Gandhi Lite. - Review - book review

National Review, Feb 7, 2000 by Kanchan Limaye

The Cost of Living, by Arundhati Roy (Modern Library, 126 pp., $11.95)

AMERICANS know Arundhati Roy as the attractive young author of The God of Small Things (1997), an elegantly written first novel about a pair of twins growing up in a village in southern India. As one of a cadre of Indian writers that includes Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Kiran Desai, and Shashi Tharoor, Roy has earned fame in the West by writing about an exoticized East. Her book-an instant popular and critical success-received glowing reviews, winning the U.K.'s prestigious Booker prize and becoming an American bestseller.

As a writer, Roy's great talent lies in spinning lush, lyrical prose about human relations, and thereby drawing out the significance of "small things." One of the novel's central passages depicts the forbidden inter- caste romance between Velutha, a handsome "Untouchable," and Ammu, a factory-owner's daughter: "They knew there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things. They laughed at the ant-bites on each other's bottoms. At clumsy caterpillars sliding off the ends of leaves. At overturned beetles that couldn't right themselves . . . at a particularly devout praying mantis."

Roy's fellow Indians, however, know her not as a darkly ringleted exotic with a gift for musical prose but as their own Emile Zola-a writer- activist whose controversial views are a national scandal and whose progressive political impulses drive her fiction. Roy's taboo-busting portrayal of inter-caste love became a cause celebre in her homeland, actually prompting an offended citizen to sue her. Now the anti- development slant of her new screed, The Cost of Living, has provoked the Indian Supreme Court to consider legal action, and sent enraged Gujaratis marching through the streets on book-burning sprees. It has also made her the latest darling of the anti-American Left.

Comprised of two essays previously published in Indian magazines, The Cost of Living attacks the wasteful follies of internationally financed Third World development. In the first essay, "The Greater Common Good," Roy deplores the many Big Dam projects India has adopted in the 50 years since Independence. In the second, "The End of Imagination," she condemns India's May 1998 detonation of the nuclear bomb. In a way that will no doubt delight her fans, Roy unfurls the lyrical imagery and child's-eye view characteristic of her novel-children

scamper across Indian farmland like "motorized peanuts" and whatnot. But alas, suggestive imagery is no substitute for sound journalism. Roy repeatedly enjoins the reader, "come with me and hear my story," but in place of a narrative ground ed in human experience is cranky fulmination. She throws development statistics at us like a manic pitcher hurling curve balls. Ultimately, The Cost of Living congeals into a verbal mishmash of mystical environmentalism, anti- development rhetoric, and small-is-beautiful musings.

Roy's lack of journalistic skill doesn't invalidate her cause, of course. Big Dams were supposed to irrigate India's cities and enable land to bear new cash crops. Instead, they've displaced 33 million people, most of them illiterate farmers, shepherds, and fisher-folk who depend on the land for their livelihood. The Indian government doesn't bother systematically to find these people new homes, so they seek work as urban laborers or menial servants in dam-builders' houses. Many starve and die. Roy points out indignantly that while the West is convulsed over the future of 1 million Kosovar refugees, 50 times that number have already been displaced in India thanks to these hubristic projects. Nor is India alone: The dams cause wreckage wherever they're builtChina, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, and Guatemala. Roy cites several examples of Big Dam disasters to establish their bad track record-a record the Indian government conceals behind shifting statistics. Though she cramps her argument with tedious passages straight out of an engineering textbook, she concludes eloquently: "To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them of volition. Day by day we are being broken."

Eloquence devolves into raving in Roy's second essay, "The End of Imagination," where she succumbs to the kind of crude anti-American rhetoric that has long been a tired old refrain. "Colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons, they (the West) virtually invented it all," she shrieks. "They have plundered nations, snuffed out civilizations, exterminated entire populations." The very worst of these inventions, the nuclear bomb, "is the most anti-human, antinational, antidemocratic, outright evil thing that man has ever made." Nuclear weapons "pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat-hooks in the base of our brains." In vivid prose Roy conjures a world devastated by nuclear winter: "What shall we do then, those of us who are still alive? Burned and bald and blind and ill, carrying the cancerous carcasses of our children in our arms?"