ABSTRACT
Long before The God of Small Things, the Booker-winning Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy appeared in a “lunatic fringe cinema,” In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, where she played the role of a bright, brash, and vaguely idealistic nal-year student of architecture named Radha. The screenplay was written by Roy herself in 1988 and the movie-although it was shown only once on Door Darshan, the national television of India, and that, too, in a late-night slot-became popular among the English-speaking contemporary urban Indian youth. In defending her architectural thesis, Radha told the examiners:
Every Third-World city consists of two parts: the city and a non-city. And the city and non-city are at war with one another. Now, the city consists of a number of institutions: of houses, ofces, shops, roads, sewage systems … the non-citizen has no institutions; he lives and works in the gaps between these institutions; he defecates on top of the sewage system. He [the architect] designs them [the institutions] so that they say to the non-citizens, “stay out of here”, “keep out, this is not your area.”1
