My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-fiction ★★★★★

A quintessential read for Indians. In her inimitable prose, Arundhati Roy lays bare the Indian government's (BJP and Congress) authoritarian tendencies and exposes the sham that democracy is as practiced in India. Her seminal works include essays on the Narmada Sagar dam, her year spent with the Maoist rebels, the Kashmir occupation, and her exposé of Gandhi's views on caste and his differences with Ambedkar.

You may live outside India and detest her while claiming to love India, but she at least lives in India while fighting the good fight. Jailed and threatened with lawsuits and physical violence, she continues to voice her dissent. Her prose is crisp, clear, and evocative. She is a citizen that most countries should yearn for.

PS. If I had to quibble, I wish the publishers could've chosen an Indian to narrate the audiobook. The text is replete with Indian names and terms, which the narrator mangles. If they wanted to appeal to a global audience, they could've chosen an Indian-origin with an American accent who could also get the Indian pronunciations right. There are plenty of us.

Edition Read

• Edition Type: Paperback
• Number of Pages: 1000 pages
• Date First Published: June 4, 2019
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• ISBN10: 1608466736
• ASIN: 1608466736
• Language: English

Description

Bookended by her two award-winning novels, The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), My Seditious Heart collects the work of a two-decade period when Arundhati Roy devoted herself to the political essay as a way of opening up space for justice, rights, and freedoms in an increasingly hostile world. Taken together, the essays speak in a voice of unique spirit, marked by compassion, clarity, and courage. Radical and superbly readable, they speak always in defense of the collective, of the individual and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military, and governmental elites.

Source: GoodReads

Notable Highlights

“Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India

“Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children’s children. Of everything we love. We have to reach within ourselves and find the strength to think. To fight.”

“corruption. Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In the future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative, too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality or in creating yet another power structure that people will have to defer to?”

“If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low, down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains, and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains, and the rivers protect them.”

“Reading the papers, it was often hard to tell when people were referring to Viagra (which was competing for second place on the front pages) and when they were talking about the nuclear bomb

“If there is a nuclear war, our foes will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the earth herself. The very elements

“In 1937 Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians: I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

“Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.”

“It’s being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas. We’re being asked to believe that the US marines are actually on a feminist mission. (If so, will their next stop be America’s military ally Saudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: in India there are some pretty reprehensible social practices, against ‘Untouchables’, against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should they be bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad, and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Is that how women won the vote in the United States? Or how slavery was abolished? Can we win redress for the genocide of the millions of Native Americans, upon whose corpses the United States was founded, by bombing Santa Fe?”

“In the lane behind my house, every night I walk past road gangs of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber-optic cables to speed up our digital revolution. In the bitter winter cold, they work by the light of a few candles.It’s as though the people of India have been rounded up and loaded onto two convoys of trucks (a huge big one and a tiny little one) that have set off resolutely in opposite directions. The tiny convoy is on its way to a glittering destination somewhere near the top of the world. The other convoy just melts into the darkness and disappears.”

“To understand this, you must try and put Rape into its correct perspective. The Rape of a nice woman is one thing. The rape of a nasty/perceived-to-be-im-moral woman is quite another. It wouldn’t be quite so bad. You wouldn’t feel quite so sorry. Perhaps you wouldn’t feel sorry at all. Any policeman will tell you that. Whenever the police are accused of custodial rape, they immediately set to work. Not to prove that she wasn’t raped. But to prove that she wasn’t nice. To prove that she was a loose woman. A prostitute. A divorcee. Or an Elopee

“The other tactic the BJP and its media partners have used to silence people is an absurd false binary

“Anybody who criticizes the corporate takeover of Adivasi land is called an antinational “sympathizer” of the banned Maoists. Sympathy is a crime, too. In television studios, guests who try to bring a semblance of intelligence into the debate are shouted down and compelled to demonstrate their loyalty to the nation. This is a war against people who have barely enough to eat one square meal a day. What particular brand of nationalism does this come under? What exactly are we supposed to be proud of? Our lumpen nationalists don’t seem to understand that the more they insist on this hollow sloganeering, the more they force people to say “Bharat Mata ki Jai!” and to declare that “Kashmir is an integral part of India,” the less sure of themselves they sound. The nationalism that is being rammed down our throats is more about hating another country

“Many years later, this idea has trickled down to the impoverished countryside of Bangladesh when Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank brought microcredit to starving peasants with disastrous consequences. The poor of the subcontinent have always lived in debt, in the merciless grip of the local village usurer

“Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons? After all, the economies of Europe, the United States, and Israel depend hugely on their weapons industry. It’s the one thing they haven’t outsourced to China.”

These are popular quotes sourced from Goodreads readers.