The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
Listening to Grasshoppers

Listening to Grasshoppers

Field Notes on Democracy

Summary

'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.

About the author

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. She is the author of various works of nonfiction including My Seditious Heart, Azadi and, most recently, The Architecture of Modern Empire.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more