Reconstructing the excluded voices: The politics of resistance in Arundhati Roy’s non-fictional essays

Abstract

Arundhati Roy got phenomenal success with her maiden Booker Prize winning novel, The God of Small Things (1997) and became the poster child of an emerging power. However, the interesting thing is that instead of exploring the genre further she soon fused her ‘aesthetic sensibility’ with the ‘political entity’ and became an author-activist, a vigorous voice of the global dissent. This transformation - from a literary sensation to a polarizing polemist - is largely due to her painful consciousness of a world where ruthless exploitation of the poor is done in the name of progress and development. And thereby, the obligation she felt as a writer to forge an alliance – a direct link between the personal and the public, between art and activism, first, to promote cultural awareness of the exploitation and marginalization of the poor people by providing physical evidence of the civil and terrestrial injustices inflicted upon them; and then to narrativize the possible methods of resistance and the subsequent reconstruction by contesting and re-shaping the ‘western ideologies of development’ pursued at present. The present study, therefore, investigates the interface between the discourses of resistance viz Marxism, Feminism, Post Colonialism and Subaltern Studies in the non-fictional essays of Roy as her generic mobility, her art and activism, amalgamates within her narrative the multiple minoritarian perspectives. As such, this research paper consists of five chapters. The introduction serves as the necessary backdrop for the rationale of this research work. It traces the evolution and transformation of Arundhati Roy from the much-hyped prestigious Booker Prize winner to an author-activist whose sole concern is to narrate the untold and unheard tales about the pathetic plight of the socially excluded people from the multiple minoritarian perspectives. The first chapter concerns Reconstruction and Roy’s role in reconstructing the excluded voices by confronting the dominant and oppressive structures on both, the global and the local level. The second chapter, ‘Reaction Against Environmental Injustice’ penetrates into the representations of eco-consciousness of Roy’s texts from an eco-critical standpoint. It deals with the issues of environment – its exploitation and degradation due to the pursuance of the flawed developmental policies of corporate globalization and the terrible plight of a large number of people displaced and dispossessed to make room for the mega projects. The third chapter, ‘Resistance Against Neo-Imperial Injustice’ relates and limits to the injustices inflicted upon the laymen by neo-imperialism that operates through the overt and covert means of corporate globalization and neo-liberalism. An in-depth analysis of Roy’s texts has been done to understand how she problematizes the issues of corporate globalization, neo-liberalism and the catastrophic effect of America’s global war on terror. The fourth chapter, ‘State Sponsored Communal Violence and Genocide: A Critique’ emphasizes on communal violence and genocide - both in India and abroad – to understand how they are used by the power as effective tools of hegemonic expansion. The fifth chapter, ‘A Review of Maoist Insurrection’ critiques at length the impact of India’s New Economic Policy upon the tribal heart-land of India, the Maoist insurrection and the subsequent launching of Operation Green Hunt – fuelling a serious internal crisis in the country. The conclusion is based on the findings and inferences that are derived and wrested from the research work of her non-fictional endeavours.