Arundhati
Roy (Suzanna Arundhati Roy, born November 24, 1961) is an
Indian novelist and activist. Her First novel "God of
Small Things" has become an international best-seller,
and in October 1997 won the coveted Booker Prize.
 Roy
was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian
mother and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession.
She spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala, schooling in
Corpus Christi. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked
on a bohemian lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin
roof within the walls of Delhi's Feroz shah Kotla and making
a living selling empty bottles. She then proceeded to study
architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she
met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.
Arundhati
met her second husband, filmmaker Pradeep Kishen, in 1984,
and moved into films under his influence. She acted in the
role of a village girl in the award-winning movie Massey Sahib,
and wrote the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives it Those
Ones and Electric Moon. She also wrote the screenplay for
The 'Banyan Tree', a television serial.
Roy
began writing The God of Small Things in 1992 and finished
it in 1996. She received half-a-million pounds in advances,
and rights to the book were sold in twenty-one countries.
The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures
her childhood experiences in Aymanam. Contrary to some assumptions,
Roy is not a twin. This misinformation arose from the fact
that the character of Rahel is based on herself. We see this
in the physical description of the character in her adulthood
and also by some of this character's interactions with her
mother, Ammu.
The
nutshell of the story
The
God of Small Things is about two children, the two-egg twins
Estha and Rahel, and the shocking consequences of a pivotal
event in their young lives, the accidental death-by-drowning
of a visiting English cousin. In magical and poetic language,
the novel paints a vivid picture of life in a small rural
Indian town, the thoughts and feelings of the two small children,
and the complexity and hypocrisy of the adults in their world.
It is also a poignant lesson in the destructive power of the
caste system, and moral and political bigotry in general.
In
response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran,
Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of
the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published
in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded
against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the
central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh
and Gujarat. She has since devoted herself solely to non-fiction
and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as
well as working for social causes.
In
2002, Roy was convicted of contempt of court by the Supreme
Court in New Delhi for accusing the court of attempting to
silence protests against the Narmada Dam Project, but she
received only a symbolic sentence of one day in prison.
Roy
was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May, 2004, for her work
in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.
In
June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq.
 
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