Novels, Portals, and Politics
Another person who appears throughout our book is the writer Arundhati Roy.
First coming to our attention from winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 with the fabulous novel God of Small Things, the Indian author Arundhati Roy has been a major political thinker and author who we have followed ever since. For us thinking mindfully about culture, heritage, and museums, involves realising they are framed within an understanding of the wider culture and politics of society at large, writers such as Arundhati Roy help us to understand those contexts both for museums and well-being.
“If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?”
– Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Although Roy has published a second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, it is her work in non-fiction that has dominated the last few decades. In 2019 most of her essays concerning culture and politics were collected into an amazing single volume book entitled My Seditious Heart. However, the text we most refer to in our book Museums and Well-Being, is not included in that volume but a version does appear in the book Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction. This is the article The Pandemic is a Portal, published in the Financial Times.
“Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet?”
– Arundhati Roy – The Pandemic is a Portal
Consistently an outspoken political critic her work came to prominence within the Alter-Global movement, where her idea that the whisper of a new world could be heard in the movement of movements became a regularly quoted meme, it was during this time she published many books the most influential being War Talk, An Ordinary Persons Guide to Empire, and Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, and almost as a post-script Capitalism: A Ghost Story.
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.”
– Arundhati Roy – War Talk
Roy’s work has principally focused on India and as such she has expressed support for the independence of Kashmir, and for a peaceful settlement with the Naxalites. She was charged with sedition along with separatist Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani and others by Delhi Police for their “anti-India” speech at a 2010 convention on Kashmir: “Azadi: The Only Way”. She remains a vocal critic of Hindutva and Hindu nationalism, and an active anti-Dam activist.
“I soon learned that Dandakaranya, the forest I was about to enter, was full of people who had many names and fluid identities. It was like balm to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with yourself, to become someone else for a while.”
– Arundhati Roy, Walking with The Comrades
To finish this post here’s a 64 minute documentary, not about Arundhati Roy, but about her words… specifically her speech Come September, and its discussion of the war on terror, corporate globalization, justice and the growing civil unrest
& if you’d like to see how we incorporate Arundhati Roy into our book, well you could buy a copy here: https://routledge.pub/Museums-and-Well-being
