Excerpted with permission from Twilight Prisoners by Siddhartha Deb, published by Westland Books.
The apartment where I met [Arundhati] Roy in July occupies the topmost floor of a three-story house and has all the trappings of an upper-class home—a sprawl of surrounding lawn, a high fence, and a small elevator. There are few signs of her dissenter status: the stickers on her door (‘We have to be very careful these days because …’); the books in the living room (Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano); and, particularly unusual in the Indian context, the absence of servants (Roy lives entirely alone). Perhaps what is most telling is how Roy ended up in this house, which she used to ride past every day on her way to work, on a bicycle rented for a rupee.
Roy was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in 1959 in Shillong, a small hill town in the northeastern fringes of India. Her mother, Mary, was from a close-knit community of Syrian Christians in Kerala. Her father, Rajib, was a Bengali Hindu from Calcutta, a manager of a tea plantation near Shillong, and an alcoholic. The marriage didn’t last long, and when Roy was two, she and her brother, Lalith, a year and a half older, returned to Kerala with their mother. Unwelcome at the family home, they moved into a cottage owned by Roy’s maternal grandfather in Ooty, in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu.
‘Then there are a lot of horrible stories,’ Roy said and began to laugh. ‘My mother was very ill, a severe asthmatic. We thought she was dying. She would send us into town with a basket, and the shopkeepers would put food in the basket, mostly just rice with green chillies.’ The family remained there until Roy was five, defying attempts by her grandmother and uncle to turn them out of the house (inheritance laws among Syrian Christians heavily favoured sons). Eventually, Roy’s mother moved back to Kerala and started a school on the premises of the local Rotary Club.
As the child of a single mother, Roy was ill at ease in the conservative Syrian Christian community. She felt more at home among the so-called lower castes or Dalits, who were kept at a distance by both Christians and upper-caste Hindus.
Siddhartha Deb
Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Decline of India
Westland Books, 2024
‘Much of the way I think is by default,’ she said. ‘Nobody paid enough attention to me to indoctrinate me.’ By the time she was sent to Lawrence, a boarding school founded by a British Army officer (motto: ‘Never Give In’), it was perhaps too late for indoctrination. Roy, who was ten, says the only thing she remembers about Lawrence was becoming obsessed with running. Her brother, who heads a seafood-export business in Kerala, recalls her time there differently. ‘When she was in middle school, she was quite popular among the senior boys,’ he told me, laughing. ‘She was also a prefect and a tremendous debater.’
Roy concedes that boarding school had its uses. ‘It made it easier to light out when I did,’ she said. The child of what was considered a disreputable marriage and an even more disgraceful divorce, Roy was expected to have suitably modest ambitions. Her future prospects were summed up by the first college she was placed in; it was run by nuns and offered secretarial training. At sixteen, Roy instead moved to Delhi to study at the School of Planning and Architecture.
Roy chose architecture because it would allow her to start earning money in her second year, but also out of idealism. In Kerala, she met the British-born Indian architect Laurie Baker, known for his sustainable, low-cost buildings, and was taken with the idea of doing similar work. But she soon realized she wouldn’t learn about such things at school. ‘They just wanted you to be like a contractor,’ Roy said, still indignant. She was grappling, she said, with questions to which her professors didn’t seem to have answers: ‘What is your sense of aesthetic? Whom are you designing for? Even if you’re designing a home, what is the relationship between men and women assumed in that? It just became bigger and bigger. How are cities organized? Who are laws for? Who is considered a citizen? This coalesced into something very political for me by the end of it.’
For her final project, Roy refused to design a building and instead wrote a thesis, ‘Postcolonial Urban Development in Delhi’. ‘I said: “Now I want to tell you what I’ve learned here. I don’t want you to tell me what I’ve learned here.”’ Roy drew sustenance from the counterculture that existed among her fellow students, which she would represent years later in the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989). She wrote, designed, and appeared in it—an elfin figure with a giant Afro playing the character of Radha, who gives up architecture to become a writer but drowns before completing her first novel.
By this time, Roy had broken off contact with her family. Without money to stay in the student hostel, she moved into a nearby slum with her boyfriend, Gerard da Cunha. (They pretended to be married in deference to the slum’s conservative mores.) ‘It’s one thing to be a young person who decides to slum it,’ Roy said. ‘For me, it wasn’t like that. There was nobody. There was no cuteness about it. That was my university, that period when you think from the point of view of absolute vulnerability. And that hasn’t left me.’
After graduation, she briefly lived with da Cunha, in Goa, where he was from, but they broke up, and she returned to Delhi. She got a job at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, and met Pradip Krishen, an independent filmmaker who offered Roy the female lead in Massey Sahib (1985), a film set in colonial India in which Roy played a goatherd. Roy and Krishen, who later married, collaborated on subsequent projects, including ‘Bargad’, a twenty- six-part television series on India’s independence movement that was never completed, as well as two feature films, Annie and Electric Moon (1992).
Arundhati Roy in ‘Massey Sahib’. Photo: X/@mubiindia
Krishen’s background could not have been more different from Roy’s. A Balliol scholar and former history professor, Krishen, a widower, lived with his parents and two children in a sprawling house in the posh Chanakyapuri neighbourhood. When Roy joined him, they moved to a separate apartment upstairs. Roy immersed herself in Delhi’s independent-filmmaking world. The movies’ progressive themes appealed to her, but it was a world dominated by the scions of elite families, and it soon came to seem out of touch and insular to her. She spent more and more time teaching aerobics, to earn her own money, and hanging out with artists she met in school.
She had already begun work on her novel when Bandit Queen, a film based on the life of the female bandit Phoolan Devi, was released. Devi was a low-caste woman who became a famous gang leader and endured gang rape and imprisonment. Roy was incensed by the way the film portrayed her as a victim whose life was defined by rape instead of rebellion. ‘When I saw the film, I was infuriated, partly because I had grown up in Kerala, being taken to these Malayalam films, where in every film—every film—a woman got raped,’ Roy said. ‘For many years, I believed that all women got raped. Then I read in the papers how Phoolan Devi said it was like being raped again. I read the book the film was based on and realized that these guys had added their own rapes … I thought, You’ve changed India’s most famous bandit into history’s most famous rape victim.’ Roy’s essay on the film, ‘The Great Indian Rape Trick’, published in the now-defunct Sunday magazine, eviscerated the makers of Bandit Queen, pointing out that they never even bothered to meet Phoolan Devi or to invite her to a screening.
The piece alienated many of the people Roy worked with. Krishen, who gives the impression of a flinty loyalty towards Roy even though the couple split up, says it was seen as a betrayal in the tight-knit film circles of Delhi. For Roy, it was a lesson in how the media worked. ‘I watched very carefully what happened to Phoolan Devi,’ she said. ‘I saw how the media can just excavate you and leave a shell behind. And I was lucky to learn from that. So when my turn came, the barricades were up.’
