The goddess of big things

The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy

However, while ever a creative writer, she has since devoted her life and, by extension, her pen to the causes of the common man, most notably as a critic of the Narmada dams project with its consequent displacement of millions of people. Those people, who have suffered the tyranny of “compulsory purchase orders”, have been disenfranchised and seen their lands flooded, their protests violently put down, their freedom a myth.

Pandit Nehru said “dams are the temples of modern India.” Grandiose though this sounds from a pillar of the young democracy, “the thing about dams and the struggle against them is that people have to understand that they’re just monuments to corruption and they are undemocratic. They centralise natural resources, snatch them away from people and then redistribute them to a favoured few.” These favoured few seem to drive the “free market” behemoth that is modern India. They, in the form of the Indian government, have made it clear, for instance, that in the matter of the Bhopal gas tragedy they support the outrageously negligent US company Union Carbide over the survivors of the tragedy.