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Dec 11
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Secrets and Silences of Girlhood and Womanhood | T. Alma Poinamei

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Review:  Fear and Lovely by Anjana Appachana. Penguin Random House India, 2023.

Anjana Appachana’s first novel Listening Now was published in 1998. Twenty-five years later, its sequel Fear and Lovely was published in March 2023. The sequel continues some of the concerns from the first book such as the themes of gendered listening, female solidarity forged through gossip and secrets, and the bildungsroman of the female character. The structure of the second novel also follows the blueprint of the first: the plot progresses through different characters’ points of view that intersect and overlap. 

Fear and Lovely’s central character is Mallika (the precocious daughter of Padma whose bildungsroman was traced in Listening Now), who loses three days of her memory, following which she is diagnosed with mental illness. Considering it a taboo and a hindrance to a good marriage, her mother and her aunt, who Mallika is insistent on referring to as her second mother, go to lengths to cover it up as TB. 

As in her first novel, Appachana emphasises the importance of female friendship. Solidarity is forged through gossiping sessions and keeping each other’s secrets. Mallika’s understanding of society comes from listening to the older women in the family and her female friends. Her relationship with her two ‘mothers’ and grandmother allow her to grasp the inequitable nature of a heteronormative marriage from as young as the age of thirteen. Additionally, listening to and watching her female friends grow into diverse personalities within different familial contexts allows her to assess the imposed models of girlhood and womanhood in a predominantly Hindu society. Mallika is the ideal listener, sometimes appearing as a stand-in for the readers: “The best thing about listening to people’s stories was that I didn’t have to talk. Those who spoke to me were the storytellers, and my ear (my sympathetic, fascinated, cornucopia-like ear) was their page” (9). However, Appachana does not just stop at listening as a solitary burden but demonstrates how Mallika, the listener, also needs a listener. The secrets that Mallika carries manifest in physical ailments that include a migraine, a miscarriage, and memory loss. She observes retrospectively, “for all the love we bore each other, we had no idea of each other’s silences. We didn’t even understand our own” (10). Appachana’s foregrounding of secrets often referred to as “silences” also extends to the male characters. While Listening Now offered very limited perspectives of the male characters, the sequel delves into the intricate thoughts of Mallika’s closest male friends, Randhir and Arnav. The writing propagates certain stereotypes of gendered speaking in that, their narratives are peppered with phrases like “fucking dead” (294) and “bloody” (296) amidst superficial conversations about Swedish cars (378). A male friend also tells Mallika, “I’m a guy, Mallika. Guys aren’t good at corresponding” (325). Despite this, Appachana is also careful to reveal that underneath their veneer of ostensible machismo, they carry secrets they do not find a listener for. Through their narratives, Appachana dissects the attributes of masculinity that they are expected to live up to in an Indian context.     

While the first novel is set in the aftermath of the Independence, the second is set in the heart of the Emergency. College students talk politics with an idealistic fervour at parties and family dinners. However, national politics simply serves as a backdrop while the politics of the home take center stage. Mallika’s aunt, Shanta, is keen that Mallika learn the adages of domestic politics that she has acquired through her own marriage: “idealism without money was fatal to wives. But when idealism was borne aloft on money’s radiant arms, oh, how brightly it shone” (363). Appachana’s writings are unequivocally and unapologetically about women and domesticity. The arguments surrounding this genre of ‘women’s writings’ tend to focus on how they do not contribute to the discourses of the postcolonial nation, with some critics adopting a defensive tone in arguing for the relevance of this genre despite eschewing political concerns. This consistent burden placed on postcolonial Anglophone novels to talk about the nation and its historiography limits the discourses that can contribute to the ‘woman question.’ Appachana remarks on this in the novel when Mallika says, “If you wanted to talk about justice and injustice, truth and untruth, right and wrong, then talk about politics, talk about the Emergency, not about women, for heaven’s sake” (56). As was the case in her first novel, it is through the conversations among women that the readers are confronted with women’s lived reality. When Mallika’s friend, Prabha attacks a man on a bus for sexually harassing her, she is assailed by various responses: her parents chastise her, younger women advise her to ignore it in the future and her male friends find it hard to believe that this is a regular occurrence. But, with her female friends, Prabha feels understood and encouraged for her response to the incident.        

Appachana also touches on ‘Indian thinking’ or ‘Indian philosophy’ about mental health, marriages, homosexuality, and individual desires. While ‘American thinking’ would appear to be posited as the antithesis, the actual critique is directed at a society that cannot accommodate non-conforming women and the changing ideals of a younger generation.        

Listening Now subscribes to the “post-Rushdie tradition” (Majumdar 211) of “old-fashioned” (Mukherjee 2007) domestic novels akin to that of Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande. In a lot of these novels, the female characters begin their journey towards autonomy through a break from marital relations rather than parental authority (Abel et al. 12). However, in Fear and Lovely, Mallika’s bildungsroman begins by defying parental authority. The defiance also happens spatially when she leaves for America despite the reluctance of her two ‘mothers’. Besides this shift, the novel remains a nuanced portrait of women and the intricacies of domestic life. Through the foregrounding of women and the quotidian events that shape their social ontology, Appachana portrays a crucial facet of India’s postcolonial reality. 

Notes:

1. Josna. E Rege writes that Appchana’s works are not “shoring up a disintegrating discourse of nation… but are exploring the possibilities of coming to terms with the past in new ways” (367). Meenkashi Mukherjee, in her review for Listening Now writes, “… to ignore the nation and the backdrop of history when a good part of the novel is set in the fifties needs a certain amount of defiance in the current climate” (2007).

 

Works Cited 

Abel, Elizabeth et al, editors. The Voyage In. The University Press of New England, 1983. 

Appachana, Anjana. Listening Now. India Ink, 1998. 

—. Fear and Lovely. Penguin Random House India, 2023. 

Majumdar, Saikat. “Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction.” A History of the Indian Novel in English, edited by Ulka Anjaria, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 207-220.  

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “IndiaStar Review of Books: Listening Now by Anjana Appachana.” IndiaStar, 28 January. 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070128063638/http://www.indiastar.com/mukherjee2.html

Rege, Josna E. “Victim into Protagonist? ‘Midnight’s Children’ and the Post-Rushdie National Narratives of the Eighties.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 29, no.3, 1997, pp. 342-375. 

 

Themreichon Alma Poinamei is a PhD student at the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad. For her PhD project, she is working on Indian Women’s fiction.

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MLA:
Contributor last name, first name. “<Title of the Essay>.” Indian Writing In English Online, <Date Published dd mmm yyyy>, <link to the post> .

Chicago:
Contributor last name, first name. “<Title of the Essay>.” Indian Writing In English Online. <Date published mmmmm dd, yyyy>. <link to the post> .

Oct 30
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Arun Joshi | Kanak Yadav

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MLA:
Yadav, Kanak. “Arun Joshi.” Indian Writing In English Online, 30 Oct 2023, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/arunjoshi_kanakyadav/ .

Chicago:
Yadav, Kanak. “Arun Joshi” Indian Writing In English Online. October 30, 2023. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/arunjoshi_kanakyadav/ .

Introduction: The Writer and Indian English Canon

Arun Joshi (1939-1993) was born in an academic environment as his father, the botanist A. C. Joshi served as the vice-chancellor of two leading Indian universities, namely, Punjab and Banaras Hindu University (Randhawa). Joshi was himself academically oriented holding a Master’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.  After completing his education, he returned to India and joined the Shri Ram Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, a Delhi-based NGO and served as its Executive Director until his death on April 19, 1993 (Indian Journal of Industrial Relations).

Despite having a prolific writing career publishing five novels and a collection of short stories, Arun Joshi has remained an elusive figure in the canon of Indian fiction in English. Alongside his career as the Head of the research institute and as a journal editor, Joshi successfully managed another career as a writer. His skillful prose brings out the thematic complexity of his fiction which explores issues like inequalities in the Indian social structure, moral decadence, the futility of materialistic pursuits, the conflict between individual desire and societal repression, the crisis of enlightenment, and how a foreboding sense of alienation preoccupies the human subject. Joshi was also a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi award in 1982 for his novel The Last Labyrinth (1981). Nevertheless, he continues to be undervalued, both in the literary marketplace and in academic circles despite his significant contribution to Indian Writing in English, which leads Pavan Kumar Malreddy to question: “How do we explain this glaring discrepancy between the prolific output on Joshi’s literary oeuvre and his almost neglected place in the pantheon of the postcolonial canon?” (3-4).

One possible reason for the obscurity of Arun Joshi’s fiction could be its unavailability. His works remained “out of print” (Sudarshan 2013) until a decade ago when his Delhi-based publisher, Orient Paperbacks, republished some of his works under their venture called, “Library of South Asian Literature.” Joshi’s fictional world, which was otherwise confined to the dusty shelves of old Indian libraries, has now been rediscovered by an entirely new generation and a global audience with the reprinting and availability of e-copies. Joshi’s early death at the age of 54 and his books not being marketed outside the subcontinent even when international publishers had entered the Indian literary market (Sudarshan 2013) are some of the contributing factors for the cultural amnesia that he has suffered.

The struggle to situate Arun Joshi within the corpus of Indian English Literature is a real one since his subject-matter is unlike any of his peers. According to Madhusudan Prasad, Joshi’s fiction is “singularized by certain existentialist problems and the resultant anguish, agony, psychic quest, and the like” (103). His fiction evidently draws influence from twentieth-century Western philosophers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre who question the existence of God and the purpose of human existence. Generally labeled as “existentialists,” a term which many writers so categorised have invariably rejected, their literature demonstrates the individual trapped in a crisis of identity as seen in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1916), breakdown of language and selfhood in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (1952), and the absence of God and the absurdity of life in Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Stranger (1942). The philosophical issues explored in Arun Joshi’s fiction bear close resemblance to existentialist philosophy to the extent that critics have interpreted Joshi’s first novel The Foreigner (1968) as inspired by Albert Camus’s 1942 novel The Stranger (Prasad 104). Similarly, O. P. Mathur interprets the protagonist of The Foreigner (1968), Sindi Oberoi, as a “Sartrean protagonist” who embodies the journey from alienation and detachment to “right and useful action” (425). The influence of Western philosophy on Joshi’s fiction has also contributed to creating a disconnect between him and the Indian English canon.

Arun Joshi’s literary vision has made it difficult to label him a quintessentially “Indian” writer particularly since, in the early years, the formation of the Indian English canon was mainly developed upon the idea of how it was lending a voice to the postcolonial nation state. As such, Joshi is either canonised as a divergent voice in the various histories and anthologies of Indian Writing in English, or else his “Indian sensibility” is overdetermined to fit him neatly in the field. For instance Meenakshi Mukherjee interprets Joshi’s first novel The Foreigner (1968) within the framework of the “East-West” (207) cultural encounter and reads its sense of alienation through the lens of cultural difference and an individual’s sense of conflict. M.K. Naik’s A History of Indian English Literature (1982) offers a comprehensive critical account of Joshi’s novels and identifies him as one of the “most striking” (270) voices of the seventies. In Naik’s words, “Joshi is a novelist seriously interested in existential dilemmas and equally acutely aware of both the problems of post-Independence Indian society and the implications of the East-West encounter” (292). Naik clubs the psychological and intellectual struggles of Joshi’s flawed protagonists into an “East vs West” debate in order to affirm their postcolonial ethos. Joshi’s fiction, however, refuses convenient labels: neither could it be categorised as “existentialist” literature alone, which is imitative of western philosophy, nor could its subject be reduced to a cultural clash between eastern “tradition” and western “modernity.” If there is anything substantial that one can conclude from Joshi’s representation of the conflict between the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ worlds, the individual and the society, the body and the mind, and desire and its repression, it is that he does not perceive these categories as antithetical. Instead, he intertwines these seemingly opposing worldviews to reflect upon metaphysical questions pertaining to life and its meaning.

The Politics of Joshi’s Fiction

Arun Joshi’s writing has focused on the individual psyche, its struggles and the pretentious world of the Indian elites without manifestly engaging with larger events like the Indian independence and the social ills plaguing the postcolonial nation state, concerns which have been crucial in defining and shaping the canon of Indian Writing in English. Furthermore, because of Joshi’s metaphysical inquiries into life’s meaning, subjecthood, and the alienating effects of modernity, the socio-political aspects of his narrative also tend to get overlooked in the overarching frame of the individual’s quest for meaning. For instance, the crisis of selfhood plaguing Joshi’s fatalistic protagonists, and the attempts to resolve it, cannot be separated from their male privilege and their upper-class, upper-caste background. His fiction often centers around a privileged male subject who feels alienated despite having all the comforts. However, the novels do not simply serve as  mouthpieces to these flawed protagonists but remain critical of their worldview and ideologies. As Joshi focusses on the psychological instead of the manifestly political, he remains critical of upper-class values and culture.

In The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971), tribal culture exists as an antithesis to the modern society and is romanticised in order to strike a contrast with the culture of big Indian cities. Makarand Paranjape draws a parallel between Joshi’s novel and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to comment on how the former is a “Conradesque journey into the heart of the Indian darkness” (1052). For instance, Billy’s position within the tribal group can be compared to Kurtz’s relationship with the African natives especially in terms of his God-like status among the tribes. However, the comparison also ends there as Billy is completely integrated into the tribal culture without showing any moral superiority for his own civilisational values. The novel, therefore, privileges indigenous knowledge but only to contrast and critique the world inhabited by the urban  elite.

The connection between the protagonist’s quest for identity and his own caste and class privilege is also present in The Last Labyrinth (1981). Som Bhaskar’s existentialist dilemma is tied to his caste identity as a Brahmin millionaire. The question that Anuradha poses to Som Bhaskar towards the beginning of the novel, “What is a Bhaskar doing in business?” (Joshi, The Last Labyrinth 11) implicitly links his spiritual crisis with the quest for transcendence that is associated with his identity as a Brahmin man. Som Bhaskar is a millionaire who despite his successful business and relationships suffers from an inexplicable cry, “I want. I want.” (Joshi The Last Labyrinth 9). This unquenchable desire not only takes him to Banaras but also to a Krishna temple in the mountains that leads him to the spiritual awakening of how Anuradha miraculously saved his life when the doctors had given up faith. The manner in which the novel upholds the unknown, mysterious elements of life makes it difficult to separate Bhaskar’s spiritual crisis with his Brahmin identity.

Joshi’s existentialist fiction, therefore, appears as a world occupied by upper-class/upper-caste men who are oblivious to their caste and cultural privilege, which seems to be a major limitation in his writings. However, it is their relinquishment of material comfort and privileges that leads to meaningful insights over individual freedom, morality, the crisis of selfhood, and societal expectations. While this is overtly manifested in The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) as Billy abandons Delhi to search for greater truths in the expanse of the forests, The Last Labyrinth too explores the idea of renouncing metropolitan life to find comfort in the old world order epitomised by the Lal Haveli in Banaras. Even The Apprentice (1974) – which follows a different trajectory since the protagonist, Ratan Rathor, belongs to a humble background – explores the idea of repentance for one’s wrongdoings by indulging in good deeds. Ratan Rathor’s dramatic monologue which narrates his rags-to-riches story comes to an end with his confession of becoming the almighty’s “apprentice” by visiting the temple daily to “wipe the shoes of the congregation” (Joshi, The Apprentice Chap. 12). Given the unreliability of Rathor’s story, it is doubtful if he has truly mended his ways after clearing the defective order which cost him the life of his close friend, the Brigadier. However, The Apprentice (1974) also manages to tease the other possibility of Rathor seeking redemption by rising above his greed for material comforts. Hence, Arun Joshi’s anti-heroes question and critique the world of privileges, its corrupt value system, and the social divide it perpetuates.

The City and the River (1990) is distinctive when compared with Joshi’s other works which are thematically centered around an alienated subject. This allegorical tale, recounted by the Great Yogeshwara to his disciple, the Nameless One, shows the power struggle between politicians and citizens, law enforcers and law abiders, and the haves and the have-nots respectively. The tussle between the Grandmaster and the scheming Astrologer on one side and the underprivileged like “the mud people” and “the boatmen” on the other, is symbolic of class struggle as the Grandmaster dictates and commands without any consideration for the needs of the masses. However, this is not a simplistic tale of conflict between the ruling class and the working class, as Nirmala Menon tellingly reminds us how the novel critiques “both social institutions and its subjects” (74). She argues that the novel allegorically refers to the Indian Emergency (1975-1977) whether it is through the usage of the phrase “‘The Era of Ultimate Greatness’” or the “mass arrests” that are carried out in the text (Menon 74). Furthermore, the policy of “one child to a mother or two to a home” enforced by the Grandmaster suggests the two-child policy and mass sterilisation that was promoted during the Emergency (Joshi, The City Chap. 1). The City and the River (1990) is a political text which connects politics to philosophical enquiry. Unlike Joshi’s other novels which are centered around the psychology of the individual, The City and the River (1990) focusses on the “politics of collective” (Menon 65).

Beyond Dualisms

As argued previously, Arun Joshi’s fiction cannot be interpreted solely in terms of binaries like “East vs West,” “tradition vs modernity,” and “individual vs society,” as his novels challenge such dualisms to show their interconnections. For instance, Joshi’s first novel, The Foreigner (1968), demonstrates the lonely world occupied by the anti-hero, Sindi Oberoi, who despite his multiracial background feels like a “foreigner” in whichever country he goes to. According to Madhusudan Prasad, the novel “relates the pathetic story of its narrator, Sindi Oberoi, who reflects helplessly on his meaningless past and is apprehensive of his equally meaningless future” (104). Born to an interracial couple, an English mother and an Indian father, Sindi lost his parents at an early age and was brought up by his “uncle in Kenya” (Joshi, The Foreigner Chap. 2). His education was also “global” as he studied in East Africa, London, and the United States (Joshi, The Foreigner Chap. 3). Sindi’s character embodies what Homi K. Bhabha has termed “cultural hybridity” (6). However, instead of accepting and acknowledging his multicultural background, he fails to belong to either Kenya, America, or to his Indian origins. Sindi’s “in-between” identity and his life’s philosophy of detachment alienate him from the world-at-large. (Bhabha 2).

In not belonging completely to any particular country or race, Sindi Oberoi is not uprooted and detached as he would like to convince himself, but his existence lies between cultures and spaces such that he could belong anywhere in the world: a message which he learns only by the end of the novel when he has already lost Babu Rao Khemka and June Blyth because of his philosophy to “live without desire and attachment” (Joshi, The Foreigner Chap. 11). Sindi’s absolute belief in non-commitment and inaction was a ruse for self-preservation and it is only by the end of the novel that he realises this truth when an office employee, Muthu, shares his own understanding of detachment: “Sometimes detachment lies in actually getting involved” (Joshi, The Foreigner Chap. 18). Seen in this context, Sindi’s decision to stay back and manage Mr. Khemka’s business for the sake of the employees is intellectually enlightening for him as he arrives at a pluralistic sense of modernity which values action. After losing Babu Rao Khemka and June Blyth, Sindi realises that “detachment consisted of right action and not escape from it” (Joshi, The Foreigner Chap. 15). His modernist angst, which was founded upon loneliness and a crisis of faith, finds a temporary resolution towards the novel’s end as he recognises an alternative worldview where attachment and detachment are not mutually exclusive.

Similarly, interpreting The Foreigner (1968) in terms of the conflict of “East vs West” is far too simplistic, as the novel does not privilege one set of cultural values over the other. The two characters who symbolise the eastern and western civilisations – Babu Rao Khemka and June Blyth respectively – struggle to survive because of their absolute values, not to mention Sindi’s “withdrawing” attitude (Prasad 104). In the character of Sindi Oberoi, the novel brings together “eastern” and “western” values to uphold a pluralistic culture. As Sindi, the rootless, alienated protagonist starts running Mr. Khemka’s business, the novel challenges his bad faith to uphold a vision of modernity that does not demand a transcendence from the material world but a willful engagement with it.

Joshi’s second novel The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) also disputes the purpose of existence, enlightenment, and the apparent progress of human civilisation by portraying the eccentric life of Billy Biswas. Billy Biswas was an Indian anthropologist trained in the United States and working with Delhi University, who withdraws from the elite circles of his Delhi household to settle among a tribal group, the “bhils of the Satpura Hills” (Joshi, The Strange Case 7). The novel critiques the normative modernity of English-speaking urban elites and their demand for social conformity as it tragically recounts the fate of Billy Biswas who is hunted down and eventually killed when his family attempts to reclaim him from his tribal life.

Recounted through the perception of the second-person narrator, Romi Sahai, a civil servant who befriended Billy in New York, the novel reflects on the social rebellion of Billy Biswas against the upper-class Indian society and its understanding of development, culture, and modernity. By contrasting the enriching lives led by the tribal groups against the materialistic, civilised world of metropolitan spaces, Joshi explores the divide between nature and culture, rural and urban spaces, indigeneity and modernity, and theory and praxis. Billy’s decision to assimilate himself within the local tribe and abandon his family serves as a comment not only on his passion for the unknown mysteries of life but also on his willingness to bridge the intellectual gap by privileging indigenous knowledge structures which the civilised world may frown upon.

Billy Biswas could be considered a misfit in the society as he recklessly leaves behind his entire family by disappearing into the woods. However, his unreasonable, self-serving quest for meaning that drives him to withdraw from civilisation is also a greater search for “one’s true self” (Mathur 426). In his first encounter with the tribes and their festivities, Billy Biswas feels a connection and a calling to be his “primitive self” (Joshi, The Strange Case 101):

He stood on a rock and saw in the night sky a reality that blinded him with its elemental ferocity. It was as though his life had been reduced to those elements with which we all begin when we are born. (Joshi The Strange Case 102).

This meeting with the tribe awakens something primordial in Billy since the tribe stood in stark contrast to the sophisticated world from which he had arrived. In order to contrast the world of the city as egotistical and predetermined by social pretensions and material worth, Arun Joshi romanticises tribal life through the character of Billy, by privileging their legends and myths, without dealing with them critically. By contrasting the culture of the city with tribal life, the novel critiques the superficiality of the modern Indian society. In this process it touches upon elements that remain questionable from a representative point of view, such as Billy’s god-like stature among the tribes and the overt sexualisation of Bilasia who is meant to symbolize feminine energy. The novel uses such problematic elements to provide answers to philosophical questions that had haunted Billy as an academic and which he only understood once he acquired alternative knowledge by living with the tribes. The novel synthesises western enlightenment and indigenous knowledge structures, reason and myths in the character of Billy whose pursuit of anthropology as a field of study led him to deeper inquiries which he could only comprehend after annihilating his “modern,” urban self. Although the novel’s engagement with tribal culture stems from its desire to interrogate urban Indian culture, it, nevertheless, ends up broadening the meaning of culture and modernity by privileging cultural differences that may otherwise be conveniently disregarded as primitive.

The Last Labyrinth (1981) explores a married business tycoon, Som Bhaskar’s obsession with a woman named Anuradha through whom he wants to conquer his unquenchable thirst for wanting more. By overlapping the desire for material possession (Aftab’s shares) with the immaterial like spiritual fulfillment, sexual bliss, love and transcendence, Joshi synthesises opposing elements to comment on the inherent contradictions in human desire. The novel begins with Som Bhaskar’s desire to capture Aftab’s business which he eventually obtains but without contentment, and ends with an unsatisfied Som, who is scared and on the verge of self-harm, as Anuradha has disappeared from his life. The novel concludes in an open-ended manner, as it is unclear whether Anuradha has willingly gone missing or has been subject to violence within the mysterious folds of the labyrinthine Haveli. In the Som-Anuradha relationship, social conventions are flouted to establish a connection between the known and the unknown, the spiritual and the sexual, and the body and the mind respectively. For example, Som Bhaskar’s physical fixation with Anuradha attains a mystical dimension when he gains the knowledge that Anuradha saved him from dying because of their “spiritual” connection. Similarly, in Anuradha’s disappearance, the novel seems to point to the unknown, mysterious elements of human desire which can never be understood fully.

Conclusion

From critiquing the upper-class of the Indian society to the quest for meaning in an absurd world, Joshi’s anti-heroes embody the modern dilemma to both belong and transcend the world. Whether it is through material possessions, sexual bliss, intellectual pursuits, detachment, or even religious devotion, his nonconformist characters are not just meant to demonstrate the wrongs of the society. Instead, they are intended to challenge the fundamental premise of human civilisation. From Billy Biswas abandoning the civilised spaces of Delhi to live amidst tribal groups to Sindi Oberoi’s theory of detachment in The Foreigner (1968), to Som Bhaskar’s sexual and spiritual obsession with Anuradha and the maze-like structure of Lal Haveli in Banaras, which preserves an older world, in The Last Labyrinth (1981), Joshi’s preoccupation lies with metaphysical enquiries which he addresses by exploring the limits of human reason, faith, morality, desire, and sexuality. Undoubtedly, Joshi’s philosophical engagement is not apolitical since most of his protagonists come from privileged backgrounds, except for Ratan Rathor in The Apprentice (1974) who represents the common man’s struggles to “arrive” in the city. Nevertheless, Joshi remains vehemently critical of the social class he represents. It can be argued that Romi Sahai, the narrator in The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) serves as the author’s mouthpiece when he says how “life’s meaning lies not in the glossy surfaces of our pretensions, but in those dark mossy labyrinths of the soul that languish forever […]” (8). Joshi’s fiction explores the psychological realms of this world which otherwise lie buried within the human subject.

Bibliography:

Joshi, Arun. The Apprentice. Orient Paperbacks, 1974.

—. The City and the River. Orient Paperbacks, 1990.

—. The Foreigner. Orient Paperbacks, 1968.

—. The Last Labyrinth. Orient Paperbacks, 1981.

—. The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. Orient Paperbacks, 1971.

Works Cited:

“Arun Joshi.” Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 28, no. 4, 1993. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27767266 . Accessed 12 July 2023.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Joshi, Arun. The Apprentice. Orient Paperbacks, 1974.

—. The City and the River. Orient Paperbacks, 1990.

—. The Foreigner. Orient Paperbacks, 1968.

—. The Last Labyrinth. Orient Paperbacks, 1981.

—. The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. Orient Paperbacks, 1971.

Malreddy, Pavan Kumar. “Arun Joshi: Avant-Garde, Existentialism and the West.” Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 62, no. 1, 2014, pp. 3-12. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2014-0002 .

Mathur, OP. “Survival and Affirmation in Arun Joshi’s Novels.” World Literature Today, vol.63, no. 3, 1989, pp. 425-428. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/40145317 . Accessed 13 July 2023.

Menon, Nirmala. “Peripheral Identities and Hybridity in Arun Joshi’s The City and the River” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 62, no. 1, 2014, pp. 63-6. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2014-0007.

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English. Heinemann, 1971.

Naik, MK. A History of Indian English Literature. Sahitya Akademi, 1982.

Paranjape, Makarand. “Post-Independence Indian English Literature: Towards a New Literary History.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 33, no. 18, 1998, pp. 1049–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4406729 . Accessed 15 July 2023.

Prasad, Madhusudan. “Arun Joshi: The Novelist.” Indian Literature, vol. 24, no.4, 1981, pp. 103-114. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23330214 . Accessed 13 July 2023.

Randhawa MS. “Amar Chand Joshi (1908-1971).” Indian National Science Academy, https://www.insaindia.res.in/BM/BM15_9214.pdf .

Sudarshan, Aditya. “The strange case of Arun Joshi.” The Hindu, March 2, 2013, https://www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/the-strange-case-of-arun-joshi/article4465223.ece .

Kanak Yadav
Oct 23
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“Fiction or truth? I wondered”: A Gothic of/for the Nation-State | Sayantan Lahiri

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Review: The Light at the End of the World, by Siddhartha Deb, Context, 2023.

 

“This was a hungry novel, haunted by other writers, artists, ideas and historical events.”

                                                          -Siddhartha Deb, The Light at the End of the World

This sense of haunting and being haunted influences the novel and its characters. Deb tries to (re)imagine India’s imminent dystopian future through the lanes (and lens) of its violent history of the last two centuries. However, instead of taking the ‘top-down view’ of narrativising the history of the bourgeois, he chooses to paint micro-stories of humanity, struggle and anxieties.  However, the apocalyptic historical milieu looms large in the backdrop, impacting the characters’ lives and their choices. The sense of history Deb portrays in the novel is not one of continuity and poise, but a tale of its ‘apocalyptic ruptures’.

Like the Gothic genre, The Light doesn’t allow the characters to bury their deep-seated anxieties, rather it “offers ways of exposing, and articulating, some of the horrors and fears…” (Wisker 238). Deb’s language is unapologetic, blunt, and precise, deliberately unsettling the readers if they were reading comfortably.

This overt political meta-narrative is beautifully complemented by the delicate touch and care with which Deb carves out the characters and their milieu. The novel is structured in four sections, each a novella on its own, depicting stories of humanity and its quest amidst their dystopian catastrophic worlds, as the characters witness its boundaries and their insides collapse.

The first section, “City of Brume” recounts the story of Bibi, a journalist in Delhi in the near future. The city is described in the traditional Gothic tropes of entrapment, filled with uncanny characters like the anonymous “Monkey-man”, a zombie like figure who has returned after his supposed death to haunt the nation-state with the threat of exposing the secrets of its coercive and ideological state apparatuses.

“Claustropolis: 1984” situates the narrative in the Indian city of Bhopal, the site of India’s worst industrial disaster. The narrative shifts to the first person, an assassin who must hunt down his ‘kill’ before that disaster ‘outbreaks’. The sense of the weird is further developed by the anonymous boss of the assassin, who cannot be defined into traditional identities, and therefore is described in every paragraph using a long name: “That man an operator at a chemical factory on the Kali parade grounds” (Deb 145).

The third section, “Paranoir: 1947” captures the tale of a humble Bengali student, (Das) and his quest for a Vedic aircraft that can repel the impending genocide. Das begins with the stereotypical Romantic images of Bengal and its Gangetic planes. However, they are undercut by the unsettling metaphors that follow, which do not offer any sense of ease: “The leaves of the fossil-like banyan trees rustle. Invisible little ghosts scurry in the grass, stopping occasionally to tickle Das’s ankles” (Deb 221-2). Deb takes another quantum leap in the history of India in the fourth section, “The Line of Faith: 1859” which narrates the story of Colonel Sleeman and his troops who fight a rebellion to secure their alleged “super weapon” that will expel the British from India.

To some readers the novel may feel a slow read, with the subplots taking time to build up. However, this is a novel of moments, where Deb creates an aesthetic of the mundane—the unchanging, routine life of these characters. Their lives seem monotonous, only to be shattered by the apocalyptic ruptures of historical moments. In the third section, for example, the assassin’s comments are repetitive, with the refrain “FOLLOW AND PERFORM” (Deb 145) being repeated several times, that it almost gets instilled in the subconscious of the character as well as the readers.

Another traditional Gothic trope which links these sections together is the narrator’s fascination with insomnia, haunting, and nightmares. Deb mentions, on almost every occasion, in precise details about when the characters sleep (if at all), when they wake up, in which mental state, and their dreams/nightmares while sleeping. In the “City of Brume,” for instance:

THROUGHOUT THESE TURBULENT months, Bibi sleeps…[s]he sleeps like everything…has happened many times before and will happen many times again, an unending cycle of present, a loop to be broken only by some apocalyptic ruptures. (Deb 4)

Although The Light paints images of these “apocalyptic ruptures” of cosmic horror, it is perhaps more encouraging than the typical post-apocalyptic fiction. It defies any easy categorisation and generic expectations. It deliberately pushes boundaries—of genres, histories, and experience. Therefore, it is perhaps befitting that Deb quotes from Frankenstein in the epigraph of the epilogue in the quest for the “eternal light” (Shelley 3). We meet Bibi again in the epilogue in the Andaman Islands as she continues her quest. The choice of a space like the Andamans for the epilogue is telling: a floating island, distanced from the ideological body of India and its “imagined communities” (Anderson 22)—a space which was historically associated with punitive measures for ‘rebels’—provides Deb with the perfect milieu to paint a picture of the life of a rebel in exile; a space where Bibi, in the near future must continue her quest for her sense of the self and the world.

 

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso Books, 2016.

Deb, Siddhartha. The Light at the End of the World. Context, 2023.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Penguin Classics, 1986.

Wisker, Gina. Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction: Carnival, Hauntings and Vampire Kisses. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-30349-3 .

 

 

Sayantan Lahiri is currently working as an Institute of Eminence (IoE) funded Research Intern at the University of Hyderabad, India. The research project focuses on establishing decolonial Indian Research Methodologies (IRM) from Sanskrit Texts. After finishing his M.A. in English Literature from the same university, he wishes to pursue research in the areas of Postcolonial Gothic, Indian Writing in English, Ageing Studies, Posthumanism and Cultural Studies.

 

Page Header Image: Penguin Random House

Cite this Review

MLA:
Lahiri, Sayantan. “’Fiction or truth? I wondered’: A Gothic of/for the Nation-State.” Indian Writing In English Online, 23 October 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/fiction-or-truth-i-wondered-a-gothic-of-for-the-nation-state-sayantan-lahiri/ .

Chicago:
Lahiri, Sayantan. “’Fiction or truth? I wondered’: A Gothic of/for the Nation-State.” Indian Writing In English Online. October 23, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/fiction-or-truth-i-wondered-a-gothic-of-for-the-nation-state-sayantan-lahiri/ .

Jul 03
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Arundhati Roy | Vaibhav Iype Parel

By Critical Biography No Comments
Cite this Essay

MLA:
Parel, Vaibhav Iype. “Arundhati Roy.” Indian Writing In English Online, 03 July 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/arundhati-roy-vaibhav-iype-parel/ .

Chicago:
Parel, Vaibhav Iype. “Arundhati Roy.” Indian Writing In English Online. July 3, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/arundhati-roy-vaibhav-iype-parel/ .

Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong in 1961. After completing her schooling from Ooty, Tamil Nadu, she left home at sixteen, to study architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi. Interested in the alchemy of words, she never pursued a career in architecture, but urban planning and architecture left an indelible imprint in the ways she designed and visualised her future work.

She started her career as an award-winning writer of screenplays. She wrote her first screenplay for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) in which she also acted. This was a movie that discussed her experiences as an architecture student. It won her the National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1989. Later, she wrote for Electric Moon (1992). Both these films were directed by Pradip Krishen. Roy has also written for television serials such as The Banyan Tree (twenty-six episodes), and crafted the screenplay for the documentary DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002).

Other than the Booker Prize in 1997, Roy won the Sydney Peace Prize and the Orwell Award in 2004, the Norman Mailer Prize in 2011, the St. Louis Award in 2022, and most recently, the 45th European Essay Prize for the French translation of her compilation of essays titled Azadi. This global recognition is, however, unable to blunt the edge of controversy, anger, and hate that her writing often evokes. In fact, global recognition goes hand-in-hand with the controversy and hate that her writings arouse. Her criticism of the state is misunderstood as criticism of the nation itself. This easy and politically lazy conflation – of the state with the nation – makes her an ‘enemy’ of the nation.

Roy declined the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Algebra of Infinite Justice in 2005, stating that she could not accept an award from a government whose policies on big dams, nuclear weapons, increasing militarisation, and economic liberalism she was deeply critical of in the book for which she was being awarded the prize.[1] In 2015, she returned the 1989 National Award (for the best screenplay)  in solidarity with other writers/artists to protest the rising religious intolerance in the country, as was evident by incidents of mob-lynching and the killing of rationalists. She wrote in The Indian Express, “If we do not have the right to speak freely, we will turn into a society that suffers from intellectual malnutrition, a nation of fools.”[2]

 

Fiction

In 1992, Roy started working on the draft of what would become her first novel, The God of Small Things (TGOST, 1997). It won her an advance of £500,000, and catapulted her to fame on the international literary stage when it won her the Booker Prize in 1997. Exquisitely written, the novel shows time to be a malleable  construct. Memory, passion, and history are delicately interwoven into a rich tapestry where the past and the present inform each other, while also intermeshing in ways that obscure their separateness. This is achieved by a tightly controlled narrative that allows ‘History’ and ‘history’ to intertwine. The narrative is structured around Sophie’s death; her arrival, accidental death, and its aftermath all carefully create pathways for time, the history of small things/people/events, and their memories to coalesce around intimately explored questions of childhood, poverty, exploitation, and nature.

A fiercely feminist text, TGOST, signposts the violence that is meted out by abusive husbands and alcoholic fathers, while highlighting Ammu’s inability to possess legal rights to the property as a daughter, since she had no “Locusts Stand I” (57). As Roy calls it, TGOST “is about a family with a broken heart in its midst” (Azadi, 88). Whether it be the passionate inter-caste coupling of Velutha and Ammu, the incestuous love between Estha and Rahel, or the inter-national coming together of Chacko and Margaret, the novel speaks of love in all its shades. which, however, become threatening when their effervescence spills over the boundaries dictated by the “Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much” (328). The ways in which desires spill over, and the inability of the “Love Laws” to circumscribe, contain, and define the contours of desire becomes the central strand around which much of the novel revolves. The open, free, and deliberate social transgressions that we witness in the novel challenge the social status-quo in ways that remain deeply unsettling. In fact, the last chapter of the book offended purists in Kerala enough for them to bring charges of obscenity against Roy in a court. The case took a decade to be dismissed.

Roy’s deftly woven critique of Marxism impels the narrative into directions that force upon us the recognition of the nature of politics in the Kerala of the 1960s. Her criticism is particularly sharp when she equates the Inspector and Comrade with “mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine” (262). The novel’s audacious representation and critique of institutional complicity between the state and Marxism, while remaining deeply casteist – as evidenced by Comrade Pillai’s wife who does not allow the entry of the Paravan’s into the house – is a vector of sustained narrative tension, and attracted a sharp rebuke from the Communist Party.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (MUH, 2017), published twenty years later, is a dense work that mirrors the social and political changes in India in the twenty years that divide the two novels. Roy clearly wanted to do something different from her previous novel. MUH exemplifies the political as personal: whether it be the Hijras in Khwabgah, or the motley cast of residents in Jannat Guest House, Roy embraces liminality as an affective position through which to view the world. Political events like the Emergency, the Godhra riots, the insurgency and counter-offensives of the Indian Army in Kashmir, the 26/11 Mumbai attack, and the Naxalite movement feature in the novel not as distant political events that frame a background, but as personal events that have real consequences like births, deaths, and executions. The suffering and joy of the characters is narrativised through the personal, and the personal is always and unconditionally the political.

For Roy, MUH is:

a conversation between two graveyards. One is a graveyard where a hijra, Anjum – raised as a boy by a Muslim family in the walled city of Delhi – makes her home and gradually builds a guest house … where a range of people come to seek shelter. The other is the ethereally beautiful valley of Kashmir which … has become, literally, almost a graveyard itself (Azadi, 152-53).

As the city becomes a character in the novel, the poorest people and the most neglected socio-political concerns shine from the margins in an idiom that renders them unforgettable. Roy repeatedly makes visible the yawning gulf between the rich and the poor. Her fiction becomes most visceral when it mimics the cold and dispassionate indifference of the burgeoning middle-class to burning issues, questions, and concerns that lie at their doorsteps, that they are surrounded by, but are effectively blind(ed) to. Her anger, as it excoriates all shades of politicians for their apathy, raises pertinent questions about the functioning of our democracy, especially with the turn in the political fortunes of the Hindu right. The challenge that Tilo faces, “to un-know certain things” (262), resonates for the reader as well. Roy’s fiction becomes a document of our times even as she narrativises the story of many official documents like affidavits and memorandums for the reader.

 

Non-fiction

Compelled by a need to communicate, she follows different rhythms when writing fiction and non-fiction, by her own admission.[3] Writing fiction is a labour of joy, where she sets herself a challenging task: to close the gap between language and thought.  The issues that inspire her non-fiction, however, evoke a more immediate response that is characterised by its urgency. She finds herself agitated, angry, and even sleepless. Roy’s first essay came soon after she won the Booker Prize. “The End of Imagination” (1998) was written as a response to India’s nuclear tests in May 1998 that were closely followed by Pakistan’s nuclear tests. Over the years, her writing has generated heated debates over questions of authenticity and expertise. One crucial example is her essay, “The Doctor and the Saint” that introduces B R Ambedkar’s seminal text, Annihilation of Caste (1936) that was published in a new critical edition of Ambedkar’s text by Navayana in 2014.

Roy was attacked for this essay by Gandhians and Dalits. On the one hand, scholars like Rajmohan Gandhi thought that hers was an unfair and biased representation of Gandhi.[4] On the other hand, Dalit scholars and activists claimed that since she was neither a Dalit nor a scholar on Ambedkar, her essay was a disservice to the Dalit cause based on inauthenticity (of her position) and lack of expertise (as a scholar). The debate, as it swirled on various media forums, took various forms – reviews, opinion pieces, open letters, and Roy’s replies to many of her accusers.[5] Surveying both sides of the debate, Filippo Menozzi argued in 2016:

In the case of Arundhati Roy’s debate with Dalit Camera, the witness is the one who is able to place oneself in the position of those who are oppressed, even if they have not lost their language, because they are living and they are able to speak. Assuming a Dalit standpoint is an epistemological act that does not aim at appropriating Dalit experience, but at becoming able to listen to Dalit perspectives by identifying with them; it is the precondition to challenging caste-blindness (“Beyond the Rhetoric,” 75; italics in original)

For Roy, then, it is her vocation as a writer – above all else – that allows her the freedom to intervene in political questions. In her essay, “The Language of Literature,” she explains how the struggle to communicate her political convictions to the widest audience possible impels her to find an idiom that is best suited to the task. She speaks of the form, language, narrative, and structure that she envisaged for non-fiction. She asks, “Was it possible to turn these topics into literature? 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?” (Azadi, 87). Describing these twenty years of writing non-fiction, she says, “I knew it would be unapologetically complicated, unapologetically political, and unapologetically intimate” (Azadi, 88). Her writing has remained, as she says, complicated, political, and intimate. The topics that have engaged her have ranged widely from the politics of the nation and the world, ecology, environment, dams, caste, the Naxals, to Kashmir, among others.

She wrestles with form and structure to allow an apparently seamless overlap between fiction and non-fiction. She gestures towards non-fiction being a universalised form of literature that is more open, democratic, and accessible, but one that is always inherently political. This overlap between what are considered distinct genres, is most evident in MUH. For Roy, “it would be a novel, but the story-universe would refuse all forms of domestication and conventions about what a novel could be and could not be. It would be like a great city in my part of the world in which the reader arrives as a new immigrant” (Azadi, 88). The topical political metaphor of the immigrant itself should alert us to the ways in which fiction and non-fiction intertwine in her writing.

Coming to fiction after having worked on screenplays, she wanted her novels to allow the multiple and playful interaction of image and metaphor in the mind of the reader. TGOST as Roy puts it, is a book “constructed around people … all grappling, dancing, and rejoicing in language” (23). It was after TGOST that she felt that she found “a language that tasted like mine … a language in which I could write the way I think” (23).

The opening essay of her collection, Azadi, is titled, “In What Language Does Rain Fall over Tormented Cities?” which is a line from a poem by Pablo Neruda. Here she explores questions of languages, translation, thought, and expression. The unsettled, uneasy, and constantly shifting relation between English, Englishes and other languages defines her fiction and non-fiction. While English has become the language of aspiration, inclusion and exclusion in India, and her novels are in English, the stories emerge “out of an ocean of languages, in which a teeming ecosystem of living creatures … swim around” (14). This multiplicity of languages/idioms, in turn, internally transforms English: “English has been widened and deepened by the rhythms and cadences of my alien mother’s other tongues” (9).

In her evocative words, her characters in MUH do not just use translation as a daily activity, but “realize that people who speak the same language are not necessarily the ones who understand each other best” (14). This was a language that was “slow-cooked” (23). As her characters like Dr Azad Bhartiya, Biplab Dasgupta (Garson Hobart), Tilo, and Musa begin to inhabit her mind and populate her fiction, boundaries between inside/outside, fiction/non-fiction become porous, permeable, and transparent. The Kashmiri-English alphabet becomes the final move towards creating a political idiom where the personal and the political integrally define each other, and are constitutively incomplete without each other. In a dramatic metaphor of reconstitution, she says, “I had to throw the language of TGOST off a very tall building. And then go down (using the stairs) to gather up the shattered pieces. So was born MUH” (32). Her answer to Neruda’s question – In What Language Does Rain Fall over Tormented Cities? – is “in the Language of Translation” (52).

Roy remains deeply suspicious of ‘causes’, and distances herself from titles like ‘activist.’ As she explains in an interview, this is because causes belong to everyone. Her engagement with various groups of people consciously remains an individual act that helps her to be constantly vigilant against attempts at appropriation by the establishment that may defang the critical impulse of her work. Humour in her writing allows flashes of rebellious and militant joy to erupt. Joy generates hope that adds yet another political dimension to her writing.

If writing can be a refuge and an expression of our collective rage, hope, and desire, it can also mark epistemological departures where multiple knowledges, languages, and ways of inhabiting the world intersect and interact. Roy’s writing opens for the reader critical vistas hitherto unexplored about the self and the world. With Roy, an unrelenting hope and rage are coupled with implacable courage born of the conviction that the job of the writer is to speak truth to power. In stubbornly refusing to be compartmentalised into externally imposed labels (like ‘fiction’ or ‘non-fiction’), her work exemplifies what it means to be human in the most profound ways possible. To ignore her is to ignore our humanity.

 

Primary Bibliography

Fiction:

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. Flamingo, 1997.

____. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Hamish Hamilton, 2017.

 

Non-Fiction:

Roy, Arundhati. The Cost of Living: The Greater Common Good and the End of Imagination. Flamingo, 1999.

____. Power Politics. South End Press, 2001.

____. The Algebra of Infinite Justice. Flamingo, 2002.

____. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Consortium, 2004.

____. Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. Penguin, 2010.

____. Walking with the Comrades. Penguin, 2011.

____. Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Verso, 2011.

____. Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Haymarket, 2014.

____. “The Doctor and the Saint”. Introduction to S. Anand (ed), Annotated edition of B R Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. Navayana, 2015.

____. My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-Fiction. Haymarket. 2019.

____. Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction. Penguin, 2020.

 

Documentary

DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002). Last accessed 14 October 2022.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlyZofTmUO4&ab_channel=theskeeboo

 

Interviews

“An Evening with 2022 St. Louis Literary Award Winner Arundhati Roy.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-SVAFgEd5g  (Last accessed 1 November 2022).

Aitkenhead, Decca. “‘Fiction takes its time’: Arundhati Roy on why it took 20 years to write her second novel.” The Guardian. 27 May 2017. Last accessed 17 October 2022.

Deb, Siddhartha. “Arundhati Roy, the Not-So-Reluctant Renegade.” The New York Times Magazine. 5 March 2014. Last accessed 3 October 2022.

 

Secondary Bibliography

Bose, Brinda. “In Desire and in Death: Eroticism as Politics in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.”  ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 29, no. 2, 1998, pp. 59-72.

____. ‘A fearless antinovel.’ Review of Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Biblio: A Review of Books.  July-­September 2017.

Fuchs, Felix. “Novelizing Non-Fiction: Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades and the Critical Realism of Global Anglophone Literature.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 23, no. 8, pp. 1187-1203, 2021.

Khair, Tabish. “India 2015: Magic, Modi, and Arundhati Roy.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 50, no. 3, 2015, pp. 398-406.

Menozzi, Filippo. “‘Too much blood for good literature’: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and the question of realism.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 55, no. 1, 2019, pp. 20-33.

____. “Beyond the Rhetoric of Belonging: Arundhati Roy and the Dalit Perspective.” Asiatic, vol. 10, no. 1, 2016, pp. 66-80.

Neumann, Birgit. “An ocean of languages? Multilingualism in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Published online: 29 April 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/00219894211007916

Prasad, Murari (editor). Arundhati Roy: Critical Perspectives. Pencraft, 2006.

Rajan, Romy. “Where Old Birds go to Die: Spaces of Precarity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 52, no. 1, 2021, pp. 91-120.

Ramdev, Rina. “Arundhati Roy and the Framing of a ‘radicalised Dissent.’” Rule and Resistance Beyond the Nation State: Contestation, Escalation, Exit. Edited by Felix Anderl et al, pp. 243-256, Roman & Littlefield, 2019.

St. John, D. E. “Mobilizing the past: The God of Small Things’ automotive ecologies.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 59, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1-14.

Subramanian, Samanth. “The Prescient Anger of Arundhati Roy.” Review of My Seditious Heart. The New Yorker. 12 June 2019.

Tickell, Alex. “Writing in the Necropolis: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 2018, pp. 100-112.

____. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Routledge Guides to Literature. Routledge, 2007.

____. “The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy’s Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 38, no. 1, 2003, pp. 73-89.

 

Notes:

[1]https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/arundhati-roy-declines-sahitya-akademi-award/articleshow/1372130.cms The Times of India, 14 January 2006. Accessed 20 March 2023.

[2] https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/why-i-am-returning-my-award/ 5 Nov 2015. Accessed 20 March 2023.

[3] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-SVAFgEd5g, interview with Roy where she explains her different approaches to fiction and non-fiction. Accessed 1 Nov 2022.

[4] Rajmohan Gandhi, ‘Response to Arundhati Roy’. Economic and Political Weekly. 25 July 2015, vol. 50, no. 30, pp. 83-85.

[5]  See the following to get a sense of the contours of this debate:

Bojja Tharakam, https://www.roundtableindia.co.in/without-arundhati-roy-without-anand-without-gandhi-the-book-had-its-own-value-bojja-tharakam/ 23 March 2014. Accessed 25 March 2023.

Shivam Vij, https://scroll.in/article/658279/why-dalit-radicals-dont-want-arundhati-roy-to-write-about-ambedkar. 12 March 2014. Accessed on 22 March 2023.

G Sampath, https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/dl8AvXg2PYchgE9qGogzJL/BR-Ambedkar-Arundhati-Roy-and-the-politics-of-appropriatio.html 19 March 2014. Accessed 22 March 2023

 

 

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