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 8 million copies and turned the young author into a star of the literary world.
In the years that followed, she turned to non-fiction writing, taking on issues ranging from poverty and globalization to the conflict in Kashmir in essays that were often highly critical of India’s ruling class.
Her campaigning earned her the wrath 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.
Publisher Penguin said it takes the reader “from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis” and on to the troubled Kashmir Valley and the jungles of central India, racked by a long-running Maoist rebellion.
“There was this huge sense of urgency when I was writing the political essays, each time you wanted to blow a space open, on any issue,” Roy told The Hindu daily in an interview published last week.
“But fiction takes its time and is layered... It is not just a human rights report about how many people have been killed and where. How do you describe the psychosis of what is going on? Except through fiction.”
Her criticism of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has been particularly fierce. She once called for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be put on trial over the deadly anti-Muslim riots in the state of Gujarat in 2002, when he was chief minister.
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