Azadi, Arundhati Roy
Azadi, Arundhati Roy
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Azadi
Freedom. Fascism. Fiction.

Author: Arundhati Roy

Narrator: Shaheen Khan

Unabridged: 6 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/01/2020

Synopsis

From the author of My Seditious Heart and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a new and pressing dispatch from the heart of the crowd and the solitude of a writer’s desk.The chant of Azadi!—Urdu for “Freedom!”—is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically it has also become the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism. What lies between these two calls for Freedom? A chasm or a bridge?In this series of penetrating essays on politics and literature, Arundhati Roy examines this question and challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism.Roy writes of the existential threat posed to Indian democracy by an emboldened Hindu nationalism, of the internet shutdown and information siege in Kashmir—the most densely militarized zone in the world—and India’s new citizenship laws that discriminate against Muslims and marginalized communities and could create a crisis of statelessness on a scale previously unknown.

About Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. Both novels have been translated into more than forty languages. My Seditious Heart is a collection of her nonfiction written over twenty years. She lives in Delhi.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Siddhartha on March 29, 2023

I don't have a lot of friends who are supporters of the ruling BJP (well at least the ones who have disclosed it publicly), and consequently whenever the conversation shifts towards the ongoings in India, more often than not, we find ourselves agreeing with each other. Although this is perfectly alr......more

Goodreads review by Kevin on August 28, 2022

Catching up with Roy… --Having been recently disappointed with a sample of Ursula K. Le Guin’s nonfiction musings, I knew I had to return to Roy. I finished Roy's 20-year collection of nonfiction My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction last year; this collection (2018-2020) bridges the gap to the pr......more

Goodreads review by Maxine on July 15, 2020

Indian writer Arundhati Roy is probably best known for her literary fiction including The God of Small Things for which she won the Man Booker prize. But she is also known for her essays and Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. contains several in which Roy gives us a powerful and clear look at the sit......more

Goodreads review by Bindesh on September 11, 2020

Repetitive. Left-liberal cribbing presented in a literary language. Narcissistically keeps on explaining her novels. Sympathy for the downtrodden in Kashmir and Assam as well as Delhi is good but blaming the ruling dispensation for all the ills bedeviling India is biasness. Her dear comrades are no......more

Goodreads review by Abhilash on October 01, 2020

If you follow what happens in India these days, there is nothing in this book for you - the decision to collect speeches in this book was a mistake, the content looks dated already and there are no new insights or anything. Book's still relevant for those who are trying to understand the "utmost hap......more

Quotes

“Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time.” Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author

“Roy’s…nonfictional engagement with the conflicts and traumas of a heedlessly globalized world has manifested the virtues of an unflinching emotional as well as political intelligence…In an age of intellectual logrolling and mass-manufactured infotainment, she continues to offer bracing ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling.” Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire

“No writer today, in India or anywhere in the world, writes with the kind of beautiful, piercing prose in defense of the wretched of the earth that Roy does…Roy the essayist embodies the legalistic but humanistic ruthlessness of a public defender, the wit and wordplay of a poet, a comrade who takes no injustice as a given.” Jacobin

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