Stranger than fiction

Arundhati Roy's move from prose to politics has not been popular, writes Matt Wade in New Delhi. A mid the clamour of voices debating the future of the world's biggest democracy, few stand out like Arundhati Roy's. Advertisement: Story continues below Twelve years ago she shot to fame with her debut novel, The God of Small Things, and became a pinup for India's increasingly confident and assertive middle class. But rather than writing more fiction, Roy turned her elegant prose to politics. Over the past decade she has written a steady stream of essays portraying a grim picture of her country. Roy has denounced the treatment of tribal people, the rise of Hindu nationalism and the loss of civil liberties to counterterrorism measures. She has also condemned things that many Indians take pride in: its nuclear weapons program and big dams. Last year she defied political orthodoxy and wrote that the cost of India's military occupation of Kashmir was too high and ''makes monsters of us all''. The author, 48, says it was a conscious choice to change direction. ''When I finished God of Small Things and won the Booker, I became a darling of the middle class,'' she told the Herald. ''But it was around that time that India's nuclear tests happened and I sensed a shift in language. There was a rise of nationalism and Hindutva [Hindu nationalism]. I was dismayed by the fact that the Rosetta Stone Hindi V3 press and all kinds of middle class people were ecstatic about it. I realised right then that I had the space to say what I thought and that keeping quiet about what was happening would be as political as speaking out.'' In a new book, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, Roy takes aim at India's muchcelebrated democracy, which she says has been emptied of meaning. Rather than serving the country's mass of poor people, democracy and free market reforms have ''fused into a single predatory organism'', she claims. ''India's dominant class, caste and power elite have lost their imagination,'' she says. Roy has no regrets about the path she has taken since winning the Booker Prize. ''I had the choice of floating into the ether and becoming part of this glittering club of shining India or journeying in the other direction, which is what I did,'' she says. ''I didn't just want to be some toy writer who moves from one success to the next. I'm not interested in being the kind of writer who functions from the heart of the market.'' Last month Roy published an essay alleging that a Government campaign against Maoist insurgents in the country's heartland was a ploy to rob poor tribal people of their land so it could be handed over to mining companies. ''India has adopted a ''juggernaut of polices which contain an unsustainable level of injustice'', she says. Maoist rebels are present in up to 20 of India's states and have evolved into a formidable insurgency. They have been blamed for killing more than 900 security officers in the past four years. The Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, recently described the Maoist uprising as the country's ''singlelargest internal security threat'' and a fresh counterinsurgency campaign was announced.

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