How the battle over an old farmhouse shaped Arundhati Roy’s opinions on women’s rights
India’s human rights laws are biased and broken and need to be urgently rewritten. Imagine what it would feel like to be a third generation citizen of a country, only to realize that the laws of that country didn’t apply to you and you were subject to special laws just for you that excluded you from basic things like being able to inherit your family’s property ? That’s exactly what Arundhati Roy was a witness to as a child, which influenced a large part of the themes and topics behind her book The God of Small Things. Her mother fought in court for 49 years to inherit the family home that she and her daughter lived in only to raze it to the ground when she finally received it due to the horrible memories and family bitterness it had caused.