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Arundhati Roy's Writings: The other famous and renowned novelist under the study is Arundhati Roy, born in 1961 in Bengal. Arundhati grew up in Kerala; she trained herself as an architect at the Delhi school of Architecture but abandoned it in between. She believes that, "A feminist is a woman who negotiates herself into a position where she has choices."7 The International community knows Arundhati Roy as an artist with her debut novel 'The God of Small Things.' 'The God of small things' won Britain's premier Booker prize, the Booker McConnell in 1997.
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| Arundhati Roy |
Roy is the first non-expatriate Indian author and the first Indian woman to have won this prize. Roy's major essays 'The End of Imagination' and 'The Greater common good' are available online. She is between the two Indian writers writing in English who has won the Booker Prize (the other one being Salman Rushdie for his 'Midnight Children'.
Arundhati has never admitted that she is a feminist but 'The God of Small Things', reveals at many places her feminist stance and her protagonist represent feminine sensibility. Arundhati Roy's mother says, Arundhati is a born talker and a born writer. While, she was studying in school, it was a problem to find a teacher, who could cope with her voracious appetite for reading and writing. Most of the time, she educated herself on her own. I can remember our vice principle Sneha Zaharias resorting to Shakespeare's The Tempest as a text for the little fourth grade.
Roy seems to be iconoclast in, 'The God of Small Things'. The stylistic innovations make the novel unique and bring vitality and exuberance to the novel. The novel is unique in every aspect and it is a linguistic experiment with the English language. The stylistic writings include the use of words, phrases and even sentences from vernacular language, use of italics, subject less sentences, faulty spellings, topicalisation, deviation from normal word order, single word 'sentences', change of word classes, clustering of word classes and a variety of other techniques. She has given prominence to ecology and subalternity as the major themes in the novel. Roy's close observations and the minute aspects in the creation of her literary skills are observed in her other works. Her two important articles on the net are 'The end of Imagination' and 'The Greater Common Good.' In the End of Imagination, Roy criticises nuclear policies of the Government of India.
Arundhati Roy foretells the harmful consequences of nuclear weapons on human beings and ecology in the End of Imagination: "Our cities and forests, our fields and villages will burn for days." Rivers will turn to poison.The air will become fire. The wind will spread the flames when everything there is to burn has burned and the fires die, smoke will rise and shut out the sun. There will be on day and only interminable night. Temperatures will drop to far below freezing and nuclear winter will set in Water will turn into toxic ice. Radioactive fallout will seep through the earth and contaminated groundwater. Most living things, animals and vegetables, fish and fowl, will die. Only rats and cockroaches will breed, multiply, and complete with forging, relic humane for what little food there is.