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| The Reading Room |
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Book Report: The Cost of Living, by Arundhati Roy
Published 1999 by The Modern Library
My India-born spouse once described the difference in how he and I had been taught, through subtle
societal reward, to make and respond to assertions. "If you say, 'The sky is blue,'" he said, "I think,
'Ann thinks the sky is blue.' But if I say to you, 'The sky is blue,' you say, 'Oh, it is?' You're ready to
believe, just because I stated it as fact. That's why you hedge your thoughts with the words, 'I
think,' rather than just saying what you think."
I recall that conversation as I read Arundhati Roy's The Cost of Living, in particular, the essay "The
Greater Common Good." Because her voice is clear and compelling, my first response is, "Fifty million
people have been displaced by ineffective dam-building in India! Good god, what can be done?"
Then I slow down. Remember. "Arundhati Roy thinks that fifty million people have been displaced in
India, by dams she thinks are ineffective. Does she make her case?"
She does.
"The Greater Common Good" means to persuade, but its reportage is separable, sentence by
sentence, from the argument. Roy's research is compiled, not from debunkable interviews, but from
government plans and records, World Bank reviews and estimates of economic benefit and capital
cost, and from statistics such as river flow, reservoir levels, areas of irrigated land, numbers of
malaria cases, and megawatts of power produced. More than careful, Roy gleefully points out that
the Indian government has produced no studies to verify the difference from the lowest baseline
calculation of displaced people, or to quantify agricultural benefits gained from completed dam
projects.
To follow along, you'll need to work through numbers and a cast of characters, as with any story
about accounting and the preservation of power. The payoff to your attentiveness is that once you
gather who's done what and at what cost in India's dam-building plans, you are as fully armed as
Roy herself to examine the rest of her assertions. You'll have enough facts to agree or disagree with
her thesis, "Carelessness cannot account for fifty million disappeared people... Let's not delude
ourselves. There is method here, precise, relentless, and 100 percent manmade."
Roy doesn't leave the American reader the familiar out: "I don't live there. I don't have the right to an
opinion." Roy works in facts as well as narrative; you'll be hard pressed to evade responsibility for
your assent or dissent from her conclusions. Like this one: "Resettling 200,000 people in order to
take (or pretend to take) water to 40 million—there's something very wrong with the scale of
operations here. This is Fascist math." You can agree or disagree... but reading "The Greater
Common Good," you can't wheedle your way out of having a stance.
Two treasures are secreted away inside "The Greater Common Good." One is the story of modern
Satyagraha—the practice of nonviolent resistance—how the villagers of the Narmada valley walked
into the valley when it was to be flooded, willing to drown. They won a postponement and an
independent review of the dam project. The other is a thin, brilliant thread through the narrative:
Roy's support of her right as a citizen to research and respond to her government's decisions. It
implies the reader has an obligation to respond as well.
In a single sentence, in the heart of the essay, Roy says, "The people whose lives were going to be
devastated were neither informed nor consulted nor heard." Her challenge to the reader echoes,
unstated: What do you think of that? What do you think?
My India-born spouse once described the difference in how he and I had been taught, through subtle
societal reward, to make and respond to assertions. "If you say, 'The sky is blue,'" he said, "I think,
'Ann thinks the sky is blue.' But if I say to you, 'The sky is blue,' you say, 'Oh, it is?' You're ready to
believe, just because I stated it as fact. That's why you hedge your thoughts with the words, 'I
think,' rather than just saying what you think."
I recall that conversation as I read Arundhati Roy's The Cost of Living, in particular, the essay "The
Greater Common Good." Because her voice is clear and compelling, my first response is, "Fifty million
people have been displaced by ineffective dam-building in India! Good god, what can be done?"
Then I slow down. Remember. "Arundhati Roy thinks that fifty million people have been displaced in
India, by dams she thinks are ineffective. Does she make her case?"
She does.
"The Greater Common Good" means to persuade, but its reportage is separable, sentence by
sentence, from the argument. Roy's research is compiled, not from debunkable interviews, but from
government plans and records, World Bank reviews and estimates of economic benefit and capital
cost, and from statistics such as river flow, reservoir levels, areas of irrigated land, numbers of
malaria cases, and megawatts of power produced. More than careful, Roy gleefully points out that
the Indian government has produced no studies to verify the difference from the lowest baseline
calculation of displaced people, or to quantify agricultural benefits gained from completed dam
projects.
To follow along, you'll need to work through numbers and a cast of characters, as with any story
about accounting and the preservation of power. The payoff to your attentiveness is that once you
gather who's done what and at what cost in India's dam-building plans, you are as fully armed as
Roy herself to examine the rest of her assertions. You'll have enough facts to agree or disagree with
her thesis, "Carelessness cannot account for fifty million disappeared people... Let's not delude
ourselves. There is method here, precise, relentless, and 100 percent manmade."
Roy doesn't leave the American reader the familiar out: "I don't live there. I don't have the right to an
opinion." Roy works in facts as well as narrative; you'll be hard pressed to evade responsibility for
your assent or dissent from her conclusions. Like this one: "Resettling 200,000 people in order to
take (or pretend to take) water to 40 million—there's something very wrong with the scale of
operations here. This is Fascist math." You can agree or disagree... but reading "The Greater
Common Good," you can't wheedle your way out of having a stance.
Two treasures are secreted away inside "The Greater Common Good." One is the story of modern
Satyagraha—the practice of nonviolent resistance—how the villagers of the Narmada valley walked
into the valley when it was to be flooded, willing to drown. They won a postponement and an
independent review of the dam project. The other is a thin, brilliant thread through the narrative:
Roy's support of her right as a citizen to research and respond to her government's decisions. It
implies the reader has an obligation to respond as well.
In a single sentence, in the heart of the essay, Roy says, "The people whose lives were going to be
devastated were neither informed nor consulted nor heard." Her challenge to the reader echoes,
unstated: What do you think of that? What do you think?
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