Azadi
Description
From the author of My Seditious Heart and The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness, comes a new and pressing dispatch from the heart of the crowd and the solitude of a writer's desk.
The chant of Azadi!--Urdu for "Freedom!"--is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kasmir against what Kasmirris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically it has also become the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism. What lies between these two calls for Freedom? A chasm or a bridge?
In this series of penetrating essays on politics and literature, Arundhati Roy examines this question and challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism.
Roy writes of the existential threat posed to Indian democracy by an emboldened Hindu nationalism, of the internet shutdown and information siege in Kashmir--the most densely militarized zone in the world--and India's new citizenship laws that discriminate against Muslims and marginalized communities and could create a crisis of statelessness on a scale previously unknown. The essays include mediations on language, public as well as private, and the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times.
Azadi, she warns, hangs in the balance for us all.
About this Author
ARUNDHATI ROY is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and has been translated into more than forty languages, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017. Roy has also published several works of non-fiction, including The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Listening to Grasshoppers, and Broken Republic. She lives in Delhi.
Reviews
"Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time."
--Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal
"Roy's . . . nonfictional engagement with the conflicts and traumas of a heedlessly globalized world has manifested the virtues of an unflinching emotional as well as political intelligence. . . . In an age of intellectual logrolling and mass-manufactured infotainment, she continues to offer bracing ways of seeing, thinking and feeling."
--Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger
"[Roy is] at her passionate best. . . . The passion and beauty of [Roy's] voice is unabated, but what comes through in [Azadi], too, is a new sense of maturity in both her execution and engagement as she comes to terms with her vocation and the choices she has made. . . . What she has produced, in Azadi, is . . . the outcome of a life of writing from the frontline of solidarity and humanism, and from a writer who is perhaps only now reaching the height of her literary powers."
--The Guardian
"In Azadi too, as in her fiction, Arundhati Roy's writing underlines the importance of specificity, of allowing the reader to look down over a particular issue and notice the power dynamics at play. . . . [H]er prose is so poetic; it always feels like a conversation, never a monologue. She takes us through the grim realities that we live in, and she ends on a vaguely hopeful note, powered by the conviction, the rage and the pain we must feel within."
--The Daily Star
"[Azadi] is an eloquent and scorching indictment of growing authoritarianism and Hindu nationalism. . . . [A] tour de force . . ."
--The i (UK)
"Roy masterfully examines [the] irony [behind the term "Azadi"] and the questions that arise from it by drawing on her expertise as a novelist, and meditating on fiction and the power of 'reimagining the world.'"
--New Statesman
"Azadi is necessary writing."
--Newcity Lit
"Arundhati Roy's Azadi is a collection of essays and speeches describing India's recent descent into totalitarianism that speaks to the heart and the mind. Intelligent and thoughtful and written with empathy, it brings the reality of the situation home in way few other writers can."
--Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"No writer today, in India or anywhere in the world, writes with the kind of beautiful, piercing prose in defense of the wretched of the earth that Roy does. . . . Roy the essayist embodies the legalistic but humanistic ruthlessness of a public defender, the wit and wordplay of a poet, a comrade who takes no injustice as a given."
--Jacobin
"[Roy's] talent is in exposing . . . stories of power and abuse--by governments, corporations, religious communities--with horrific detail. Stunningly, Roy has not become desensitized. Her objective is to make sure we don't, either. . . . Roy's trademark voice is one of urgency, alternatingly pleading and furious, heartbroken and dripping with sarcasm. Anger comes quickly to her, albeit justifiably. . . . The essays in Azadi are piercingly human."
--In These Times
"[A]n amalgam of language, hope, love, fiction and history. . . . The best part of Azadi is its strange ability to shout and scream as well as to whisper softly into our ears. . . . We are on the verge of losing [freedom] in more than figurative ways. Roy's Azadi grabs us by the collar and reminds us of just that."
--The Indian Express
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