a lyrical language about South Asian themes and characters in a narrative that wandered through time, Roy’s novel became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author and won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Roy’s subsequent literary output largely consisted of politically oriented nonfiction, much of it aimed at addressing the problems faced by her homeland in the age of global capitalism. Among her publications were Power Politics (2001), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002), War Talk (2003), Public Power in the Age of Empire (2004), Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), Broken Republic: Three Essays (2011), and Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014). In 2017 Roy published The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her first novel in 20 years. The work blends personal stories with topical issues as it uses a large cast of characters, including a transgender woman and a resistance fighter in Kashmir, to explore contemporary India.
Roy is not only a delineator of characters and storyteller but also a perfect human being too as expressed through her non-fictional writings. Her humane vision of life and compassion for the mute illiterate, undemanding tribals, and the poverty-ridden villagers have made her a champion of the cause of the deprived and the lonely.
Written By: Mohit Vyas
Editor and Team Lead: Ashutosh Sharma
About The Author(s)
Chemistry major with self-proclaimed good taste in Books and Music.