Know all about the Novelist Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian novelist, essayist and activist who focuses on issues related to social justice and economic inequality. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays. Her writings on various social, environmental and political issues have been a subject of major controversy in India.

For her work as an activist, she received the Cultural Freedom Prize awarded by the Lannan Foundation in 2002.

Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, India, to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother, the women's rights activist Mary Roy, and a Bengali father, Ranjit Roy, a tea planter by profession.

She spent her childhood in Aymanam in Kerala, and went to school at Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by the Lawrence School, Lovedale, in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. She then studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, where she met her first husband, architect Gerard da Cunha.

Roy met her second husband, filmmaker Pradip Krishen, in 1984, and played a village girl in his award-winning movie Massey Sahib. Until made financially stable by the success of her novel The God of Small Things, she worked various jobs, including running aerobics classes at five-star hotels in New Delhi. Roy is a cousin of prominent media personality Prannoy Roy, the head of the leading Indian TV media group NDTV,. She lives in New Delhi.

Early in her career, Roy worked for television and movies. She wrote the screenplays for "In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones" (1989), a movie based on her experiences as a student of architecture, directed by her current husband, and Electric Moon (1992); she also appeared as a performer in the first. Roy attracted attention in 1994 when she criticised Shekhar Kapur's film Bandit Queen, based on the life of Phoolan Devi. In her film review titled, 'The Great Indian Rape Trick', she questioned the right to "restage the rape of a living woman without her permission," and charged Kapur with exploiting Devi and misrepresenting both her life and its meaning.

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati's statement on Kashmir issue:

"When I was in Kashmir.. what broke my heart on the street of Srinagar was when people say "Nanga Bhukha Hindustan, Jaan Se Pyara Pakistan" and I said no because "Nanga Bhukha Hindustan" is with you, and if you are fighting for a just society then you must align yourself with powers and here are people who have fought their lives opposing Indian state....You have to look beyond stone-pelting and how the state is using people. ...You have to know your enemy and you have to be able to respond by aligning tactically, intelligently, locally or internationally."

Arundhati Roy