24th November 1961: Arundhati Roy, Indian writer and activist, was born

YB WEB DESK. Dated: 11/24/2021 12:58:52 PM

Man Booker Prize-winning author and political activist Arundhati Roy was born on November 24, 1961, in Shillong, Meghalaya. Her father, Ranjit Roy, was a tea planter, and mother, Mary, a women’s rights activist from Kerala. Roy spent her childhood in Kerala’s Aymanam village, a place which she would revisit in her acclaimed debut novel, The God of Small Things. Speaking about the ways in which her mother influenced her, Roy said in an interview to The Progressive magazine in April 2001: “I sometimes think I was perhaps the only girl in India whose mother said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t get married.’… She is like someone who strayed off the set of a Fellini film. She’s completely nuts. But to have seen a woman who never needed a man, it’s such a wonderful thing, to know that that’s a possibility, not to suffer.” After her school education, Roy studied architecture at Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture. She then played the role of a village girl in the critically acclaimed film, ‘Massey Sahib’, which was directed by her husband, Pradip Krishen. Her involvement with films continued for several years, and she wrote screenplays for ‘In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones’ and ‘Electric Moon’, both directed by Krishen. The former, a part autobiographical account of her experiences at the School of Planning and Architecture, won her a National Film Award for best screenplay. Roy did other jobs too, including teaching aerobics at five-star hotels in Delhi. One of her earlier writings which was noticed and generated a lot of debate, was an article titled ‘The Great Indian Rape Trick’ in which she slammed the makers of the 1994 film Bandit Queen, which was based on the life of the dacoit Phoolan Devi. “If it were a fictional film, where rape was being examined as an issue, if it were a fictional character that was being raped, it would be an entirely different issue. I would be glad to enter into an argument about whether showing the rape was necessary, whether or not it was ‘exploitative’,” she wrote. “ Bandit Queen…has nothing intelligent to say about the subject beyond the fact that Rape is degrading and humiliating. Dwelling on the Degradation and the Humiliation is absolutely essential for the commercial success of the film. Without it, there would be no film.

 

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