SHE WON THE Man Booker prize in 1997 for her debut novel, but since then not a single work of fiction by Arundhati Roy has featured even on the Booker longlist. That’s because, 15 years after The God of Small Things became a literary sensation, its author still hasn’t written her long-awaited second novel.
When the tall, curly-haired 37-year-old from Kerala in India signed a book deal worth half a million pounds, she never expected to become an international star, much less a “fairy princess of the rising Indian middle-class”.
Though several UK critics were less than kind to The God of Small Things, the public took her to their hearts – the book sold six million copies and was translated into 40 languages. So imagine her publishers’ disappointment as they waited and waited for the follow-up.
“Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things,” she told The Guardian in November.
The God of Small Things was a semi-autobiographical book, its narrative drawn strongly from Roy’s own childhood in the Aymanam region of Kerala. Her mother, Mary Roy, was a flamboyant, outspoken divorcee who ran a girls’s school. Arundhati left home for Delhi at 17, trained as an architect, then began writing screenplays for Indian film and TV. When she hit the big-time with The God of Small Things, she seemed set for a long, lucrative career in novel-writing.
Instead, she turned to activism, writing searing, passionate polemics against inequality and injustice in her home country. She has been an advocate for Kashmiri self-determination, and has come out in support of the Naxalite-Maoist insurgents. In a recent essay, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, she attacks many of the Indian government’s policies, and lambasts the rich elite of Mumbai, particularly Mukesh Ambani, the owner of Antilia, the 27-storey building said to be the most expensive home in the world.
Her tireless activism has made her a thorn in the side of corporate and government bodies; even other activists have criticised her for being too “shrill”, but Roy, now 50, insists she will continue to be outspoken. She has cast her net wider, criticising the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lending her support to the Occupy Movement.
“They have tried putting me in prison and they have tried giving me awards,” she told the The Guardian. Watch this space, Nobel Peace Prize pundits.
Roy lives in New Delhi with her second husband, film-maker and environmentalist Pradip Krishen.
Last year, Krishen lost his court bid to keep a bungalow that he’d built which allegedly encroached on tribal land, leading to Roy’s critics accusing her and her husband of “land-grabbing”.
