By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS,
Kathmandu : Booker prize winner and social activist Arundhati Roy walked with comrades of a different kind in Kathmandu Monday on her maiden visit to the Himalayan republic.However, it was not the Maoist party of Nepal with whom she came to show solidarity though two top Maoist leaders are her personal friends, one of them, former physical planning and works minister Hisila Yami, being her room mate during her days as a student of Delhi School of Architecture.
The 51-year-old was attending and participating in “Count me in”, the three-day conference hosted by the New Delhi-headquartered feminist human rights organisation CREA to give a voice to marginalised people in South Asia – the differently abled, sex workers, sexual minorities and people with HIV/AIDS.
Roy, whose debut novel “The god of small things” won the Booker in 1997, told a mesmerised audience – including people from Indonesia, the Philippines and Nigeria – she was “very, very touched and honoured to be counted in” though at times exclusion was a blessing.
Roy, whose activism has included opposing high dams, nuclear tests and the crackdown by the Indian government on the burgeoning Maoist movement in India, said the Indian government and a few corporate houses were designing massive sets of policies designed to exclude the majority of people.
The latest measure was the unique identity card that the Indian government is mulling making mandatory for all citizens.
“In India, 800 million people live on less than Rs.20 a day,” Roy said. “… This is not due to a natural disaster but created by policy…There’s a huge civil war going on, millions of people have been displaced.”
Roy, whose bestselling fiction was modelled on her family life in a conservative village in Kerala, described with wry humour how she had known exclusion firsthand when she was a child.
“My mother belonged to the Syrian Christian community, who are very traditional, very conservative and quite boring,” she said. “She broke two taboos: she committed the cardinal crime of getting married outside the community and then she got divorced. And of course there was no money.”
When Mary Roy returned to the village with her son and daughter, the children were “completely banished” by the community.
“The god of small things” also broke taboos about love and sex with the depiction of a relationship between an upper caste woman and a Dalit and an enigmatic love between brother and sister.
Roy chose to read out a passage from the book that dwells on a recurring theme and made her an instant icon of the sexual minorities: who is to decide who we should love and how and how much.
Roy said she would like to reserve her judgment on Nepal’s Maoists, who had fought a 10-year war, then signed a peace pact, took part in elections and joined the government.
“The Maoist movement in Nepal is at a very crucial stage now,” she aid.
“They face a big challenge.
“When people come to power, they (all) tend to start privatisation and build dams.”
(Sudeshna Sarkar can be contacted at [email protected])