Fourteen years after the publication of Roy’s first and only novel, I found the time and space to give it a read. And, with job completed, I must say without the slightest hesitation, that all the accumulated superlatives that this book has attracted are fully merited. Very few novelists are cable of intertwining the particular, the historical and the universal with such ease and with such profound effect. How dare Ms Roy not devote her life to churning out more of the same. How dare she fritter her life away battling this injustice and that. But she dares, and now Arundhati Roy is as recognised as a champion of the downtrodden and oppressed as she is for her contribution to literature.

Firstly to the book itself. Not to do it a disservice I would say its central theme was that of fate of India’s caste system and the plight of it untouchables. Which is not in anyway to belittle all the other intelligently explored themes of human longing, human brutality, human stupidity and not forgetting, childhood fears. All this and written in a lyrical, haunting, poetic style that leaves the reader thirsting for more. Oh, and I forgot – humour. Roy does a great line in black humour which is never contrived and invariably hits its mark. If ever I am tempted to try my hand at novel writing, the high skill and beauty of Roy’s work would convince me instantly to stick to my own turgid, didactic polemics. Roy, it might be said, is in a class of her own.

I have many favourite passages but my favourite of my favourites involves a discussion of why the Communist Party was more successful in Kerala, the location of the novel, than in most other parts of India. Roy elaborates:

There are several competing theories. One was that it had to do with the large populations of Christians in the state. Twenty per cent of Kerala’s population were Syrian Christians, who believed that they were the descendants of the one hundred Brahmins whom Saint Thomas the Apostle converted to Christianity when he travelled east after the Resurrection. Structurally this somewhat rudimentary argument went Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end. Whereas the Hindu mind had to make more complex adjustments. The trouble with this theory was that in Kerala the Syrian Christians were, by and large, the wealthy estate owning feudal lords, for whom communism represented a fate worse than death. P66

There you have it. A history lesson, a politics lesson and a philosophical discourse all neatly wrapped up together with Roy’s bitter dry humour. Roy is continually offered massive publishing advances as an incentive to write a second novel which she regularly rejects. This gives more than a hint of where her priorities lay. Her overriding world philosophy is one of self reliance and sustainability which the following lines nicely encapsulate.

India has millions of internally displaced people. And now, they are putting their bodies on the line and fighting back. They are being killed and imprisoned in their thousands. Theirs is a battle of the imagination, a battle for the redefinition of the meaning of civilisation, of the meaning of happiness, of the meaning of fulfilment. And this battle demands that the world see that, at some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.

To all those who secretly wish that Roy would return to the world of the novel, Roy is at pains to emphasise that there is no real separation between her fiction and non fiction. Roy explains: The theme of much of what I write, fiction as well as non-fiction, is the relationship between power and the powerlessness and the endless, circular conflict they’re engaged in. There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing. So when I tell a story, I tell it not as an ideologue who wants to pit one absolutist ideology against another, but as a story teller who wants to share her way of seeing. Though it might appear otherwise, my writing is not really about nations and histories, it’s about power. About the paranoia and ruthlessness of power. About the physics of power. I believe that the accumulation of vast unfettered power by a state or a country, a corporation or an institution or even an individual, a spouse, friend or sibling regardless of ideology, results in excesses..( from Not Again)

I’s good to have discovered (albeit 14 years after most other people) another writer and campaigner who has joined forces with the Noam Chomskys, Tariq Alis, John Pilgers, Naomi Klein’s, Michael Moores, and George Monbiots of this world, who are all, in their own inimitable styles, trying to paint a vision of a world beyond capitalism and corporate greed.