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Arundhati
Roy
Writer & Social Activist
Susanna Arundhati Roy the first Indian woman to have
won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, was born on 24th November 1961 in
Bengal and grew up in Aymanam village, Kottayam, Kerala.
She was born to parents Mary Roy a well known social activist who won a
landmark Supreme Court verdict that granted Christian women in Kerala the
right to their parent's property and father a Bengali Hindu tea planter.
Arundhati's parents separated when she was small and she did her formal
education in Corpus Christi school run by her mother in Kottayam District,
Kerala. When she was just 16, she left her home and settled in Delhi.
There she did her degree in Architecture at the Delhi School of
Architecture. During this period she met Gerard Da Cunha a fellow
architecture student and married him but their marriage lasted only four
years. After a brief stint in the field of architecture, she found that it
was not for her. She left for Goa, making a life out at the beach, got
tired of it after a few months, came back to Delhi. She took a job at the
National Institute of Urban Affairs, met Pradeep Krishen, a film director
now her husband who offered her a small role in 'Massey Saab'. She went to
Italy on a scholarship for eight months to study the restoration of
monuments. She realised she was a writer during those months in Italy.
After she returned from Italy she worked with Pradeep Krishen and they
planned an episode television for Doordarshan called the 'Banyan Tree'
which didn't materialise and was shelved by the producers after shooting
2-3 episodes. She wrote and starred in 'In Which Annie Gives it Those
Ones', a film on college life in India, based on her experiences in the
University of Delhi, and wrote the screenplay for Pradip Krishen's film
'Electric Moon' (1992). She quickly became known for her work as
screenwriter. Then she wrote a series of essays called 'The Great Indian
Rape Trick' which attracted media attention, in defense of former dacoit
Phoolan Devi, who she felt had been exploited by Shekhar Kapur's film
'Bandit Queen'. Then came her debut novel 'The God of Small Things' which
shot her into prominence in 1997, by winning the prestigious British
Booker prize in London and becoming an international best seller. The
book, which took almost five years to complete, gives an insight to the
social and political life in a village in South India through the eyes of
seven year old twins and how it effects/disrupts their small lives. The
book won £20,000 as prize and sold nearly 400,000 copies globally by
October that year.
In the years following her success, she has turned to activism, writing
'The Cost of Living' a book comprising two essays 'The Greater Common
Good'(1999) and 'The End of Imagination'(1998); the former against Indian
Governments massive dam projects which displaced millions of poor people
and the latter; its testing of Nuclear weapons. She has been an active
participant in public demonstrations against the construction of the
Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river in Western India and has donated a
substantial amount around 1.5million rupees, equivalent to her Booker
Prize money, for the cause. She was even arrested along with other
protestors for campaigning for the cause. 'Power Politics' her latest book
published, takes on Enron the power corporation based in Houston trying to
take over Maharashtra's energy sector. She has also spoken on and
published several articles such as 'Promotion of equal rights' supporting
equal rights for lower caste in India and 'War on Terrorism' (2001)against
the Iraq war.
With her latest publications, Arundhati is carving a niche for herself as
a political journalist. This unusual women who has been on several lists
of 'the 50 most beautiful women in the world' is not intimated by her
success and fame but is an inspiration to all those who seek to speak up
against the powers in support of the poor and the oppressed. She now lives
in Delhi with her husband Pradip Krishen and his two daughters Pia and
Mithva from a previous marriage. |
