Arundhati Roy’s eagerly-awaited second novel went on sale on Tuesday, two decades after her prize-winning debut The God of Small Things propelled her to global fame and launched her career as an outspoken critic of injustice in the country.
Ms. Roy, now 55, became the first Indian woman to win the Booker Prize with her 1997 work, which sold around eight million copies and turned the young author into a star of the literary world. In the years that followed, she turned to non-fiction writing, taking on issues ranging from poverty and globalisation to the conflict in Kashmir in essays that were often highly critical of India’s ruling class.
Campaigning influence
Her campaigning earned her the wrath of many in the establishment and has clearly influenced her latest novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , which she has said took 10 years to produce.
Publisher Penguin says it takes the reader “from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis” and on to the troubled Kashmir Valley and the jungles of central India, racked by a long-running Maoist rebellion.
“There was this huge sense of urgency when I was writing the political essays, each time you wanted to blow a space open, on any issue,” Ms. Roy told The Hindu in an interview published last week.
“But fiction takes its time and is layered... It is not just a human rights report about how many people have been killed and where. How do you describe the psychosis of what is going on? Except through fiction.”
