The Personal Is Political: An Activist’s Memoir

Magsaysay Award-winning social activist Aruna Roy’s remarkably forthright memoir is the story of two parallel journeys—a fifty-year-long engagement with public action in India, and a personal narrative that traces how the author has striven to convert her ideological convictions into practice.

For long decades, Aruna Roy has lived with and worked for the benefit of marginalized communities in rural India, fighting for the right to survive in a hostile environment. Alongside accounts of the plight of the vulnerable and the transformative power of mass-based grassroot social movements, her recollections are marked with stories of resilient individuals and communities and their extraordinary resistance to oppression.

Roy recounts a powerful lesson learnt from her extraordinary life: that every issue, whether it is poverty, discrimination, inequality or corruption, has personal as well as political ramifications. It is only by connecting the personal and the political, Roy says, that each one of us can make a difference.