# Listening to Grasshoppers

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/arundhati-roy/listening-to-grasshoppers/9780141044095

JSON version (same data): https://www.bookquiver.com/arundhati-roy/listening-to-grasshoppers/9780141044095.json

![Listening to Grasshoppers](https://quivercdn.com/covers/penguin/arundhati-roy/listening-to-grasshoppers_978-01-4104-409-5.jpg?v=2026-04-23%2011%3A13%3A37)

- Book: [Listening to Grasshoppers](https://www.bookquiver.com/arundhati-roy/listening-to-grasshoppers) ([Listening to Grasshoppers.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/arundhati-roy/listening-to-grasshoppers.md))
- Authors: [Arundati](https://www.bookquiver.com/arundhati-roy)
- Publisher: Penguin
- ISBN: 978-01-4104-409-5
- Pages: 304
- Published: 2010-02-04
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

'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.