An Indian Novelist Turns Her Wrath on the U.S.

November 3, 2001

By CELIA W. DUGGER
 

NEW DELHI, Nov. 2 - Arundhati Roy, the lyrical novelist, has morphed into a rebel with many causes. Lately, as India's most passionate polemicist, she has raged against the bombing of Afghanistan, which she calls "another act of terror against the people of the world" by the American government.

She says she has no desire to be an antiwar diva or "the cool babe" of those who are fighting, like her, against big dams, nuclear weapons, multinational power companies and, now, the Afghan war.

But here in the capital, her home, she has stepped into the limelight with a gusto for intellectual combat that has made her perhaps even more famous than her only novel so far, "The God of Small Things," which has sold more than 6 million copies in 40 languages since it was published in 1997.

Her dark, luminous eyes, deep set in a delicately boned face, stare out from the covers of magazines that carry her long, metaphorically rich political essays. Photographers swarm about Ms. Roy, who is 41, snapping furiously, whenever she marches in a protest, as she did Tuesday.

She cut off her unruly mane last year because she did not want to be known "as some pretty woman who wrote a book."
Now her shorn head and big ears make her seem even more subversive in a country where long, glossy tresses are a
measure of femininity.

Her reputation for ferocious independence, which some see as evidence of her fearlessness and others of her intemperance, grew Monday when she refused to apologize to India's Supreme Court, which has charged her with criminal contempt in a case that has its roots in her ardent opposition to a big dam project that the judges have allowed to go forward.

Earlier this year, the court ordered an investigation into allegations that Ms. Roy and other prominent dam opponents had threatened to kill some men during a protest outside the court. Ms. Roy replied in an affidavit that the charges were so ludicrous that not even the police had pursued them. The judges' decision to do so, she added, indicated "a disquieting inclination on the part of the court to silence criticism and muzzle dissent, to harass and intimidate those who disagree with it."

The outraged judges said it appeared that she had impugned their motives. In a new affidavit, Ms. Roy told them that she had had no such intention, but also said that if her criticisms were valid, "the court cannot hope to restore its dignity by punishing or silencing the critic."

In the hearing on Monday, the court brusquely declared itself unsatisfied with her reply and set a hearing for January. She could be sentenced to six months in prison.

"The way Rushdie is known for a fatwah, I don't want to be known for this," Ms. Roy said, as she strode from her lawyer's office to the domed Supreme Court, a cameraman trailing in her wake. "I want to be known for my writing."

In her latest writings, Ms. Roy has taken on the United States in two 4,000-word essays about the war in Afghanistan, published here in October issues of Outlook magazine.

She argues that Osama bin Laden is "America's family secret," the monstrous offspring of its support for the mujahedeen after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

"He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid waste by America's foreign policy," she writes. The bombs raining down now, she says, are "blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury" and will inevitably spawn more terrorism.

Her words have struck a rich seam of anti-Americanism that lies just below the surface not only in Muslim countries, but in much of the third world. Outlook's middle-class readers, who largely rejected Ms. Roy's morally unyielding, 8,000-word case against India's 1998 decision to conduct nuclear tests and become a nuclear power, have mainly embraced her dark views on the Afghan war. They have inundated the magazine with hundreds of letters, more than it has ever received in response to an article.

To date, all major American newspapers and magazines have rejected Ms. Roy's new essays on the Afghan war, her gent, David Godwin, said. But her writings on the Afghan war have gained a wide readership in Europe, where The Guardian, Le Monde and El Mundo, among other newspapers, have published them. The war essays, like her other political work, reflect what she called her obsession with power and powerlessness. She described her own relationship with authority as genetically adversarial.

Her mother was a rebel in her own time. Mary Roy married out of her family's Syrian Christian community in the southern state of Kerala, then divorced the Bengali Brahmin she had chosen.

She took her baby daughter and son back to Kerala in 1961, but the family paid a price for the mother's defiance of social conventions. From the time Arundhati was 5 or 6, her mother explained to the girl that nobody from their community would ever marry her and that Arundhati would need a profession of her own to make her way in the world.

"I am a woman who is a granddaughter of a lady who used to be beaten on the head by her husband, of a mother who went through hell because she was divorced and had to bring up these kids," said Ms. Roy, now a millionaire because of her novel's success. "And I can take 10 men out to lunch and pay the bill and nobody even thinks twice about it. So don't mess with me."

One who has taken her on is the historian and cricket columnist Ramachandra Guha, who says he is of the moderate left. In articles last year in The Hindu, a national newspaper, he decried her essays as vain, shrill, unoriginal, oversimplified, hyperbolic and lacking any voices but her own.

In one article, he wrote that "her demonology is more capacious than that of the Ramayana," the Sanskrit epic, and concluded another by tartly remarking, "We would all be better off were she to revert to fiction."

Ms. Roy fought back in an interview with Frontline magazine that went on for eight pages, taking Mr. Guha's arguments
point by point and belittling him as yet another of the "academics-cum-cricket statisticians" who have criticized her work. She mocked him for his biography of the social anthropologist Verrier Elwin, saying, "I think we've had enough, come on, enough stories about white men."

David Davidar, who heads Penguin Books India, has published both Ms. Roy, whose novel has sold more in India than any other English-language novel, and Mr. Guha, whom he described as perhaps the best of India's nonfiction writers.

"The funny thing for me is that both are my friends," Mr.Davidar said. "Each is very brave and contemptuous of those who don't measure up."

Next month, Penguin India will publish a complete collection of Ms. Roy's political writings, all penned since her novel came out four years ago. She said she hoped this would clear the mental space for a return to fiction, but she is tentative.

"Fiction is such an elusive thing - a collaboration between me and something," Ms. Roy said. "But I really hope so. Let's see."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/03/international/asia/03ROY.html?ex=1005809197&ei=1&en=28e02dbc05a17712