Arundhati Roy: The good of small things

Arundhati Roy's impassioned essays aren't a holiday from fiction, but a crucial form of expression. All the same, as she tells Judith Palmer, it might soon be time to pull back from polemic.

"Numbers used to make my eyes glaze over. Not any more. Not since I began to follow the direction in which they point. Trust me. There's a story here." So writes Arundhati Roy in her book of essays, The Algebra of Infinite Justice (Flamingo, £8.99). But that's not the right kind of story, people whine. We want one like the last one. Can't we have mangosteens and lime pickle, and baby bats crawling up old ladies' saris, a sky-blue Plymouth with chrome tailfins, and a pair of seven-year-old twins in a mossy old house by a river?

No. The new book is about the rise of Hindu fascism, the mammoth dam-building programme in the Narmada Valley, India and Pakistan's nuclear face-off, and America's War on Terror. "People have been outraged and said, 'It's not your job' to write about these things. It's so ridiculous," says Arundhati Roy indignantly. "Or people say, 'It's so nice you're using your fame to talk about these issues.' That's like telling a footballer, it's so nice you're using your fame to play football. It's different if you're an actor and you're saving the rainforest ... But I'm not endorsing some side product. I'm doing what I think is my main work. I'm writing."

The Algebra of Infinite Justice collects essays, lectures and articles written between July 1998 and October 2001. Tackling irrigation projects and import restrictions, World Economic Forum meetings and World Bank annual reports, export credit agencies and India's privatised power supply, Roy puts on a pair of metaphorical rubber gloves and sticks her hand down the U-bend of current affairs. Prodding away at years of bureaucratic bullshit, she attempts to reclaim these subjects from the obfuscatory, sleep-inducing language of social policy documents, to reveal the human cost of government actions. But what's the cost on her, of having to give up her limber, free-flowing novelistic language to play the bureaucrats at their own game and stick to Gradgrindian facts?

"It's a sleight of hand. It's my fundamental belief that I actually break all these rules, and that's what makes people crazy," she says. "Are you an academic, are you a journalist, a sociologist, a hydro-electric expert? What are you? I'm saying the story must be told with facts, with stories, with feelings, with all kinds of skills. So when I say, 'Let's get back to the facts,' what I mean is, 'I can do that too.' " f Just a few individual stories are thrown into the mix, but they stand out all the more poignantly. Like the man in a tin resettlement hut, displaced by a dam, who counts off on his fingers the 48 kinds of fruit he used to be able to pick in the forest, and who has never been able to buy his children a piece of fruit since.

Roy flinches when she's called a writer-activist (she says it makes her feel like a sofa-bed). She's "a writer", and believes her novel "is no less political than any of my essays ... There's a sort of political vision, a way of seeing, which is just expressed in different ways," she says. "Sometimes it's a film, sometimes an architectural thesis, sometimes a novel, sometimes non-fiction, sometimes it's just walking down the street and the way you look. Fundamentally, running through all these things is a way of examining the relationship between power and powerlessness. I'm very interested in that relentless circular fight."

It was more than five years ago that Roy published The God of Small Things, her lyrical first (and so far sole) novel. Before it was even published, it was a cause célèbre. British literary agent David Godwin made his famous overnight dash across the world to sign up Arundhati as soon as he read her manuscript – then auctioned her novel off for what was reported to be the biggest ever advance for a first novel.

Then came the Booker Prize win. She was the first Indian woman to win the award, and the first non-expatriate Indian. On TV, the publishing doyenne Carmen Callil choked out her verdict that Roy's book was "execrable'; while Arundhati, back at the Guildhall, herself was delivering an altogether more gracious acceptance speech, claiming modestly that hers was not the better but "the luckier book".

It went on to sell over six million copies worldwide, and Roy of course became an international superstar. "With my burgeoning bank account I felt every feeling in The God of Small Things turn into a silver coin. I felt I'd turn into a silver figurine with a cold silver heart," she admits. Everywhere she went, her own image was stalking her: staring from every bookshop window, that gorgeous smouldering photograph, all elegant collarbones and untamed curls.

"I was getting to be quite oppressed by my own image. I never wanted to become the kind of person who would freeze in time. I thought I would freeze inside as well," says Roy. Shearing off the long hair, and adopting the current gamine Audrey Hepburn crop, was all part of the process of salvaging herself from her own global brand identity: "It has been a very strange experience ... wonderful and terrible. It's very frightening to be this kind of very public figure."

In India, Roy is a very, very public figure. "I don't not do things because of attracting attention, and I don't do things to attract attention, I just do what I have to do," she sighs. Doing what she has to do, however, has got her in a lot of hot water. In 1994 there was a court case over an article she wrote accusing director Shekhar Kapur of exploiting Phoolan Devi in his film Bandit Queen. Then came obscenity charges over the inter-caste relationship in The God of Small Things, followed by outrage from the local Communist party over the book's portrayal of Marxists.

In March this year, Roy was sent to jail for contempt of court following a petition that she'd tried to kill "five thugs" over the dam protest. "People think I was put into jail for a day," Roy adds. "They don't realise that I was under trial for a year, and that's much worse. That's how they break you."

It's not just the authorities who are out to get her: Roy's fiercest critics are activists who accuse her of hijacking their causes. "There's a lesson that activists in India need to learn, which is not about self-righteousness and showing how hard you're working," counters Roy. "It's important to re-imagine dissent, so that it's exciting. If you're just going to tire yourself out with your own virtue, you've had it. But if you're having a high old time while you're doing it, then you're a proper fighter."

It must be a baffling life. Tihar jail one minute, an offer (declined) to model Gap Khakis the next. A request to inaugurate a lung-infection unit in a Kerala hospital. A request from an underwear company asking whether she'll write their chairman's speech. Will she talk on literature, on water, on nuclear weapons? With every disaster comes a call asking her opinion. "A lot of people think you're just some gun for hire – that they'll tell you the cause and you'll just churn out this passionate piece," says Roy. A phone call from one editor sticks in her mind. "She said, 'Darling, I just read that lovely piece you wrote on the dam. Could you do one for me on child abuse?' I said, 'Yeah, sure. For or against?' "

"Each time I write, in India especially, I get so much flak that I think I'm never doing this again. Then something happens and this hammering sets up in my head I can't ignore," Roy explains. A hammering so urgent, there's been no time or space to let it distil into fiction. At least until now.

"I don't want to be the kind of person who has to comment on everything," says Roy. "It's a crucial thing to remove yourself from the centre of the narrative. There are a million things that are important in the world, but they don't all have to be addressed by me. I know there is a time – and maybe that time has come – when I will just pull back and say, OK: I'm writing something else now."

Biography

Arundhati Roy was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in 1959 in Shillong (then in Assam), where her Bengali father was a tea-planter. She has one older brother. When she was about two, her parents separated, and she moved with her mother, Mary Roy, to Kerala, where her uncle ran a pickle factory. She studied at home until 10, when she became the first pupil in the school her mother still runs. She left home at 17 to study architecture in Delhi. She qualified and won a scholarship to Florence, studying restoration. In 1984 she met her husband, film-maker Pradip Krishen, and played a small role in his film Massey Sahib. She wrote two screenplays as well as the script for a 21-part TV serial which got axed mid-production. Her first novel The God of Small Things was published in 1997 and won the Booker Prize. Her political essays have been published around the world. Eight are collected in The Algebra of Infinite Justice (Flamingo). Arundhati Roy lives in Delhi with her husband and four dachshund-cross dogs.