Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives

Arundhati Roy: Environment and Uneven Form

Arundhati Roy Environment and Uneven Form upamanyu pablo mukherjee I’ve been wondering why it should be that the person who wrote The God of Small Things is called a writer, and the person who wrote the political essays is called an activist? True, The God of Small Things is a work of fiction, but it’s no less political than any of my essays. —Arundhati Roy, “The Ladies Have Feelings, So . . . ,” The Algebra of Infinite Justice For most critics and commentators, the phenomenal global success of Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize–winning debut novel, The God of Small Things, is largely due to Roy’s deft use of literary style that spins a moving tale of lost childhood innocence and doomed love. As a result, “Roy theauthor”isfrequentlyseenasadifferentcreatureto“Roytheactivist,” who is perhaps best known for her flamboyant and committed opposition to the Narmada Dam project in the Indian states of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.1 Roy herself, however, in numerous interviews and essays, has expressed her irritation with this formula that neatly separates her literary labor from her “green” politics. But with very few exceptions , her insistence on the essentially political nature of her novel has not been taken with sufficient seriousness. Where it has, the discussion has been limited to her representation of Indian caste politics and her misrepresentations of leftist political history of Kerala (Ahmad 103–11). While there is much of value in these criticisms that do make an effort to read Roy politically, as someone like Aijaz Ahmad does, in this essay I suggest that a proper engagement with Roy’s novel needs to incorporate a concept of the environmental into those of the historical and political. This is so because for Arundhati Roy, there can be no separation between the political and the environmental. In contrast to the still-entrenched dogma that sees human politics as a part of the world of “culture” and the environment as being synonymous to that of 18 upamanyu pablo mukherjee “nature,” Roy belongs to the radical school of thinking that sees politics and environment, “nature” and “culture” as necessarily and mutually interpenetrated. For her, any serious political and cultural consideration is thus always already environmental, although of course such a consideration can be progressive or regressive. Schematically speaking then, my argument may be presented thus: Arundhati Roy’s literary style, form,andsubjectaredeeplyartisticresponsestothehistoricallyspecific condition of uneven development in India, a condition that cannot be properly understood without considering the environmental history of the region; so, a proper critical response to Roy’s art must combine aesthetic , political/historical, and environmental approaches in such a way that these categories appear in their real, mutually interpenetrated condition ; finally, the full charge of most, if not all, of the cultural products of what is known as the postcolonial world cannot be felt if our critical methods continue to insist on separating these categories and creating disciplinary boundaries on that basis. Uneven Style A dominant theme in the critical reception of Roy’s novel has been its alleged stylistic unevenness that has somewhat paradoxically drawn both negative and positive comments. Thus, Amar Nath Prasad talks about Roy’s omniscient third-person narrator who is “possessed of his/ her own consciousness which gives shape to the linguistic expression and unconventional words and phrases, syntax and structure. . . . As a resultwehavebrokensentences,illogicalstatements,unrestrictedsprinkling of italics, bizarre phrases, ungrammatical constructions, unconventional rhythm” (214–15). Similarly, M. P. Sinha has noted the juxtaposition of interior monologues with the dramatic and a narrator who is “sometimes a young girl of seven or mostly, a young woman of thirtyone and occasionally a person who, knows everything but is Rahel neither at seven nor at thirty-one” (15). While making such assessments, what these critics have in mind are passages such as this from The God of Small Things: “Now,ifyou’llkindlyholdthisforme,”theOrangedrinkLemondrink Man said, handing Estha his penis through his soft white muslin dhoti, “I’ll get you your drink. Orange? Lemon?” Estha held it because he had to. “Orange? Lemon?” the Man said. “Lemonorange?” arundhati roy 19 “Lemon, please,” Estha said politely. He got a cold bottle and a straw. So he held a bottle in one hand and a penis in the other. Hard, hot, veiny. Not a moonbeam. . . . “Good,” the Orangedrink Lemondrink man said. “Excellent.” His hand closed tighter over Estha’s. Tight and sweaty. And faster still. Fast faster fest Never let it rest...