Book: 'Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy'; Author: Arundhati Roy; Publisher: Penguin-Books India; Price: Rs 499

By Madhusree Chatterjee

Man Booker winning author Arundhati Roy takes a probing look at the underbelly of the world's oldest democracy in her new anthology of essays 'Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy' published this week.

'By democracy, I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: western liberal democracy, and its variants. Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defence of democracy. It's flawed, but it's better than anything else that's on offer,' Roy said.

The anthology is typically Arundhati Roy - candid, chatty, lucid and probing - more like snapshots from all her earlier works of non-fiction since 1999.

With intelligent political insight, she shows how the journey of Hindu nationalism and neo-liberal economic reforms, flagged off almost around the same time in the early 1990s, is now manifest in dangerous ways.

The book begins with an essay on the state-backed killing of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, explaining how 'progress and genocide' have always be comrade-in-arms. They either take place together or follow each other in a strange cycle of fate.

'Fascism's firm footprints has appeared in India. Let's mark the date: Spring 2002. While we can thank the US president and the coalition against terror for creating a congenial international atmosphere for fascism's ghastly debut, we cannot credit them for the years it has been brewing in our public and private lives... it breezed in after the Pokhran nuclear tests of 1998,' Roy writes in her essay, 'Democracy: Who's She, When She's At Home'.

The argument makes sense.

In the essay, 'How deep shall we dig', a text of the lecture that she delivered at the Aligarh Muslim University in 2004, she uses Kashmir to establish the Indian government's handling of terrorism along its margins - Jammu and Kashmir and in the seven sister states of the Northeast where the 'schism between the real and the virtual world has turned into a place of endless speculation and potential insanity'.