Abstract

AGAINST COMPASSIONATE MISREADING: ARUNDHATI ROY, ADIVASI DISPOSSESSION, AND THE POLITICS OF REFUSAL

Pankaj Sharma

Volume: 5 Issue: 2 2015

Abstract:

Indian criticism has largely received Arundhati Roy’s writing on adivasi dispossession as the protest of a conscience — a novelist moved by suffering, faulted chiefly for excess. This paper argues that the reception is a misreading, and that the misreading is doing political work. Roy’s essays on Bastar and on mineral extraction hold a consistent left position: that the dispossession of adivasi India is not a failure of governance but the ordinary operation of capital, with the state acting as its instrument. Three bodies of evidence are read here — the property argument running through Walking with the Comrades and Broken Republic, the attack on philanthropic capital in Capitalism: A Ghost Story, and the assault on Gandhian reformism in The Doctor and the Saint. Each is a refusal of reform rather than a demand for it. The paper tests the claim against the strongest counter-readings, including the charge that Roy has no programme and no party, and argues that constancy of object, not doctrinal fidelity, is what the description requires. Reading Roy as a conscience disarms her admirers and lets her critics avoid the argument she is actually making.

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