The Other India 2 - 'The Shape of the Beast' by Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is a great writer. She has the ability to use prose to transport you, make you empathize, live somewhere else for some time.





'The Shape of the Beast' conversations with Arundhati Roy is a great read.





I really liked the book but I just can't get over a particular paragraph. It is like when you have a cavity in a tooth. Your tongue gravitates to it all the time. You cannot think of anything else. The rest of your dental equipment might be perfect, but that becomes immaterial. The one who is not just nags you no end. It is irrational and even unfair. But you can't help it.





And before that we discuss that there is Speaker K. Radhakrishnan. Radhakrishnan is the first dalit speaker of the Kerala assembly. Softspoken and young (for a politician that is) Radhakrishnan is one of the most likable characters in Kerala politics. Recently he gave an interview, discussing everything from his early life, when he owned only a single pair of clothes every year, to activism and politics. Here is an extract (translated).





" (Implying that) Just the Adivasis (should) keep their 'originality' while everyone else moves forward with the times is making them show case pieces."





Urbanization ,change in customs and 'traditions' are all part of human evolution. Have always been. Roy, unfortunately, does not seem to have done a study of the cultures, backgrounds, prejudices and outlooks of the dispossessed whom she wants to defend. As a polemicist, she can afford to do that unlike Radhakrishnan who as the SC/ST development minister in the previous left government had to deal with the nitty gritties of making the policies to help the downtrodden.





Okay, Here is what Roy says.



"I saw a news report about two adivasi girls getting married to each other. And the whole village was saying: If that's what they want, it's fine. They had this ceremony, with all the rituals and customs, and they let them get married. That's a moment of magic. It reveals their level of modernity, of their sophistication. Of their beauty."





Selectively extracting a single incident and using it to romanticize adivasi life is patronizing to say the least. Painting the adivasis as icons of liberalism who allow two of their lesbian daughters to marry each other is intellectually dishonest. It is a known historical fact that most tribal societies including the ones in India practice stringent marriage laws for preserving their tribal solidarity and any act which goes against that is the shortest route to exclusion with no chance of appeal. There is no doubt that more than a few adivasi customs exist which impinge on individual rights and are remnants of the past. As there are in Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Oriental, western, middle eastern, whatever backgrounds and cultures.





Now that I have got around that tooth, here is the a great description that the author herself has given about her own celebrated first book in one of the interviews.





" The God of Small things is a book connects the very smallest things to the very biggest. Whether it's the dent that a baby spider makes on the surface of water in a pond or the quality of moonlight on a river or how history and politics intrude into your life, your house, your bedroom, your bed, into the most intimate relationships between people - parents and children, siblings and so on. If you lose these connections, everything becomes noise, meaningless, a career plan to be on track for tenure."