A Rebel Writer's First Revolt

Summary

Illustration: Jan Robert Dünnweller/Source Photograph: Nasir Kachroo/Getty Images Arundhati Roy identifies as a vagrant. There was a moment in 1997, right after the Delhi-based writer became the first Indian citizen to win the Booker Prize, for her best-selling debut, The God of Small Things, when the president and the prime minister claimed the whole country was proud of her. She was 36 and suddenly rich; she could have coasted on the money and praise. Instead, she changed direction. Furiously and at length, she started writing essays for Indian magazines about everything her country’s elites were doing wrong. As nationalists celebrated Indian nuclear tests, she wrote, “The air is thick with ugliness and there’s the unmistakable stench of fascism on the breeze.” In another essay: “On the whole, in India, the prognosis is — to put it mildly — Not Good.” She wrote about Hindu-nationalist violence, military occupation in Kashmir, poverty, displacement, Islamophobia, and corporate crimes. Her anti-patriotic turn got her dragged in the press and then to court on charges that ranged from obscenity (for a cross-caste sex scene in The God of Small Things) to, most recently, terrorism. She began to define herself against the conflict. As Roy writes in Mother Mary Comes to Me, her new memoir, “The more I was hounded as an antinational, the surer I was that India was the place I loved, the place to which I belonged. Where else could I be the hooligan that I was becoming? Where else would I find co-hooligans I so admired?” She has since published more than 20 books, including only one other novel, 2017’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The rest are nonfiction: essay collections, field reports, repackaged lectures, short treatises on politics — and now, at age 63, Roy has published a memoir. Still, The God of Small Things is her best work. Inspired by her childhood spent in a Kerala village, the story about fraternal twins and their renegade single mother glides back and fort...