The rubber-producing area of Kottayam, in the Indian state of Kerala, truly comes alive in the detailed depictions and sensuous poetics of Arundhati Roy’s Booker Award-winning first novel, The God Of Small Things. So much so, I’ve been encouraged to learn more about the area. In southwest India facing the Arabian Sea, the state has over 18 million residents, and one of the world’s only democratically elected Communist governments.
“I just do what I do you know. I don’t believe that just because I’ve written a book I have to write another ten books, or just because I’ve written a screenplay I have to carry on doing that. Sometimes something is a book; and sometimes a screenplay or…something else. I think that sometimes we are just sort of put into these categories, and we don’t think about it, we just keep running on those tracks.” -Arundhati Roy, when asked if she was working on her next book
One of the things she “just does” (and quite well, I might add) is anti-Imperial journalism.