The first Indian citizen to win the prestigious booker prize and a million dollar book deal has made Arundhati Roy, a celebrity and a tall literary lioness persona. Now in her late-30s, living in Delhi, Arundhati Roy (One of People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World 1998") grew up in Kerala, in which her award winning novel "The God of Small Things" is set. The novel is a poetic tale of Indian boy-and-girl twins, Estha and Rahel, and their family's tragedies; the story's fulcrum is the death of their 9-year-old half British cousin,Sophie Mol, visiting them on holiday.
Arundhati Roy was born in 1961 in Kerala. Her mother, a Kerala native, was Christian; her father was a Hindu from Bengal. The marriage was unsuccessful, and Roy spent her childhood years in Aymanam with her mother. The influence of these early years permeates her writings, both thematically and structurally.
Roy's mother, who herself was a prominent social activist, founded an independent school and taught her daughter informally. This freedom from intellectual constraint allowed Roy to write, as she puts it acccording to Jon Simmons on his "Arundhati Roy Web", "from within"; the ability to follow her inner voice, rather than having a set of restrictive rules ingrained in her, has been an integral part of her accomplishments as an adult writer.
At age of sixteen Arundhati left home, and eventually enrolled at the Delhi School of Architecture. There she met her first husband, Gerard Da Cunha, a fellow architecture student. Their marriage lasted four years. Both of them did not have great love for architecture, so they quit their profession and went off to Goa. They used to make cake and sell it on the beach to make living. This continued for seven months after which Arundhati returned back to Delhi.
She took a job at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, rented a barsati near the dargah at Nizamuddin and hired a bicycle. One day film director Pradeep Krishen saw her cycling down a street and offered her a small role of tribal girl in the film "Massey Saab". Arundhati Roy accepted the role after initial reservations. She later on married Pradeep Krishen. Meanwhile, Arundhati got a scholarship to go to Italy for eight months to study the restoration of monuments.
In addition to the style of her writing, its subject matter also reflects the cultural texture of her childhood." The deep-seated nature of Roy's activism may also be traced back to her early years, and the rural beauty of the landscape in which she spent them: "I think the kind of landscape that you grew up in, it lives in you. I don't think it's true of people who've grown up in cities so much, you may love building but I don't think you can love it in the way that you love a tree or a river or the colour of the earth, it's a different kind of love. I'm not a very well read person but I don't imagine that that kind of gut love for the earth can be replaced by the open landscape. It's a much cleverer person who grows up in the city, savvy and much smarter in many ways. If you spent your very early childhood catching fish and just learning to be quiet, the landscape just seeps into you. Even now I go back to Kerala and it makes me want to cry if something happens to that place.
Her Words:
She comments that "When I write, I never re-write a sentence because for me my thought and my writing are one thing. It's like breathing, I don't re-breathe a breath... Everything I have - my intellect, my experience, my feelings have been used. If someone doesn't like it, it is like saying they don't like my gall bladder. I can't do anything about it."
Of Kerala she says that "it was the only place in the world where religions coincide, there's Christianity, Hinduism, Marxism and Islam and they all live together and rub each other down...I was aware of the different cultures when I was growing up and I'm still aware of them now. When you see all the competing beliefs against the same background you realise how they all wear each other down.
I am happy that an Indian novelist's narrative is described by New York Times Book Review as " so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple -- that the reader remains enthralled all the way through".
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