Photo by jeanbaptisteparis (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Unsurprisingly, Arundhati Roy, the incendiary author of 1997’s The God of Small Things and this year’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, drew a massive crowd for her Thursday night ILB presentation. So massive, in fact, that many spectators – our reporters included – were forced to listen at the door of the auditorium until seats opened up. As we stood, ears eagerly pressed to the dishearteningly thick wooden auditorium doors, we realized we were waiting with a long-time family friend of Roy’s, who admitted having 10 pages left until she finished Roy’s latest book, but praised the author’s prose as “true and very deep, if you know India, and know Indian politics.”
The ILB audience would seem to agree with her appraisal – Roy received a welcome befitting a rock star and throughout her talk, her riffs on literature, identity and politics received spontaneous applause and whoops suited to a particularly wild guitar solo. Literature’s darling, who had finally published her second novel after a 20 years hiatus that involved a focus on political issues in India and beyond, was perhaps not quite the expected firebrand – questions about the nuances of novels and fiction provided a relatively neutral backdrop for her discussion. Regardless, the audience was enraptured for almost two hours by her answers, along with readings from her latest novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in both German and English and even a short trailer for the novel, featuring quotes and footage of Delhi.
In person, Roy is as delightfully rebellious as her prose – when reading an excerpt from her most recent novel, she seemed to take a gleeful pleasure in reciting the sentence, “It was the summer grandma became a whore.” Roy was also, though, just as thoughtfully meticulous and boldly outspoken as her prose would suggest. When asked to explain her famous quote, “Language is the skin of my thinking,” for example, Roy told the story of her “activism” (inverted commas necessary, as she is not a fan of the word) against the Indian delegation to the Hague’s International Water Conference, which she claims she attended on invitation to “wreck things”.
She described the other bureaucratic “writers” at the panel as “widening” the gap between language and thinking, providing purposefully opaque and indirect explanations for water laws, and positioning her own prose as an attempt to minimize the gap between language and thought. She also couldn’t resist a jab at governmental writers generally – when describing an American delegate who said he wrote about water “because he was paid to,” Roy recounted answering the same question by saying, “I write about water because I’ve been paid a good deal not to.” This sly, clever contrarianism defines Roy’s stage presence and remarkable prose, making her an exciting and informative speaker for guests of all backgrounds and political persuasions at the ILB.