Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers

Arundhati Roy

окт. 2009 г. · Haymarket Books+ORM

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In “gorgeously wrought” essays, the New York Times-bestselling author of The God of Small Things takes a critical look at India’s political climate (Time Magazine).

These “powerful” essays (Kirkus Reviews) examine the dark side of contemporary India, looking closely at how religious majoritarianism, cultural nationalism, and neo-fascism simmer just under the surface of a country that projects itself as the world’s largest democracy. Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy writes about how the combination of Hindu nationalism and India’s neo-liberal economic reforms, which began their journey together in the early 1990s, are turning India into a police state.

She describes the systematic marginalization of religious and ethnic minorities, the rise of terrorism, and the massive scale of displacement and dispossession of the poor by predatory corporations. She also offers a brilliant account of the August 2008 uprising of the people of Kashmir against India's military occupation and an analysis of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai. Field Notes on Democracy tracks the fault-lines that threaten to destroy India's precarious democracy and send shockwaves through the region and beyond.

“Genocide, denial, and truth-as-a-victim are just a few of the big subjects dealt with by Booker prize-winning Indian author and activist Roy . . . [a] vivid inside look at India's turbulent growth.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Takes aim at India's self-image—and reputation—as the world’s largest and most vibrant democracy.” —The Washington Post

“After so much celebratory salesmanship about India the ‘emerging market,’ Roy draws us into India the actual country . . . one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time.” —Naomi Klein, New York Times-bestselling author of No is Not Enough

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Arundhati Roy is among the most well-known writers and social justice activists in the world today, with a committed global audience. Her best-selling 1997 novel "The God of Small Things" and her courageous, popular interviews and essays on war and peace, contemporary India and Kashmir, U.S. imperial power, and a renewal of popular democracy across the world, have earned her a large audience and international profile. Roy's writings on Southeast Asia come at a time of renewed interest in the subcontinent. But Roy offers an essential counterpoint to the caricatured Western image surrounding India's precarious version of secular democracy. As indicated by the title of the book, the topics Roy explores are also of global concern. These include war, terrorism, national and ethnic identity, social inequality, the environment, and globalization itself.