By 2001, when this collection of 12 interviews with US writer and broadcaster David Barsamian begins, Arundhati Roy was already under fire. Leading leftwing critics, among them Aijaz Ahmad, had attacked her Booker prize-winning The God of Small Things (1997) for its anti-communism. In Kerala, where it was set, she was charged with “corrupting public morality”. The End of Imagination (1998), an essay collection in which she railed against India’s turn to nuclear nationalism and the growing number of mega-dam projects harming the country’s environment and rural population, led to charges that she was anti-progress, anti-patriotic, unladylike.
Did this make her watch her tongue? The very thought. Her fires keep burning all the way through The Architecture of Modern Empire, whether she’s talking in Delhi or Las Vegas, at Berkeley High School or in the back seat of a car driving across Boston. Sometimes she laughs, sometimes she rages, sometimes both. Were a non-Indian to itemise the country as she does they would be damned as an orientalist. Anti-blackness, huge rates of illiteracy and malnutrition, the murder of millions of young girls, the ubiquity of rape, feudalism, ever greater numbers of deaths in custody, “genocide” against Muslims, air pollution, river poisoning: it’s a dark index.
