Message: 9
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:55:21 +0000
From: Salil Tripathi <sali...@googlemail.com>
To: silklist@lists.hserus.net
Subject: Re: [silk] For the Arundhati Roy haters out there
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<f2ba76c71003230255v62d2ef97x275c589ac7ae4...@mail.gmail.com>
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Many years ago, as I faced the keyboard, I remembered that distant
afternoon when a journalist near Ayemenem carefully destroyed
Arundhati Roy's plagiarism....
OK, back in 2001, I read this piece in the southern Indian Express,
which effectively demolishes Ms Roy's claims of originality. I found
the old post, that I thought I'd share. It also has a couple other
things I spotted as problematic.
My concern with her - when GOST came out, was a simple one. The
influences - of Faulkner, Lee, Marquez, etc were all over the place.
And yet, when asked, she claimed not to have read any of them. She is
the same age as me, and has had a similar sort of upbringing as most
of us have. The PLU upbringing. To say, in your mid-30s, that you
haven't read those writers, is, then, either a lie, or shows
exceptionally shallow reading habits, and neither of which makes me
admire her. That, and her childish counter-attacks on BG Verghese and
Ramchandra Guha (who challenged her on dams) and her deliberate
ignoring of Gail Omvedt's criticism of her work, meant I lost interest
even more.
I could go point by point and refute everything the Indian Express
article said. We all know of older Indian aunties with necks that
have threads of talcum powder. I think GOST was more an
autobiography than plagiarism. Ammu seems based on Mary Roy, and
Arundhati had a Bengali father, just like the book, who left them. I
haven't read Faulkner, all of Marquez or Lee. Unlike the cool prose
of Jhumpa Lahiri or Alice Munro, Roy's prose is spare but has so much
passion. Why does she evoke so much ire? The editor of Mint,
Sukumar, said in some article and context which I have forgotten that
many TamBrahm men use derision as a cloak to deal with life-- and
this could be true of the critics of Roy. Okay, so I am
biased....but anyway....what's with the enough already and move along
like Rhett? I thought Silk was to debate a topic ad nauseum.
