Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy

Description

'What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning?' Combining brilliant insight and razor-sharp prose, Listening to Grasshoppers is Arundhati Roy's essential exploration of the political picture in India today. In these essays she takes a hard look at the underbelly of the world's largest democracy and shows how the journey that Hindu nationalism and neo-liberal economic reforms began together in the early 1990s is unravelling in dangerous ways. Beginning with the state-backed killing of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, and ending with an analysis of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai, Listening to Grasshoppers tracks the fault-lines that threaten to destroy India's precarious future and, along the way, 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.

Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997, and two collections of essays: The Algebra of Infinite Justice and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. She lives in New Delhi, India.