A firebrand writer from India will share the Vancouver Playhouse stage with one of Canada’s most outspoken authors on Wednesday (September 17) evening. The Vancouver Writers Fest will present Arundhati Roy in conversation with Naomi Klein to help promote Roy’s new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me.
The book reveals Roy’s troubled upbringing by a brilliant single mother and educator who often expressed rage at Roy and her older brother.
“She told me many times that she had tried her best to abort me because she didn’t want another child,” Roy told The Current host Matt Galloway on CBC Radio One on September 16.
In the same interview, Roy credited her mother for ensuring there were many books in the home when she was young. This sparked the author’s love of reading. But she revealed that her mother later deeply resented Roy’s fame as a writer.
In the West, Roy is perhaps best known as the Booker Prize–winning author of The God of Small Things, which was her first novel. She is also a searing essayist. This was on display in her 2019 collection My Seditious Heart.
In one 119-page essay called “The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar–Gandhi Debate”, Roy tore into the Mahatma for his support of the caste system. She also highlighted his support of segregating Indian prisoners away from African prisoners when he was living in South Africa.
She also didn’t spare Ambedkar, accusing the esteemed leader of the Dalits of having a colonial mindset when it came to India’s Adivasis (Indigenous people).
Roy acknowledges that her work causes discomfort
Within India, Roy constantly endures criticism for challenging the national orthodoxy about Kashmir and for condemning corporations for cozying up to Hindutva extremism. Recently, she has come under fire for maintaining that the upper-caste Indian state has perpetually waged war against its own citizens in various parts of the country.
In her interview with Galloway, Roy said that people would call her an activist when she started writing about “the dark tunnel that India was entering”—whether that was about nuclear weapons, huge dams, displacement of communities, privatization, or corporatization.
“I said, historically, writers have written about these things,” the author stated. “But now, in this new world where a writer and their books are commodified and supposed to make people comfortable in some ways, the discomfort that my work was causing made people say that’s a separate thing from writing.”
Roy noted that this went on for 20 years, even as she was trudging through forests, speaking with guerillas, and learning about connections between mining and the burning of Indigenous villages. She documented all of this in her 2011 eyewitness account of the Naxalite rebellion, Walking with the Comrades.
“And I say, but this is what writers are supposed to do,” Roy declared on The Current. “Why is it so hard for you to understand that?”
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