Arundhati Roy awarded the 45th European Prize for Lifetime Achievement: 5 works by the critically acclaimed author

Writer Arundhati Roy. (Photo: Mayank Austen Soofi via Twitter)

Arundhati Roy became the first Indian recipient of the coveted 45th Prix Européen de l’Essai for Lifetime Achievement. The award was announced in June and the ceremony was held on Tuesday in Lausanne, Switzerland. She was given Rs 18 lakh in prize money for the translation of Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction (Hamish Hamilton by Penguin Random House, 2020), Azadi: Liberté, Fascisme, Fiction, which has been translated by Irène Margit and appeared in Gallimard, a leading French publishing group.

The unique thing about the prize is that it’s always awarded to an essayist: Prix Européen de l’Essai. Past winners include Amin Maalouf and Siri Hustvedt. Since 1975, the Lausanne-based Charles Veillon Foundation, which confers the prize, has been recognising literary works that “foster understanding between peoples and unity through the bonds of the spirit”.

According to the jury statement, “Arundhati Roy uses the essay as a form of combat, analysing fascism and the way it is being structured. This is an issue that is increasingly occupying our lives. Her essays offer shelter to a multitude of people. In awarding the prize for her literary work, the jury is also acknowledging the author’s commitment to political action.” Perhaps, through this recognition, publishers in India may recognise and give due attention to the essay form.

In the Introduction to Azadi, Roy expresses how the book’s title came about. For a collection of essays, it was strange for her to blurt out, “A novel” after a thoughtful hesitation to her publisher, Simon Prosser. She writes, “Because a novel gives a writer the freedom to be as complicated as she wants — to move through worlds, languages, and time, through societies, communities, and politics.” Who can know this any better than Roy herself, who has dedicated her life to putting hard-hitting reality and politics in an easy and accessible language?

Roy won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 with her debut novel The God of Small Things. A complex caricature of growing up in a world contrivedly falling apart owing to multiple fractures in a variety of ways it functions, through ...Small Things, Roy invented a new idiom for fiction writing in India. While Salman Rushdie had already refused to explain to the West and had opened up ways to chutney-ify the language, Roy pried open its fault lines and contextualised what it means to live in this new, messy, and corporatised India, something several privileged shied away from articulating.

But it’s her essays that troubled the powerful more than her fiction. Her observant and empathetic tone is closer to that of Joan Didion, a pioneering essay writer herself. It’s interesting to note that both were mesmerised by cinema and were deeply disappointed at having discovered that words didn’t perfectly translate onto the screen. (Both Didion and Roy have noted how their screenplays were different from the final products. ...Small Things happens to be Roy’s indulgent, revenge project, as she wanted to write something that couldn’t be reproduced on the screen.) Unlike Didion, Roy even acted in films.

Trained as an architect, Roy chose to function freewheelingly, producing an array of works across media. Below are five works that reflect the distinctive achievement of Roy as an artist:

Roy (second from right) at the Thought and Truth Under Pressure conference at The Swedish Academy in Sweden in March this year.

The first is a speech she delivered at the Swedish Academy earlier this year at a conference called Thought and Truth Under Pressure. It was published by Lit Hub titled  Approaching Gridlock: Arundhati Roy on Free Speech and Failing Democracy. The principal takeaway of this critical piece is for a fiction writer as she notes how there can be “no fiction without appropriation”, and she did it because of the identity politics at play when we do words and language. She says, “In India, like in other countries, the weaponisation of identity as a form of resistance has become the dominant response to the weaponisation of identity as a form of oppression. Those who have historically been oppressed, enslaved, colonised, stereotyped, erased, unheard and unseen precisely because of our identities — our race, caste, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference — are now defiantly doubling down on those very identities to face off against that oppression.”

Roy in a still from 'In Which Annie Gives Those Ones' (1989).

Before the international recognition that came her way with the Booker Prize, the author starred in multiple films directed by her ex-husband and naturalist Pradip Krishen. All available on YouTube, they include Massey Sahib (1985), based on Joyce Cary’s novel Mister Johnson (1939), in which Roy played a tribal girl, Saila. Then, the 1989 English-language movie In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, with a Shah Rukh Khan cameo as Senior, for which Roy received the National Film Award for Best Screenplay and Krishen won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in English. The movie was inspired by Roy’s experiences as a student of architecture in Delhi. The last one is Electric Moon (1992), which was written by Roy and directed by Krishen, who received yet again a National Film Award for Best Feature Film in English, is a satire that can give Jaipur Literature Festival a run for its money.

Roy with Raghubir Yadav in a still from 'Massey Sahib' (1985).

While her collections of essays critical of the government, multinational companies, tribal rights, Gandhi and Ambedkar, and angst against globalisation and capitalism are crucial reads, it’s her return to fiction after 20 years of The God of Small Things that’s unmissable. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is precisely the kind of work that reflects the facts and fiction in an internecine way as they can be presented. A deeply flawed book, in the sense that the literary sensibilities are overcome by the political ideology of its writer, Ministry still manages to capture the fluidity of borders, genders, and the lives we live in a way only a few literary works do.

The Delhi-based writer is truly a poetic rendition of a thought which comes as a flicker of hope in the darkest hours.