Arundhati Roy basati sul libro consigliato "Il Dio delle Piccole Cose"

Arundhati Roy (1961)

About the author

Daughter of a Syrian Christian women's rights activist from Kerala (southwestern tip of India) and a Hindu tea planter from Bengala.

“A lot of childhood in Aymanam (Ayemenem) in Kerala, the atmosphere in God of Small Things is based on my experiences of what it was like to grow up in Kerala. Most interestingly, it was the only place in the world where religions coincide, there's Christianity, Hinduism, Marxism and Islam and they all live together and rub each other down. […] I was aware of the different cultures when I was growing up and I'm still aware of them now. […]. To me, I couldn't think of a better location for a book about human beings.

I think the kind of landscape that you grew up in, it lives in you. I don't think it's true of people who've grown up in cities so much, you may love a building but I don't think you can love it in the way that you love a tree or a river or the colour of the earth, it's a different kind of love. If you spent your very early childhood catching fish and just learning to be quiet, the landscape just seeps into you. […] I grew up in very similar circumstances to the children in the book. My mother was divorced. I lived on the edge of the community in a very vulnerable fashion.”

“Given the way things have turned out, it's easy for me to say that I thank God that I had none of the conditioning that a normal, middle-class Indian girl would have. I had no father, no presence of this man telling us that he would look after us and beat us occasionally in exchange. I didn't have a caste, and I didn't have a class, and I had no religion, no traditional blinkers, no traditional lenses on my spectacles, which are very hard to shrug off. I sometimes think I was perhaps the only girl in India whose mother said, ‘Whatever you do, don't get married’”

• Higher education at the School of Planning and Architecture (like her heroine Rahel), New Delhi.
• Early work for television and cinema as screenplay writer and also performer.
• 1992-1996: First (and only) semi-autobiographical novel, The God of Small Things.
• 1997: Booker Prize for Fiction for the novel. Symbolically she donated the prize to a grassroots–activist group which opposes "big dam" developments in India: how a world recognition in literature may support local battles and change + performative role of literature.
• Journalist, essay writer and activist.

Anti-globalization

She was against globalization when it means excess and transformation which cause devastation or is aimed at economic and political conquest. She’s actually very critical. Globalization led to wealth, but who is taking advantage of it? Plus, it polarizes the human condition in extreme ways, especially in India: people who have a lot and people who don’t. Only a minority of the Indians can actually take advantage of it.

• American “imperial democracy” vs. (neo-imperialism and global policies).
• Nuclear weapons policies (“The End of Imagination”, vs. India’s 1998), militarisation and exploitative industrialization of power sector (e.g. vs. the Narmada dam project).

“Globalization, though it professes to homogenize the human condition, seems actually to polarize it in extreme ways” (Sankaran, in Joseph & Wilson, eds., Global Fissures-Postcolonial Fusions, 2006).

“The people of India have been […] loaded onto two convoys of trucks (a huge big one and a tiny little one) that have set off resolutely in opposite directions. The tiny convoy is on its way to a glittering destination somewhere near the top of the world. The other convoy just melts into the darkness and disappears” (Roy, Power Politics, 2001).

“As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife. So I'm not talking about being anti-development. I'm talking about the politics of development, of how do you break down this completely centralized, undemocratic process of decision making? How do you make sure that it's decentralized and that people have power over their lives and their natural resources?”

She is critical of some aspects of Indian society: she’s against impositions of any kind which limit humans’ freedom, she’s against the caste system.

Fiction and truth

Fiction encou