Translations of Arundhati Roy's "Ahimsa", "Come September" & "Confronting Empire"

Abstract

Arundhati Roy, the famous Indian author and a prominent critic of imperialism, was born on 24 November, 1961 in Shillong, Meghalaya in India, and grew up in Kerala. She studied at the School of Planning and Architecture of New Delhi. Her mother was Mary Roy, a women's rights activist and a Syrian Christian from the state of Kerala, whose court case changed the inheritance laws in favor of women. Her father was a Bengali tea planter who left the family when she was only two. Her mother's influence is very important in Roy's life; something that we know from many of her interviews she has given in different newspapers, TV channels, journals and websites. Her most famous work, as an author, is The God of Small Things, the only novel she wrote. It won her the prestigious Booker prize in 1997. Before she became famous for her novel, she struggled a lot and had to do various jobs to earn her bread and butter, such as selling cakes in Goa beach, taking aerobics classes in five star hotel and writing screenplays and acting in movies. The movies in which she acted are In which Annie Gives It Those Ones (she also wrote its screenplays), Massey Sahib and Electric Moon. Media attention first came to her in 1994 when she criticized Shekhar Kapoor's film Bandit Queen, in her film review named "The Great Indian Rape Trick", for exploiting Phoolan Devi (particularly in a rape scene) and misrepresenting her life and her significance as she questioned Kapoor's right to "restage the rape of a living woman without her permission". The controversy regarding this review at last went to court