Unmatched Authorial Endowments Spell Out Arundhati Roy’s Quest for Freedom and Solace

 

Arundhati Roy came back to the readers once again with another out-of-the-box literary work Mother Mary Comes to Me in 2025. It was her return to fiction after long eight years. Her first book The God of Small Things was a novel which was published in 1997 and which brought her the prestigious Booker Prize. Arundhati Roy was awarded Sydney Peace Prize in 2004 which added another feather to her authorial crown. She received the Pen Pinter Prize in 2024 from England. Though Mother Mary Comes to Me, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness are three fictional works of Arundhati Roy, she has penned a broad number of non-fictional books from 1997 till now. Listening to Grasshoppers, The Shape of the Beast, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, The End of Imagination, Capitalism: A Ghost Story are some of the fabulous books which have over and over again enhanced Arundhati Roy’s eminence and illustrated her philanthropic attitude towards the global masses who are unspeakably jeopardized with repressions, socioeconomic atrocities and maltreatment.

Arundhati Roy all the while championed the belief that fact is stranger than fiction. In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Mary, insistent that Arundhati Roy was too young to remember the scene, and Mary Roy, insistent that it was supposed to be fictitious, had “never felt the weight or the sorrow of this memory.” Yet somewhere, it served as proof that we are all “a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination—and that we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” With the opening assertion of true fictions and false realities, the tone of the memoir is set: an emotion-packed, quasi-magical haze that Arundhati Roy weaves into a classical saga in the ongoing postmodern era in art and literature.

When Mary is Arundhati Roy’s total focus, the writing seems to be engrossing. Part of what makes Mother Mary Comes to Me such a penetrative discourse is the grit and depth of the subject, Mary Roy who is abusive, cruel and above all else, a survivor in this heartless world where humanity has been marginalized and mercy, pity, peace and love have been trampled under the jackboot of misgovernance, socioeconomic injustice and total absence of equal rights. Mary Roy flits from catastrophic failures—at one point, the family of three was starving and squatting in a relative’s house only to eventually be kicked out—to legacy-defining successes; the Travancore Christian Succession Act, which stated that daughters had no right to their father’s property, was legally challenged before the Indian Supreme Court by Mary, and she won. Mary is, at every step of the way, impossible to figure out until Arundhati Roy determines the true face of Mary and the mask she had to put on for dealing with the hostile society around us.

Arundhati Roy’s 2017 fictional work The Ministry of Utmost Happiness touches upon an unhappy world which gets on paradoxical terms with the title of the book. The golden deer called happiness remains beyond the catch of ordinary people who have been languishing under the jackboots of racism, poverty and discrimination for ages. This contradiction between the title and the content of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness makes the book all the more engrossing and poignant. This book characterizes a community of transgender people and their tribulations in India but this is not the only theme this postmodern tale spotlights on. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes the readers to different Indian states where Maoists guerillas have been fighting with the Indian law and order forces, the persistent violence in Kashmir, militancy, the dehumanizing impact of caste system and some more catastrophic pieces of reality which are sources of frequently haunting nightmares for millions of underprivileged people across South Asia.

Another widely applauded book by Arundhati Roy is Capitalism: A Ghost Story which appeared in 2014. Like all her previous books, this one is also loaded with pointblank words and resentments towards injustice, social inequity, abuse of power and other political and economic anomalies in South Asia and beyond. The level of socio-economic discrepancies that prevails across the South Asian countries including India touches the hearts of readers, particularly when it is narrated by Arundhati Roy. Her compassion towards people living below the poverty line is highly eye-catching in all her books. Simultaneously, her unflinching standpoint against torment also deserves to be noted with due importance.

She argues that it is capitalism that has over the decades unleashed an inequitable allocation of wealth that has made just a handful of people abnormally rich leaving millions of ordinary people in hardcore poverty. Billions of dollars glitter in the coffers of a few Indians, while a massive number of people have to sweat to the last drop to secure two meals a day. According to Capitalism: A Ghost Story, 2,50,000 debt-ridden Indian farmers have so far committed suicide to get rid of the agony and humiliation caused by their failure to pay back loans taken from different financial agencies and landlords. These ill-fated farmers are just a portion of the huge number of poverty-stricken masses victimized under the hammer of capitalism. In this book Arundhati Roy allegorically cited the word “ghost” to refer to the departed souls of these hapless peasants who had to kill themselves for redemption from the whips of pauperism. According to the book, millions of Indian people have been rendered homeless to facilitate the construction of different private and state-sponsored projects. Most of these forcibly ousted people belong to lower castes and tribal clans whose tears and grievances often go unacknowledged and most of them have shifted to the shanty colonies and slums of Indian cities after their eviction from rural areas.

In Capitalism: A Ghost Story we further come across the “ghosts” of dead rivers, denuded forests and demolished mountains. Deforestation in different parts of India goes on continuously in the name of privatization and progress. This kind of assaults on environmental resources may lead to severe ecological disasters, but the authorities concerned don’t have time to pay heed to these issues, Arundhati Roy regrets. Enormous business organizations have been ceaselessly doing large-scale damages to the forests and hills of India for expansion of their industries. The owners are being allowed by the Indian government to go ahead with their onslaught on India’s environmental splendor and diversity, the writer claims.

Moreover, Arundhati Roy pointed fingers at another ongoing menace of India—the detention of tribal people on vague charges which are even unknown to the detainees. In her words, “Hundreds of people have been jailed, charged for being Maoists under draconian, undemocratic laws. Prisons are crowded with Adivasi (aboriginal) people, many of whom have no idea what their crime is.” She gave the example of a female school teacher from a district in central India who was arrested by Indian cops for interrogation and was tortured in the most ruthless manner to force her to confess that she was a Maoist messenger. No action was taken by the Indian government even when the news of this inhumanity flashed out. Rather the police officer who was in charge of that interrogation was later on rewarded for “gallantry”. Forced confessions and merciless persecution of detainees take place under the custody of Indian law-enforcing agencies quite frequently, as stated in Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Similar instances are found in Arundhati Roy’s another book Listening to Grasshoppers. 

In Arundhati Roy’s view, the form of capitalism we see in South Asia makes itself comparable to an unchained monster—terrifying and gobbling up the poor on its rampage. Besides, capitalism views the world as a marketplace where everything goes on sale—beliefs, moral values, ballots, ideologies and all other things we can think about.

Arundhati Roy wants people to be more sensible and more devoted for the betterment of their fellow human beings. She wants all sorts of maltreatment to come to an end so that innocent and insolvent people can live at peace and do not fall victims to political intrigues. Arundhati Roy urges everyone to abandon vengeance and to uphold fraternity to pave the way for an ideal world free of hunger, deprivations and agonies.

Arundhati Roy does not need to be introduced to the readers anew. She is acclaimed across the world as a nonconformist author who condemns torment and injustice taking place in any corner of the globe. Arundhati Roy has so far penned a broad number of fictional and non-fictional works. She is celebrated for her humanitarian approach to downtrodden masses. Arundhati Roy can be termed an uncompromising crusader who keeps on fighting against socio-economic discrimination and socio-political maltreatment in the Indian subcontinent and even beyond.

Azadi is Arundhati Roy’s latest book which was published in 2020 at a time while the whole world was swirling in the maze of Covid 19 pandemic which widely endangered people all over the world both on economic and health grounds. Azadi consists of nine separate articles which were written on the basis of Arundhati Roy’s speeches at different times and some of her write-ups which were published in English newspapers of different countries.

Arundhati Roy always seems to be too concerned about the plight of underprivileged people living in South Asia. She wrote in one part of Azadi, “The tea workers, living on starvation wages, were (and are) among the most brutally oppressed and exploited people in India.” The subhuman plight of tea workers in South Asia including Bangladesh is known to everyone but very few people seem to have any headache for turning around the wheels of their fortune. Arundhati Roy portrayed the lives and livelihoods of transgender people in her book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and thus fortified her foothold in the arena of subaltern literature. Subaltern literature spotlights on the misery of the most suppressed people in society who virtually do not have any access to socio-economic recognition.

Arundhati Roy quests for freedom and solace through her writings. She mentioned in Azadi, “It was only after writing The God of Small Things that I felt the blood in my veins flow more freely. It was an unimaginable relief to have finally found a language that tasted like mine. A language in which I could write the way I think. A language that freed me.”

Arundhati Roy blames the onslaught of capitalism for the augmentation of discrepancies and misgovernance around us. Capitalism views the world as a marketplace where everything goes on sale—ideologies, faith, values and so on. Arundhati Roy writes in Azadi, “While small businesses, traders and most of all, the poor have suffered enormously, several corporations have multiplied their wealth several times over. Businessmen like the Kingfisher Airlines and Beer magnate Vijay Mallya and the diamond merchant Nirav Modi have been permitted to decamp with thousands of crores of public money while the government looked away. What kind of accountability can we expect for all of this? None? Zero?”

In Arundhati Roy’s view, ultra-capitalism is responsible for the spread of corruption and irregularities in most of the countries. Arundhati Roy upholds a very compassionate attitude towards Hindus belonging to lower castes who are known as “Dalits”. The Dalit Hindus are often victimized by landlords, by state mechanism, by law and order forces and by the legal system of India, Arundhati Roy asserts. In her words, “Today, there are thousands of people in jail across the country, poor and disadvantaged people, fighting for their homes, for their lands, for their dignity—people accused of sedition and worse, languishing without trial in crowded prisons.”

Arundhati Roy writes for establishing equal rights for all and to make socio-economic justice prevail so that people can have access to their legitimate rights without barriers.

In Arundhati Roy’s another book The Shape of The Beast, she wrote about Kashmir, “Kashmir is the rabbit that both India and Pakistan pull out of their hats whenever they are in trouble. For them Kashmir is not a problem, it’s a solution.” The authorities in India and Pakistan do not want to settle down the Kashmir issue. Rather they want to play around with the Kashmir conflict to jump over other political stumbling blocks. At the same time the governments in both India and Pakistan have been able to keep up an ultra-nationalistic vigor among their masses by means of the predicament over Kashmir—this is how we can interpret Arundhati Roy’s standpoint regarding Kashmir.

She writes in Azadi, “Kashmir is the real theater of unspeakable violence and moral corrosion that can spin us into violence and nuclear war at any moment.” The glaring Kashmir issue has all the likelihood to destabilize peace and security in South Asia anytime if not properly taken care of by the top functionaries of India and Pakistan.

To quote a few lines from Azadi about capitalism, “Capitalism’s gratuitous wars and sanctioned greed have jeopardized the planet and filled it with refugees. Much of the blame for this rests squarely on the shoulders of the government of the United States. Seventeen years after invading Afghanistan, after bombing it into the Stone Age with the sole aim of toppling the Taliban, the US government is back in talks with the very same Taliban. In the interim it has destroyed Iraq, Libya and Syria.”

Arundhati Roy is a strong denigrator of American neoimperialism by means of which the US leaders impose their repression on third world countries. The US military forces demolished Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya to build up so-called peace but these countries are still stuck in the quagmire of terrorism and instability.  So, the invasion by the United States and its allies on the above countries have made things worse and have made the lives of the ordinary people in these countries more vulnerable. Lots of innocent men, women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan have been killed in the war on terror by the US and its geopolitical sidekicks.

Arundhati Roy’s book Azadi reminds us of a famous saying by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who once said, “Humans are born free but everywhere they are in chains.”

Going back to Mother Mary once again to conclude the article. Mother Mary Comes to Me is a victory lap for an Indian activist and educator like Arundhati Roy who relentlessly fought for a smarter India but most of all it’s a beautiful peek into a fascinating person, told with Arundhati Roy’s adorable stylistic transcendence. This memoir is a treasure for those who are fans of Arundhati Roy and a prodigiously graceful and charming introduction for those unfamiliar with her fictional superiority.


Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury
is a contributor to different
English newspapers and
magazines.