The Booker-winning Indian author casts an exacting eye over inequality, gender politics

and imperialism

Bidisha

Sun 16 Jun 2019 07.00 BST

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Arundhati Roy at the time of her protests against the building of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the
Narmada Valley in 1999. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

With its gold-striped spine, crimson endpapers and silky leaves, My Seditious Heart is a
handsome edition of previously published essays by Booker-winning writer Arundhati
Roy. Despite the stately presentation and the fact that some of the essays first appeared
20 years ago, these studies are trenchant, still relevant and frequently alarming. Roy
reveals some hard truths about modern India and makes powerful analytical forays into
American and British foreign policy, aid, imperialism and attitudes.

Roy’s India is one of extreme wealth and extreme poverty; opportunity and exploitation;
cynicism and hypocrisy; ambition and greed; dynamism and thuggery. “India lives in
several centuries at the same time. Somehow we manage to progress and regress
simultaneously.” She describes emaciated workers toiling by candlelight through the
night to lay broadband cable to accelerate the country’s digital revolution. The Greater
Common Good looks at (futile) resistance to the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Narmada
valley, the forced displacement of local people and the slandering of activists as
troublemakers. Another essay looks at uranium mining in Jadugoda, while in another
piece Roy accompanies tribal anti-government fighters in the forests of Dantewada in
Chhattisgarh.

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Certain areas of interest emerge clearly. Roy covers the aggressive appropriation of
tribal rural lands for mining and water projects, the expansion of nuclear weapons
programmes, the privatisation and commercialisation of Indian services, the legacies
and continuation of colonisation and imperialism in various forms, government
corruption, American warmongering and national hypocrisy. The essays are also
prescient in their early sensitivity to environmental damage and to indigenous rights.

Roy is of course a consummate storyteller, her novels The God of Small Things and The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness having been translated into 40 languages. These essays
are much denser than her prose fiction, although not rebarbatively so. Rather, they are
thick with intelligence and firmly bolstered with fact. To Roy’s exacting eye, everything
in the world is complicated, contradictory, contingent – even resistance and freedom-
fighting. She gives a droll commentary on the glib language of human rights in the essay
Power Politics, reflecting on a do-gooders’ conference at the Hague and the way “the
whole purpose of language is to mask intent” in such environments, resulting in
“consummately written, politically exemplary, socially just policy documents that are
impossible to implement and designed to remain forever on paper”.