A short biography of the Author Arundhati Roy.
Written by Mujibur Rahman
Chapter 1 – Small Things, First
Once upon a time, before she became a name that glowed on book jackets and charge sheets and prize lists, she was simply a small girl with big eyes in a house full of arguments and monsoon light.
Shillong. 1961. The clouds there don’t just hang in the sky, they walk through the rooms. Suzanna Arundhati Roy arrived in that mist – the child of a marriage already beginning to come undone. A Bengali father who managed tea estates and drank more than he should, a Syrian Christian mother from Kerala who refused, quietly and then loudly, to behave.
When the marriage cracked, they didn’t glue it back together for the children. They let it break. Mary gathered her son and daughter and left. Southward. Down past the spine of the country, towards the red mud and rubber trees and long, green waterways of Kerala. There is a particular loneliness in being a single mother in a small town, in a time when people whispered the words like a diagnosis. Your daughter learns those whispers by heart.
The child watched everything. The way adults spoke one language and meant another. The way caste slipped like invisible barbed wire between neighbours. The way love could be fierce and cruel at once. She walked through a world of laterite roads and dragonflies and mango trees, not knowing that one day she would fold it all into sentences and send it out into the world.
Her name at school roll call: Suzanna Arundhati Roy. The “Suzanna” would peel away later, like a label she chose not to wear. The “Arundhati” stayed. In Malayalam it rolled off tongues differently. In English it carried the faint taste of stars.
She went to Corpus Christi School in Kottayam, the school her mother started because the schools that existed were never quite enough. A place where Mary, small and asthmatic and unstoppable, tried to build a different universe for children – one where they were not stratified by surname and father’s job and bank balance. That was the theory. In practice, the old hierarchies seeped in through the gates. The child watched that too.
Later came boarding school in Lovedale, the Nilgiri hills. Mist again. Pine trees, cold corridors, the particular ache of being the girl who never quite had the right clothes, the right accent, the soft polished confidence that money buys. Inside, she stored it all: the humiliations, the friendships, the smell of term breaks and the taste of cheap sweets on the train home.
A girl doesn’t know she is gathering material. She thinks she’s just surviving. The words live quietly inside her, like seeds, waiting for rain.
Chapter 2 – Drawings of Cities, Drafts of Escape
Before she built worlds with paragraphs, she built them with lines and measurements.
Delhi: hot, dusty, impatient. She arrived there as a young woman to study at the School of Planning and Architecture. Not for love of concrete exactly, but because it was a path that presented itself – respectable, useful, and just distant enough from Kerala to feel like escape.
Architecture taught her grammar of another kind: load-bearing walls and open courtyards, structural integrity and the art of leaving space. She learnt to think of people as inhabitants of rooms and cities, as bodies moving along fault lines of class and design. She watched how planners drew lines on paper and called it development; how those lines cut through actual people’s lives far away.
In the studios and canteens, she met others like her – young, clever, restless. One of them, Gerard da Cunha, she married. Two architecture students binding themselves together with plans and possibilities. It didn’t last. Some structures look perfect on the drawing board and then crack in real weather. The marriage crumbled. She moved on with barely more than a small bag and big stubbornness.
Delhi can be both cruel and generous. It didn’t care about her heartbreak, but it did offer her alleys and bus rides and odd jobs. She worked at the National Institute of Urban Affairs. Read reports about slums and satellite towns. Learned how power disguised itself in phrases like “urban renewal” and “resettlement”. The city itself became a textbook, full of margins scribbled with inequality.
But the drafting tables began to feel like cages. She could feel something pressing against her ribs, some other kind of structure asking to be built. One that didn’t have to pass through committees or building codes. One that could be as strange and as particular as she wanted.
Sometimes, late at night, she would imagine whole cities made of sentences. Streets of dialogue, rooflines of memory, neighbourhoods of rage and tenderness. At the time she didn’t yet call it a novel. She called it not knowing what she was going to do with her life.
Chapter 3 – Cinema, Almost
Enter, stage left, a man with a camera.
His name: Pradip Krishen. Independent filmmaker, stubborn like her, allergic to formula. He cast her as a goatherd in Massey Sahib. A tiny role, but the camera did something to her sense of narrative. She watched, fascinated, as scenes were shot from different angles, rearranged in the edit room, time sliced up and stitched back together.
Soon, she was not just standing in front of the camera but sitting behind the scripts. She began to write.
In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones grew out of her memories of architecture school: the absurdities, the petty rebellions, the stale chalk dust of classrooms where imagination tried to survive bureaucracy. She wrote it with a kind of giddy freedom. Low budget. Student hostels. A hungry, unruly charm. She acted in it too, slipping into the frame as easily as into a sentence.
The film won the National Award for Best Screenplay. On paper, this should have been her doorway into a long, glittering career in cinema. But “should” is a brittle word. The film industry, even in its independent pockets, comes with its own heavy furniture – producers, financiers, compromises that creep in through drafts even when you’re not looking.
She wrote another script, Electric Moon, a satire about eco-tourism and postcolonial nostalgia. Again, the work was sharp, funny, layered. Again, the reality around it felt like a bad remake of itself: money problems, distribution issues, the constant grinding uncertainty of a medium that eats resources and spits out disappointments.
She realized something essential: film, by its nature, is a committee. You can write the most delicate scene, but it still has to pass through a crowd – cameramen, editors, distributors, censors, sponsors. Everyone leaves their fingerprints. She wanted, secretly and then not so secretly, a space where the only fingerprints on the work would be hers.
And so, quietly, she stepped back. She ran aerobics classes to pay the bills. She lived in small apartments with fewer objects than ideas. And she began, like someone laying the first bricks of an impossible house, to write a novel.
Chapter 4 – The River of Small Things
Kerala again, but not exactly as it was. As it is when remembered.
She sat in a Delhi room and unspooled Ayemenem: river, rain, house. Twins with “two-egg twins” closeness. A family standing on its own wreckage as if it were furniture. Love that crossed forbidden lines – caste lines, class lines, Love Laws that “lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.”
She wrote slowly. She looped time. She repeated words like incantations. The English language, usually so sure of itself, suddenly had to behave differently: playful, wounded, childlike and wise all at once. She rearranged grammar the way a child rearranges furniture – to see how it feels, to see if there is more room to breathe.
The manuscript that emerged called itself The God of Small Things. It was about a village in Kerala and also about the way history seeps into children’s bones. About a boat and a river and a factory and a forbidden body. About the way a single moment – a choice, a touch, a betrayal – can echo across decades.
When the book slipped out into the world in 1997, the world, to everyone’s surprise (including hers), caught it with both hands. Reviews flew in like monsoon birds. Translations bloomed in foreign tongues. And then, the glittering thing: the Booker Prize.
One night in London, she sat at a round table under bright lights, listening to her name being spoken as winner. Cameras flashed. Applause ricocheted. It felt, she would later suggest, both exhilarating and faintly unreal – like winning a beauty pageant for a face that didn’t feel like hers.
India embraced her and argued with her at the same time. An Indian writer, writing in English, writing unabashedly local, had captured one of the world’s biggest literary prizes. Some celebrated, some grumbled. Why English? Why this story? Why this woman? A nation’s unresolved conversations about language, class, and representation crackled around her.
She took the prize money and much of the gush of royalty that followed and turned it outward – to movements fighting displacement, to people standing ankle-deep in river water in protest against a rising dam. It was as if the success of the book demanded a counterweight, a way of refusing the easy arc of success stories.
The world wanted a second novel. Soon, preferably. She did the opposite.
Chapter 5 – Essays in the Time of Dams and Bombs
“Development.” “Reform.” “National security.” Words that wore suits and ties and carried statistics around like briefcases.
She watched as India tested nuclear weapons in the desert and celebrated them with patriotic songs. She watched dams rise along the Narmada, swallowing villages in the name of progress. She watched the poor being moved like furniture from one place to another, without being asked if they wanted to go anywhere at all.
The novelist picked up her pen and did something people didn’t expect: she wrote essays, furious and tender at once. “The End of Imagination” was her answer to the nuclear euphoria – a long, pleading, blistering letter about what it means to live under the shadow of a bomb that can’t be unfired. She wrote about the Narmada dam in “The Greater Common Good”, walking readers through drowned homes, lost fields, the arithmetic of sacrifice in which the same people always seem to be on the losing side.
The essays came in waves: The Cost of Living, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. She wrote about the war in Afghanistan, about Iraq, about the way the “War on Terror” rearranged the planet’s understanding of whose lives mattered. Her sentences carried statistics, yes, but also stories: a child’s toy in the rubble, a woman’s eviction notice, a forest path trampled by soldiers’ boots.
People who had loved The God of Small Things purely as a love story were startled. Some delighted in this new, political Roy. Others felt betrayed, as though writers were supposed to stay in the safe lanes of metaphor and leave policy to men in suits.
She refused that division. To her, the line between a fictional child in a Kerala river and a real child displaced by a dam was thin, almost invisible. Both were caught inside systems they did not design. Both deserved a chronicler.
The essays were not footnote-heavy academic documents. They were literary acts. Sarcastic, playful, grieving. They named corporations like villains in a fairy tale. They lined up acronyms – WTO, IMF, UAPA – like bullets on a table. Some critics accused her of oversimplification. Others called her a “rock star of resistance,” a phrase she would surely have found faintly ridiculous.
And yet, there she was: a Booker-winning novelist standing in protest marches, signing petitions, visiting forests and parliaments and refugee camps. On the page and on the street, saying: this too is part of the story.
Chapter 6 – Cases Filed, Names Called
If you talk long enough about the skeletons in a nation’s cupboard, somebody will eventually accuse you of treason.
Kashmir: a valley ringed by mountains and soldiers and stories. She went there, not as a neutral tourist but as a witness. She listened to mothers whose sons had disappeared. To young men whose futures were made of check posts and curfews. To slogans shouted in the streets that did not fit neatly into the maps in school textbooks.
She said, out loud, that Kashmiris should be allowed to decide their own future. She used the word “azadi” alongside them. For this, they filed sedition cases against her. Her sentences – these small, dark marks on paper – became potential crimes. Years later, old speeches were exhumed and dusted off; harsher laws were draped over them like new uniforms.
Elsewhere, she walked into the forests of central India and sat with Maoist guerrillas. She wrote “Walking with the Comrades”, tracing a war that official newspapers often reduced to three paragraphs on page seven. Here were adivasi communities, trapped between mining companies and insurgents, between police camps and underground factions. The government called them “left-wing extremists”; she called them people whose land had been taken.
In living rooms and TV studios across the cities, people shook their heads. She had gone too far this time, they said. She was glorifying militants. She was weakening the nation. She was out of her depth. They called her “anti-national,” “self-hating,” “dangerous.”
She carried those names the way she carried awards: with a slightly sideways smile and an underlying weariness. It is tiring, after all, to constantly explain that caring deeply about a place is not the same as worshipping its governments.
Books of hers were banned in certain regions. Passages were dissected in courtrooms. The right to speak, that supposedly basic democratic muscle, was constantly being tested against newer, tighter laws.
And yet, she did not retire into polite silence. She wrote more. Spoke more. Even when she knew that anything she said could end up, one day, as Exhibit A in a file on some bureaucrat’s desk.
Chapter 7 – The Ministry of Broken and Mended Things
Twenty years is a long time in the life of a writer. Long enough for a country to shift shape, for new kinds of violence to arrive, for old ones to mutate.
When she came back to the novel with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in 2017, it was not as the same person who had written The God of Small Things. That young woman had carried family tragedy and caste and desire on her shoulders; this one now carried war zones and demolished homes as well.
The new book opened not in Ayemenem but in Old Delhi, under the shade of a tree in a graveyard. At its centre stood Anjum, a hijra, who builds a guesthouse for the living inside the city of the dead. Around her swirl a host of others: Tilo, the architect whose life arcs towards Kashmir; Musa, the militant; a baby found on a pavement; an officer of the state whose name is a joke and a warning; an entire crowd of people who refuse to stay in the background.
The novel is not tidy. It does not proceed along a straight road from beginning to end. It meanders like a protest march – sometimes focused, sometimes breaking into smaller groups and conversations. It carries within it riots in Gujarat, secret prisons in the Valley, dalit deaths, public hangings. It makes room for animals, for gods, for bureaucrats, for lovers.
Some readers wanted another God of Small Things, smaller, tighter, soaked in the melancholy of childhood. Instead they got a tapestry, messy and magnificent, full of news headlines turned inside out and lives that statistics usually erase. Some critics said it was too crowded. Others said it was exactly as crowded as the country it was trying to portray.
The language remained unmistakably hers: sentences that pirouette, words capitalised mid-phrase for emphasis or mischief, the tender attention to how children think, how misfits speak.
Once again, she refused to build a wall between the political and the personal. In her novels, love does not exist in some sealed bedroom, far away from parliament and police stations. It pulses right there, under the sound of helicopters and loudspeakers, in the pauses between slogans.
Chapter 8 – Mary, Mother, Mountain
For years, her mother hovered at the edges of interviews, mentioned in passing: “my mother, Mary Roy, who fought the inheritance case,” “my mother, who founded a school,” “my mother, who was difficult and brilliant.” A shape made of anecdotes and rumours.
After Mary died, the daughter turned fully towards that shape.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is not a biography in the dry, orderly sense. It’s more like opening a cupboard full of old letters and clothes and secrets and sitting inside it for a while, breathing in the dust and the perfume and the mould.
Mary Roy: small, asthmatic, furious. A woman who took the Syrian Christian inheritance laws to court because they said daughters must settle for scraps. She fought, and won, a judgment that changed the rights of thousands of women. At the same time, at home, she could be sharp as a blade. Her love was not easy. It could feel, her daughter writes, like being strapped to a rocket that could go either to the stars or straight into the side of a mountain.
The book moves between public and private: one page we are in the Supreme Court, watching a landmark judgment being read out; the next, we are in the kitchen of a house in Kottayam, watching Mary throw plates or words like grenades. We see her as school principal – fiercely devoted to her students, deeply suspicious of mediocrity – and as mother, saying things that would leave wounds decades deep.
Arundhati writes it not as a saint’s life, but as a confession: of grief, of rage, of unexpected tenderness. She is honest about the damage and equally honest about the ways in which Mary’s ferocity gave her the blueprint for her own refusal to bow.
In telling the story of one woman in one corner of India, she also tells the story of the country’s relationship with its daughters: the laws that tried to contain them, the silences they were expected to keep, the rebellions that cracked those silences open.
By the time we close the book, we know Mary better. We also know Arundhati better. How much of her certainty comes from growing up with someone who never backed down. How much of her empathy comes from learning young that the heroes in public life can be villains at home, and that love is rarely pure.
Chapter 9 – Prizes in One Hand, Petitions in the Other
Awards look good in obituaries. They fit neatly into paragraphs: Booker Prize, National Film Award, Sydney Peace Prize, Lannan Cultural Freedom Award, PEN Pinter Prize. They tell one kind of story: the story of how the world’s institutions responded to her work.
But her relationship to awards has always been sideways. She accepted some, wrestled with others, sometimes sent them back like misdelivered letters. When she returned her National Film Award in protest against growing intolerance, it was a small act, symbolic, but it signalled something: that she refused to let her name be used as decorative proof that everything was fine.
When she accepted the PEN Pinter Prize, she shared it with Alaa Abd El-Fattah, an Egyptian activist imprisoned for years. In that gesture was a kind of answer to the question: What is the point of all this recognition, if it cannot be bent, even slightly, towards those whose names don’t trend?
For every ceremony there were also charge sheets; for every standing ovation, a troll army. She became one of those figures who divide rooms. You could measure a certain kind of Indian dinner party by the moment her name came up: eyes rolled, voices rose, hands sliced the air either in defence or attack.
She lives with that division as one lives with a chronic ache: aware of it, irritated by it, but not paralysed.
Her public speeches continue to needle, to provoke. She calls out “great nationalists” as tax evaders. She jokes darkly about sedition. She refuses the soft cushion of phrases like “on the other hand,” “to be fair,” when she thinks something is fundamentally unjust.
At the same time, away from microphones, there is the quiet, ongoing work: writing, editing, answering letters from readers who felt less alone because of a sentence she wrote. Walking in protests where nobody is there to film her. Listening, still, more than she speaks.
Chapter 10 – The Thread Through It All
If you stand far enough away from her life and squint, you might see only the big shapes: the Booker, the dams, the sedition charges, the novels, the mother. But if you move closer, you start to notice the thread.
The thread is this: she believes that small things matter. A child’s fear. A worker’s eviction notice. A river swollen with monsoon rain. A word twisted by a news anchor. A kiss that crosses a line drawn centuries ago. A mother’s sentence that lodges like shrapnel in a daughter’s chest. A constitutional clause rewritten in a parliament far away from the village it will transform.
Her work – whether it arrives as a novel, an essay, a speech, or a memoir – is an attempt to line these small things up and say: look. Look properly. Don’t look away. Don’t let the bigness of “nation” and “development” and “security” erase the small lives they trample.
She is not a comfortable writer. She doesn’t tuck her readers into bed with moral clarity and happy endings. She leaves them with questions, with sentences that double back and bite. With images they can’t quite forget.
In an age that loves its categories – activist, novelist, journalist, public intellectual – she remains cheerfully uncooperative. She is all of these and none of them. An architect of sentences. A witness with a notebook. A daughter. A dissenter. Someone who knows, perhaps better than most, that stories can both wound and heal, and chooses, relentlessly, to tell them anyway.
Disclaimer
This biography is an independent, unofficial account created for informational and educational purposes only. While care has been taken to be accurate, some details may be interpretive or incomplete and should not be treated as a definitive or authorised source. All rights to Arundhati Roy’s life and works remain with her and their respective rights holders.
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