Arundhati Roy's essay on the Sardar Sarovar dam, The Greater Common Good, was published by Outlook and Frontline magazines in May 1999. http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html
In November 2000, environmental historian Ramachandra Guha wrote a critique of Arundhati Roy's writing and her brand of environmentalism and politics in The Hindu. http://www.hindu.com/2000/11/26/stories/13260411.htm Now I'm not saying Guha is like Santosh Helekar or Roy is like Selma Carvalho but there are parallels if not similarities in their approach. ----------- To selectively quote Guha... "As a work of analysis, it was unoriginal: Kothari and company had been there before her. As a piece of literary craftsmanship it was self-indulgent and hyperbolic." "Yet her vanity was unreal. Ms. Roy quoted, without irony, the judgment of her friend that after having written one successful novel she had seen it all, that a barren stretch of life lay before her until the final meeting with her Maker." "Altogether, this was an essay written with passion but without care. In her stream-of-consciousness style, the arguments were served up in a jumble of images and exclamations with the odd number thrown in. The most serious objections to the dam, on grounds of social justice, ecological prudence and economic efficiency, were lost in the presentation. What struck one most forcibly was her atavistic hatred of science and a romantic celebration of adivasi lifestyles." "Arundhati Roy might very well equal Orwell and Karanth in her bravery. But she lacks their intellectual probity and judgment. Those men wrote with a proper sense of gravitas, in a prose that was lucid but understated, each word weighed before it was uttered. " "Perhaps we should blame the time we live in for Arundhati Roy's carelessness. That she is careless is beyond dispute. " "And the natural bent of this particular celebrity is towards hyperbole and hysteria. "When NATO bombed Yugoslavia," says Ms. Roy, "a tiger in the Belgrade zoo got so terrified that it started eating its own limbs. The people of the Narmada valley will soon start eating their own limbs." "I am told that Arundhati Roy has written a very good novel. Perhaps she should begin another. Her retreat from activism would - to use a term from economics - be a "Paretto optimum": good for literature, and good for the Indian environmental movement. " "Postscript: As this article was going to press, the latest Outlook arrived, with Ms. Roy's latest venture into social science. It is like the others: self-regarding and self- indulgent. The essay is also self-contradictory, a jeremiad against the market and globalisation by one who is placed in the heart of the global market for celebrity-hood." -------- Cheers! Cecil =============
