By Mahinda Hattaka –
Mahinda Hattaka
Arundhati Roy best known as a controversial contemporary Indian writer inspired to write her memoires by the demise of her mother Mary Roy at an unexpected moment that left her shocked and devastated. This book vividly depicts her attachment to the mother a rebellious and daredevil woman in completely detached manner. She called her mother Mrs. Roy as taught her since her student days.
But Mother Mary Comes To Me is not an eulogy. It is a cruel and unapologetic incision of umbilical cord of love hate relationship that sustains her in victories and innumerable downfalls. Mrs. Roy as she usually calls her mother never showed her love or attraction to Arundhati overtly or in a sense covertly.
She encouraged Arundhati to write from her school days. When Arundhati came home from yje school, actually they lived in part of the school which Mrs. Mary started on her own, her mother asked why she was in a low down casted mood. Then Arundhati recalled how she was scolded and humiliated by her class teacher for giving the correct answer to a question posed to her. Then Mother Mary calmly asked her to write down the story on a piece of paper. Though the few sentences she wrote make no sense as she recalled later mother kept it as a precious piece of writing to the very end of her life.
Her mother’s love and affection did not prevent use of most foul words to thwart Aundhati. She says ” The insults washed over me like a tide. Apart from usual ones, the additional theme of course was “whore” and “prostitute”. It went for ever………. ‘
Arundhati is very explicit and bares everything in her dealings with family members and the people around her make her writings magical and illuminating to the reader. She sees her mother’s behavior or the attitude toward her is emanating not from any lapse on her part but her wrath against motherhood itself. Therefore she tried surgically excise an incident from its circumstances and look at it dispassionately shorn of excitement. “As though she were someone else’s mother and as though it were not I but someone else who was the object of her wrath”.
What made reading Arundhati exhilarating and exciting is the poetic but objective way of looking at seemingly ordinary and simple things differently. For instance the distance covered to come to Delhi from Cochin by train counted not by kilometers or any other system of measuring the distance but by days and nights. She spent three days and two nights to reach Delhi. This kind of figurative thinking is abundant throughout the book.
Most interesting is the way she visualize the language. We all use language whether it is English, Hindi or any other as a medium of communication. Language is an already existing phenomenon. We have to depend on it to lead a meaningful life in the society. But Arundhati saw it also differently. ” I wanted to test myself to see whether I could find a language, a writer’s language to write about the Narmada and the tragedy that had befallen it in the way I had found a language about Ayermenem and the Meenachil. Could I write about irrigation, agriculture, displacement and drainage the way I wrote about love and death or about characters in a novel?” she asked.
The style of the language she used in her first and award winning novel God of Small Things is totally different from the style and nuance of the language she used in her first political ( and controversial ) essay on the nuclear ambition of the BJP government, End of Imagination. She firmly believes the language should be modified, molded and created to cater the needs of the picture she visualizes in certain context. Just as an artist selects the brushes, colours and the canvas to create a picture she or he imagine. Even though she is writing in English the way she is using the grammar and the syntax is not the ordinary run of the mill type. Even the name of the book Mother Mary Comes To Me can be interpreted many ways. For a Christian Mother Mary demotes religious feelings of affection and devotion and virginity. But she uses it in a different hyperbolic environment. The name of her first novel God of Small Things is also sort of a puzzle. For a resourceful person can visualize it in many ways.
Literature is a medium, she thinks that compel a reader to understand and react to world around him more penetratingly and critically. At a public reading session on her book held in Kerala, her native place a person from a small village came upto her to get her signature on a book he purchased. She says ‘ It made me realize now literature can joins humans in a bond of quite intimacy the way almost nothing else can.” It reminisced her Estonian translator of her book God of Small Things saying ”Your book is about my childhood” A Jewish publisher said ‘ we’ve all got aunts like Baby Kochamma”
She confesses that the inspiration to write this memoir mainly comes from her love and devotion to her mother. That love and devotion compels her to write about the contemporary issues that bedeviled the Indian society and the world at large. Most interestingly these polemical writings are not different from her literary creations. Her Italian friend and great writer John Berger wrote her after reading her essays about Narmada dam saying that her fiction and nonfiction- they walk you around the world like your two legs.
When the Indian Supreme Court vacated its earlier order stopping the work of Narmada reservoir consequent to a petition filed by a group of civil activists led by Medha Patkar they felt lost the momentum and the thrust of their movement. To galvanize the public support to fight against big capitalists hell bent on exploiting natural resources and to restore the rights of indigenous people and rural poor they had to start the protest campaign anew. One of the activists of the movement Himansha extended an invitation to Arundhati to visit the valley and write an article about the ecological devastation going to happen and the consequent human suffering. She travelled length and breadth of the valley and wrote an explosive article in her usual sarcastic and corrosive style which resulted in summoning her to the Supreme Court for insulting the judiciary. This is the first of many criminal charges she faced mainly because of her writing exposing undemocratic and discriminatory nature of the prevailing social and political order. This earned her a new epithet, ‘activist writer’.
Her mother a fighter of indomitable courage and steadfast was a strength and inspiration to these polemical writings. She says ‘mother hovered over me like an unaffectionate iron angel’. But the judiciary of India is not that sympathetic to her uncompromising criticism of the prevailing social injustices and the institutions which sustain it. The Supreme Court of India imposed a fine and prison sentence for one day for the contempt of the Court’
Mother May Comes To Me is not a chronology of events and reminiscences but a deep and uncompromising analytical study of present day Indian society and the social order that is undergoing rapid changes in the name of modernization and innovation that may shake its roots set against the background her mother’s and her own living experience.
