New Delhi, July 17: The year before its second nuclear tests, the world’s largest democracy hurled a bomb onto the international stage.
At first, people didn’t realise it was a bomb. It was tiny, looked harmless and took a while to explode. But explode it did and the world’s largest democracy is still reeling.
Or perhaps we should say “democracy”. Perhaps, in fact, we should say “heavily sponsored, TV-friendly spectator sport”.
The bomb, of course, was Arundhati Roy, the fragile-looking beauty from Kerala whose whimsical tale of two-egg twins and pickles, literal and metaphorical, bagged the Booker and set the world on fire. For India, this was confirmation that theirs was a land rich in saleable exports: photogenic, charming and home-grown. No hooded eyes or fatwas here; no unseemly flight to London or New York. Here was glamour, here was grace, here was huge-eyed modesty in a sari.
This was the face of the new India: sophisticated, educated, funny and – did we mention this? – drop-dead gorgeous.
“I have truly known,” wrote Roy the year after her Booker win, “what it means for a writer to feel loved.” She was, she added, “one of the items being paraded in the media’s end-of-the-year National Pride Parade”. I don’t think she would be now. Her comments were made in an essay, “The End of Imagination”, written in August 1998, three months after those nuclear tests.
She had dreamed, she wrote, after her “five minutes” of fame, of growing “old and irresponsible”, eating “mangoes in the moonlight” and maybe writing a couple of “worstsellers” to “see what it felt like”. All this was blown apart. “There can be nothing more humiliating,” she wrote, “for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has already been made.” She did it anyway. She had, she felt, to write about the apocalyptic folly of a government that found displays of nuclear-fuelled nationalism more of a priority than educating its 400 million illiterate inhabitants.
–Agenices