Combining brilliant political insight and razor-sharp prose, Arundhati Roy in these essays, takes a hard look at the underbelly of the world’s largest democracy, and shows how the journey that Hindu nationalism and neoliberal economic reforms began together in the early 1990s is unraveling in dangerous ways.
Beginning with the state-backed killing of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, she writes about how ‘progress’ and genocide have historically gone hand in hand; about the murky investigations into the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament; about the dangers of an increasingly powerful and entirely unaccountable judiciary; and about the collusion between large corporations, the government and the mainstream media. The collection ends with an account of the August 2008 uprising in Kashmir and an analysis of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai. ‘The Briefing’, included as an appendix, is a fictional text that brings together many of the issues central to the collection.
As it tracks the fault-lines that threaten to destroy India’s precarious future, Listening to Grasshoppers asks fundamental questions about democracy itself, a political system that has, by virtue of being considered ‘the best available option’, been put beyond doubt and correction.