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Biography Contribution to Roy Article

Attention: Currently working on Roy's Biography on behalf of a English Seminar Project, any further contributions would be appreciated. We wanted to add to her biography but had difficulties with the format and citations. However, we still wanted to contribute what we researched to Roy's page. We have provided parenthetical citations as well as a works cited page, so our sources can be available. Due to citing difficulties, any further help with potentially citing our information on Roy's wikipedia page will be greatly appreciated.

Susanna Arundhati Roy was born on November 24, 1959 in Shillong, Meghalaya,[1] India, to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother, the women's rights activist Mary Roy, and a Bengali father, a tea planter by profession. Roy’s parents divorced when she and her brother, Lalith were children (Rao 1). Roy responds to her mother being characterized as an “unconventional woman” by stating she married a man who “was a Bengali Hindu and what’s worse she divorced him, which meant that everyone was confirmed in their opinion that it was a terrible thing to do in the first place…I sometimes think I was perhaps the only girl in India whose mother said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t get married” (Barsamain 2). Roy states that growing up she had, “No father, no presence of this man telling us that he would look after us and beat us occasionally in exchange. I didn’t have a caste, and I didn’t have a class, and I had no religion, no traditional blinkers, no traditional lenses on my spectacles, which are very hard to shrug off” (Barsamian 2). Roy’s mother became “well-known in Kerala because in 1986 after winning a public interest litigation case challenging the Syrian Christian inheritance law that said a woman can inherit one-fourth of her father’s property or 5,000.00 rupees, which ever is less. The Supreme Court actually handed down a verdict that gave women equal inheritance retroactive to 1956” (Barsamian 3). Mary Roy started a school called Corpus Christi (Rao 1). Arundhati Roy was educated at her mother’s school and was the only person in the class at one point (Frumkes 1). Roy describes her mother’s achievements by stating, “She runs a school and it’s phenomenally successful-people book their children in it before they are born-they don’t know what to do with, or me” (Barsamian 3). Roy eventually continued her education at the Lawrence School, Lovedale, in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. Arundhati Roy left home at the age of sixteen, to live on her own (Rao 2). Roy states “I grew up in Kerala. It was a nightmare for me. All I wanted to do was to escape, to get out to never have to marry somebody there…I was the worst thing a girl could be: thin, black and clever” (Barsamian 2). Roy eventually decided to study at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. While attending school, Roy lived with a group of young people (Frumkes 2). They lived in a slum colony within the walls of a monument (Frumkes 2). In describing this point of her life Roy states “we had no money but we had a lot of fun. When you’re that young, somehow the future does not scare you. You just live day to day” (Frumkes 2). It was at The School of Architecture where she first met her husband, Gerard D. Cunha (Rao 2). While they were married the couple embarked to Goa on the coast of India where they made and sold cakes to tourists for seven months (Rao 2). However, Roy ended their marriage within four years (Rao 2). Roy eventually found a job with the National Institute of Urban Affairs (Rao 2). Roy met her second husband, filmmaker Pradip Krishen, in 1984, and played a village girl in this award winning movie Massey Sahib. Roy eventually teamed up with her husband to write a screenplay for a television series (Rao 2). Unfortunately the idea failed, but she continued to write more screenplays which resulted in several films including “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones” and “Electric Moon” (Rao 3).

Works Cited

Barsamian David. “Interview with Arundhati Roy”. April 2001. 

Frumkes, Lewis Burke. “A conversation with Arundhati Roy.” The Writer. 111.11 (Nov. 1998): p23. Literature Resource Center. Gale. ST. JOHNS UNIV. 8 Apr. 2009 .

Rao, E. Nageswara. "Arundhati Roy." South Asian Writers in English. Ed. Fakrul Alam. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 323. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Gale. ST JOHNS UNIV. 14 May 2009 .

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