My Seditious Heart, is an ucompromising collection of essays that collects the work of a two decade period when Arhndhati Roy devoted herself to the political essay as a way of opening up space for justice, rights and freedoms in an increasingly hostile environment. Taken together, these essays trace her twenty year journey from the Booker Prize winning The God of Small Things to the extraordinary The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: a journey marked by compassion, clarity and courage." Radical and readable, they speak always in defence of the collective, of the individual and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military and government elites." said the publisher in a statement.
When taken together these essays trace Roy's journey from her first book to her last "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness"- a journey marked by compassion, clarity and courage, it added.
Since her debut novel she has concentrated her writing on political issues.A vocal, visible, and courageous activist, who often takes on unpopular, underwritten causes and is unafraid to challenge the ruling elite. She has campaigned against the Indian nuclear weapons program, in response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a powerful 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 also spoke out against the barbarity of her government’s repression of the Kashmiri and Naxalite insurgencies, and the environmental and human costs of India’s hydroelectric dam projects, and also opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Born in northeast India, Roy was the daughter of a tea plantation manager and a women’s rights activist. When aged two, her parents divorced and Roy’s mother took her young children back to her hometown of Kerala, in south India. At 16, she left the south for Delhi where she lived in a small tin-roofed hut and sold empty beer bottles.
Her first novel published in 1997.told the devastating story of twins Rahel and Estha and in doing so, examined India’s caste system, its history and social mores. It explored the ways in which the ‘Untouchable’ caste is derogated and ostracised from society, and the consequences of breaching the caste’s longstanding codes. The narrative deftly illustrated how the personal is indeed political.
Her political campaigning has caused clashes with the state on a number of occasions. In 2002, she served a “symbolic imprisonment” of one day due to her opposition to the contentious Narmada dam project, the largest river development scheme in India which was set to potentially displace 1.5 million people at great environmental cost. In 2010, she faced threat of arrest, and charges of sedition, after she remarked that Kashmir, a disputed territory, was not an integral part of India. In 2015, she received a contempt notice from the Bombay High Court on writing an article in support of Professor Saibaba, a severely disabled academic at Delhi University, imprisoned for ‘anti-national activities’.
Among her prestigious awards, she is the recipient of the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award (2002), the Sydney Peace Prize (2004) for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence and the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing (2011). In 2003 she was awarded special recognition as a Woman of Peace at the Global Exchange Human Rights Awards in San Francisco. In June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice', but declined to accept it. Roy came out with her second work of fiction "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" in 2017 after a hiatus of 20 years. She lives in Delhi, India
In constant conversation with the themes and setting of her novels, the essays in this collection form a near-unbroken memoir of Arundhati Roy's journey as both a writer and citizen of both India and the world, from 'End of Imagination' which begins the book to "My Sedititious Heart', with which it ends. She presents interlocking network of ideas, attitudes and ideologies that emerge from the contemporary social and the political world andsteps into "the very heart of insurrections" raging against globalization, privatization, and neoliberal capitalism in India and around the world, and the abuses of power that pit economic profit over human lives. She asks her readers to emulate the rebels whose resistance she chronicles to;
"find the courage to dream. To reclaim romance. The romance of believing in justice, in freedom, and in dignity. For everybody," she writes. "We have to make common cause, and to do this we need to understand how this big old machine works—who it works for and who it works against. Who pays, who profits."
These essays, are united by Roy's unflinching assessment of the violence and inequality around her, and her search for alternatives to the world we've inherited. Roy reminds us that silence and inaction are choices. Trying to crawl out of the moral "crevasse" of the world as it exists is also a choice
These studies are trenchant, still relevant and frequently alarming. Roy reveals some hard truths about modern India and makes powerful analytical forays into American and British foreign policy, aid, imperialism and attitudes. Roy's essays about the environmental and human costs of late-capitalist development read as dispatches from a recent past that will also be our future. Climate change threatens to displace more than 140 million people by 2050—another example of the "fascist math" Roy describes operating during the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. The project's planners dispassionately recommended displacing millions to dangerous urban slums where they had no means of sustaining themselves and might well perish. The danger of "fascist math," Roy argues, is that it "strangles stories ... [and] bludgeons detail." It blunts our ability to empathize with those who bear the brunt of environmental injustice—a category that will soon encompass many more of us.
Roy writes in her foreword that “Not one iota of my anger has diminished” since the time of writing these essays. Yet they do not come across as angry, instead, their impact comes from their precision, research and damningly clear reportage. Roy refuses to accept the inevitability of development, of globalization, of fascism, of sacrifice by the poorest people for "the greater common good." Instead, she argues:
"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay seige on it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music our literature, our stubborness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling -- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this:We be many, and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
From the shadows of our grotesque world ,on quiet days, we too can hear another world breathing. I thank Arundhati Roy for her rebellious political conscience, and for delivering weighty truths and her willingness to discuss the difficult and those that have been previously silenced, and continuing to speak truth to power and for reminding us that our world is still worth fighting for. Her voice is vital, we need many more writers like her, and quite frankly the urgency of her message is simply impossible to ignore.
