Reference Publications

Power Politics - Mixed Media - Book Review

New Internationalist, Oct, 2002

by Arundhati Roy (South End Press, ISBN 0 89608 668 2)

Since she won the Booker Prize in 1997 with her splendid novel, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy has become a severe annoyance to some very important people. Her involvement in the Narmada Dam protests has led to sneering references to her as a 'writer-activist'. She was jailed for one day for contempt and is contesting a number of trumped-up charges in various parts of India. In an intemperate rant against what they called 'that woman', the Indian Supreme Court accused her of' contumacious violation... vicious stultification and vulgar debunking (which) pollutes the stream of justice'. An object lesson there, I think, to all budding writer-activists!

Power Politics brings together Arundhati Roy's recent essays. In five pithy and elegant pieces, she skewers India's political elite and their complicity in the barbaric neo-colonialism that is globalization. From the ruinous privatization of India's power supply to the environmental and social disaster of the Madhya Pradesh water projects, she exposes the compact between greedy corporations and venal bureaucrats.

The concluding pieces, 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice' and 'War is Peace' are sober and clear-eyed reflections on the 11 September suicide attacks and the US reaction to them: a presumptuous declaration of an endless, inchoate 'war on terror'.

Roy concludes by asking if, in the light of the World Trade Center and Afghanistan, we have 'forfeited our right to dream'? She resolutely reasserts that right by her assiduous attention to her responsibilities as a writer and a citizen: 'asking, in ordinary language, the public question and demanding, in ordinary language, the public answer'.

RATING: ****

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