Daily Times

NEW DELHI: Arundhati Roy’s eagerly-awaited second novel went on sale 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 her native India.

Roy became the first Indian woman to win the prestigious Booker Prize with her 1997 work, which sold around eight million copies and turned the young author into a star of the literary world.

“I have never been particularly ambitious. I am not a careerist, I am not trying to get anywhere in a career. It is more important to engage with society, to live it, to have different experiences”, said Roy, addressing the audience at Sharjah International Book Fair.

In the years that followed, she turned to non-fiction writing, taking on issues like poverty and globalisation to the conflict in Kashmir in essays that were often highly critical of India’s ruling class.

Roy has also been very rigorous on penning down political issues. She has written on diverse topics such as Narmada Dam project, India’s nuclear weapons and American power giant Enron’s activities in India. She also served as a critic of neo-imperialism and has been linked with anti-globalization movement.

Her campaigning earned her the indignation of many in the Indian establishment and has clearly influenced her latest novel “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”, which she has said took 10 years to produce.

Roy was praised at home when she became the first resident Indian to win the Booker for her novel which was about twins growing up in the southern state of Kerala. While the previous Indian winners had always lived outside the country.

Roy recalled in a recent interview about how she was suddenly on the cover page of every magazine — until she spoke out against India’s nuclear tests a year later.

“Not that I had a say in it, but I was being marketed as this new product of the global India,” she said.

“And then suddenly the government did these nuclear tests… and I wrote this essay condemning the tests, and at that point the fairy princess was kicked off her pedestal in a minute.”

Internationally she remains a huge draw, lauded both for her activism and her writing, and the reviews of her second novel have been positive broadly though not universally.

The Financial Times said it was “as remarkable as her first” and the readers would not be disappointed, while The New Yorker called it a “scarring novel of India’s modern history”.

But some critics were doubtful about her attempts to introduce political causes into her fiction.

“Ministry’ is two decades of invective distilled into one book, with a superstructure of fiction to hold it together,” said The Economist. “It does not work.”