Ms Arundhati Roy gave an interview at an event on Dec 30, 2025 where her memoir was re-examined by Mr Mohan Vellapally, who brought out its finer points by asking a number of questions. Ms Roy responded in the time available with incisive comments, and to further elaborate, read sections of her memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me. This threw light on various facets of the complex relationship between her and her mother.
It became clear that her visits worldwide for readings of the memoir are not merely for marketing, but in her case establishes the essential contact between her and her readers that matters so much to her. A previous blog post shows just how she goes about cultivating her loyal, adoring, fan base by extending her love to them. It is an important counter-balance because she has a large number of detractors among the conservative right wing factions in India who habitually hurl epithets like ‘urban Naxal’ and ‘anti-national’ at her.
The reading and interview was preceded by by the Beatles song Mother Mary Comes To Me sung by her brother Lalith Roy with Raina John:
https://www.instagram.com/pulse.unplugged/reel/DTIGKFNESAP/
The interview with Ms Aurundhati Roy was conducted by Mohan Vellapally at the beautiful auditorium Lalith Roy built in his Pulse centre for performing musicians. Here is the entire 1-hour interview on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTIPpkkk8y5/
During the course of the interview Ms Roy brought up various topics which are of interest to readers everywhere. In this blog post I cover a few under the headings below.
The universality of literature appears in connecting people everywhere to the story and the characters whom they seem to know from their own real-life experiences. She has mentioned before that when she went to New York after the launching of The God of Small Things (TGOST) and met some independent Jewish women, who abound in the world of New York publishing, they said: “We all have those aunts like Baby Kochamma.” Baby Kochamma, you will recall from TGOST, is the manipulative, bitter, grand-aunt of the twins Estha and Rahel, whose unrequited love for a priest and subsequent bitterness fuel her malicious actions, especially her role in framing the untouchable Velutha for a crime, leading to tragic consequences for the family, especially Ammu and the children.
Once, in Estonia, where the only previous book from Kerala published was a volume by EMS Namboodiripad, she was hailed by a woman who said TGOST was her story. Wherever she went visiting countries like Norway, and Estonia, and Russia, and China, and America, and so on, they would assure her this was their childhood too, ‘How did you know?’
Yet people in Kerala think, no one else can understand it but us Malayalis. Everyone had their way to enter into the novel. Arundhati Roy said, “It made me revere the idea of literature, how it unites people in these bonds which are so intimate, and it requires some labour. It's not just sitting and pressing buttons and watching a movie at home. You, the reader, also are involved in a relationship with that book, with that writer.”
She contrasted the roles of the atom bomb and literature,, noting the former divides people, the latter unites them and provides the essential understanding across time and space.
2. A writer’s business is not to be aloof, but to be engaged
They used to label certain authors in France as un écrivain engagé (a committed writer). It denotes an author who uses hiser pen to take a stand on social, political or moral issues, actively intervening in the debates of the time, as illustrated by the French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, who is an emblematic example of this type of writer. An even better example is Albert Camus.
Albert Camus (1913–1960) you will recall as a writer, philosopher, and journalist whose work was deeply rooted in a “stubborn humanism,” focusing on justice, solidarity, and the dignity of the individual. His commitment to social and moral issues was marked by a, consistent opposition to violence, totalitarianism, and the death penalty, alongside a call for active resistance against oppression. For example, he exposed the extreme poverty, famine, and systemic neglect faced by the indigenous Kabyle population of Algeria under French colonial rule (Camus himself was born in French Algeria).
During the Nazi occupation of France, Camus joined the French Resistance and became editor-in-chief of the clandestine newspaper Combat. Immediately after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Camus was one of the few Western intellectuals to publicly denounced the American use of nuclear weapons.
There are striking parallels in Ms Roy’s own life. She took up the cause of the tribal people of the Dandakaranya forests and wrote about their grievances and the violence meted out to them when they defended their territory against land-grabbing for mining. Walking with the Comrades, was the essay resulting from a 3-week stay in the forests, first published in Outlook magazine in March 2010. Her essay The End of Imagination relating to India’s explosion of atomic weapons in 1998 underscored the crisis of people not realising it was laying the foundations hatred and separation between peoples.
Ms Roy said, “It’s a beautiful, unique, wonderful thing, this mix; I think it has to do with a writer engaged in the world. A writer speaking to the world and not believing that the writer's business is to sit alone in some beautiful isolated space. Every time people offer me a writers’ retreat to go and write, I'm totally terrified. I don't want some silent retreat to sit and write. Offer me a New York pub and I’ll write in a crowd.”
3. Difference between poetry, and novels in prose
Mohan Vellapally quoted William Wordsworth, who described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Ms Roy had a significant comment on the difference between writing a novel and writing a poem, though the public has not seen examples of her trying her hand at poetry.
Ms Roy noted, “I think there's a difference between poets on the one hand, and novelists and writers on the other, because it’s not from some inspired moments that the writing comes as it does perhaps for a poet; it's really sometimes years of labour that goes into constructing something like a novel. It’s not distilling something as a poet does – it's the opposite of that – it's invoking a period in time. For me this is a biography of a relationship, but it's also about the time, it's also about being a writer in this moment.”
To elaborate a bit, Ms Roy seems to be saying a poem is the distillation of a brief episodic moment of experience. The source of inspiration may be varied. A scene in nature, a recollection of an event, the expression of a deep inner longing, or whatever. The novel on the other hand she describes as a long labour of building a structure of a story and the characters in it and brining out the relationships between the characters as it evolves in time. Time is a basic differentiator, both the time it takes to write, and the length of time over which the story develops in the novel.
I daresay there are always exceptions. If you embark on a long poem like The Divine Comedy (14,233 lines) in three parts, throughout maintaining a strict form called the terza rima, perhaps it is like a novel. It tells the story of Dante’s journey through the three realms of the afterlife, beginning on the night before Good Friday in 1300 and ending in Paradise, meeting friends and villains on the way. The poet Virgil guides him through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice, his beloved, Dante's ideal woman, guides him through Paradise.
It would be good to hear Ms Roy at length on this subject, but there was not enough time. The poet Philip Larkin said novels are “about other people and poetry is about yourself.”
May Sarton, the Belgian-American novelist, poet, and memoirist. contrasts the “journey” in novels with poetry's “arrival.” Poetry, for Sarton, captures an essence or a single, poignant moment – often a moment of intense change – rather than following the slow development of that change. She described poetry as a dialogue with the self, a more intimate and direct communication. Poetry felt more like a “gift from powers beyond my will” or a “true work of the soul.” While novels explored what she thought, poems were written to discover what she felt. Sarton felt these two forms arose from “entirely different modes of being.”
T.S. Eliot who wrote essays, plays and poems, but not novels, had a markedly different attitude, antithetical from that of Wordsworth and Larkin, regarding poetry. He noted poetry is “an escape from emotion,” not an indulgence in emotion, and “an escape from personality,” meaning in his case he abstracted himself away from the poems he wrote. He contrasted poetry with the typical novelistic exploration of self through character.
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4. The unique process of writing a novel
Ms Roy began her foray into writing with screenplays. She designed the films (In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, and Massey Sahib) and acted in some of them. The work was collaborative and she got quite tired of it and wanted to work alone, she said.
She read a book called The Art and Craft of Novel Writing by Oakley Hall, and declared it to be the first book that had ever torn up and thrown across the floor. It was an utterly useless guide, because it pretended by a step-wise process one could attempt to write a novel.
She came to the conclusion that novel writing didn't have any rules. To elaborate, Ms Roy read a portion about the business of language from her memoir. This is from the chapter in the book titled, “Have You Ever Considered Becoming a Writer?”
All through school, I did consistently badly in English, language and literature. I never understood the rules. Mrs. Roy would slash through my little essays and compositions, mark me three out of ten, and write comments like Horrible. Nonsense. She was right. They were complete and utter rubbish. Even then I knew that the language I wrote in was not mine. By mine, I don't mean mother tongue, and by language, I don't mean English or Hindi or Malayalam. I mean a writer's language. Language that I used, not language that used me. A language in which I could describe my multilingual world to myself. I knew even then that language was outside me, not inside me. I knew it would not come to me on its own. I needed to hunt it down like prey, disembowel it, eat it. And when I did, I knew that language, my language, would ease the way blood flowed through my body. It was out there somewhere, a live language-animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me, the predator. That was the law of my jungle. It wasn't a non-violent, vegetarian dream.
But once I started running, when all I could ever think about was day-to-day survival, my hunt for language stopped. It needed time and practice. I needed to train just like a painter or a dancer or a swimmer might – except that my ambition was more basic. It had to do with regulating my body temperature and the way the blood flowed in my veins. It had to do with keeping my sanity, my equanimity, with finding a way to talk to myself.
To train, I needed shelter, not physical but emotional – somewhere to sit down, even for a little while. I didn't have that. I never had that.
Once I started running, once I joined Architecture School, I thought that a writer was the last thing I could ever be. I gave up.
Perhaps we can all be writers, if we are at it regularly, thoughtfully, looking over what we write and not being satisfied. But to be a REAL writer requires a dedication that few can muster. Ms Roy describes her preparation to write by becoming a reader first:
“As a child, it’s all I ever thought I’d be. Nothing made me forget the world like reading did. Nothing made me think about the world like reading did. Nothing else filled me up. Nothing else emptied me out. Sentences and paragraphs would drift through my head like clouds.”
She wanted to be a writer even as a child, and when she grew older she wrote screenplays for films, and kept going. A turning point came which she recalled in her recent memoir from the time when she travelled to Italy on a scholarship:
“At night, every single night, I’d write a letter to Pradip [that’s Pradip Krishen, naturalist, photographer, film-maker and author of wonderful book Trees of Delhi]. These were not love letters. They were just descriptions of my daily life. They had only one purpose. I wanted that brilliant man to write back and say, Have you ever considered becoming a writer? That is exactly what he did.”
And then years later came that letter. Have you ever considered becoming a writer? I knew that I hadn't found a grazing language-animal, but the bloodhound in me caught the faint, faraway scent of it on the breeze.
But once I started running, when all I could ever think about was day-to-day survival, my hunt for language stopped. It needed time and practice. I needed to train just like a painter or a dancer or a swimmer might – except that my ambition was more basic. It had to do with regulating my body temperature and the way the blood flowed in my veins. It had to do with keeping my sanity, my equanimity, with finding a way to talk to myself.
To train, I needed shelter, not physical but emotional – somewhere to sit down, even for a little while. I didn't have that. I never had that.
Once I started running, once I joined Architecture School, I thought that a writer was the last thing I could ever be. I gave up.
And then years later came that letter. Have you ever considered becoming a writer? I knew that I hadn't found a grazing language-animal, but the bloodhound in me caught the faint, faraway scent of it on the breeze.
Ms Roy confessed, ”There are no rules. In fact, there is a part in this book when the launch of TGOST happens and I read a part of it at a gathering and then her uncle G. Isaac (Chacko in the novel TGOST who ran a factory called Paradise Pickles & Preserves) stood up and said, “When I die and go to heaven and I am refused entry at the gates, I am going to quote from TGOST chapter so and so page so and so, ‘there are no rules.’”
5. I left my mother not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.
In the introductory chapter of her memoir titled Gangster Ms Roy writes: “I left my mother not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her. Staying would have made that impossible. Once I left, I didn't see or speak to her for years. She never looked for me. She never asked me why I left. There was no need for that. We both knew. We settled on a lie, a good one. I crafted it –– “She loved me enough to let me go.” That's what I said on the front of my first novel, TGOST, which I dedicated to her. She quoted it often as though it were God's truth. My brother jokes that it's the only piece of real fiction in the book.” (Chortling laughter)
In the interview Ms Roy states, “To the end of her days, she never asked me how I managed during those years when I was a runaway. …
After our brittle tentative reunion, I returned to her, visiting her regularly over the years as an independent adult, a qualified architect, a production designer, a writer, but most of all as a woman watching another with love and admiration – and a fair amount of disquiet – not just for her great qualities, but the opposite too. In that conservative, stifling little South Indian town where in those days women were only allowed the option of cloying virtue – or its affectation – my mother conducted herself with the edginess of a gangster. I watched her unleash all of herself – her genius, her eccentricity, her radical kindness, her militant courage, her ruthlessness, her generosity, her cruelty, her bullying, her head for business and her wild, unpredictable temper – with complete abandon on our tiny insular Syrian Christian society, which because of its education and relative wealth, was sequestered from the swirling violence and the debilitating poverty in the rest of the country. I watched her make space for the whole of herself, for all herself in that little world. It was nothing short of a miracle, a terror and a wonder to behold.”
Ms Roy saw plenty in her mother to admire, particularly her ability to survive husband-less in that conservative milieu of patriarchal Syrian Christian Kottayam, and create an independent space by dint of her will and hard work. Then later having to fight legal battles to secure the inheritance that was her due by the Constitution of India. All this Ms Roy was in awe of and there is no denying that the steel in her own stand on many issues comes from her exemplary mother.
Equally there was a ‘Gangster’ inside her mother , as she frankly notes: such as severe condemnation of her children to the point of abusing them mentally and physically; enforcing her will on them without consideration for their tender sensitivities; belittling them by criticism, often in the presence of others; playing the victim of her asthma to gain a sway over her children. Ms Roy does not hold back in narrating all the violence she suffered in her childhood. But there was a bond that is difficult for readers to comprehend from afar – why did Ms Roy entertain such a deep regard for her mother, and love her enough to see that she had to get away to maintain that bond, except get away? Else it would have ended up in severely crippling her own development and instilling a resentment for her mother.
Once she decided to write the memoir of her relationship with her mother she realised she would have to dredge all her memories and put it out, for, Ms Roy said, it would not serve any purpose if she revealed only half – it would not work. The memoir is as much about her own independent development as a woman and a writer, as it is about her mother and the bond between them. The honesty is searing at points, and makes one wonder how did the people around her tolerate a bully like Ms Mary Roy?
As I noted in a previous blog post:
“Ms Roy characterises her leaving home at age 16 as an escape from the tyranny of her mother. She needed space to grow and become herself, without the creative person’s curse of being the offspring of a famous scandalous parent. “I ran from her not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her,” she writes. The central element of love is forgiveness, even of grievous faults, because you comprehend and then see the entire person. Knowing that karma is the inescapable fruit of one’s actions, you do not wish to be part of the retribution, but part of the healing. It is this quality of Ms Roy that is outstanding in a book that can be praised for much else.”
6. About politics in her books.
7. The money coming in and how she spends it
Ms Roy mentioned her quandary with the money coming in after TGOST: “After these nuclear tests happened, I started writing politically. I started traveling in the Narmada Valley. I saw the extent of displacement of people from the land they lived in. I kept feeling everyone's life is being destroyed while my bank account is burgeoning. I've written this super bestseller and I felt like if I wasn't careful, I would turn into some cold silver figurine with a cold silver heart. And I said to myself, ‘No, I'm going to deploy this money politically.’” Over the years she would learn that “sharing money with love and in solidarity is a delicate process, far more difficult than hoarding it. But until we live in a more equal world, sharing (responsibly) is the best you can do.”
So began Ms Roy’s careful project with a number of others to put a part of her royalties into a trust to express solidarity with those who are engaged in the same fight for justice. Ms Roy is suspicious of trusts and NGOs and has written a lot about it, but this is just money that goes out in solidarity with people, activists, etc. “I feel that it's very important to be open about money. … A group of us, which includes activists and lawyers, started a trust into which I put a portion of my royalties every year, as they come in. The trust does not bear my name and does not raise or accept money from anyone else. It is solely devoted to sharing my crazy royalties. The money goes out to journalists, activists, teachers, lawyers, artists, and filmmakers who have the courage to stand up against the tide. To people who understand the politics of corporate NGOs and international foundations and refuse to take money from them. To people who don’t know how to or don’t want to make smooth proposals that massage the NGO machine. As trusts go, it’s tiny, but it is not removed or in any way distant from the people with whom we share our money. And we share it in the spirit of solidarity, not as charity. All of us who are part of the trust know that our work has to be done with the greatest care. Because money can be liberating, but it can also be debilitating and as destructive as nuclear waste. When my books stop selling and the money runs out, our trust will shut down. Like Laurie Baker’s architecture, it’s not meant to last forever.”
8. Why she is averse to making a movie out of TGOST
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An elderly gentleman kissed the writing hand of Ms Roy before asking her to autograph a copy of her memoir for his son
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